The vibe of Aurora isn’t Zombie Café, but I still like it. An entire wall of posters advertising indie bands and comedy shows and drag performances is to my left. A creepy mural of snowy mountains and phoenixes with TVs for faces line the opposite wall. Burnt-orange plastic chairs and wooden tables clutter the space between the door and bar.
Every customer has a neatly-kept beard or tattoos or flip-flops. I stick out, at a table near the front. Maybe it’s my curls. Maybe it’s the ultra-blue Vans with no socks. Maybe it’s my nerves vibrating. My leg won’t quit shaking. I’ve only had three sips of my iced coffee. I’m too busy checking my phone and tracing a finger over all the names carved into the tabletop and watching the glass doors. I’m early.
I keep typing and deleting a text to Ian. I hope he’s asleep. I hope he doesn’t see those three ellipses appearing and disappearing. What do I say?
Thanks for spending your evening with me and my little sister. BTW, you’re an amazing kisser!
There’s nothing wrong with that. As truthful as it is, it’s not enough. It’s missing something, like me. All my life, I’ve been missing something.
“Wow. You really look like him.”
My eyes raise.
Free Williams has been misrepresented by her Instagram photos. She’s stunning. A cloud of loosely-flared curls as dark as her thick veil of eyelashes frames her face like a lion’s mane. Her dark brown eyes are wide, very expressive. Her skin is like the edge of autumn—rich-bronze.
She flops down across from me, dropping a hefty bookbag in the chair next to her.
I can’t take my eyes off her. We don’t look exactly the same. But we have similar noses and cheekbones. Her mouth curves a little at the corners the way mine does when I’m about to smile.
My voice cracks. “Him?”
“Your father.”
I flinch hard. Some of my coffee spills. Free arches an eyebrow as I try to clean up my mess with napkins. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she says, leaning back. “I guess that’s new for you? Someone mentioning your real dad?”
“I have a real dad,” I hiss. That’s new, too, the frustration. “Sorry. It’s just, I have—”
“Parents? A family?” That curvy smile returns. “Yeah, I’ve seen pictures. Your… that guy who knocked up our mother was quite the self-absorbed jerk, anyway.”
“I don’t know anything about him.” About you, rests on my tongue.
“You wouldn’t want to know him.”
That stings. It also ignites this curious flame in my ribcage. What’s he like? Are parts of me like him? Do we share more than physical features and a connection with a dead woman? I force myself to chug the rest of my coffee, struggling to breathe.
“That was a truly shitty thing to say,” Free comments. “My bad.”
“It’s okay,” I say, though it’s not. I’m caught in this warped reality where I have a sister and an unpopular father and a dead mother. It’s as if I’m six years old again, accepting the reality that I’m a Cameron legally, but not by birth. My hands shake under the table.
“Let’s try again. I’m Free.” She wiggles her fingers in a casual wave. This girl is all chilled energy. She’s jazz in the summer; a cup of hot cider in December. “Free Williams. I’m your—”
“Sister,” I say, quietly; not ashamed, just quiet.
“Half-sister,” she corrects.
“Oh.”
“Different dads, obviously.” Free pushes curls away from her cheeks. “Our mom and my dad dated in high school. It didn’t work after she got pregnant with me. She didn’t love him. He didn’t love her. No biggie.”
She says it as if it doesn’t hurt, as if it truly is no biggie. I can’t imagine Mom and Dad “not working.” Then again, I didn’t imagine having a half-sister, but here I am.
“So, Remy.” She says my name with a curl to her lips; not teasing, just amused.
“Remy Cameron.” My voice still squeaks. “Rembrandt.”
“I still can’t believe she named you that.” Her laugh is fond, like a lost memory returning.
“It’s not the best name to avoid being teased about.” A giggle squeezes through my tight throat.
“Who’re you telling? Try growing up Frida!”
“Frida?”
“Like the—”
“The painter,” I interrupt, then my face heats when she smirks.
