Another night when just Maggie and I were home, I stayed awake after she went to bed. I roamed through the house, picking up books and trinkets at random, peering into cabinets, closets, the freezer. At last I went up to my room and crawled out the window and perched on the roof, pretending to be at ease though the air was biting and there were shingles pressing into my butt, and I didn’t want to move around too much because I was afraid of falling. I liked sitting on the roof, but I was also posing there, posing for nobody. Sometimes I would bring a notebook out with me and write wretched poems—once I’d torn one out and then lost my grip on the paper, so that it flew away and landed in the neighbor’s pool. But that night I just sat with my hands around my knees and shivered and wondered what it would be like to fall, to go sliding over the gutter and land on the back deck.
I heard the phone ring and hoisted myself back inside. On the other end of the line, Courtney’s voice was low and flat, steady like she was trying to keep it steady. “Can you get Dad?”
I told her he was still at the lawyer’s office.
“It’s almost midnight.”
“He’s not here.”
“Seriously,” she said, and then hung up. I lay down on my parents’ bed, the bed upon which I’d been, or at least might’ve been, conceived. I listened to the clang of the heating pipes. I put my cold hands over my face, and when I did I saw Courtney’s face disembodied and surrounded by sunbursts of yellow and pink, as if her head were inside some psychedelic television set. She wasn’t in trouble and she wasn’t smiling either. She was floating there coolly. I slid to the floor and went to the door of Maggie’s room and peeked in: she was curled up in a lump in the middle of her bed. Her faint snuffle had a hint of melody to it, against the ticking of the clock. The phone rang again.
“He’s not answering at the law firm,” Courtney said.
“Where are you?”
Her voice took a cracked, woozy turn. “I don’t know. I don’t feel good.”
“Okay. What do you see around you?”
“Wisconsin Avenue.”
“Who are you with?”
“Nobody. I just need Dad to come pick me up.”
“I can come in Mom’s car.”
“You don’t have your license.”
“Duh. I can still drive.”
“I have the spare key with me.”
“Then get a cab? Or do you want to wait for Dad? I’m sure he’ll be home soon.”
“Why are you sure?”
“Just tell me where you are.”
She said, “I’m—” Then her voice cracked. “Shit. Shit.”
“Should I call—”
“No! Don’t call anybody. I just need to fucking get picked up.”
“Just tell me where you are right now! I’m calling a cab!”
“I’m near the grocery store.” It was another battle to get her to tell me which one she meant, and she kept saying she didn’t want a cab, no, no, and so I told her I was coming to get her. I didn’t know how I would do it. “Just stay where you are. I’m on my way.”
“I need a sweater,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Or a coat or a blanket. I’m freezing.”
I called Anthony. We’d been avoiding each other. Once in a while I’d catch him watching me, in the lunchroom or in class, with a look on his face that I would describe as forensic. Still, he had his own phone line, one I could call without waking his parents, and I knew he would help. He’d spent his summers as a camp counselor, and at school the teachers would entrust him with tasks like taking copies over to one of the classrooms or showing a new kid around. The sound of his sleepy voice comforted me, though when I told him why I was calling I got scared again.
While he was on his way, I filled a school duffel, the kind we used for our gym gear, with things I thought might be needed. I had become entirely practical but had lost common sense in the bargain, packing not just a sweater but also sweatpants, a plastic baggie full of crackers, a package of wet wipes, a handful of Band-Aids, and a bottle of room-temperature cranberry juice. Courtney was fine, she was fine, I said to myself. I’d just talked to her and she was waiting for us and I was bringing supplies and she would be fine.
I must’ve looked all too happy to see Anthony. He turned quickly away from me and, facing the windshield, asked me where to go.
The night was a forest of traffic signals diffusing in the haze. Anthony drove fast but not fast enough for me. At one point he slowed for a yellow light that he easily could have sped through.
“No rush or anything,” I said.
“Where are your parents?”
“My mom’s out of town and my dad’s still with his lawyers, I guess.”
“It’s, like, midnight.”
“They have a lot of work to do.”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“What does that mean?”
“I bet all those guys are going to get away with it. They’ll get off scot-free,” he said. He stared at the road the whole time.
“I don’t know about the ones who did it, but my dad didn’t do anything.”
“Okay.”
“He didn’t. He wasn’t in charge.”
In his silence he was a bastard, and I couldn’t believe him, despised him, what did he know? I might have said something, but we’d come to the part of Wisconsin Avenue where the Giant Food was, where Courtney had said she would be.
I didn’t see her. I saw the supermarket’s tall windows with that week’s specials taped to them, and I saw a homeless person cocooned against the store’s red brick wall. Oh god, I kept saying.
Anthony tried to reassure me. She probably got a taxi, he said.
We can’t leave, I said, and we circled, driving past the store and halfway around the block, taking the back way into the store parking lot and then going around again. After three or four circuits I made Anthony stop the car. He tried to tell me that there was nothing I’d see on foot that we hadn’t already seen, he said that maybe she’d been talking about a different store, but I got out anyway. It was windier than it had been when we left the house, and I didn’t have any plan about what to do. I paced and waited for her to, I don’t know, burst out of the ground like a crocus or a missile. And at the same time I had this view of myself, I saw myself from a distance, the middle sister in a fairy tale—a fucked-up fairy tale in which our girl in her jeans and rugby shirt wanders piteously back and forth in front of Giant Food, now the castle in which her beautiful sister has been imprisoned.
