“That shouldn’t have happened to you.” That’s all Chatham says when I tell her about Damien, about the scar on my arm. She doesn’t try to explain it, or rationalize, or even let my mother off the hook. There’s no judgment implied at all beyond it’s wrong.
We’re in the den now. I’m on the couch, and she’s on the floor across the coffee table from me. She’s wearing my football sweatshirt and a pair of my sports socks because a girl from Georgia doesn’t understand the fickle whims of autumn in Chicago. She looks good in my clothes. Small. She’s rolled the sleeves up a few times.
“You can’t pick your parents.” She sips from the glass of water I brought her, and I see something in her expression—resignation, maybe, or a sense of survival—that bonds us through past experiences we haven’t yet verbalized. “I didn’t pick either set.”
Either set? I do a double take, try not to stare too expectantly, but it’s obvious I have to know what she’s talking about.
“It’s kind of a crazy story,” she says.
“Crazier than the one I just told you?”
“No comparison . . . it’s a different kind of crazy. Loretta and Wayne.” She takes another drink of water—I watch her, the bob of her swallow in a perfect peach neck—and follows it up with a sweep of her tongue over her lips.
Lips I’ve kissed, thank you very much.
Savannah’s adopted, I know that.
And Chatham’s told me that they weren’t biological sisters.
But I assumed that Loretta and Wayne were Chatham’s biological parents.
“They didn’t adopt me because I have parents. A mom, anyway. My father’s dead.” She says it so matter-of-factly.
And I can’t help but think maybe this is why I’m drawn to her. I have a mom. I have a father, but he isn’t even in the periphery of my life. He’s never even seen me.
“So technically, I’m a foster. My biological mother. She’s sort of . . . I don’t know . . . ever hear the term unfit?”
“Are you kidding? I live with unfit.”
She laughs a little, but then her voice goes quiet. “My mother left me in a hot car on a ninety-degree day when she ran an errand.” She uses air-quotes with the last word. “I mean, if you can call a drug run an errand . . .”
“God.”
“I was little. I don’t really remember it beyond the sensation of loss.” She blinks, meets my gaze, then redirects to the Scrabble board that I never put away. “I was the only one who survived.”
“The only one?”
“I had a baby brother.”
“He died?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t imagine losing my sisters. How do you . . . how do you forgive something like that? Do you still, you know, see her?”
“I used to see her sometimes. Supervised visits. Every couple years, she’d request a visit. Not often. Last time, about five years ago, she basically told me I wasn’t her daughter anymore, so . . . yeah. That was the end of that.”
“I can’t even imagine.” Rosie may hate me from time to time, but she’s never actually disowned me. “That shouldn’t have happened to you.” I know it’s her line, but it’s still true.
“Do you ever think about the ripple effect?” she finally asks. “Something seemingly insignificant you do one day could affect you years down the road?”
“Like watching a girl’s backpack so she can take a swim?”
“Exactly.” A nervous kind of giggle escapes her. “It’s like whatever happened to make my mother leave us in that car that day, it led me to Savannah. It led me here.” She takes a breath like she’s about to explain to me why, or how, we so naturally seem to fit together. Why she decided to trust me the first second she saw me.
It’s because of this story about the hot car, maybe. The neglect, the feeling that you just don’t matter enough, which is an emotion I’m more than in touch with. Or maybe it’s the other hints she’s dropped in my lap about Wayne, about the things he’s done, versus the things Savannah has tried to pin on him. About the girl under the floorboards in the stables, about Loretta not saying anything out of turn.
“We understand each other,” I say.
I wait for her to confirm it.
But instead, she says, “Wasn’t it seventy-two degrees just yesterday?”
What? I let a few beats pass. I don’t want to talk about the weather. Not now. But when she doesn’t say anything else, I agree. “Yeah.”
“It’s freezing tonight.”
“Well, you’re in shorts.”
