The Vow (5 page)

But that was somebody else’s sister. Not mine. Wasn’t it?

And finally. It clicked, like machinery sliding into place, an old-fashioned key with notches and grooves. Lena was the first half of one of those stories. Half an episode, half a thirty-second news report, half a tragedy. Nothing didn’t mean nothing at all. There was something horrific waiting at the end of this story, just like all those others.
Nothing
just meant we didn’t know which grotesque ending was hers. Ours. Yet.

Striking a deal with God seemed like my only hope. So I stopped eating. I told Him I’d start again when He brought Lena back. Back then he was still worth a capital letter at the beginning of his name.

I didn’t know then that already-skinny nine-year-olds aren’t allowed to go on hunger strikes. Four weeks and twenty-three pounds later, my parents yanked me out of fourth grade and checked me into the psychiatric ward of Hardin Children’s Hospital. A nurse put a tube into my neck, and I had to watch the calories pour into my vein all day long, wondering whether God considered the tube a deal breaker or not.

The child psychiatrist tried to get me to confess to hating my body, then pursed her lips and gave me soft, sad eyes when I wouldn’t.

But why would I hate my body?

Her attention-seeking-behavior theory made even less sense. It was the opposite. I wanted to disappear, but that fact didn’t have anything to do with my deal with God either.

Then she tried to convince me I was punishing my parents for giving up on Lena. I already disliked her, with her frizzy bun and coffee breath, but now I had a reason to hate her. She wasn’t allowed to talk about my parents like she knew them. They weren’t moving on. They were moving into themselves—away from each other and me and the world. Mom was sure that Lena was still alive, living with hippies or polygamists or devil worshippers or whoever. And Dad had transformed from a man who built birdhouses for Mom’s garden to a man who kicked holes in walls. Why would I want to punish them more?

I would die, the shrink finally told me, if I didn’t start eating.

I pretended not to hear her. I didn’t tell her that God would save me. I knew he would, though. Not because I needed saving, but because he was going to bring back my sister.

It wasn’t until spring that I started eating again. Hunters found Lena’s body in the woods only forty miles south. Of course nobody told me the details, but I read them years later online. Naked, raped, strangled, discarded, frozen, thawed, and gnawed on by wild animals. That was how god brought her back to me.

The frizzy-bunned shrink took full credit for my recovery, and I never told her or my parents about my pact with god. Just Mo, when we were fourteen.

He listened, then asked who won.

“Won? It wasn’t a contest, Mo. It was a deal.”

“A deal? But what does God have to gain from you not eating?” he asked.

“I don’t know. That’s not really the point.” I’d expected sympathy, not a critique. But I’d forgotten that Mo thinks first and feels later. “It made sense at the time. I was
ten
, Mo.”

“So you started eating again because you realized God doesn’t make deals?” he asked.

“No. I started eating because there is no god.”

He said nothing. Then finally, “Hmm.”

“What does that mean?”

“What if you’re wrong? What if there is one and he just doesn’t make deals? Or what if he does make deals and the feeding tube was breaking it? What if you lost?”

“It wasn’t a contest.”

“Sounds like one to me.”

“Forget it.”

But he didn’t forget it. The next day he slid an envelope into my locker with a bumper sticker inside—one of those Christian fish symbols with feet and
DARWIN
written across it. The accompanying note said:
Sorry. I’m an ass. You’ve totally earned atheism.

That’s something Mo can do better than anyone else: apologize. It isn’t that easy for most people to say sorry and mean it, but I knew he meant it.

At the time, I didn’t have a car, and I was pretty sure Mom wouldn’t let me use her Tahoe to mock Christianity, so I put the sticker on my bathroom mirror instead. My parents never asked about it.

“Why don’t you head out,” Reed says. My head snaps up and into the present. “I can finish,” he adds.

I stare down at the rag in my hand. How long have I been wiping circles with this same dirty rag? He must think I’m crazy. I glance at the clock. “It’s okay. My ride won’t be here for another ten minutes.”

Having Mo pick me up is the only thing keeping Mom and Dad from freaking out completely about the fact that I’m working here.

Reed tosses me a fresh rag. “You want to do the booths then?”

