by Nicole Baart
“I’m not too early, am I?” Kat called. She lifted a pair of paper grocery bags out of the backseat of her car and slammed the door with her hip.
“Have you been out all night?” Dani asked, taking in her sister’s ripped jeans and the sparkly, sleeveless shirt that played back the morning sun like a disco ball. Hardly weekday-morning attire.
“I snagged a few hours at the trailer.” Kat jogged sure-footed across the dewy grass and took the porch steps two at a time. “But I haven’t showered yet. I was saving that for your house. You have better water pressure.”
“And expensive shampoo.”
“That too.” Kat shuffled the grocery bags to one arm and pulled Danica into a lopsided embrace. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks.”
“Like death warmed over.” Kat dropped a kiss on Dani’s cheek and pulled the end of her sister’s loose braid. “But we’re going to take care of that. I come bringing libations.”
Dani stepped back, barefoot on the porch, and studied Kat with a critical eye. “It’s seven o’clock in the morning. You brought booze to cheer me up?”
Kat’s nose crinkled. “Booze?”
“Libations.”
“Is that what that means? I meant supplies. You know, food and drink.”
“Provisions.”
Kat snapped her fingers and grinned. “Exactly. Provisions. I’ve taken the next two days off and I’m not leaving your side.”
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“Maybe a bit of both. Could you get the door for me? I’m a second or two away from dropping these bags on your porch.”
Dani swung the screen door open for Katrina and followed her inside. The living room looked windswept and disgruntled; pillows were tossed on the floor, knickknacks were tipped over on the end table, and one of Etsell and Dani’s wedding portraits hung askew.
“Tough night?” Kat asked, toeing a pillow out of the way.
“The wind, I guess.” Dani swung the afghan off her shoulders and folded it neatly. She arranged the pillows on the couch and righted the trinkets on the coffee table, but when she reached for the photograph she couldn’t bring herself to touch it. “I suppose some of that stuff needs to be refrigerated?” She stole a look at Kat and caught her staring. There was an indecipherable look in her eyes, but she blinked and smiled, dispelling the awkward moment.
“Yeah. I picked up eggs and juice, bread. . . .” Kat peered inside her bags with a curious grin, as if she were seeing the contents for the first time. “Who knows what else? I just grabbed stuff that looked good.”
Dani unpacked the bags while Kat scrubbed the coffeepot. There was indeed an eclectic sampling of grocery-store fare, everything from high-pulp orange juice to dried cherries in dark chocolate and a bottle of rum.
“Libations,” Dani said, holding up the bottle.
“Arr, matey!” Kat winked and saluted.
There was a squat, shiny green pepper and a little box of button mushrooms with bits of earth still clinging to the stems. Dani knew that Kat hadn’t learned to cook in her short absence, so she settled her sister at the table with a week-old copy of the local paper and set to work cleaning and chopping the vegetables for an omelet. Only hours ago she had wanted to crawl into a hole and die, but there was something soothing about the soft snick of her knife on the cutting board and the scent of fresh coffee in the kitchen. The hint of a smile graced Dani’s lips, but it came bearing the burden of a sharp and sudden guilt. She bit the insides of her cheeks.
Kat didn’t mention Alaska, and it shadowed the air between them, growing in size and clarity until Dani’s failed quest sat like an unscalable mountain in the middle of the room. Her own personal Everest. When the eggs were just beginning to bubble, Dani sighed and turned to face her sister. She hated always being the strong one, but if Kat wasn’t going to mention Alaska, she had to.
“It really sucked,” Dani said, answering the unspoken question. “I tried to fly and couldn’t. Hazel was . . . well, Hazel. And there were a couple of days when I thought, when I believed that Etsell had disappeared with another woman.”
“What?” Kat snapped the newspaper shut and slapped it on the table with both her hands covering a photo of a farmer straddling infant rows of tiny corn. “Another woman? Ell?”
