False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

  In high school, Leigh had qualified to take special courses at the college, but she’d gotten caught slashing her sleazy boss’s tires and ended up with two months in juvie. Then there was her meltdown with Buddy less than a month before she was due in Chicago, though admittedly Callie had laid the dry powder for that particular explosion.

  Why Leigh continued the pattern into her adult life was a puzzle that Callie could not solve. Her big sister would have these bursts of joyful wife- and motherhood where she’d be carpooling Maddy and going to dinner parties with Walter and writing white papers on crazy smart shit and doing speaking engagements at legal conferences and then, eventually, something trivial would happen and Leigh would use it as a reason to self-sabotage her way out. She never did anything bad with Maddy, but she would force an argument with Walter or yell at a room mother or get sanctioned by a judge for mouthing off or, if the usual routes failed her, she would do something incredibly stupid that she knew would send her back to purgatory.

  There wasn’t a hell of a lot of daylight between what Leigh did with her good life and what Callie did with the needle.

  The bus bristled against the curb like an exhausted porcupine. Callie pushed herself up from the seat. Her leg immediately started to throb. Navigating down the stairs took an inordinate amount of concentration. She already had issues with her knee. Now, she had added the burgeoning abscess to her list of maladies. She hefted the backpack onto her shoulders and, suddenly, her neck and back moved up to the number one and two slots. Then the pain radiated down her arm, her hand went numb, and, by the time she turned onto Phil’s street, all she could think was that another bump of methadone was the only way she was going to get to sleep tonight.

  That was how it always started, that slow decline from tapering off to function and then slowly falling back into not functioning. Junkies were always, always going to find the solution to any problem at the tip of a needle.

  Phil would take care of Binx. She wouldn’t read books to him, but she would keep him brushed and educate him about birds and maybe even give him some advice on his tax situation since she’d spent a lot of time reading up on sovereign citizenship. Callie reached into her pocket. The bright green goggles she had bought at the tanning salon clicked against her fingers. She had thought the cat would want to see them. He knew nothing of indoor tanning.

  Callie wiped tears out of her eyes as she trudged the last few yards toward her mother’s house. The pile of shit across the street had been smeared by an unfortunate shoe. Her gaze moved upward to the boarded-up house. There was no flicker of light or motion from the front. She saw that the piece of plywood that had disgorged the camera-strangling man had closed its mouth. The brambles and weeds were trampled where he’d run across the yard, robbing Callie of her fleeting hope that the entire thing had been a product of her methadone-addled imagination.

  She turned, then kept going in a complete three-sixty.

  No white dude. No nice car, unless you counted Leigh’s Audi cooling in the driveway behind Phil’s redneck Chevy truck.

  That was definitely not a good sign. Leigh wouldn’t panic over Callie’s lack of a text or phone call because Callie had long ago burnished her reputation as an unreliable correspondent. Her sister would only panic if something bad had happened, and she would not be inside Phil’s house for the first time since she’d left for Chicago unless something really, really horrific had brought her there.

  Callie knew that she should go inside but, instead, she tilted her head back, watching the sun wink its way through the leaves on the treetops. Dusk was coming fast. In a few minutes, the streetlights would wake up. The temperature would drop. Eventually, the rain she could taste in the air would start to fall.

  There was an alternate Callie who could walk away from this. She had disappeared before. If it weren’t for Leigh, Callie would’ve been riding with Binx on a bus right now—it was foolish to think she could leave him at Phil’s—and they would’ve been discussing the fine selection of cheap motels, deciding which one was seedy enough to have dealers but not so seedy that Callie would get raped and killed.

  If she was going to die, it was going to be by her own hands.

  Callie knew she could dawdle outside the house sorting through fantasies for only so long. She walked up the creaky stairs to her mother’s front porch. She was met at the door by the sight of Binx dragging around his plastic lei, which meant he was having feelings. She longed for her own crutch, but that could come later. Callie knelt to stroke the cat along his back a few times before she let the invisible wire of tension pull her deeper into the house.

