No One Knows Us Here(90)

CHAPTER 31


Half a year went by. The cherry blossoms bloomed up and down the riverfront, and then the pink flowers dried up and floated away in the breeze, the petals flying like snow through the air. It was so beautiful. It was always so beautiful, those cherry blossoms, but I wasn’t there to witness them. I missed the summer, too, the entire season. No hot days and long nights and sipping cold drinks in sidewalk cafés. No sunbathing on the roof of my apartment building or road trips to the coast to cool off in the frigid Oregon coastal waters.

It was always the same temperature in jail, and the lights went off at the same time every night and flipped back on at the same time every morning. I didn’t get beaten up or tormented by heartless guards. The food was terrible, just like you’d expect. Sometimes—most times—I struggled to identify the food at all. Soft mounds of a mushy meat mixture next to even softer mounds of vegetable matter, a hodgepodge of carrots and peas, perhaps, blended into a sickly grayish-green. I closed my eyes and swallowed each spoonful like medicine.

The worst part was the boredom. The way the days blended into each other, punctuated only by visiting hours.

I didn’t see my sister at all for eight weeks. For eight weeks, I was tormented by her silence. She had to hate me, after everything I had done. Everything. Leaving her to fend for herself with her abusive father. Failing to take care of her when our mother died, and when she ran away to be with me, what did I do? Did I welcome her with open arms? I made her go back. She had to stab herself in the wrist to make me take notice, and even then I hadn’t tried hard enough. And then she moved in and I was supposed to take care of her, but I didn’t. She became best friends with a twenty-year-old who enabled her eating disorder. Wendy was wasting away before my eyes, and instead of doing anything about that, I went to France, murdered my boyfriend, and got locked up in jail. I really couldn’t have done a worse job if I had tried.

She had been sent back to live with her grandmother, right back where she started. Maybe it would be different this time. Maybe living with her grandmother would be a welcome respite from life with me.

But then one Saturday she showed up for in-person visitation. I was so happy to see her that tears sprang to my eyes. I pressed my hand to the glass separating us, and she lifted her hand, too. “Oh my god!” was the first thing she said. She was smiling. A huge, ecstatic grin. All those weeks I had imagined her withering, shrinking further from herself. Her hair falling out in clumps. But she looked good. A flush to her cheeks, a little filled out since I had seen her last.

We talked through heavy black telephone receivers, and she told me she’d worked everything out. She was sorry it had taken her so long, but all this time she had been working her way back here, to Portland, to me. “And here I am!” she said, holding up her arms like a magician’s assistant.

She’d sold the ring. This was a long, complicated story, but the salient detail was that she got $120,000 for it. She’d checked herself into a thirty-day program for girls with eating disorders. Her grandmother signed the paperwork. Hannah had gone there, too, at the same time. They’d done it together. “Look,” she said, pulling up one of her sleeves to show me the creamy-white flesh of her arm.

“What am I looking at?” I leaned up to the glass and peered at the white expanse of skin stretched over bones. The arm was still thin.

“The lanugo,” she said. “It’s gone.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“That’s what I’m showing you.” She brought her arm closer to the glass. “I told you I’d get better.”

“Yeah.” I attempted to lift the corners of my mouth. “You did.” When I got back to my cell, I wanted to scream and punch my dirty little prison mattress with my fists, but I felt too worn out. I just stared up at the ceiling. My little sister had almost withered away, the fat dissolving from her bones. Her skin tried to protect her, sprouting almost invisible hairs, a fine veneer of fur. How did I miss that? It seemed impossible.

How long would she be in town, I asked her at the end of our visit. When could she visit again? She smiled her big smile and said she was here for good. She was living with Hannah now. Her grandmother was allowing this? I asked, incredulous. Wendy shrugged. She didn’t have much of a choice. But, I protested, Hannah was an adult and Wendy was fourteen. (Fifteen! Wendy reminded me. Fifteen in May.) Fourteen, fifteen. What was the difference? Why did a twenty-year-old woman want to take care of a teenager? What was in it for her? What was wrong with her? It wasn’t like that, Wendy insisted. They were friends. That was all.

I didn’t get it. It haunted me, this idea that Hannah was using my sister somehow, taking advantage of her. Damaging her. I hated the idea of them living together, but what could I do? Nothing. I was in jail.

Margorie visited me a few times; even Steele came once. I should have told them, they both said. I should have let them help me. One person who never visited me, not once in the whole half year I spent locked up in that jail, was Sam. They had remote visitation now. Jamila dialed in from Los Angeles; reporters chatted with me from their Manhattan lofts. If he wanted to visit me, he didn’t have to leave his apartment. He wouldn’t even have to come downtown.

I tried to see things from his point of view: I had promised him I’d let him save me again. I was the damsel in distress, and he was the valiant knight, swooping in to rescue me. He liked that. He liked saving me. I promised to let him whisk me away to Iceland or Russia, let him give up his whole life for me. Hours later, I broke that promise. No wonder he was upset. He had to know, though, that I did it for him, for my sister. I couldn’t let them live like that, as fugitives, covering up a crime I’d committed. What kind of person would let the people they love take the fall for them—with them—like that? I did it for you, I would tell him, if he ever gave me the chance. You have to understand that.