“Maybe he’s finally changing.”
“No,” Peter said, shaking his head. “He never changes.”
“Well, then maybe he’s always wanted you there. Maybe he’s just never been able to say it,” Emma said gently. “The thing about parents is that you always just assume they’re supposed to be good at their jobs, because they’re parents. But they’re usually not. So this might be the only way he knows how to tell you.”
Peter frowned. “Tell me what?”
“That he wants you to stay. That he’d miss you otherwise.”
“But the whole point of going to college is that it’s your one chance to escape where you’re from. You get to start over.”
“Oh, that’s the point of college,” Emma teased. “Good to know, since I thought you’d had your nose in a book all these years for fun.”
“Well, it was for fun, actually,” he said with a smile. “But you know what I mean. You’re always trying to escape too.”
“Yeah, but you’re just talking about geography,” she said. “And that’s not always everything.”
Later, as they walked back to the apartment, Peter noticed that Annie had picked a different route. He tried not to let this bother him, but as they headed deeper into an unfamiliar neighborhood and farther from her street, it was all he could do not to ask what was going on; it seemed impolite to question her sense of direction when she’d lived here for over ten years. So instead he studied the spidery cracks in the sidewalk, distracting himself by formulating a new map in his head.
It didn’t surprise him that Emma hadn’t noticed; she was too busy pretending to ignore Annie. And so when they came to a stop before a narrow house with chipped yellow paint and a faded blue door, Emma very nearly bumped into her sister.
“What’s this?” she asked, frowning up at the building, which seemed to slump to one side. Through one of the downstairs windows they could see the huddled form of a sleeping cat, and the wind chimes hanging from the front porch tinkled in the breeze.
“It’s where you lived when you were little,” Annie said with a small smile. “It used to be white with blue shutters, and there wasn’t a porch, but …”
Emma’s face changed, her eyes widening, her mouth turning up at the corners, and she began to pace back and forth along the sidewalk, her head tipped back to take it all in. “Oh, yeah,” she said, pointing at the driveway, the lacework of cracks in the asphalt. “This must be where I tripped when I was still learning to walk.” She raked back the hair from the left side of her face to display a tiny scar that Peter had never noticed. “Three stitches. And we used to take our Christmas photo in front of that tree.” She jogged over to the front corner of the house, where the cement showed beneath the wood paneling. “And that must be where Patrick crashed the car.”
Peter looked on as she pinballed around the yard, and he couldn’t help himself from smiling whenever she did, as if it were something contagious. It was like watching someone reclaim their past, or better yet discover it for the first time. Seeing her this way made him think, unexpectedly, of the pay phone by the river, and all the other pay phones along the way, silent and empty monuments to some great failure, whether his or his father’s Peter couldn’t tell.
But he wished now he’d had the courage not to hang up. All this time he’d been grateful that his dad hadn’t called, but he suddenly wished just the opposite: that rather than teaching him a lesson by letting him go, letting the quiet between them stretch the length of the country, his dad would ask him to come home.
He also knew that the braver thing to do would be to stop waiting, to quit wondering, to go searching and seeking and asking. The braver thing to do was exactly what Emma was doing now. It was being determined to discover the past. It was not letting anything get in your way.
Unfortunately, Peter wasn’t anything like Emma.
He watched her now, pacing the front yard as Annie pointed at the second floor of the house, which seemed to strain forward, leaning toward the telephone wires where a few birds were huddled together.
“Remember how you and Mom used to make signs welcoming me home from school?” Annie asked. “You’d hang them in the windows at Thanksgiving and Christmas. You used to be so excited to see me.”
The smile slipped from Emma’s face. “And you used to be so excited to come home.”
Annie blinked a few times, as if unsure how to respond. “I still am,” she said eventually, but something had shifted, and they stood looking at each other without knowing what to say. A bank of clouds passed overhead, pulling a shadow across the house and the little party standing outside of it, and so one by one they turned to leave, making their way back up the street single file, Annie followed by Emma followed by Peter.
“You should go easy on her,” Peter whispered, feeling both brave and hypocritical at once, waiting for Emma to either snap at him or ignore him. But to his surprise she slowed down and nodded.
“It’s just that she was always so close, just a city or two away, and she hardly ever visited,” she said, her eyes trained on Annie’s back as she led them all home. “I mean, no wonder we have nothing in common. I never got a chance to know her.”
“You’re family,” Peter said simply.
“Maybe so, but I don’t get her.”
“Maybe she doesn’t get you, either.”
“That’s the point,” Emma sighed. “Nobody understands anyone else in my family, and nobody even tries. Least of all with me.”
“It’s not just your family, you know,” Peter pointed out, and then stopped himself. He wanted to say more, to tell her how he suspected everyone felt a little bit alone, that maybe it was impossible to ever be fully understood, and that she wasn’t the only one in the world who felt that way. But he was afraid of breaking the newfound complicity between them.
“Maybe not,” Emma said. “But it sometimes feels that way.”