“Mom had a thing for the arts. She loved painters.” Morning light tickles through the door and grazes her heart-shaped face. Something tender but haunted moves in her eyes. “That’s all she ever wanted: to be an artist. To have one finished piece hung in a museum or art gallery.”
“Really?”
“It never happened, though. Too many distractions.”
“Distractions?”
“Yep. Being a single mother. Raising a wild child like myself. Work. That… man.” The last word comes out sharp. A slow-build of venom pollutes my blood. I hope I’m nothing like… that man. Nothing at all.
“She’d say, ‘Frida Williams, be somebody. Make the world remember you.’ And I’d look her dead in the eye and tell her I already was somebody. I was her somebody.” Free’s fingers toy with the collar of her sweatshirt. It’s been cut to shreds, then put back together with safety pins. The Agnes Scott emblem is mangled but familiar.
“What happened?” I ask, too quick, too urgent.
I want to swallow the words. Seventeen years of life, life without birth parents or a half-sister, invade my core and infect my cells and curiosity stands atop Mount Who Are You, glaring victoriously at me.
Free’s expression is lighthearted, but her eyes darken. Maybe she’s caught in this time warp too. Maybe we’re both not ready to walk into this new world.
“What do you want to know?”
“Um.” I look down at the scarred tabletop.
“What happened to her? What happened between her and your… Is sperm donor too harsh?”
I shrug. “Seems accurate.”
Her raspy laugh invades my ears again. I kind of like it.
“Why she gave you up?”
“Uh…”
“How’d I find you?” Free’s eyebrow is arched high, as if she knows that’s my number one question.
My neck is hot. My ears burn. Every muscle in my throat constricts, preventing the raging yes from escaping my mouth. Finally, I whisper, “All of it.”
“All of it? Hmm.” She cups her chin in one hand. Free has more rings than fingers. She says, carefully, “Okay.”
“Okay,” I repeat, uncertain.
“But first, coffee.”
There’s something intensely bizarre about listening to someone tell the history of a family that didn’t exist a month ago. It’s an out-of-body experience. Everything is muted except their voice. I’m breathing, but I’m not. My iced coffee is watered down, but I keep drinking, because my throat is too dry to talk.
The only thing that exists is Free’s voice and eyes and curls. She tells me about Ruby, our mother: her eyes, her voice, her art. Free talks about where she was born, where they lived.
“Decatur, where it’s greater, baby!” Free says with that infectious laughter, with an easiness, as if she’s not exposing her bare bones to her newly-discovered brother. Half-brother.
Free talks with her hands. Everything is dramatic, overwhelming as Times Square. She fills in the gaps about what happened before I was born. Where Ruby worked: line cook during the day, art gallery custodian in the evening. How Free stayed with a different neighbor every night. All the Christmases they spent at Waffle House, then the movies. Ruby was an only child. Her parents—my unknown grandparents—are dead.
“Were you lonely?” I ask, shyly. I haven’t found her line between curious and nosy.
“Boy, I was popular!” She slurps down iced
coffee. She takes it with vanilla and cream, almost like mine. “I was always over at a friend’s house, playing superheroes and climbing trees. You couldn’t keep me out the pool in the summers.”
I think about how Willow loves to swim, too. And then this fuzzy guilt plops on my chest. Should I be thinking about Willow? Is that wrong? To have all these fond, high-definition memories of my adopted sister and relate them to pale, faded memories borrowed from my birth sister? I don’t know.
“Was she happy?”
Free’s eyes finally leave mine. “Sometimes. When she was painting, she was in the clouds. When we did meaningless things, like run barefoot in the grass. Most days, whenever she didn’t…”
Her words trail off, and I don’t question the rest. I know I shouldn’t. Not yet. Not until Free is ready to tell the story.
“She loved too easily,” says Free. Lips pursed, she stirs ice around her cup with the straw. “Way too easy. I suppose that’s how your—”
I clear my throat.
“That man,” she says with a bite to her voice, “had such a lasting impact on her.”
