She crouches, getting at Ginny’s eye level. Knowing Ginny, Jess is looking at a bug right now, but she doesn’t seem grossed out. When I met her, I guess I wouldn’t have figured she’d be good with kids. I would’ve figured they were too chaotic, too nosy, too pushy. But looking at her now, she seems totally at ease. Everything that can read as harsh and censuring about her silence around Salem and me seems to have settled into a kind of kid-specific patience and tolerance.
“That’s how she used to be,” Tegan says, interrupting my thoughts.
I turn my attention back to her, but I hide my curiosity in my coffee cup.
“Before my mom left, that’s how she was with me,” Tegan continues, swirling her cereal around. “She was really fun when she came to visit me.”
It isn’t that I hadn’t known this detail—that Tegan and Jess didn’t live in the same house together until after Charlotte Caulfield left with Lynton Baltimore—but hearing Tegan say it this way somehow makes the knowledge more striking.When she came to visit me. It must’ve been such a big change, when all of a sudden Jess was there every day. All the time, and in circumstances that were the opposite of fun.
“The coolest big sister,” she adds, a wistful note in her voice.
“She’s still cool.”
My defense of her is automatic, and—judging by Tegan’s smile—pretty revealing. I’m tempted to look back out the window, get a glimpse of Jess to ground me. But before I can, that smug and knowing smile on Tegan’s face fades.
“I really want to find my mom. That’s why I wanted to come on this trip.”
I lower my brow, confused. That’s not news. It’s what she’s said from the jump, even when she was pretending to be someone else.
“I want to know why she left and why she never came back, and what she’s been—”
“Let’s get your sister.” I’m not fucking this up worse by breaking any of the rules. No one talks to Tegan about this stuff unless Jess is around.
“No,” Tegan says, the sharpness in her voice from last night back again. “And don’t bring up the ‘conditions,’ or whatever, because I’m pretty sure you and Jess have already talked about my mother when I wasn’t around.”
I could argue, I guess. I could say that Jess has said very little about Charlotte to me.I didn’t want her to know me anymore, she said last night, but that was basically the extent of it.
But Tegan looks so serious, so desperate to get this out.
“And anyway, what I want to say to you isn’t about my mom. It’s about Jess.”
I swallow. That five minutes is surely written all over my face.
“So I want to find my mom for my own sake, of course I do. I’m going to college in a matter of weeks and Ineedto know about this. I need to at least try. I want to meet new people and be able to tell them about myself without having this big question mark about my life in the background. That’s what I want, before I go out there on my own. As an adult.”
I know better than to tell an eighteen-year-old in Tegan’s circumstances that real adulthood is probably still a ways off, or that the shit that bothers her at eighteen is, annoyingly, going to bother her for a fair number of years yet, if not forever. I channel the kind of patience I saw Jess showing to Ginny out there on the back deck, when all I really want to know is what she has to say about her sister.
“But I want to find her for Jess’s sake, too. Because in a couple of months when I’m not home every day, when she doesn’t have me to take care of, I have the feeling that a bunch of stuff she’s ignored for a lot of years is going to catch up with her. I may be mad at her for what she hid from me, but at the same time, a person doesn’t hide five postcards in a freaking curtain rod if they have a healthy relationship to their trauma.”
If it were any other day, in probably any other circumstance—any other circumstance where I haven’t gone ass over feet for this young woman’s older sister—I’m sure I’d be hearing these words in a way that’d interest me from a professional perspective. Tegan speaks in a way I recognize from a lot of people in her generation—the phrase “healthy relationship to trauma” trips easily off her tongue; she’s steeped in a language that makes it possible for her to talk about pain. I’ve thought a lot about it in the past few years, since Cope died. I’ve wondered if things could’ve been different if he’d had that kind of vocabulary. IfI’dhad that kind of vocabulary.
But I can’t make this thought more than fleeting at the moment. I shouldn’t have had this coffee on an empty stomach. Especially not if I was going to have to hear about Jess Greene as a thirty-one-year-old empty nester.
All alone with her trauma.
“My sister likes you. I think you know that, but I definitely knew before you did. I’ve never seen her watch someone the way she watches you when she thinks no one is looking.”
“Tegan—” I attempt, not sure if I’m trying to protect Jess or myself at this point.
“And I don’t care that she does. I don’t care that you obviously like her back, because you watch her, too, like you’re dry ground in a drought. In fact, I think you could be good for her, if she’d let you be.”
I could be, I want to tell her, as if I’ve had this thought in my head all along—how I’d be, if I got to know Jess outside of this shitty story that defined her life against her will. I’d take her out, let her talk or not talk. Plan trips that have nothing to do with family secrets. Let her sleep late. Make her pancakes any day she wanted them, every morning an opportunity to celebrate. I’d do all the things for her I bet she’s spent the last ten years doing for someone else. Laundry, meals for the whole week, the shitty, boring errands that wreck your entire Saturday.
I could be that.
“So be with her, or don’t be with her,” Tegan says. “But remember what I said, okay? She does need to know about our mom, even if she doesn’t think so right now. Don’t mess this up. Don’t hurt her again, because she’s been hurt enough for a whole lifetime.”
Unlike when I first woke up this morning, I’m nowhere near back in time now. I’m ruthlessly present. I want to make Tegan a million promises I have no right to make. Not without talking to Jess.