It wasn’t long before they came across a small city park where a four-man band was playing on the pavilion. Emma made them stop to listen, and as they watched, Peter could tell that the trumpet player—clearly the worst of the quartet—was struggling to keep up with the rest of them. Every so often a stray note would make itself heard amid the other instruments, and the poor man would heave a desperate breath into his horn as he limped through the song.
Peter glanced over at Emma and Annie, both looking on with a similar expression of mildest interest, their heads tilted the exact same way. Nobody else seemed to notice the lagging trumpeter as the trombonist entered the song at high volume and the saxophone kicked up at the chorus.
That was the thing about playing with a band, Peter thought. There was always someone else to rescue you when it seemed certain you might fall behind. Only the solo acts left themselves open to those kinds of disasters.
chapter seventeen
When Charles arrived home from work later, it was with a large bag of takeout food, which he and Annie set about unpacking in the kitchen.
“You guys like sushi, right?” Annie asked as an afterthought, already carrying out a large plate full of little rolls of rice with bits of raw fish peeking out the middle. The dog lifted his nose to catch a whiff, then flattened his ears and backed away with a little whine.
“Don’t know,” Emma said, grabbing one with two fingers. Whatever was holding it together tasted like old seaweed, and she coughed and wrinkled her nose. It was like eating a slug, the way the whole thing went slithering down her throat. “What is this?”
“It’s eel,” Annie said, looking amused.
“No, the part on the outside.”
“Nori.”
“Well, it tastes like seaweed.”
“It is seaweed,” Charles said, grabbing one for himself with a grin. “Maybe I should have ordered a pizza instead.”
Annie stared at them. “You’ve never had sushi before?”
“I once had a goldfish named Sushi,” Peter offered.
“Right,” said Annie, e
vidently not sure how to respond to this. “So, what time are you guys planning to take off in the morning?”
Emma lowered her eyes to the bits of crab on her plate. It was hard to ignore Peter, who was looking at her with such alarm you might have thought there was a gunman standing directly behind her, and she knew he was wondering if they were really—after all they’d been through—just going to slink back home, tails between their legs, without putting up so much as a fight.
The truth was, Emma didn’t know the answer to that yet.
“Whenever we get up, I guess,” she said, still not looking at anyone in particular.
Annie nodded. “So what do you want to do tonight?”
“What are the options?”
“We could play a board game,” Charles said, launching himself off the couch and throwing open the cabinet beneath the flat-screen TV. “Monopoly?”
“Okay, then I call the top hat,” Emma announced, and Annie looked stricken.
“ I was always the top hat,” she said, and Peter and Charles exchanged a look. “Patrick was always the race car, Nate was the dog, and I was the top hat.”
“How am I supposed to know that?” Emma said. “It’s not like you guys ever played with me.”
“Maybe it’s because whenever we tried,” Annie said, “you always got bored as soon as you started to lose.”
“Sounds about right,” said Peter, and Emma shot him a look.
“Fine, then,” she said. “I’ll be the stupid thimble.”
While they played, Emma kept a close eye on her sister, making sure she didn’t snake a hand past Charles to steal money from the bank or nudge her marker forward one space too many to land on Free Parking. The Healy family had a long-established tradition of cheating in these kinds of games, applauding cleverness and ingenuity over straightforward honesty, at least within the realm of the game board.
“It’s run by a pint-size millionaire wearing a tux,” Dad would say whenever Emma attempted to reform them. “I’m pretty sure he expected this sort of thing.”
On her next turn Annie managed to land her little top hat directly in jail. She fumbled through her piles of colored money and handed Peter—who had quite happily agreed to be banker—a fifty.
“What’s this for?”
“You can bribe the banker to get out of jail.”
Charles laughed. “No way.”
“Don’t think so,” Peter said, shaking his head solemnly.
Annie looked over at Emma. “Healy family rules, right?”
Peter cleared his throat politely. “Uh, we play Milton Bradley rules.”
“No way,” Charles said, eyeing the top hat suspiciously. “This game’s corrupt.”
“That’s the point,” Annie and Emma said at the exact same time, grinning at each other in an unexpected display of solidarity.
“The idea is to be clever about it,” Annie explained. “But corruption rules.”
“Exactly,” Emma said. “Jailbirds pay off bankers to let them out early. That’s just the way it is. Healy family rules.”
Peter shrugged and laid the money obediently in the bank, Annie rolled the die, and the top hat went skittering further up the board as they continued to play.
Every so often Emma found herself sneaking a sideways glance at Annie, wondering if she herself looked the same way: competitive and impatient, tensed up as if ready to pounce, yet clearly enjoying herself. It had been a long time since Emma had spent time alone with her, without the rest of the family around to muddle the conversation with talk of philosophy or ethics or poetry.
She was surprised now—and a little unsettled—to see so much of herself in her sister. If you took away the clipped tone of voice and fancy vocabulary, the ramrod-straight posture and refined mannerisms, the similarities between them were undeniable. But it was something that went deeper than that too, a shared background that transcended everything else, and this somehow made Emma uneasy. All day she’d assumed they were butting heads because they were so different, but it now occurred to her that maybe that wasn’t the case at all. Maybe it was because they were so similar.