“Well, no.” Dani’s hands felt useless and unfamiliar, like they were a part of someone else’s body. She looked at her open palms, then placed them very deliberately on her hips and opened her mouth to reassure her sister. But Kat was already on her feet, eyes shining with fury and fists at her side.
“I didn’t dare to ask,” she fumed. “I was going to just let you bring up Alaska when you felt good and ready. But I can’t believe this. I mean, Etsell? Seriously? Another woman? I’d like to get my hands on him and—”
“Katrina. There wasn’t another woman. It was a weird coincidence. Nothing, really.” Dani shrugged, tried to look nonchalant, but her arms were stiff. “I’m just trying to tell you about it. To tell someone what it was like to be there. I mean, in Alaska with the mountains and the water . . . It’s like a different world.” Dani shook her head. “It felt like winter but they said it was spring. And I could picture Ell there, you know? It smelled like him, even though I’ve never been to Alaska, and before a few weeks ago he hadn’t either. . . .”
Kat didn’t say anything. She stood there and waited, and, like a tap being primed, Dani kept talking. First in spurts, then louder and longer, her voice tight with the power of all the emotions behind the words.
“I spent an entire week wandering the streets of Seward and looking for him. Which is stupid, I know, but I couldn’t fly—I tried, believe me, I tried—and there was nothing else to do but sit and worry. And I kept looking for him in the most impossible places—in bars, on boats, beneath the water of the bay as if he had crashed in the ocean and I expected his body to float to the surface in front of me.”
“Dani, don’t. That’s just . . . Please. Don’t.”
“When I wasn’t picturing him dead, I saw my husband with her. This other woman who didn’t have a face and who just walked into the middle of a decade—a decade—and unraveled all our history in a couple of weeks. How can that happen?”
“It didn’t happen,” Kat said. She seemed to come to her senses and crossed the kitchen in a few quick strides. Taking Dani by the shoulders, she squeezed tight. “You said so yourself. It didn’t happen.”
“But it was like a nightmare—not knowing and thinking the worst. And then she came back and he didn’t, and I didn’t know if I should be happy or devastated.”
Kat put her arms around Dani and fit her chin against her sister’s rigid shoulder. “It’s not over yet, honey. Just because you didn’t find him doesn’t mean he’s not still out there—”
“Stop, Kat.” Dani pulled away and regarded her sister with a cold glare. “Just stop. We both know he’s not coming back.”
The air in the kitchen was warm, but ice formed in dark corners and seemed to spin fragile webs on the windowpanes like a swift summer frost. The air felt ready to crack and shatter, but then Dani sighed and softened, and the spell was broken as quickly as it was cast. “Oh, God,” she breathed. Just that: a name, an incantation, nothing more.
“I know,” Kat whispered. They stood there for a moment, less than an arm’s breadth away, and regarded each other as if they were strangers though they could both close their eyes and paint the other sister’s face from memory. But it was different now. Etsell haunted the room, an echo that hovered beside Dani like the silhouette of a nearly transparent shadow, little more than a ripple in the air.
“The eggs.” Dani spun around and knocked the frying pan off the burner, but it was too late. They were burned, and all at once the kitchen seemed heavy with the odor of scorched butter and blackened mushrooms.
“I wasn’t hungry anyway,” Kat said.
They drank coffee in the garden, silent and thoughtful, with only the sound
of a summer morning between them. The backyard seemed savage somehow, thick with early-summer growth and clearly untended. The grass was long and the trees were almost ostentatious in robes of lightest green, a color that would soon darken in the sun as Dani’s skin would glow with a sprinkling of freckles in the passing of warm weeks ahead. But for a little while, even the untamed tangle of her generous yard would be lovely simply because it was alive. It grew and thrived, and while it would gradually brown at the edges, the early-June splendor of a forgotten garden was still a sight to behold.
When the sisters were jittery and high-strung from too much caffeine, Kat stood and reached to pull Dani to her feet. “Put on some clothes. We’re going for a hike.”
“A hike?” Dani gave Kat’s outfit a skeptical look. “Looks like you better put on some clothes too.”
“Got a T-shirt I can borrow?”
