Part Eight: Mara on the Couch
My sister stayed with me for six weeks.
She slept on the couch and she was terrible company in all the ways that were actually what I needed: she did not walk on eggshells or speak softly or treat me as something breakable. She watched television loudly and ate crackers in bed — my bed, when I was working in the living room and she’d migrated — and had opinions about my coffee maker that she expressed at full volume, and made pancakes on Sunday mornings that were consistently, impressively bad.
“You used too much baking soda again,” I told her, on the fourth Sunday.
“I have a master’s degree,” she said, eating one anyway.
“In law enforcement. Not pancakes.”
“The principles should transfer.”
Noah loved her. He had always loved her, since before he could talk, in the uncomplicated way children loved people who were consistent and present and found them interesting. During those six weeks, he followed her around the house asking her questions about her job — what was the biggest case, did she have a badge, could he see the badge, did she ever have to run, could she show him how to run like an FBI agent — and she answered all of them, patiently, with the specific patience she reserved for him and almost no one else.
She taught him, at some point during those weeks, a system for remembering where he’d put things. It involved a song. He still used it at eight years old, and I sometimes heard him singing it to himself in his room, looking for his shoes or his backpack, and it made something in my chest go complicated in a way I had learned to let pass.
The night before she went back to her own apartment and her own caseload, we sat on the back porch after Noah was in bed, with wine and the particular quiet of two people who didn’t need to fill all the space.
“I thought you were unraveling,” I said. “When you called. I thought something had broken in you.”
She was quiet for a moment. “I know. I used that. I needed you to move without thinking about it.” She turned her wine glass in her hands. “I’ve done that once before, in the field. Used the thing that someone needed to hear to get them to do the thing that kept them safe.” She paused. “I didn’t like doing it to you.”
“It worked.”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m grateful.” I looked at the garden — the one I tended, because Caleb never remembered to water things, and which had continued to grow through all of it, the tomatoes coming in red and indifferent and the herbs going leggy in the late summer heat, completely unbothered by the fact that the world had rearranged itself. “You knew before you called. You’d known for a while.”
“I suspected. Knowing and being able to act are different.”
“How long did you sit with it?”
“Longer than I should have.” She set the glass down. “I kept hoping I was wrong. That it was someone else’s account, someone else’s connection. That there would be an explanation that didn’t require me to tell my sister that her husband — ” She stopped. Started again. “I’m sorry I didn’t come to you sooner.”
“If you had, it would have ended differently,” I said. “He would have known. He would have moved earlier.”
“Yes.”
“So you being late was the right timing.”
“Yes.”
“Then I forgive you for the timing,” I said, “and I’m not angry about anything else.”
She looked at me for a moment.
“You should probably be angrier,” she said.
“I know. I might be, later.” I looked at the tomatoes. “Right now I’m mostly just tired.”
