The Good Sister (21 page)

Sin is going through a dresser, placing items of clothing into a box. I don't want to see any of it, because every time I try to give away a shirt or a pair of pants, I think maybe I should keep it and wear it myself if I ever lose ten pounds. Then I think, no way, I'd be depressed every time I saw the stuff. Then I think, but if it's gone, I won't have that little piece of her.

And I get nothing done.

The shoes are not so difficult since I can't very well turn my size-nine feet into size eights.

After working my way through all the shoes, I pull out a shoebox from the bottom of her closet. I can tell by the weight that it doesn't hold a pair of shoes, and besides that, it is decorated with little pen-and-ink doodles of swirls and stars and hearts and animals. It looks like something Sarah might have done in her middle-school days, which means this box has been around for a while. The brand of shoes it once held has been obscured by white cardstock glued to its sides and top.

Sin is still busy sorting through Sarah's clothes, folding them all carefully and placing each piece in a cardboard box that says
FARM FRESH
on the outside.

I try not to look at the stuff as he puts it in the giveaway box because then I recall different times she wore a certain shirt, a certain pair of jeans. And what if someone else wears her stuff? They won't even know anything about Sarah when they do, won't know she's gone, which bothers me. I think maybe we should burn the box of clothes when it is packed. Maybe Sin shouldn't be folding it all so carefully, but I don't want to commit to doing one thing or another, so I say nothing.

I open the box, feeling guilty as I do so. Inside are some letters, a couple of rocks and seashells, a journal I am careful not to open, and beneath all that a blue shirt folded up. I recognize it as one of Sarah's. It's a delicate silk tunic edged in crocheted lace. I don't know why she would keep it in here. Maybe she was trying to hide it from Rachel, who borrows and ruins things, but it isn't Rachel's style. I take out the contents on top of the shirt, then the shirt itself. From within it falls a piece of newspaper folded up small.

When I hold up the top, I can see that it is streaked with stains, brownish in color, like old blood. Was this why she'd hidden it? Was she too in love with the shirt to get rid of it after she'd ruined it?

But … it doesn't look like it has even been washed. Like no attempt has been made to remove the stains.

Sin notices and comes to take a closer look. “Is that blood?”

“I don't know.” The hairs rise on the back of my neck.

Something isn't right. Or maybe I'm prone to thinking the worst, now that the worst has already happened.

I imagine possibilities. Stomach cancer. She could have been vomiting blood. Maybe she didn't have the heart to put us through it all again.

He bends and picks up the piece of newspaper. As he unfolds it, I see that it's one section of the
Marin IJ,
folded small. The cover section. On the cover is an article about the hit-and-run accident that happened in February, in which a guy who'd been hitchhiking along Highway One had been killed. The car that had struck him—and the people in it—had fled the scene and hadn't been found.

“Let me see that.” I take the paper from Sin.

He is frowning in a way that makes me nervous.

“Do you think…” He begins to ask, but doesn't. He knows better than to complicate matters right now.

I don't think.

No. Absolutely not.

Hearing footsteps in the hall, I look up to see Rachel standing in the doorway, just home from work and still wearing her black barista apron. She eyes the article in my hands curiously. “What's that?”

“Nothing,” I say, not wanting to betray Sarah's secrets, even if I don't yet know what they are.

She comes closer. “Let me see.”

I ignore her outheld hand.

But she needs only to look over my shoulder to see that it's an article about the dead guy. His name was Brandon Ashcroft, a guy from out of state who'd been backpacking along the California coast.

“So what's all this?” Rachel asks, looking at the box of stuff I've been going through.

“I don't know.”

She surveys it all. “Come on, Nancy Drew. You can figure it out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You found Sarah's private stash. This is where she keeps all her deep, dark secrets.”

“It's just some old stuff,” I say, but Rachel picks up the stained shirt and cocks an eyebrow at me.

She has this look in her eyes, like a snake preparing to strike. “Was
this
in the box? With
that
?” She nods at the article, sounding calmer than the situation calls for.

I say nothing.

“So what?” Sin asks. “Do you know something we don't?”

Rachel expels a breath of disbelief and drops the shirt on the bed, rolls her eyes at us, and walks out.

“Idiots,” we hear her say on the way out the door.

My stomach twists and turns. Shadowy, ugly possibilities dance around the edges of my thoughts, and I don't want to consider them.

But it's all so obvious. Maybe Sarah was there when that guy died. Maybe she knew what happened. Maybe she was involved in what happened, if the shirt had anything to do with it.

Why wouldn't she have said anything though?

David springs to mind. Had she been protecting him by saying nothing? Had
he
been driving the car that killed the hitchhiker?

No, she was too honest. She'd had come forward, no matter the cost.

I'm pretty sure.

Sin picks up the shirt and folds it into a small square, which he puts back into the box. Then he takes the newspaper and does the same. Each item I've scattered on the bed, he places carefully back into the box, then he puts the lid back on and places the box inside the larger cardboard box of stuff we plan to keep. But what if Mom sees it? I think but don't ask.

He looks at me carefully. “Maybe you should keep this stuff in your room.”

“What about Rachel?” I love that Sin knows what to do without having to ask.

“She could have already come in here and gone through this stuff if she'd wanted to find something.”

Nothing makes any sense. What does Rachel know that she isn't saying? And what does any of it have to do with anything?

I don't want to think that the most obvious explanation could possibly be true, and I'm not sure truth is what I want to find anymore.

Maybe Sarah left this stuff here because she wanted me to find it. Was it supposed to tell me something she never had the courage to say?

“Do you want to take a break?” Sin asks.

“Yeah … no. I mean, I don't know.”

“Let's take a break.”

“No, we have to get all this sorted. What if there's more…”
More stuff hidden
is what I intend to say, but the words stall out on my tongue.

