Again: I am fucked.
“Salem, hey.” I give my sister a wordless signal to hang on a minute.
“How’s farm life?” She sounds completely normal. I’ll give her this: She is resilient as all hell.
“Good,” I say, even though my day has been pretty much the opposite of good. “Quiet.”
“Well, I hate that,” she says, referring to . . . quiet, I guess.
“Where are you?”
“Cafeteria. The coffee is—”
“Terrible?”
“No.” She sighs. “But also, yes. Like tar.”
“How’s Pen?”
There’s a slight pause. Not good news, I take it, but Salem doesn’t provide any detail.
“I’ll probably need a couple more days.”
“It’s fine,” I tell her, even though I have no idea if it’s fine. In a couple more days from now Jess might be back in Ohio with Tegan, having done all the thinking she needs to decide she never wants to see me again.
“I’m working on Tulsa,” she says, back to business. “Reviewing some of the initial leads we had about Baltimore’s connection to that area.”
I suppress a wince. There weren’t any promising leads about Baltimore’s connection to Oklahoma. She’s reaching.
“And the postcard for this one, it does mention something about a ‘tough few days,’ but obviously that could be anything. Have you asked Jess and Tegan about it?”
I clear my throat. “Not yet. Maybe tomorrow.”
The truth is, I haven’t even thought about Tulsa. Not since we left Florida and decided to come here.
“Well, they might help narrow things down.”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, but there’s no curiosity in it.
“If things aren’t wrapped up here in two days, go to Tulsa without me. I’ll meet you guys in New Mexico. I trust you.”
Christ. I feel as low as the dirt beneath my feet. “Salem, I—”
“Listen, you had a lot of injuries when you played football, right?” she interrupts, her voice quick and tight. It’s a rare show of vulnerability from her, and I have a strange thought.
Salem and Jess probably have more in common than either of them would ever guess at.
“I had some, sure.”
Not the kind Salem’s daughter has—I was uniquely lucky in never having broken a bone, and I never needed surgery. But I had overuse injuries, too many to count. Compression in my spine. Sprains and strains that felt as bad as breaks, made worse by the way I played through them. Two concussions, both mild.
“And you’ve turned out fine.”
“Sure,” I repeat. I’m glad I’ve never told her about the pain I get when I sit for too long, or any of the other half-dozen complaints I have about parts of my body on any given day. I’m glad I never mentioned the inflammatory ulcers I got from taking too much ibuprofen for years at a time, or that “mild” is pretty much a misnomer for any sort of brain injury.
I picture Salem alone in the hospital cafeteria, probably putting on a show of looking busy and irritated, sucking down tar-flavored coffee while she worries desperately about her daughter and doesn’t show it to anyone, even the husband that I gather she’s not talking much to.
“She’s young,” I add. “She’ll recover.”
