by Alix Ohlin
“She was trying, you know,” he said. “To change her life.”
“I know,” I said. Every Sunday morning Nicole would tell me she wasn’t going to party anymore, and she meant it, too; she just couldn’t act on it. I’d told her there were things she could do, people who would help, that she didn’t have to do it all by herself, and she’d say, “It’s not that easy, Amb,” and I thought that she preferred the drama of it, the allure of her own misery, which at least made her feel important and alive. And then, in the hospital hallway, I put it together.
“The Lutheran church has AA meetings,” I said. From the expression on his face I knew I was right. “She didn’t tell me she was going.”
He shrugged. “She was private about some things,” he said. “I know that much.”
It almost made me laugh. My sister was the least private person I knew. She’d been on television crying, drinking, making out with the guy who was the star of the show; she’d been photographed for a magazine shoot with the other contestants, all of them wearing lacy bridal lingerie, which was supposed to signal their hopes for a sexy wedding night. She said things out loud I wouldn’t have whispered to my closest friend. Then again, she’d surprised me earlier that year by showing me a printout from the internet of all the women in North America who had our mother’s name. “She could be in Seattle,” she’d said, “or Toronto. Or Des Moines.”
“I don’t care where she is,” I’d said, which was the truth. “I don’t need her for anything.”
“How do you know what you don’t need?” Nicole had said, folding the paper and putting it back in her purse.
“I just do,” I’d answered, and she went quiet. I’d been surprised that she was even looking for our mother. I’d always thought we had an unspoken pact to let her go, to match her strength and defiance with our own. A while later I asked her if she’d contacted any of the women, and she shook her head and never brought it up again.
* * *
—
Kevin Hewey came by once more, but only to admit that they had no idea who had hit my sister and would likely never find out; she’d been discovered well after the accident by some high school kids dazed and jubilant on Molly, who’d called the police in between giggles. They hadn’t understood how serious her injuries were and they were not helpful witnesses.
Noriko visited every day, bringing thoughtful, useless gifts for Nicole—a throw blanket, fancy hand lotion, an audiobook called The Power of You which I refused to play—and food for me and Lord. Muffins she’d baked from scratch. When I asked her about my father, she hesitated and then shook her head. I was so angry at him I didn’t know what to do, except to shelve my anger and deal with it later. Instead I focused on Nicole; Lord and I took turns reading to her, combing her hair, lotioning her hands. Her nail polish was chipped, and I took it off and applied a new coat of pink. It was something to do. During the long hours, of necessity, Lord and I got to know each other a bit. He’d been living in town for around a year, he said; he’d moved here from Glens Falls to start over after he got sober. Despite his name, he hadn’t always been religious; for the longest time, he said, his teachers and social workers would shake their heads at him and say, “I wonder how you got that name.”
“How did you?” I asked him, and he said he didn’t know. He couldn’t remember his birth parents, who’d named him; he’d spent his childhood bouncing around foster care until he wound up in a semi-permanent situation with an aunt and uncle. Then they got divorced, and Lord was on his own again, and there were a few years of his life that he clearly didn’t care to discuss. He worked at Foot Locker at the mall, and when I said it was nice of them to give him time off, he shrugged and said, “I’ll find something else.” I nodded. At the Blue Dragon, I’d gotten people to cover my shifts so far but the weekend was coming up and my manager, Doug, was starting to make noises. Doug knew Nicole—they’d even dated for a while, a couple of years earlier—and said he wanted to be sympathetic but “you know Saturdays, Amb, we need all hands on deck.” I hung up on him.
