Chapter Forty. Ingrid
CHAPTER FORTY
INGRID
After Travis dropped me off, I came into the house quietly, easing the door shut and slipping my shoes off.
Dad was asleep in the recliner with the television still on.
I’d found him like this every night, and I wondered if he’d been sleeping in the living room ever since Mom was admitted to the hospital, avoiding the empty bed upstairs.
It’s been forty-five years since he’s slept alone.
I turned off the TV and covered him with a blanket.
Now I’m sitting on my old bed, flipping through the stack of photos I brought down from the attic.
In one, Izzy and I are helping Dad paint the garden shed, both of us with our hair tied up in messy buns, wearing paint-splattered Preston High T-shirts.
I squint at the picture, trying to figure out which one is me.
No one will know it’s you, I’d told Izzy when I had tried to convince her to do my gymnastics routine.
Because even Ben, who had known us both a lifetime, with his face close enough that I could feel his breath hot on my ear, hadn’t been able to tell us apart.
The truth is, the last time I saw my sister, I was angry at her.
For emailing that college guy, for stringing Ben along.
Every time Ben kissed her, every time he reached for her hand in that easy, familiar way, it boiled me up.
It wasn’t fair to him. She’d always had him, and so she didn’t appreciate him.
And what was she going to do? Wait until the day we left for college to pull the rug out from under him?
Let him play out this charade all summer?
Don’t even go to dinner, I told her. I knew exactly how that would play out: Ben would kiss her as soon as she arrived, and she’d lose her nerve.
She’d end up staying over with him, telling Mom and Dad in the morning that she’d fallen asleep on the Shermans’ sofa, or she’d sneak back home late in the night.
Either way, she’d tell me that she hadn’t gone through with it.
That she’d break up with him next time. We’d been playing this game for months.
Just go straight to his house now. Rip the Band-Aid off.
Tell him it’s over. You owe that to him, Izzy.
I don’t know, she’d said, flustered. She was packing her date-night purse, a little black clutch that barely fit her wallet and ChapStick, fiddling with the zipper to avoid eye contact with me. I have to go to the library first and study.
There were only a handful of people at the library that day.
Sheriff Ryan interviewed them all, and no one had seen Izzy.
I always thought that meant she’d taken my advice.
That instead of waiting to meet Ben up at the square, instead of breaking up with him in a crowded restaurant in the middle of town, she had gone straight to the Sherman house.
That I was the reason she had been alone with him that day in the middle of the woods.
That I had practically marched my sister to her death.
What if that wasn’t true? What if, when she pulled away from the house that day, she hadn’t gone to the library or to the Sherman house?
But then where did she go? And who had been waiting for her there?