Chapter Eleven

chapter eleven

June 18, 2019

Ifilled a travel mug with coffee and set out for the airport in my sister’s yellow Mustang. The driver’s seat held the indentation of her small, muscular frame. An empty Diet Coke bottle rolled around on the passenger side floor. A hair scrunchie was wrapped around the gearshift. Swimming goggles were hung over the rearview mirror. The car even smelled like Lexie: warm and floral, with a sharp tang of the tea tree oil soap she used. Sitting in the driver’s seat, I missed my sister so fiercely that the longing for her became a physical pain, a throbbing I felt in my whole body.

I remembered watching her swim out from the beach at Lake Wil-more, standing on the shore as she got farther and farther away until she was just a tiny dot. Then she’d turn around, swim back, and once she was out of the water, I’d hug her tightly. “Good swim,” I’d say like I was proud, when actually I’d just been terrified she wouldn’t come back.

I pulled the scrunchie off the gear shift. A piece of her blond hair was tangled up in it.

I had wasted a year barely talking to her, and now she was gone forever. I’d never get that time back. I’d never get the chance to tell her how sorry I was, that I’d made a terrible mistake.

Maybe moving so far away had been a mistake, too. After high school, all I could think of was how I didn’t want to get trapped by Lexie. It was too easy to get caught up in her chaos, to come running every time she had a crisis, to jump in and try to fix her messes for her. I only applied to colleges on the West Coast, telling everyone I wanted a change of scenery. I’m sure Lexie knew the truth. She knew me better than I knew myself.

I sank back in the leather bucket seat and sobbed. I screamed and pounded the steering wheel, hating myself, hating life for being so fucked up and unfair, hating my sister for finally leaving me for good. When I was emptied out, my chest hollow, my body drained, my eyes swollen, I turned on the ignition. Music blasted out from the oldies station. I shut it off, adjusted the seat and mirrors, and pulled out of the driveway and through the tiny center of Brandenburg, passing the Blue Heron Bakery, the general store, and the post office. I drove by the turnoff for Meadow Road that led out to Lake Wilmore. I crossed the train tracks where Lexie and I used to place pennies, letting the old freight cars crush them, turning them into flattened bits of copper that we pretended were gold.

There was no GPS in the car, and no maps, but I knew the way. It all came back easily. My sister’s car purred along, handling so much better than the crappy old Honda I was used to driving, as I followed the two-lane roads and passed farms, cows, houses set back from the road with peeling paint and angry-looking dogs in the yard. I opened the sunroof and the air smelled green and alive; fresh-cut grass and warm leaves reaching up to touch the sun.

I turned the radio back on and cranked the volume, listening to the music I always teased my sister for loving: Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Fats Domino.

I drove the back roads until I came to a Sunoco gas station just before the highway on-ramp. I stopped to fill up the tank—Lexie was famous for running on fumes and rarely kept more than a quarter-tank of gas—then shifted to fifth gear and cruised along Interstate 93. In my peripheral vision, I was sure I caught a glimpse of her in the passenger seat. Why don’t you open her up and see what she can really do?

The speedometer hit eighty-seven before I stopped myself, tapping the brakes. I felt my sister rolling her eyes beside me.

“Shut up,” I said out loud.

Great. Now I was talking to ghosts.

On the radio, a song I didn’t recognize came on, the artist cheerily promising, “Like a rubber ball, I’ll come bouncing back to you.”

I took the exit for the airport and followed the signs to arrivals. Immediately recognizable by his Greek fisherman’s cap and gaudy Hawaiian shirt, my father was standing outside the terminal waiting for me, a small duffle bag slung over his shoulder.

I pulled up and got out of the car.

He looked older than he had the last time I’d seen him, and he’d gotten skinnier. His hair had been cut recently, and his beard was neatly trimmed.

“Jax,” he said, enveloping me in a hug. Lexie had started calling me Jax back when we were kids, so our names would match. It’d never caught on with Mom and Gram, but my father took to it, called us “The X girls.” “Oh Jesus, Jax.” He squeezed me tighter. He smelled like gin and Aqua Velva, a combo that melted me in a deep, primal way, and brought me right back to piggyback rides and scratchy daddy kisses. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”

“I know,” I said, squeezing back, feeling like I was hugging a skeleton. Ted had always been a little on the thin side, but this was concerning. “Come on, let’s get you to Sparrow Crest.”

“Can we stop for a bite on the way?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. But when I pulled into a McDonald’s drive-through ten minutes later, he shook his head.

“There’s a Mexican place down there,” he said, pointing to a giant neon margarita glass flashing in the window. His hands trembled slightly; it wasn’t food he wanted. I hesitated, thought of what Diane said: He’s never going to change. I could have tried to put off the inevitable by pulling into the drive-through and getting him a burger and fries, but he’d find a drink with or without my help. I resolved that, on this trip, I wasn’t going to be the booze police. The last thing I wanted to do was pass judgment; I’d done that with my sister and look where it led me.

I pointed the Mustang toward the Mexican restaurant.

The place was nearly empty—it was only a little after eleven, too early for the lunch crowd—and decorated with piñatas, fake cactuses, walls made to look like adobe. Mexican music, heavy on the horns, played from speakers in the ceiling. We got a table in the back corner, and my father ordered us both house margaritas before I’d touched a menu.

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, Jax, Lexie whispered in my ear.

“I’ve gotta drive,” I reminded him.

The drinks came, and he took them both. I bit my tongue and said nothing. Still, he waved his hand, pooh-poohing me. “These are mostly sugar water. I need fortification before going to that god-awful house.”

