“Good luck,” says the girl.
We turn, and start walking. Sean is holding on to my arm, his entire body shaking. “Let’s just get this over with,” he says. “We’ll just go now, no stopping, no thinking. We’ll go and then we’ll find somewhere to sleep and then when we wake up tomorrow morning, this will all be behind us.”
“Yes,” I say to Sean. I am walking beside him, breathing in and out and in and out, reminding myself to have faith in her. To keep walking. And when the time comes, to be ready. “By tomorrow morning everything will be different.”
Forty-one
We turn right and walk up a steep hill on a narrow street, surrounded by tall skinny houses on either side. It’s pretty and peaceful. Not the setting you’d expect for something like this. But really, what is?
Sean’s hand is on his stomach, holding on to the gun through his shirt. “This has already happened,” he whispers. “All of this has already happened.”
We’re both panting. We turn right, then left, then right again. I think I hear footsteps behind us, but I’m too scared to turn around. My heart is pounding.
Sean whispers, “I can’t wait until this is all over.” “Me, neither,” I whisper back. We keep walking. The sky is dark. Our only guides are the yellow light coming from the cracked street lamps and the faint white glow of the moon.
Finally Sean stops walking in front of a narrow gray house, with a heavy brass 1414 hung upon the blue front door. “This is it,” he says in a voice that no longer sounds like his own. Sean grabs the doorknob. He turns it. The door is unlocked. Sean whispers, “Fate.”
He opens the door. There’s a skinny staircase leading up with a yellow paper lantern dangling above it. Sean takes the gun out from under his shirt with shaking hands. He whispers, “Go.” And I start walking slowly up the stairs.
Right foot.
Left foot.
Right foot.
Left foot.
“Call her name now,” he whispers.
I take a deep breath. “Nina,” I call out.
“Louder,” he says.
Right foot.
Left foot.
Right foot.
“NINA,” I say again.
“That wasn’t loud enough,” Sean says.
Left foot.
Right foot.
“NINAAAAAA!” No answer. “NIIIIIINNNNNNN-AAAAAA!!!!!”
Left foot.
Right foot.
Left foot.
“Belly?” We hear a voice coming through the door at the top of the stairs, very quiet, barely more than a whisper.
My heart stops. “Belly? Is that you?”
Sean’s breath catches in his throat.
I squeeze my eyes shut and I inhale deeply. I smell sweetness and spice. Oranges and ginger. Nina. I’m not scared anymore.
We reach the top of the stairs and push through the door. We’re in a large living room—dark wood floors, big fluffy couches, framed drawings covering every last bit of wall space, and there, standing by herself in the center of the room, is my sister.
My sister.
Looking both exactly like and completely different from the person I remember.
Our eyes meet just for a moment, and I feel a warmth spreading outward from the middle of my chest. When she sees me she starts to smile, but then she looks behind me, at Sean, and stops. Her jaw drops, her lips pull back. It looks like she’s screaming only no sound is coming out. I have never in my life seen Nina afraid before. But now, she is terrified.
She is not supposed to be terrified.
My heart pounds painfully in my chest. Icy sweat springs out of every pore in my body.
She is not supposed to be fucking terrified!
That final call that came in on Sean’s cell phone back at the motel, the one that I answered with my feet, I thought that was Nina. I thought I heard her voice saying hello through the phone. And I thought she had been listening to everything Sean and I were saying after I kicked the phone under the desk. I thought she knew we were coming to Haight Street. And I thought she was leading us to her. I thought she was going to save us.
But I was wrong.
Everything I thought was wrong.
“Nina,” I hear Sean’s voice over my shoulder. I turn. He’s staring at her, his nostrils flared, his eyes glowing. He barely even looks human.
“Sean,” she says. “What are you doing here?”
Sean reaches for the gun inside his shirt.
“I think you already know that,” he says. “This is for what you did to me…” He sounds like he’s reciting lines from a script he rehearsed in his head a thousand times over. “This is for what you made me do to him.”