Under normal circumstances Dani would be exasperated. Kat’s version of help was never very helpful, and often resulted in more work for Dani instead of less. A few years ago, when Etsell and Dani had both come down with influenza A, Kat arrived on the scene to make chicken soup and take care of them. But she didn’t know how to make soup, and Dani ended up chopping vegetables in her bathrobe—and spoon-feeding it to Kat when she got the flu too.
Kat had arrived less than an hour earlier, and already Dani was cooking, providing emotional support, and furnishing an appropriate wardrobe for her older sister. But there was something comforting about a familiar routine. Dani knew this role by heart, and though Kat’s presumptuousness would have bothered her a month ago, she found it almost endearing now.
“Sure, I’ve got a T-shirt,” Dani said. “And a pair of shorts that won’t show your booty too.”
“I like my booty.”
“Maybe a little too much.”
Dani dug jean shorts and T-shirts out of her dresser drawer, then pulled her hair into a ponytail and splashed her face with cold water. Brushing her teeth was an almost religious experience—when she rinsed her mouth she was struck by the bite of peppermint on her tongue and the feeling that some things never changed, no matter what happened. Life went on, even when you didn’t necessarily want it to.
Stepping out of the bathroom Dani came face-to-face with her reflection: Kat in her clothes, hair long and loose around her shoulders—the way Dani wore hers when she wanted to feel pretty—looking for all the world like Dani’s fraternal twin. Kat was a handspan taller, and her hair was several shades darker, but they had the same upswept nose, narrow legs, long arms. Without thinking, Dani crossed the space between them and wrapped her arms around her sister’s slender waist. Kat held her tight.
“Thanks for coming. I didn’t think . . .” But Dani didn’t finish. She couldn’t bring herself to admit that she thought she would have to face this alone.
As Dani laced up her tennis shoes on the steps of the front porch, she lamented the fact that her feet were a full size smaller than Kat’s. “You’re stuck with a big pair of Etsell’s flip-flops, a little pair of mine, or those ridiculous heeled things you came in. Where exactly are we going?”
“Not far.” A secret smile slid across Kat’s features. “But I have a surprise for you when we get there.”
“So we’re not actually hiking per se.”
“Nah, it’s more of a walk. I’ll take your flip-flops.”
Standing in the shadow of her detached garage, Dani could pretend that she lived out in the middle of nowhere. The yellow house sat on one of the last corners in town, a square edge of concrete where Thirteenth Street met Ridge Road. If she turned down Ridge, the first house she ran into would be Benjamin’s. There were a few more houses before a bend hid the rest of the blacktop from sight, but she wasn’t familiar with those far-flung neighbors. And if she headed back into town on Thirteenth, she would have to cross an empty lot before reaching Mrs. Kamp’s peeling-paint home. Across the road was a cornfield, and where the concrete of Thirteenth ended, a gravel path to nowhere began.
Kat crossed the empty street and headed down the gravel road with a bounce in her step. “Coming?” She threw a wink over her shoulder, and Dani jogged to catch up. Her chest suddenly felt tight—history crunched beneath her feet as she followed her sister down a trail that belonged to her and Etsell.
“Are we going to the river?” Dani asked, trying to keep the strain out of her voice.
“Surprise!” Kat threw up her arms in mock excitement. “Seriously. Where did you think we were going?”
Dani fumbled. “I don’t know, Kat. I don’t feel like walking to the river right now. I have a headache. Let’s just—”
“Come on.” Kat grabbed her sister’s hand briefly, squeezed. “Walk with me. The fresh air will be good for you.”
“I got plenty of fresh air in Alaska. And it didn’t smell like manure.”
“The scent of money, baby.” Kat wiggled her eyebrows. “See? I’m a good little rural girl.”
Dani grunted, but she followed Kat all the same. If she had felt even a little optimistic in the garden, all that hope fizzled away beneath the glare of the rising sun. She felt incapable of turning around, of challenging Kat’s will. So she bowed her head and watched the sun-speckled dust rise beneath her feet as the trees around her began to thicken.
