15. Theresa
What kind of promise would a man make to his girlfriend that he wouldn’t break? They weren’t married, not even engaged. As he said those words, he’d looked sad, almost defeated. Not like the confident, self-assured neighbor she usually saw. She didn’t like the way his change in mood made her feel. Protective of him and angry at Mel for putting a man like Derek through this drama.
She understood what it meant to make a promise. She”d never stop looking for her sister, or her mother, and never stop doing whatever she could to make them safe and healthy.
“I made a promise to someone too,” she said quietly, not sure why. She shouldn”t have let him in the apartment, much less sat down and had a conversation. The only reason she blasted the opera music was to make him angry. Work had been horrible. She”d missed over two weeks, and no one noticed.
Last month, another nurse missed three days after a small fender-bender. Everyone signed a card for her, and someone made a cake on her first day back. People acted like that nurse had recovered from a near-death experience.
Theresa had surgery in that same hospital, missed two weeks of work, and all she got was a lecture from her supervisor about the difficulty of rearranging shifts to cover her absence.
No one missed her.
What if something really bad had happened to her that night in the alley? Would anyone notice if she was gone?
“Was that promise to your sister?” Derek asked, looking at the floor instead of her.
“How do you know about her?”
“The emergency room, remember? You were scared and in a lot of pain.”
A lot of her memories from that night were hazy. How much had she said? Despite years of refusing to talk about her sister, she wasn’t sure how to deny that her sister and mother still haunted her daily.
“It”s ok. I won”t judge you. You said something about her being addicted to drugs. Are you trying to help her?”
“Wouldn”t you help your family if you were in that situation?” She frowned and studied her nails, trying to look like she didn”t care about this conversation.
“I wouldn’t stop trying to help until I turned over every rock in the city.”
“Well, each path I choose leads to a dead end.”
He fell silent, and she felt the urge to say everything. All the things that she”d kept bottled up for the past few weeks and months. It was getting harder and harder to keep everything inside, especially today. Realizing that she was invisible to the people she worked side by side with for hours on end, broke something in her today.
“Grab that book on the shelf. The book on the left of the second shelf. And the one next to it too.” She waited until he pulled the correct books from the bookcase. “Turn to page 84 of the red book.” She closed her eyes as he opened the high school yearbook from their sophomore year to the page with individual pictures. “That was taken before she changed. Now look in the next book. Page 103.” She waited until she heard him stop flipping through the pages.
“There’s no spot for her picture.”
“She dropped out of school by the time they took the school pictures our senior year. Everyone who used to be my friend stopped talking to me. The teachers judged me. No one cared when I was bullied. I only graduated because I wanted to show everyone that they were wrong. I had the highest GPA in my class that year. But did anyone care that I was different from her? All they cared about were the rumors about my sister.” She didn”t even mention her mother and how her drug use spiraled out of control during that time. How Theresa had to quit playing sports and leave the math competition team in order to work a minimum wage job in order to have enough food to eat at night.
“She’s not a bad person,” Theresa continued. “Even though we”re twins, we had different personalities. I was shy, but she was outgoing. She could make friends with anyone. But she hated school and started skipping classes. She got suspended for drinking at school, which only made it worse. Once she got tired of alcohol, she moved on to other things. Stole my mom’s drugs, stole money from me, and stopped coming home at night. I should have hated her, but I didn’t. Angry, yes. Very angry at times. But I didn’t hate her.”
She kept her eyes closed as she spoke again. “Now look at the inside covers of both books. The part where everyone is supposed to sign the yearbook and write about how wonderful the year was and how they”ll never forget you.”
He must have looked at the yearbook from her sophomore year first, because she heard him mutter as he read some of the nice things her classmates had written. She waited another minute until she heard him flip to the inside cover of her senior yearbook.
“No one wanted to write anything in that book. By the time I graduated, no one cared about me. It was like I didn’t exist.”
“That”s horrible.”
“I decided that I was never going to do that to my sister. I was never going to turn my back on her and ignore her the way everyone else did to me. To us.”
“Is that why you don”t have friends?”
She opened her eyes and looked out the window at the lights from the city. “Probably. Friends are overrated. They only help when it”s easy and run away when things get ugly.”
“Where”s your sister now?”
“Who knows? I thought I was about to find her the other night, but . . .” she pointed to her ankle. “I haven”t been able to get downtown again to search for her since then.”
His silence was louder than the opera music she”d blasted earlier that evening.
“Say it. I know you want to ask.”
He hesitated. “Do you think she wants to be found?”
“Does it matter? Like you said, a promise is a promise, and I can”t stop looking. Just like you can”t break up with your girlfriend.”
After several seconds, he spoke again, softly. “Why are you telling me this?” His words hung in the air, his question reflecting what she was wondering herself.
Why was she saying any of this? She barely knew him, and he annoyed her each time she saw him—or, that’s what she wanted to believe. She needed to find a reason not to like him. He had shown up at the soup kitchen that evening to make sure she’d get home safely, came to her rescue in the alley, watched over her during the first few days after surgery, and made sure she had everything she needed . . . he was dangerous. He made her want to believe that good people existed, people who didn’t turn their backs when things got hard.
“I don’t know. I guess I talk too much when I’m tired.”
“Yeah, same here.” His tone sounded as unconvincing as hers.