Rapid Falls(28)

The drive back to the city feels much longer. I quickly fill Rick in on the charge against Anna. As we merge onto the highway, Rick dials his father, and the two talk through the car’s hands-free system in hurried tones about the next steps. I try to follow the conversation, but my skull feels like a cage that’s too small for my brain. My headache builds as the miles pass and the alcohol in my system changes from pleasant to poisonous. I hate letting his upper-crust parents know about my sister’s latest disaster. His dad is pleasant, but his tone seems professionally distant, as if he’s talking to an objectionable client. It reminds me of the way the prison staff used to treat me.



I drove this highway every second Saturday for the three years that Anna was in prison. It took me five hours, round-trip, but I never missed a day. I was the only person who had visited her regularly. My dad had promised to come once a month, but the time between his visits got longer and longer. My mom went a handful of times. The first visit, three months in, was to tell Anna that she had decided to leave my father. Then she moved back to Fraser City and started her master’s program in art. Apparently it had been a lifelong dream, but she couldn’t realize it in Rapid Falls. After her move, the visits dwindled. When I went, I tried to keep my talk of our parents and the outside world to a minimum. Anna seemed to get duller and sadder every time I saw her. She didn’t need me to tell her how wonderful my life had become with Rick by my side.

After she was released, I offered to share my one bedroom with her until she got on her feet. Her parole officer helped her find a job at a fast-food place down the street. The grease from the fryers made her skin break out, and her hair was dry and frizzy. I’d asked if she wanted to try to reapply to film school, but she just shook her head. She seemed far away when I tried to engage her in wedding planning, even though the date was only six months away. I had just finished university, and Rick was three years into his snowboard-design job. I had set the date specifically so Anna could be my maid of honor, but she didn’t seem to care.

I was careful about how much I told Rick regarding Anna’s crime. He knew that she had served time for drunk driving, that she had killed a boy from our high school. He didn’t know that Jesse had been my boyfriend. When we first started dating, I didn’t want to scare him away. Later, it felt like telling him would be admitting a sort of a lie since I had kept it from him for so long. When she came to live with me, I swore Anna to secrecy. She agreed. She needed me so badly at that point. I could have asked her for anything.

In our wedding photos, Rick and I are luminous. Anna looks exhausted and sallow, even though I had paid for the most flattering bridesmaid dress I could find. It was the first time in our lives that our father congratulated me without noting one of Anna’s achievements. His words were enough to make me feel like I had finally accomplished what I had been trying for all my life. After the ceremony, I asked Anna to come with me to the bathroom, begging her for help to maneuver the beautiful but absurdly wide train of my gown.

Her face brightened at being needed, and she squeezed my crinoline and herself into a small stall. She was holding my gown up around my body as I sat on the toilet when the door opened and a couple of women came in. They chatted to each other about my dress before noting that prison must have made my sister forget that people tried to look pretty at weddings.

Anna’s eyes widened like a wounded animal’s as their cruel laughter followed them to the door. She looked at me, dropped my gown, then ran her palms from her forehead to her cheeks. It was a nervous habit she’d had all her life. Wiping the slate, my mom used to call it. She did it when she was nervous, uncomfortable, or scared. I knew I should say something, but I felt speechless. Anna dropped her hands and looked at me with tears brimming in her eyes. We stayed in the stall until the girls left. Anna smiled at me when the door closed to let me know that she was okay, even though we both knew she wasn’t.



The sound of Rick saying goodbye on the phone shatters my reverie.

“What a fucking mess.” I swear without meaning to—another remnant of Rapid Falls that I haven’t been able to shake, to Rick’s chagrin. The more energy I put into Anna, the less I have for Rick and Maggie. Caring for my sister is a zero-sum game.

“Cara. Come on. We need to stay calm.”

“I know.” I force myself to take a kinder tone.

“So one of us needs to make a call to the station. Probably better if it’s you since you are a blood relative. My dad’s going to email me the names of several attorneys who specialize in this area.”

“Okay,” I say. “Should we talk about bail?”

Rick sighs heavily. I can tell he would rather not use our money to save Anna again. I feel the same way, but it doesn’t seem like a choice. A good sister would never leave Anna in jail. “We can probably get Anna out tomorrow but not sooner. She’ll be arraigned first, and then they’ll set bail.”

“Okay.” I had planned to spend the morning at the gym and then have a leisurely, luxurious breakfast with Rick.

“This is a nightmare,” Rick says as he stares out into the dark farmers’ fields, lit only by the string of orange lights dotting the highway.

“I know,” I say. I worry that soon he’s going to realize that he can wake up from it. He could leave it all so easily. I distract myself by thinking about the call I need to make to my dad. I could do it from the car, but I’d rather wait until I’m alone. After Jesse died, my father had been everything I needed for the first week after the accident. Then he had just closed up. Talking to him was like trying to find a station on a radio with a broken antenna. Once in a while, he’d bark at me like a burst of static, but most of the time he was silent. No more conversations, no more hugs. He stared through me when I tried to talk to him, like he was seeing someone there he didn’t know. Then his drinking got bad, so bad that I had to make sure to tell him anything important by 11:00 a.m. or he wouldn’t remember.