“No. The company sent a car.”
“Ooh, corporate big shot.”
“I think it’s more that they’re afraid I would go Mad Max on my way to the meeting. There are twelve lanes of traffic and none of them are moving. So how have you been? How’s Vermont?”
“Oh, it’s . . .”
Tell him, Sorrow thought. Tell him. Say it.
But if she said it, if she started with the night Julie died and let the rest spill out, they would be right back to where they had ended their last conversation, and this time Dad would be right. Nothing was okay. Everything was broken and wrong and terrifying, exactly as he had feared and Sorrow had insisted would never happen. Sorrow knew her father. He would be so worried for her he wouldn’t even manage an I told you so before he was making arrangements for her to go home. A plane ticket and a plan. That was all he could do. He was too far away to do anything else. He had always been too far away.
“Does that significant silence mean things are really good or really bad?” Dad asked.
“Can I ask you something?” Sorrow said.
“Sure,” Dad said. “What is it?”
Sorrow gripped the steering wheel with her free hand, so tight her knuckles were white beneath her summer tan.
“Sorrow? Is something wrong?”
“Why didn’t you come to Vermont after Patience died? Before Verity went into the hospital, I mean. Why didn’t you come back?”
“Oh,” said her father, a breathy exhale of a word.
And there was a long, long silence.
“I didn’t know you . . .” Dad trailed off, started again. “You’ve never asked about that before.”
“It was, what, two weeks? What could you have been doing for two weeks that you couldn’t even—that you didn’t even—” Sorrow’s voice caught. She pressed her knuckles to her lips, held her breath for a few seconds.
Two weeks of unnatural cold. Two weeks of crushing quiet. Two weeks of crying herself to sleep, stifling her sobs in her pillow so her mother wouldn’t hear, and waking every day wishing for spring to come, wishing her mom would get better, wishing her sister would return.
“I wanted to come back,” Dad said. “But Verity told me to wait.”
Sorrow let go of the steering wheel. That pinch she felt in the center of her chest, it wasn’t surprise. You couldn’t be surprised by something you had suspected before you asked.
“She told me it would only make it harder for you. That I shouldn’t force you to deal with somebody who was essentially a stranger when you were grieving your sister. She told me to give you time. All of you. And I . . . I didn’t argue.” Dad made a frustrated sound. “I wanted to see you, but she wasn’t entirely wrong. I was a stranger to you. We barely knew each other when Patience died, and we didn’t for a long time after, did we?”
They had never spoken of it before, those agonizing first months in Florida, after Sorrow had been plucked from the only life she knew, how long it had taken for the nightmares to fade, the tears to dry up, the knowledge that she wasn’t going home again to sink in. By then she had been so tired of rebuilding the walls around her heart she had given up in exhaustion. It had taken the two of them months to begin acting, in fits and starts, neither of them knowing how, like father and daughter rather than a lost child and a bewildered man who had been thrown together by an accident of fate.
“That’s not a good enough reason,” Sorrow said. Her voice sounded like a stranger’s to her own ears, hoarse and wet and faint. “I get what you’re saying. I get that—but it’s not, it’s not good enough.”
“I know,” Dad said quietly. “Has something happened, Sorrow? What’s this about?”
“Do you give Verity and Grandma money?”
That caught him off guard. “I—uh, well, yes. I’ve helped them out from time to time.”
“Does Sonia know?”
A brief pause. “She does now, yes.”
“And she doesn’t care?”
“Honey, what’s going on? Is there something wrong?”
Sorrow scrubbed the tears from her cheeks. “Why does something have to be wrong? Do I need a reason to ask questions about my own family?”
“You can ask whatever you want. But you sound so upset and this isn’t—this isn’t like you.”
“Being upset isn’t like me?” Sorrow said, laughing bitterly. “Well, isn’t that convenient for everybody else. We’ve always got to have one person in the family who doesn’t get upset so everybody else can lose their fucking minds, right?”
“Sorrow—”
“I have to go,” she said.
“Sorrow, wait—”
“Talk to you later. Bye.”
Sorrow hung up and threw her phone onto the passenger seat. She reached for the key in the ignition, changed her mind before she turned it. Her phone rang. She ignored it. The voice mail beep sounded. A text, then another. She ignored those too. The only sound inside the car was her own breathing, rough and fast; she put a hand over her mouth to trap the sobs, swallow them down, bury them away somewhere deep inside. It didn’t help. Her shoulders were shaking, her throat raw. Her phone rang again, and still she didn’t answer. She closed her eyes and leaned forward to rest her head on the steering wheel.
She had come back to Vermont because she had realized, that day in the Everglades, the day she had imagined Patience walking beside her and understood she was older than her sister would ever be, that she didn’t know how to move forward into terrain Patience had not explored first. She had been following Patience’s example for so long, for so many years even after Patience was dead and buried, she hadn’t known she was still doing it until she tried to look forward and couldn’t see anything at all except the shadows and gaps and echoing empty spaces behind her.
But none of it had worked like she’d planned. All she had wanted to do was remember the last days of her sister’s life, to have a complete picture of the person Patience had been, to know what she had wanted to be. But now Patience’s only friend was dead, Verity was back in the hospital, and Sorrow felt more mired in the past than she ever had before.
It was a long time before she felt steady enough to drive away.
32