Before I Let You Go(37)

“Do you hear from Mom much?” Annie asks me now, and I shake my head.

“No. I call her every few months.” We both ponder this quietly for a moment, then I ask her, “So, given everything, have you thought more about when you might want to call her to talk to her about the baby?”

“Maybe soon. Next week, maybe, once the dust settles.”

“Okay.”

“You know this hospital has its own entertainment system in the TV . . . like a fancy hotel.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Last night I was flicking through it and I saw they have Back to the Future. Remember when we watched that with Dad?”

I laugh softly.

“I remember we had an argument over which one of us was going to marry Michael J. Fox when we grew up.”

“Oh, yeah.” She laughs. “I forgot about that. Let’s watch it again when we finish this game. For old times’ sake.”

The TV is mounted to the ceiling above Annie’s bed and hangs at an angle, so that someone lying close to flat could still see the screen. It’s hard to see the TV from the visitor’s chair. About ten minutes into the movie, Annie glances at me and notices the awkward way I’m sitting, and she shuffles awkwardly to the edge of her bed and pats the mattress.

“Sit up here,” she says.

“I can see fine,” I assure her.

“Suit yourself.” She shrugs, then adds a little bitterly, “I’m sure you can afford a fancy chiropractor to fix it if you fuck your neck up sitting like that. You’d probably rather hurt yourself than actually share a mattress with a filthy junkie like me.”

“Annie,” I groan, and I stand and slide onto the bed. I lean into the pillows and stretch my legs out, then I slide my arm around her shoulders, pulling her close. She sits stiffly, still offended. “Don’t do that. Don’t assume I think those things about you. You’re my sister.”

“Those things are true, though,” she mutters, and I contract my arm around her.

“Would you stop jabbering for five minutes so I can relive my childhood fantasies about Marty McFly?”

“Hands off, bitch,” she says lightly. “You’ve got Sam. Marty McFly is all mine.”

We both chuckle, and then she drops her head, resting it against my shoulder. Eventually she falls asleep like that, and as her breathing deepens, I feel myself start to relax, too. I press my cheek against her hair, and I rest, too—somehow complete again, as if a part of myself has been missing for all of this time.





12


ANNIE


So, Luke:

There were few saving graces in Winterton, but chief among them once again was Lexie. She was so much smarter than I, and she quickly figured out how to roll with the punches in that place. I was still fighting to go back to our old school even months after we arrived, but Lexie quietly agreed to attend the community school and set about getting through the curriculum as quickly as she could. Mom kept reminding her as a girl in the community, she could study only until she turned sixteen.

“What’s she going to do after that?” I asked one day. “She’s already doing some high school curriculum, isn’t she? Will she finish it by then?”

“It doesn’t matter whether she finishes or not. The day she turns sixteen, she’ll have to leave.”

“That’s so stupid, Mom.”

“Women should care for their homes and the men. They don’t need to study more than that.”

“Even you went to college.”

“That was a mistake. Lexie will finish school on her birthday, and she’ll get a job with one of the village businesses until she finds a husband.”

When I asked Lexie what she thought about all of this, she’d shrug and change the subject. I figured that she had a plan, because there was no way someone as smart as my sister was going to just agree to stop school because she didn’t happen to be a boy.

Every good thing in that place had a downside. Mom finally went back to work, but now she was my teacher, and when we were at school I was supposed to call her Mrs. Herbert. Every time I called her Mom, she sent me out of class. Then I found the library—which was vast and right near our house—but even as I explored it, I realized that most of the books were theological textbooks, and the handful of novels in the collection were classics for adults.

“Why aren’t there any books here?” I asked Lexie.

“The elders think said novels are worldly.” She rolled her eyes.

“What are we supposed to read?” I asked, bewildered. Lexie picked up one of the ever-present Bibles and pressed it toward me. When I frowned at her, she laughed and withdrew it. “But . . .”

“Just write your own stories,” she suggested. “Your stories are better than anything you’ll find in this stupid cult.”

For a while, that’s what I did. I had little notepads full of stories hidden in our bedroom and in my schoolbag. I’d slide them inside workbooks so when I was bored in class I could get right back to them. I was writing a series of tales about two orphaned sisters, Tara and Ellen, who were detectives just like Nancy Drew. Day and night, I was thinking about Tara and Ellen. They were all alone in the world, but they were doing okay.

One Saturday afternoon, Lexie and I were in our bedroom talking when Robert threw the door open.