Of course we talked about Nicole, me more than Lord. I told him how Nicole was my best friend, how because our mother had left, we’d each acted as mother to the other; we’d taught ourselves about makeup and boys, we’d shared every morsel of information we found out about the world. The bond between us felt so solid that when Nicole came back from LA, plastic and haunted, with a fake bubbling laugh that hurt my ears, I assumed it was only a matter of time before the closeness between us would return. And when I saw her on Sunday mornings, her makeup smeared, scratches on her knees from God only knew what Saturday-night events, I couldn’t see her for what she was, for her trouble and pain. I saw her as my little sister, my partner in harmless crimes, and I believed against evidence that she would be restored. I had refused to understand how far gone she was, and now—I said this to Lord, crying, while he listened silently—it was too late. Lord didn’t deny it.
* * *
—
Three days passed and my sister’s condition did not change. My father still refused to come to the hospital. When I called him with updates, he said, “Keep me posted,” as if Nicole’s injuries were a party I was planning. I was furious with him, and when I yelled he didn’t yell back or excuse himself or explain. It was like punching a pillow, all give. Needing an outlet for my fury, I went to see Sam Postelthwaite. He lived in a run-down house near the old glove factory, where men of my father’s generation had worked straight out of high school and which now stood abandoned. People missed the jobs but not the gloves themselves, which had been cheaply made and caused rashes. When Sam saw me, his whole face wrinkled in chagrin. “Come in,” he said.
In the living room, he gestured towards the couch, and lowered himself down into a green armchair with the air of a man whose bones hurt him all the time. I told him I was there about my father, and he didn’t seem surprised.
“I’ve known your father a long time,” he said. “He’s a decent man.”
“I know he’s decent.”
“He’s under a lot of stress.”
The look I gave him must have been severe, because he wiped his palms on his pants as if I made him nervous. I went to his kitchen without asking him. It was the home of a man who fended for himself well enough: neat stacks of canned food in the cupboard, a freezer fully loaded with microwave meals. On a small shelf next to the fridge I found a bottle of whiskey. I wasn’t much of a drinker—I saw too much of it at work—but I was craving alcohol, and I brought the bottle back to the living room, pouring us two glasses. By the time Sam had raised his glass to toast me, I’d already drunk mine down and poured a second. I examined his old man’s face, the folds of flesh, the dark hairs on his bulbous nose. His skin hung on him like a bigger man’s suit. He cleared his throat.
“I’ll admit I feel responsible for your sister,” he said. “I was supposed to look after her, but I couldn’t be there every minute. She kept late hours, and I’m not as young as I used to be.”
There was a pause in which he waited for me to say it wasn’t his fault, and I didn’t.
“Nicole is a wonderful girl,” he went on. “But troubled, as you know. In the past two years she’d been badgering your father for information about your mother. She wanted to find her.”
I remembered the printout she’d shown me, the list of names and addresses.
“Your father told her he didn’t know where she went, but that’s not entirely true.”
“What do you mean it’s not entirely true?”
He poured another shot and drank it down. I took another, too, which was more than I usually ever had. I didn’t feel drunk, though, just flushed with an anger I didn’t know where to direct—at my father, my sister, the car that had hurt her and then disappeared.
“I mean it’s not true at all,” he said. “Three years ago your father came to me and asked me to trac
k your mother down. For you girls’ sake. And for his own, too. So I did.”
“You found her?”
I had always thought of our mother’s disappearance as magical and complete. In my mind she’d reinvented herself so thoroughly that she belonged to a separate dimension. She owned a bar in Mexico and went by the name Dolores. She lived on a pot farm in the mountains and made millions, which she kept under the baseboards because she didn’t trust banks. She was the wife of a gangster or a cult leader and everybody called her Mia. (Her real name, which she’d always hated, was Gwen.) Sitting on Sam Postelthwaite’s brown tweed sofa, whiskey in my veins, I couldn’t bring myself to ask him where she was.
“She died, Amber,” he said. “She died five years ago. She had a hard life after she left here, I think, though I don’t know the whole story. She was involved with drugs and, well, things caught up with her after a while, I guess.”
My anger was a furnace inside me, glowing with impossible heat. I put down the glass of whiskey because I was afraid I might shatter it. I looked at my shoes.
