She popped to her feet. She stretched her arms out wide. She opened her mouth to say something but then bit it back. She blinked several times.
“That’s what you think this is?” she cried.
“Isn’t it?” I asked.
“No,” she snapped. “Did it ever occur to you that I’ve been trying to drum up the courage for years to come and see you?”
I put on my bored face. She was not going to bamboozle me. She could have approached me anytime over the past twelve years, when she was officially an adult, and yet she never had.
“Well, you’re here now,” I said. “So what do you want?”
“I want my brother back,” she said.
We stared at each other. What was I supposed to say? We couldn’t just erase a twenty-year absence of birthdays, holidays, vacations, and the day-to-day cap on, seat down, who ate my yogurt issues that were the bedrock of being a family.
“I can’t help you with that,” I said.
I heard Jackson hiss a breath. I could have drowned in the disapproval pouring off him. I opted to hold my breath.
“That’s it?” Lexi asked. She began to pace the room.
She looked devastated, as if everything she had feared about approaching me had come to pass. Not gonna lie. It made me feel like shit. Still, I didn’t say anything, which was fine as it turned out she wasn’t done.
“You don’t have anything else to say to me? No ‘Hey, Lexi, I’ve missed you, too. Sorry I never reached out’?” She stopped pacing and planted her hands on her hips, staring down at me from across the coffee table.
“Reach out? Are you serious?” I snapped. I wished with everything I had that I could stand up. I couldn’t risk it. The muscles in my leg still felt weak even as the tingling in my hands faded. I was not about to do a face-plant in front of her. I didn’t have a lot of the old me left, but I had my pride.
I supposed that was wrong, but that pride had gotten me through some very bleak times and kept me from following my parents into the quicksand of bad decisions. It also stoked the fire in my belly to prove myself, to be somebody to the foster dad who called me worthless and slapped me so hard, my ear rang for a week when I accidentally scratched the back bumper of his piece of shit ancient minivan with my bike. And to the foster mother who liked to call me into the bathroom when she “forgot” a towel, laughing when my adolescent body betrayed me and responded to the sight of her naked and wet. Yes, those were the “parents” I hoped choked on my success. But the ones I wanted to suffer above all others were my real parents, the ones who’d abandoned me and my sister to the system when they decided getting sober for their kids was just too hard.
I shook off the memories and stared my sister down. “Reach out?” I repeated. “You got placed with a family, a good family, and moved three thousand miles away to the East Coast. Exactly how was I supposed to reach out?”
I could feel Jackson’s eyes on my face. He didn’t know anything about my past, because I never talked about it. I was certain he was examining these pieces and trying to figure out how they fit into the puzzle that was me. I would have told him not to bother, but I was too focused on making my past, in the human form of my sister, go away. I didn’t want anyone to see me in my self-imposed isolation, especially Lexi. The pity would flatten what little self-respect I had left. And believe me, I hadn’t been operating at capacity for a long while.
“There’s this crazy thing called the Internet. You could have found me. You could have stayed in my life,” she argued. Her pointy chin was set at the stubborn angle I remembered so well when she didn’t get her way.
“Is that what your new family told you?” I stared at her, incredulous. I didn’t want to shotgun any positive feelings she had about her adoptive family, but they had made it very clear, painfully clear, when they moved that I was to stay far, far away.
“No,” she said. She glanced down and then back, still brave even after all these years. “Mom admitted that Dad told you to keep your distance when we left Arizona. They were worried you’d be a bad influence on me.”
It was jarring to hear her call her adoptive parents Mom and Dad. It’s what I’d wanted for her when she left, but it made the chasm between us feel that much wider.
“He said it a hell of a lot more plainly to me than that,” I corrected her. “When did she tell you?” Suddenly, it was very important for me to know how long she had known the truth.
“After he died last year,” Lexi said. “Mom started to get worried that if something should happen to her, I’d have no one, and she told me I should find you. When I said I doubted that you were interested in me because I’d never heard from you after we moved to Virginia, she told me what Dad said to you.” She looked sad. “You still could have reached out to me, you know.”
I stared at her. Hard. She had no idea. That day, the day they packed up and left Arizona, taking my baby sister with them, had been the worst day of my entire life. It still was, ranking even higher than the day the bottom had fallen out on me, which was saying something.
Upon the Brewers coming to collect her, Lexi had worked herself into such a state, she had to be sedated for them to be able to take her from the foster home where we’d been since our parents had abandoned us. Lexi had been nine. I’d been fourteen, too young to be emancipated, too young to take care of us by myself.
Up until that moment, I’d thought having my parents decide they didn’t want to be a family anymore was the most devastating thing that could happen to me. They were suburban junkies, hopped up on OxyContin after a car accident left my dad with a crushed vertebra and my mom a debilitating case of guilt since she’d been the driver. Their doctor tried to make it all go away by prescribing the wildly addictive narcotic painkiller. What he actually prescribed was the death of a family.
My father became an addict first, and he dragged my mother down the dark path with him. When they couldn’t get their scripts filled anymore, they rolled over to street drugs until they were selling everything we owned to supply their heroin habit. Looking back, I was only surprised they didn’t try to sell me and Lexi, instead of just handing us over to the state when parenting was cutting too deeply into their drug money. Still, none of that had cut as deeply as losing Lexi, the one person who understood how horribly awry our childhood had gone. The one person I loved, who loved me back unconditionally.
I shook my head. There was too much. Too much hurt and anger and grief to unbox from my past. I had moved on, pushed through, and I had no intention of backsliding now. I had enough on my plate, thanks.
“No, I couldn’t reach out,” I said. “If I did, your ‘dad’ was going to have me arrested and thrown in jail. I had to give you your best shot, so I did. Now we’ve both moved on. We’ve built lives for ourselves. There’s simply no need to revisit the past.”