You Are Here (19 page)

When Charles arrived home from work later, it was with a large bag of takeout food, which he and Annie set about unpacking in the kitchen.

“You guys like sushi, right?” Annie asked as an afterthought, already carrying out a large plate full of little rolls of rice with bits of raw fish peeking out the middle. The dog lifted his nose to catch a whiff, then flattened his ears and backed away with a little whine.

“Don’t know,” Emma said, grabbing one with two fingers. Whatever was holding it together tasted like old seaweed, and she coughed and wrinkled her nose. It was like eating a slug, the way the whole thing went slithering down her throat. “What is this?”

“It’s eel,” Annie said, looking amused.

“No, the part on the outside.”

“Nori.”

“Well, it tastes like seaweed.”

“It
is
seaweed,” Charles said, grabbing one for himself with a grin. “Maybe I should have ordered a pizza instead.”

Annie stared at them. “You’ve never had sushi before?”

“I once had a goldfish named Sushi,” Peter offered.

“Right,” said Annie, evidently not sure how to respond to this. “So, what time are you guys planning to take off in the morning?”

Emma lowered her eyes to the bits of crab on her plate. It was hard to ignore Peter, who was looking at her with such alarm you might have thought there was a gunman standing directly behind her, and she knew he was wondering if they were really—after all they’d been through—just going to slink back home, tails between their legs, without putting up so much as a fight.

The truth was, Emma didn’t know the answer to that yet.

“Whenever we get up, I guess,” she said, still not looking at anyone in particular.

Annie nodded. “So what do you want to do tonight?”

“What are the options?”

“We could play a board game,” Charles said, launching himself off the couch and throwing open the cabinet beneath the flat-screen TV. “Monopoly?”

“Okay, then I call the top hat,” Emma announced, and Annie looked stricken.

“
I
was always the top hat,” she said, and Peter and Charles exchanged a look. “Patrick was always the race car, Nate was the dog, and I was the top hat.”

“How am I supposed to know that?” Emma said. “It’s not like you guys ever played with me.”

“Maybe it’s because whenever we tried,” Annie said, “you always got bored as soon as you started to lose.”

“Sounds about right,” said Peter, and Emma shot him a look.

“Fine, then,” she said. “I’ll be the stupid thimble.”

While they played, Emma kept a close eye on her sister, making sure she didn’t snake a hand past Charles to steal money from the bank or nudge her marker forward one space too many to land on Free Parking. The Healy family had a long-established tradition of cheating in these kinds of games, applauding cleverness and ingenuity over straightforward honesty, at least within the realm of the game board.

“It’s run by a pint-size millionaire wearing a tux,” Dad would say whenever Emma attempted to reform them. “I’m pretty sure he expected this sort of thing.”

On her next turn Annie managed to land her little top hat directly in jail. She fumbled through her piles of colored money and handed Peter—who had quite happily agreed to be banker—a fifty.

“What’s this for?”

“You can bribe the banker to get out of jail.”

Charles laughed. “No way.”

“Don’t think so,” Peter said, shaking his head solemnly.

Annie looked over at Emma. “Healy family rules, right?”

Peter cleared his throat politely. “Uh, we play Milton Bradley rules.”

“No way,” Charles said, eyeing the top hat suspiciously. “This game’s corrupt.”

“That’s the point,” Annie and Emma said at the exact same time, grinning at each other in an unexpected display of solidarity.

“The idea is to be clever about it,” Annie explained. “But corruption rules.”

“Exactly,” Emma said. “Jailbirds pay off bankers to let them out early. That’s just the way it is. Healy family rules.”

Peter shrugged and laid the money obediently in the bank, Annie rolled the die, and the top hat went skittering further up the board as they continued to play.

Every so often Emma found herself sneaking a sideways glance at Annie, wondering if she herself looked the same way: competitive and impatient, tensed up as if ready to pounce, yet clearly enjoying herself. It had been a long time since Emma had spent time alone with her, without the rest of the family around to muddle the conversation with talk of philosophy or ethics or poetry.

She was surprised now—and a little unsettled—to see so much of herself in her sister. If you took away the clipped tone of voice and fancy vocabulary, the ramrod-straight posture and refined mannerisms, the similarities between them were undeniable. But it was something that went deeper than that too, a shared background that transcended everything else, and this somehow made Emma uneasy. All day she’d assumed they were butting heads because they were so different, but it now occurred to her that maybe that wasn’t the case at all. Maybe it was because they were so similar.

Underneath the table Peter gave her foot a little kick, and Emma lurched for the die, thinking it was her turn. But when she saw that Charles was preparing to roll, she raised her eyebrows at Peter, who looked embarrassed.

“I’m still sort of hungry,” he mumbled. “The sushi was good; it just wasn’t …”

Annie stood up and stretched. “That’s okay; I could use a snack, too,” she said, heading toward the kitchen. “Popcorn okay with everyone?”

Peter nodded, and after a moment Emma scrambled to her feet to follow Annie out of the room. She was already tearing open a box of microwave popcorn, her head half hidden by an open cabinet.

“You can go back and hang out if you want,” she said. “I’m not much of a cook, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got this covered.”

“What about drinks?” Emma said, opening the refrigerator. “I could help with those.”

Annie shrugged and pulled a few glasses from a shelf, handing them over. “Knock yourself out.”

Emma filled each one with ice, and Annie leaned back against the counter as the popcorn began to heat up, little bursts of noise emerging from the microwave like distant fireworks. Out the window Emma could see the building next door, each lit square revealing a different scene: families eating dinner or watching TV, two people gesturing wildly at a toaster, a fat man with no shirt flipping an egg with a spatula. Emma’s eyes skipped from one to the next, like changing television channels, and when she turned back to her own scene, it was to discover Annie watching her closely.

