“Where the hell have you been?”
It was Cora I was braced for, Cora I was expecting to be waiting when I pushed open the door. Instead, the first thing I saw was Jamie. And he was pissed.
“Jamie,” I heard Cora say. She was at the end of the hall, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Roscoe, who had bolted the minute I dropped his leash, was already circling her feet, sniffling wildly. “At least let her get inside.”
“Do you have any idea how worried we’ve been? ” Jamie demanded.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Do you even care?” he said.
I looked down the hallway at my sister, who had picked Roscoe up and was now watching me. Her eyes were red, a tissue in her hand, and as I realized she, like Jamie, was still in the clothes she’d had on that morning, I suddenly remembered their doctor’s appointment.
“Are you drunk?” Jamie said. I looked at the mirror by the stairs, finally seeing myself: I looked terrible—in Nate’s baggy sweatshirt—and clearly, I stank of booze and who knew what else. I looked tired and faded and so familiar, suddenly, that I had to turn away, sinking down onto the bottom stair behind me. “This is what you do, after we take you in, put you in a great school, give you everything you need? You just run off and get wasted?”
I shook my head, a lump rising in my throat. It had been such a long, terrible day that it felt like years ago, entire lifetimes, since I’d been in this same place arguing with Cora that morning.
“We gave you the benefit of the doubt,” Jamie was saying. “We gave you everything. And this is how you thank us?”
“Jamie,” Cora said again, louder this time. “Stop it.”
“We don’t need this,” he said, coming closer. I pulled my knees to my chest, trying to make myself smaller. I deserved this, I knew it, and I just wanted it to be over. “Your sister, who fought to bring you here, even when you were stupid and resisted? She doesn’t need this.”
I felt tears fill my eyes, blurring everything again, and this time I was glad, grateful for it. But even so, I covered my face with my hand, just to make sure.
“I mean,” Jamie continued, his voice bouncing off the walls, rising up to the high ceiling above us, “what kind of person just takes off, disappears, no phone call, not even caring that someone might be wondering where they are? Who does that?”
In the silence following this, no one said a word. But I knew the answer.
More than anyone in that room, I was aware of exactly the sort of person who did such a thing. What I hadn’t realized until that very moment, though, was that it wasn’t just my mother who was guilty of all these offenses. I’d told myself that everything I’d done in the weeks before and since she left was to make sure I would never be like her. But it was too late. All I had to do was look at the way I’d reacted to what Cora had told me that morning—taking off, getting wasted, letting myself be left alone in a strange place—to know I already was.
It was almost a relief, this specific truth. I wanted to say it out loud—to him, to Cora, to Nate, to everyone—so they would know not to keep trying to save me or make me better somehow. What was the point, when the pattern was already repeating? It was too late.
But as I dropped my hand from my eyes to say this to Jamie, I realized I couldn’t see him anymore. My view was blocked by my sister, who had moved to stand between us, one hand stretched out behind her, toward me. Seeing her, I remembered a thousand nights in another house: the two of us together, another part of a pattern, just one I’d thought had long ago been broken, never to be repeated.
Perhaps I was just like my mother. But looking up at Cora’s hand, I had to wonder whether it was possible that this wasn’t already decided for me, and if maybe, just maybe, this was my one last chance to try and prove it. There was no way to know. There never is. But I reached out and took it anyway.
Chapter Nine
When I came down the next morning, Jamie was out by the pond. From the kitchen, I could see his breath coming out in puffs as he crouched by its edge, his coffee mug on the ground by his feet. It was what he did every morning, rain or shine, even when it was freezing, the grass still shiny with frost all around him. Just a few minutes spent checking on the state of the small world he’d created, making sure it had all made it through to another day.
It was getting colder now, and the fish were staying low. Pretty soon, they’d disappear entirely beneath the leaves and rocks on the bottom to endure the long winter. “You don’t take them in?” I’d asked him, when he’d first mentioned this.
Jamie shook his head. “It’s more natural this way,” he explained. “When the water freezes, they go deep, and stay there until the spring.”
“They don’t die?”
“Hope not,” he said, adjusting a clump of lilies. “Ideally, they just kind of . . . go dormant. They can’t handle the cold, so they don’t try. And then when it warms up, they’ll get active again.”
At the time, this had seemed so strange to me, as well as yet another reason not to get attached to my fish. Now, though, I could see the appeal of just disappearing, then laying low and waiting until the environment was more friendly to emerge. If only that was an option for me.
“He’s not going to come to you,” Cora said now from where she was sitting at the island, flipping through a magazine. The clothes I’d been wearing the night before were already washed and folded on the island beside her, one thing easily fixed. “If you want to talk to him, you have to take the first step.”