Saint Anything(17)

I’d learned this the hard way one afternoon when my mom was at the grocery store. I answered, said yes to the call, then waited through a series of clicks and beeps. Finally, my brother spoke.

“Sydney?”

It was the first time I’d heard his voice in over a month. He sounded far away, like he was standing back from the receiver. Also, there was a steady buzz on the line, which made it hard to make him out. “Hey,” I said. “Mom’s not here.”

I regretted this the minute I said it. In my defense, though, she was the one he usually spoke with. If my dad answered, the conversations were always shorter and more about legal issues than anything else.

“Oh.” There was a pause. Then, “How are you?”

“I’m okay. You?”

I winced. You don’t ask someone in prison how they’re doing. Just assume the answer is “not so good.” But Peyton replied anyway.

“I’m all right. It’s boring here more than anything else.”

I knew he was just making conversation. But all I could think of was David Ibarra in his wheelchair. That had to be boring, too.

“You should write me a letter,” he said then. “Fill me in on what’s going on with you.”

This conversation was hard enough. Now he wanted me to put words on a page? My mom had said that mail could be a huge element in a prisoner’s mental health, which was why she’d recruited many in our family and several close friends to send letters and postcards. She’d even provided stamps and addressed envelopes, a stack of which sat untouched on the desk in my room. Every time I even thought about pulling out a piece of paper to try, all I could imagine was filling that empty white space with all the words I could never, ever say. Silence was safer.

I’d ended the call soon after, telling him I’d let my mom know he’d phoned. When she walked in ten minutes later and I passed along the message, she went ballistic.

“You didn’t wait until he was told to hang up?” she demanded, dropping one of her cloth shopping bags with a clunk on the island. “You just hung up on him?”

“No,” I said. “I said good-bye. We both did.”

“But he could have talked longer? No one was stopping him?”

I suddenly felt like I might start crying. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

My mom bit her lip, then looked at me for a long moment. Finally, she sighed, reaching out to put both her hands on my shoulders. “Sydney. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for your brother to have contact with the outside world. Even if you only talk about the weather. Or what you ate for lunch. Just talk. Keep him talking until his time on the phone is up. It’s critical. Do you understand me?”

I nodded, not sure I could speak without sobbing. When she turned around to unload the groceries, I had to take several deep breaths before I was calm enough to help her.

The second time I’d talked to Peyton was when I came home from having coffee with Jenn and found Ames on the phone with him.

“Your gorgeous sister just walked in,” he said into the receiver, then waved me over with his free hand. “Yep. Oh, don’t worry. I’m keeping the boys away from her. They’d better think twice before they come around our girl.”

I felt my face get hot, the way it always did when he said stuff like this. Oblivious, he grinned at me, pulling out the chair right beside him.

“Yeah, she’s right here, I’ll put her on. Uh-huh. Be there in a few days with vending machine money in hand. Right. Here she is.”

He handed the phone out to me, and I took it. The mouthpiece was hot from his breath. I tried to hold it away from my own lips as I said, “Hey, Peyton.”

“Hey,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Okay.” I looked at Ames, who was watching me. “Did you, um, get to talk to Mom yet?”

“Yeah. She answered when I called.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Well—”

A loud tone sounded on the line, followed by a recording announcing that the call would terminate in thirty seconds. “I’d better go,” my brother said. “Tell Mom I love her, okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Bye, Sydney.”

I didn’t reply, and then the line went dead. Still, I sat there a second, letting the dial tone fill my ear, before I hit the END button. “Time’s up.”

“Always comes too quickly,” Ames said. He smiled at me. “He sounds good, right?”

I nodded, although to me he hadn’t really sounded like anything. Not even Peyton.

But that was the phone; Family Day would be face-to-face. Now, in the kitchen, I sat down, picking up my fork while Mom slid into a seat across from me. I’d been starving since I smelled the bacon cooking, but now the last thing I wanted to do was eat.

“Is Dad going to this thing?”

“If he’s in town,” she said, taking a tiny nibble of her toast, then chasing it with coffee. “Otherwise, it’ll just be you, me, and Ames.”

I put my fork back down. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m worried I might freak out or something.”

She looked at me. “Freak out?”

I shrugged. “It’s just kind of scary.”

“It is,” she agreed. She took another sip. When she spoke again, her voice had a hard edge to it. “It’s very scary. Especially for your brother, who is locked away, alone, with no support system other than us, his family.”