Merritt laughed. She lay back against the wall and looked out her mother’s window, down at her mother’s low-fenced autumn garden, barely visible around the building’s far corner. She had a good mom, and it had been good talking to her. Talking like two adults, at that. Except Kathleen had reminded her of one horrible truth: she and Whit still had to write a book together.
Oh joy.
Whit’s parents had divorced when he was in ninth grade. The signs had been visible long in advance, and he and Evie, who was three years younger, had developed strategies to avoid the unpleasantness of their parents’ slowly crumbling relationship. Whenever the cold war between Ned and Maureen Longacre bubbled up into full-scale aggression, the siblings would ride their bikes to the convenience store or the nearby playground. When the divorce was finalized, the back-and-forth between their parents’ houses felt, to Whit, like he and Evie were soldiers on the move, constantly deployed and redeployed to familiar spaces with slightly different objectives: support Mom, cheer up Dad.
Evie was better at both missions. She could see where their mother’s path needed easing (“Let’s clean the kitchen before Mom gets home from her meeting”) and sensed her dad’s impending depressive episodes (“Star Wars marathon tonight?”). Whit had been happy to follow his sister’s lead, despite being the older of the two, but it was his torn ACL in eleventh grade that really cemented her role as Emotionally Intelligent Surrogate Parent. Evie was the one who’d come to his room when he called out for help in that first week after surgery, and she was the one who made sure he remembered his PT appointments, regardless of which house they were at for the week. She was the one who’d always ask, “You okay, Bubba?”
She’d been checking on him ever since. So when Whit called Evie this time, she answered immediately.
“Whit? Are you okay?”
He laughed. “I’m fine.”
She waited.
“Okay, that’s a lie. But everything’s all right.”
“Annie—?”
“—is fine.”
“Mom and Dad—?”
“—are alive and well. Seriously.”
“Ok-ay,” Evie said, her voice rich with restrained anticipation.
Whit clenched his jaw for a moment.
“It’s just...” He rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know.”
Whit sighed. He was sitting on the back terrace, looking out over the wide lawn, on the other side of which he could see the woods through which he and Merritt had hiked. Behind the woods the land continued to rise into a hill, and beyond that was the sea.
“I amworriedabout Annie.”
This was not the only thing that had compelled him to call his sister, but it had been where his mind landed after the party. He both did and did not want to talk about the mistake he’d made with Merritt, and the image ofLord of the RingsHelen was hanging like haze before his eyes, twisting his humiliation over Merritt into something more complicated.
But when he squeezed those thoughts out of his head, his memories returned to the dull feeling that had wormed its way into him as he held the picture frame and then looked at Annie’s hopeful face. He’d focused on his daughter.
“I don’t know what to do about her. She seems... most of the time she seems really okay, but the other day she was clearly upset after school, and then later I found her crying in bed, and she wouldn’t tell me why. Even after I pressed. I’ve asked her a few times since, too, and she won’t budge.”
“Oh, Whit,” Evie said, and unlike the irritation Whit normally felt at her displays of sympathy, the gentleness in her words nearly broke him. He felt like he had at age twenty when he called home after being dumped at college. The sound of his mother’s voice, her chipper hello, had sliced through him then, and his next words had come out all weepy.
Whit did not cry now, but he did take a deep, settling breath.
“I know,” he said at last. “It’s pathetic.”
“Shut up,” Evie scolded. The intensity of her drive to protecther older brother, even from his own harsh self-critiques, made him laugh.
He told her then about the party and Annie finding the picture.
“Wait,” Evie interrupted, “who’s Merritt?”
“What?”
Whit hadn’t even realized he’d said her name.
“You said you were on the back steps with Merritt when Annie showed up. Who’s Merritt?”
