Caleb made a noise that was part laugh, part incredulous exhalation. “What do you mean, ‘That was my sister’? What sister? And perhaps you’d like to explain just how the bloody hell the door was answered by the aunt whose death you’re supposed to be mourning?”
I opened my mouth, even though I had yet to formulate an explanation. Lanie giggled in the next room, and Aunt A’s hovering presence was audible from the staircase. Whatever I was going to say to Caleb, I needed to say it without an audience.
“Let’s go upstairs.”
Caleb looked over at the staircase and clenched his jaw. His hesitation was a punch in the stomach.
“Please,” I said, my voice wavering.
After another agonizing moment, Caleb nodded silently and followed me upstairs.
I shut the door and gestured for Caleb to take a seat on the bed. The expression on his face indicated he thought the bed might be a lie, too, but he conceded to sit tersely on the blue-and-white quilt.
“I thought we agreed that you weren’t going to come to Illinois. How did you even know how to get here?”
I instantly regretted starting on the offensive. Caleb stared at me as though he could not believe that I was going to try to make this into his fault, and then his expression hardened.
“Your aunt’s return address was on an envelope on the desk. After I got over the jet lag and cleared my head, I realized I should’ve never let you come to the funeral—or,” he said, hooking his fingers into air quotes, “the ‘funeral’—alone. Your aunt raised you and you think of her as a mother. If that’s even true.”
“The truth is complicated.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Jo. The truth is never complicated. It’s just the truth. Circumstances may be complicated, but the truth is always black and white.” Caleb looked at me sternly. “Now, I need some answers. What the hell is going on?”
My throat was clogged with a lump so large I doubted words would fit around it. I swallowed hard, and my saliva was bitter and metallic. It seemed like an unpromising start, but I forged ahead. The only thing that could salvage our relationship was the truth.
“I haven’t been entirely honest with you about my family.”
Caleb snorted to signal that was an understatement.
I nodded miserably, uncertain what to say next. My father is dead, my sister is crazy, my mother is both dead and crazy? Nothing sounded right. Caleb was watching me expectantly, and I could feel the air between us cool with each moment I hesitated. In desperation, I reached for a literary trope, something I had often heard extolled in the bookstore: Show, don’t tell. I stuck my hand in the top drawer of my bedside table and dug past decade-old notes, tangles of costume jewelry, sticky tubes of lip gloss, and a dog-eared romance novel until I found it. My fingers trembled as they closed around the edge of the frame and pulled it from the drawer.
I was almost too heartsick to look at it. The photograph had been in the drawer ever since Aunt A had received the letter from our mother, the one that informed us she had chosen the Life Force Collective over us, the one that did not contain a single line for Lanie or myself. Reading that letter, my blood had gone fiery with unfamiliar rage. I had wanted to destroy everything that reminded me of her, tear it into tiny, unrecognizable bits, set it aflame and curse the ashes, but my sentimentality had ultimately prevailed. Instead, I had buried the photograph beneath teenaged flotsam and done my best to forget about it.
The photograph had been taken Christmas 2001, the last Christmas that the Buhrman family numbered four. Using the camera’s timer function had resulted in an off-center and slightly out-of-focus image, but it was nonetheless our last remaining family portrait. In it, Lanie and I sit in front of the Christmas tree in matching plaid pajamas, our father behind us, a pipe clenched between his teeth and his great arms encircling us and pulling in my mother, a reluctant figure in a cranberry-colored sweater offering a shy smile, diamond earrings twinkling in her ears. My father had not been a religious man—I couldn’t recall a single instance of him attending church—but he had always loved Christmas, its emphasis on family and demonstrative affection.
I set the cheap, gold-edged frame in Caleb’s hands and pointed at the faces as I identified them.
“This is me,” I said, laying my finger on the head of a dark-haired girl with rosy cheeks and a gleeful grin. I could barely remember being that person. “And this is my twin sister, Lanie. We were fourteen here. And this is my father. Ten months after this picture was taken, my father was killed.
“And this,” I said, placing my finger on my mother’s soft expression without waiting for Caleb to absorb the information about my father, “is my mother. My father’s death was hard on all of us, but it was hardest on her. My mother had always been delicate, but she fell completely apart after Dad died.” Memories of my mother sitting in the courtroom, her face pale and utterly slack, or of pacing in the bedroom across the hall, making endless circles on the worn floor, flooded my mind, and I had to shake my head to clear them. “We essentially lost both parents the same night. Our mother shut down completely. She stopped speaking to us, she’d barely even look at us. Aunt A took care of us from then on. That part has always been true.”
I hazarded a glance at Caleb. His brows were knit together and his mouth was tight, but I couldn’t tell if it was an expression of sorrow or pity or anger.
“And then, a year after Dad was killed, when Lanie and I were sixteen, our mother ran away to join a cult. We hadn’t heard from or about her until the other day, when Aunt A got a call. Our mother is dead. It was her visitation I went to yesterday, and it’s her funeral you’ll be attending tomorrow.” I swallowed hard. “That is, if you stay.”
Caleb frowned. “Why did you tell me that your aunt died?”
“Because I’d told you years ago that my mother was dead. How could I explain that no, actually, this time she was really dead?”
“But why did you lie in the first place? Why did you tell me that your mother was dead when she wasn’t?”
“Because, Caleb, she joined a cult. She abandoned us. By the time I met you, I hadn’t heard from her in seven years. For all I knew, she was dead. But it wasn’t just about her. It was about me, too. I’d devoted a lot of time and effort to distancing my old life from my new one. I tried to forget about my family.”
“Jo, I’m not trying to minimize anything that happened to you in your childhood, but I don’t understand what you were thinking. Didn’t you think that someday I’d find out the truth?”
“Honestly, I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. When I first told you about my family that night in Zanzibar, I didn’t know we had a future together. I thought I was just something to keep you entertained while you were in Africa.”