The space was dark and cool, cluttered with old furniture and holiday decorations, and the storm seemed far away. Boxes were stacked in the far corner. I yanked the string dangling from the rafters, and yellow light spilled down in a cone.
I pulled a heavy box toward me, smeared with dust, the dry tape offering no resistance when I pulled apart the flaps. Papers, probably every note I ever took, every test. Why had Julie kept them? She couldn’t have imagined that I would want to wade through my theories regarding Nazi-occupied France. I shoved the box aside.
The next box was light, and rattled as I took it down. Trophies. Not mine, but somehow, magically, Julie’s.
A tarnished figurine of a girl holding a ball aloft, cobalt blue ribbon wrapped around the stand. I remembered Julie sinking the final basket, putting her team over in the last second of the game. I’d yelled so loud I was hoarse the whole next day. You’d think that a trophy figure would show some emotion. You’d think the chin would be raised and the mouth stretched wide in triumph.
The door at the top of the stairs creaked open, letting in a wedge of light shining around a pair of jean-clad legs. Peyton came down the stairs, arms filled with clothes, not seeing me until she was halfway to the washer. She looked away, but too late.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” came the reluctant response.
Up went the lid of the washing machine, in went the clothes. She shook in detergent, lowered the lid, pressed a button. Water rushed into the tub.
“Look what I found,” I said as she turned to the stairs. “Your mom’s old trophies.”
“Yeah?” Grudging.
“Here’s the one she got senior year. Her team voted her Most Valuable Player.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“She was the best point guard our high school ever had.”
“They have a plaque in the hallway.”
“Really.” The thought warmed me. “Her coach said she could’ve gotten a college scholarship.”
“She didn’t want that. She wanted to be married. She wanted to have me.”
Said challengingly. I wondered who had told her that. Julie or Frank? Julie’s senior year, she and her coach had sat at the dining room table in our old house, debating all the options. In the end, Julie decided she couldn’t leave me. She’d told her coach in a low voice that I wasn’t supposed to hear from where I perched on the landing, She thinks people always leave.
In the end, I was the one who left Julie.
“Do you play basketball?” I asked.
“Yeah, in middle school.” She sat cross-legged beside me, her short blonde hair feathery, and one knee poking through the denim of her jeans. She smelled of popcorn and rain. “I didn’t make the high school team.”
I didn’t move, not wanting her to bolt.
Peyton pulled a trophy from the box and sneezed. “Yuck. Why did she keep all this stuff?”
“For you, I bet.”
“Me? What am I supposed to do with it?”
“You could pass it to your own children.”
“You kidding? I’m never having kids.” She dropped the trophy into the box and wiped her palms on her jeans.
Would Julie have protested, hearing that, insisted that Peyton was too young to make such a decision? No, she would have kept silent and given Peyton space, the way she had done with me.
The next box was filled with odds and ends. Would this mix of stuff hold Peyton’s interest, keep her close for just a few more minutes? I reached for a short red plastic tube. “Bet you don’t know what this is.” I held it out, and after a moment, she took it.
Shaking it, she pried off the top and tipped the tube to let small cardboard disks slide into her palm. She frowned.
“Pogs,” I said. “They were big when I was a kid.”
She poked one with a finger. “What do they do?”
“Nothing. You collect them and have wars with your friends. Whoever wins gets to keep the other person’s.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Pretty cool, huh?” I said lightly. “Bet you’re surprised we had such fun games back then.”
She made no comment, merely dropped the disks back into the tube, but I thought I saw the ghost of a smile touch the corners of her mouth.
I took out a stuffed sock monkey, its wide red mouth looking slightly obscene. “Yikes. I forgot about this guy. Your mom always said it gave her nightmares. Why did she even bother to keep it?” Maybe she’d imagined the two of us going through all this stuff and laughing. Julie had always been such a hopeless optimist.
“My mom kept everything.” Peyton pulled out a poster and unrolled it. “Who are New Kids on the Block?”
I groaned. “You’re making me feel ancient.” An easy exchange, the beginning of something?
The creak on the stair shattered it.
Frank, coming down the steps and walking across the cement floor. The smell of whiskey rolled off him, and by the way Peyton wrinkled her nose, I could tell she smelled it, too. “Take a look at this, Peyton, and tell me if you made this call last month.”
She got up to look at the paper he extended. “Where?”
He tapped the sheet and she shrugged.
“The phone company made a mistake. I just called that number a few days ago.” She handed the paper back to him. “That’s Dana’s.”
Ah. The phone bill. I’d hoped neither of them would ever know. Reluctantly, I got to my feet. “It’s not a mistake. That’s when Julie called me.”
They both stared at me.
“Julie called you?” Frank scanned the paper then frowned. “Five weeks ago?”
Confusion played across Peyton’s face. “You didn’t tell me that.”
No, I hadn’t.
“Hold on a minute,” Frank said. “You knew about Julie?”
“No,” I said. “She didn’t tell me she was sick.”
“Why did she call you, then?” Peyton asked.
I couldn’t bear to see the accusation on her face. I turned to Frank, who stood there, arms crossed, waiting for my reply. “I don’t know,” I admitted.