“Sure.” I drop my mine into the murky-watered blue bucket and take the warm rag to the first booth. “So, how many summers have you worked here?” I ask.

“Last year was my first.”

I give him a moment to elaborate or ask me a question, but he doesn’t. Not surprising since so far I’ve learned only what I can see:

He drinks his already-too-sweet Mr. Twister iced teas with two packets of sugar.

He listened to Flora gripe about her landlord, then let her make fun of his geeky glasses.

He cleans the geeky glasses with the corner of his apron, and for just the moment that his face is bare I think his eyes could tell stories. But then he puts them back on, and he’s closed again.

He looks vaguely uncomfortable when Rachel or Clara or one of the other college girls tries to flirt with him.

The cookbooks he reads during his break aren’t the kind that my mom has, with pictures of bubbling casseroles, promising meals with five ingredients in less than ten minutes. The one he left on the table in the back had recipes with a zillion ingredients, half of which I’d never heard of, and whole chapters on the making your own cheese and discerning the quality of truffle oil.

“What’s culinary school like?” I ask.

“It’s hard. Harder than I thought it would be.”

“Do you like your classes?”

“Yeah.”

“My mom always says she wishes she went to culinary school,” I say. “She watches
Top Chef
like it’s her job.”

“Does she work?”

“She used to teach Victorian Lit at U of L.”

“Really?” Suddenly he’s interested, and I’d kill for something intelligent to say. Our eyes lock. He’s wondering if I’m more than just some dumb blonde. I look away.

“She doesn’t teach anymore?” he asks.

I tuck the hair that’s escaped my ponytail behind my ear. What to say?

She went on sabbatical after Lena disappeared and then just never went back. She was always going to. I can’t remember exactly when we stopped hearing
next year
, but it was no longer a question we asked.

“She’s working on a book,” I say, though I don’t actually believe this. She talked about writing some poet’s biography a few years back, but unless planting peonies is research for the book, the biography project is on hold.

“I think your ride’s here,” Reed says.

I hadn’t noticed the sound of the truck pulling in, but I can hear the familiar grumble now. I pull back the blinds and peer out into the dark parking lot. Sure enough, there’s Mo. He was stoked about the chauffeuring arrangement since he’s without wheels otherwise. Who knows what he’s been up to since he dropped me off this morning, but judging from the bug carnage on my grille, it was far away. Last shift he drove out to Mammoth Cave with Bryce.

Mo flashes his brights,
my
brights, into the shop, then lays on the horn, two long blasts. Nice. Heaven forbid he have to wait for a whole minute.

“Go,” Reed says. “I’ll finish up.”

“You sure?” I’m already untying my apron.

“Of course.”

I glance up and he’s watching me. My fingers fumble with the knot at my waist, but I can’t seem to wriggle my thumbnail into the center. How did this thing get pulled so tight?

He squints, gives a half smile. “You need some help with that?”

“I’ve got it,” I say, finally looking down.

I chuck the apron in the dirty linens bag and give him an awkward wave good-bye, but he’s not looking anymore. He’s moved on to fiddling with the ice machine.

“All right,” I say. He’s elbow-deep in ice. Maybe if he looked at me again I could see the amber flecks in his brown eyes, and maybe I could say something clever enough to make him smile again.

The horn blares and Reed raises an eyebrow.

I shake my head. “I guess I’m going home.”

Chapter 6

Mo

I
’m going home.

I’m sitting in the dark, watching Annie hurry down the steps of Mr. Twister, but I’m not really here at all. I’m still at the kitchen table, staring at the steam curling off my tea, marveling at the perfect flatness of my dad’s voice. The way he said it—
We’re going home
—he could have been asking for more stew or telling me I needed a haircut.

I glance at the clock. It’s lying. It can’t have been just one hour. I’ve had a week’s worth of thoughts and a year’s worth of emotions since then, and yet I’ve landed at nothing—thinking nothing, feeling nothing. Is this what shock is? I can’t remember actually driving here, so it’s lucky I didn’t get pulled over for speeding since my autopilot mode is twenty over the limit.

He tried to make it sound like it was for the best, like the tanking of ReichartTek was not the end of the world.