“So?” she asked, and Emma blinked back at her.

“What?” she said, although she already knew. Annie didn’t answer, just folded her arms, and Emma took a deep breath. “I wanted to go down to North Carolina.”

“To see Nate?”

She hesitated. “That was part of it, I guess.”

“Well, what was the other part?” Annie asked, her mouth turned down at the corners, her green eyes searching Emma’s.

“I know about Thomas,” Emma said finally.

Annie stared at her for a moment, as if searching through the catalog of her mind, a lengthy glossary of schoolmates and colleagues and cousins and friends, seeking among them the Thomas who might have sent her little sister careening south in a stolen car. And when it finally registered—when it seemed to occur to her that it was
the
Thomas, the
only
Thomas, the forgotten and the unforgettable, the long-lost but never-quite-gone brother—her mouth curved into a tiny O of surprise.

“How did you … ?” she began, her voice low. “How long have you … ?”

“Not long,” Emma said. “I found the birth certificate in the attic.”

Annie shook her head with a kind of mechanical tempo, back and forth so steadily and for so long that Emma began to wonder whether she was okay. She didn’t think she’d ever seen her sister so discomposed; Annie just stood there looking shaken and edgy and quite suddenly pale. The popcorn had long stopped popping in the microwave, but neither made a move to turn it off, and the burnt smell soon filled the kitchen. The dog padded in to investigate, the toenails of his three good paws clicking unevenly as he crossed the tile floor, and when it became clear that the smell wasn’t going to be followed up with any sort of food, he curled up at Emma’s feet with a sigh.

“It wasn’t meant to be a secret,” Annie said quietly.

“Well, you all did a pretty good job of not bringing it up for seventeen years, then,” Emma said, sliding down along the cabinets until she was sitting on the floor beside the dog, who scooted over to rest his chin on her knee. To her surprise Annie joined her on the floor, sitting cross-legged in her expensive pants, the charred smell of the popcorn hovering like a cloud over their heads.

“Something’s burning,” Charles called out from the other room, but they both ignored him, looking evenly at each other, unsure exactly how to proceed.

A part of Emma wanted to wait until Annie apologized, until she reached for the phone to get their parents on the line so that Emma could listen as they all cried and wept and asked her forgiveness for keeping something so important from her for so many years. But the bigger part of her was tired from all the wondering, exhausted by the strain of not knowing, worn out by the guesswork and uncertainty, the near constant reminder of an unsettled past.

And so the question she finally asked was the one she’d been carrying with her the longest, since the moment she first discovered the yellowing piece of paper in the bottom of the box in the attic and saw the name so similar to hers.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It’s not that we meant to keep it quiet,” Annie said. “But after a while it just seemed easier not to talk about it, not to upset anyone. It wasn’t that we were pretending it never happened. It was just a way of surviving it.”

Annie was an engineer; her job was to test the weaknesses in buildings, to guard against even the faintest of cracks. But Emma could see now how silence had worked its way through the core of her family like an invasion of termites, burrowing and gnawing until the whole thing was on the verge of crumbling. And yet Annie had stood by along with the rest of them, just watching it happen, just waiting for the inevitable collapse.

Emma shook her head. “But even now?” she asked. “So much time’s gone by, and still nobody …”

“It just became a habit, I guess,” Annie said. “I mean, every once in a while someone would try to bring it up, but everybody else would just kind of shut off. You know how our family is; it’s always been easier for us to stick our noses in a book than deal with what’s really going on. Dad had his poems and Mom had her research, and Patrick and Nate and I had school and jobs and futures to think about. It wasn’t that we forgot. But things like that sometimes get stored away, and there never seems to be a good time to dig them up again. It hurts a lot less to keep them buried. That doesn’t make it right, but it’s just the way it is.”

The kitchen door creaked open, and they both looked up at Charles with red-rimmed eyes. “Oh, sorry,” he said, seeing them huddled on the floor. “I just thought … the popcorn … never mind.” He backpedaled out of the kitchen in a hurry, leaving them alone again.

Emma looked away. She didn’t know whether to be frustrated or upset by all this, whether to launch herself into her sister’s arms or stay pinned against the cabinets, keeping a safe distance between them. She felt simultaneously betrayed and abandoned and grateful and sad, her heart banging hard against her rib cage.

“What happened?” she said, in a voice so small she almost didn’t recognize it.

Annie looked as if she were about to cry. “We don’t know,” she said. “Nothing. Everything. It just happened. One night you were both fine, crying and laughing and wiggling your toes, and then the next morning, all of a sudden, he just … wasn’t.”

Emma wrapped her hand around a chunk of the dog’s soft white fur as if to steady herself, swallowing hard as she watched her sister fight back tears.

Annie’s voice was uncharacteristically gentle, low and gravelly and full of emotion. “You have no idea what it was like just afterward. We were all completely devastated, but Mom especially—she didn’t get out of bed for weeks. And Dad walked around like a robot, talking in this awful monotone voice, like his heart had just gotten up and walked away.” She paused and shook her head. “But
you
were still there, needing to be fed and changed, not knowing what happened. Patrick and I did the best we could, but I was your age at the time, you know? Nate was supposed to be spending the summer doing research in Maine, but he came home to help out. And after a while, Mom and Dad came back to us too.”

Emma had been staring at her lap, absently petting the dog, but she now ventured a look up, setting her trembling mouth into a straight line.

“It was because of you,” Annie said, her eyes bright. “Because you were there, needing them. Don’t you see? It’s never been about excluding you, or keeping you in the dark. We might be completely scattered and hopeless in the ways that count for most families, but we were there when it mattered. We needed you as much as you needed us. You brought us all back. You saved us.”