Once he’s gone, I head inside to look for supplies to clean both our cars. I want to find Jess and ask where she might keep rubbing alcohol, but when I call out her name, there’s no reply. The living room and kitchen are both empty.
“Jess?” I call out again.
I open the kitchen door that goes out onto her small back patio. It’s gusty out, but a lattice board blocks the wind that sweeps in from the fields, not unlike the ones behind my house. The wind scatters dead leaves across her patio.
No sign of Jess. I try to quell the stabs of fear shooting through me. I’m sure she’s around.
I go down the hall by Sam’s room and a half bath. I poke my head into the smallest of the three bedrooms, which Jess uses as her office. All is quiet, so I continue down the hall to Jess’s room. The door is closed.
“Jess?” I tap on the door. “You in there?”
I open the door and step in. Jess is curled in a fetal position on her bed, face buried in a pillow.
I’m relieved she’s fine, but then a prick of irritation follows. But as usual, not for long before the same flood of guilt washes over me.
I helped create this. And for me to want her to buck up, to be stronger than this is not only unreasonable, it’s selfish.
“Jess, what’s going on?”
She shakes her head into her pillow.
“Trust me, they’re going to find who did this.”
She props herself up on one arm and looks at me with puffy red eyes. “It’s everything, Cros. It’s too much.”
“I know. It’s a lot to handle.” I want to make more promises, but her words earlier to quit acting so confident ring in my ears, so I wrap her in my arms and hold her. She doesn’t resist the comfort.
“I wish I couldsleep,” she says. Jess has had trouble sleeping ever since the assault, and I’m sure this week isn’t helping. “But I can’t. I keep seeing him, keep feeling his hands on me every time I shut my eyes. I just wish I could tell him what he’s done, how he’s wrecked so much, but I can’t.”
For the gazillionth time, guilt falls over, pressing me down. But to hear her say it out loud again gives me the sense that I’m sinking below the earth, dirt filling my mouth and throat, choking me. I practically want to run to the sink and spit and spit. To wash my mouth out repeatedly. “Try to relax. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to clean that crap off our cars, okay?”
She puts her head back down.
When Mom died and Jess had holed up in her bedroom and I took the semester off to be with her, one night, she lifted her head, half asleep, and said, “You’re the best sister a girl could have.”
She was eighteen. I was twenty-one. I was afraid I’d never make it back to Missoula to finish my criminology degree. But so much more terrifying was the thought that Jess would keep getting worse, like Sophie.
But by the end of that long fall semester, she pulled out of it. She started back into school at the community college. She caught fire there, kept it up at the University of Montana for her BS. In Missoula, she met Patrick, Sam’s dad, and got pregnant her sophomore year, when she was only nineteen. I had just graduated and was applying for a position with the local force in Kalispell. I was worried the pregnancy would set her back, but it didn’t. She insisted on having the baby, and even becoming a young mom didn’t deter her.
She was three months pregnant when she finished her sophomore year. She married Patrick that summer. After Sam came along, she stayed strong, even after she realized Patrick was too young and wasn’t going to be very helpful. They divorced within a year.
And I was there to help her. To pick up the slack.
She was even able to build on her BS for her MS, also from the University of Montana, which segued smoothly into her business, which boomed. An amazing ride. I was so relieved.
It didn’t bother me that I put some of my own ambitions aside to go into the force and stayed in Missoula—a town that carried so many awful memories for me—an extra two years working odds-and-ends jobs before returning to Kalispell so I could help look after Sam while she studied. That I had been ignoring the heavy plunge of my own heart to help her through, the pain of losing our mom leaking into every part of me like I was made up of broken pipes.
I was just happy it was working out for Jess. That she had come out of her debilitating state. I knew I could apply anytime for the department in Kalispell, and that’s what I finally did two years later, when I was twenty-four.
And then Mark Coleman came along four years later, and all that effort—on both our parts—slipped down the drain.
I go look for some rubbing alcohol and also her medicine cabinet in the hallway bathroom for some Advil to treat my sleep-deprivation headache. There’s only a bottle of bright-red, sugary-looking kids’ liquid Tylenol for Sam. Not finding any adult Tylenol or ibuprofen, I go into the kitchen and riffle through Jess’s pantry. Nothing. I go into her office. Nada. Jess might have secretly turned to healing herself through faith because her drug supply is nonexistent.
I scoot over some loose papers and file folders scattered on her desk in case the bottle’s hiding, but it’s not. Who doesn’t have pain reliever on hand? I poke around the credenza her printer rests on, but there’s nothing but a cluster of framed photos on it—mostly of Sam, one of Mom and her, one of Dad and both of us when we were little out at his cabin, and one of me and her on the summit of Logan Pass in Glacier Park.
I open her top desk drawer but find only pens, notepads, paper clips, neon Post-it notes, stamps. The next drawer down is deeper and holds boxes of envelopes, new pens, and pencils.
I sit back and consider that the bottle is probably right next to her where she’s dozing or in her attached bathroom. My head throbs. I take a seat in her chair, resting my elbows on the desk. I am about to tiptoe back into Jess’s room to look when a file poking from underneath several others catches my eye. On the tab, I read the lettersPetro...