My mother said nothing, of course. She just stared over my shoulder, out the French doors, through the pool chairs and the freshly painted fence, and into the blur of horizon and sunset. She already knew. That was clear. Her eyes were dry but bloodshot under swollen lids. More than once during his speech, she picked up the teapot with trembling hands, then realized nobody needed more tea and put it down again.

“It’s actually a good time to be going home,” he said after rambling about research opportunities in Jordan for someone of his education and experience.

“But this
is
home,” Sarina whispered. Then eyeing her nasty little cat, “Can I bring Duchess?”

At the time I was too dazed to be appropriately pissed off, but now I’m ready to punch the steering wheel.
Can I bring Duchess?
What kind of idiotic response is that? She’s fifteen—too old for her biggest concern in life to be proximity to her little cat. And as for
But this
is
home
, she has to see that it isn’t home. We’ve been pretending. Home claims you.

According to my passport, Jordan claims me, but by my third summer of visiting home, I knew I didn’t belong there anymore. Whatever admiration my Jordanian cousins had for my fancy American accent and clothes had turned sour by the time I was a teenager.

Their disgust wasn’t subtle. The cherry-red Nike basketball shoes I’d been giddy to show off were not items to be coveted but damning proof that I thought I was better them. And the fact that my best friend wore a bra made me
haram
—never mind that my cousins were only slightly more religious because they lived closer to Teta and Jido. America had rotted my soul.

Annie appears.

I exhale slowly. She’s walking toward the truck with her head down, bobbing as she steps over a bike propped against the railing. She walks like a twelve-year-old boy, probably because her legs are too long for her torso and her arms swing like a primate’s, plus she hasn’t got enough muscle holding her bones together.

She looks up at me and glares. The honking.

This is going to kill her. I feel it, and suddenly my mouth is so dry I can’t swallow, can’t breathe. Why haven’t I been planning what to say to her? She’s right in front of me, just a few more seconds of ignorance between us, and I didn’t even think about how upset she’s going to be. I don’t want to tell her.

The passenger side door squeals as she pulls it open. “Was that really necessary?”

“You don’t want to drive?”

“You can,” she says. “I’m so tired I don’t even care.”

Usually she does care. Very much. She says I drive like a crack-crazed maniac.

She climbs in and I can see the exhaustion in the slump of her shoulders, the way her hair is fuzzy on top and falling out of her ponytail around the other side. Maybe I should wait till tomorrow to tell her.

“Take me home, driver. Don’t get a ticket and I’ll forgive you for the honking.”

What if I don’t have to tell her? There are crazy stoic people out there who keep terminal illnesses to themselves, and they just drop dead one day and surprise everyone who knew them. I could be one of them. I’d just disappear.

Except I can’t pretend with Annie.

“Something bad happened,” I say. My voice doesn’t even sound like my own. “Really bad.”

She cracks her neck. I hate it when she does that, but I’m too distracted to lecture her about arthritis in her spine right now. “As long as it doesn’t involve you hitting a pedestrian with my truck, I’m sure it’ll be okay,” she says. “Did Bryce finally beat you at foosball or something?”

“No. He left for Argentina yesterday.”

She waits, but I don’t have a place to start. It doesn’t seem fair to give her the same abrupt explanation my dad gave us. I owe her more. I wish it were over. “It’s really bad,” I repeat.

“What do you mean?” she asks quietly. She’s staring at me now. Her skin is bone white except for the vein at her temple that looks like a river on a map. “You’re scaring me,” she says. “What happened?”

“My dad lost his job.”

“Oh, Mo,” she says, and in the lamplight I see relief soften her face. “I’m so sorry.” She reaches over and hugs me. She smells like Lysol and butterscotch. The combination is unsettling.

“My mom’s losing it,” I mumble into her shoulder. It’s true but not relevant, just something to say while I stretch out the telling.

Annie lets go of me. She swallows and nods. She thinks she understands, because my mom is always in some state of losing it.

“You think she’s going to be okay?”

“No. He just told us at dinner, and then . . .”

And then we sat and stared at our stew. Finally Sarina got up and scraped the cold bowls into the disposal. Mom started to sniffle, Dad cleared his throat, Mom started wailing, and Dad retreated to the den.

“. . . then I had to come pick you up,” I finish.

“Did something happen, or are they just downsizing?”

