by Deborah Reed
“Come west,” she was going to say. A line for a laugh, standing in the snow she was going to make him laugh. Come west, young man. She’d come down a mountain to tell him this, and to tell him that she loved him. I’ve come down a mountain and it’s snowing and I love you.
But she said none of those things because he could not hear them. She did not know her sister had gotten to him first.
She said, “I hope you’re all right.”
“I’m seeing someone,” he said.
Her chest barely had time to take the sting. “That was fast.”
“Not as fast as you packing up and leaving. What’d it take, Elin? Two hours? Less? An hour to throw your clothes and books and albums in your car and disappear?”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called. It was stupid.”
“You think calling is the stupid thing, Elin? You think calling me is the problem?”
“Do I know her?”
“What the hell difference does it make?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t deserve to know.”
Elin was already crying quietly, hating herself for it, and for everything else she had no control over. Why she’d imagined it would be so easy, she didn’t know. She was naïve. Before that moment she was. She suspected she wouldn’t be after.
“I take that back,” he said. “You do deserve to know. You actually do.”
Years later it was like a memory that belonged to someone else, a story she once read about but had gone fuzzy on the details. So many times she’d thought to call and say the things she never said, but nothing good could have come of it. These were not sentiments to make anyone feel better. She never knew what Kate had told him. She stopped wanting to know years ago.
Hot pink wax hardened in the white frosting. Elin held her bottom lip between her teeth, forbidding more words from jangling loose. She was sick of herself, sick of clinging to old anger. Like moss gripping a rock, she wanted to kick it free, but oh how slippery it was.
“Happy birthday,” Elin said as if making a toast, and Kate’s hand twitched toward the cupcake. “Kate? Can you hear me? Make a wish. On the count of three I’ll blow out the candle for you. Can you see the cupcake? I lit a candle for you. It’s here on the tray. Make a wish.”
TWENTY-NINE
KATE HAD SPARED HER MOTHER and sister her limp, her drool, her slow and ghastly decline. She’d spared them their own pathological past, and that was no small task. And yet she’d spared them the love she might have offered, too, a love she couldn’t offer, a love they could not see anyway, no matter the want.
She had never loved her mother more than the day her doctor explained what was wrong with her hands, what would happen very soon, her doctor her executioner, detailing the workings of the guillotine. Had someone else in her family died from ALS? She’d answered yes without hesitation. Shivering on the cold examining table in the cool green room, fully clothed as if in ice, memories of her father snowballing through her mind. His weak hands, odd walk, her mother forbidding him to swing her. Dear mother. “Yes,” Kate told the doctor. “Yes.”
Knowing without knowing.
Nothing had ever quickened the life in her heart faster than her own impending death. She had no memory of leaving the doctor’s office or how she got home that day. All she knew was that by the time she opened the front door of her old apartment, the future, her future, had nearly taken shape. The rest of her life would not be spent as a symbol of all that was wrong with her family. She would not open that door, invite the past to rush in, devour her own children before she was forced to abandon them. Quincy was only seven months old.
Two to five years, on average.
Kate had made it to six. Six more years with her daughters. But the day her doctor had told her her fortune, Kate went home and asked Neal to leave, something she should have done long before, made clearer by the fact that he grabbed his things without a fight, without a tear, without one single word. When Kate followed him to the driveway, saying, “I never loved you. This whole thing between us was a terrible mistake,” he did not turn around and deny it. He did not say he’d wished it had been any another way.
One month later Kate called her mother to say she was leaving the state, getting out just like Elin, she just needed a little time, a change. She’d promised to be in touch once they got settled, and then she disconnected her number and moved across town. As often as once a week she returned, sometimes boldly, parking in Roth’s lot. Two rows back afforded her a glimpse of her mother behind the large plate windows, ringing up groceries, a drawn face, smiling every now and then.
Three months later Kate couldn’t be trusted to drive. And then she couldn’t leave the house. But the Internet allowed her to find Elin’s website. She read Elin’s blog posts and links to design articles, and over time it began to feel like a conversation, like they were friends, sisters, chatting about art and poetry, about a life that mattered to them both.
Kate found Rudi’s dealership, too, a headshot of him in the corner of the homepage. He was gorgeous, no other way to say it, more handsome than Neal, an old-world look, a classic beauty of a face. Kate was happy for Elin, until the day she clicked through the employee’s names and faces, their bios, and a new photo gallery, where she came across a blond in a steely blue jumpsuit, glancing up at Rudi, her eyes catching his just so, and Kate nearly gasped. She could not shake the feeling. She saw what she saw, and had been wondering for months if Elin had seen it, too.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Elin said.
A cupcake.
Sugar.
Butter.
Cream.
I will blow out the candle for you.
Make a wish.