“You’re telling me you two were talking,” Frank said, “and she never said anything about being sick?”
“We weren’t talking. It was just the one phone call.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Peyton said.
Frank had his gaze firmly on mine. “What did you two talk about?”
“Not much. I couldn’t talk just then. I was busy, in the middle of setting up a shoot.” It sounded horrible, put like that. It didn’t say anything about how stunned I’d been to hear my sister’s voice on the other end of the line, how haltingly the few words we’d exchanged had come. It didn’t describe the awkward gaps where both of us paused to let the other speak, only to find silence standing where words should have rushed in.
“You were too busy,” Frank repeated.
This was why I hadn’t wanted to say anything. This was how I knew the conversation would unravel, in ugly hopeless circles. “That’s not how it went,” I said, miserably. “She asked if I was a doctor. She sounded disappointed to hear I wasn’t.”
“Mom wouldn’t have cared about something like that,” Peyton said.
Peyton hadn’t heard the flatness in my sister’s voice. Julie had cared, all right. I’d been embarrassed. It had made me feel defensive. I’d cut the call short, promised to call her back. But I never did.
“What else?” Frank asked. “What are you hiding?”
“Nothing.” It had been a private phone conversation. It had nothing to do with either of them, yet there they both stood, expecting explanations from me, wanting to understand why Julie had called and, most of all, why she hadn’t told either of them about it.
“Yes, you are,” Peyton said. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes narrowed with anger. “Tell him what happened in Chicago.”
How could she know about that? The triumph on her face told me she knew the whole story. Now Frank
was looking at me. “Someone got hurt in the shoot . . . ,” I began.
“Someone died,” Peyton corrected.
“Yes,” I said. “Someone was inside the building when we shot it.” Calm and certain, betraying none of my fear and indecision. I had a steady hand in wiring a building with dynamite. I had a steady hand here. “We don’t know how she got in there. We think she may have been sleeping it off.”
“You killed someone?” Frank said.
“We didn’t know she was there,” I said.
“What do the police say?”
I hesitated. I’d been gone for almost a week and the police detective hadn’t once phoned. Because I wasn’t a suspect, or because I was? “The police are still investigating.”
“Are they looking for you? Are you hiding out here?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. They know I’m here. They have my cell number.”
“Will you talk to them if they call?” Peyton demanded.
“Peyton,” I said, “I didn’t know she was sick. She didn’t tell me.”
“You must have known something was wrong. You just didn’t care.”
But I hadn’t known anything was wrong. Julie had completely fooled me. I could never have imagined that my sister would have been able to keep something so urgent from me, but she had. She’d changed. “I did care. I do care.”
“I wish I’d never called you. I wish you’d never come back.” Peyton’s face was my sister’s, the same downward tilt to her eyes, the same arch to her eyebrows. It was mine, too, the same face that stared back at me from the mirror each morning.
Frank put his hand on her arm. “Come on, princess.”
She allowed herself to be pulled away. Frank didn’t even look at me as they went up the stairs.
How is she? I had asked Julie in that brief phone call.
Peyton’s fine, she had replied, and that was when I had learned the name my sister had chosen.
TWENTY
[PEYTON]
THE MOST TIMID OCEAN CREATURES ARE THE FEATHER stars, delicate animals that look like ferns and tuck themselves into crevices to hide. At night, when everyone’s asleep, they gingerly extend their arms and feed on drifting plankton. They swim slowly or creep along the ground, and prefer still water. They’re not a main food source for any species, and humans don’t collect them. If they were to die off, no one would notice or miss them. They lead quiet, unassuming lives, with one exception.
Once a year, the females briefly spawn, releasing millions of eggs in one big burst. The moms frantically churn the water with their arms to disperse their babies and send them floating away to make a home for themselves somewhere else. They’re hoping with all their hearts that this next generation will find it easier or happier or better. But what they don’t know is that their eggs eventually settle and hatch in another part of the ocean identical to the place they’d once called home. All that energy and hope for nothing; it’s better they don’t know the truth.
Peyton woke boiling mad, her cheek pressed hard against her pillow. Why? Then the night before swam back to her, and she flung off the covers and padded over to her aquarium.
Tiny fish fluttered up from the bottom, tails and fins rippling, happy to see her, happy to know they were going to be fed. Her peaceable kingdom, everyone getting along. You first. No, please, after you. She unscrewed the lid on the food, took a pinch and sprinkled it over the tank. They darted around greedily. She waited a minute. They still looked hungry, jabbing the water surface with their teeny snouts, so she added another pinch. “That’s it,” she told them.
Dana’s bedroom door was closed. Light showed very faintly across the sill, seeping onto the floor of the darkened back hall.
Her dad manned the coffeemaker as if he could physically draw the coffee down into the pot.
“Why is she still here?” Peyton demanded. “Why are you letting her stay?”
“She’s your mom’s sister.”
“Like that means anything!”
“It means something to me.”
That surprised her. But then again, her dad was kind of tight with his sister. Maybe that was the way it was with sisters. Peyton would never know. “Are we going to church?”
“Your mom would want us to,” he said, and that was that.
