by Adi Alsaid
“Well, we can’t just come out guns blazing. We would need a plan.”
“Of course,” Bree said, sitting up from the bench and joining Leila on the floor. “We should take a hostage. When someone comes to get us, we can use my laces to tie him up. I’ll hold a shoe to his head while you slap a clear path ahead.”
“What do we do when we make it outside?”
“That’s when we start letting the footwear fly. In the confusion of the shootout, we make a break for a squad car. We hot-wire it, take it to a safe location, and paint it red.”
“Then we’ll live out the rest of our lives as fugitives,” Leila said, her voice gleeful. “We’ll drive through the whole country, taunting the authorities. Then we’ll cross the border and go as far north as the Canadian roads will allow. We’ll watch the Northern Lights, then come back to the States and go all the way south to Patagonia to see what the sky does on that side of the world.”
Bree was about to voice her approval when they heard the opening and closing of doors, then the heavy footsteps of an officer walking down the hall. “The state requires us to provide you each with a phone call to get in touch with a lawyer or relative,” he said as he pulled his keys out.
Bree stayed put, quiet. She could feel Leila and the cop eyeing her expectantly. Leila asked the cop to give them a second and then went over to take a seat next to Bree and waited for Bree to meet her eyes. “I have no one to call,” she said softly. “Do you?”
Bree exhaled, maybe exaggerating a little to show that the question was like a punch to the stomach. She shook her head.
“I was hoping maybe you had an aunt or uncle,” Leila said.
“Nope. Not anywhere nearby anyway.”
Leila brought her hand up to her mouth and bit on the corner of a fingernail. “As surprisingly okay as this stay in jail has been, we’re probably going to be in deep shit if we don’t call someone. Like, life-ruining deep shit. If there was anything else for us to do, anyone else at all to call, I wouldn’t ask you to do this. Unless you can think of something else, we need to call your sister.”
“Maybe things aren’t that bad,” Bree said. “We should wait until someone comes to talk to us and we find out exactly what we’re facing.” The words didn’t even sound convincing to herself, but she was trying to push away the thought of calling Alexis. They hadn’t talked in over nine months. Bree had this one recurring nightmare that she was hitchhiking and every car that would stop was driven by Alexis, with Matt in the passenger seat.
“Bree, you and I both know that’s not a good idea. We had a hell of a day.” She motioned around the jail cell and smiled, still speaking softly. “But I think it’s safe to say, this is as far as we go. Now the consequences start to kick in. And if we don’t have someone to help us out, they’ll be worse than they have to be.”
“Leila...” she started to say, but she didn’t know how to go on.
“I know you didn’t leave home under the best of circumstances,” Leila said. “But what else can we do?”
“You don’t understand,” Bree said, surprised at how close to crying she was. “‘The best of circumstances’ is a hell of an understatement. I can’t just call after all this time and ask her to bail me out of jail.”
The silence of the cell returned, broken only by Bree’s heavy breathing. She brought her knees up to her chest, barely able to fit her feet onto the narrow bench. She picked at the crusty spot on her shoe, which flaked away with a nauseating crackle.
“You can’t do a whole lot of life-seizing in here, Bree. I know you don’t want to talk to her. But you have to. You’re sisters. I’m sure she she’d just be happy to hear your voice.”
Bree stopped scraping the thing on her shoe and leaned her head against her knees. “I kissed her fiancé.” She took a deep breath, trying to steady her voice, remembering the look on Alexis’s face. “I was just being wild, you know? A little rebellion is to be expected when you’re being babied. She caught us. As soon as I saw the look on her face, I packed a bag and left.”
Bree had thought that the next time she saw Alexis, they’d both be well into adulthood, the wounds they’d inflicted on each other rubbed smooth and painless by time. She’d even had little fantasies of running into her on the street somewhere—New York, maybe—and they’d crack smiles and say, “How’s it been?” and go grab a cup of coffee. By then everything would be forgotten or at least irrelevant.
