Before I Let You Go(96)
But I don’t, and it’s unbearable, and just when I start to feel so alone that I could almost panic just because my sister is dead, I see Sam burst through the crowd. He throws the car door open and he kneels on the ground beside me, and his face is blanched with shock and pain.
“Lexie,” he whispers. “Oh, baby. I’m so sorry.”
I work my jaw, and I can’t make any words come out—but I have just enough sense to gently pass him Daisy and to step out of the car and away from them before I throw up.
I give a statement to the police officer and then we wait for the coroner to finish. Sam wants to take Daisy straight home once the police say I’m free to go, but I can’t leave—not while Annie is still inside. So we wait, and they do whatever it is they need to do, and then I watch the coronial staff carry the body board down the stairs. I am sobbing again, but even in my grief I notice how easy it is for them to lift her. It is as if she was nothing at all.
Then Sam asks again if we can go, more insistently this time, and I finally agree. He drives my car—we leave his at the trailer park. At some point, we will need to go back and get it, if it’s not stolen in the meantime. I sit beside him in the passenger seat, and my knees feel stiff, because I’ve been sitting in the same position for hours. I keep thinking about Annie’s shoulders and how limp they were but rigor mortis would have set in by now, and now I’m stiff, and I wish for just a passing, fleeting moment that I could be dead, too, with Annie and with Dad, away from all of this pain.
“Lexie?” Sam speaks gently, and I turn to look at him. The sky has darkened and heavy rain is falling. I look toward the windshield and watch as the water runs down onto the hood, rivulets of ice-cold water. I think about the coldness in Annie’s body. She must be in the refrigerated morgue by now. What would happen if I went and held her hand? Maybe if I held it long enough, I could warm it back up again.
“Lexie,” Sam says again.
This time, I manage to croak out an answer, “Yes?”
“I just wanted to say again—I’m so, so sorry.”
“Thank you. And . . . I know,” I say, and I go back to watching the water run down the window. When we finally get back to the house, Sam parks the car in the garage and undoes his seat belt, but I don’t move.
“Sweetheart,” Sam says gently. “We need to get Daisy inside.”
I turn to look at him slowly. I’ve been vaguely aware of Sam tending to Daisy since he arrived, but I haven’t really spared her a thought for hours, other than to obsess over what might happen for her next . . . what might happen for me next. What kind of aunt does that make me?
Am I just her aunt now? Daisy doesn’t have a mother anymore. I’m all she has left. I’m the only mother she’s ever known other than those disrupted days with Annie in the hospital.
I didn’t even tell Annie I loved her. She rang me and I had the chance and I didn’t even think of it.
“Come on,” Sam prompts again, and he unbuckles my seat belt for me. I reach for the door handle, but I can’t focus long enough to open it. Sam removes Daisy from the car and takes her inside, and then he comes back for me. He opens the door and he gently hooks my arm over his shoulder and he leads me out of the garage and to the couch. I lie still like Annie. I close my eyes and I see her purple lips and her gray face, so I open them again and I stare up at the stucco ceiling while Sam prepares a bottle for Daisy and tops up her acetaminophen, and then he bathes and dresses her and brings her back to me, clean and swaddled and happy.
Annie has robbed me. She has taken my happy ending, and I know that this makes me selfish, because it was never my happy ending at all. But I deserved to see her okay again. I deserved another Christmas when we sat beside one another, and we ate spaghetti or turkey or whatever else we wanted and we laughed, and we were both healthy and fully present. I haven’t had one of those for years, and goddamn it, I deserved it. I deserved for Daisy to watch us interact at that dinner. I deserved for Daisy to be my niece—I deserved to be an aunt who could spoil her silly and then pass her back to her mother to handle all the discipline and hard work.
I deserved Annie to be beside me at the altar at my wedding. I deserved to glance at her in her bridesmaid’s gown and I deserved to be jealous of how she outshone me.
And now, she will not be there. She will not be at any of the big events in my life, or her daughter’s life. If Daisy had any chance of surviving her rocky entry into the world unscathed, I’m sure that this is lost now. She will forever be the daughter of a dead woman, a woman who died of a drug overdose—a deliberate drug overdose?
Sam has Daisy tucked in his elbow, but he slides his other arm around me, just as he did this morning. It feels like a million years ago now. I remember the moment I saw a shadow at the window. Was that really Annie, or did I imagine it?
Was that my chance to save her, or was it the phone call?
How hard would it have been for me to just agree to meet with her in the first place, instead of rejecting her and leaving her alone? How hard would those three little words have been to squeeze into our last conversation? Love you, Annie.
Oh God. What if she did it on purpose?
“Lexie,” Sam whispers, and my tears surge again.
“I should have saved her.”
“This isn’t your fault.”
“I was supposed to look after her. I should have let her see Daisy today. I should have promised her I’d find a way to help her.”