I could not avoid this week’s call from home. My mother called every Sunday at ten A.M., without fail, like the faithful summoned to church. My sister got her calls on Sunday evening because of her work schedule. I’d asked her when we were together last Christmas if Mom felt the need to check in with her weekly as well, keeping tabs on her general life progress, and was relieved to discover that she did. It was moments like this when I felt closest to my sister: one of the few elements still tethering us together.
Rebecca had laughed and said she’d rather get her calls over with earlier, like me, and get on with her day, but I thought she was lucky. Meanwhile, I’d have to spend the rest of Sunday replaying the conversation, considering my atonements.
Last week I’d avoided my mom’s call by saying I needed to catch up on an assignment for my teaching certification classes, and she’d understood. Two weeks in a row, though, and she’d grow more concerned (was I falling behind? was I balancing everything okay?). The irony being that this week, I did really need to catch up.
I answered on the first ring—better to get it over with, to face it head-on. “Hi, Mom.”
“Good morning, Leah. How goes the education of the next generation?”
“Fine. It’s a busy time of year. We’re entering midterms, so I’ve got a lot of grading.”
I started cleaning up the kitchen, straightening Emmy’s knickknacks. I found it best to multitask while on the phone with my mother, to defray the nervous energy. Ever since I left Boston, I’d felt I had something to prove to her.
“Rebecca’s having a particularly busy time, too,” she said. “Something about a highly competitive fellowship application. I don’t know the specifics. Maybe she’s told you about it?”
“No,” I said, “she hasn’t told me.” No matter what my mother claimed, she knew exactly what my sister was working on. This was her reminder that I should keep up more with my sister. A seemingly endless hope she had for us, though Rebecca and I had never quite had that type of relationship. My mother had decided, years ago, that competition fueled success. Rebecca and I did not enter into this agreement willingly, instead veering so far from each other that we could never be considered on the same playing field.
As I’d gotten older, I could understand why our mother pushed so hard. She raised us by herself after our father left when we were five and eight. He had another family somewhere, one I had no interest in meeting. A second try, a do-over. My mother had a pretty decent settlement, and the checks kept coming until I’d turned eighteen.
But she did it on her own, raising us. She put herself through nursing school after he left, and she made sure we were always prepared to stand on our own feet. So we would never be blindsided, as she once was. I don’t remember much about that time, other than our neighbor watching us more often than not, but I wondered if Rebecca did. If that was why she was a little more driven, a little more stoic, a little tougher. If she saw who my mother had been before, and fought against it. If she remembered the days or weeks or months before my mother picked herself up and pushed on.
For as long as I could remember, Rebecca was always the independent one. She achieved everything my mother had hoped, going to med school, excelling during her residency, never worrying about who would support her. Never being caught without a fallback plan when life didn’t turn out as expected. Never having a boyfriend turn on her, turn her in. Never living at the whim of another—on a pullout couch, in a basement apartment, all exposed nerves.
My mother always said Rebecca was the practical one—that she could buckle down and get things done. In a crisis, she was the one you’d want.
I, on the other hand, felt too deeply and relied on other people too heavily. I let things get to me, let them simmer and grow until they took me over. I threw myself into a job, a story, a relationship, with no fallback, and was surprised each time I got knocked down, scrambling for anything to hold on to. Sometimes I wondered if I was an affront to my mother’s brand of feminism.
But when I graduated from college with my degree in journalism, she was just as happy as I’d remembered her being at Rebecca’s graduation. Look at you, she’d said. How you’ve channeled your faults into strengths. As if one had been merely masquerading as the other all along.
I figured she was talking about my attraction to the morbid, as she called it. Always wrinkling her nose when she said it. There was something vaguely distasteful about the books I chose, all gory thrillers, and the crime documentaries I watched, the way I’d browse the obituaries—all distant memories I could solve. And now I had channeled that into something worthwhile, built a life around it. The words I’d overheard years earlier, warming me on the inside: Rebecca helps the ones who can be saved, and Leah gives a voice to those who cannot. We were still two sides of the same coin, a pair, a unit.
“Have you met anyone, Leah?”
“I’ve met a lot of people, Mother.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
I thought of Kyle. Of Davis Cobb. “I went out on Friday with a woman I work with. We had a good time.”
“Great,” she said. “Have you decided on next semester, then?”
