There are a few couples, young and not so young, leaning across the table in various poses of affection or malice. There’s a group of what I assume to be long-haul truckers lined up at the bar, drinking coffee, with their pants hanging off various points of butt or no butt, their guts or no-guts hanging a bit over their belts, their T-shirts hiding what they can, but—let’s face it—a T-shirt only has so much to work with. They all have mesh-back ball caps. One of them has what looks like a map tattooed all over his forearm.
Satisfied that no one’s out to get us or even gawk at us, I turn back to my food and go in for another round. When we’re all finished, Betty, the manifestation of grace on earth, clears it all away, like a battlefield medic.
Stan leans back in the booth, clearly full and satisfied. He looks at Ted and Callie and then back to me.
“Did you notice how they, like, touch the ground when we get out of the car?” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Weird.”
“Yeah. They like grass better than asphalt, it seems.”
“That thing with them and soil.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s definitely weird. But honestly that’s not even close to what I’m thinking about. I mean, I’m kind of excited,” I say. “About this ‘journey of discovery’ or whatever it is.”
“Why the air quotes on ‘journey of discovery’?”
“Oh,” I say. “Um. I was being ironic, I guess? I don’t know why I felt weird calling it that.”
“Oh,” he says. “So you were being ‘insincere’?” He puts his hands up and curls his fingers in scare quotes when he says “insincere.”
“No! I just . . .”
“Because,” says Stan, “it’s not like I’m comfortable calling this a ‘journey of discovery’ or whatever. But probably that’s what it is, right?”
“Yeah. That’s probably what this is. And it’s really weird to think about! I mean, I never really thought I’d see where they came from. You know? And not just with Callie, in the context of a journey of discovery, but in general. I still don’t fully believe it. That we could—that we could—learn so much about Callie, about Ted, about these people we spent our whole lives growing up with, our siblings . . .
“So I guess it’s more that I’m being . . . cautious. Trying not to jinx it. I mean, it’s not like anyone’s going to give us a map to their past, full of explanations and a backstory and a whole pile of solutions to the questions our perpetually mute siblings inspire. But I just . . . I guess I just resigned myself to the fact that I’d never get to share anything with Callie. Especially not something that mattered.”
Stan’s looking at me like I have one too many heads, so I take a pause to sigh and figure out what it is I’m trying to say. “I guess I don’t really know how to put this. But it’s like . . . this is the first chance I’ve had that I can think of where I can do something for her that won’t just help her, you know, with day-to-day things. It’ll be something I can do for her and also with her, that will be a shared experience. It’s not like I’m helping her get around on the first day of school back when we were kids, or showing her how to be around people, or sitting with her in the garden. Whatever this is, we’re going through it together, as sisters. I’ve never had anything like that. With her or anyone else. I’ve spent a lot of time wishing I could share something meaningful with her, or that some kind of miracle might happen that would just turn everything around. Like . . . maybe one day Callie just starts speaking. And we stay up all night and share everything forever. And it turns out I’ve mostly done right by her. Sure, not all the time. She’ll tell me that there’s some stuff I should really work on. But she knows my heart was in the right place. But I never thought any of those wishes would come true. Or that I’d actually get to do something for her that was real. And this is real. This isn’t a story I tell myself to feel better about things, it’s an actual thing that’s happening.
“And, well,” I go on, because all of this is hitting me just now, hours after Callie and Ted made their islands and we set out on this crazy journey, “I’ve wondered a lot about what things would be like if Callie hadn’t . . . been around. If I didn’t spend my days thinking about how she might view the world, trying to think of ways to make it easier on her. I hated having those thoughts. Having those thoughts made me hate myself. I don’t know what happens next, but I know something happens next, and whatever it is, I just hope it means that I don’t ever have those thoughts again. I don’t know what I’m saying or even fully what I mean. It’s just . . . this feels like something new. Like something is happening. Does that make any sense?”