The Girls I've Been(54)

“Are we leaving soon?”

“We need to get your new ID on the way out of town. I know someone.”

Of course she does.

“Are we going overseas, like you said?”

Amelia shakes her head. “I’m taking you home with me.”

The word echoes strangely in the room. She’s never mentioned home. I don’t know where she lived before we started the Florida Plan. Amelia has always been careful with the information she’s given me. She had to be, because girls are supposed to choose their mothers, and what if I did, in the end?

Abby would’ve chosen him. The last two years tell me over and over again that she would’ve chosen him. I have to believe that. I have to understand that the second they met, her world tilted toward him, tossing me off. I could’ve crashed, but Amelia helped me fly.

What had she sacrificed to get here? I know some, but not all. I look at her out of the corner of my eye, thinking about how the room had crackled between her and Agent North. You know me, Amelia had said, and I knew what she sounded like when she was telling the truth.

“You slept with the FBI agent, didn’t you?”

And for the first time since this all started, my sister lets out a laugh. “Oh fucking hell,” she says, and then that laugh turns into a mockery of it.

I don’t know what to say. I feel sick. What I know about sex and relationships is purely transactional and violent and violating, but I’ve read enough to know that that’s not right. That it can be different.

Can’t it?

“I’ve got you less than six hours and you’re already picking me apart,” Amelia says, shaking her head. “You are a trip.”

“I’m sorry.”

She reaches over and grabs my hand, squeezing it. “Don’t ever apologize for being smart,” she says. “You and I, we see things differently than most people. We catch the little stuff, the hidden things.”

“Because of Mom.”

She squeezes too tight. I don’t flinch. “No, she just saw it in us. It doesn’t mean it’s because of her. And it doesn’t mean we have to use it the way she does.”

“But . . . you did sleep with the FBI agent,” I say, because I don’t want to talk about her anymore. I can’t. Not yet. Maybe never again. Can I do that? Can I just hide forever?

“It’s complicated,” Amelia says.

My lips feel horribly dry. I lick them. “Does that mean . . . That means you did it for me.”

She starts to say my name but stops, because I asked her before not to. It’s enough answer.

“You conned her,” I say. “She was the one who answered your cell phone when I called you in Washington. And I called late. Which means . . .”

“I—” She leans her elbows on her knees, breathing deeply. She’s not elegant, my sister. But she’s all raw-hewn grace and neatly pulled-back hair, cheekbones for days and big eyes full of regret. “I want you to be a kid,” she says. “I want to take you home and have you go to school and live the kind of life you haven’t had and I never will. And if I tell you—”

“If you tell me, I’ll know what I owe,” I interrupt.

That makes her straighten. “I’m going to say this once: You owe me nothing. I chose to seek you out when you were little. I chose to get you free of her. I chose to be your sister. That was all me. There is nothing owed. You and I are on even ground. Always.”

“I don’t know how to be on even ground.” My confession, when it comes, is just as quiet as hers, but it’s so shameful. I am so ashamed. Tears well in my eyes, and am I a monster, that this is where I cry? Not before?

The bathroom light outlines her profile, stark bones against the golden glow. We are both so tired, and there is so much still to do. There is so far to flee. But I have to know.

If she wants us on even ground, I need to know what she did for me. What my existence did to her.

So I’m honest for once and tell her that. And in turn, she is honest with me.

“I didn’t find out about you until you were three,” she says. “When I ran from Mom, I was determined to never come back. I ended up in LA. Disappeared into the sprawl. I worried that if I started running cons, it might get back to her somehow. So I went legit. Worked for a PI. Got my own license. I resisted looking for her for a long time, but when I finally did . . . that’s how I found out about you.”

“But you didn’t come to see me until I was six.”

“I didn’t want to come at all,” she says, and she can’t look at me while she says it. Honesty at its most brutal. This is what I asked for. “For years, I told myself that you weren’t my business. I knew if I went back, she’d just use you to pull me in.”

“What changed your mind?”

“You were turning six,” she says. “I was six when—” Her fingers shake as they press against her lips, like she’s trying to keep the words inside. “I couldn’t leave you. I had to try to get you away from her. So I made a plan.”

“You came to see me.”

Her fingers are still pressed against her mouth, but her lips spread, an almost-smile for the tips of her to remember. “You were so funny and smart already. But you were wary. And the second I saw that rubber band on your wrist . . .” She shakes her head.