This is how my body sounds, I wanted to say,when I get out of bed in the morning. This is what you’d hear if you slept with me there.
Now, I look over the center console at her, knowing I shouldn’t be picturing it: Jess in the California king I have at home, way too big for my small apartment, but worth every square inch. I have white sheets, but maybe I should get black. Her skin, her hair, all a contrast. Her tattoos, to match.
Yeah. Black sheets.
“Quit it,” she says, barely loud enough to hear over the music she has playing from her phone through the van’s speakers, but there’s the quirk at the side of her mouth.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your brain is loud.”
I snort. She doesn’t know the half of it. I shift slightly in my seat, trying to ignore that the black-sheets daydream gave me a semi. Jess’s eyes flick up to the rearview.
“Out cold,” I say, and I’m not exaggerating. Tegan took the bench seat in the way back when we set off, proclaiming herself “totally wiped” from the time with my nieces. She’d put on a pair of noise-canceling headphones, casually shouted, “Behave!” at us, and then she was asleep before we even cleared the edges of the family property.
That “Behave!” made Jess’s neck flush. But I know she’s not keeping this thing between her and me a secret from Tegan, not after all the secrets that brought them to this point. She may not have told her sister about last night—that, I’m pretty sure, is only for Jess and me—but she’s not hiding that we’re closer, either.
“Those girls ran her ragged,” Jess says. “They couldn’t get enough of her.”
I don’t miss the pride in her voice.
“She was good with them.”
Jess doesn’t volley back right away. Instead she chews on the inside of her lip and lowers her brow.
I’m about to ask her what’s wrong when she blurts, “I didn’t let her babysit, you know.”
“I didn’t know that, no.”
I say it as if that makes sense, as if it’s something I might have occasion to know, when in fact—even though I spent part of last night inside this woman—every new thing I learn about her, about her history, is a precious, perfect shell I’ve collected. One I never want to coat in something toxic.
“She wanted to. Her friends at school did. But then I would worry. What if no one hired her, because of . . .” She trails off, waves a hand in the air. “Whatever people thought about me, or us as a family? Or what if people did hire her, and asked her questions about Mom?”
I know exactly what Salem would ask right now. She’d say,And that’s because you already had figured out who your mom had left town with, by this point?She’d ask,Did you worry people would make a connection, somehow, between the boyfriend your mother left with and Lynton Baltimore?
I say, “That was probably smart.”
She cuts her eyes to me, quirks her mouth. She can maybe see the sap.
But also, I mean it: It was probably smart. It was probably smart and difficult and Tegan surely gave her hell for it. It was probably the kind of lousy, fraught decision Jess must’ve spent the last ten years making while she did the best she could to protect her sister.
I’m desperate to put a hand on her. The back of her neck, her thigh. Anywhere I could reach to offer her some kind of recognition or comfort or promise that I always want to hear anything she’s willing to tell me.
But then the ring of her phone cuts the music that’s piping through the car’s Bluetooth, and she startles, her eyes darting to the dash display.
Dad, the screen reads.
“Oh,” she says, something flummoxed in her voice, and I realize that she’s debating whether or not to answer, whether or not to take a call from her dad when I’m in the car to hear it.
I figure it’ll always be a little like this: her making calculations in her head about what’s okay to reveal, and when. Opening up and then closing down. I think briefly of what my dad said, and shove the thought away.
Beside me, Jess sets her jaw.
And then quickly reaches out a finger and presses accept.
“Hi, Dad.”
I wonder if he can hear the effort in her voice that I can.
