“Well, you know where I am if you need me. I’m happy to help, night or day.”
She smiles ruefully. “I wish I was back there,” she says, getting up from the sofa and slinging her handbag onto her shoulder.
I follow her gaze to the picture of New York she’d bought me. Perhaps she thought I was homesick. I didn’t have the heart to say I couldn’t feel any less homesick if I tried. Even in all its beauty, the Manhattan skyline stacked up against the banks of the Hudson River evokes nothing but bad memories, so I’d discreetly hung it behind me.
“I thought you’d put it over there,” she says, pointing to the opposite wall. “So that you could see it all the time.”
“I know what a wonderful place it is,” I say, attempting to laugh. “So I thought my clients might want to look at it.”
“Don’t you ever wish you were back there?” she says, her eyes alight.
“Sometimes,” I lie.
My phone vibrates on my desk and I give it a cursory glance to see who’s calling. A breath catches in my throat when I see Aunt Meryl’s number on the screen. I FaceTime her in America at the same time every Friday evening, so if she has cause to ring me midway through a Monday, it means something’s wrong.
“I’m sorry, but I need to get this,” I say to Anna.
“Of course,” she says, turning to leave. “I’ll see you next week.”
I offer a tight smile, but already my mind is with Aunt Meryl, imagining every worst possible scenario.
“Hey, Aunty,” I say, my voice already cracking. “Everything OK?”
“Well, no, not really,” she says.
“What is it?” I ask, panicking that this might be the call I’ve spent my entire life dreading.
4
“I don’t really know where to start. It’s still just as much a shock to me as it will be for you.”
I take a sharp intake of breath. Aunt Meryl may well be seventy-six years old, but I’m no closer to being able to accept her mortality than I ever was.
“Woah, slow down,” I say, my pulse quickening. “What’s going on? What’s happened?”
“Oh, darn it,” she says tearfully. I wait for her to blow her nose into the tissue she always keeps in the sleeve of her sweater. “Your father…” she starts. “Your father’s been released.”
My legs immediately give way and I collapse onto the couch, as every breath that had, until just a second ago, sat deep within my lungs, is sucked out of me by an unseen force.
No, no, no.
I can’t tell if I scream it out loud or if the deafening cry of anguish is in my head. That isn’t possible. This can’t be happening.
I blindly stab at my phone, my trembling fingers typing words that don’t exist, before Google eventually recognizes enough to take me to the Federal Bureau’s website. I don’t know why I’m doing it because I know that my father is still incarcerated in Upstate New York.
Just typing his name into the Inmate Locator makes me feel sick. I trail a finger across the screen, expecting to see Green Haven under Current Location—as it’s been every time I’ve checked over the past twenty-six years. But it’s not there. My eyes blur and lose focus on the word that’s replaced it.
Released.
I blink furiously, in an effort to shock my pupils into only seeing what’s there instead of the morose prank they’re trying to play on me. Taking a deep breath, I squint along the line, careful not to cross into another inmate, but it still says Released.
“Naomi, honey, are you there?” asks Aunt Meryl, through the clouds of cotton wool that my head feels encased in.
I draw my legs up onto the couch and rest my head upon my knees, trying so desperately hard not to cry. If I allow the floodgates to open, they’ll never close again.
“How … how did you…” I mumble.
“Your sister’s been to see me,” she says.
My heartbeat stills in my chest. That wasn’t what I was expecting. “Jennifer?” I ask, as if I have more than one sibling.
I picture the little blonde girl with ruddy cheeks who I’d last seen as I tucked her into bed in our foster home a couple of months after our mother’s death. Her eyes had grown heavy as I read her a bedtime story, desperate to play mom because I was the nearest she’d ever have.
“You’ll still be here tomorrow, won’t you?” she asked, like she did every night, just before she fell asleep.
“I’ll never leave you,” I’d promised as I stroked her hair.
The very next morning, she’d gone, with only the pink bunny rabbit she couldn’t be without left on her pillow. I was terrified that she’d screamed for me as she was dragged away, and that I had been in too deep a slumber to hear her.
“She’s gone to her forever home,” my social worker told me casually over breakfast.
“But why haven’t I gone with her?” I asked.
“You’ll never find a forever home,” she’d said cruelly. “Nobody wants a thirteen-year-old.”
And she was right, as after being in the system for over a year, I was still being passed from pillar to post. If it hadn’t been for Aunt Meryl taking me in, just as soon as she recovered from the stroke that she swears my father had caused by snuffing out her baby sister’s life so violently, I dread to think what would have become of me.
It was too late to save Jennifer though.
Just as soon as I was old enough, I immediately set about trying to find her, desperate to have my sister back with me, where she belonged. But every door I knocked on was slammed noisily in my face. “She’s a minor.” “She’s happy and settled.” “She has all the family she needs,” were the resounding words of social services.
So why did she turn up at Aunt Meryl’s as soon as she turned eighteen to find the family she’d lost?
By then, my “happy and settled” sister had become a drug addict, who had left her adoptive home and was in and out of trouble with the law. She was also looking for someone to blame.
“She abandoned me,” she’d spat, when Aunt Meryl told her I had gone to live in England. “She promised she would never leave me then, and now she’s done it all over again.”
Could she not see I had my own demons that I needed to silence? That I’d had no choice but to get away from the grief and shame that clouded my every moment in New York. Grief for the mother and sister I’d loved and lost. Shame that I’d not been able to save them.
Yet despite all that, I’d gotten on the first plane back home, desperate to be reunited with her. By then though, she’d disappeared into the black abyss of the subway system and every time I got close to her, she’d slip through my grasp.
Aunt Meryl had given her my email address, and every week I wondered if she would ever reach out. And just when I’d convinced myself I’d never see that little girl again, a note popped into my inbox, telling me that she had to come to England because she needed to be with me. I didn’t have to be told twice. I wired five hundred dollars to the account she quoted and waited at Heathrow airport for her flight to land. But to my surprise, though I imagine not to anyone else’s, she was nowhere to be seen and I haven’t heard from her in almost fifteen years. But as much as it hurt, I’ve made my peace with it, because it gave me closure on my past. At least it had, until now.
“How … how is she?” I ask.
“Oh, so much better,” says Aunt Meryl. “She’s not long out of rehab and looks really well. She’s got herself a job too—it looks like she’s finally turned her life around.”
I want to believe her, but there’s a nagging doubt that’s pulling me back. “Where is she now?” I ask.
“She’s back out on Long Island,” she says. “She’s got herself a condo, just a rental, but it’s a start.”
I couldn’t ever imagine going back to where it all happened. I’d rather be anywhere than there. Even the metro system? I ask myself.
“She was asking about you,” Aunt Meryl goes on.
That’s what I feared, though I don’t know if I’m more frightened of the past or the present. “I can’t go through that again,” I say.
“I know how disappointed you were, sweetheart, but I really do think it will be different this time.”
“Has she seen him?” I ask, unable to say his name.