“Uh-huh,” I say, settling my head back down on the quilt.
Savannah knows I run at night, but she thinks I do it alone. She thinks I’m an insomniac. I’ve told her that I am, told her I run to relax. Which isn’t entirely a lie. Sometimes I get so angry that I am certain I will burn up from the inside out. If I run long enough, hard enough, push myself past pain and aching muscles, I can break through, into a state of absolute calm.
In middle school Savannah and I both did track and field, both loved to run (she did sprints, I did long distance), but Savannah quit at the end of last year and I wasn’t about to keep doing it without her. So now I only run with my sister.
When Savannah and I were little, I would talk about Lee sometimes. The first time Savannah stayed for a sleepover at Grandma Margaret’s house, I made her climb out the window of my first-floor bedroom with me at midnight. Margaret’s house is way out on one of the ridges, built by her granddaddy nearly a hundred years ago. It’s surrounded by forest and accessible only by a narrow dirt road. Savannah and I stood in the backyard for hours, staring at the dark wall of trees, waiting. But my sister didn’t show up that night, or any of the other nights that I forced Savannah to wait with me. Lee is scared of people, so I should have known that she would never come out of the woods if there was anyone other than me in the yard. After a while I stopped trying to convince Savannah that my sister existed.
In fact, I stopped mentioning my sister at all, to anyone. It was safer that way. If people found out about her, about the way she lived, they would take her away from me. When I was younger I thought that someday she could come live with me and Aggie and Margaret and go to school and be a normal person, but I understand now that could never happen, even if my sister weren’t afraid, because there’s this thing called the state and the state takes children.
When Savannah told me in second grade that the state took her cousins, I imagined a monster, something with claws and teeth, dragging them out of their beds while they screamed. Her aunt hadn’t been doing a good enough job raising her kids, I guess. Someone called the state and said her kids were too skinny and had bruises and were left alone in the house overnight while their mother went out to score drugs. If that’s all it took for the state to step in, what the hell would they make of Lee? Left alone for years. Skinnier than any kid in town. Matted hair and yellowed teeth. Fleas in the summer. Tick bites. Scars from head to toe. Two of her toes permanently numb from frostbite she got before she met me.
Someone would have to answer for that. Grandma Margaret still has custody of me, even though she lets Aggie do all the work, the same way she owns Joe’s Bar and Grill but does nothing except collect a check every month. Margaret owns me and Aggie both, in a way. And Lee should be her responsibility by law, I guess. Maybe they’d charge her for neglect. After all, I did try to tell Margaret. When I was very little, I told her about my sister, but she didn’t believe me and so nobody but me has taken care of Lee all these years.
I’ve done my best, but the state wouldn’t care about that, wouldn’t care that being forced into a foster home with strangers would send Lee wild with fear, that being locked up in a hospital or a psych ward (and I’m sure they’d think she was crazy, mentally challenged, stunted, backward, strange) would probably kill her. I think of her locked up, strapped to a bed, and my chest seizes as if her terror were my terror. She would be an animal caught in a trap, gnawing off her own leg to get free. I don’t know if she could survive it. I don’t know if I could, either.
Because I hide myself as much as I hide my sister. I hide the person I am when I’m with her. When I was a kid it was easier. How I acted in the day wasn’t much different from how I acted at night. Outside of school at least, the kids of Lester roved about, playing in the woods behind someone’s house or alongside the train tracks, fighting with sticks, running races, trying to catch fish in Monday Creek, acting out plays with dead bugs as the actors. But as I got older, there were more and more things that weren’t acceptable or cool, especially for a girl.
I added them all to the secret half of me.
Sometimes I wish I could put the two halves back together. I wish my sister could come and live here, with me and Savannah, in Myron’s house, which the forest is taking back anyway.
I blink sleepily at Savannah, who is smiling down at something on her phone, the screen’s glow reflecting onto her cheeks.
There is nothing more peaceful than this. Smoke fluttering from her fingertips toward the ceiling. The naked ladies on the wall behind her gazing down protectively, big-breasted angels with ’80s hair.
I feel myself drifting. The ladies blur into a landscape. Bosomy clouds, blond waterfalls. Savannah a distant mountain.
I think of my sister, sleeping somewhere in the woods even now. I close my eyes.
* * *
—
I wake to the sound of banging on the wall. I roll over to ask Savannah what’s going on, but she’s gone.
I jump up, heart pounding.
It must be the pastor. He must have followed us here somehow. Must have been watching me. Waiting to break my legs. I run down the hallway, kicking up clouds of plaster dust in my wake. The banging continues.
Then suddenly: silence.
I skid into the kitchen, and there’s Savannah. She’s leaning out the window, elbows on the paint-flaked sill, talking to somebody.
She’s swaying her hips a little side to side. She’s giggling. She’s shed her oversized hoodie, has it wrapped around her waist. Her pink bra straps clash with her olive-green tank.
I come up behind her. Standing outside is Tanner Burch, one of several boys she currently has a crush on. Just last week, he took her for a ride on his friend’s four-wheeler and they kissed in the fog. He’s got on a too-big camo jacket, ripped jeans, orange trucker cap. How the hell did he find us?
“You going to let us in or what?” says Tanner.
“What’ll you give me if I do?” asks Savannah.
But of course he didn’t find us. Savannah must have told him where we were. She must have texted him to come here. To our house. Our secret.
“I’ll shoot you if you come any nearer!” I shout at Tanner, doing my pretend Uncle Myron voice. I used to crack Savannah up doing that voice, drawling, Hey there, hunny pie, you bring that sweet ass over here, give your favorite uncle some sugar.
“Who’s that?” says Tanner. He moves closer to the window, trying to peer in past Savannah. I see then that there’s someone else with him, someone standing a little ways back, toeing the dirt with his boot. Someone with pale skin and freckles and a shock of dandelion fluff hair.
Henry.
“It’s Jo,” I say in my normal voice, my anger tempered now with some other feeling, a sort of fluttering nervousness. I see Henry all the time in history, sure, but it’s different seeing him outside of school. “Wait there. We’ll come out in a second.”