Chapter 22
Carter
Dani drives four hours and is sitting on my steps in Diego’s hoodie before I’ve decided whether I’m ready, which is the whole point of sisters — they don’t wait for you to be ready, they just show up and make you.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” I say.
“I texted you a question mark. You sent one back. That’s a whole conversation in our family, you absolute caveman.
” She’s up and into my arms before the sentence finishes, and she smells like the four-hour drive and the gas-station coffee and, underneath, faintly, like the hoodie, which still somehow after two years smells like the person it belonged to, and I hold my little sister on my own front steps and feel the specific ache of being known by someone who knew me before.
“You look good,” she says, pulling back, scanning me with the sister-radar that misses nothing. “That’s annoying. You’re supposed to look terrible so I can fuss. Why do you look good.”
“I’ve been sleeping.”
“You haven’t slept since the funeral, you liar.” She says it easy, no flinch, the way she says everything — and walks past me into the house like she pays rent.
***
This is the thing about Dani: she carries him into the room without making it a thing.
She does it over takeout, sprawled on my couch with her feet in my lap, telling the parking-lot story — the one I’ve heard forty times and will hear forty more and never once stop her on.
“So he’s got me in the church lot,” she says, “because Mom won’t let him take me on a real road yet, and he’s doing the whole — you remember — the coach voice.
Find the bite point, Dani. Feel the car talk to you.
Like he has the faintest idea what he’s doing.
Like he didn’t teach himself off the internet a month before. ”
“He didn’t learn off the internet.”
“He absolutely did, he admitted it at Christmas, you were right there.” She doesn’t wait for me to confirm it.
She never does. She just runs the present tense straight over the top of the gap where he’s supposed to be arguing back.
“So I stall it. Obviously. I stall it about nine times, and the tenth time I panic and stamp the gas instead of the clutch and we go straight into the rectory hedge — and Diego — Diego — looks at the hedge, looks at me, completely calm, and goes: that hedge came out of nowhere.”
And she laughs, the real one, head back, because it’s funny and because she’s doing his voice — and I laugh too, because it is, and because for the length of a story he gets to just be a guy who blamed a hedge.
Present tense. Diego would’ve, Diego always said, you know how Diego got.
His name ordinary and warm in her mouth.
And I do the thing I do, which is let her carry the word the whole way so I never once have to pick it up myself.
It’s somewhere in the middle of the story that I clock how much of her actual life I’ve been missing while I’ve been busy not living mine.
She’s finishing her degree in the spring — social work, of all things, my baby sister who used to set off the smoke alarm making toast, about to be the person other people fall apart in front of for a living.
She’s got a roommate she fights with about the thermostat, and a maybe-boyfriend named Theo she mentions a shade too casually to actually be casual, and a plan — an actual plan, the kind with steps and dates — for a life that keeps going forward.
She lost the same brother I did, the same week, in the same phone call. And she’s done the thing I haven’t: she’s kept building. Not over it.
Through it. She put his name in her grad-school essay, she tells me — the part about why social work — and she didn’t come apart writing it.
She cried a normal amount and finished the paragraph. I’ve spent two years thinking I was protecting everyone by carrying it alone, and my little sister has been four hours up the highway the whole time, quietly demonstrating the other option, where I was too far under to look.
She says his name maybe nine times over dinner. I don’t say it once.
I haven’t said it once, out loud, to anyone, in two years. I let it live in her mouth where it’s safe and warm and ordinary, and I keep mine shut around the shape of it, and Dani lets me, because Dani has been letting me for two years and has decided, I can tell, that tonight she’s done letting me.
“So,” she says, when the food’s gone and the room’s gone quiet. “Are you going to tell me about her, or am I going to have to find out from the internet like a stranger.”
“There’s nothing to—”
“Carter.” She levels me with the look. “I have seen every photo. The whole manufactured thing. I know it’s a campaign, I’m not an idiot.
” She pulls her feet out of my lap and sits up, serious now.