Underneath the table Peter gave her foot a little kick, and Emma lurched for the die, thinking it was her turn. But when she saw that Charles was preparing to roll, she raised her eyebrows at Peter, who looked embarrassed.
“I’m still sort of hungry,” he mumbled. “The sushi was good; it just wasn’t …”
Annie stood up and stretched. “That’s okay; I could use a snack, too,” she said, heading toward the kitchen. “Popcorn okay with everyone?”
Peter nodded, and after a moment Emma scrambled to her feet to follow Annie out of the room. She was already tearing open a box of microwave popcorn, her head half hidden by an open cabinet.
“You can go back and hang out if you want,” she said. “I’m not much of a cook, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got this covered.”
“What about drinks?” Emma said, opening the refrigerator. “I could help with those.”
Annie shrugged and pulled a few glasses from a shelf, handing them over. “Knock yourself out.”
Emma filled each one with ice, and Annie leaned back against the counter as the popcorn began to heat up, little bursts of noise emerging from the microwave like distant fireworks. Out the window Emma could see the building next door, each lit square revealing a different scene: families eating dinner or watching TV, two people gesturing wildly at a toaster, a fat man with no shirt flipping an egg with a spatula. Emma’s eyes skipped from one to the next, like changing television channels, and when she turned back to her own scene, it was to discover Annie watching her closely.
“So?” she asked, and Emma blinked back at her.
“What?” she said, although she already knew. Annie didn’t answer, just folded her arms, and Emma took a deep breath. “I wanted to go down to North Carolina.”
“To see Nate?”
She hesitated. “That was part of it, I guess.”
“Well, what was the other part?” Annie asked, her mouth turned down at the corners, her green eyes searching Emma’s.
“I know about Thomas,” Emma said finally.
Annie stared at her for a moment, as if searching through the catalog of her mind, a lengthy glossary of schoolmates and colleagues and cousins and friends, seeking among them the Thomas who might have sent her little sister careening south in a stolen car. And when it finally registered—when it seemed to occur to her that it was the Thomas, the only Thomas, the forgotten and the unforgettable, the long-lost but never-quite-gone brother—her mouth curved into a tiny O of surprise.
“How did you … ?” she began, her voice low. “How long have you … ?”
“Not long,” Emma said. “I found the birth certificate in the attic.”
Annie shook her head with a kind of mechanical tempo, back and forth so steadily and for so long that Emma began to wonder whether she was okay. She didn’t think she’d ever seen her sister so discomposed; Annie just stood there looking shaken and edgy and quite suddenly pale. The popcorn had long stopped popping in the microwave, but neither made a move to turn it off, and the burnt smell soon filled the kitchen. The dog padded in to investigate, the toenails of his three good paws clicking unevenly as he crossed the tile floor, and when it became clear that the smell wasn’t going to be followed up with any sort of food, he curled up at Emma’s feet with a sigh.
“It wasn’t meant to be a secret,” Annie said quietly.
“Well, you all did a pretty good job of not bringing it up for seventeen years, then,” Emma said, sliding down along the cabinets until she was sitting on the floor beside the dog, who scooted over to rest his chin on her knee. To her surprise Annie joined her on the floor, sitting cross-legged in her expensive pants, the charred smell of the popcorn hovering like a cloud over their heads.
“Something’s burning,” Charles called out from the other room, but they both ignored him, looking evenly at each other, unsure exactly how to proc
eed.
A part of Emma wanted to wait until Annie apologized, until she reached for the phone to get their parents on the line so that Emma could listen as they all cried and wept and asked her forgiveness for keeping something so important from her for so many years. But the bigger part of her was tired from all the wondering, exhausted by the strain of not knowing, worn out by the guesswork and uncertainty, the near constant reminder of an unsettled past.
And so the question she finally asked was the one she’d been carrying with her the longest, since the moment she first discovered the yellowing piece of paper in the bottom of the box in the attic and saw the name so similar to hers.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s not that we meant to keep it quiet,” Annie said. “But after a while it just seemed easier not to talk about it, not to upset anyone. It wasn’t that we were pretending it never happened. It was just a way of surviving it.”
Annie was an engineer; her job was to test the weaknesses in buildings, to guard against even the faintest of cracks. But Emma could see now how silence had worked its way through the core of her family like an invasion of termites, burrowing and gnawing until the whole thing was on the verge of crumbling. And yet Annie had stood by along with the rest of them, just watching it happen, just waiting for the inevitable collapse.
Emma shook her head. “But even now?” she asked. “So much time’s gone by, and still nobody …”
“It just became a habit, I guess,” Annie said. “I mean, every once in a while someone would try to bring it up, but everybody else would just kind of shut off. You know how our family is; it’s always been easier for us to stick our noses in a book than deal with what’s really going on. Dad had his poems and Mom had her research, and Patrick and Nate and I had school and jobs and futures to think about. It wasn’t that we forgot. But things like that sometimes get stored away, and there never seems to be a good time to dig them up again. It hurts a lot less to keep them buried. That doesn’t make it right, but it’s just the way it is.”