Chapter Eight Mary
Chapter Eight
Mary
Five years ago
I’d been sitting in the waiting room for nearly three hours when my mother came bursting through the door.
“Mary! Oh, thank God!” she cried, pulling me into her arms the instant I was on my feet. “Thank God you’re all right!”
“Mom!” I gasped, feeling my ribs contract in her viselike grip. “Mom, please! You’re hurting me!”
She let go of me abruptly and took a step back, still gripping my upper arms as she scanned me from head to toe and back again. When she was convinced that I truly was unharmed, she let go, wiping at the tears running down her cheeks.
“Oh, baby, I’m just so . . . relieved,” she whispered with a sniff.
Then we heard my father yelling from down the hall.
“Terry? Terry, where are you?” he called out.
“Doug, we’re here,” she responded loud enough for everyone on the floor to hear.
When he, too, came flying in, making a beeline for me, I held up my palms. “Don’t. Please. I’m fine, Dad. Really, not a scratch on me.”
He stopped just in front of me, both hands running through his hair at the same time as he looked up at the ceiling and blinked back tears of his own.
After a long moment, he pulled me into his arms and just held onto me as I listened to the muffled sound of his heart beating through the wall of his chest.
Wow, they really were scared!
I looked up into his face. “I’m sorry for what I said before I left,” I whispered, blinking back tears of my own. “I didn’t mean it—”
“I know, baby,” he murmured, pulling my head back to him and stroking my hair the way he did when I was a little girl.
At last he loosened his grip after a few minutes. “Honey, what happened?” he asked.
I didn’t really know—everything had happened so fast. And I had to walk a very thin line.
If I told the whole truth, there was a real chance they’d decide Sam needed to be put on psychiatric lockdown for her own safety.
Maybe she’d been impulsive, sure, but she wasn’t dangerous.
And I wasn’t about to lose my sister—not now that I’d finally found her.
So I told the police the same version I told the nurses: a softened version of what happened, something that didn’t involve the words “jumped out of a moving car.” It wasn’t exactly a lie .
. . just the version least likely to get her locked away.
“The car door—it wasn’t latched all the way, and I-I don’t know, I somehow tripped the locks with my elbow. It was one of those perfect-storm things, and she just sort of . . . fell out of the car.”
What little color had remained in my mother’s face drained in front of me. “While it was moving?” she gasped.
“Yeah. But I had just driven into a construction zone, so I was going way slower than I could’ve been,” I explained, digging deeper into my alternate version of events.
“But you’re okay?” my father confirmed.
I nodded again. “Yeah, Dad, I’m fine. I didn’t even want the cops to call you, but they said they had to since the car’s registered in your name.”
They looked at each other, then back at me, and I had the distinct impression that they’d spent time discussing how to handle this. How to handle me.
“Mary,” Mom began softly, “we’re sorry about how things went this afternoon. You just . . . it was just such a shock, finding out about Sam. It’s going to take a little time for us to get used to the idea of her, you know?”
I’d spent the last three hours kicking myself over this. I hadn’t done any of us any favors by ambushing them earlier. But here was an opportunity. I was certain of it.
“I’m so sorry too—about how I sprang all this on you . . . and about what I said.”
There were fresh tears in her eyes. “Mary, you know that we could not possibly love you any more if you’d been our biological child. I’d do anything to keep you safe and happy. So . . . if you want us to spend time getting to know Sam with you, of course we’ll do that. We’d do anything for you.”
I flung myself into her arms once more and held on tight.
It was another hour before the doctor came to find us in the waiting room, still wearing his surgical scrubs and cap. He looked tired as he approached us.
“Are you Mr. and Mrs. Kinski?” he asked my parents.
They were shaking their heads before he’d even finished the question.
“No, we’re not—”
“No, they’re not,” I jumped in, cutting them off. “But I’m . . . I’m her sister . . .” I couldn’t decide which felt stranger, saying the words or hearing them.
I had a sister. And I was all she had.
“Oh, yes, of course! You’re twins, then,” the doctor noted, taking a good look at me.
“Right, well, Samantha is going to be fine, but she’s pretty banged up.
The worst of it is a broken arm, bruised spleen, and broken pelvis.
There are some very nasty abrasions on her body—road rash, as the bikers like to call it.
Those will need some special wound care for a while to prevent infection. ”
“Oh, thank you, Jesus!” I murmured a relieved exhalation.
How horrible would it have been to find my twin, only to then lose her hours later?
“That being said, it could have been much worse. I’m keeping her here for a few days, but then you can take her home. She’s going to have to take it easy for a while. It’ll be two or three months before she fully bounces back from this. Maybe as long as six months to heal.”
“What about school?” I asked. “We start our freshman year at college next week.”
The doctor shook his head grimly. “No, I’m afraid that’s out of the question. Next semester, perhaps, but not right now. What Samantha needs is to rest and recuperate for a while.”
I looked at my parents just in time to see something unspoken pass between them.
“We’ll see to it she has everything she needs,” my mother replied for them both, and my heart swelled with gratitude, pushing out any lingering remnants of my earlier anger.