He raises his arms, the gun clutched between his shaking hands.
Nina just stands there, frozen, staring.
The gun is pointing straight at her.
This is it.
This is it.
This.
Is.
It.
And then, an explosion. Not a bullet out of the gun, but something within me:
Nina is not the only one who can save us.
Suddenly I am flying through the air screaming, “LEAVE MY SISTER ALONE!!!”
I stretch out my arm, catching Sean right under his chin, snapping his head back, hard. And then I slam both my shoulders into the middle of his stomach with everything I’ve fucking got. We tumble down to the floor. Sean lands on his back, a wheezy whistling noise escapes from his lips. The gun is knocked from his hand and slides spinning across the wood.
And for a moment we are all silent and completely still. I don’t think a single one of us can quite believe what I’ve just done.
“FREEZE! PUT YOUR HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD!” I look up. Five uniformed police officers have materialize out of the shadows. They stand over us, their guns cocked and aimed at our heads. Sean turns to the side, the expression on his face one of such complete and utter bewilderment that for a second I actually feel sorry for him.
But just for a second.
“What’s going on!?” he says. “Ellie? Ellie?!”
All I can do is shake my head.
A police officer yanks his arms behind his back and cuffs him. Another one starts to read him his rights. Two others lift him up, his body limp like a doll’s, his head hanging down. His feet just barely brush against the ground as he is carried backward toward the door.
But right before he is pulled through, he looks up, and there is a hint of something else on his face. Something that looks an awful lot like relief.
And then he is gone.
I look up. The wall behind Nina is covered in drawings, photo-realistic scenes from our lives growing up—the park where we used to play, our aunt’s house at the beach, even a little picture of the guy from the Covered Wagon Shipping commercial. And right in the center is a framed portrait of our mother. In the picture she looks different than I’ve seen her in a long time, soft and pleased and proud as though this is how Nina’s been remembering her.
I look back at Nina, standing right there in front of me. It took two years and two thousand miles, but I am finally here with her. Her bottom lip is shaking. Mine is shaking, too.
We run toward each other, Nina and I, crash together into a tight hug, a hug that feels like any of the thousands and thousands of other hugs we’ve shared in the last sixteen years, but also completely different because of all that it took to get here, because we almost didn’t get to have this one. Neither of us says anything because words just do not exist for this kind of moment. We just stand there hugging until the tears are pouring down both our faces.
Forty-two
What happens next is a blur, but there are certain details I know I will never forget—the sour human smell in the back of the police car, a mix of a hundred people’s anxious sweat, the sound of my mother’s voice on the phone when they call her from the station, because I can tell she’s crying, the buzz of the bright fluorescent lights in the room where I
tell Detective Bryant a four-hour-long story about every single thing that happened in the five days since I’ve met Sean. But more than anything I know I will never forget the look on Nina’s face when Detective Bryant comes into the waiting room where Nina and I sit on scratched-up wooden chairs to tell us that Sean confessed. To everything. “We barely even questioned him,” Detective Bryant says. He shakes his head. “That happens sometimes.” And Nina just turns toward me, her lips pressed together, her eyes watering, her entire face contorted with such pure relief, I know I cannot even begin to understand the hell that preceded it.
“It’s over,” Nina whispers. “It’s finally over.” And she squeezes my hand.
“I’ll take you home now,” Detective Bryant says.
So we stand up and we walk outside. The clear early-morning sunlight shines on our faces. I can already tell it’s going to be a beautiful day.
Forty-three
Everything out the window shrinks as we rise higher, houses, cars, people, mountains. My ears pop. I press my face against the glass.
“Wait, wait, wait, Belly,” Nina says. “Don’t move for just ooooooooone more second…” She holds her pen up to her lips and then brings the point back to the napkin she’s been sketching on. “Your face is more angley than it was the last time I drew you.” She holds the pen to her lips again. “More cheekboney.”
