Over the Falls

by Rebecca Hodge

  I shook my head at my foolishness. The last thing I needed to worry about was the moon. The previous day, I felt bad about spooking Josh with talk of bobcats and bees. Now I’d give anything to worry only about such mundane risks.

  I glanced at my phone for the twentieth time. No call or text from my mother. It’s what I would have expected if I’d called about myself, but a call about Del? Mom should have tripped over herself to call back, eager to learn about her favorite daughter.

  Del had always been her focus, the center point of Mom’s orbit, but after my father died, Del became her obsession. Del was the cute one, the one who cared about hair and clothes and dating. The one who turned to Mom for advice, even if she never took it. I was the tomboy with my nose in a book, who questioned things Mom knew nothing about. Apparently, it was an easy choice. Del’s lies and failing grades were shrugged off and ignored as thoroughly as my accomplishments.

  I pulled up Mom’s number and got voice mail again. Left another message, more pointed this time: I’m calling about Del, not me. Maybe this time I’d hear back.

  I slipped the phone into my pocket, but it chimed at once, and I took it back out to check the incoming text.

  No name. A number I didn’t recognize. Six words: One day wasted. Six days left.

  My mouth went dry, and my legs went wobbly. I leaned against the side of the truck for balance and read the message again.

  How had Carl gotten my number?

  Instantaneous rage swamped my fatigue. Carl was not in charge. I wasn’t going to play this game. I blocked the number, turned off my phone, and stormed inside.

  “You ready?” I snapped the question at poor Josh as if every problem on the planet was his fault.

  A stupid question—he was pacing the living room, impatient and eager to be gone—and he looked at me in hurt surprise. “Yeah, I want to get home. Let’s go.” He and Tellico raced to the truck and settled in.

  At least one of us had energy.

  I armed the new security system and locked the front door. This new world of access codes, video feeds, and beeping monitors unsettled me more than I’d expected, but I dutifully checked my phone app and confirmed everything was working. For years I’d felt safe here. I rarely even locked the doors except when I went into town. Now here I was, jumpy and watching over my shoulder and worrying about the least little noise.

  I hated Del for creating this mess. If I had any sense, I would stay put and barricade myself here at the homestead with Josh. I could stay on guard against Carl and close my eyes when it came to Del’s disappearance. Let the police handle any search for her. After all, that was their job, right?

  But Carl’s threats were all too real, and locking myself away was no way to fight back. Instead of heading back inside, I climbed into the truck and started driving. What is it they say about eldest children? Responsible. Practical. Self-sacrificing. Maybe it was hard-wired; maybe I’d been raised to believe it. Despite my doubts about Del, I couldn’t turn tail and hide.

  Josh stayed quiet the first hour of the drive, but he fidgeted nonstop, like something was eating him. Started a game on his phone and put it down minutes later. Stared out the window. Picked up the phone again.

  Would a good aunt ask what was bothering him or leave him alone? I figured it couldn’t hurt to try. “What’s the matter? You’re acting like popcorn in hot oil. We’re headed for Memphis—I thought you’d be pleased.”

  He gave me a long assessing look, but no answer.

  I waited. I knew there were things he wasn’t telling me about Del, but he acted like this was something new. Whatever it was hovered in the air between us, the issue so thick it was almost visible.

  He finally faced forward and stared straight ahead out the windshield. “You said you knew my dad.”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were going to marry him.” He slammed the words down, one at a time.

  Shit. I tried to ease the sudden crick in my neck, but that only bought me a few seconds. “No, I didn’t tell you. How did you find out?”

  “Those pictures. The ones you were looking at last night. The ones you tried to hide.”

  A moment of outrage built over the fact he’d searched my stuff, but in his place I probably would have done the same thing. I stuffed my irritation aside and sorted through my answer. “Your father and I dated for several years in college. We planned to get married. We broke up. He married your mother instead. That’s it.” There. Just the plain bullet-point facts, as if I didn’t care much either way. As if I could ignore the all-too-familiar sense of loss that washed over me as I thought about the plans Sawyer and I had made.