  Everything was out of whack. Roger and Brock were alert on the couch rather than rolled up in a dognap. The gurgle of aquariums was muted by the seldom-closed door. Even the birds in the dining room were keeping their chirps on the downlow.

  She found Leigh and Phil sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. Phil’s goth was showing signs of wear. The heavy black eyeliner had turned full-on Marilyn Manson. Leigh had put on her own armor. She’d changed into jeans, a leather jacket, and biker boots. They were both tensed like scorpions waiting for the opportunity to strike.

  Callie said, “Another beautiful family moment.”

  Phil snorted. “What shit did you drop yourself into now, smart ass?”

  Leigh said nothing. She looked up at Callie, eyes kaleidoscoping in agony, regret, fear, anger, trepidation, relief.

  Callie looked away. “I’ve been thinking about the Spice Girls. Why is Ginger the only one named after a spice?”

  Phil said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Posh isn’t a spice,” Callie said. “Why aren’t they named Saffron, or Cardamon, or even Anise?”

  Leigh cleared her throat. She said, “Maybe they ran out of thyme.”

  They smiled at each other.

  “Both of you can go fuck yourselves.” Phil understood enough to know that she was being left out. She pushed herself up from the table. “Don’t eat any of my fucking food. I know what’s in there.”

  Leigh nodded toward the back door. She had to get out of this house.

  Callie’s neck was killing her from lugging around the backpack, but she didn’t want her mother stealing anything so she carried it with her as she followed Leigh outside.

  Her sister nodded again, though not toward her Audi parked in the driveway. She wanted to go for a walk, the same way they had gone for walks as kids when being out in the ’hood was safer than being around Phil.

  Side by side, they started up the street. Without being asked, Leigh took the backpack. She looped it over her shoulder. Her purse was probably locked in the trunk, and Phil was probably squinting at the fancy car right now, trying to decide whether to break into it or strip it for parts.

  Callie couldn’t worry about Leigh’s car or her mother or anything else at the moment. She looked at the sky. They were heading west, directly into the sunset. The heaviness of promised rain seemed to be lifting. There was a tinge of warmth fighting against the slight drop in the temperature. Still, Callie shivered. She didn’t know if the sudden chill was from the lingering effects of Covid, the fading sun, or fear of what her sister was eventually going to say.

  Leigh waited until their mother’s house was well behind them. Instead of dropping an atom bomb on their existence, she said, “Phil told me a spotted panther has been shitting on the sidewalk to warn her something bad is about to happen.”

  Callie tested the waters, saying, “She went across the street with her bat this morning, started banging on the boarded-up house for no reason.”

  “Jesus,” Leigh mumbled.

  Callie studied her sister’s profile, looking for a reaction that would tell her Phil had mentioned the man with the camera.

  Leigh asked, “She hasn’t hit you, has she?”

  “No,” Callie lied. Or maybe it wasn’t a lie because Phil hadn’t meant to hit her so much as Callie had been unable to duck out of the way. �
��She’s calmer now.”

  “Good,” Leigh said, nodding her head because she wanted to believe it was true.

  Callie stuck her hands into her pockets though, weirdly, she wanted to hold on to Leigh’s hand the same way they’d done when they were little. She curled her fingers around the goggles. She should tell Leigh about the white dude/nice car. She should let her know about the telescoping lens on the camera. She should stop shooting up methadone in tanning salons.

  The air turned crisp as they continued their stroll. Callie saw the same scenes as the night before: kids playing in the yard, men drinking beers in their carports, another guy washing another muscle car. If Leigh had thoughts on any of the sights, she kept them to herself. She was doing the same thing Callie had done when she’d seen Leigh’s Audi in the driveway. She wanted to draw out this false sense of normalcy as long as possible.

  Callie wasn’t going to stop her. The man with the camera could wait. Or he could get stored somewhere in the back of her brain with the rest of the terrible no-good things that haunted her. She wanted to enjoy this peaceable walk. Callie was seldom out once dusk started to settle. She felt vulnerable at night. Her darting days were over. She couldn’t turn her head to see if the stranger behind her was looking at his phone or running toward her with a gun in his hand.