It’s me who’s quiet, this time. I’m not ready to talk about him. Not yet. “Who was her favorite painter?”
“Vermeer. Hals. Ruysch.” Free rolls her eyes. “That woman loved her Dutch Golden Age.”
“Favorite movie?”
“She loved old-school stuff. Imitation of Life.”
“Never seen it.”
Free’s neon-bright laughter has darkened. “The irony of that movie and her life.”
“Did she like music?”
“Jazz,” she says. Her eyes are crinkled, amused. “And anything by a singer-songwriter.”
I sense Dad would appreciate that. Maybe Dad and Ruby would’ve been friends. Maybe I shouldn’t think that way.
“What—” My throat closes around the rest of the words. Behind my eyes, this throbbing sting begins. I’m not ready, I’m not ready, I’m not ready… “Why did she—”
Free lowers her cup. Her hand is warm, strong, as it wraps around mine. My hand is trembling. That little spark of brightness returns to her eyes. She squeezes my hand.
“That man and our mother dated for a few months. Then she found out she was pregnant with you. It wasn’t a fairytale love, but she seemed happy.” Free holds my gaze. “She loved him. Hardcore. But he wasn’t in love with her. He loved the thought of being loved, but not returning it.” That sounds familiar, like a page in a book I’ve read cover-to-cover.
“Six months into her pregnancy, he bailed. She crumpled like wet paper.”
I suck in a breath, though my lungs hurt, though every part of me is numb except that sensation behind my eyes and the skin her hand touches.
“My dad always said, ‘Ruby loved the sauce.’ He’s one of those true-blue southerners.” Free’s laugh is cracked, sad. Her curls fall around her jaw in a dark hood that makes her eyes wider. “She loved to drink, Remy. And she did. Before you. After you. It was her thing. She was an alcoholic—your daddy was just the gateway to her depression.”
“He’s not my daddy.”
She nods, once, smiling but not smiling. “No, he’s not.”
“Why’d she give me up?”
It’s hard not to compact all my curiosity and fear and anger into those five words, five words I never wanted an answer to. I still don’t think I do. But they’re out, hovering between us like a giant spaceship waiting to crash-land into my chest.
Free pulls her hand back. She slouches, not looking at me. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. Maybe this is the one thing Free can’t give me.
“Momma always said, ‘He’s better off where he’s at.’ Every time I asked, I got that same response. I was six when you were born.” Her eyes fall on me, dark and full. “It ain’t easy going from rubbing your mom’s stomach waiting on your little brother to arrive to finding out you’re never gonna meet him. That he’s been taken in by another family. That your mother thinks all the things you have are too worthless to raise a new baby in. That your new brother deserves more, but all of this is good enough for you.”
Anger lives in Free’s voice, but it’s not for me. I can tell. It’s for Ruby. Most of it is for the guy who made her fall in love, then left. None of it’s for me, but here it is: loud and fiery and smacking me in the face.
“I’m sorry.”
Free tuts, shaking her head. “Don’t be. My life, where I’m from is good enough. I’m damn good enough.”
I don’t know how to reply. I almost reach out to grab her hand. I sense she doesn’t want me to. This isn’t Free looking for comfort. This is Free rejecting Ruby’s messed-up idealism.
“When I was younger—after you were born, I used to wonder about you. Wondered if your life truly was so much better without us,” says Free. That hint of resentment still lingers. Even if her expression doesn’t announce it, the tightness of her voice does. “I kept asking and asking about you. What you looked like. Where you were. Was your favorite color purple like mine? But Momma never would tell me.”
And that’s how we’re different. Free wanted to know things about me. I never wanted to know anything other than my family: my parents and Willow.
She shrugs weakly. “Then I gave up.”
I almost reach for her hand again.
“Until Momma died.” She chews on her straw, traces the names on the table with her eyes. “I was eighteen.”
I hiccup, hand over my mouth. Eighteen. I’ll be eighteen in a year. How would I survive without my parents? I wouldn’t.
