16. Lori #2
She is not crying when she says this, not like the first night.
I notice that. Ava tells me this on the first night: the doctor says the feeling is the last thing to come back.
Words first, then doing, then feeling. In that order, in some women.
Sometimes everything all at once, sometimes nothing at all.
"I stop sleeping. Maybe day eight or nine. The thoughts come in then." She looks at the wall. "On the day I drive down, I do not sleep in maybe four days. I am on the kitchen floor. Junie is in the bassinet beside me, just looking at me with those eyes."
She stops. Picks the words back up carefully.
"I think she is looking at her mother and her mother is not here anymore. She is looking at a body. And whatever I do next, the best thing for her is for me to not be the person taking care of her. Not for one more day. Because I cannot even take care of myself."
I’m holding Junie, not breathing. I need to hear every word she pushes out of her chest and if I breathe I might break whatever thin thread is letting her do it.
"So I pack her bag and put the note on top and drive. I do not remember the drive, but I remember the address from the gift card you send in the mail a few months back. The porch I remember, and putting the basket down."
Her voice drops.
"I drive away because I cannot be a person on your steps. There is not anything left of me to be one. Even for you."
Silence. The clock ticks.
I reach across the table and put my hand over my sister's hand. Her skin is cold.
"Tyler's alive," she says.
I just nod.
"He's going to want to know me. The person he married.
Lori, she's not here. I have to find her again.
Or build a new one. The doctor says it can come back.
With the medicine and the talking and time.
She says don't be too hard on yourself, or other women who survives this.
Some women don't survive it. Some need more time to understand what is happening to them.
She says strength when you're drowning is proportional to support. "
Ella finally looks at me. "Lori. I am so sorry I left her on your porch."
"Ella — "
"I am so sorry I picked you. I am so sorry I made you my emergency person without asking permission. I know you take her. I know that about you. And I use it. And I am so sorry."
This is exactly what Ella and I were raised not to do. I hear our mother underneath it. Softness gets you left. Don't be heavy. Don't be a burden. Don't be hard to keep.
Six weeks of fury. Six weeks of building a verdict in my head at 2 a.m. while I warm bottles. And now, I am sitting across from my sister listening to her apologize for trusting me, and the anger leaves my body in one long exhale.
"Ella." I keep my voice steady. "You do the only thing left to you. I am so glad you pick me. I would be furious for the rest of my life if you pick anyone else."
She starts to cry. Not all at once, but in bursts, the sound catching and releasing. A body remembering how to after weeks of forgetting. The feeling, beginning to come back at the edges.
Junie is against my chest, watching her mother cry without flinching.
I stay with my sister and her baby until it gets quiet.
The drive back to the house is quiet, the weight of the last three days settling into the cold January air.
The third night, I sit on Ava's back step after everyone is asleep. Tyler is on the floor beside Ella's bed. Junie is in the borrowed crib. The Fredericksburg cold is different from Carson's, drier, thinner and sharper through the hills.
For six weeks, I build a case against my sister. Now, every charge collapses.
She is sinking.
The baby on the porch is not a dump. It is the last clear act of a woman going under, putting her child in the only hands she trusts before she completely falls apart.
And underneath the crisis is the older wound. The one I have not looked at in six years.
We grew up in the same house. Our mother drills into our lives that need is weakness.
Asking for help is the same as failing. You handled your own grief, your own hunger, your own marriage falling apart by going quieter and quieter until nobody knows you are drowning. That is love in our mother's house.
Love is carrying it alone, so the people you love can’t be burdened.
Ella takes the lesson hard. Marries Tyler and doesn’t say anything when it gets hard. Gets pregnant, and doesn’t say that she is scared. Stops sleeping. Stops being able to look at her baby. Stops answering the phone.
Withdraws further and further into herself until she cannot pull herself out.
She doesn’t call her sister because calling can make her a burden, and being a burden is the one thing she cannot be on top of everything else.
She carries it alone until it wrecks her.
In her story, I see myself.
In the two months of letting Carson tear up my checks and keep my sister's baby alive in his guest room, I measure the bill in my head.
I brace for the day it gets called in. I do not said I love you to a man who says it every morning when he sets a mug on the counter with three sugars and a splash of cream.
Not because I don't. But because saying it would be asking for something. It makes me a burden to him. The women in our family are raised to not become a burden. Instead, we disappear into our own silence, call it strength or independence, and risk losing everything.
I sit in the cold with that. My sister's wreckage has my face in it, too.
On the fourth morning, Ella comes out to the kitchen while I’m warming a bottle. She stands in the doorway in a sweatshirt, arms crossed, watching Junie in my arms. The baby turns toward her mother before Ella makes a sound, just the bare feet on the tile, the shift in the room, and reaches.
Ella doesn’t move.
Her mouth works. Her arms stay crossed. She watches her daughter reach for her from three feet away, and she cannot close the distance.
I watch my sister's face and I see it. Not the absence of love.
The terror of it. The fear that her hands will do it wrong.
That whatever broke inside her will break the baby, too.
"I don't know how to take her back." Ella's voice is barely a voice. A scrape of sound against the morning. "I don't know how to be her mother."
Junie's hand is still reaching. Outside, Tyler's boots cross the porch, the slow walk of a man who doesn’t know where to stand.
And neither do I.