  She wrapped her arms around her waist to ward off the chill. She looked up at the trees again. The leaves were popping out like Skittles. Faltering sunlight seeped through the thick fingers of the limbs. She felt her heartbeat slow, matching the soft slap of their footfalls against the cooling asphalt. If Callie could stay in this quiet moment, big sister by her side, for the rest of her life, then she would be happy.

  But that wasn’t how life worked.

  And even if it did, neither one of them had the stomach for it.

  Leigh took another left onto a crappier street. Yards overgrown. More boarded-up houses, more poverty, more hopelessness. Callie tried to take a deep breath. The air whistled through her nose, then churned like butter in her lungs. After the grind of Covid, Callie never walked for very long without being aware that she had lungs in her chest and that those lungs were not the same. The sound of her own labored breathing threatened to push her back into those weeks in the ICU. The fearful looks from the nurses and doctors. The distant echo of Leigh’s voice when they held up the telephone to Callie’s ear. The constant, unrelenting memory of Trevor standing at the aquarium. Buddy banging open the kitchen door.

  Pour me one, baby doll.

  She took another breath, holding on to it for a few seconds before letting it go.

  And then she realized where Leigh had taken her, and Callie had no air left anywhere in her body.

  Canyon Road, the street that the Waleskis had lived on.

  “It’s all right,” Leigh said. “Keep walking.”

  Callie wrapped her arms tighter around her body. Leigh was with her, so this should be okay. This should be easy. One foot in front of the other. No turning around. No running away. The one-story ranch was on the right, the low roof sagging from years of neglect. As far as Callie knew, no one had lived there after Trevor and Linda had moved out. Callie had never seen a for-sale sign in front of the house. Phil had never been tasked with finding desperate tenants to rent the three-bedroom crime scene. Callie guessed that one of the neighborhood’s many slumlords had rented it out until there was nothing left but a leaking hull.

  As they drew closer, Callie felt goose bumps trill along her skin. Not much had changed since the time of the Waleskis. The yard was more overgrown, but the mustard-colored paint was baked into the vinyl siding. All of the windows and doors were boarded up. Graffiti skirted the lower half. No gang tags, but plenty of schoolyard taunts and slut-shaming along with the normal array of spurting cocks.

  Leigh kept her pace consistent, but she told Callie, “Look, it’s for sale.”

  Callie shifted her body so she could see into the yard. The FOR SALE BY OWNER sign was being swallowed up by pokeweed. No graffiti had blocked out the letters yet.

  Leigh had noticed the same thing. “It must be recent.”

  Callie asked, “Do you recognize the number?”

  “No, but I can do a search on the deed to see who owns the property.”

  “Let me do that,” Callie offered. “I can use Phil’s computer.”

  Leigh hesitated, but said, “Don’t let her catch you.”

  Callie shifted forward again. The house was out of her line of vision, but she could feel it staring her down as they walked past the broken mailbox. She assumed they were going to make the long loop back to Phil’s, trapping Callie in an endless Inferno circle of her past. She rubbed her neck. Her arm had gone numb up to the shoulder. Her fingertips felt like they were being stabbed by thousands of African crested rats.

  The problem with a cervical fusion was that the neck was designed to flex. If you fused one section, then the section below took all of the stress and, over time, the disc wore down and the ligaments gave up and the unfused vertebrae slipped forward and touched the adjacent vertebrae, usually at an angle, usually compressing a nerve, which in turn caused incapacitating pain. This process was called degenerative spondylolisthesis, and the best way to fix it was to fuse the joint together. Then time passed and it happened again so you fused the next joint. Then the next.

  Callie wasn’t going to go through another cervical fusion. For once, the heroin wasn’t the issue. She could be medically detoxed, the same as they’d done when Covid put her in the ICU. The problem was any neurologist would take one listen to the glassy crinkle inside her lungs and tell her she wouldn’t survive the anesthesia.

