Winter Flower

by Charles Sheehan-Miles

  “Brian?”

  “Oh, he’s your dad’s boss, the division manager.”

  He had to leave for an emergency. Weird. Really weird.

  I sighed. I didn’t want to bother Dad, especially if there was an emergency. But there was no public transportation. I sat at the counter, as far from the old man as I could get, and dialed Dad.

  It rang twice, then he answered. From the background noise, I knew he was driving as soon as he said, “Hello?”

  “Dad? It’s Sam.”

  “Sam? Hey. Did you get the note we left?”

  “What note?”

  Dad sighed. “On the kitchen table.”

  “Oh … I’m not home. I missed the bus. I was calling to see if you or Mom could pick me up. I’m at the Waffle House.”

  Silence. For ten long seconds. Then Dad said, “Sam, your mom had to take an emergency trip. We’re halfway to Atlanta, I’m taking her to the airport. I won’t be back until pretty late.”

  I swallowed. Emergency trip? “What … what trip?”

  “I left you twenty dollars so you could order a pizza. It’s on the kitchen table with the note.”

  I sighed. Why didn’t he answer? “Okay. I’ll walk, it’s not that far.”

  “Christ, are you sure?”

  What choice did I have? I felt a lump in my chest. What could be so important that they dropped everything to rush Mom to the airport? Urgently enough that they wouldn’t even bother to make any provisions for me other than leaving some money on the table.

  Brenna.

  That’s all it could be. We didn’t have the money for anyone to be traveling. If Mom was flying somewhere, and they were keeping it a secret, then it had to be Brenna … and it had to be bad news. Why else would they hide it?

  I choked back tears. “I’m sure.” I hung up the phone. I waved and said, “Thanks,” to the waitress, whose name I still didn’t know. Then I got out of there as quickly as I could.

  It wasn’t that far. I guess. Three miles? It felt like longer in the heat, as I walked past Oxford Mall, with its empty parking lots, then crossed the overpass over I-20. I stood in the middle of the bridge for a minute looking down as the traffic raced by underneath. The cars moved so fast from this perspective.

  I kept walking, past the giant Indian mound, which was tied up in controversy. My history teacher had talked about it the other day. Part of the mound had been excavated to make space for a Sam’s Club, and an entire archeological site, once a village, had been bulldozed.

  Alabama.

  All told, the walk home took an hour. Not bad, all things considered. As I walked, I thought about Brenna. I thought about Cody and Ashley and what had happened today.

  What had happened was that I’d behaved like a mouse. She bumped into me and dropped her phone, but I was the one who apologized.

  Brenna would have said I needed to own it. That instead of keeping to myself, slinking through life with my eyes on the ground and my arms across my chest, that I needed to flaunt myself, own my own style, take charge.

  But I wasn’t Brenna, I never had been. It made me feel guilty sometimes to think about it, but often I thought she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. Confidence and flash only goes so far. There were very real dangers out there: dangers she’d had no idea of until two years ago, when she vanished off the face of the earth. I’d have done anything to have my sister back in my life. But whatever happened to her, it had to have been bad. It had to have been truly awful for her to never so much as send a text message, contact us online, call, nothing at all.

  In my heart, I knew my sister was probably dead. But the thought seized me up, tightened my throat, made me want to fall apart. Our lives had all frozen in the moment she disappeared. Life seemed to go on around us, but me and Mom and Dad? We were all dead to the world. And I was afraid we’d never recover, never learn to live our own lives, never move on. And I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to move on. I wanted to find her, rescue her, hug her, give her life back.

  My sister was perfection. Her confidence and talent. Her porcelain skin. Her infectious smile and laugh, her sense of humor. She protected my secrets. She protected me. But I wasn’t able to return that protection.

  So I kept to myself. I didn’t look up, I didn’t interact, I didn’t say a word as I trudged through life.

  When I finally got home, it was broiling inside the house. I turned on the air-conditioning and went to dump my books in my room.

  The note was on the kitchen table.