He watches me as I turn and start pulling out the drawers of Sarah's nightstand, looking for I don't know what. My insides are tightening up and hardening now. I pull out entire drawers and dump their contents on the bed. Bottles of nail polish mingle with papers and jewelry and pens and earrings and all the other random crap that accumulates in a drawer. Something inside me feels monstrous and scared and out of control now. My hands are shaking.

Sin sits down on the end of the bed and picks up a folded piece of paper, opens it, and reads it. Then he sets it aside and does the same with another piece, and another. He understands now that we are no longer sorting a dead girl's stuff into what to keep and what to get rid of.

We are looking for answers I'm terrified to find, while I am sure I can't let anyone else find them first.

Thirty-One

Sarah

Little sister.

Flesh of my flesh,

Bones of my bones,

Heart of my heart.

She found the box that tells the tale I could not tell.

At the top of the list of things I wish I had never done, I struggle to order the events. Which one thing is more awful than the next?

Here is the dirty secret, the story for which I have no pretty words.

Something changed about David. I can't say when, but I knew things were different between us, and I made the mistake of asking him about it on the way home from a party. We'd been in Point Reyes Station, at the house of someone who was celebrating the release of an album I can't even remember. We'd both been drinking, he more than I.

I should never have agreed to drive, but I did. I knew I was more sober than he was, and I'd thought … only two drinks.

I'd had two drinks. Maybe three. More than enough for a girl like me who almost never drank.

I was angry at David for seeming distant, so I asked him what was wrong, and he told me. All about Rachel, and him, and how he was in love with her.

It made terrible sense. Perfect, horrible sense.

The hills were dark, like sleeping creatures spread out around us on a cloudy, moonless night. This is what I remember most—how black it was, how lightless. Wisps of fog hung around us, covering the darkness in gauze.

Why was I driving? I asked myself so many times. I should have pulled over, insisted on walking, anything. I should have, and given another chance, I would have, but I didn't when it counted.

Fate. That's why. I understand now that it was time for me to meet mine.

I started crying as David talked about his feelings for Rachel so openly, you might have thought he was telling a friend and not the girl who loved him like a puppy dog.

I cried, and I looked at him across the darkness of the car, and I never saw the hitchhiker.

Not until he was in front of the car, so close there was no swerving away.

Too late.

I remember only the screech of tires, the unfathomable thud of metal against flesh, the shock of a body against the windshield of the car.

I remember a frozen moment of surprise, feeling as if time had stopped.

The next moments were a blur of terror. I don't recall opening the car door or getting out.

He is lying on the cold earth, amid the wild wheat growing at the side of the road. I feel as if I am moving in slow motion as I go to his side and kneel down there. I am having too many thoughts at once—is he alive, and call 911, and what have we done, and it's my fault, and it's David's fault, and why were we even arguing, and God this can't be happening, and what will happen to me, and will I go to jail, and what if he's really dead—

“Check his pulse,” David says, standing over me.

My hands shaking, I try to find an artery in his neck, but I can't, so I try his wrist. I feel nothing.

Most frightening is his stillness, which is not the stillness of the living.

I glance up at David, and he understands.

“Fuck!” David says. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. This is bad. We could go to jail for this.”

Not
we
.
Me
. It's me who would go to jail. I am the driver. I am the guilty one. I think of the beers I had at the party, and maybe I felt okay to drive, but maybe I wasn't.

No, I definitely wasn't okay to drive.

“I'll say I was driving,” David says, “so you won't get in trouble.”

I shake my head. Whatever else he's done, I'm not letting him take the fall for me. I know without thinking that I couldn't live with that. “No,” I say, on the verge of tears.

“Let's just go. There's no real damage on the car that wasn't already there. Let's go before someone drives by and sees us here.”

I look down at the guy. He's our age, blond, good-looking. I cannot believe he's died right here, right now. I wonder about CPR. Would it help? I've taken a class, but in my terror I can't remember a single thing about it. Can you give it to dead people?

There is so much blood. I think it's coming from his head, mostly. On his face, his clothes, his hair.

It's on me too, not sure how it got there.

I place a hand over his mouth, beneath his nose, to see if I can feel any breath, but no. He is so still, something about his face totally different from that of someone merely unconscious.

He is inanimate. Whatever made him alive has gone. In that moment, I wish I knew what his eyes looked like before his death. I have only a flash of an image of him, just as we were about to make impact, shock registering on his face. That tiny bit of horrific memory doesn't tell me what I want to know.

I cannot think what else to do, so I stand up and look at David, trying hard not to cry, not to fall apart.

“He's dead. There's nothing we can do,” David says. “Come on, let's go now while we still can.”

And so.

We go.

In the moments and hours and days that follow, we never decide upon a strategy. Our strategy is simply to pretend the accident never happened. We never speak of it out loud again.

Although I know David has checked already, I do look the next morning at the front of the car, but its old chrome bumper looks the way it always has, and the dents and the rust on the hood do not appear any different from how they did the day before.

Days and weeks pass, and the news of a hitchhiker killed by a hit-and-run at first dominates the papers and local TV, then fades when there is nothing further to say. I begin to sense that we will get away with what we have done—what I have done—but this doesn't ease my conscience. It only makes me feel worse.

Yet what haunts me most, what consumes me day and night, invading my every thought, are the stories of Brandon himself.

A sense of guilt like the weight of a mountain settles over me. A feeling I know I will never outlive.

I find a story in the
Marin IJ
two days after the accident, with a picture of Brandon, his senior photo, in which he looks not quite clean-cut, but nice. His hair comes to his collar in the photo. It is wavy and dark blond, and he is smiling as if thinking of some private joke. His eyes though, his eyes are what keep me studying the photo again and again. I can see the life in them, the spark, the essence of who he must have been.