Kate traveling with Averlee and Quincy down the two lane truck route toward an eagle she’d never before seen. Look there, in the trees and in the smell of pine, and the sharp, wintery blue sky, a tenderness, how perfect the cool, cool day, benevolence in her bones put there long ago by her mother. Look now, Kate pointing at an eagle lighting on its thickly woven nest, as wondrous as an early morning trip to the mountains, yet so close, in the bright flickering flame, to home.
PART THREE
THIRTY
NEAL STOOD IN THE ARIZONA sunset for the better part of five minutes. His tin mailbox atop a weathered pine post burned his elbow, but he forgot, repeatedly, and leaned against it for support. The long envelope in his hand was slightly tattered and stained, forwarded from two previous addresses, postal stickers overlapping on the front. The return address was his cousin Angelina’s in Orlando. He had not heard from Angelina since moving to Arizona six years ago.
The only other mail was an envelope written in his own hand, return to sender stamped red across the front. He did not open it. He began to shake.
He read the letter from Angelina, and then the newspaper clipping tucked inside, an obituary, and then he reread both once more, carefully, the fuller story blooming now, and his breath came up short. Kate has died, succumbed to ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, which I’m sure you’ve heard of. Did you even know she was sick? If you get this letter, the law is looking for you. You’re the only parent those girls have left.
A drop of salty sweat stung his eye and he looked across the road at his house, his shiny yellow Karmann Ghia in the driveway, waxed yesterday, a rare thing for him to do, born of boredom, but now the polished finish made the brick house appear buttoned up, as if the people living there were smooth-sailing through their days.
He stuffed the envelopes in the back pocket of his jeans and wiped his forehead on his arm, itself damp with sweat, and he hurried across the red sand into the house, slammed the door, and leaned his back to it. Even when he noticed the trembling of his hands he could not make them stop.
Two imaginary daughters appeared, slumped on the sofa. “Hey, Daddy,” one said, pointing the remote at the TV, and the other asking for dinner or shoes or whatever it was girls asked for, and, “My God,” he
said. Kate was dead.
He started toward the phone, a bubble of panic in his chest. Who was he going to call? He thought he heard the door, stopped, and looked through the blinds. A dust devil spun toward the oversized aloe lining the driveway. No one there, only the wind pushing red sand between acacias on the hill across the road. He was still sweating.
Did you even know she was sick? looped inside Neal’s head with such force that he nearly spun the words out loud.
No. He did not. But knowing now was turning everything on its head, upright where it belonged all along.
He pulled the envelopes from his pocket, slapped them into his open palm, and stared across the living room into the kitchen as if daring someone to come toward him, though that wasn’t how he felt. A guilty anger wove through his gut, an eerie charge for which he had no words, only the shape of a vague and sudden future forging through his mind.
All those letters he’d mailed over the years to his daughters, letters like the one returned in his hand, letters he was sure they never saw, and he wrote them anyway with the belief that one day Kate would change her mind, would sit the girls down and slide the stack across a table and explain how she’d held them back and how that had been a mistake. She would tell their daughters how Neal had sent news to them every month along with a hefty amount of child support ever since they were babies, and she would encourage them to sit together in a quiet kitchen and read each letter carefully. Their hearts would reshape with every word, all the worried little threads that had formed there over the years dissolving with each peak of insight until they came to rest in the long valley of understanding that life was not perfect, and not everything had been as they’d believed. Their father had loved them after all, his staying away dictated by this selfsame love.
And now Kate was dead.
A new kind of lonesome tore through him. Unlike the days where he felt he could not rise from his bed if another human being did not lay hands on him, if a voice did not whisper one small word into his ear, even to ask for a fork, a book off a shelf, unlike that, this new, godforsaken battering of hurt called for motion.
Through the house and out the back door he went to stand before a golden-purple sunset, the outline of a mule deer against the sandstone peaks before it disappeared into the cottonwoods. The vision of his grown daughters forgiving him everything vanished for all time. A tangle of new options fell as his feet, fractured and flimsy, impossible to hold, but he was certain that the lawn beneath his feet would become their yard, the mountains their view, the house at his back their home. It already had. He was their father. The only parent those girls had left.
THIRTY-ONE
ELIN WOKE ABRUPTLY, SUCKING AT the air, feeling as if something terrible was waiting, would always be waiting, on the other side of every new day. By the time she remembered where she was—her room at the B and B—and understood it was just after dawn, she was pulling away from her dream, a nightmare scurrying back into corners unseen.
Grief filled her bones like buckshot, painfully weighing her body to the bed. It caught in her throat every time she spoke, and on top of that, a gritty glue of anguish permeated her membranes—the lining of her sinuses, the tender bed of her fingernails. Every whiff of gardenia in the sun, every piss taken hurt—tugging with it a new layer of agony from some other crevasse it had folded itself into.
She lugged her body to the edge of the bed. Morning birds called to each other at the window. No sound from the girls asleep in the adjoining room. Fluke had slept at her feet. She was failing her own dog—no commands, no direction, no sense of purpose. She’d had him for five years, and in three weeks she’d made a lesser animal of him. They’d all, in one way or another, been reduced.
