Until Now

by Rebecca Phillips

  “No, but they should be back soon. They’re at a wedding reception. I’m babysitting the twins this evening.” She frowned at me, clearly taken aback by my slightly manic appearance. But the desperation in my eyes must have softened her, because she smiled and stepped aside to let me in. “Drake and Lila will be thrilled to see you.”

  I swallowed hard. “Are they okay? I called here earlier and Lila answered. I heard them screaming.”

  Tamara closed the door behind me, her brow creased in confusion. “Oh,” she said, and her smile returned. “That’s their new thing. Answering the phone. They don’t bother listening to who’s on the other end…they just fight over who gets to answer it when it rings. I guess Lila got to it first and Drake took offense.” She laughed. “They’re fine, Robin. Really.”

  The knot in my gut slackened a bit as she led me downstairs to the lower level. The house screamed “old people” with its cluttered, outdated furnishings, but at least down here I could see some toys scattered about.

  “They’re in their playroom,” Tamara said, leading me down a short hallway past a laundry room and bathroom. I could hear them now, their familiar little voices ricocheting off the walls.

  Tamara and everything else faded away when I turned the corner into the playroom and saw them. Lila stood in the corner, cooking a plastic pork chop on the stovetop of a giant play kitchen while Drake sat at a tiny table, coloring a picture of Spongebob Squarepants. They looked bigger, taller, and painfully beautiful. They looked happy.

  “Hi, guys,” I said quietly, not wanting to startle them. Both heads whipped around at the sound of my voice, and my legs started shaking so much that I had to kneel down on the carpet. I couldn’t believe I was finally with them again.

  “It’s Robin,” Lila said, dropping her little blue frying pan to point at me.

  “Yes,” I replied, tears stinging my eyes. “It’s Robin.”

  I held out my arms and she ran over to me, grinning all the way. My body sagged in relief as I hugged her to me. She smelled different, like watermelon instead of the lavender-scented shampoo I’d once used on her, but that was okay too. She was still Lila.

  “You got so big,” I whispered to her as my gaze met Drake’s over her head. He still sat at the table, big brown eyes open wide, like he was looking at a ghost. “Drakey,” I said, holding my free arm out to him. He continued to stare at me for a few moments, then got up and walked over to me, glancing over my shoulder at Tamara for approval before letting me hug him. This hurt, but only for a moment. All I cared was that they were in my arms again.

  “Did you come over to play with us?” Lila asked curiously, like I was some distant family friend who’d dropped in for a visit instead of the sister who’d helped raise them for almost three years. But they were children, innocent and unaware. We’d been separated for months—of course they saw me differently now.

  “Yeah,” I replied, trying to smile. What else could I say? That I’d come to take them home? Tamara would head straight to the phone and call the cops on me. “How are you guys?” I ran my hand over their honey locks. “Did you have a good summer?”

  Lila nodded vigorously. “We have a pool.”

  “Yeah?” I looked at Drake, whose arms were wrapped around my neck in a death grip, then shifted my gaze to Tamara. “Do they ever talk about me?” I asked her.

  “They asked about you a lot, at first,” she said, avoiding my eyes. But I could fill in the blanks. They’d missed me when they first got here, but eventually recovered. Like most three-year-olds, their attentions spans were short. “They adjusted to the new routine fairly quickly,” she continued, beaming down at the kids. “Having them around has been great for Mom and Dad. Makes them feel young again.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. What or how the grandparents felt was of no concern to me.

  “I’m going to pre-school soon,” Lila piped up. She said the word pre-school like it was some sort of exotic destination.

  “I’m going too,” Drake said, sounding almost shy. I was glad to hear his voice.

  “They start the first of September,” Tamara confirmed.

  I felt a surge of panic. The grandparents were making plans for them. Long-term plans. Clearly, they thought this was a permanent situation. “But…” I said, trying to organize the various protests on the tip of my tongue. “Do you really think that’s—”

  My sentence was cut off by a series of noises upstairs—a door closing, footsteps, voices. The grandparents were home. I kept my arms around the twins and looked at Tamara, wondering if I should stay where I was or reveal myself and get it over with. She smiled and turned toward the door. “I’ll go let them know you’re here.”

