The day she moved out, I woke up with a sore throat. It was a Saturday morning, and I helped her carry her boxes and a couple of suitcases downstairs. My mother stayed in the kitchen, chain-smoking and silent, not watching as we carted out my sister’s few possessions, loading them into the trunk of a Jetta that belonged to a girl named Leslie whom I’d never met before that day and never saw again.
“Well,” Cora had said, when she pushed the hatchback shut, “I guess that’s everything.”
I looked up at the house, where I could see my mom through the front window, moving through the kitchen to the den, then back again. And even with everything that had happened, I remember thinking that of course she wouldn’t let Cora just go with no good-bye. But as the time passed, she got no closer to the door or to us, and after a while, even when I looked hard, I couldn’t see her at all.
Cora, for her part, was just standing there, staring up at the house, her hands in her pockets, and I wondered if she was waiting, too. But then she dropped her hands, letting out a breath. “I’ll be back in a sec,” she said, and Leslie nodded. Then we both watched her slowly go up the walk and into the house.
She didn’t stay long—maybe a minute, or even two. And when she came out, her face looked no different. “I’ll call you tonight,” she said to me. Then she stepped forward, pulling me into a tight hug. I remembered thinking, as she drove away, that my throat was so sore I’d surely be totally sick within hours. But I wasn’t. By the next morning it was gone.
Cora called that first night, as promised, and the following weekend, checking in and asking how I was doing. Both times I could hear chatter in the background, voices and music, as she reported that she liked her roommate and her classes, that everything was going well. When she asked how I was, I wanted to tell her how much I missed her, and that my mom had been drinking a lot since she’d left. Since we’d hardly discussed this aloud face-to-face, though, bringing it up over the phone seemed impossible.
She never asked to speak to my mother, and my mom never once picked up when she called. It was as if their relationship had been a business arrangement, bound by contract, and now that contract had expired. At least that was the way I looked at it, until we moved a few weeks later and my sister stopped calling altogether. Then I realized that deep down in the fine print, my name had been on it as well.
For a long time, I blamed myself for Cora cutting ties with us. Maybe because I hadn’t told her I wanted to keep in touch, she didn’t know or something. Then I thought that maybe she couldn’t find our new number. But whenever I asked my mom about this, she just sighed, shaking her head. “She’s got her own life now, she doesn’t need us anymore,” she explained, reaching out to ruffle my hair. “It’s just you and me now, baby. Just you and me.”
Looking back, it seemed like it should have been harder to lose someone, or have them lose you, especially when they were in the same state, only a few towns over. It would have been so easy to drive to the U and find her dorm, walk up to her door, and announce ourselves. Instead, as the time passed and it became clear Cora wanted nothing to do with me and my mother, it made sense to wipe our hands of her, as well. This, like the alliance between me and my sister all those years ago, was never officially decided. It just happened.
It wasn’t like it was so shocking, anyway. My sister had made a break for it, gotten over the wall and escaped. It was what we both wanted. Which was why I understood, even appreciated, why she didn’t want to return for a day or even an hour. It wasn’t worth the risk.
There were so many times during those years, though, as we moved from one house to another, that I would find myself thinking about my sister. Usually it was late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, and I’d try to picture her in her dorm room forty-odd miles and a world away. I wondered if she was happy, what it was like out there. And if maybe, just maybe, she ever thought of me.
Chapter Three
“Ruby, welcome. Come join us, there’s a free seat right over here.”
I could feel everyone in the room watching me as I followed the outstretched finger of the teacher, a slight, blonde woman who looked barely out of college, to the end of a long table where there was an empty chair.
According to my new schedule, this was Literature in Practice with an M. Conyers. Back at Jackson, the classes all had basic names: English, Geometry, World History. If you weren’t one of the few golden children, anointed early for the AP-Ivy League fast track, you made your choices with the minimal and usually disinterested help of one of the three guidance counselors allotted for the entire class. Here, though, Mr. Thackray had spent a full hour consulting my transcript, reading descriptions aloud from the thick course catalog, and conferring with me about my interests and goals. Maybe it was for Jamie’s benefit—he was super donor, after all—but somehow, I doubted it. Clearly, they did things differently here.
Once I sat down, I read over my list of classes, separated into neat blocks—Intro to Calculus, Global Cultures and Practices, Drawing: Life and Form—twice, figuring that would give people adequate time to stare at me before moving on to something else. Sure enough, by the time I lifted my head a couple of minutes later to turn my attention to the teacher, a cursory check revealed everyone else was pretty much doing the same.
“As you know,” she was saying, walking over to a table in front of a large dry-erase board and hopping up onto it, “we’ll be doing several assignments over the course of the rest of the year. You’ll have your research project on the novel of your choosing, and we’ll also be reading a series of memoirs and oral histories.”