  Josh grunted. “That’s why you didn’t talk to my mom all this time.”

  “Yes.”

  “They got married because Mom was pregnant. With me.”

  I hunted for the right words, hoping I could find ones he could hang onto. “They got married because they wanted to be good parents. Because they knew how much they would love you. They wanted to give you a family.”

  Maybe that was even true. Sawyer had always wanted kids, that was for sure, but he’d been as blindsided as I was when Del announced her news.

  The spring after we’d found the wreck with its horribly dead driver, Sawyer had been unusually jumpy. Overly solicitous. Eager to please. He’d said all the right things and gone through the right motions but got antsy whenever I talked about wedding plans. I’d asked several times what was wrong, but each time he brushed me off. He didn’t give me a single hint about the night he’d spent with Del.

  In early April I came into town for a weekend visit, determined to force him to tell me what his problem was. I arrived at Sawyer’s apartment, but we were interrupted at once by a knock. Sawyer slipped out of my arms to answer, and when he opened the door, Del waltzed in like she had every right to be there.

  She had the same self-satisfied look on her face as the day she stole my high school boyfriend, and she glared at me like I was the one who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I looked from her to Sawyer and back again, sudden apprehension making me queasy.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  “Guess who the father is.” She said those last words in a voice of delighted triumph.

  I started to laugh—how bizarre, how ridiculous, this had to be a tasteless joke—but then I saw the look on Sawyer’s face. A pulverizing weight on my chest threatened to crack ribs, the pressure making it impossible to breathe. Stunned disbelief held me together, but I was shaking.

  “Sawyer. Is this true?” I could hardly speak.

  His face was a wordless answer. He gulped hard. “Bryn. I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you …”

  He stumbled to a halt because I was already up and moving, grabbing my weekend bag from the spot where I’d left it moments before, opening the apartment door, slamming it hard behind me.

  I must have put one foot in front of the other, because somehow I ended up back in the car, back on the highway, peering at the interstate through a storm of tears. Sawyer’s “I’m sorry” was the final blow. The pieces of who I’d been up until that moment shattered, tumbling into an irreparable heap.

  Did Sawyer marry my sister only out of a sense of obligation? Out of a desire to protect his unborn son? I hoped so. The alternative—that he loved her, that he chose her over me with conscious intent and his whole heart—was still too painful to consider even all these years later.

  That final scene with Sawyer was etched in my memory with vivid clarity, but I couldn’t pass that damage on to Josh. “Look, all that stuff with your parents and me was a long time ago. No matter what trouble your mother has gotten into now, I know she loves you. You wouldn’t be who you are if that wasn’t true.”

  He licked his lips uncertainly but gave a small nod. “Yeah. Okay.” He wiped at his face with the back of one hand. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  Neither did I, b
ut I tried one more time to imitate a good aunt. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  He said nothing, just picked up his phone and started another game. And that was the way we left it the whole rest of the way to Memphis.

  In the hours of silence, I forcibly set aside thoughts of Sawyer, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Carl. I kept seeing the wreck. Carl then, with a gun in his hand. Carl now, threatening flames. Annabelle, her still-warm body limp in my hands.

  A one-week deadline. Six more days to find my missing sister. A ticking sound in my head, counting down the minutes, made my skin prickle. I kept glancing in the rearview mirror, making sure we weren’t being followed. He wasn’t there—I knew he wasn’t there—but the scared part of me half expected to find Carl lurking in the backseat of the truck, grinning as he planned his next move.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Bryn

  It was late afternoon when we started seeing signs for Graceland. I exited the interstate and followed my phone’s directions to the address Josh gave me. We wound our way through downtown, the sky cloaked in heavy clouds and the streets clogged with rush-hour traffic. High-rise office buildings towered everywhere, creating steel canyons that made me feel small and hemmed in. It had been years since I’d been back to Memphis, and I immediately wanted to leave.