  Once she was gone, I planted kisses on the twins’ foreheads and stood up on wobbly legs, anxious for what was to come. Would they yell at me for coming here without any notice? Would it deter me if they did?

  The grandmother entered the playroom first, wearing a blue floral dress and sensible heels. The grandfather followed a few seconds later, his wrinkled face puckered in surprise. He looked like an older, wizened version of Alan in his suit and tie. They both looked at me, standing there frozen in the middle of the playroom, then at each other. I couldn’t interpret their silent exchange, but it appeared to be something along the lines of Did you know she was coming?...No, did you? At least they weren’t yelling.

  “Grandma and Grandpa are home!” Lila squealed, bolting toward them and crashing into the grandfather’s legs. In spite of his spindly appearance, he barely even budged from the impact. He smiled and reached down to stroke Lila’s hair, just like I’d done earlier. Drake ran to them too, pointing back at me like I was a rare artifact he’d found and couldn’t wait to show off.

  The grandmother threw me a brief, unreadable glance, then bent down to greet her grandchildren. Both kids orbited around their grandparents’ legs like bees, vying for attention. “How are my darlings?” the grandmother’s voice rose over the chaos. “Were you good for your aunt Tamara?”

  They nodded simultaneously. “Robin came to see us,” Lila informed her, as if she hadn’t noticed me standing there.

  “I see that,” the grandmother said, then she turned to me and added, “I wish you’d called to say you were coming. We would’ve come home earlier.” The grandfather nodded his agreement and mumbled something about how he would’ve been glad for an excuse to leave the wedding reception early.

  I studied their calm, surprisingly pleasant faces and felt a pang of doubt. All summer, they’d been blocking my attempts to connect with Drake and Lila, and I didn’t trust this hospitable act of theirs one bit. “It was a spur of the moment decision,” I said, keeping my voice calm for the kids’ sake. “I figured it might be better to show up unannounced, seeing as you won’t even let me talk to them on the phone.”

  Hearing the bitter undertone in my words, the two of them stared at me with uneasy expressions. I stared right back, immovable.

  “Hey,” Tamara said brightly, smiling at the twins. “I think it’s time for a snack. Why don’t the three of us go up to the kitchen and let Robin talk to Grandma and Grandpa for a bit.”

  Drake and Lila both brightened at the word “snack” and followed her willingly to the door. I watched them go, my heart squeezing in my chest as they disappeared from sight. They didn’t even look back.

  “Now,” the grandmother said in a let’s get down to business tone. “What’s all this about? I understand you’re upset, but—”

  “Of course I’m upset,” I said through clenched teeth. “You’re trying to push me out of my brother and sister’s lives. How should I feel?”

  The grandfather winced, as if he wasn’t accustomed to such outbursts. I wondered how such a quiet, gentle man had fathered Alan. He obviously took after his vocal, irrational mother.

  “It may seem that way to you,” she said in a steely tone. “But you’re wrong.” She sighed and patted her gray-streaked hair, which was curled and sprayed into
submission. “When the twins first got here, they were scared. And homesick. We thought it would be best for them to have a clean break, at least for the first little while. I told you this, remember? The day we came to pick them up? I said they needed time to adjust to all these changes. Regular contact with you would have been…disruptive.”

  “Disruptive.” I gave a mocking snort. “Is that how you think of me? I’m not my mother, you know. I may look like her, but we’re not the same person. She left them. I didn’t.”

  “We know that, dear,” the grandfather told me, touching his wife’s arm in solidarity.

  “We didn’t set out to punish you,” she said, moving a couple of paces toward me. Up close, her eyes were large and brown, like Alan’s. Like Drake and Lila’s. “After your mother left, the twins needed a home. Structure. And we gave that to them. It took time, and patience, but they’ve made so much progress over the last couple of months. If you love them, you would realize—”

  “Of course I love them,” I said, blinking back tears. “I’m their sister, and they belong with me. That’s why I came here. So I could…” I clamped my mouth shut as a flicker of suspicion crossed the grandmother’s face.

