No One Knows Us Here(4)

“Were you?” Wendy asked.

“Was I what?”

“Acting.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“So the minute you take off for college, I never hear from you again? And then our parents die and it’s like, ‘Have a nice life’?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like, then? Explain it to me.”

I had left her. That was true. I had left her deliberately and completely. Our mother, too. It was for her own good, I wanted to tell her. I had planned to leave years before I did, as a teenager. The only thing that got me through my teen years was the knowledge that one day they would end. After I graduated from high school, I would go off to college and never come back. I applied to colleges all over the country and a couple outside the country. I wanted to get as far away as possible. I didn’t get any farther than Portland, Oregon. A small liberal arts college had not only accepted me but given me the most generous scholarship, so that was where I landed.

I hugged my mom and sister goodbye and vowed to never see them again. They would be better off without me. That was what I believed.

That first Thanksgiving, I didn’t go home. I stayed in Portland in a special dorm for all the other stragglers, the exchange students and the kids who couldn’t afford a plane ticket. After that it was easier. I made friends. I never went home again and discouraged my family from visiting. It was that simple.

It was Wendy’s grandmother—my step-grandmother, I guess—who got a hold of me to tell me the news near the end of my junior year. I never asked how she tracked me down. My mother and stepfather had died in an accident, she said. I was sitting in the library, studying with a group of friends. Philosophy 312. Ethical Theories. I watched my classmates, their heads huddled together over books, while she talked. They’d driven straight off the edge of the mountain in broad daylight, she’d said. They were dead. I’m sorry, I remember telling her. You must have the wrong number. I ended the call, just like that.

“It wasn’t about you,” I said to Wendy after a moment. I took a few gulps of my wine, just to get it down. A dull pain throbbed behind my eyes.

“My parents just died! How was it not about me? Didn’t I factor into it at all? Didn’t you wonder, gee, what is my little sister going to do now?”

I shook my head and frowned. “What can I say? I’m a selfish bitch.” The truth was, when Wendy’s grandma called to tell me the news, I hadn’t thought of Wendy at all. That was what a normal person would have done, right? Think of her little sister? To be fair, I hadn’t thought much of myself, either. I had gone back to studying and focused on my notes. It was as if her words had entered my head but then immediately been erased.

The next day I got up and aced that test.

It hit me later that evening, when I was sitting around with a group of friends in their weird run-down house that was painted Pepto Bismol pink with brown trim. I was with Steele at that point, though it was fairly new at the time. We were passing around some disgusting drink—generic Kool-Aid and lower-shelf vodka—and at some point someone asked me what was wrong. I was just sitting there, practically catatonic, staring into space, glugging down that punch. I think my mom just died, I announced. I don’t remember much after that. I don’t even remember how I managed to make it to the funeral. Did I buy myself a plane ticket? Did one of my friends? It didn’t seem like something I would have been capable of doing on my own.

Was I thinking of my twelve-year-old sister, wondering how she was doing or who was taking care of her? She didn’t even cross my mind. Not back then.

“I know what it was about,” Wendy said. “I know why you left and never came back.” Her chair scraped across the balcony, closer to me. I could feel her wine-scented breath in my ear. Her eyes were huge, wild, scanning my face for a response.

My hands gripped the armrests in a flimsy attempt at steadying myself. I tried to keep my expression blank, neutral.

“I know what my dad did to you,” she said, so softly I could almost believe I was hallucinating.

A shiver ran through me, though the air was still warm, at the tail end of summer. Even in the middle of the night. I pulled the blanket tight around my shoulders and let my eyelids sink down, the way they might in church, before a prayer.

“Wendy—”

“I know because he did it to me, too.”

Everything went sideways, all at once. All the wine went straight to my head, and I felt drunker than I’d ever been. I tried to screw my eyes shut, clamp them closed, but it made everything worse, like I was seasick, lurching back and forth, this close to capsizing.

It was the worst moment of my life. Worse even than the phone call announcing my mother’s death.

“You don’t have to cry about it,” Wendy said, and that’s when I realized that tears were streaming down my cheeks, snot was leaking from my nose. “You had to have at least suspected—”

“He was your father,” I managed to say at last. “Your own father.” Fathers do bad things to their daughters all the time. I knew that. I just didn’t think Jason would do that to Wendy. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me. “I never would have left,” I said. “You’ve got to believe me.”

She shrugged, like she was over it now.

I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead, trying to release the pressure forming behind my skull. “No, no, no,” I muttered to myself. And then I yelled out onto the street, a wordless cry, so loudly a flock of birds in a nearby tree startled, flapped their wings, rustled the leaves, and shot out, one after the other, frenzied. Then they were gone, their dark figures receding into the distance.