“They’re probably worried,” Andi says when I’m silent too long, everything about her carefully neutral, hands folded on the table in front of her. “Also, it’s Christmas Eve, so…” she trails off, but there are years of weight in that ellipsis. I shake my head.
“Phone’s all yours,” I say, deposit the dishes in the sink, and grab the phone from where it’s been charging from a solar battery. “Here. Sometimes the satellite connection cuts out but it’s usually pretty good. You can use it like a regular phone, just—yeah. Have fun.”
I turn away before I can say more stupid things or continue the discussion about why I’m here on Christmas Eve and not at my parents’ house watching nieces and nephews run around, hopped up on sugar, while my sister Beth tries to corral them into making a nice picture or singing Christmas carols and my brothers Zach and Matt stand off to one side, letting the women do the parenting, while they subtly compare their children’s accomplishments.
But that’s not what Andi remembers, because she moved away before any of that. If she remembers anything it’s popcorn strings and sugar cookies and cozy pajamas, songs sung next to the Christmas tree, everyone listening as my father read the nativity story. I wonder how often she thinks of it. If she thinks of it. I wouldn’t.
I’d say it was nicer back then, but time casts a long shadow backward, and the truth is that we didn’t know any better. We were all still kids who more or less fell in line.
These days there’s only so much I can take of them pretending my brother Elliott doesn’t exist and so many times I can ask them not to deadname Reid, so I usually pick one winter holiday to spend with them. This year it was Thanksgiving.
She’s gone into the other room of the tiny cabin, and I can hear the creak of the floorboards under her feet. I put the bowls and the pot into the sink full of freezing cold soapy water and tell myself that I’m not listening to see who she calls.
But I hear, “Hey Rick, it’s me,” anyway, and it hits me right in the chest. That tender spot between the lungs, and it’s so unexpected that breathing feels funny for a second, like all my bodily processes forgot what they were doing for a moment and now I’m breathing with my heart and pumping blood with my lungs.
What the fuck is wrong with me that hearing her say Hey, Rick, has me holding onto the edge of the sink and staring into the dishwater like it’s got some answers?
“Wait, Rick, can you—” Andi says, and pauses. There’s laughter in her voice. I grip the sink a little tighter. “Is Dad there? Can you put him on so I can just talk to both of you at once?”
It’s not—it’s—I don’t know. It’s the funny ache of releasing a grip you’ve held for too long, a relief and a new pain, all at once. It’s the answer to a question I hadn’t let myself ask for twenty years: no, I didn’t rip them apart, because Andi is on the phone with her dad and her stepdad, and they’re in the same house, and she’s telling them over and over that she’s fine, she’s safe, she’s fine, she’s sorry.
When I was a kid, I was always told to give it to God. It was whatever bad thing I’d done or whatever bad way I felt; as if I was supposed to simply hand it over and be free. I tried. I always tried, and it never really worked; I could hand things over again and again, but they always seemed to come back and stick like burrs in my conscience. It was because I wasn’t doing it right, wasn’t trusting God enough, didn’t have the right kind of faith.
After Andi left—after her family got chased away and it was my fault—I didn’t try any more. For the first few years I was still too self-righteous to think I’d done anything wrong, and after that I didn’t think I deserved to be rid of it. Even after I grew up, after a stint in the Army and a college degree, after therapy and a steady job and my own house, I never let go. I never told anyone who didn’t know already. I never gave up the guilt, but I did push it down.
But Andi still says Rick the same way she says Dad, and I’m so grateful for this small mercy that it hurts.
Christ, I’m a mess. I’m tired and haven’t eaten enough or drunk enough water. It’s been a long, stressful day and it’s still not over because the truck is still a mile away and I don’t know when we’re getting out of here. It’s exhaustion and stress and being blindsided by twenty-year-old sins in the middle of it all, and after some sleep and some breakfast I’ll feel normal again.
I reach my hands back into the freezing dishwater and get back to work, only to hear Andi laugh.
“Because I’m tired after my near-death experience and dramatic rescue, and only want to tell you about it—no, I wasn’t really near death. Yes, I promise.”
I wash the dishes as quietly as I can and try not to listen. I even start humming Christmas carols to myself, despite firmly not being a Christmas Carol Person, so I can’t hear her talk to her parents. Every so often, though, she’ll laugh or exclaim something and then I can’t help but start listening again to the bright, happy cadence of her voice in the next room.
Strange, how she sounds exactly the same, like sunny summer days, like goading me into going past the property markers and deeper into the woods, like walking across a fallen tree over the creek, ten feet in the air, and knowing I’d follow her. She was always right. I always did, even if I paid for it later.
“Yes, a cabin,” she’s saying, in the tone of voice that suggests it’s not the first time she’s said it. “A ranger came and got me and drove me back here. The Parkway’s closed, anyway, and it’s too far to drive in the snow.”
She says all this like she’s the authority on the matter, like she knew this all herself and wasn’t stuck in a sleeping bag, cold and freaked out when I found her earlier. Her bravado could be annoying, but instead it’s kind of charming.
“I don’t know, Dad, it’s a cabin,” she says. I need something to do besides eavesdrop, so I start wiping down the counters and then the table again. “It’s kind of cute and old-timey. There’s a wood stove, there’s a kitchen, all the lamps are oil lamps. The fridge is avocado green, you’d hate it.”
I wipe down the ugly fridge, too.
“The ranger?” she asks, and for all that I’m determined not to listen in there’s a note of alarm in her voice. I realize she was pacing back and forth because the soft creaking of the wooden floor stops. Suddenly, it’s very quiet. “Why?”
There’s a long silence. I don’t breathe and don’t make noise, then think that I should be making noise, so I pace over to the sink and toss the dishcloth in, rearrange some of the dishes in the drying rack.
In the other room, Andi clears her throat and drops her voice, so I have to strain to hear it when she says, “Uh, it’s Steve.”
Pause.
“Wheeler?” Pause. “No, I didn’t get his badge number. Do rangers even have that? He might not be a ranger, he said he was up here to… study something. About birds and global warming?”
I think, inanely, that I never told her why I was here but that it’s a good guess; for a moment, I wonder how on earth she got my name wrong.
It takes me a minute to realize that she doesn’t want them to know who she’s with. Of course. I probably wouldn’t either.