16. Lori
Lori
My ear still feels warm from where the phone rests when I realize the call ends and I hold the phone tight. Carson takes it out of my hand.
I must look worse than I think, because he doesn’t ask. He sets the phone on the counter, puts his hand on my shoulder, and says my name once in the voice he uses on calls when the situation is unclear and somebody needs to start making decisions.
“Is she with her? I drive."
"No." I hear myself say it before I mean to. "Tyler and I go. You stay with Cadie."
He looks at Tyler, then back at me. He nods. That is the whole conversation. Carson West does not argue with a woman who already has her keys in her hand.
"Ava says Ella is with her. She lives in Fredericksburg. She says she send to me the address."
Tyler puts his boots on without a question. I think if I say the moon, he drives.
We leave at midnight. Tyler follows in his car. We go in separate cars in case he needs to stay and I have to go back. I need an out when I walk into whatever is waiting at the end of this drive, and I need to fall apart without an audience.
Junie is still sleeping, now in the car seat at the back, her breath clicks against the pacifier in a steady rhythm that fills the cab and keeps the silence from swallowing me.
The Hill Country at midnight in January has no color.
No warmth. The live oaks along the road are stripped to their winter bones, branches pale against a sky too overcast for stars.
Cedar fence posts mark the miles. Tyler's headlights sit steady in my rearview.
I rehearse what I say.
Where the hell are you?!
No.
Do you have any idea —
No.
Ella, I call you a hundred times.
The verdict is selfish.
The sentence is she’s the same as Mom.
Now I am driving two hours in the dark because the verdict might be wrong, and I am terrified of who I become if it is.
None of it survives contact with her face. I know that, too.
I pull into a gas station forty minutes out. Tyler goes inside for water. I sit in the cab with the engine running and call the one person I want to hear.
Carson picks up on the first ring. "Hey."
"Hey." I lean my forehead against the steering wheel. The leather is cold. "Thirty minutes out."
"Okay." A pause. I hear the creak of that floorboard by the hall. He is standing. He never goes to sleep. "Cadie's out. Kicks the covers off twice."
"She does that."
"I know."
Silence. Two people not saying everything they mean, both knowing it, neither one fixes it.
I close my eyes. "I want you here."
It comes out before I can stop it. Meant as I am scared, meant as I miss your hands, meant as I cannot do this alone. All honest. All out past every wall I own before I grab them back.
His breath changes on the line. I hear him swallow.
"I know," he says in the voice he saves for me and nobody else. "Me too. You call me after?"
"Yeah. I call."
I love you. I hang up before I say it. Tyler comes back with two bottles of water and does not ask why my eyes are wet. I appreciate this about him more than he ever knows.
Ava's house is a small limestone bungalow off a side street three blocks from Fredericksburg's Main Street. Dead lavender in clay pots along the railing. The yard is tidy, one-task-at-a-time clean, kept together by a person managing more than her own life.
I park on the street. I sit in the cab with my hands on the wheel for a full minute. Letting go of the wheel means walking up those steps, which means seeing what is on the other side of the door.
Tyler stays in the car. He gives me what I ask for — a few minutes to see her first.
I unbuckle Junie. She makes her small wet protest at being moved and settles against my body. I walk up the steps and knock.
The woman who opens the door is small, dark-haired, in her late twenties.
She is dressed in a fleece pullover and barefoot.
She has weeks of tiredness on her. I recognize the look because I wear it, too.
We stand there for a half second, two women who hold something too heavy for too long, looking at each other across a threshold.
"Lori?"
"Yeah."
Ava looks at Junie. Her whole face eases — relief, I think.
"She's in the spare room. She sleeps a lot. The medicine makes her tired."
I nod. My stomach turns over. The hallway is narrow, a small kitchen to the left with a meal plan taped to the fridge in a doctor's handwriting, a living room with a couch, a quilt, a mug on the side table going cold. The house smells like toast and stillness.
The spare room door is open two inches. I push it with my shoulder and there she is.
My sister. On the bed in someone else's sweatshirt, grey, UT Austin across the chest. Her hair unwashed and pulled back with a tortoiseshell clip I recognize as mine, lost at her apartment in San Marcos a long time ago.