  “So you could what?” she asked, suddenly alarmed. Her husband shifted closer to her and they both peered at me in the same way Nicole had earlier today—like I was a dangerous intruder, here to steal their precious possessions. Which in this case, I kind of was.

  I buried my damp face in my hands, unable to look at them anymore. What was I doing? I wasn’t this sort of person anymore…disruptive, like they’d said. What did I think I would accomplish, coming here and ripping the twins away from them just like they’d done to me three months ago? Only in this case, they wouldn’t be heading for something better, a real home…they would be going back to nothing, because that was all I had left to give them.

  “I—I have to go,” I said hoarsely. I took one last glance around the twins’ well-appointed playroom, a big, bright space created just for them, and bolted for the door.

  Upstairs, Drake and Lila were sitting at the kitchen table with Tamara, eating apple wedges and cheese. Tamara watched me as I approached them, her expression dense with pity. I was so sick of that fucking look.

  I covertly wiped my eyes, making sure no tears remained, and leaned over to kiss each twin on the top of the head. They grinned up at me, eyes twinkling and their mouths full with food. “I have to go now, guys,” I said, the strain in my voice betraying my distress. But if the kids noticed, they didn’t let on.

  “Will you come back tomorrow?” Lila asked in a distracted way as she shoved another slice of cheese in her mouth.

  “Not tomorrow,” I said, “But soon.” I turned away and swallowed, fighting for strength and control. This was too much. Too much.

  “Robin.” Tamara stood up and took my arm, tugging me toward the kitchen doorway and out of the twins’ earshot. “I promise you,” she said softly. “They’re happy and well taken care of. They’re thriving here. You don’t need to worry.”

  I looked over at my baby brother and sister, giggling together as they pushed apple wedges across the table like sailboats. I’d come all this way to bring them home, but after seeing them here in this little house, surrounded by warmth and security and people who loved and wanted them just as much as I did, the truth had finally hit me—they were already home. The kind of home I’d always lacked. The kind of home I’d never be able to provide for them on my own.

  I’d been wrong about so many things, but now I understood. I’d just had to see it for myself.

  They didn’t need me anymore.

  I shook myself out of Tamara’s grasp and stumbled blindly down the stairs and out the front door. The setting sun burned into my eyes, making them water until I could no longer make out the walkway in front of me. I tripped over nothing and fell, my knees hitting the pavement with the full force of my body. There was pain, but my mind barely registered it. I barely registered anything, even the warm hand on my shoulder and Ryan’s familiar, worried voice in my ear, assuring me he was here now and that everything would be okay.

  Chapter 28

  I hissed through my teeth and jerked away, backing up further onto the sun-warmed seat.

  “Sorry,” Ryan said, his hand on my calf as he crouched in front of me, pressing a napkin to my skin. Both my knees were torn up badly from their meeting with the pavement, and the abrasions bled so much that he’d had to stop the car at a fast-food place, go in and grab some napkins, and apply them to staunch the flow. “There’s too much blood and dirt,” he said, peeling back the napkin to check underneath. “I need to find a drug store and get some first aid stuff.”

  I said nothing to this. In fact, I hadn’t said a word since he’d picked me up off the grandparents’ walkway twenty minutes earlier. I felt empty, eviscerated, like my insides had been scooped out with a giant spoon. Talking seemed like too much effort, and I knew I didn’t have to explain anyway. The look of understanding on Ryan’s face told me that he’d already pieced it together.

  He swung my legs back inside the car and shut the door behind them. Lowry wasn’t exactly a metropolis, so he found a drug store pretty quickly. He left me in the car and took the keys, in case I got an urge to either go back to the grandparents’ house or drive off a cliff. I didn’t have the energy to do either.