  Sam,

  Your father is taking me to the airport for an urgent trip. He’ll be home very late.

  Love you,

  Mom

  Why would they keep whatever it was so secretive? What happened?

  My parents didn’t trust me at all, they hadn’t since Brenna’s disappearance. After all, she’d hinted to me that something was happening. What are you going to do when I’m gone? And I didn’t tell them. So it was my fault.

  And then I did tell, and that delayed the investigation. My fault again.

  As if I didn’t know that already.

  How late was late? It was more than two hours to Atlanta in one direction. Plus maneuvering the airport. Traffic. I suspected late meant very late indeed.

  Was it wrong for me to hope so?

  I took a sharp breath. Shaking with anticipation, I closed my eyes for a few seconds. I wasn’t thinking straight. I should call. Find out how long. But I didn’t want to make them suspicious. I didn’t want to give my father any cause to wonder what I was up to. And calling them would do that.

  It would be hours, whatever happened. I opened my eyes and walked to my closet. In the back, a stack of cardboard boxes contained my life from before we lived in this tiny place. I slid the top box off of the stack. The second box was labeled books. I took it out into my room and reverently laid it on the bed, carefully removing the packing tape. I hadn’t opened this box since we’d left our house in Virginia.

  Opening the box revealed chapter books, books that I’d read in middle school. Carefully I took them out, setting them to the side, revealing what was underneath.

  On the very top. A silk dress. Brenna had taken me shopping for it. “It’s for a costume party,” she told the women in the store. But I think maybe they knew. From the way I shook, from the way I stared, wide-eyed, at myself in the mirror.

  I didn’t care.

  Shaking, I quickly undressed. The dress was wrinkled, but I didn’t care. I put on the panties from the box, but I almost screamed in frustration when I couldn’t get the bra on. It didn’t fit anymore. I pulled and stretched, and finally got it on, though it cut into my ribs almost painfully. Then, slowly, I slid the dress over my head, almost getting stuck pulling it down over my shoulders.

  I felt … conflicted, angry, confused. Reaching behind me, I pulled the zipper up. It was far too tight; two years had gone by and I’d grown a lot. I turned toward the mirror and cringed. I looked … ridiculous. Rage filled me when I saw that my shoulders were broadening. I’d taken the hormones until they ran out, but run out they had, and there was no money to buy any more, nowhere to have them shipped even if I could, and I wanted to scream because … I was starting to look like a boy.

  I blinked my eyes, trying to shut out the cascade of emotions. The dress didn’t look right, too tight in the shoulders and chest, too loose in the hips. It was painfully obvious my breasts were nonexistent. I sat down at my desk in front of the mirror, still shaking in anger, and began to brush my hair, parting it high above my left eye. It was almost shoulder-length now. My eyes fell to my legs. The dress had been knee-length when Brenna bought it for me. Now it was at least four inches shorter. It had been a couple days since I’d shaved my legs, but I didn’t have time right now.

  You need to get a haircut, Sam, you’re starting to look like a girl.

  Dad said that to me the other day. I wished. I wished I looked like a girl, but a glance in the mirror showed I didn’t
. I reached in my bottom desk drawer. In the very back was my makeup case.

  Slowly I began to apply mascara. My eyes, a deep blue, were probably the only feature I was happy with. Very carefully, I applied eyeshadow and eyeliner, choosing a pale blue eye shadow that complemented my eyes and the dress.

  I almost froze at that point. I closed my eyes, and I could feel the silk of the dress against my skin. It felt right. The last time I’d worn this we’d still lived in a fifteen-room house, and my parents would never come looking for me anyway. I didn’t think they’d seen my bedroom more than twice in the year after Brenna disappeared. But here we were living in a shoebox, and I was lucky to even have a room.

  If my father came home now, I’d never have time to change and remove the makeup.

  I swallowed. I stood, my heart racing, and looked at myself.

  I wanted to cry. When my eyes were closed I could imagine it was the way I wanted to be. Beautiful. Or even simply pretty.