She is thinner than I remember. Not diet-thin, but housed in a body that quits caring whether it eats or not.
Her eyes are open. She is staring at the ceiling and she doesn’t turn around when the door moves.
"Ella."
She turns her head slowly. Two seconds, then three, and recognition crosses her face in pieces, uneven, like watching someone surface from deep water. Her mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
Then her face breaks. The chin first, then the mouth pulling sideways, then the eyes, and she makes a sound I have never heard from her. It starts as a breath and keeps going, airless, pulled from somewhere so far down I am afraid of what it costs her to bring it up.
I cross the room. I sit beside her on the bed with Junie in my arms and my sister folds into me, face against my neck, arms around my waist.
And she cries.
She cries for a long time. I hold the back of her head. I say nothing. Junie sleeps between us, the room dark except for the light from the hallway. I hold my sister because there is nothing else to do, nothing else to say. Holding her is the only thing she needs from me at this moment.
After a long time, her voice comes. Into my shoulder, muffled.
"I cannot do it. I cannot do it. I think she is going to die because of me. I think I am going to die. I just want her with someone who knows how to keep a person alive."
I press my mouth to the top of her head, where her hair is oily and smells like someone else's shampoo, and hold on.
Tyler comes in at some point. I hear the floor creak, then he is on his knees beside the bed, arms around both of us, face in Ella's hair. She looks up and cries harder when she notices him.
“Tyler —” She sobs. “Tyler, you’re here — I think —”
I let go of her and Tyler hugs her tight.
The story comes out in pieces over the next three days.
It doesn’t happen on the first day. The first day, Ella sleeps.
She eats four bites of scrambled eggs at Ava's table, drinks half a glass of water, takes a pill from the amber bottle on the counter, and goes back to bed.
Tyler sits on the floor beside her with his back against the wall, silent.
I stay in the kitchen with Junie and Ava, learning what happens in this house.
"She shows up at my front door, out of the blue," Ava says. She wipes the counter in slow circles, a motion that has more to do with occupying her hands than cleaning anything. "I haven’t talked to her since graduation. She is on my porch around midnight with no bag and no baby and she asks if she can stay here for a while. She doesn’t say anything else for four days. "
Ava takes her to the doctor. Drives Ella to her appointments. Stocks the fridge according to the meal plan and sits with her in the living room without asking a single question.
I watch her refill the water pitcher, set out the pills, check the schedule.
Here is a woman who saves my sister's life by doing absolutely nothing heroic. She just shows up. Keops showing up for her when she cannot do it for herself.
I think about every time Carson does the same for me. Every time Tina brings food and I turn it into a negotiation. Every favor this town tries to give me that I insist on earning.
Ava is the mirror to this realization.
On the second day, Ella starts to find her voice.
I sit across from her at Ava's kitchen table with Junie asleep against my chest. Tyler is on the back porch, giving us the room, his boots visible through the screen door. Ella's hands are flat on the table and she is looking at them.
"I want to start at the part I can say."
"Okay."
Her voice is flat. Briefing-flat. The older-sister's voice that reads the bills aloud when our mother leaves them stacks on the counter and somebody has to figure out which ones are overdue.
"The man from Tyler’s company calls on a Tuesday. He says there was an incident. He uses that word. Incident. He cannot tell me anything else until they have family confirmation. I told him I am family. He said someone calls me back." She pauses. "Nobody calls me back."
"I keep calling the company. Twice a day, three times. The woman on the line knows my name by the second day. By the end of the first week, she stops saying it back. She just puts me through to voicemail before I finish the sentence."
Ella's hand twitches on the table. She doesn’t lift it.
"I just know, Lori. I knew something is wrong. And I think — I think he is —"
She stops. Looks at the wall above my head. The clock reads ten past two and neither of us has eaten and the eggs Ava sets out at noon sit cold on the counter.
"I sit at the kitchen table. Junie is in the bouncer beside me, crying. I can hear it. I just — can’t get up. My body will not get up. I sit there for, I don't know. Two hours. Maybe three. By the time I get up she cries herself out and is asleep."
A long silence.
"I pick her up and she wakes up and starts again. I try to nurse her. Some breast milk comes out, but it isn't enough. She keeps screaming."