“She’s different from anything I expected,” Chase whispers once we hear Ruth pad her way into the bathroom. We can both see the light on in there through the gap in our bedroom door. I undress hurriedly, as if being timed.
“You told me you thought she was probably dead,” he says.
I don’t take the bait. I’ve got nothing to say. The last thing I’m doing is explaining myself.
He gets into bed and sits cross-legged, a child with a big man-chest. “I kind of had this idea in my head that if she was alive, she was living out of dumpsters or shouting at pigeons. But she seems … normal. Why do you think she showed up now?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Is it? You told me she was a drug addict.”
“She is. She was. She was when I last saw her.” I toss my T-shirt to the ground. “Look, she abandoned my entire family. Just up and ran away from us all, never to be seen again. I didn’t know what became of her. She was a mess. I just assumed the worst.”
He glares at me as if I’m not apologizing enough.
“When it comes to the details of my life, Chase, you’re hardly a master code cracker. You barely show interest.”
“Hey, don’t turn this around. Whenever I ask about your past, I get one-word answers and shrugs. And besides, I’m not mad that she’s here. She’s your sister, after all. She’s family.” His jaw clenches. “I just want to know who I’m welcoming into my house.”
“Excuse me?”
“Our house.” He sighs. “You’ve always said your sister was serious trouble. So is she or isn’t she?”
“Why don’t you decide? You’re the one who invited her in for dinner.” I stamp my pants to the ground and leave them there.
“I was trying to be nice! I didn’t know what to do. You weren’t offering many cues as to how I should act.” He lets out a deep breath, turns back the duvet for me, and I slip under it. When he speaks again, his voice is gentle. “Look, I know this is all a shock. Let’s just try to calm down and talk about this sensibly, okay? What I really want to know is why she’s here. Why would she search you out now, when she’s pregnant?”
Chase doesn’t know that he’s playing with fire. How could he?
“We should be careful,” I say, hugging my knees.
Chase rubs my back roughly, a bear pushing at a tree. “Why?”
“She’s done a lot of things that were kind of wild. She put my parents through hell. She put me through hell, too.” The past swells in my throat, and I swallow hard to keep it down. “She claims to build things while she actually destroys them. She’s hurt me, Chase. I don’t want her to do that again—not to you, not to me.”
He gives up on his version of a massage. “I don’t really know what that means, Alex. What exactly did she do?”
“She’s that kid who borrows a toy and gives it back broken.”
“Yeah, but you’re both grown up now. My brother used to take my ski gloves and rip them up on a tree run. But that was when we were ten.”
I squeeze my eyes closed for a second, my throat tightening again, as I picture Chase’s perfect family, his banker father and yoga-loving mother and Brad, his brother, who sails yachts. They live in Nantucket now, all of them, but Chase stayed on the west coast for his career. He grew up without a care in the world. It’s one of the things I love about him—his limitless innocence. My own childhood was quite different.
“Ruth made a mistake years ago that changed everything for my family. And then she made a hundred more. She left because my dad disowned her. He had to.”
Chase doesn’t say anything.
See? I think. You don’t want to know. If you did, you’d ask why.
He thumps his pillow a few times before settling back against it. “All I know is you do a lot for other people’s families. She’s your sister. And she’s clearly doing better than when you last saw her. Maybe things are different now. Maybe you should try a bit, see if there’s a way to help her out.”
“She’s a virus.”
“Wow. That’s pretty harsh. She doesn’t look that bad to me.”
He shifts so his back is against me, and I lie down, too, but there’s no way I can close my eyes. She’s cleverer than both of us, I want to say. I don’t care if that’s cold. I don’t care what she thinks of me and nor should you. But I don’t say anything, and within minutes he’s asleep. It’s like he has a sleep switch he can instantly flick on or off. I hate it. I listen to the softness of his breathing, and then the padded creep of my sister’s footsteps out of the bathroom and back to the couch. For the first time in ten years, I’m lying in the dark near my sister. I lie stiffly, afraid that she’s a spider that will move while I’m not paying attention.
There have been chances before this to tell Chase more about Ruth, to sketch in all the details of my family, tell him everything that happened in Horizon. But the truth is I’ve moved on and I don’t want to look back. I’ve dealt with the mess Ruth left me. And it’s over. I have a stable life here—I’m a social worker; I’m helping people—and I won’t let her ruin that.
Out in the living room it’s quiet, but I know she’s awake. I still remember the rhythms of her sleep. Perhaps that’s the real intimacy: to know how someone else breathes when they’re asleep. To know the patterns, to predict how they’ll move. In our old room as kids, our beds were so close together that Ruth and I could reach out with our fingers and touch. One time, when I was in second grade, I’d taken a treasure from the teacher’s desk. It was a round piece of basalt stone, smooth as skin. The teacher used to run it under hot water and give the warm trophy to the kid who’d done the best that day. She never once gave it to me. When I stole it, I hid it in the vent in our bedroom. I was stroking a forefinger over the top of that stone when Ruth saw me.
“Alex,” she said, coming right beside me. She reached out a hand and moved hair from my forehead. “I’ll get you your own perfect rock. Put that one back tomorrow before the teacher notices it’s gone.” That was when she still had my back.
Ruth left the farm when she was twenty, seven years after she tore our family apart. Mom didn’t want her to go, even if she couldn’t say it loudly. Every time Ruth passed by with a new armful of belongings to put into her boyfriend Hal’s stupid car, Mom touched her on the shoulder or arm, but Ruth kept going. Hal offered her a get-out-jail-free card, and she took it. He burned out of our driveway in that car, rock music blaring in Mom’s face. There’s no doubt in my mind he’s the father of Ruth’s baby. She can say he isn’t, that he’s a thing of the past, but there’s no way. I don’t believe it for a second.
Two summers after Ruth took off, Dad found Mom lying face-first in the field out back of the house. She used to walk on her own each evening. It was a heart attack, which sounds right if you’re listing organs most likely to store sadness. They said it happened fast, but I know that part’s a lie. It was slow and insidious, and Ruth was at the root of it all.
I’ve spent years sorting through the things Ruth has done, putting them away, rising above them. I doubt she’s been doing the same. She definitely hasn’t come here to apologize.