  “This way,” Leigh said.

  Instead of turning right to make the journey back to Phil’s, Leigh went straight. Callie didn’t ask questions. She just kept walking by her sister’s side. They returned to their companionable silence all the way to the playground. This, too, had not changed that much during the ensuing years. Most of the rides were broken, but the swings were in good shape. Leigh shifted the backpack onto both shoulders so she could sit down in one of the cracked leather seats.

  Callie walked around the swing set so she was facing the opposite direction from Leigh. She winced at the pinch in her leg when she sat down. Her hand went to her thigh. The heat was still pulsing through her jeans. She pressed her knuckle into the bump until the pain swelled like helium stretching a balloon.

  Leigh was watching her, but she didn’t ask what was going on. She held tight to the chains, took two steps back, then lifted her feet into the air. She disappeared for a few seconds, then swung back into Callie’s line of sight. She wasn’t smiling. Her face had a grim set to it.

  Callie started her swing. The balance was surprisingly harder when you couldn’t use the full range of motion in your head. She finally got the hang of it, pulling on the chains, leaning back into the upswing. Leigh zoomed by, going faster each time. They could be two trunks on a couple of drunken elephants, if elephants weren’t notorious teetotalers.

  The silence continued as they both swung back and forth—nothing crazy, they were women of a certain age now, but they kept up a steady, graceful sway that helped dissipate some of the anxious energy between them.

  Leigh said, “I used to take Maddy to the park when she was little.”

  Callie blurred her eyes at the darkening sky. The sun had slipped away. Streetlights started flickering on.

  “I would watch her on the swings and think about how you used to try to go high enough to flip around the bar.” Leigh swung by, legs pushing out. “You almost did a few times.”

  “I almost fell flat on my ass.”

  “Maddy’s so beautiful, Cal.” Leigh went silent as she disappeared, then picked back up when she was facing Callie. “I don’t know why I got something so perfect in my life, but I’m grateful every single day. So grateful.”

  Callie closed her eyes, feeling the cold rush of wind in her face, listening to the swish every time Leigh
soared past.

  “She loves sports,” Leigh said. “Tennis, volleyball, soccer, the usual stuff kids do.”

  Callie marveled at the idea that this was usual. The playground they were swinging in had been her only outlet for fun. At ten, she’d been pushed into finding an after-school job. By the time she’d turned fourteen, she was either obsessing about how to keep Buddy in her life or obsessing about how to handle his death. She would’ve killed to run up and down a field kicking around a ball.

  Leigh said, “She’s not passionate about competing. Not like you were. It’s just fun for her. This generation—they are all incredibly, boringly, sportsmanlike.”

  Callie opened her eyes. She couldn’t dive any deeper into this conversation. “I guess there’s something to be said for Phil’s style of parenting. Neither one of us has ever been sportsmanlike.”

  Leigh slowed her swing, turning to watch Callie. She wasn’t going to drop the subject. “Walter hates soccer, but he’s at every practice and every game.”

  That sounded like a very Walter kind of thing to do.

  “Maddy hates hiking,” Leigh said. “But the last weekend of every month, they hike up Kennesaw Mountain because she loves spending time with him.”

  Callie leaned back in the leather seat, pushing herself to go higher. She liked the idea of Walter in a comically tall red and brown ball cap with matching pantsuit, but she understood he probably did not go on hikes dressed like Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits.

  “She loves to read,” Leigh said. “She reminds me of you when you were a kid. Phil used to get furious when you had your nose in a book. She didn’t understand what the stories meant to you.”

  Callie swung past, her sneakers turning into white fangs biting into the dark sky. She wanted to stay suspended in the air like that forever, to never drop down into reality.

  “She loves animals. Rabbits, gerbils, cats, dogs.”

  Callie swung back, passing Leigh one more time before she let her feet drag the ground. The swing came to a slow standstill. She twisted the chains to face her sister.