15. Lori #2
I tell him everything Tyler said, plain and spare.
Carson listens with his hand resting on the step between us, palm down, close enough to touch my thigh if I shifted a little.
When I run out of words, he is quiet long enough for the wind to change and a live oak branch to scrape the gutter with a thin metallic sound.
“There’s a name for what you just described,” he says. He is looking at the cattle gate. “I see it. In my own house.”
“What?”
“Postpartum depression.” He says it plainly, no frame around it, just a word he has carried long enough that it no longer scares him to say out loud. “The worse end of it. The part where a woman starts thinking the people she loves would be better off without her.”
The cold air thins in my lungs. I know the term before, in passing, on television, something that happens to other people in other lives. I never connect it to Ella. In our mother’s house you are sad or you get over it. Sickness is not on the list. Needing help is not on the list.
“Does Megan have it, too?”
He nods once. The wind pushes my hair across my face.
He sets his coffee next to him, both hands flat on the wood.
“Megan gets quiet after Cadie is born. You don’t really see it if you’re not watching for it, because the parts of her that are still working were working hard.
She shows up. She nurses the baby. She gets dressed in the morning.
She says she is fine.” He pauses. “Every time I ask. I’m fine.
I’m just tired. New-mom thing. It’ll pass. ”
My hands tighten on the mug.
“I believe her. Because I want to. The alternative is that something is wrong and I don’t know how to fix it, and I am raised to fix things. That includes her.” He takes a deep breath. “She is performing fine for my sake, I realize. So I don’t have to feel like a failure.”
“By the time I figure it out, she goes somewhere I can’t reach.
She tells me once. It is the only time she ever says it out loud — I don’t feel anything.
About anything. She is looking at Cadie in her bed when she says it.
I think she means she is tired. I think she means the baby cries too much. I think she needs a weekend.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know there is a name for what is happening to her until my mother tells me a year later. By then, Megan is already gone.”
Still looking at the distance, he says, “This isn’t abandonment, Lori. This is a serious condition. Your sister is not okay, and we need to find her.”
I think about it for a while, what Ella must have felt like. What she’s going through.
“Megan leaves.” It doesn’t come as a question.
He nods.
“Ella leaves Junie on my porch.”
“Yes.” He nods again. “Different choices. Same condition.”
“She doesn’t stop loving Junie.” I say it to the dark, to the cedars, to the cold gate at the bottom of the hill. “She gets sick. And she cannot figure out how to say so. And the only thing she can still do was —”
I cannot finish. She carries the baby to the one person she trusts to take her without asking why. She chooses me because she knows I pick up the baby and never once make her feel like a burden for needing help, because I am the world's foremost expert at never being one myself.
That is what everyone knows about me.
Lori will handle it. Lori doesn’t need anything. Lori is fine.
My sister is drowning and she chooses to leave her baby on my porch, because she knows I pick up the baby and never once make her feel like a burden for needing help, because I am the world's foremost expert at never being one myself.
Tears start to fall on my cheeks. They are cold on my face in the wind and I don’t wipe them immediately.
Carson’s hand lifts from the step, and I feel it hover over my shoulder, close enough that the heat of him moves across my skin. I want him to touch me so badly. I want his hand on the back of my neck and his mouth against my temple and his voice saying my name like he says it last night.
His hand falls back down. The not-touching burns hotter than any touch has a right to.
I let it go because I need to find my sister and what’s going on between Carson and I is something I cannot afford to think about right now.
“I’m not telling you what to do with this,” he says, quieter. “I tell you about Megan so you know what it looks like from the outside.”
“I read everything I could find. I talk to the wives at the station. I ask Marisol questions I do not have anyone else to ask. I will never know it as Megan knows it. But I can recognize it now — going quiet, performing ‘fine’, disappearing.”
I stare at the mug in my hands. I spend six weeks furious at a woman who is disappearing inside her own mind. I carry that anger around like it is clean and justified, and all of it is wrong.
Every late-night dial-and-hang-up. Every time I tell myself she is a coward. My sister is sick, and she chooses my porch because she trusts me more than anyone alive, and I hate her for it.
I press my forehead to my knees. Carson’s hand finds the back of my neck, warm and steady, his thumb against the knob of my spine. Not pulling. Not holding. Just there.
I let him. I don’t have anything left to keep the wall up with.
The sun dips below the tree line, casting long shadows across the porch, and we move inside to do the only thing left to do.
We start making calls after dark. Junie is in the bassinet in the living room, sleeping. Carson, Tyler, and I sit in the kitchen under the overhead light and work through every number we have. Tyler’s phone is cracked and low on battery.
We start with her college roommate in Dallas. Straight to voicemail.
The friend from the restaurant in San Marcos. Disconnected.
A cousin in San Antonio I meet once at Thanksgiving that ended in a fight about money. Rings eight times. Nothing.
I try Ella’s phone. Straight to voicemail. I hang up without leaving a message.
After a while, Tyler remembers a name. Ava.
Ella's college friend. He finds her number on his phone, and says he and Ella put some friends and relatives' numbers on each other's phone, in case of emergencies.
He does not think to call her earlier because he thinks Ella and Ava do not stay in touch in a while.
I call the number. The phone rings. Three times. Four. My thumb hovers over the red button.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice, thin and frightened.
“My name is Lori Jones. I’m looking for my sister, Ella. I wonder if you —”
“Yeah. She’s here.” The words come out in a rush. There’s a sound of a door closing, footsteps moving to another room, the voice drops low. “She’s not okay. I do not know what to do.”