Rapid Falls(44)

I have a vision of Anna’s thin arms covered in angry red bites. The image fills me with rage, but I gulp down half a glass of wine to contain it. I focus on my mother’s face, trying to concentrate on her words and not the fact that she left me behind. My head begins to pound as I remember the feeling of sheets plastered to me with sweat. Something happened to me when my mom was away. I had gotten sick. Dangerously sick. And she wasn’t there to take care of me. I suddenly feel terrified. Ingrid reaches over to me, and I push the memory aside.

“Are you okay?”

I look at her and nod as I swallow hard. “So you moved back in?”

“Yes. I came back to you.”

“Thanks, Mom.” My words are barely more than a whisper, but my mom smiles as if I have forgiven her.

“We were never the same after that, your father and I. We stayed together, but we didn’t love each other. I hated him for what he had done to me.”

“You’ve all been through so much,” Ingrid says.

“It’s incredible how resilient you are, Cara. I’m always amazed at how you’ve been able to weather the blows, while Anna fell apart.”

I nod, grateful that I still seem stronger than my sister to her, even though my mind feels as splintered as a frozen puddle trampled by a heavy boot.

“I’m so sorry, Cara.” My mother’s sentence ends in a sob.

I speak quickly. I know what I need to say, even though none of it is true. “Mom. It was so long ago. I’m okay. Let’s put it behind us.”

My mother smiles through her tears as she leans over to embrace me, as if she believes all the things I’ve just said. As if her choosing Anna over me could ever be forgiven.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

August 1997

When someone you know is charged with a crime, you spend a lot of time waiting. Cop shows never go into that part. There’s a good reason. It’s boring.

At first things moved quickly. Two days after Anna was charged, she and my parents met with a lawyer in Nicola. My parents came home tight faced and vehemently opposed to the other’s ideas about what to do next. My mom was convinced that the only option was for Anna to plead not guilty and take the case to trial. The idea of Anna spending a single moment in prison was unbearable to her; she couldn’t even consider the possibility without breaking into tears. The lawyer thought Anna should plead not guilty as well. Of course the lawyer would say that, my dad said: more money for him if the case goes to trial. My dad kept repeating that she needed to avoid going to court. Anna was going to be found guilty no matter what, he said. Better to make a deal, get a short sentence, and close this chapter. She would be able to move on. She would still be young after a sentence of three to five years.

“How can you say that?” my mom yelled one night over a dinner of scrambled eggs that none of us was eating.

“Suzanne, we can’t change what happened. The only thing we can do is get this over with quickly. That way, no one else will get hurt, and we won’t have to expose ourselves to the whole town by going to trial. This needs to end now, before it gets worse. We have to make some hard decisions right now. For Anna. But for Cara too.”

He stared at me the same way he had when he was drunk, like he was trying to tell me something that he couldn’t say out loud. My dad seemed less angry now. More resigned, as if Anna pleading guilty would let us all move on. My mom slammed her wineglass down so hard that the base broke from the stem. She jumped up with the bowl of the glass in her hand, but my dad and I just stared at the thick round piece of glass that was left. The spike at the top looked jagged and dangerous. Anna fled from the table, sobbing. I don’t think my mom and dad ever slept in the same bedroom again. They talked like they knew what they were doing, but I could see my parents were scared. Anna could see it too. Late at night, I heard her crying through the wall between our bedrooms.

After a few days, the heated arguments turned sour and silent, and our house felt wrong. None of us met each other’s eyes if we happened to cross paths on the way to the bathroom or while grabbing a few stale crackers from the cupboards. It felt like we were all squatters trying to avoid trouble with the other strangers who shared our space. My only escape was Wade, who used to pick me up for drives after dark so no one in town could see us. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” Wade muttered in response to me trying to describe what it was like. I realized then that clichés exist only so you didn’t have to sit in silence. Silence made you think about the people who weren’t coming to visit. Like Sandy. None of us had seen Anna’s best friend since the funeral.

Sadness weighed us all down. The TV was on constantly. My dad was usually drunk by 3:00 p.m. Anna rarely left her bedroom. My mom, who used to celebrate her deep, even tan every summer, dismissing skin cancer with a roll of her eyes, was pale as a ghost. We all were. We stopped going to the grocery store after each of us experienced the damning hush that occurred every time people noticed our presence. For over a month, we survived on canned food and whatever was left in our freezer, until my mother arranged for our old babysitter to begin picking up groceries for us. One night I ate a frozen pizza that was so freezer burned I could hardly tell what it was. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t taste it anyway. I was grateful when fresh food began coming in from Mrs. Evans and I no longer had to gnaw on eight-month-old fruitcake for breakfast. It wasn’t until years later that I realized how humiliating it must have been for my mom to be unable to complete basic tasks.