He hated Sparrow Crest, or as he called it, “Dracula’s castle.” He loathed it even though he and Mom had been married there, in the gardens. The story I heard later was that Ted wanted to elope, but Gram had insisted, so in the end, Dracula’s castle it was.

“Imagine it, loves,” he said, telling Lex and me the story when we were little. “The organ playing, sounding more like a funeral march than ‘Here Comes the Bride,’ the bats swooping down from the belfry.”

“There were no bats, Ted,” Mom corrected, shaking her head, laughing. “And Sparrow Crest doesn’t have a belfry.”

“Well, the attic, then. There were too bats, and they came swooping down from the attic, got all tangled up in your mother’s wedding veil. They joined up with the spiders and the ghosts, and the vampires—never have there been such strange guests at a wedding. I won’t even tell you what happened when it was time to cut the cake!”

I ordered loaded nachos for us to share. I wasn’t hungry, but my father could use something to absorb all the booze. “Have you been sick?” I asked.

“You look great, too, Jax,” he said.

“Seriously, Ted. You kind of look like hell. Are you okay?”

He leaned back in his bench seat. “One of my kids just died, Jax. And I’ve been on a cleanse. Macrobiotic. I’ve been dating a woman—Vanessa. She wants to purify my body and soul.” He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and dropped his voice. “So what do we know? What happened to Lexie?”

“She went off her meds…”

He took a long sip of the margarita, twirled the plastic straw, rattled ice cubes, ran his finger along the edge of the glass, picking up salt. “She shouldn’t have been all alone in that place,” he said. “That house…” He shook his head.

“Gram left it to her. And Lexie loved Sparrow Crest.”

“She had a hard winter there, Jax,” Ted said. He looked at me icily, his eyes saying, Not that you would know.

“Diane said she was doing well,” I said, defensively.

“Diane saw what Lexie wanted her to see,” Ted said. He stared at his drink, then looked up at me. “When was the last time you talked to her, Jax? Really talked to her?”

Guilt gnawed at my insides like an angry rat. I didn’t answer.

“She called me,” my father said now. He sounded hesitant. Like he wasn’t sure he should be telling me. As if he was betraying some confidence, even now. He’d always been like this when talking about Lexie. He was protective of their relationship, of the secrets they shared.

“When?”

“Three nights ago. The night before she… before it happened, I guess.” He settled back in his vinyl bench seat.

“How did she sound?”

“A little manic. Not bad. Not off the charts. I’ve heard her much worse.”

Lexie had the kind of relationship with him that I never did. They understood each other. She called him when she was off her meds, he called her when he was in a three-days-with-no-sleep painting frenzy. And both of them always picked up the phone.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She was asking about Rita. Anything I could tell her about Rita. But mostly, she wanted to know…” He paused, looked forlornly into his glass. “If it was possible that what happened with Rita wasn’t an accident. She said she’d found something, something that made her believe Rita might have been murdered.”

“Murdered?” The word came out too loud, too angry. I bit my tongue to keep from saying the next words that flew into my head: You’ve gotta be fucking kidding. I took in a slow breath to calm myself.

Be objective,I told myself. Use your listening skills. Take everything in and gather all the information you can before forming any opinions.

“Okay,” I said, voice level. “What else did she say? Did she tell you what she’d found?”

He shook his head. “She was talking fast. Saying she was onto something. Something big.”

I nodded. “And what did you say to her?”

He looked down at his hands on the table. “I told her the truth.”

“Which is?” I steeled myself.

“That your mother knew Rita wasn’t alone at the pool that night. That she’d met someone down there.”

“What?” I’d certainly never heard this part of the story. I was used to Lexie and my father keeping secrets from me, but the idea that my mother had kept a secret like this was too much.

“The way Linda told it, she woke up, noticed Rita was gone. She went to the window. She couldn’t see the pool because she was in the room you always slept in—her view was blocked—but she heard voices. Rita and someone else. Linda wondered if Rita was just playing with Martha.”

I nodded. I’d heard a few stories about Rita and her imaginary friend, Martha. How Rita would insist Gram make an extra plate at dinner that Rita could bring outside for Martha. They’d all hear her talking to Martha, giving the imaginary girl a high, squeaky voice. I thought of the drawing inside the Snakes and Ladders game: Martha W. 7 years old.

My father continued. “But apparently, it didn’t sound like Rita talking to herself, you know, doing her Martha funny voice. This was different. Linda wanted to see who Rita was with, but she didn’t want to get in trouble or get Rita in trouble. So she went back to bed.”

“And Rita drowned that night.”

Ted nodded. “Your mother always blamed herself. And she never told anyone else what she’d heard. Not her mother or sister or the police when they came to ask questions. She was afraid they would blame her—ask her why she didn’t get out of bed to go check on Rita, to bring her back inside. I’m the only one she ever told.”

I tried to imagine it: My mother living with that kind of guilt. Always wondering if things might have turned out differently if she’d gone out to the pool that night. And the pool, of course, was a constant reminder not only of what happened to Rita, but of the fact that she might have been able to stop it. No wonder she hated Sparrow Crest. No wonder I never once saw her swim.

“But who was Rita out there with?” I asked. “Who could it have been?”

“Maybe no one.” He shrugged. “We’ll never know.”

I blew out an exasperated breath. “And you told all of this to Lexie?” I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t like Lexie needed help getting crazy ideas in her head.

“What choice did I have? We were always straight with each other. And you know how she was—she knew there was more to the story than she’d been told. And once she got hold of an idea and it built up in her mind into an obsession—there was no stopping her.” He flagged down the waitress, signaling for another margarita.