Chapter 14 #3
“We don’t usually talk about it very much,” I said.
“My sister and I have the same dad but different mothers. She lived with her mom and I lived alone with mine, up until my parents got married when I was six or so and we moved into my grandparents’ house.
Dad had been with my mother for a few years but they split up for a while, right before she found out that she was pregnant with me.
They were apart when Willow was conceived.
That’s why she and I are so close in age, but he didn’t know about her for a long time, like…
” I thought. “At least a decade, because I found out that I had a sister when I was around eleven. I was so excited.” I had thought that we’d be instant friends—best friends.
It hadn’t worked out that way at first, but we had fixed it.
“How did your dad find out about her?”
“It was because her mom died,” I said. “When she was sick, she wrote letters to everyone, including to him. He saved it and it’s in that box.
” I pointed to one of the plastic bins. “She blamed him for ruining her life and Willow’s, too, and he felt very guilty and very, very sad.
And my mom felt really mad.” I remembered that, because it had been explosive.
“My sister came to live with us and my dad took us on vacation. I guess he was trying to make everything ok for her and for my mother, like, to make it up to them.” The car ride to the Alabama shore from northern Michigan had been about twenty hours, one way—forty total hours of my angry mother, my confused and sad sister, and my guilty and depressed father, with me trying to placate everyone. It had been a disaster.
“Willow’s mom saved almost all her baby stuff,” I said, patting the top of another box. “My mother didn’t do that, though. I’m glad she kept my birth certificate but there’s really nothing else.”
“That’s too bad.” Everett carried that box to the shelf and then walked back to me. He pulled me into his arms. “That’s a shitty story.”
“It’s—”
“Don’t say ‘it’s ok,’” he ordered. “It’s sad.” He bent and twisted a little to look at my face. “Are you sad about it?”
“No, it’s…” I stopped and didn’t say that it was ok, because he was right.
It wasn’t. “My dad never got over it. He blamed himself for the accident, too, and he drank so much. He took off in my mom’s car and wrecked it, and he spent a ton of money that we couldn’t afford to waste.
When he finally came home, he tried to quit cold turkey.
That can be dangerous, but I didn’t know at the time.
He passed away in his sleep.” If my mom had been angry at Willow before, it was nothing compared to her rage after all that happened.
My dad had blamed himself for the problems, but my mom blamed my sister.
“Jesus. Damn.” He snuggled me more tightly, and he kissed me gently. That was our fifth. “What a bunch of bullshit to put on the two of you.”
I held up my face and lifted on my toes, so he kissed me again as I put my arms around his waist. And again, and again, and I stopped counting and just enjoyed it.
The abrupt noise of a car’s honk made us separate.
We turned our heads and saw Boyd and Willow staring through his windshield into the garage, amusement on his face and shock on hers.
Her hand was on the steering wheel, too, so she had been the one to lay on the horn.
I started to pull away but then thought, no. I stayed where I was.
She got out and I was worried when I saw how stiffly she moved, until I realized that it was due to anger. “Hey,” Everett called to her, and she gave him a stare of death which didn’t seem to bother him. “I need to get going,” he told me. “I’ll call you from Omaha.”
“Ok.” I smiled up at him and he smiled back, then kissed me again. I heard my sister hiss, like a snake. Boyd had to move his car, since he’d parked it in the middle of the driveway, so that Everett could reverse out. He waved as he pulled down the street and I waved too, smiling even more.
Willow had already joined me in the garage, and she was not smiling. “What are you doing?” she asked, the words sibilant. “What are you doing, Zoey?”
“I was cleaning up some of the stuff from our old apartment and Everett had to leave for the game. They fly in an orange plane together,” I explained. She wasn’t as up on Woodsmen stuff as I now was, but that hadn’t been the information that she was after, anyway.
“I knew you were sleeping with him,” she said. “I knew it.”
“I’m not,” I answered, before I remembered that I didn’t have to share that information. “It’s none of your business,” I added, too late.
“Zoey! This is terrible!” She looked toward her boyfriend’s car and waved at him until he got out. “Let’s get a guy’s perspective. Boyd, if you were Everett Ford and you were sleeping with my sister—”
“I don’t want to play this game,” he interrupted, and neither did I.
