If there’s an overriding theme to our winter celebrations, it’s solstice. That makes sense up here, where we are enslaved by sun and season. Next week is winter solstice, the longest night of the year. The party will last for every minute of it, as we celebrate the return of the sun, knowing each day following will be longer, until summer solstice, when the town will party from 4 A.M. sunrise to midnight sundown. When you live without TV and social media, you exploit every excuse for a celebration.
My mood lifts on seeing the decorations. With Rockton’s wooden buildings and Wild West flair, there’s nostalgia there, too, even for someone who doesn’t consider herself particularly nostalgic. Squint past the modern clothing, and you can imagine a town from times past, bedecked in its holiday finest, everyone’s step lighter, their smiles wider.
Those smiles dim when they see the dead body on the stretcher, but even then, it’s simple curiosity. We are indeed, in so many ways, the Wild West town we resemble, where violence and death are as much a part of life as decorating for the holidays.
I head to April’s house, beside the clinic. Like Dalton, Anders, and myself, she gets a small one-and-a-half-story chalet to herself. That’s the perk of being essential services. Rockton could build one for each resident—we certainly have the land—but the larger the town is, the more likely it is to be spotted by planes. We use both structural and technological camouflage to prevent that, but we still need to keep our footprint as small as possible.
Anders takes both dogs to Raoul’s owner, Mathias, who’ll look after Storm while we’re busy with this problem. I rap on my sister’s door. I almost hope that she doesn’t answer. Or that, if she does, she has company. It’s her day off, and it’d be nice if she wasn’t spending it home alone, but with April, that’s like saying it’d be nice if the temperature hit thirty Celsius today. It just ain’t happening.
No, that isn’t entirely true. It would have been when she first arrived. Now, there is a chance she’ll be out, not exactly socializing but at least interacting. Inviting someone into her home is too much. She’s been known to haul the toilet tank onto her back porch for pickup to avoid having anyone come inside.
April opens the door as I’m reaching for a second knock.
“What are you doing back?” she says.
“Nice to see you, too, April.”
Her brows crease, as if she’s trying to figure out why it would be nice to see her. Isabel—a former psychologist—believes my sister is on the autism spectrum, undiagnosed because my parents refused to see anything “wrong” with their brilliant older daughter. They had enough trouble dealing with their rebellious younger one. To them, a diagnosis of even mild autism would have meant April was intellectually imperfect, and so they instead let her struggle through life, a gifted neurosurgeon and neuroscientist unable to form all but the most tenuous of personal relationships, lonely and alone and never knowing why. My parents screwed up my life in so many ways, but compared to what they did to my sister, I got off easy.
When we raised the possibility of autism with April, I’d been terrified she’d see it as sibling envy—me trying to knock down my brilliant older sister. I’d been convinced otherwise by a joint coalition of Isabel, Kenny, and Dalton … and they’d been right, which is humiliating to admit, proving how little I know my sister. Too much familiarity and too little actual understanding, a lifetime of trying to get to know her and, when I couldn’t, creating her wholesale.
April was fine with the diagnosis. She treated it the way I would have: like a physical ailment. Here’s the problem, and now that we know what it is, let’s tackle that. Relief, I think, at giving it a name.
“I brought you a body,” I say.
Her frown deepens, and she’s looking for some alternate meaning in this. A sign that I’m joking.
“I found a murdered woman in the forest,” I say.
Now she relaxes, and I get the April I know well, rolling her eyes at her feckless little sister. “Really? You don’t have to make the world’s problems your own, Casey.”
“You know me. Can’t relax. Always looking for work. If I don’t have it, I make some.” I pause. “Which does not mean I made this dead body. That would be wrong.”
A pause. Then, “That’s a joke, isn’t it?”
I clap her on the arm as I propel her back into the house. “Yes, April. It’s a joke.” I pull shut the door before she can protest. “Don’t worry—I’m not coming in for tea. I found something else, which I’d rather not broadcast.”
SIX
After I explain, we head out April’s back door and across her yard to the clinic’s rear entrance. As we do, she says, “I hope you’re not thinking of adopting this child, Casey.”
I tense so fast my spine crackles. “No, I’m not stealing someone’s baby, April.”
“The mother is dead. That is not stealing.”
“Presumably the father is alive, and potentially other family, which I’m going to find.”
“Good. This isn’t a stray puppy.”
My teeth barely part enough for me to say, “I’m aware of that,” but one of my sister’s cognitive challenges is interpreting body language, so she ignores that and continues.
“There is no place in your life for a baby, Casey. I realize you’re comfortable here, and you’ve settled into a long-term relationship with Eric, but this is not a situation for motherhood.”
“I found a baby with a dead mother. Buried under the snow. Alone and in distress. I brought her back to Rockton so she doesn’t die, not to fill a hole in my life.”
“There is no hole in your life. You have Eric, and you have Storm, and you have Rockton and your job. You are happier and more satisfied than I have ever known you to be.”
I answer slowly, keeping my tone even. “I appreciate the fact that you recognize I’m happy, April. And there isn’t a baby-size hole in my life. I just happened to find a child, whom I intend to return to her family. Just because I’m a woman in a happy romantic relationship doesn’t mean my ovaries go into hyperdrive seeing a baby.”
“Good.”
I push open the back door of the clinic with a little more force than necessary. I tell myself that April isn’t being patronizing. I’ve spent my life dealing with this from her, and I’m trying to understand that she doesn’t mean it the way it sounds.
Yet it’s also a constant reminder that my sister put me into my box when we were young, and nothing I’ve done since then has—or possibly ever will—let me escape it. I’m reckless. I’m impulsive. I’m thoughtless, rushing headlong into every bad decision life offers. My sole consolation is that anyone who knows me would laugh at all those descriptors.
Inside, Dalton and Anders have the baby on the examining table. As soon as I see that, I barrel into the room and snatch her up.
“You can’t leave her on that,” I say. “What if she rolls off?”
“She can’t even lift her head, Casey,” Anders says.
“Which doesn’t mean she can’t wriggle. Or slide.”