  A few minutes later he was back, stooped in front of the open passenger side door with a bottle in his hand. Peroxide, I realized as he poured some on a square of gauze. I wanted to close my eyes, drift off into nothingness, but I couldn’t resist watching him for a minute first. His hands moved gently, taking care not to hurt me any more than he had to. His expression vacillated between concern and attentiveness and frustration, depending on what he was doing. Right now he looked frustrated, probably because the sky was getting darker and darker, making it almost impossible for him to see.

  “Robin.”

  I startled and tried to focus on his face. I’d drifted off again, soothed by his presence.

  “I can’t get these scrapes clean like this,” he said, scrutinizing my knees like they were a troubling math problem he couldn’t solve. “You need to soak them somehow.”

  He gazed off in the distance, his face composed in thought. After a long pause, he started gathering up the first aid supplies and tossing them back into the drug store bag. Then he nudged my legs into the car once again, shut the door, and settled back into the driver’s seat, his helpless frustration suddenly erased. I shut my eyes, prepared to slide into unconsciousness for the long trip home, but they popped open a few minutes later when the car stopped again.

  “Come on,” Ryan said, opening his door. When I didn’t move, he circled to my side and opened my door, too, gently pulling me to standing. That was when I noticed we were in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn Express.

  “Why are we here?” I asked. My first words in an hour. Ryan looked relieved that I wasn’t completely catatonic.

  “Because you need to soak those knees,” he said, steering me toward the entrance. “And because it’s getting late and I don’t feel up to driving for four hours tonight.”

  The front desk clerk pretended not to notice my swollen eyes and vacant expression as Ryan checked us in. Or the fact that we had no luggage. She just handed him the key cards and pointed us in the right direction. After winding through a short maze of hallways, we came upon our room—a clean, utilitarian space with two beds and a view of the parking lot. Right away, Ryan flicked on the bathroom light and parked me on the edge of the tub.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked, examining my scrapes in the bright light.

  I shook my head. My knees looked terrible, like raw hamburger, but the sting felt almost good. It reminded me that I was still alive. Even though, at the moment, I didn’t particularly feel like it. My eyes filled with tears again.

  “It’s okay,” Ryan said, smoothing back my hair with his fingers. “You’re okay.”

  I pre
ssed my face into his shoulder and wept, soaking his shirt and neck with my tears. He continued to stroke my hair, murmuring comforting things in my ear until the sobs tapered to sniffles. I never wanted to move. He felt so good, and I’d missed him so much.

  After a while, he reached behind me to turn on the tub faucet, testing the temperature with his hand. When he was satisfied, he pulled back to look at me. “Soak for a while, okay?” he said. “I’m going to call my parents and let them know what’s going on. I’ll be right out there.”

  I nodded and he left, shutting the door behind him. The tiny bathroom was already filled with steam, fogging over the mirror above the sink. Numbly, I slipped my sundress over my head and tossed it onto the counter, then stood up to remove my underwear. I grabbed the hotel soap and stepped into the water, which was hot but not scorching. I sunk down, wincing as my legs hit the water. Blood and dirt rose from my skin in a cloudy swirl.

  I sat there for a long time, smoothing the bar of soap over my knees until just the jagged skin remained. I could hear Ryan’s voice through the wall, explaining to his parents where he was and why. God, I thought. If they didn’t hate me before, they certainly did now. I was sure Jane regretted that day at gymnastics back in May, when she touched my arm and asked me if I was okay. She probably wished she’d ignored me instead. If she had, her son wouldn’t be here right now, four hours away from home and his own son, cleaning up the mess I’d made.

  Thinking about Mason made me think about the twins, and a fresh batch of tears spilled over. I thought about their little round faces, and how they lit up with joy when their grandparents walked in the room. They used to look at me like that, their big brown eyes filled with unconditional love and trust, like they relied on me and needed me in their lives. And I’d thrived on it, because after growing up lonely and alone, all I wanted was to feel like I mattered to someone. Like there was at least one person on this earth who was happy to have me around.