I smile. “Maybe,” I say. I glance at the napkin onto which she’s sketching the outline of my face.
“No, definitely,” she says. “You look older.”
“Well…time will do that to a person, I guess,” and I try to make my tone light and jokey but it doesn’t come out that way. The problem is this: After two years of wondering, my brain doesn’t quite know how to stop. I’ve reminded myself that now that Nina is safe and I can see her, that nothing else matters, that nothing else should matter. But what we tell ourselves and what we deep down believe, those are two different things, I guess.
“I can’t believe Mom’s taking the day off just to come meet us at the airport,” Nina says. Out of the corner of my eye I can see her shaking her head slowly. She looks at me, down at the napkin, back up at me. “I mean, when’s that ever happened before, right?” She’s smiling. I don’t say anything.
The unasked questions sit heavy in my mouth like marbles, and everything else I try and say has to work its way around them. “I don’t know,” I say. After what my sis-ter’s been through, it doesn’t feel fair. It doesn’t feel fair to make her explain anything. But my brain just won’t stop wondering.
“Oh, Belly.” Nina sighs and puts down her pen. “Please, just ask me, already, okay? I know you need to ask me and it’s okay. Just…ask me.”
“How did you know…”
“We’re sisters,” she says simply. “That’s how.” And she turns toward me and smiles this bittersweet smile.
We’re sisters. There’s someone here now who can say that to me.
I take a deep breath. “I just need to know why,” I say, very quietly. I look down at my lap. “And I know it’s selfish to ask because of everything that you went through.”
Nina lets out this wry little laugh and then shakes her head. “I’m not the only one who’s been through something here, Bell. Need I remind you?”
I shake my head.
“Look, you need to know, so I need to tell you.” Nina takes a deep breath. “So here it goes. Three years ago I went to a party at this crazy house called the Mothership. It was the middle of summer, but it looked like the middle of winter in their backyard because someone had somehow gotten ahold of an industrial snowmaking machine and they just turned that sucker on and left it running for two days straight. When I got to the party, everyone was outside going nuts, some girls were building an igloo and there were snowball fights everywhere and some guy was making this insane snowman that actually looked like a person. So I had had this idea to make this sort of fuzzy pink dress for myself and dye my hair light pink, and be a Hostess Sno Ball. So I did, and that’s what I wore to the party, but everyone just kept asking if I was cotton candy or a pink pom-pom or something.
“And then this guy came up to me, really cute, carrying this snowboard. And I’d noticed him before doing these insane snowboard tricks on this ramp they’d set up. Anyway, he just turned to me and, I’ll never forget this because it was the very first thing he ever said to me, he said, ‘Someday I’ll be telling our grandchildren how when I met their grandma she was dressed up like a snack cake.’ And I know that could sound like a cheesy line or something but because of the way he said it and because it was about snack cakes, it didn’t feel cheesy, it was just funny. And then I looked at him and I was like, ‘Well, you know, by the time we have grandkids it’ll be way in the future and snack cakes might not even exist anymore,’ and he was like, ‘Well, if that’s true we should probably start stockpiling now, don’t you think, sweetheart?’ And that was the first conversation we ever had.” Nina turns toward me and smiles.
I smile back.
“That was kinda it for me. We were just together after that. We didn’t have to talk about it or wonder about it, we just…were. So, one day Jason starts telling me about his stepbrother and how he was kind of messed up and how he got sent away to boarding school and how really deep down he was a good kid.” Nina shakes her head. “Jason saw the best in people. Which wasn’t always so good for him, I guess.” She looks back down at her napkin. “Jason said his stepbrother was going to be in town on break from school and he wanted me to meet him. And I was excited, actually. I mean, I had no idea where all this would…” Nina swallows hard. “I had no idea where all this would end up. But anyway, so I met Sean. I remember thinking right when I first met him that there was just something really, I don’t know, different about him, I guess. But I kind of liked that about him. You know what I mean?”
