While I wait for the soup to finish heating, I text Reid that I’m still fine.
Reid:Dolly misses you
Reid:Also I might have given her slightly more treats than you said were technically allowed
Reid:She keeps glaring at me
Me:She’s a cat. That’s her job.
Reid:Think of it as bribing her not to eat me in my sleep
Me:If she wakes you up at 3am demanding crunchies, you did this to yourself.
Me:DO NOT give her 3am crunchies, then it will never end.
Reid:What if she gives me her murder glare, though
I leave my brother to his longstanding feud with my cat and let my friends’ group text know that I made it back in one piece with a bonus houseguest. The responses are mostly emojis, followed by some earnestglad you made it back safesentiments.
“Andi!” I shout, grabbing two mismatched bowls from a cupboard. “Soup!”
“That smellsincredible,” she says of reheated canned soup as she enters the kitchen.
“Eat, then call…” I start, andfuck. I nearly saidyour dad, as if that’s something I can just say to her, and I can’t because this is so nice, right now: Andi being friendly and pleasant and glad to be alive. There’s no way she’s forgotten what I did but at least right now, we’re not talking about it.
“…anyone you need to call,” I finally settle on, pretending that I was so absorbed in the process of pouring soup that I couldn’t talk and concentrate at the same time. “I just told dispatch that I’ve got you, so they’re probably contacting people now.”
We wolf the soup down in silence, sitting on opposite sides of the scarred wooden table. At the end Andi lifts the bowl and drinks the last few mouthfuls of broth, and that’s another flash of memory: her doing that with cereal milk and her dad laughing about the milk mustache she’d get. After a moment, I drink the rest of my soup, too.
“Thanks,” she says, the fingers of one hand lightly drumming the table, her braid over one shoulder. She must have redone it because it’s smooth now, not the staticky, wild halo it was earlier. Her cheeks are still pink, though, twin blotches of color that go nearly to her jaw and make her pale blue eyes look even bluer. The color’s coming back into her lips and there’s a tiny, red scratch on her chin I hadn’t noticed before. It makes me feel oddly unsettled.
“You can borrow my phone,” I tell her when I realize I’m staring. I grab both bowls and jerk to my feet, the chair scraping over old hardwood. “I’ll get it.”
“Do you want to call your parents first?” she asks. Her voice is light, but I can hear the tension in it, see it in the ramrod-straightness of her spine. “I mean, it’s your phone, I’ve got other stuff I need to do. There’s no rush.”
I nearly ask her why I’d call my parents, because the thought hadn’t occurred to me.
“They’re probably worried,” Andi says when I’m silent too long, everything about her carefully neutral, hands folded on the table in front of her. “Also, it’s Christmas Eve, so…” she trails off, but there are years of weight in that ellipsis. I shake my head.
“Phone’s all yours,” I say, deposit the dishes in the sink, and grab the phone from where it’s been charging from a solar battery. “Here. Sometimes the satellite connection cuts out but it’s usually pretty good. You can use it like a regular phone, just—yeah. Have fun.”
I turn away before I can say more stupid things or continue the discussion about why I’m here on Christmas Eve and not at my parents’ house watching nieces and nephews run around, hopped up on sugar, while my sister Beth tries to corral them into making a nice picture or singing Christmas carols and my brothers Zach and Matt stand off to one side, letting the women do the parenting, while they subtly compare their children’s accomplishments.
But that’s not what Andi remembers, because she moved away before any of that. If she remembers anything it’s popcorn strings and sugar cookies and cozy pajamas, songs sung next to the Christmas tree, everyone listening as my father read the nativity story. I wonder how often she thinks of it. If she thinks of it. I wouldn’t.
I’d say it was nicer back then, but time casts a long shadow backward, and the truth is that we didn’t know any better. We were all still kids who more or less fell in line.
These days there’s only so much I can take of them pretending my brother Elliott doesn’t exist and so many times I can ask them not to deadname Reid, so I usually pick one winter holiday to spend with them. This year it was Thanksgiving.
She’s gone into the other room of the tiny cabin, and I can hear the creak of the floorboards under her feet. I put the bowls and the pot into the sink full of freezing cold soapy water and tell myself that I’m not listening to see who she calls.
But I hear, “Hey Rick, it’s me,” anyway, and it hits me right in the chest. That tender spot between the lungs, and it’s so unexpected that breathing feels funny for a second, like all my bodily processes forgot what they were doing for a moment and now I’m breathing with my heart and pumping blood with my lungs.
What thefuckis wrong with me that hearing her sayHey, Rick, has me holding onto the edge of the sink and staring into the dishwater like it’s got some answers?
“Wait, Rick, can you—” Andi says, and pauses. There’s laughter in her voice. I grip the sink a little tighter. “Is Dad there? Can you put him on so I can just talk to both of you at once?”
It’s not—it’s—I don’t know. It’s the funny ache of releasing a grip you’ve held for too long, a relief and a new pain, all at once. It’s the answer to a question I hadn’t let myself ask for twenty years: no, I didn’t rip them apart, because Andi is on the phone with her dad and her stepdad, and they’re in the same house, and she’s telling them over and over that she’s fine, she’s safe, she’sfine, she’s sorry.