“They’re going under, or trying not to by letting a bunch of employees go.”

“Your dad will get another job, though,” Annie says. “He’s a genius big shot, right? And you guys are pretty well-off. I mean, it’ll probably be tough for a while, but I’m sure it’ll all work out.”

“You don’t get it.”

It’s the wrong thing to say to Annie. She bristles and straightens like someone’s pulling her up by the spine. I don’t know who’s to blame for making her think she’s stupid—probably that dumbass seventh-grade math teacher Mr. Crickshaw—but she won’t let it go.

I try again. “I mean I haven’t told you everything yet. It’s about our status.”

She rolls her eyes. “Seriously? That’s crap, Mo. Nobody’s going to think less of your family just because your dad lost his job. It happens to people all the time. I don’t mean it’s not terrible, but it doesn’t affect your status.”

“No.
Immigration
status.”

Insects shriek and pulse in the blackness beyond the truck. I see her shoulders rise and fall, but her face stays perfectly still. Annie is the master of the serene surface. I can’t even tell if she’s understanding what I’m saying.

“But you have a green card, right?”

“No.”

“But you’re legal.”

“Right now, yeah. My dad has a work visa, so we’re legal until he’s no longer working for ReichartTek.”

She folds her arms over her chest. I can see her pinching the skin at the backs of her arms between her index finger and thumbs. “So you all have to apply for green cards now, right?”

I want this conversation over. I don’t want to see her response when it clicks.

“Right?” she insists. “It’s not like you snuck into the country in the back of a pickup. And you’ve been here
forever
!” The cords in her neck are straining beneath her skin.

“That doesn’t matter.”

She stares at me, eyes suddenly wide with panic.

I have to look away. “He’s already started looking for jobs back in Jordan.”

“
What?
Why not here?”

Exactly.

I wanted to grab my dad’s head and shake him when he told me he was actually excited about the interview he has lined up in Jordan. Excited to go home.
His
home. He actually said maybe the timing was lucky, that this opportunity was perfect.

I won’t criticize him in front of Annie, though. I can’t tell her he’s choosing to go home, or at least accepting it. She won’t forgive that.

“Why isn’t he looking for a job here?” she repeats, her voice bordering on shrill.

“It doesn’t work like that. ReichartTek got him the visa. That visa isn’t good anymore, so we have to leave. He’s got two weeks.”

“Are you kidding me? Then what?” The brain vein is bulging now, and she’s turning splotchy like she does every time she has to give an oral presentation.

“We have to leave.”

“But what if you don’t? I mean, nobody’s going to force you onto an airplane, right?”

“I don’t know how it works,” I mutter. “I’ve never been deported before.”

She puts her hand to her head and wipes the loose strands of hair from her eyes. It looks like straw, like she’s spent the whole day swiping it away in exasperation. “You’ve lived your whole life here, though. That has to mean something. I’m sure if people knew, like if you got somebody to write an article in the paper or something, or maybe start a petition . . .” She trails off.

She’s not stupid, but that might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard her say. “Annie, people aren’t going to sign a petition, and if they did, it wouldn’t matter. Nobody cares.”

“I care.” Her voice breaks, and I hear something split inside her. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry. I just . . . this is
crap
! I don’t even believe this. How are you just sitting there? How are you feeling?”

My least favorite question. She knows it, but can’t stop herself from asking it anyway. I’ve yet to discover how telling people how I feel makes anything better, and she’s yet to care that I hate it.

How. Are. You. Feeling.

Scared.

“Mad,” I say.

She stares at me for a moment, then turns so she’s facing forward again. We’re still here in the parking lot, and I’m not sure why until I remember I’m the one behind the wheel. I turn the key, wrestle the gear shift into reverse, and back out.

Inside Mr. Twister I can see a man’s silhouette and what looks like a mop handle coming out of his back. The outline makes him look like he’s been impaled by a broom or something.

Annie starts to cry. I haven’t seen her cry in years. She doesn’t make a sound, but her shoulders jerk and bounce, and I have the same gut-twisting feeling that I did the last time I saw her cry. I want to puke. It’s worse than getting kicked in the balls. I just I want her to stop. I’ll do anything to get her to stop.