Free says, “It’s like curiosity reached into my chest, tore away all the muscle and bone, and reminded me, ‘I’m not alone. There’s someone else.’”
“Me,” I whisper.
“You.” She hums. “Luckily, Momma wasn’t great with all her secrets. I knew her passwords. Did a little snooping in her e-mails. It was an open adoption, you know?”
I didn’t. I don’t really know what that means. I tell her as much. Free explains about how, in certain adoptions, the birth parents and the adoptive family come to an agreement that permits limited contact—e-mails exchanged, photos shared. She found a dozen e-mails from my parents to Ruby a few weeks after I was born: a timeline of updates and baby pictures.
“Your mom,” Free’s shaking her head, “I don’t know her, but she seems pretty genuine. In every e-mail, she never stopped thanking Momma.”
I grin at my hands. Abby Cameron, sweeter than a bowl of peach cobbler and vanilla-bean ice cream.
“Momma never replied to your parents. Not one single time. Eventually, they stopped writing her.”
My eyes lift, and we share a long, sad stare. The ‘and then she died’ is left to float in the ether between us.
“I was so angry at her for so long for keeping you from me,” whispers Free, that latch shutting away her anger undone again. “Until I saw those e-mails. Until I realized the reason she couldn’t say a damn thing back was because she didn’t know if she’d done the right thing for both of us.”
“Is that how you found me?”
“It’s not hard to find people nowadays,” she replies. “Social media makes it way too easy. Looked up your parents on Facebook—cute dog by the way.”
“Thanks,” I say, almost laughing.
“Clicked around and there you were.” Free looks away again. “I saw your face and I was a little girl running around the house, shouting about my baby brother again.” Her voice is even softer when she whispers, “I just wanted to know that little boy I never got to meet, to know I wasn’t alone.”
I bite my lip hard enough to taste something sharp, unpleasant. But I don’t flinch in front of Free—only my hand, the one in the middle of the table, a few inches from hers. In my head, I hear a chant, set to my drumming heartbeat: We are not alone. We are not alone.
“God,
why’d you let me go all Viola Davis in the middle of a coffee shop?” She laughs again, brighter. Her fingers brush under her eyelids. Maybe she’s trying to disguise the tears. Maybe I’m rubbing my eyes too.
We finish our coffees. An old couple walks in holding hands. The barista seems to be coming down from an espresso high. The music inside Aurora is a little loud—this cool rotation of reggae versions of vintage songs. I like it. Free’s bopping her head. It’s a nice interlude in our awkward silence.
“Tell me about being seventeen in Dunwoody,” she requests with a low sigh. I can tell she’s pretending to be nonchalant. I wonder if she really wants to know, or if this is just our way of walking around the elephant plopped on the table between us. I’m okay with that.
I tell her about school, about the things she couldn’t learn from Facebook. She tells me about her friends, about what she’s studying—biochemistry, because, unlike for me, science is fun for her—and I tell her about Mr. Riley and about Lucy and Rio and my Zombie Café addiction.
“Do you want to know about my family?” I ask, because I’m high on caffeine. I’m cruising on this moment of sharing things about myself without having to set it to pretty little words in the Essay of Doom.
Free says, quick and sharp, “No.”
And I come down from my high. “But—”
“I’m good,” says Free, jaw tightening. “Maybe one day, but not now.”
My mouth hangs open. Something guarded hardens Free’s features, like a great wall protecting a castle. I don’t understand it. Should I? She’s shared so much about Rudy and herself. I want to reciprocate with things about my family. I stare and stare at her until she turns back to me, shrugging.
“Should I not have—”
“We’ve had enough heavy talks for the day,” Free interrupts with a look in her eyes that’s almost fond again. Almost.
“I’m sorry if—”
“It’s cool.” She rests her chin on her knuckles so just enough of her smirk is hidden. “Let’s talk about you and dating.”
How to Be Remy Cameron Page 18