“Here,” his voice said. He was holding out a photograph of a woman I didn’t recognize. She had my mother’s eyes but her hair was blond and frizzy and her appearance was one of disturbed neglect. Her teeth were dark with rot. In the picture, she was wearing a blue dress and smiling sloppily at the camera—it may have been taken at a party—and these festive touches made the picture altogether sadder and worse than it would otherwise have been. I didn’t take it from his hand.
“Your father couldn’t bring himself to tell you,” he said. “And now he thinks that maybe if he had, your sister…” He trailed off. I understood that our father had tried to allow us our fantasy of our mother, just as he used to let us eat all our Halloween candy on the first night, even though it made us sick. He had always been soft-hearted, unlike our mother. “Now look what happened,” she used to say sternly when Nicole and I fought and ran to her, wailing from the injuries we’d given each other. “Look at what you’ve done.”
* * *
—
When I left Sam Postelthwaite’s apartment I was exhausted and drunk, and I made it only a few blocks before I pulled over and laid my head on the steering wheel and cried. The night was dark and it was still cold enough that when I turned off the engine my breath plumed around me, boozy and visible. I called my father, and reached his voice mail. “Daddy,” I said, and I had not called him that for many years, “I need you. I know everything and I need you.” Snot bubbled out of my nose and I wiped it on my sleeve and dropped the phone under my seat. As I was bent over, a wave of lights strobed over the car. They almost instantly gave me a splitting headache. There was a hard rapping sound at the window, and I rolled down the window to see Kevin Hewey.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Aren’t there any other cops in this town?”
“I’m going to need you to step out of the car, ma’am,” he said, and the ma’am was a rebuke to every sarcastic answer I’d ever given him, every time I’d stepped out of the way as he grabbed my ass at the bar. I got out. He took my license and then came back with a Breathalyzer test, which I took and failed. Then he turned me against my car and ran his hands up and down my legs, my shoulders, my back and stomach, my breasts, my crotch. I didn’t make any protest. In my head I saw my ruined mother and my ruined sister, my companions, all of us ruined together.
* * *
—
People can surprise you with their weakness, Noriko had said, and Kevin Hewey surprised me with his. He finished his rough inspection of my body and then turned me around. He put a hand on my cheek. He had affection for me and he wanted me to know it. “You’ve had a bad week,” he said. “Don’t do this again.” Then he lowered me into the passenger seat of the police car, with his palm on the top of my head, and drove me home, where I fell drunkenly asleep on top of the bedcovers, still wearing all my clothes.
In the morning I had to call Noriko to take me back to my car. She said she would come, but the person who showed up, his face steadfastly neutral, was my father. He was wearing a blue baseball cap and jeans and, for some reason, a sports jacket. I offered him some coffee and he shook his head. We drove out to the glove factory in silence and all he said, when we got to my car, was that he would see me at the hospital. I started to make some hostile comment—“miracle of miracles” is what I almost said—but then buttoned my mouth.
When we got to my sister’s room, no one was there except her. The lights were bright and the machines hissed and beeped and the hallway intercom was a constant broadcast. When my father saw Nicole, his face crumpled and his bottom lip jutted like a little kid’s. “Stop it,” I said harshly, and pushed him toward her bed. Obediently, he sat down and placed his hand over hers, whispering something to her I couldn’t hear. He sniffled and put both his palms over his eyes. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen my father cry. He cried when our mother left, and when his own parents died, and he even cried at movies sometimes. Nicole and I used to make fun of him for it. It was unusual for a man of his generation, and I don’t know if it meant that he was more sensitive than those other men, or more damaged. Maybe it meant nothing at all.
