I don’t know if I nod. For a few seconds, I don’t know if I do anything other than clutch at the counter I’ve found myself at, right in front of the kitchen sink. I flip on the tap, run my wrist under the cool water. I’m desperate to get rid of this hot, sick feeling. Ten years I’ve spent, being the best I could for Tegan. Responsible, protective,present. Only to be undone by my paranoia over my photograph being taken and a callous listicle. Undone by my past absence.
When I flip the water off again and look up, she’s watching me. Waiting for me, I guess, so she can be sure I’m paying attention to her for this next part.
“And then I went looking through your things. Mom’s things.”
She reaches beneath her chair and grabs at the backpack I saw on her bed when I first came home. From it she pulls a plastic zippered pouch, pale pink with a goldTon the bottom left corner. Before she graduated she kept pencils inside it. I ordered it for her last summer.
She takes out the five postcards and sets them on the table. They still curl slightly from the way I’d stored them.
She arranges them like we’re about to play some kind of game. Match these cards to a terrible memory, maybe, and I could do that easily. Every one of those cards came on a day I was drowning: when I was washing Tegan’s sheets for the third time in a week because she’d wet the bed again. When I was arguing with my dad and my stepmom, Bernila, for even gently suggesting I let someone else take care of Tegan. When I was sick with shingles—stress, the doctor at the urgent care had said—gasping with pain every time my T-shirt rubbed against my back. When Tegan’s principal suggested she be held back a grade. When the state social worker came for a scheduled home visit and interview, an expression like she’d smelled something bad on her face the whole time.
“You did more than go looking,” I say, because they weren’t simply put away. They weren’t with any of the other things Mom left behind, which I’d boxed up carefully and stored in the garage. They weren’t with things I considered personal—a memory box from high school, my bank information, the advance directive and will I had done when I officially became Tegan’s guardian.
I’dhiddenthose postcards.
“Inside a curtain rod,” she says. “Smart.”
God. She makes me sound like a criminal. Like I’m Lynton Baltimore himself.
“I planned to tell you about them.”
“When?” She slaps her hand on the table, and the cards scatter. Two on the floor. Three to the edges of the table.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” I say, because . . . don’t I have to? Don’t I have to be in charge here? Don’t I have to somehow take control of this, the way a parent should?
She stands from her chair quickly, nearly knocking it over. She points down at the cards.
“She talks about me.” Her voice is shaking with tears, with rage. With some combination of the two. “She said she was thinking about me.”
“And I told you that, Teeg. I never kept that from you.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
Idoknow. I told her things like,I know Mom thinks of you all the time, orI’m sure she’s missing you. I told her those things as if they were an obligation, a hope, a probability. But I never told her the specific things in those cards, things that I thought were painful and selfish and so grossly detached from the mess Mom had left behind. That selfishness, that detachment—thatwas the mom Tegan had been too young to truly see.
I’m sure you’re doing fine with Tegan. I saw wild horses the other day! I know she loves horses.
“You have to understand. That time, after she left—that was such a hard time. It was confusing for both of us, and—”
“I’m not a kid anymore!” she shouts, and there’s a unique pain to this. To know how fully she means it, and to know that, to me, it’s so fully untrue. Isn’t she still a kid? Haven’t I worked so hard in order that she could stay one?
But seeing my sister like this, her light eyes like fire, her delicate skin flushed with frustration—it’s the first time in all these years I’ve felt, down deep, that all the work I did was wrong. That I messed up, miscalculated. That my choice to not tell her about those postcards—about my suspicion that the man we knew as our mother’s boyfriend was someone else—was the worst one I could have made.
That it would push her straight toward the things I’ve tried to protect her from.
“Salem is giving me a chance,” she says. “To find out all the things you never told me.”
That cuts like a knife. Right down the center of me.
“Tegan,” I say, my voice strangled. “There’s not—I don’tknowwhere she is. I didn’t tell you about the postcards, but there’s nothing else. I’ve never heard anything else.”
It’s true, but I can see that right now, to her, it doesn’t matter. I’ve betrayed her. Failed her. She trusts Salem Durant and a man named Hawk more than she trusts me, and I guess, when it comes to this, that’s what I deserve.
“I’m going with them, Jess. And if they don’t want me to go anymore, that’s fine. I’ll go by myself.”
“You can’t.”
She bends down and calmly gathers the two postcards from the floor. Reaches across the table and slides the other three toward her, stacks them all in a tidy pile, zips them back into her pouch. She clutches it tight as she looks at me.
