Rachel Hawkins - Grim

Julia, please come.

After a long silence, the floor creaks.

A door opens down the hall, and my heart plunges. It’s only Mom. She’ll make her bumbling way to the bathroom and ruin everything. Julia won’t come near now.

But no...Mom is coming my way, toward the bedroom that she hasn’t entered since it happened. She’s in the doorway, her body backlit by the hall night-light. The bedroom curtains are open, and the moon casts a faint glow on her face. I’ve never seen her eyes so wide.

I stand quickly. “Mom?”

She leans against the doorjamb, pausing as if there’s a force field keeping her at bay. Then she seems to make an effort, pushing through, and steps toward my bed.

All I can do is stare.

She eases herself onto the edge of the bed, her posture stiff.

“It’s been so hard, Claire,” she says.

For a moment, I can’t think how to respond. “I know, Mom,” I finally whisper. “But you’ve got to pull it together.”

“Sometimes it’s just too much,” she says.

The silence deepens, and I resign myself to a night without a glimpse of Julia. I’ll stand here until Mom shuffles back to her room, and then I’ll endure the hours until the next chance of seeing my sister again.

But then I feel it—the strange charge to the air that tells me Julia is near. I draw closer to Mom, wanting to be fully visible through the doorway. A chill snakes through me, and I know it’s a shiver of fear and longing.

She has come.

As before, Julia rigidly faces forward when she passes by the door, but I still see the pale of her flesh, the bluish shadows under her eyes. Her body is slightly stooped, as if she’s tired...or broken. It hurts to see her this way—it isn’t the Julia I know. She seems lost, untethered. I focus on her face, pleading with her to turn.

Look at me, Julia.

She pauses. My heart swells as her head turns.

But her eyes don’t meet mine. They find Mom instead, and her mouth drops open.

Mom raises her head and gasps. “Julia?”

But my sister walks on, past the doorway, vanishing from our view.

The air stills. The electric charge is gone, and my spine softens. I concentrate hard on the room—otherwise I fear I might melt into the floor.

The silence drags at my limbs, weighing on my shoulders.

Mom shudders. “That was... I just...” She trails off, shaking her head.

“Yeah,” I say dully.

She’s quiet for a long moment. “Why’d she look at me that way?” she finally asks. She still faces the doorway, arms wrapped around her body.

I don’t say anything. She doesn’t want to hear my answer anyway.

Mom slumps. “She blames me.”

Right now, I blame her for barging in and ruining my moment with Julia...but it’s no good telling Mom that. She hears only what she wants to hear. When she finally lurches back to her own room and shuts the door, I stretch out on my bed and remember our raised voices in the driveway, car doors slamming and tires peeling out.

In the midst of arguments—and there had been plenty in the last year, though none as bad as that one—I knew our mother was crazy. She’d lost her grip on reality. She’d lost control. But seeing her face just now has made me less certain.

Mom has always been outnumbered. Excluded, even. Maybe that made her all the more tenacious, to the point of desperation, when she tried to lay down the law.

We were stubborn, too. So stubborn that sometimes getting our way was more important than having peace...or being safe.

“You saw her again?”

I nod. Ben knows without asking, but he asks anyway because he’s the sort who likes to verbalize. He thinks it’s unhealthy to repress emotion. Most of the time, I like this quality—every other guy I’ve known is tragically stunted when it comes to words and feelings.

“I know you’re hoping to get something out of these, um, encounters with Julia,” he continues, “but are they helping? Every time I see you, you seem more depressed.” He pulls me against his chest. “I wish you’d just come away with me.”

I tighten my grip around him, surprised at myself for smiling. “Would you take me away from all this if I asked?”

“Of course. But I’m afraid you’d just run back.” He kisses the top of my head. “So what happened last night?”

“Mom ruined it. She came to our room and tried to talk to me, and when Julia finally appeared, she saw Mom. Not me, Mom. You should have seen Julia’s face. Narrow eyes and forehead all wrinkly—like she was furious.” My eyes fill with tears. “I’m afraid she won’t come back now.”

“Hmmm,” Ben murmurs.

“What?”

“Did you ever think your mom might be the key to this?”

I wipe at my eyes. “How?”

He looks beyond me, his eyes thoughtful. “Why would your sister be angry with her?”

“Mom thinks it’s because Julia blames her.”

“Should Julia blame her?”

Anger flares in my gut. “Well, yeah. You know how freaking unreasonable Mom was!”

He sits up suddenly, pushing me away. “Claire, did your mother cause the crash?”

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.

“Did she turn that wheel into the retaining wall?”

I take a breath. “No.”

Ben nods. “Well...there you go.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I don’t know.” He looks away. “It’s not really my business.”

I can’t bear the sudden gulf between us, so I tug at the hair that curls near his ear. “My business is always your business, buddy, and vice versa. You know you’re stuck with me, right?”

“I’m counting on it. I just...” He breaks off. “I want you to be whole again, or as whole as you can be, considering. If I could somehow make this better, I would.”

“I know. But it’s my job to fix things...if they can be fixed at all.”

He opens his mouth to protest, but I lean forward and silence him with a kiss. It’s one of my favorite tricks when he doesn’t agree with me. I feel his lips curve upward as his arms tighten around my waist. Sometimes I think it would be so easy to lose myself in this thing Ben and I share.

But the call of blood to blood won’t be ignored.

Maybe Ben is right, and Mom is the key. The key to reaching Julia...or to losing her forever.

I’ll find out tonight.

When the time comes—when the darkness and silence deepen and I feel the first crackle of that charge to the air—I go to Mom’s door. For once it’s open, and through the three-inch crack I see her sitting on the old cedar chest at the foot of the bed. Her shoulders droop, and it strikes me how much weight she’s lost. Her face is slack and sharply angled, her shoulders pointy rather than rounded. In that baggy sweat suit she looks like a kid in hand-me-downs.

For so long Mom has been an opposing force—a wall of anger, rather than a woman of flesh and feeling. A sour pang of guilt roils in my belly.

“Mom?”

She doesn’t lift her head.

“Mom, I need you.”

She shudders slightly and wipes at her eyes.

“Come to our room, Mom,” I say as gently as I can. “I want you there.”

I don’t know what else to do, so I go back to the bedroom and sit on the edge of my bed. It’s time to concentrate on Julia—on her laughter, her dimpled smile, the warmth of her skin, the scent of her hair. With each passing day the details fade a little more.

Moments later Mom stands in the doorway. She hesitates before stepping forward and easing herself onto the bed next to me. I reach out slowly, wary of startling her, and place my hand on her knee. She flinches but does not cry or push my hand away.

There’s a thump in the distance. The light changes, brightening ever so slightly, and I feel that static in the air.