“But here’s what the campaign doesn’t explain.
You’re funny again. Not on-camera funny — you’ve always been able to do that, you could do that at the funeral, you did do that at the funeral and it scared me.
I mean you’re funny. The real one. The one from before.
” Her voice doesn’t break. It does the level thing, on purpose.
“You sound like the before-you. The one from before we lost him. I haven’t heard that guy in two years, and some woman who’s supposed to be your fake girlfriend just handed him back to me across a phone line, and I drove four hours to find out if I imagined it. ”
She’s right about the funeral. I don’t tell her she’s right. I sit there instead with the thing she’s just handed back to me — the front of a church, a borrowed black suit, me halfway through the words and landing a joke.
A real one. The whole room breaking into laughter, grateful for it, every face coming up out of the grief for a second like swimmers taking air. I remember the relief on them.
I remember thinking, clear as a struck bell: I can do this. I can hold this entire room up off the floor as long as I keep it light enough.
Being the fun one was always just my position — the spot I played on the team even back when he was alive. After, it stopped being a position and turned into the whole job. The only job.
Keep it bright, keep it moving, keep every face up out of the water so nobody — me least of all — ever has to go down to where the heavy thing actually sits. It’s a good system.
It held for two years. The single thing it can’t survive is somebody who quietly prefers the version of me that isn’t performing, and I went and fell for one of those.
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing in my throat that’s shaped like words.
“You didn’t imagine it,” I manage, finally.
“I know I didn’t. I’m the one who heard it.” She reaches over and flicks the strap of my kit bag, where it sits by the couch, where it always sits, with the weight in it she’s never asked about. “Still carrying that everywhere, I see.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not. I never do.” And she doesn’t. She’s the only one who’s earned the not-asking and also the only one who’s allowed to flick the strap and let me know she knows.
***
She pushes at the door, gently and then less gently, the way only she can.
“You should tell her,” she says. “The real stuff. Him. The bag. Whatever’s in the notebook you think nobody knows you write in.” She holds up a hand before I can lie. “I’m your sister. I’ve known about the notebook since you were sixteen. You think you’re subtle. You’re a billboard.”
“I can’t.”
“Why.”
“Because if I open it for her, then it’s—” I stop. The sentence has a cliff at the end of it and I don’t go over. “Because the second someone real has it, I can’t pretend I’m fine. The fine is load-bearing, Dani. I take the fine out and I don’t know what’s holding the roof up.”
She looks at me for a long moment, and — unheard of — she doesn’t have a joke, and the not-having-a-joke is how I know she’s about to say the truest thing she owns.
“He’s holding the roof up,” she says quietly.
“Still. You let a dead man hold your roof up because you won’t ask anyone living to help carry it.
That’s not loyalty, Carter. That’s just being alone with extra steps.
” She stands, and pulls the hoodie sleeves down over her hands the way she does when she’s said a hard thing and needs the cuffs.
“I’m staying at Mom’s. Don’t walk me out, you’ll make it weird. ”
***
She makes it to the door and stops with her hand on the frame, and I know from the set of her shoulders that the real thing is coming, the one she drove four hours to deliver.
“I texted you something a few weeks back,” she says, not turning around.
“About the way she looks at you. You read it. You did nothing — because reading a text isn’t the same as your sister standing in your doorway making you hear it out loud.
” She turns, and her eyes are wet and her voice is steady, which is the most Dani combination there is.
“I’d know that look anywhere. It’s the one I make over the album at two in the morning, over a man who isn’t coming back.
Somebody alive is making it at you, right now, across a city, and you’re choosing a notebook over her.
” She waits. “Say his name to her. Out loud, to a living person, one time. It won’t kill you — he’s the one who’s gone, dummy, not you. Stop being a coward a year too late.”
And she’s out the door and into the dark before I can answer, and the kit bag by the couch has never weighed more, and I sit alone in the quiet with the shape of a name in my mouth that I still, even now, even after all that, cannot make myself say.