I laughed and slapped her ass. “I mostly miss home cooking, or having a kitchen. And that isn’t to say Navy food is bad. It’s not. It’s just not home. My brother loves pickles. He’s a pickle freak, and yeah, I’ve told him that his fondness for dick probably started there. He used to make his own pickles when we were in high school, and no matter where I go, I can’t find anything like Wes’s. It’s that sort of thing I miss.”
“In other words, you miss people cookingforyou,” she clarified.
“No, actually,” I said. “I can cook pretty well. I make a mean pancake.”
“I prefer my pancakes sweet,” she said. “Keep your mean pancakes to yourself.”
“Duly noted.”
“I don’t cook,” she said. “I’ve tried, but…yeah. It’s just not my thing. I never have the right ingredients either. Grocery stores annoy me. I don’t have the patience to babysit a simmering pot or turn a piece of meat at the right time. I just want it”—she waved her hands in front of her—“I just want itdone. I’ve tried, but instead of making food, I summon demons.”
“I can see that,” I said.
Shannon stayed quiet until we rounded a steep bend. “There’s one thing I can make, though,” she said, almost to herself. I glanced at her, wanting to hear more. “Even when I was younger, I was a wreck in the kitchen. I was good with measuring things for recipes. My mother made butternut squash pie. She did it all from scratch, roasting the squash and rolling the dough and everything. She grew the squash, too. She had a garden in the yard. I never understood why she grew such random things like green beans and pickling cucumbers and zucchini. I never thought to ask her why she chose those, and not bell peppers or strawberries.”
We were headed toward the trail’s high point, but the incline didn’t seem to bother Shannon. She was pushing forward and barely breaking a sweat. Nothing should have surprised me about this city girl.
“Lo said she died when you were really young.”
She veered off the trail and climbed some boulders to look out at the valley below. “She did,” Shannon said, nodding. “She had undiagnosed preeclampsia. It’s a pregnancy complication. She bled to death.”
With her hands braced on her hips, she stared ahead, silent. Her words were too crisp and efficient. They weren’t real. This was the hard-ass version of Shannon, the one who liked to pretend she was too tough to let anyone else know she cared or felt.
She hopped off the boulder and marched back toward the trail, and I was right behind her.
“How old were you?” I asked.
Her shoulders tensed when those words hit her. Another mile passed without a response from her, and I was ready to shift gears into less sensitive subject matter. Sometimes I got lucky and she shared freely, but other times she closed right up.
“Nine,” she said, pulling her cap lower. “I was nine when she died. Erin was only two, and God, she was so confused. She wandered around the house for months, looking in my mother’s bedroom, her sewing room, the kitchen. Everywhere. She didn’t understand, and how do you explain death to a baby? What do you say?”
I stopped to tie my shoelace. Shannonnevertalked about Erin. I asked her about that situation once, and she clammed right up.
“She’s the only one who isn’t involved in the business,” I said.
“She never wanted that,” Shannon said. “She’s independent and selfish, and she took a lot of joy from flipping off my father.” She loosened her ponytail and then retied it, all with her back to me. “Not that he didn’t deserve it. So anyway…she was a baby, and she didn’t understand anything that was happening. She was convinced my mother was in the house, and all you’d hear was her crying and screaming.” She tugged at the hat again, until the brim fully shielded her eyes. “My father lost it one night. He couldn’t handle hearing ‘mama, mama, mama’ all over the house so he locked Erin in a basement closet. It was dark and freezing, and he nailed the fucking door shut. It took Matt and me almost three hours to get it open, but I guess it worked because I’ve never heard her say ‘mama’ since that night. It was like the word vanished from her vocabulary.”
She sucked in a watery breath and turned her face toward the sun. She still wouldn’t cry in front of me. I knew this wasn’t information she readily shared, and I knew there was something about getting away from her world that made her open up. I loved and hated it in equal measures. She was withme, and tellingme, and that gave me a surge of victory I hadn’t known I wanted. But these stories were horrible, and I wanted to hug her, kiss her, and ask a million questions about why no one ever put an end to this shit. She shouldn’t have dealt with this then, and she shouldn’t be mothering all over her siblings to make up for it now. Someone had to end this.
“Was it always Erin and Riley?”
She wrapped her hand around her ponytail, smoothing the strands and then repeating the motion. “No, but my father was worst to the youngest ones. Well…maybe that’s not accurate.” She took a sip from her water and offered it to me. “He hated us all in different ways. Riley and Erin have scars you can see, but…it’s what you can’t see that does the most damage.”
This was the second time Shannon mentioned her father’s abusive behavior, and she didn’t have to say anything else for me to know he harmed her, too. It wasn’t simply the trauma of seeing a brother beaten or a sister trapped, and I found it hard to breathe around the weight of that knowledge. I wanted to find his remains so I could have the pleasure of killing him again.
I lived with an intimate knowledge of the unimaginably gruesome awfulness that existed in the world, and though it was easier to believe that awfulness was extraordinary, that it was exception, I knew it wasn’t exclusive to the war-torn regions I frequented. The unimaginable happened to ordinary people every day, and often, the people you least expected.
I didn’t want it to bemyperson.
“But he didn’t take on Matt or Patrick, and they were better at not triggering my father. Sometimes I thought Erin wanted to piss him off. When she was older, she went out of her way to do it, as if she wanted to know how far she could push him. She was willing to go all the way to the edge, and there were times when I thought she wanted to go over just to see what the fall was all about. She’s fearless like that. I mean, she’d have to be. She walks on fucking lava.”
I handed the bottle back. “What exactly does she do? Other than infiltrating the bedrock of the Italian mafia?”
“She’s a geologist now. She studies volcanoes, and travels all over the world doing research. She’s been published in journals, and even a few science magazines. She’s smart, really smart,” Shannon said, and I had to pause and study her for a second. The pride in her voice was measurable, and all of this was coming from the woman who routinely refused to speak about the sister in question. “When she told me she wanted to go to the University of Hawaii, I figured that was just her way of telling everyone to fuck off. Then she got there, and she took some geology classes, and she was a convert. It’s probably the right field for her. There aren’t many options for people like Erin. It’s either village witch or head of the Holy Roman Empire, and I think that ship has sailed. Somehow volcanologist is right in the middle.”
We continued along the trail, following the Bosque River, and even though the silence was heavy with history, it wasn’t uncomfortable. A desert cottontail rabbit charged across the dusty path and into a cluster of low juniper bushes, then scrambled over the footbridge ahead. I tracked its movements while organizing the shards of childhood Shannon just placed in my hands.
Everything inside me demanded that I wrap my arms around Shannon and hold her until those memories faded into the background, but she wouldn’t allow that. Going to her now would result in a brush-off, a brash comment, and even more ground to cover until I earned my way back.