She didn’t seem to understand that this job wasn’t temporary. Still clinging to the idea that I was on a brief sabbatical, that I’d get it out of my system and then return to my predicted life.
“I signed a contract for the full year,” I said. “Which I’ve told you before.”
“Right. It’s just, I was speaking to Susanna—you remember her son, Lucas?—and she said he’s been freelancing in New York. Apparently, there’s a lot of movement there, if you’re looking for a change. If things went south with Noah, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t want to work together anymore.”
I pressed my fingers into my temples. Grabbed a rag and started scrubbing the counters. “It’s not about Noah, Mom.”
“Leah,” she said. “Why don’t you come home for a little while. Take a long weekend, some time away.” But I was no longer listening.
I looked out the window, saw a shadow fall across the front porch—hadn’t heard the footsteps on the stairs or any car coming up the drive. I dropped the phone to my hip, heard my mother’s voice call my name from far away.
I stepped slowly, softly, toward the glass door. Raised the phone to my face and whispered, “Mom, I have to go. Someone’s here.”
“Who?” she asked. But I’d already pressed the end key.
By the time I slid the door open, whatever had been there was gone. A pitter-patter of steps, a rustle of leaves and branches. I stared off into the woods, squinting. The sun was still low, and I wondered if something small could cast a larger shadow. A cat on the banister. A coyote. A dog. Or whether it was something more.
Whether it was the same person who had left me the newspaper.
And if so, what the hell they were after.
I DO NOT FEEL safe in this house. It was a sudden, fleeting thought, gone as quickly as it had appeared. But I had learned to trust my instincts. I had learned to pay attention to those sudden, fleeting thoughts. And so I did what I would’ve told anyone else to do before they became the story themselves.
Get out.
I thought of Emmy missing, and James Finley in my house, and his record that Kyle had detailed in this very room. I wondered if the police had already picked him up for questioning or if he was out there still.
I threw some clothes in an overnight bag, packed up my laptop and my schoolwork, my phone charger. I checked out the front doors, the side window, before I grabbed my keys and left. Then I drove myself over to Break Mountain Inn, where I parked in the lot in front of the lobby. I sat in my car, waiting, watching the road in the rearview mirror.
A single car drove by without slowing down, but the Sunday-morning streets were otherwise calm and empty. None of the cars in the lot looked familiar. I grabbed my bag and walked into the lobby.
A man looked up—the same man I’d seen the evening I went out looking for Emmy. “You again,” he said. He looked at the bag slung over my shoulder, and then at me, in my Sunday-lounge-around-the-house outfit, and grinned.
“Hi,” I said. “I need a room for the night.”
“Sure thing,” he said, his eyes glowing from the reflection in the computer screen. “The full night, then?”
“Yes,” I said. I handed him my credit card and leaned against the counter. “Hey, did the guy you were covering for ever show back up?”
He handed me a key on a ring, the number 7 written on a tag hanging from the loop. “Guess not, since I’m still here.”
“Thanks,” I said, pushing through the door.
I strode down the sidewalk, passed the three other cars in the lot, heard the television in a room as I walked by, laughter from another. Tried to picture Emmy walking this same strip with James Finley, using a key, laughing, and Jim following her inside.
I tried not to picture the moment everything might’ve gone wrong.
The room had gray carpet and tan walls and a thin green comforter over a queen-size bed. Thick beige curtains hung from the windows, and I pulled them closed and flipped the light switch, which cast a yellow circle over the bed. I slid the deadbolt and dropped my bags and thought, for a moment, that this was it. This was rock bottom.
I had brought myself to a place where people stop caring who you are or what happens to you. The type of place where people don’t look too closely or for too long.
A girl from the apartments, wandering alone at night by the lake.
Emmy, hanging around some guy with a criminal record in a place like this.
A woman by herself, paying for a motel room by the night—in the same town where she lived.
If I got called out here to report on a crime—a woman found dead in the bathtub, blunt-force trauma to the head; or strangled on the bed, eyes open and fixed on the ceiling; or robbed at knife point in the parking lot—I’d know with sickening accuracy, before I even got the facts, that it wouldn’t be seen as worthy of the front page. It wouldn’t be the big story.
Depending on the day, on the rest of the shitty things done to or by other people that particular cycle, it might get nothing more than a mention in the crime beat. Any reader would give it a quick read, a shake of the head, before moving on.
I knew what they’d be thinking, skimming for the relevant details before drawing their inevitable conclusion:
What did you expect?