“What are you two doing here?” I asked.
“You weren’t answering me and I got worried,” she said, and I touched the pocket where I usually kept my phone. I hadn’t thought of carrying it with me because I hadn’t been worried about her. For the first time in years, she hadn’t been on my mind.
“I’m ok,” I said. “I really am, not just pretend ok. I’m glad you’re here, because you can take some of this back to your apartment.” I pointed to the bins.
“We don’t have a lot of extra space, like an attic or something,” Boyd told me.
“Don’t your parents have a big house?” I knew that they did since I’d visited my sister above their detached garage, and he frowned. “It’s your baby stuff. I cleaned it as best as I could,” I told her. “Have a look while I get ready for work. I’ll be a few minutes.”
“No, take your time,” she ordered me. “Dry your hair and put on makeup.”
I didn’t do all that, but I made a little bit of an effort. “I’m not wearing a ponytail,” I announced when I rejoined them in the garage. Only Boyd was there.
“Where’s Willow?” I asked him.
“In the bathroom. She looked in some of the boxes and got upset but she didn’t want you to know, so she’s trying to clean up her face.”
“Why doesn’t she want me to know?” I started to go back inside to find her, but he told me to stop.
“She thinks that you worry all the time,” he said. “She worries about you, too, like about that crap with your mom.”
“My mom? What does she have to do with anything?”
“I’m saying that your sister wants to protect you, like you do for her,” he told me. “And she wants you to believe that she’s all right and she can handle herself.”
“I do believe that. Almost always,” I amended. “She was gravely injured, though.”
“More than five years ago.”
“It doesn’t feel like that much time has passed.
Sometimes it feels like it just happened this morning.
I can picture every detail so vividly.” When I got the call about the accident, I had been cutting an apple and I sliced my finger with the knife.
I could still see the blood, my blood, as it dripped on the counter.
I had gotten worried that I wouldn’t be able to play my horn.
“I remember hearing about it. One of the girls who had been there posted shit about what had happened but she said that Willow was dead.” He blew out a breath. “I thought it was my fault. For years, that was what I thought. I had to go into therapy so that I could get out of bed.”
“You did? You cared?”
“I always cared about her,” Boyd said. “Always, but I was a stupid kid. She was, too.”
“She just wanted somebody to love her,” I said. “She had lost her mother and then she had to live with my mom being so awful, and our dad was weak and drunk. I did my best to help.”
“She knows that,” he said. “You helped her too much.”
“What does that mean?” I asked angrily. Was I supposed to have left her hungry? Who would have brought her to the bathroom? Who would have gotten her dressed? “She needed me!”
“She kind of stopped growing up, you know? Like how she never got her license, never got a job or went to school. She thinks about stuff like a high school kid sometimes, about how relationships should be, about playing games with me. But she’s working on that,” he said.
“She thinks that this Ford guy is playing games with you.”
“I don’t agree. But I realize that I don’t know enough to know,” I admitted.
“Neither does Willow. She’s just worried because she loves you so much,” Boyd told me. “I know you love her, too, and that’s why you hate my ass.”
“I don’t hate your ass,” I said. “I want us to get along.”
“Good,” he told me, and my sister came out of the house. We both watched her descend the steps to the concrete floor and I saw that she’d done a very good job of disguising the fact that she’d been crying.
“We should go,” she told her boyfriend. “Can you carry the boxes?”
He nodded at her and at me, then started for the car, taking two of the bins with him.
My sister sighed. “I made him drive me over here because I thought you’d been in some kind of accident, and the only thing going on is Everett Ford sticking his tongue down your throat.
Be careful, Zo.” She turned to follow her boyfriend.
“Why don’t you come over for dinner tonight?” I asked her. “I mean, both of you should come.”
Willow stopped and turned back. “We could do that,” she answered.
“Good. I’ll make something you’ll really like,” I said, and she smiled.
“You always do. You’re always want the best for me.”
It seemed like now, that would be mutual. I hugged my sister and I was very glad.