“There’s no way I can call her. Not after what I did.”
A tress of dreadlocked hair fell across Bree’s eyes, and she tried halfheartedly to undo some of its knots.
“Let me talk to her,” Leila said after a while.
Bree took a deep breath and shut her eyes. “She won’t come.”
“We might as well try.”
Somewhere, beyond the doors of the holding cell, a phone was ringing. “You don’t want to test out the escape plan with the shoes? I think we were really on to something there,” Bree attempted.
Leila laughed and squeezed Bree’s arm. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.”
She lingered there for a moment. Bree could hear the cop shifting his weight outside, a slight wheeze to his breathing. Leila gave Bree’s arm another squeeze and then called out to the officer that she was ready.
Bree watched Leila and the cop walk down the hall, filling it with the echo of rubber soles hitting the linoleum floors.
* * *
Bree couldn’t tell how long she and Leila been in the jail. However long it might have been, it was long enough to let the stillness in. That’s when she really started to grasp the awfulness of a jail cell. Before, she’d thought that it would be cruel to have clocks hanging around jails, forcing the prisoners to literally watch time go by without them. But now she realized that not having clocks around was the more severe punishment. Just day followed by abstract day, and you, motionless, in the middle of it.
A buzzer interrupted Bree’s musings, and the set of doors at the end of the hallway swung open. It’d been so long since Bree had seen a familiar face.
More than anything, she was surprised by the fact that Alexis still looked the same. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, pajama pants, and no makeup, so that she looked even younger than she was, closer to Bree’s age. Bree had always thought Alexis was prettier than she, and she looked it now. Well-rested, too, as if Bree’s absence had been a relief.
A cop was walking beside her, going through a set of keys and clearly not sure which one he needed. Bree didn’t stand up, but she watched her sister’s slow approach.
Leila lifted herself off the floor and stepped away from the door. She gave Bree an attempt at a comforting smile, although Bree couldn’t say she was very comforted. Her stomach was a mess of nerves. She thought she might actually throw up in front of everyone.
Alexis’s face was actually quite serene, almost expressionless, only a little different than how she’d looked months ago. Bree remembered the tightening jaw muscles that would preface all those lectures.
Bree kept waiting for something big to happen. For Alexis to yell at her or, for some reason, hug her. But she couldn’t gauge what Alexis was thinking at all.
The cop led Leila and Bree down the hall in silence. They went through a few bureaucratic procedures, signed a few forms. One of the officers talked for a while and said, “Do you understand?” when he was finished, but Bree hadn’t been listening, so she just nodded. Of all things, Bree was wondering if there were direct flights from Reno to Kansas City or if Alexis had needed a layover. How long had they been in the cell?
A young cop behind a counter gave Leila her keys and told her where her car had been towed. He handed Bree back her duffel bag. As the officer had Alexis sign a couple more forms, Bree felt the pang of anxiety growing, constricting her chest as if it actually had the power to yank at the muscles of her heart
. When they were led outside, Bree took a step away from Leila, as if to keep her safe from the altercation sure to ensue.
Here it comes, Bree thought. A lecture, the big explosion of Alexis’s unique brand of sisterly love. But Alexis just kept walking straight ahead toward the parking lot. There weren’t many cars parked, and they all looked the same whitewashed color under the glow of the streetlights. The streets were quiet, the whole suburb past its bedtime.
“That’s it?” Bree called out to her sister. “You don’t have anything to say?”
Alexis turned around. She looked as if she was about to start yelling but just said softly, “No, Bree. I don’t have anything to say to you.” She turned back and kept walking to her rental car. It took Bree a second to register that her sister’s cheeks were wet, dripping with tears that Bree hadn’t noticed at the jail.
“I’m not going back with you, you know,” Bree called out, her resolve weakened by the fact that she couldn’t remember her sister ever crying before.
“Wonderful. Thanks for making that clear.”