It wasn’t long before the sigh of the river whispered through the leaves. Though light penetrated the patchy canopy of the hardwood forest, just the knowledge of water lent a certain coolness to the air that brushed fingertips against Dani’s skin and raised a little shiver. How many times had she walked this path with Etsell? They had spotted a red fox once, and a mother raccoon with a lone kit. And there was a secret place around an S-bend curve in the river where teenagers came to drink beer and smoke pot—they had found the empty bottles and blackened joints on more than one occasion, and came back with garbage bags to dispose of the waste.
Walking with Kat was different. She bounced and chattered, scaring away any wildlife that might otherwise have been caught unawares. And instead of appreciating the quiet hum of the river, she complained about the murky water, the shallow places where sandbars peeked through the surface in uneven swaths of sticky mud and debris.
“You couldn’t pay me to swim in there,” Kat said when the stood on the damp bank. The water swirled and eddied before them, hiding a world of secrets beneath a silent cloak of coffee-colored opacity.
Dani didn’t tell her that she and Etsell had dipped into the river countless times. That they loved the feel of the water on their skin and the knowledge that it had come from distant places when snow melted in spring and rain soaked the ground. Instead, she asked a question. “Why are we here?”
Kat held up one finger to silence her, and thrust her other hand into the pocket of her shorts. After a moment she emerged triumphant and held out her closed fist to Dani. “Here.”
When she peeled back her fingers, there was a Swiss Army Knife in the palm of her hand. It was a slim cylinder, painted pink for breast cancer awareness and bearing a tiny white ribbon. Kat had started carrying it around when she began working at the gentlemen’s club. Dani wished that her sister would pack Mace instead, or, better yet, find another job. But Kat insisted that the knife was discreet, and that it offered a small amount of security. Dani was glad that her sister had something.
“What in the world do you want me to do with that?”
“You’re going to cut my hair.” Kat’s eyes flashed, as if daring Dani to object.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s what you do, Dani. I want you to cut my hair.”
“With a Swiss Army Knife? Katrina, if you want a haircut, let’s go to my salon. I’ll open it up for you right now.”
Kat shook her head. “We’ll do that later. You’ll have to clean it up, of course. But I want you to hack it here.”
Dani knew her lips were parted in disbelief, and she licked them to buy herself a moment to think. She couldn’t tell if Kat was serious or not. “I don’t get it
,” she finally admitted.
Bunching her loose hair at the nape of her neck, Kat twisted it into a knot. “Remember Little Women?”
“Little Women?” The laugh that escaped Dani was real and sudden. For just a moment everything shimmered bright, unbroken—a mere heartbeat of clarity when she could feel the narrative of her life spin the beginnings of a well-known scene around her. “You’ve never read Little Women.”
“Well, no,” Kat admitted. “But I remember when Natalie read it to you. And there was this part where Joan—”
“Jo.”
“Whatever.” Kat rolled her eyes. “Whoever she is, she cuts off her hair.”
“Her one beauty.”
Kat stopped cold. “My hair is not my one beauty.”
But Dani hardly heard her. She was laughing so hard it was difficult to breathe. Difficult to focus on why she found herself in the middle of nowhere with her arguably unbalanced sister, a pink pocketknife, and a memory that was soft and tattered around the edges—one of warm nights on the couch and Natalie’s low, even voice as she read words that didn’t matter to Dani as much as the attention. She didn’t even realize when the tide turned and her laughter was mixed with tears.
“Are you crying?” Kat asked, reaching out to touch her cheek. She stopped herself at the last moment.
“I don’t think so.” Dani sighed. “I don’t know.” She pressed the heels of her hands to her face and smeared away the dampness that was there. She smiled. “Do you really want me to cut your hair?”
Kat looked uncertain for a second, scared maybe that Dani would start to cry again and it would open a floodgate that couldn’t be closed. But then she grinned and took her sister’s hand, slapping the pocketknife into it and closing her fist around it. “Yes, I do. It was a noble thing to do in the book, right?”