She couldn’t bear to be in the house where her sister had died, couldn’t bear to bring home the urn that contained her ashes, so it remained at the funeral home, where there had been no service of any kind per Kate’s wishes. “I request that everyone should think on me quickly if they must think of me at all. Scatter my ashes in the ocean and get on with living.”
When her mother took charge of Kate’s estate, the girls fell under Elin’s care, and she brought them here, where, within days, these ever-loving sisters began to fight.
Yesterday it was over who got to give Fluke commands, another sign that Elin had turned in her badge. When Averlee stepped in front of Quincy to make Fluke sit, Quincy shoved her, hard, sending Averlee to the floor, where she barely missed landing on Fluke.
The horror in Averlee’s face equaled the horror of Quincy’s tears, each bursting forth, a dam and an ineffectual cork. If they’d been any other kids their spat would have been forgotten, a few tears shed and left behind. But they were not other kids. They were their mother’s daughters, burdened with her loss, with the love they bore for each other. What had first seemed a lesson in sibling affinity was beginning to appear more like a script from which they’d dared not stray. Kate had taught them this, demanded this, and, in Elin’s opinion, it was no different than Elin demanding obedience from Fluke. In Kate’s attempt to stop history from repeating itself she’d taken things too far. Come hell or high water, the compassion these girls felt for one another must be adhered to, good or bad, win or lose, unnatural in its force against their pain.
Quincy had sobbed into her hands.
Averlee was quick on her feet, leaping around Fluke to get to her sister, to save her from herself. “It’s all right,” she said, peeling Quincy’s fingers from her eyes. “It’s fine!”
Elin couldn’t take another second. “Come,” she said to Fluke, and he followed her outside into the blinding sun of the front porch, where Elin had spent much of the last three weeks melting in the heat, her skin darker than it had been in years. She had the urge to pick up the phone and scream at her sister for dying. How dare she leave them like this? What was Elin supposed to do with two kids? What should she teach them about fighting? About their mother being dead? About their father? “What the fuck?” she wanted to say, and then did say, loudly, above her head into the willows. She never wanted to be a mother. Had no instincts for it. In fact, the minute Quincy shoved Averlee down it was the goddamn Etch A Sketch all over again. She wanted to sling a dishtowel in their faces.
Sweat ran down the sides of her face, and yet she couldn’t bring herself to go back inside and say the right thing. She did not know what the right thing was. Maybe it was leaving them alone to work it out. Maybe that was the direst decision she could make.
Every time she tried to imagine the future, the road supposed to lead them up and out of this mess, she could not picture what it should look like. A thick black curtain fell on her imagination. Her sister dying seemed like just the start, the beginning of worse things to come. Tragedy came in threes. Isn’t that what her grandmother used to say? Mercy me. In threes. But from what point in time did the counting begin? How far back did Elin need to go?
That was all she could think about on the porch yesterday, and now here as she pulled herself out of bed, turned, and jostled Fluke’s hip. He lifted his head, glanced at her, and lay back down. “You’re a bad dog,” she whispered. He closed his eyes.
Elin shuffled to the bathroom. Neal, assuming she could find him, and assuming he even wanted his daughters, well, what then? What the hell would that look like? Because what kind of father abandons his own children? It was a story she’d never gotten to the bottom of, never cared to know. What would Neal do if the law made him take Averlee and Quincy against his will?
Magnolia branches rasped against the shingles on the roof. Elin missed home. She missed the purple wisteria out her bedroom window and the neighbor’s tabby and the hummingbird at the window. She missed Rudi, the man he was, the man she thought he was. She missed herself, the woman she’d pretended to be, a woman so much easier to be than this one dragging her feet across the floor.
She dressed quietly in shorts and a black tank top, the uniform of her days. She peeked into the next room, where the girls
still slept, the furniture large and dark in the morning light, too heavy for the space it occupied, enclosing their tiny bodies in the bed, where their limbs flung outward, everywhere, as if broken ten different ways.
She crept downstairs with Fluke and then sat outside on the front porch steps while he sniffed around the yard. The grove next door was especially rich after a midnight rain, orange and peat, a trace of fruit rot, blackbirds hopping busily from soil to tree. Elin cradled her head down onto her knees. She had been in Florida for one month. Back in Portland the days would be cooling after an already mild summer, the leaves of white aspens in the hills taking on the first yellow tint of autumn.
“I want a divorce,” she’d said when Rudi picked up the phone the morning after Kate died. It was the first time they had spoken, exactly one week and two days after she left.
“I can’t exactly blame you,” he said, with only a brief hesitation, as if she’d just told him she was grabbing takeout on the way home and he couldn’t quite decide what he wanted. Would she have felt better if he’d burst into tears?
“My sister is dead,” she said.
“What did you just say?”
“My nieces are here with me.”
He gasped, and the drama of it, however genuine, annoyed her.
“I would appreciate a quick divorce. I trust you won’t screw me over any more than you already have.”