Bree stopped walking after her. A white car about twenty feet away flashed its headlights as Alexis unlocked its doors remotely.
“Yeah, I thought so. You’re glad to be rid of me.”
Leila took a step toward Bree, as if meaning to reassure her but not knowing how.
“Glad to see you haven’t changed. Keep it up. Your immaturity is really one of your best traits,” Alexis said, now standing by the driver’s side of the car. She swung open the door but stayed outside the car, staring at her keys and her feet, a fresh onslaught of tears streaming down her cheeks. They came out so effortlessly, barely a contorted muscle in their wake. Bree had the notion that her sister wasn’t actually crying, that maybe Alexis had picked up some sort of disease, and tears were just a symptom.
“Like you were glad to be rid of them,” Bree said.
And for once, Alexis’s face contorted into a look of flat-out anguish. Bree almost felt relief at the sight of it, at its undeniable honesty.
A few interminable seconds went by. Alexis sobbed openly. Bree wanted to ask where the hell the tears had been months ago but wasn’t able to form the words. Leila shifted her weight from one foot to the other. When she managed to control herself for a second, Alexis met Bree’s eyes. “I show up in Kansas City to bail you out of jail after I haven’t heard from you in nine months, and you don’t even apologize for what you did?”
Alexis stopped and harshly rubbed her eyes with the palm of one hand. “Forget about Matt. I thought you were dead, Bree. I called every hospital within a hundred miles. I paid for online newspaper subscriptions in every major city just to check the obituaries, to read about missing people found dead, hoping no one matched your description. You were a brat for months after Mom and Dad died, never once remembering that I lost my parents, too. And all you could do was act out like I was somehow responsible. After everything we went through, you left me alone to worry about you. You didn’t give a shit about how it would feel for me.
“Then, nine months later, the worst nine months of a life that’s included many, many bad months, I get a phone call from a jail on the other side of the country, and it’s not even your voice on the other end. It’s a stranger’s. You didn’t even have the decency to pick up the phone yourself? How can you be so selfish and thoughtless?”
Leila crossed her arms in front of her chest as if to protect herself. Her eyes were fixed on Bree, her gaze steadfast if not for the little dents of worry between her eyebrows. It was quiet outside the police station, but Bree imagined she could hear the sound of things tearing apart.
“Do you really have nothing to say to me?” Alexis said, the car keys in her hand clicking against the window as she leaned on the open door. “Is that how far gone you are?”
The muscles in Bree’s chest tightened further. She could still feel Leila’s eyes fixed on her, so she craned her neck up and looked for the darkest spot in the night sky. “What the hell are you talking about? You should be the one apologizing. For months after Mom and Dad died, all I heard out of you was complaining. You didn’t once say you missed them; you didn’t once act like it hurt you that they were gone. All you cared about was spending time with Matt. As if you didn’t have any family left at all. This is the first time I’ve even seen you cry.”
Alexis exhaled out her mouth and shook her head. “I cried every night, Bree. As soon as I got to bed, I’d turn on the TV to hide the noise and bury my face in the pillow and weep. It’s a wonder Matt and I stayed together as long as we did, considering how much of our time together I spent in tears.”
The memory came back to Bree, how she’d hear the television through the wall and curse her sister for being able to move on so quickly. “If that’s true, how come you never told me?”
“I was trying to be strong in front of you. I was miserable. I’m still miserable,” she sighed, or gasped, or maybe some mix of the two. “My parents died, and then my kid sister started showing up drunk, hanging out with junkies, and always looking for a fight. How could I have possibly felt any other way?”
She sniffed and, judging by the sound of it, pulled something out of her bag to blow her nose into, though Bree couldn’t bring herself to look.
“So you know, to get you out of this mess, I had to call Matt,” Alexis added, saying his name as if she were throwing it at Bree. “The last person I wanted to talk to, thanks to you. He called the guy whose car you stole and managed to convince him to drop the charges.” She’d said the last bit slowly, as if waiting for Bree to interrupt her. “So you’re free to do whatever you want again.”