Spooning cold cereal into her mouth, she stared out the window. He’d been up paying bills again at the dining room table. She hadn’t been there watching but she knew how it had gone, the endless shuffling of envelopes, the anxious gripping and regripping of the pen as though that would make dollar bills spring from the nib. She thought of the accusing way he’d looked at her, questioning the phone charge. Five bucks. When had five bucks gotten to be such a big deal? She knew the answer: back when her mother had a twelve-dollar aspirin in the hospital. “The bird feeder’s empty,” she said.
Her mom’s job. The little wood-and-glass house had probably been empty for weeks and Peyton was only now realizing it.
“Which one?”
“The regular one.” She leaned forward and looked down. “The hummingbird feeder fell.” It lay in two pieces on the grass.
Her dad grunted.
“I’ll take care of it.” She could do the bird feeders and the laundry. He could do the bills and grocery shopping. Bit by bit, they’d close the gap her mom had left. They’d take care of all the outside stuff. It was the inside stuff that was the problem.
The diner was busy after church, all the done-praying people going after the Sunday Dinner $5.49 Special, but Leslie had saved them their usual table by the window. “Here you go,” she sang out, dropping menus onto the table. Just three of them now, instead of four. “Miriam, you want coffee?”
Peyton’s grandmother picked up the menu with her knobby hands. “That sounds fine.”
Leslie splashed coffee into the thick white mug. “Frank?”
“Thanks.”
“You want a Coke, Peyton?”
“Okay.” Leslie was nice, not in that fake way some people had, but genuinely nice. She smiled like she meant it, and she always saved a piece of blueberry pie for Peyton. She’d sent a condolence card in the mail, signed by her and her little boy, his letters irregularly formed and sliding off the page. Love, Benjamin William Jervis. It looked as though it had taken him a whole day to write it all out.
Her grandmother studied the menu, the plastic-covered sheet curled and smeared with fingerprints, its offerings unchanged for as long as Peyton could remember. Soups. Sandwiches. Entrées. Desserts. Her grandmother would tap the picture of the baked chicken and ask her dad how salty he thought the sauce might be; she’d let her finger hover over the chef ’s salad and ask him whether the ham was real or pressed. And in the end, without fail, she’d triumphantly decide on the fish.
Peyton had a ton of homework, almost a week’s worth of missed classes. Her teachers would give her a break, but the year was wrapping up and projects were due. Finals were looming. What if she just couldn’t do it in two weeks? Would they give her the summer? What if the next year rolled around and Peyton was still reading The Odyssey and writing up that DNA lab? She could stay stuck in her junior year forever, while everyone else passed her and went on to college. Eric had big plans. He was counting on his saxophone playing to get him in somewhere great; his parents were already taking him on college tours. The subject hadn’t really been discussed in Peyton’s house. Now it probably never would be.
“The sermon was very nice, wasn’t it, Peyton?” her grandma said.
“Uh-huh.” At least she knew who Peyton was today.
Her grandma set down the menu and crossed her hands on top of it. “Very thought-provoking.”
She said the same thing every Sunday, even if it was a recycled Easter or Christmas sermon that they’d all heard a billion times, or if she’d managed to snore through the whole thing. She always woke right up when it was time to go, blinking and sniffing, to gather her things and get going on to the diner. She never acted the least bit embar
rassed. She probably thought the minister’s words sailed right through her subconscious mind and fixed her right up with the good Lord’s message.
Leslie returned with Peyton’s Coke. “You folks ready to order?”
“Mom?” her dad said. “What looks good to you?”
As if he didn’t know.
“Well, let’s see. I’m trying to decide. Is the salad made fresh today, or is it left over from yesterday?”
“Which salad, Miriam?” Leslie asked. “The chef ’s or the Caesar?”
So she was going to play the game, too.
“I was looking at the chef ’s salad, but the chicken does sound . . .”
“How about the fish?” Peyton said.
All three adults looked at her.
“The fish?” Her grandmother tilted the menu. “Now, that’s an idea. I didn’t see that.”
Her father shot Peyton a look. “That’s what I’ll have, too.”
“All righty,” Leslie said. “Two fish platters.” She smiled down at Peyton. “You on for a burger?”
Peyton nodded, feeling a little abashed. Her dad had gotten her back, though, with the fish order. Now she’d be surrounded by the fishy odor and the knowledge that the deep-fried golden objects on the plates to her right and across from her were once swimming happily in the nearby lake. She handed Leslie her menu. Well, at least they didn’t serve calamari or shrimp, things that were recognizable as what they’d once been.
“With cheddar, right? Extra pickles?”
“Please.” Eric teased her all the time about eating cheeseburgers. Moo, he’d say. Don’t cows count, too?
Leslie tucked her notepad in her apron pocket. “Be back in a jiffy.”
Peyton played with her straw. Now was when her mother would start searching her purse for a quarter. She’d teasingly ask Grandma what she was in the mood for, hip-hop or heavy metal. Her grandma would laugh and laugh.
Her dad cleared his throat and slid out of his chair. “Why don’t I go check out the jukebox selections?”
He’d felt it, too. In a way, that made her feel better.
“That would be nice, Frank,” her grandma said.
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