  With my eyes open I saw … a boy, dressed in comically small girl’s clothing.

  My eyes started to water. My hair hung all wrong. Somehow in the past two years my Adam’s apple had appeared. No matter how much makeup I wore, no matter what I did with my clothes, no matter how much I wished, it didn’t change what I was. What everyone else in the world would see me as.

  A tranny.

  A pervert.

  A freak.

  I sank back into the chair and put my head in my hands. Who was I kidding?

  Some people wanted to grow up to be stockbrokers, or astronauts, or the President, and every good parent in the world would say, “When you grow up you can be whatever you want to be.”

  Except mine.

  Because the one thing in the world that I wanted to be was an impossibility.

  Erin

  I checked the time on my phone again. It was almost six p.m., and I had just an hour before my flight departed. I swallowed nervously then looked over at Cole.

  “You’ll make sure Sam is doing his homework? He gets all wrapped up on his computer and forgets.”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Don’t worry about us.” He pulled the car to a stop in the check-in lane. We were surrounded by traffic: people rushing into the airport to catch their flights, police, airline employees.

  I was shaking as I opened the car door. Cole got out and opened the trunk then set my suitcase on the ground. After my call to him, his boss had taken over the restaurant for the day, and Cole came home. While I got myself ready, he’d taken his laptop and pawned it, then dropped the money in the bank. It was just enough to pay for the ticket to Portland.

  We met at the back of the car. I took a deep breath and looked up at my husband. He had dark circles under his eyes and a mix of anxiety and exhaustion on this face.

  “Soon as I get home, I’ll put the clock on Craigslist. We should get a thousand for it … maybe more. That’ll keep you going for a while. Then I’ll … I’ll come up with something.”

  I nodded. It was the only option. Hotels and travel cost a lot of money … money we didn’t have.

  Tentatively, I reached my left arm out. To hug him? Our marriage had been a wreck for so long, we hardly ever touched each other. But I wanted to. I wanted to touch him.

  I wanted him to touch me.

  He caught the tentative motion and pulled me to him. In a rough voice, laden with emotions too complex to dissect, he said, “Find her if you can. I’ll take care of Sam.”

  I swallowed back tears, wrapping my arms around him. For a second, it felt … like Cole. Like things were the way they should be.

  But they weren’t. They couldn’t be.

  “I’ll call. Keep you updated.”

  We parted, both of us full of words we couldn’t express. Cole’s eyes met mine for a moment. I didn’t have any words for that moment, I wasn’t equipped for it. I turned, grabbed the handle of my suitcase, and walked away.

  I was a mess of free-floating anxiety. It had been three weeks since she’d been picked up by the police in Portland. Three weeks. A lot could happen in that time. She might have been moved. She might … I couldn’t think of the words. I couldn’t form them in my mind. For nearly two years there hadn’t been a word, hadn’t been any news, there’d been nothing. Now, everything was thrown out there in bright relief, and the thought of what my daughter might have endured for the past two years was too horrific to contemplate.

  I waited impatiently in the line to check-in, then even more impatiently in the security line. But finally I was through and on my way to the gate. The Atlanta airport was huge, staggeringly huge, and it took a while to figure out how to find the train to take me out to the gate. But finally I was there, and just in time. My flight was boarding. Thank God I’d only brought the one carry-on bag. I didn’t have time to mess with checking bags. With a last-minute ticket, I was stuck in a middle seat in the back row. I squeezed into my seat, in between a heart-stoppingly beautiful teenage girl who sat looking out the window, and a man in his early forties in the aisle seat.

  I sat up straight in my seat. My chest hurt, and it was hard to swallow around the lump in my throat. I didn’t have a car in Portland, and we didn’t have credit cards anymore, so I couldn’t rent one. I’d found a cheap motel to stay near the airport, but I still didn’t know anything really. In the morning I’d have to find the police station and talk to whomever had arrested her. I needed to find out where she’d been picked up, how she looked, who she was with, and who had bailed her out. What if they wouldn’t help me? If they treated me like I was interfering? How would I handle it?