Before Bree could say anything else, Alexis’s car door was closing shut. The engine shuddered to life, and the interior light of the car flicked on as Alexis checked herself in the mirror, wiping at her eyes. Then the car started, and Alexis was headed down the road.
Bree waited until Alexis’s car was no longer visible before she turned to Leila. She felt herself starting to tremble with oncoming tears, as if Alexis’s crying was contagious. “That went well.”
She grabbed her duffel bag off the ground and lifted the strap over her shoulder. It scraped against her sunburned neck and sent a sting of pain down her back. Whenever she was faced with a situation she’d never been in before, Bree liked to take note of her surroundings, committed, as she was, to not let life pass by unnoticed. But she barely paid attention to the pleasantness of the Kansas air, or to the officers chatting with their hands on their utility belts in the parking lot; they were forgotten almost as soon as they were noticed, driven out of focus by Alexis’s words. Bree felt as if there wasn’t even anything around but her and the mess happening inside her stomach. She needed to sit down, but she was afraid that then the tears would come, and she wouldn’t be able to stand back up for hours.
“You know,” Bree said, taking the stairs so slowly it looked as if she was limping, “I think I’m gonna keep going on my own.”
Leila stopped following her. “Why?” She sounded hurt.
“I just need to be on my own for a little while,” Bree said. Speaking took an unreasonable amount of effort. She felt out of breath, dizzy, picturing Alexis weeping into a pillow, calling up hospitals, worried sick while Bree herself hitchhiked and shoplifted and blocked out whatever thoughts clashed with her professed love of life.
Leila bit her lip and furrowed her brow. “I don’t understand.”
“Thanks for a good day,” Bree muttered, nearly breathless. “Sorry I got you arrested.” She adjusted the duffel bag strap one more time and then turned away from Leila, heading down the road without glancing back, the entire world fading away and leaving her alone with her thoughts.
6
NOT A LOT of people in Mission Hills, Kansas, Bree soon learned, needed to use the highway after midnight on a weekday. After leaving the police station, she’d walked for about ha
lf an hour to calm herself. And though she still couldn’t think clearly, the ingrained habits of the road took over, and she found herself searching for rides. She’d been standing at the stoplight before the on-ramp for at least an hour now, and the driver of the only car that had passed hadn’t even seen her.
She dropped her duffel bag and changed into the fluorescent-green tank top she’d used as a sun shade earlier in the day. Crumbs fell away like snow when she pulled it out. A pair of headlights started her way but turned left a few blocks before the highway. Bree usually found nighttime streets so beautiful, everything lit up in orange and acutely peaceful, the branches and streetlights and asphalt calm, as if sleeping. Now everything just looked lonely.
She spotted a scattering of rocks by the side of the road and picked up a handful of them. Feeling the urge to throw them at something, she decided on the post of the stoplight on the opposite side of the street. She was waiting for that clang of rock hitting metal but kept missing. With each pebble that flew past the post noiselessly, Bree grew angrier. At the pebbles, at the post, at herself. More than anything, though, she grew angrier at her inner monologue, at how her brain would not stop repeating the same words over and over again in Alexis’s voice: selfish and thoughtless.
Finally, a pebble caught the stainless steel of the post, and the sound reverberated through the night. Bree raised her hands in the air and let out a triumphant scream. A car on the overhead highway pass sped by unseen. Then the night fell into silence again, and Alexis’s voice returned.
Bree sat down on the curb, forearms on her legs, head buried in her lap, like someone too drunk to walk, or someone bracing for a plane crash.
Selfish and thoughtless. Bree wanted to shove the words back into her sister’s face. Who’d been selfish first? Long before Bree had left, Alexis had started spending the night at Matt’s place, had started canceling lunch plans, acting like an authority figure, when all Bree wanted was an ally. And for who? A dull, barely attractive law student? A guy with aspirations to read through contracts the rest of his life?
