I check my sister’s face, looking for some sign that I’ve crossed a boundary or calibrated it wrong. But if anything, she still has that bright and hopeful look on her face, mixed now with sympathy.
“Easier how?”
I shrug the shoulder I’m not leaning on. This part, Ireallydon’t want to mess up. I don’t ever want Tegan to think I’m angry about being the one who takes care of her; I don’t ever want her to think I resent her.
So I go back a bit further in time.
To a time before Tegan knew me.
“When Mom left the first time, with your dad”—I pause and check her face again, but she doesn’t react to the mention of him—“I worried about her a lot. I’d tell my dad all these things I thought could’ve happened to her. Every terrible news story I saw on TV—to me, they were possible explanations. He’d kind of blow me off, tell me I didn’t need to worry about those things. That Mom was fine.”
“I bet you hated that,” she says, a knowingness born from experience. I think of all the moments I told Tegan I was sure Mom was thinking of her, that Mom missed her. I know now I owe her an apology for every time I did it.
“But he was right. I didn’t need to worry about any of those things, and he knew that, because he knew her. What I needed to worry about was what ended up happening, which is that she’d come back after things fell apart and try to pretend nothing happened. And then, at some point, she’d flake out and do it all over again. This time, to you.”
She nods and looks down at her loosely clasped hands.
“Except she didn’t come back this time,” she says.
“Maybe things never fell apart with Miles. Or Lynton, whatever we’re supposed to call him.”
“Maybe.” But I know both of us feel pretty doubtful about that after today.
Both of us have the sense now that the Miles Daniels we met a decade ago wasn’t as hale and hearty as he seemed, and there’s no telling what kind of shape he might be in today. Or if he’s in any shape at all.
“Even though I never thought about it before today,” Tegan says, her voice quiet now, “I sort of—well, for a second, I almost. . .” She trails off and shakes her head. “I don’t know if I should say.”
“You can say,” I say, matching my voice to hers.
Every day since we’ve started on this trip, everything we’ve said around each other about our mother has been tied up in this story someone else is doing; everything has been weighted by this sense of beingobserved. But here, it’s only me and Tegan, and there’s tons of things we probably should’ve said to each other way before now. No weapons, no leashes.
“Today, for a little while”—she breaks off, and then she blurts, all in a rush—“I was almost hoping we’d find out that she’d died.”
She lifts her hands and covers her face.
Then she bursts into tears.
“Oh, Teeg.” I scramble up and go to her, sitting next to her and circling her awkwardly in my arms. She leans into me hard, as though she’s forgotten she’s no longer got the small-kid body that she had when she used to let me do this, when she was so raw and confused and heartbroken, when I’d murmur to her those half-truths about Mom missing her.
She sniffs and gathers herself but stays against me.
“If she were dead, it would be—I guess it would besoclear why she never came back. Kind of noble, right? Like she was sparing us some from watching her with some terrible sickness, or something.”
I swallow and rub her arm, not disagreeing, even though I don’t think it’d be noble at all. I think it’d be about as selfish and cowardly as a bunch of other stuff our mom has done. Today, when we were all sitting with the idea that she might have been sick, I kept thinking,God. What anasshole, to not even let us grieve her.
“And then, when people asked me, you know, ‘What happened to your mom?’ I could say, ‘Oh, my mom died.’ I think people would look at me different, if I could say that. I think it’d be better than how they look at me now, when they don’t ask at all. Isn’t that the worst thing you’ve ever heard?”
No, I think, squeezing her through her next rush of tears.The worst thing I’ve ever heard is that people don’t ask you. Probably because I’ve spent the last ten years making it seem to you like no one ever should.
All my boundaries and calibrations.
I set them so, so wrong.
“It’s not the worst thing. It’s totally understandable that you’d feel that way.”
She scoffs, a sarcastic, disbelieving sound.
“Tegan, I wanted to believe she’d beenkidnapped. Or that she was in, I don’t know. Witness protection, or something. I wanted to believe anything other than that she’d just . . .leftme. I really get it.”