“No, I mean, it happened so quickly. It was so nice, and pleasant, and I figured I had time to plan for the cold, but no. It came in like Hell’s Angels. For someone who’s used to a steady climate, these drastic shifts in temperature are jarring.”
“That happens here sometimes.”
“I don’t know how you get used to it.”
“You don’t.” I play off her D: dent. “Some years it’ll go from eighty to forty in a week. It always sucks.”
“That’s messed up.”
This isn’t where I wanted the conversation to go. I didn’t tell her about my mother, about Rosie’s fucked-up second husband—Richard “The Dick” Herron—whose kid used to repeatedly ram my head into the wall in the bedroom we shared only because Dick used to beat the crap out of him, or about our recent dramas with Damien, or the night two years ago when he knifed me, so that she’d spill her guts about whatever she’s been through.
But I want to keep talking about stuff that really matters. I want to know everything about her. I don’t want to talk about the weather.
“I guess I’ll have to get something other than shorts to wear.”
Is it weird that she’d arrive at the end of summer without something other than shorts and tank tops and the occasional hoodie in her suitcase? A nervous twinge, like a twisting in my gut, makes me feel dizzy for a second. They really didn’t plan on staying here, did they? After all, how long would it take them to realize Savannah was or wasn’t in Sugar Creek? Please, I pray to whichever god will listen. Let me have her a little bit longer.
“I swear, I can’t find anything. I’m going to have to hit a mall soon. But the bus schedule to get there . . . take the north line to this hub, and the west line back . . .”
“Or . . . I could take you.”
“Really?” She’s smiling like it’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever offered her. “God, that’d be great. I mean, so much easier.”
“Not a problem. Might have two little chaperones, so we can’t stay hours, but—”
“Thanks.”
It’s really not that big of a deal, but she reaches over the table and places her cool hand over mine. She’s freezing. Her fingers trace my knuckles.
I’m staring into her eyes, and for the first time, I understand how someone might get lost in a gaze. “Think you might want to buy a dress? There’s a dance in a couple weeks, and . . .” I shut up. Is asking her moving too fast?
“Homecoming?” she asks.
Of course she’s seen the banners and all the flyers in the hallways, and heard the hype about voting for court and king and queen. I don’t know why I didn’t just call it what it is.
“I don’t usually get that much into it, but I checked my mom’s schedule,” I say, even though that proves I’ve considered asking Chatham, and this isn’t just a snap decision. “She’s not supposed to work that night, and yeah, I’d like to take you.”
In a flash, she’s leaning over the table, kissing me. Her lips are cool from the water. And when her tongue brushes against mine, it’s like all that’s troubling melts away. Our bodies come together, and even if it can’t last forever, in this moment, it’s pure nirvana.
I lean closer, make my way around the table. My hands are planted at her hips. I graze my fingertips against the fringe of cut-off denim at her thighs; she doesn’t seem to mind. And before I know it, we’re on the floor in front of the fireplace. I stare down at her.
She wraps her arms a little tighter around me, and pulls me a touch closer. “See what I mean? You watched my bag on a beach, and here we are.”
“I almost want to tell you to run. Everything you’ve already been through, all the drama with Savannah . . . You don’t need to be caught up in my mess, too.”
She shakes her head. “Smile. I like your smile.”
I can’t help it. I smile.
“It doesn’t matter what happened before. All the shit you’ve been through . . . everything I’ve been through . . . it’s just the bones of life. We get to flesh it out. It’s structure, like the wire base of a papier maché sculpture. Looking at it, you won’t even know what it’s supposed to be until the paper goes on. We—our dreams, our actions, our decisions—are like the paper. We shape over the structure, see.” She licks her lips. “The bones, the wire bases . . . they’re important. But it’s not the final product, not what anyone sees when they look at you.”
“I think some people see it.”
“Really? When you look at me, do you see one-hundred-twenty degrees in an old Nissan?”
Maybe she’s right.