“Road t-trip,” I say. “W-with my s-sister.”
“Cool.” She looks around the car, the empty backseat. “Where is she?”
“P-picking h-her up there.”
“At 451 Twining Street, Langford?”
“Th-that’s the p-plan.”
“But you didn’t know how to get there?” she asks. I swallow, but I don’t know what to say. I feel her studying me. She lets it slide. “I don’t have any siblings. I think I like it better that way, though. How old is she?” She taps her fingers along the door handle and that’s when I realize I’ve made her nervous. “Younger or older?”
“Thirteen. I’m n-I’m nineteen.”
She whistles. “Man. Thirteen. That was nearly a decade ago for me. You remember that age? You just think you know everything.”
“Y-yeah.”
“God,” she murmurs, but I have a feeling whatever she’s remembering about thirteen is probably different from what I’m remembering about thirteen. Mom was still around with some guy, Arthur … lasted about half a year. Arthur something. I don’t remember him so well. Everything after Keith felt like a dream but Arthur had … slick black hair, a big nose. His voice was off-puttingly high. I couldn’t understand what Mom saw in him until I realized he always had money and he always had drugs. He was a dealer. Mom broke him in the end, got him dipping into his own supply. By the time they were done, he had nothing.
Then he was gone.
Mattie was eight and that was about the time she started figuring out something was wrong with Mom. She was making friends with kids at school at that point and it was hard not to notice that the other kids’ mothers didn’t medicate at the breakfast table, didn’t lose the ability to string a sentence together by noon and weren’t blacked out by dinner. I remember sitting outside the trailer with her and reciting May Beth’s greatest hits because May Beth told me I had to look out for Mattie that way, make sure Mattie loved the mother she had instead of wasting her life wishing for another, like me. And I love May Beth, but I hate that she did that to me. To this day, she still acts like it was my idea.
Mom’s sick, Mattie, do you understand? It’s not her fault. You wouldn’t blame someone for getting cancer.
“… I was such a bitch.” Cat’s midsentence. She’s been talking this whole time. “I couldn’t even imagine twenty, but I thought I had it all figured out, you know? I wanted to be like…” She pauses. “Like this, actually, I wanted to do whatever the fuck I wanted. Hitching on the side of the road.” She laughs. “It was a lot less ugly in my head.” Before I can ask her how ugly it’s been, she asks, “What about you?”
“—” She stares at me while I block. After the moment passes, I feel a heat in my face and do something I never do. I apologize for it. “S-sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“It h-happens when I’m t-tired.” I scratch my forehead and I wish I hadn’t said that either. “Uh. I d-don’t know. I had to l-look after my sister a lot. My mom w-wasn’t really…” I wave a hand feebly. “A mom.”
“That’s rough. What’s her name?”
“M-Mattie.”
It’s unbearable, saying her name out loud to someone else. I didn’t even say it to Javi. It’s the first time I’ve let another person hear me say it in a long, long time. There was a point with May Beth, where Mattie became her. She. Because I couldn’t— I couldn’t.
“What’s wrong?” Cat asks because it’s all over my face.
“Nothing.”
“Sorry if I…”
“It’s nothing. I j-just h-haven’t seen her in a while.”
I exhale shakily. I don’t feel well, I guess. I feel like I’m surfacing from some sort of fever dream. I think of myself in Silas’s driveway. The blood I only just cleaned off my body. It feels like years ago now, but when I look at the clock, it hasn’t been hours.
“What’s she like?”
“Who?”
“Your sister.”
I stare out at the road, trying to see at what point the rain might end but, if anything, it’s gotten worse. What little visibility there was has gone all to shit. The sky is almost black now. I’m just thinking how maybe we should pull over when the Chevy starts hydroplaning.
I lose control.
Cat’s hand flies to the door handle as my car swerves into the opposite lane. I hear her whisper oh shit as I jerk the wheel in the opposite direction, which is the wrong thing to do. I try, frantically, to remember what the right thing is. I slam my foot on the brakes. Not the right thing. By the time the car stops spinning, we’re sideways in the middle of the road and I feel like I’m dying. A car in the oncoming lane blares its horn and swerves around us, somehow managing not to skid across the water itself. And then it’s silent, except for the sounds of both of us panting with the shock and relief of a near miss.
After an eternity, Cat says, “Maybe we should stop for a while.”
“Y-yeah,” I say, when I can finally unclench my teeth. I straighten the car and get us back on the right side of the road, facing the right direction.
We find a place to park about ten miles away and even if I don’t know how to handle a car when it skids, I’m at least smart enough to know not to park on the shoulder with my lights off. We end up next to a field that’s turning into a lake. Cat’s calmed some and she’s trying to explain to me what to do if I ever find myself in that kind of situation again and it’s pissing me off because I know. I know about easing on the brakes and turning with the swerve. I just didn’t remember it in the moment because it’s different in the moment. I close my eyes to her and she finally senses she’s pushing it because she says so: “I’m not helping.”
I open my eyes. “Yeah.”
She leans into her window, nose to glass.
“I wonder when it’ll stop.”
“D-dunno.”
“You can let go of the wheel, you know.”
I flush and uncurl my fingers from their death grip on the wheel and then I try to rub some life back into them. Cat leans forward and grabs her bag from the floor. She pulls out some of her things—a wet map, a roll of plastic bags and a swollen notebook and sets them on the dash. Says, “Might as well dry some of my shit out.”
I point at the notebook. “What’s th-that?”
“Journal.” She flashes a smile at me and then grabs it, flips it open and offers me the briefest glimpse. All I see is ink, a lot of it bleeding now. Some of the pages have scrap paper, tickets and other things taped to them.
“I keep records. Places I’ve been, people I’ve met. What I think of them.”
“What are y-you g-gonna p-put in there for me?”
“Haven’t decided yet.” She opens the book and lays it out on the dash, cover side up. “I’m a runaway, I guess. Been one for a couple of years now.”
“I can s-see it.”
“What’s it look like?”
I shrug. “Y-you.”
She smiles a small smile. She turns back to the window, looking out at the field. There’s a barn in the distance. It looks like it’s dissolving. I blink heavily, shake my head.
I say, “M-my sister ran away once.”
“Yeah?”
“J-just once.”
The skin prickles on the back of my neck and I glance over my shoulder just to make sure the backseat is empty.
“Little hell-raiser, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Teenagers.”
“She w-was an ingrate, actually,” I say. “Sh-she always p-pulled all k-kinds of shit. Never once c-cut me a break. She was always t-trying to get away from m-me.”
Being tired is worse than being drunk. Things you never wanted to say coming out of your mouth and you can’t stop it and by the time you realize you shouldn’t have said it, it’s too late. It feels like a betrayal. I want to take every word of it back, even if it’s true because I don’t talk about Mattie like this to anyone else. I might think it but you don’t talk about your family like that to anyone. I would die for Mattie, I want to say, because that’s the part I want Cat to know, if she has to know anything. Not all the times Mattie pissed me off because she was thirteen years old and that’s what thirteen-year-olds are supposed to do.