“Excellent,” the doctor said with a small smile, oblivious to the volumes of subtext unspooling right under his nose. “Well, she’s in recovery now, and it’ll be a bit before she’s got a room of her own . . .”
“Can I see her?” I asked. He looked as if he wanted to say no. “Please?” I added for good measure.
“All right,” he agreed reluctantly, raising a finger at me. “But just for a few minutes. She needs to rest. And she’ll be groggy from the anesthesia.”
I nodded enthusiastically. “Okay, yeah. Of course,” I promised.
Back in the recovery room, Sam lay flat, her left arm in a cast and draped across her chest. I wasn’t prepared for the extent of the “road rash” the doctor had mentioned. A large bandage was swaddled around her head, and her eyes were closed.
“Just a few minutes,” the doctor reminded me with a finger wag.
I nodded and smiled, waiting until he was out of earshot before leaning over the bed.
“Sam?” I murmured softly. When she didn’t stir, I tried again. “Sam? Can you hear me?”
One of her eyes fluttered open slowly, the other swollen shut. She squinted at the fluorescents overhead.
“When did you get here?” she rasped.
“I’ve been here. We’ve been worried sick about you.”
“We?” A faint frown. “We who?”
“Me and my parents,” I said.
She let out a weak scoff—more breath than sound—then winced. “Ow. Okay, note to self: no facial expressions.”
“You really need to stay still. They’re going to move you upstairs soon.”
“Just go.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Go. Go home to your . . . whatever. McMansion with ponies.” The line would’ve landed sharper if she hadn’t swallowed between every other word.
“I don’t want to go home.”
“Then go back to school. Go to Disney World. I don’t care. Just—” Her eyes squeezed shut, jaw trembling. “Just go away. Jesus, I literally jumped out of a moving car to get away from you. I thought that was a pretty solid hint.”
“Yeah, about that.” I crossed my arms. “What were you thinking? You could’ve been killed.”
“Yeah,” she said, too lightly. “That was kind of the point.” The corner of her mouth lifted in something that attempted to be a smile but died immediately in pain. “God. Everything hurts.”
“Uh-huh, good. Maybe that’ll teach you not to swan dive onto asphalt. We’ve only just found each other, and you go and do something extreme like that? Why?”
Her good eye opened, raw and shining.
“Because I was okay,” she whispered. “Okay with being abandoned. Okay with being the girl nobody wanted. Bad foster home after bad foster home—I’d made my peace with being alone.
And then you show up. You, with your perfect stupid life and your perfect stupid name, and suddenly I’m staring at .
. . what could’ve been. If the universe hadn’t screwed me. ”
“And that’s worth ending your life for?”
She turned her face away, but not fast enough to hide the tears. That alone cracked something open in me. I reached for her hand—her good one—and squeezed.
“What?” she sniffed. “What do you want from me?”
“I want to get to know you. I want you to be my sister. I want a life with you in it, Samantha Kay Kinski.” Then, more quietly: “Unless that’s not what you want. I can walk out that door. I can let you go, if that’s what you need.”
“No.” Her head jerked—immediately regretted. “Ow. But . . . no. I don’t want you to go.”
“Then stop trying to shove me out of the room.”
She let out a shaky breath. “Look at me. I’m not going anywhere like this. They’re talking about sending me to a rehab place until I can walk on my own. There goes my semester.”
“That’s not happening.”
She blinked. Confused. Suspicious.
“What’s not happening?”
“You’re not going to any facility. You’re moving in with us.”
“Us?” she echoed. “Who’s ‘us’?”
“Me. And my parents. Terry and Doug. We’ll take a semester off. We’ll go back together in January.”
“Oh God. No. No. I’ll lose my dorm, my scholarship—” She stopped when I held up my hand. “What? You already solved all that too?”
“I did. You can move into my apartment in January. It’s paid for. And scholarships can be paused for medical reasons. My dad knows the provost—he can make the calls.”
She gave a tiny, exhausted snort. “Must be nice, having a daddy hotline for life’s problems.”
“You can push me away all you want—I’m still not leaving.”
Her good eye studied me like I was an unsolvable riddle. “You’ve officially lost it.”
“Maybe a little.”
She sighed, eyelid fluttering. “I’m not imagining it. Your parents don’t . . . like me.”
“They don’t know you yet.”
“They will when I show up at their house missing half my limbs and wrecking their china.”
I couldn’t help a tiny laugh. “China’s overrated.”
She didn’t smile, exactly, but something in her face softened.
“Spain?” she croaked when I teased her about studying abroad.
“You pick the semester,” I said.
“Stop,” she whispered. “Just stop.”
“What am I stopping?”
“Making it sound like I can do anything I want.”
There it was—the truth beneath every tantrum, every sharp edge, every reckless dive onto the pavement.
“And why can’t you?” I asked gently.
“Because I’m not you, Mary.” No venom. Just fact. “I don’t have money or connections or a fancy name. Life doesn’t open up for me like that.”
I swallowed. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m trying to tell you . . . you’re not alone anymore. You have a sister. As long as I’m alive, you have family.”
She stared like she’d never heard the word used on her before.
And maybe she hadn’t.
So I squeezed her hand again.
This time, she squeezed back.
And neither of us knew how much that promise would cost.