My father stayed by Nicole’s bedside for a few hours, and he came back the next day, and the day after that. We didn’t talk about Sam Postelthwaite or my mother; we didn’t talk much at all. My father read the local newspaper to Nicole, scores from high school baseball games, the weather. The doctors began to lower the dose of Nicole’s sedatives in preparation for waking her. They removed the respirator and she made a terrible gagging noise as if she might choke to death, but she didn’t, and the nurse—her name was Charlene, and I’d come to know her well—grabbed my hand and whispered, “It’s okay, that’s normal,” and I’ll always be grateful to her for that. Two weeks after the accident, Nicole opened her eyes, and her expression was confused and unhappy. It fell to me to describe to her where she was and what had happened, and I did my best. My best was not adequate to the task. Nicole’s voice was raspy, from the ventilator, and she wanted to get out of bed right away, and she had to be restrained.
Her behavior in those early days was troubling. She couldn’t seem to understand what had happened, and she was upset—with me, our father, everyone. Her short-term memory had been affected, so that every day I saw her, every new hour, we had to start all over again.
Nicole didn’t want to go to physical therapy. She wanted a drink. She wanted us to go away. Many times I stalked out of the room, unable to take any more of her quarrelsome confusion, while our father stayed, dipping into the deep well of his patience.
The doctors said her confusion was normal. They said her anger was normal. They said she might never be the same person she was before.
I cried in stairwells. My father shook their hands.
Eventually Nicole was moved to an outpatient facility, which she didn’t like any better than the hospital. She was walking and talking but her memory and her mood did not improve. I spent part of each day with her, and otherwise I went back to work at the Blue Dragon, fending off questions about her condition with a noncommittal smile. I was having trouble sleeping, and on a Tuesday night I found myself loitering outside the Lutheran church, smoking a cigarette and watching people filter into the parking lot. The last one out was Lord. If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t show it.
“Hey,” he said. “How is she?”
I frowned. “I was wondering what happened to you,” I said. I wasn’t sure which had annoyed me more, his constant presence at Nicole’s side or his sudden absence.
Lord looked over my shoulder. “Got busy, I guess.”
“Seriously?”
He lit a cigarette, and so did I.
“I’m working at Bobby’s now,” he said. I knew Bobby’s. It was a sad diner out on the highway where Nicole and I used to go when we were teenagers. We’d eat pie and flirt w
ith middle-aged men and then leave suddenly, knowing they’d settle the bill. We thought we were so dangerous. We thought being girls was such a game.
“I don’t understand you,” I said tightly.
“Look,” he said. “Your friend made it clear I shouldn’t come around.”
“My friend?” I said. “I don’t have any friends.” This was true. I knew just about everyone in town, I saw everybody at the bar, and when I went home to my apartment I crawled into solitude. I dreamed about living somewhere I knew no one, dreams all the more powerful because I’d never tried to make them come true.
“Officer Hewey,” he said.
“He’s not my friend,” I said immediately, before I understood this wasn’t what Lord meant. He meant that Kevin was a police officer; that we were both white; that we were both from this town. I remembered Kevin saying “I don’t recognize him” and making Lord sit down on the bench, and I remembered, though I’d tried hard not to think about it, how he’d run his hands up and down my body, owning it and then discarding it, because he could.
In the silence that followed we smoked. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That guy is a dick.”
He tilted his head, to say whatever. It didn’t make a difference to him whether I was sorry or not. I rushed into the silence, wanting to ease my own discomfort—that’s how I see it now. I told him about Nicole, how she’d woken up and was improving, but she wasn’t herself. I told him how hard it was to see her so confused, how I had to keep explaining her life to her: the car accident, the brain injury, the rehab facility. I told him how I was about to start double shifts at the Blue Dragon, to help cover the costs. I even told him about our mother, how Nicole had wanted to find her, and how she would never be found, and how our father had blamed himself for keeping this secret and worried that Nicole would follow her same path. I presented my life to him in rambling summation, and he listened. We stood in the parking lot for a long time, the night mild and damp, smoking one cigarette after the next. At last I leaned myself against him and tried to press my lips against his, and to be honest it didn’t humiliate me any less that he was very gentle when he put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me away.