  I closed my eyes, trying to focus. I’d call Wilcox back in the morning at the FBI. Maybe a push from him would help. Or maybe they’d be cooperative. Maybe I was borrowing trouble. I didn’t know. And that’s what it came down to. I didn’t know anything.

  I was so wrapped up in my thoughts I paid little attention to the plane taxiing to the runway, until suddenly we were accelerating and the plane took to the air.

  I closed my eyes. It’d been years since I’d been on a flight. I thought back. Brenna was five and Sam three, so that would have been around 2002. Cole had just gotten another promotion, and with the promotion came a hefty raise and a bonus. We took our first lengthy family vacation. We flew to Disney World and spent a week there.

  Cole and I were still crazy in love then. But the cracks were showing. The trip was wonderful, but the flight had been laced with anxiety, my first flight since the hijackings that had turned the world upside down.

  Today, Cole hadn’t hesitated when I’d called him. He’d immediately done everything he could to get me on this plane. It reminded me of when we were partners. I missed that. I missed holding hands. I missed feeling like we saw each other as equals. I missed dinner and looking into each other’s eyes across the table.

  I remembered the night we met. I was a junior at Georgetown, and Angela had dragged me to a party at a friend’s house just a few blocks from campus. It wasn’t an out of control party—that wasn’t our style—though there was plenty of alcohol and loud music. Not long after we got there, Angela ran into her ex-boyfriend, and the two of them camped in a corner most of the party, leaving me to fend for myself.

  I knew some of the people at the party, but it really wasn’t a crowd I ran with, so I found myself edging closer and closer to the window. I turned to the nearest small circle of people, unobtrusively joining in their conversation.

  Cole caught my attention immediately. He stood on the opposite side of the circle from me. They were all women but him, and they were hanging on to his every word, which was no surprise. He was tall, well-built, dressed in casual clothes, khakis and a black polo shirt that made his shoulders look strong and sexy. He was making a point about the midterm elections which had just gone by, his hands gesturing as he spoke.

  He was the same age as the other people at the party. But more confident somehow, more himself. From his clothes to his demeanor to his pale blue eyes, somet
hing about him just screamed confidence.

  And of course, I was one of five girls hanging on his every word. But that didn’t last, because the next thing he said was so obnoxious that my mouth just dropped open.

  “All welfare does is increase poverty,” he said. “People get trapped in a cycle where we reward them for not working. It’s a self-fulfilling negative trap and creates a whole culture of dependence.”

  I raised an eyebrow as all the girls cooed around him.

  “And you base this opinion on … what exactly?” I asked.

  I think he liked the challenge. Because he started spouting statistics and opinions right out of the Heritage Foundation’s playbook, most of which was a load of bullshit. He ended by saying, “Look, the bottom line is, we have a level playing field. Everyone in this life has a choice to work or not work. And if you work, you get ahead, and can have a decent life. Some people just choose otherwise.”

  I said, “And you don’t think there’s anything about being a white male that helps you get a leg up?” The other girls in the group gave me hostile looks.

  “No,” he replied. “In fact, if anything it penalizes me. Companies get tax breaks to hire blacks and the disabled and to have affirmative action.” As he said the last two words, he used his fingers to make air-quotes.

  I shook my head. “You’ve got no clue what you’re talking about.”

  By this time, the girls in the group were looking at me with daggers in their eyes, because Cole’s attention was one-hundred-percent on me. It was as if he’d forgotten any of them were there.

  Actually, I’m pretty sure he had, because he moved a little closer to me, which put two of the girls almost at his back.

  “I know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m not in some insulated academic ivory tower, I’m out there working for a living.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked. “So what do you do?”

  “UNIX system administrator. I work for a startup in Northern Virginia.”

  “Oh yeah? So where did you learn about computers?”

  He shrugged. “I’m self-taught.”

  “Nice,” I said. “I like that, and it fits your whole everybody can bootstrap their way up narrative. Where’d you get the computer to teach yourself on?”