I looked closer. No. This was not a little boy with dark hair and eyes. This was a woman with long black hair, a white shirt, and gray pants.
It was me.
* * *
I unlocked the door to my studio apartment, shouldering my way in, my laptop bag bulging with my work computer and notes. I set it down on the floor and attended to the first order of business: pouring myself a very large glass of wine and taking three ibuprofen. I took my first fortifying sip, then went over to the bed, stripped off my social worker outfit, and put on sweats and a They Might Be Giants T-shirt. My ex-boyfriend, Phil, had bought the shirt for me. Phil enjoyed outings of all sorts—concerts, plays, basketball games. I was more of a stay-at-home-and-watch-Netflix kind of gal, but Phil insisted that going out on proper dates was something normal couples did, so I went along with it. Phil was long gone, but the T-shirt was still going strong.
As I settled in on the couch and put my head back, I thought of Declan’s words: They weren’t who they said they were. And his drawing. I made a mental note to call the school on Monday to check in with his teacher, Ms. Evans, and see if she’d noticed any changes in his demeanor.
My job could be stressful as shit, but it had its good days, too. And on the good days—the breakthrough days when a cowbird was not just a cowbird or when a girl came into my office grinning, saying she’d used the techniques we’d been working on to get through a panic attack at school—it was all worth it. Even though I’d been in private practice for a little less than a year, my schedule was always full, and I had a waiting list of clients. Sadly, there was no shortage of messed-up kids. I gravitated toward the tough cases—the kids everyone else had given up on. My undergrad was in psychology, and I worked in community mental health out of college for several years before deciding to go back to school for my master’s in social work. I did it while working full time, taking night classes, filling my weekends with reading and writing. My area of focus was always kids.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out why I’d gotten into this line of work. And it was something my own therapist, Barbara, was fond of pointing out: “You’ve never gotten over the fact that you couldn’t fix your sister when she got sick. You couldn’t save her, so you’re trying to save all these other kids.” I’d been seeing Barbara since my undergrad days and was pretty sure she knew me far better than I knew myself—not that hard, since I rarely pointed my carefully honed skills of observation and insight at myself, figuring it was far more productive to save it for my clients.
I opened my eyes, took a sip of wine, and noticed the digital answering machine was blinking. Nine new messages. My stomach knotted.
I knew exactly who it was without needing to push play: Lexie. And if she’d called this many times, she was, no doubt, off her meds again. When she was off her meds, she forgot that we didn’t talk anymore. That we were now properly estranged.
As if on cue, the phone rang again—call number ten. I reached for it—following some deeply ingrained instinct, the need to connect with my sister—then stopped myself.
“Jax? Jax!” she shouted into the machine. “The measurements don’t lie. It’s science! The fucking scientific method. Construct a hypothesis. Test your hypothesis.”
I could go months without hearing from her, then all at once, I’d get a burst of Lexie. It was like all of a sudden, she remembered: Hey, I’ve got a sister. Maybe I should give her a call and say something really fucking cryptic.
And the truth was, we’d barely spoken at all over the past year or so. Since Gram died—a heart attack while in Arizona, the one vacation she’d ever taken—and left most of her savings to Lexie, as well as her huge house, Sparrow Crest, the place we’d loved so much when we were kids and dreamed of one day living in together. Aunt Diane got a small chunk of the money, though she was doing fine financially and didn’t need it. Me, ass-deep in student loan debt, driving a fifteen-year-old car and living in a shoebox apartment on the other side of the country: I got my grandfather’s old coin collection and some first-edition books. None of it turned out to be worth a thing. It was petty, feeling furious and scorned for being left out of the will; my sister had always been everyone’s favorite. I knew it but couldn’t help it. I was pissed off and tired of pretending that I wasn’t. I stopped calling to check in on Lexie. I made excuses for not visiting the house that was now her house. I relied on our aunt Diane to keep me informed on Lexie’s life back in Brandenburg. Barbara encouraged me to set boundaries, to distance myself from my sister. She told me that distancing myself from my sister was the healthiest choice I’d made in years, one that both Lexie and I were sure to benefit from. “Lexie needs to learn to take better care of herself, and you jumping in to help her all the time isn’t helping her. And you, Jackie, need to focus on your own life and well-being. You need to learn who you are outside your sister’s orbit.”
It still didn’t feel right, not picking up the phone. Part of me longed to answer, to reconnect with my sister, to apologize for being such a shit over this past year; to tell her I’d made a terrible mistake.
“Over fifty meters!” Lex was shouting, fast and furious, as I sat sipping my wine.
“Seven yesterday, over fifty today,” Lex said, nearly breathless with frenzy. “Oh, Jax, you’ve gotta call me. No, better yet, you’ve gotta get on a plane. You’ve gotta come see this. Please, Jax! You’re the only one who would understand this!”
She clicked off. Less than a minute later, the phone rang again.
Lexie didn’t have my cell number. I told her, via Aunt Diane, that I’d given up my cell phone, that the bills were too high, and I was going to be one of those old-school landline people who used an answering machine.
“Jax?” Lexie said into the machine. “I know you’re there. I can feel you listening.”
I turned the volume all the way down. There was no way to mute it, but I could lower it to a dull murmur. Guilt gnawed away at my stomach as I walked away from my sister’s disembodied voice, poured myself the hottest bath I could coax from the old water heater in the basement, complete with a handful of calming salts. I shut the door, tuned the radio to jazz, and did my best to forget all about my sister. I watched the faucet drip into the tub, saw the rust stains years of leaks had left in the old porcelain. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and went under, trying to still my mind, the water filling my ears and nose, muffling the world around me.
* * *
Hours later, the bottle of wine was long gone; I’d had a dinner of cheese, crackers, and olives and passed out on the couch watching The Body Snatcher. My sister had stopped calling around eleven.
The dull ring of the phone woke me a little before one. I was still stretched out on the couch, but Boris Karloff was gone and there was an exercise infomercial on. My mouth tasted like wine, and my stomach churned unpleasantly. My head still ached.
“Jax?” Lexie cooed into the machine. Even though I’d turned it down as low as it would go, I still heard her. “This is important. The biggest thing that has ever happened to me. Or to anyone. This changes everything.”
I stumbled off the couch, reached for the phone. By the time I picked it up, my sister was gone.