  Del’s neighborhood, tucked in the shadow of downtown opulence, looked long overdue for major renovation. Stately southern red oaks lined broad streets, and broken slabs of slate marked what had once been fancy sidewalks, but these were dim echoes of a long-lost past. All the houses were in dire need of paint, shingles, and basic maintenance. Plastic garbage bags lined the street for pickup, half of them torn open, their rotting guts spilling into weedy yards. Broken glass glinted along the curbing. It was a neighborhood on the way down, and it looked like its residents were embracing the slide.

  I cruised Del’s block slowly, turned around, and drove back, inspecting each parked car and every shadowed doorway, worried Carl might be lurking. Josh gave me a quizzical look, but nothing seemed threatening. I found a space at the curb to parallel park and climbed out to stretch. Too much stress. Too much sitting. Too many hours of interstate.

  “This one’s ours.” Josh pointed to a faded blue building. Their apartment was part of what had once been an elegant home, now crudely chopped into a fourplex. “Maybe Mom’s back by now.”

  He sounded so hopeful, I wanted for his sake to believe it was possible. “Let’s see.”

  A huge Doberman on a short chain barked incessantly from across the street. Tellico gave him a dismissive glance and followed us up steep steps onto the porch.

  A thin calico cat sat on the broad railing. She eyed the dog but purred and arched her back when Josh gave her a pat. “Keeping an eye on things, Patsy?” He glanced my way. “She lives next door, but I feed her sometimes.” The tiny cat yawned and stretched. When no food was forthcoming, she leaped off into the shrubbery and disappeared.

  Josh used his key on the front door and then on their apartment door, which was on the bottom left. Tellico immediately went into overdrive, sniffing around the baseboards. Tobacco, stale beer, and a mix of heavy perfumes were what I could make out, those odors strong enough to mask anything more subtle. I tried to take shallow breaths, but I could taste the foul air in the back of my throat.

  Josh looked around eagerly as soon as he stepped in, but the apartment was silent. No one home. His shoulders slumped, and he slammed his backpack to the floor with an echoing thud.

  “How about a tour?” It was a weak attempt at distraction, but I couldn’t think of anything better.

  He made a this-is-stupid face, but he humored me and did his best. “This is the living room.”

  It had probably once been the dining room of the original house, and the chandelier looked out of place, centered over nothing, its chain shortened with a yellow zip-tie to give headroom. A worn flower-print sofa, a recliner in crackled green vinyl, and an enormous plasma-screen TV furnished the room. There may have been a table beside the couch, but the whole place was so cluttered with cast-off clothing, piles of unopened mail, and assorted empty pizza boxes that it was hard to tell. I wondered for an instant if the room had been torn up by someone searching, like in a detective story, but Josh seemed to find the chaos unsurprising.

  “Here’s the kitchen and my room. Mom’s room is in the back.”

  The kitchen had lost out when the house was chopped in four, and all that remained was a narrow row of appliances and six inches of counter space. The floor sagged low in the middle, as if some sort of structural support had given way long ago, and the boxy pattern of the ancient linoleum was worn off in patches to expose underlying layers of crumbling brown.

  Josh’s bedroom, if you could call it that, looked like it had been created by knocking together a pantry and a laundry room. The marks left by old pantry shelves were still visible on one wall, and the laundry-room hookups were still present on another.

  His small space was noteworthy, however, because it was as neat and well organized as Sawyer’s bedroom would have been. The bed was made. A small bookshelf held a queue of battered science fiction paperbacks. Two plastic laundry baskets served as substitutes for a dresser, and the clothing in them was all carefully folded. The room was an oasis, a retreat for a kid who was trying damn hard to create some order in the midst of his mother’s chaos.

  Del’s bedroom formed the back of the apartment, probably a maid’s room in the original scheme of the house, and it was just as trashed as the living room. My standards were low, but not that low. I’d have to put in some work before I’d be willing to sleep here. A small bathroom with a miniscule shower completed the tour.