I nod. “I thought the same thing when I met him.” And I smile wryly, because it’s all so ridiculous.
Nina smiles wryly back. “He was really charming sometimes. Charming and weird and I thought, well, good for him for doing his own thing. And to be honest, at first I really liked having him around, it was nice having someone to be a big sister to.” Nina tips her head to the side. “I missed you then, Belly. But you were always so mad at me around that time.”
“I’m sorry.” I nod. “I just wished you were around more then, I guess, and I didn’t really know how to express it.”
“I know that now,” Nina says. “What I’m trying to say is just that I was thinking of him like a little brother. But he didn’t see it that way. He got this crush on me. Right at the beginning I thought it was just kind of innocent and sweet,” Nina takes a breath, “it didn’t take too long to realize it wasn’t.
“He started writing me these letters from school, like really, really, really long letters, full of all this stuff about how one day we’d be together, and how we were soul mates and how much he loved me. And no matter what I said or did, he couldn’t be convinced otherwise. It’s like the more I told him we were never going to be together, the harder he tried to impress me. He bought some heroin this one time. I don’t even know where he got it, but he had it with him when he came home for winter break. I remember when he showed it to me, he was just so excited about it, like I was going to be so impressed.” Nina looks at me and shakes her head. “I wasn’t.
“Fast forward to the next summer, two summers ago, right after Jason and I both graduated. It was Jason’s eighteenth birthday, and his best friend, Max, was in town staying at the Mothership, which is where he always stayed when he was visiting, and so we were having a little birthday party there for Jason. It was just me and Jason and Max and a few other kids hanging out. And I had gotten this snowboard for Jason that I knew he would love. It was expensive though, I had to get a credit card so I could pay for it. And I knew he’d never let me get him such an expensive present unless he had to,” Nina smiles, “so I drew all over it so there was no way he could bring it back. And I
’ll never forget his face when he opened it, his eyes just got huge and he couldn’t stop smiling and he got a little choked up even, like, in front of his friends and everything.” Nina smiles, pressing her lips together hard like she’s trying not to cry. “He said it was the very best present he’d ever gotten and asked if I would take a trip cross-country with him for our one-year anniversary, which was in about a month, at the end of July. He said we’d just pack up his old blue Volvo and hit the road, crashing with friends on the way, and then we could stay at his step-dad’s house in Big Sur and he’d teach me to snowboard and we could give his present its first trip down the mountain together.”
“Wait, Jason had a blue Volvo?” I tip my head to the side.
“Yup,” Nina says. And then she tips her head to the side, too. “Oh shit, that’s what Sean was driving when…” Our eyes meet and I nod. Nina sighs and shakes her head.
“Go on,” I say.
She continues. “It was around three-thirty in the morning and Jason and I were getting ready to leave the Mothership so he could drive me home, but we were both being really slow about it, I think because neither one of us wanted the night to end. I mean, it really had been just the most wonderful, perfect, amazing night. And that’s when Sean showed up, acting all casual like it was the most normal thing in the world for him to be there. Except the Mothership was about twenty miles from their house and Sean had walked there. To see me. Jason wasn’t mad or anything, because he never really got mad, he was just worried about Sean and didn’t want him to get in trouble for sneaking out and wanted to get him back home as soon as possible. At that point I felt like it would probably be better if I wasn’t even in the car with them, so I said I’d just stay over at the Mothership. I always tried to make sure I was back home by the time the sun came up, but that night it seemed like the only other choice was a really bad one. So Jason came over and said good-bye and that he’d come back and pick me up in the morning and he’d get the snowboard then, too. And then he just gave me a quick hug and we didn’t even kiss or anything because Sean was like just standing there glaring at us. They walked out waving. And then at the last second Jason stuck his head back in the door and said something about how we could get waffles in the morning, and then he mouthed ‘I love you,’…” Nina looks down, “and that was it.”
Wherever Nina Lies Page 20