“Cleary, Samuel,” she barked, and her breath fogged the glass between us.
“Uh...present?” If she wanted to see some form of identification, I was afraid I couldn’t help her. I had literally nothing except the clothes on my back.
She rolled her wide eyes at her own version of rollcall, then slid a plastic bag into a curved metal pocket underneath a gap in the glass. On a ragged piece of masking tape, big, block letters spelled Cleary, Samuel. Inside the bag were my cell phone, wallet, and keys. My phone was likely dead, but that didn’t keep me from checking anyway. Yep. Dead.
A beep sounded to my left, and the door there clicked as if it had unlocked.
I pulled open the door and hesitated, just in case this was some kind of sick joke and guards would come after me with tasers. I should’ve just run if that was the case, but I wasn’t about to screw this up, too. The door latched shut behind me. About twelve feet away, daylight slanted through the windows of the double doors. Freedom. I could practically taste the cotton-candy clouds hanging in a bright blue sky. It had only been six months, but it felt like decades.
No one needed to buzz me outside these doors, and as I went through them, a shock of winter air slammed into my face. Looks could be deceiving from the inside out. It was ball-dropping cold out here.
“Sam!” a familiar voice shouted from the direction of the parking lot.
And then there she was, weaving between cars, her hand thrown up to her forehead to ward off the winter sun’s glare off all the windshields. A smile lit up her whole face. When she raced toward me at breakneck speed, she seemed just as free as me. Whole again. That lifted the inside of my chest with relief.
I spun my sister up in a bear hug, laughing at her squeal, but quickly dumped her on her feet again so we could get out of here.
“It’s fucking cold out,” I said, in case she didn’t know. “Where’re you parked?”
Rose pointed with one of her own puffballs that dangled to the bottom of her coat from the knitted owl hat perched on top of her head. “Over there. Where’s your coat?”
“I left it next to my toothbrush shank and soap on a rope.” I started in the direction of her car because there was some major shrivel action happening.
“Don’t joke, SamRam,” she called.
“Fine. Can we go?”
She huffed out a sigh. Loose gravel rolled under her feet as she ran to catch up. Those two sounds together brought a grin to my face because it was so normal—me pissing her off but her running to keep up anyway. It was soothing somehow. Normal. I missed normal.
Once we were inside her car and the heat dial was cranked to hellfire temperature, we got on the road toward the airport. I turned in my seat to face her, not even trying to hide my stare. The cold had painted her cheeks a bright red. Several strands of blonde hair had static-clinged themselves to her owl hat. And crawling up past the collar of her winter coat was something I had never noticed before. Birds. A whole tiny, black and yellow-inked flock of them permanently marked on her skin.
“I don’t like it,” I announced.
“Well, you’re an idiot,” she said, shrugging.
I narrowed my gaze, trying to read the inside of her skull. “Why?”
“Because. You know how I feel about birds.”
The corners of her mouth lifted, and I decided right then and there that I didn’t care about her tattoo. She’d marked herself with a symbol of freedom. If it set in stone the way she looked, the way she acted, the way she should always be, forever and amen, then I could learn to deal. As long as she didn’t get a tramp stamp. Mademoiselle or no, I had my limits.
She glanced at me then shook her head, her face serious. “Dad says he likes it.”
Dad had said a lot of things. He came to visit a few times with tears in his eyes. At first, I didn’t know what to say to him. He talked while I grunted one-syllable answers because he was such a stranger to me. But when he mentioned finding some old Ozzie Osbourne records in the attic I never knew he had, I snorted all over the table between us. The thought of my dad, a one-time presidential hopeful, listening to a guy who chewed on bat heads for fun was wrong on so many levels. But it had helped kick through a chunk of the wall separating our very different lives.
“And Mom?” I checked our progress on the road and compared it to the dashboard clock. My flight left in two hours.
“Well,” Rose said on a sigh, “the last time I saw her, she’d found Jesus at the bottom of a tequila bottle and had launched into Bible verses, so...I don’t really know. She did say she was going to move out and find her own place, though.”
I nodded. Before all this, I’d felt so far removed from my parents that I didn’t think we shared the same planet anymore. They were strangers, but now that all our lies had been laid bare, maybe we could finally get to know each other again, whether married or divorced, together or separate, as the family we once were, as sappy as that sounded. Start new, like I hoped to do with Paige.
“SamRam?”
“Rose?” I said absently.
“Do you want me to stop for a baconated cheeseburger?”
My mouth began to salivate at the mention of bacon. It’d been too long. “We don’t have time.”