  “Well.” I looked around at the tight, cluttered space. It was hard to imagine anything less appealing. “We made it. Why don’t we figure out some dinner, and then we can start finding out what we can about your mom’s trip.”

  I opened the refrigerator, releasing a whoosh of stale air. Two six-packs of beer, one of Coke, a jar of mayonnaise, and a half-empty jar of pickles. In the freezer, a stack of frozen pepperoni pizzas on the left, and a lineup of ice cream on the right.

  Josh lifted a stack of colored menus off the miniature counter. “We can do takeout.”

  It was the path of least resistance.

  He flipped on the television and sprawled on the couch while we waited for a delivery from Golden China. I closed all the blinds, not wanting to advertise the fact we were there, and I started sorting through clutter, tossing clothing into one pile and mail into another. Small hurricanes of dust stirred as I worked, and the old wooden floorboards creaked with every step I took.

  I cleared a heap of outdated magazines from beside the couch and discovered that, yes, there was indeed a table hidden there. On it, knocked flat, was a hinged silver frame, the same gift I’d seen my mother give countless times for weddings, graduations, and christenings. It was badly tarnished, but the color photos it held still glowed with life. On the left, a wedding picture of Del and Sawyer. On the right, a picture of the two of them holding a tiny newborn Josh.

  It was a scalding reminder of the story I’d shared with Josh on the drive in, more searing than I would have expected. Sawyer looked solemn but handsome, and I had to admit he and Del made a striking couple. She’d always been the photogenic one, and she looked better in these photos than I would have. The realization intensified the burn.

  Not for the first time, I wondered about their marriage. Sawyer was probably pleased to be a father, but what then? He was a neatnik who alphabetized the canned goods, set the table with a full place setting to eat toast, and ironed his button-down shirt each morning before leaving for the office. I looked around at the minimal progress I’d made on the living room chaos. It was hard to picture Del and Sawyer together under the same roof.

  The food arrived, and Josh and I ate, the pungent smell of lo mein counteracting the background apartment stench, at least for the moment. We watche
d an old How I Met Your Mother rerun, its laugh track out of place in our current situation. Then it was time to get down to business.

  “Your mom has a computer somewhere?”

  “Yeah, it’s over here.” He shifted plastic grocery bags stuffed with heaven knows what away from a corner I hadn’t gotten to yet. “I needed one for school, and when Kroger upgraded their system, Mom talked them into giving her this one since it won’t work anymore on just a battery.”

  It was a laptop so ancient I was surprised it still worked at all, but it started right up after Josh plugged it in.

  I handed it over. “You know your mom’s password to log on?”

  His focus remained half on the television. “Sure. Let me open what you need.” He not only entered the start-up password but also logged in to Del’s checking account and two credit card accounts, all without looking anything up. I could have checked all this from home, but it was somehow fitting to tackle the job with Del’s clutter surrounding me.

  I settled in to look through her finances, which told a straightforward story. Income came from Del’s job and from Social Security payments to Del and Josh as surviving family. Outflow went to rent, cell phones, car payments, and a seemingly endless series of credit charges—department stores, shoe stores, online shopping. Lots of bars. Lots and lots of take-out restaurants. Josh’s Uber rides were there, and I gasped at the total.

  Credit card bills were paid with the minimum each month. One card was maxed out at ten thousand dollars and hadn’t been used for a while. The other was close to its ceiling. I read through it all twice, with a focus on the past two months.

  “Josh, turn off the TV for a minute. I want to ask you about a few things.”

  He obediently clicked off the set.

  “So, is this everything? I don’t see payments for electricity or gas or water.”

  “It’s all part of the rent.”

  “You’re watching cable. I’m on wireless internet. Where is that?”

  Josh looked a little guilty. “The guy next door has a cable splitter and lets Mom get it for free. And the internet … well, the lady above us set up her wireless using password as her password.”