And then there she was, treading slowly from the shadowy end of the block, where the police substation was. She looked awful, and she had on this weird shimmery dress that had bunched up on one side, so that the skirt hung aslant. Her face was a smear of laments I’d never seen on her face before. Her hands were clenched into fists, and as soon as she saw that I’d seen her, she put her head down. I wanted to run toward her but didn’t. I walked, and when I was close enough to touch her, I put my hand on the back of her thin arm and guided her to the car. And that meant something, to me at least: in spite of the fear and the unreal feeling I had the whole night, like we were in some strange play about the lives of other kids who had our same bodies, I would hold on to that sensation of my hand on her arm and walking right by her side, just like I made a keepsake of that little slap she gave me during basketball tryouts. Both times the contact was so brief, but in those moments I knew what we were, I knew we had a piece of each other.
Just as we reached Anthony’s car, a black Isuzu Trooper pulled up behind, familiar to me because I’d seen Rob drive it. But it wasn’t Rob who jumped out, it was Mr. Mitchell, looking dazed. He scrambled toward us and took Courtney’s other arm, and as soon as he did she left my side and collapsed toward him as if he were her own father. And he was stiff but also kind, he told her she was safe, she was on her way home. He asked, “Are you hurt?” She shook her head, and shook her head again.
He insisted on taking her to the house himself. I asked if she wanted her sweater or some juice, she said no, and they climbed into the Trooper. I got back into Anthony’s car. He turned off the tape player and drove so slowly, the car was like a boat on a still lake, skimming toward a rotten dock. Better to stay out on the water. I wished we would.
When we made it to Albemarle Street, the Trooper was idling at the curb. The doors opened, and as Courtney and Mr. Mitchell started toward the porch I stayed where I was. Anthony’s eyes were tired and steady.
“See you Monday,” he said. I could tell that he didn’t want me anymore, and that his wanting me had been the furnace of our friendship. It was something I’d let burn too high. I’d wasted it. Still, the wanting, a remnant of it at least, had to be in there somewhere: I was looking for it in his eyes and didn’t see anything at all. I leaned forward and kissed him. I felt it, but he wouldn’t let it out. He pushed me back and said good night.
From the bottom of the stairs I saw the door swing open, and there was our dad. He saw Courtney and then he saw Mr. Mitchell. I don’t even know how to describe the look on his face: it was all out of whack, anger and relief and confusion mottling him, hitting him in waves. What was his friend doing there? He must’ve wondered that. With all that beating on him from the inside he had to grab on to the doorjamb to support himself.
I hesitated to go up the stairs. I saw Courtney glide past him, and he and Mr. Mitchell stood there talking, though not for long. By the time I’d started upward, Mr. Mitchell was coming down. He gave me a tight nod as he went past.
Courtney had fled to her room, and so I was all Dad had left. “Where the hell were you?” he asked. He smelled like alcohol. I had no idea what to say, and so I just told him I’d gone to pick up Courtney but Mr. Mitchell had beat me to it. My father, uncomprehending, told me I should go to bed.
The next morning Courtney came into my room, very composed, with a sad, noble burnish about her.
“What did you say to Dad?” she asked, and then, after I told her I hadn’t said anything, she fed me a story. “Here’s what happened. Tanya’s car wouldn’t start, and so I was stuck at the party and you had to come pick me up.”
“Where were you really?” I asked her.
“That’s what happened.”
“No, for real.”
I didn’t think she would tell me a thing, but then she said, “I just got together with the wrong guy. He was being a jerk, so I left the party by myself.”
This hardly filled it all in for me, but I knew better than to press her. “So how come Mr. Mitchell showed up?”
“I wasn’t sure if you would make it, so I called Rob. His stepdad was the one to answer the phone.”
We were both grounded for two weeks, Courtney for staying out too late and me for leaving Maggie alone at the house. Not that it made Courtney any friendlier toward me—she mostly stayed in her room and listened to music. At school there was something in the air, I caught the scent of it now and again and tried to track it down. I would walk up to people and they would go quiet, and I’d know they’d been saying something about my sister. I just knew. What? I’d ask. And they’d make up something. There was a story about Courtney making the rounds, I could feel it.
* * *
Whatever happened that night, it didn’t visibly traumatize Courtney, it didn’t stop her from going out or from going out with boys in particular (there was Jesse, who had a band, and then Paul, who was Canadian), and eventually I came to remember that night as one of the last times I’d talked to Anthony, all but forgetting the reason I’d been with him. But my sister did continue down the path she’d already started down, one that led away from the rest of us. She let slide much of what she’d once cared about, everything from grades to shaving her legs. Her eighteenth birthday came and went; she barely acknowledged our presents and went out to celebrate with her friends. Her room started to look like mine: what had once been a showcase for trophies arranged just so, for books set with their spines all the same distance from the edge of the shelf, a desk with an absolutely clean surface, and the bulletin board on which photos of her friends and of Matt Dillon and a couple of mix-tape track lists had been perfectly aligned, this same room now had sweaters heaped over the unmade bed, candy wrappers on the radiator cover. A couple of times, when she wasn’t home, I went up to her room and started straightening up, even though my own room was still a mess.
One day I saw that she’d thrown all her trophies and ribbons and certificates in the trash can. I couldn’t help myself: I exhumed them and placed them back on top of the bookshelf where they’d stood before.
Of course, as soon as she came home and saw them, she guessed that I had put them there, and she barged into my room and told me I was not to go “trespassing” again. She said it like I’d gone deer hunting. Her speech lasted another couple of minutes. The carping was as familiar as could be, but the skinny almost-woman who stood before me was not my familiar sister. It was like somebody else had stolen my sister’s voice. In my disorientation I hardly listened to what she said. I wanted the other Courtney back, the one who may not have liked me that much but who was my sister all the same. I wanted my old sister back, I wanted my old family back, and in that moment the wanting was so immediate and so total that I had a glimpse of mortality, i.e., that I would never get them back.
Then Courtney went out and banged the door shut behind her. Even from the floor beneath hers I could hear the clatter of the trophies as they went again into the trash.