“Again?” I ask the single, red-rimmed eye, my brother’s, which peers out at me through the cracked-open door. He’s got the chain on this time, but he doesn’t seem aware that this will keep me and the groceries out. The bags wound round my wrists cut off circulation, turning my fingers blue.
“Again,” he slurs.
“Where’s she at this time?”
From the blankness of his stare, I gather that he’s processed nothing, that his “again” could’ve just as well come from a parrot, a mockingbird.
“Come on.” I knock my sneaker against his door, not hard, but hard enough to make it rattle in his face. “You got to unhook it.”
“Unhook it,” he mumbles, fumbling absently with the chain. “Unhook it. Yeah. Unhook it.” Eventually, he gets it off, lets me in. I sling the bags of cereal and booze onto his table, scattering Coke cans and other debris, as he makes his stooped and arduous way toward the bottle of gin on the counter and swigs.
“Your car,” I inform him, massaging the blood to return to my wrists. “It’s not out there in your lot. You leave it somewhere?”
The gin seems to have fortified him. “Where would I leave it?” he demands, smacking his lips defiantly. “You even looked for it? It’s a good car. I wouldn’t just leave it nowhere.”
“It’s a bright fucking blue Cadillac, Barry. How the hell would I miss it?”
“That bitch,” he muses. “That bitch must’ve got it.”
“Again.”
“Again. Yeah. Again.”
“So glad we’re on the same page.”
“Again,” he repeats, blowing the word into the bottleneck experimentally. “A-gain.”
“That girl of hers—she still over in Sugar Tree?”
Barry shakes his head emphatically, whipping his matted dreads from side to side.
“Help me help you, would you? Where’s she at?”
“She’s going to be a doctor,” Barry croons. “A doc-tor.”
“Med school?”
“Hell yeah, med school. I don’t want no doctor operating on me hasn’t gone to fucking med school.”
“What med school?”
“UMKC.” He sounds as proud as if he’s just received his own acceptance letter. “United Fucking Med School of Kansas City.”
“Jesus Christ. You serious?”
“Fucking serious.”
“And Lillian knows?” A stupid question: when it comes to the girl, and to just about everything else, for that matter, Barry knows only what Lillian knows. Still, I’ve got to cover all my bases. This undertaking is about to eat away my day: four hours up to KC, then another four back down to Arkansas in a vehicle with no locks, no air conditioning, and no catalytic converter while my intoxicated brother and, potentially, his lovelorn and delusional ex-wife, to whom he’s still legally married, sprawl out in the backseat. Even if I had something better to do with my day, I would do this. My brother is my world: always has been, always will be.
“Lillian,” Barry confirms, striving to annunciate each syllable, “is a goddamned bitch.”
While he downs what he can of his gin, I call the police to report the car missing. They’ve still got Barry’s plates on file and sound unduly pleased about this given that we were the ones who found it last time, parallel-parked in Lillian’s signature style, fins frozen mid-fishtail out into the street. We’ve always found it—or at least we did when Lillian’s girl, Annelise, was living in Fayetteville, first in next-door in her apartment complex, then over at Colonial Arms, and then at Sugar Tree, renting solo in all three locations even though she claimed to be fifteen when she first was recognized by Lillian.
My sister-in-law has an excellent memory. It’s no sweat for her to call to mind all the sins ever committed against her, a power that she uses only for good, of course, offering emphatic absolution every time one of those who’s sinned against her happens to cross her path. Her prodigious hippocampus retains every alphanumerical character with any significance for her nearest and dearest, and she’s demonstrated an uncanny knack for guessing usernames and passwords, if not on the first try, then at least on the second or third, enabling her to tap into her still-lawful-but-romantically-ex-husband’s Amazon, Netflix, and Chase Bank accounts on more than one occasion. Finally, and perhaps most impressive of all, she remembers her past lives. This is how she knows that Annelise was once her husband.
“She was putting her hands on me!” the girl shrieked the first time Barry and I showed up at her door to recover the car. “I’m just minding my business out here on my patio, and she rolls up out of nowhere and starts putting her hands on me! I never told her I was here. I don’t know how she found me.”
“How she found you?” The girl looked ragged in short-shorts and a Woo Pig Sooie jersey, the same dark wine red as her curls, the rest of her pale and trembling and waifish in the crisp October air, and I couldn’t help but feel a little bad for her. At the same time, though, I couldn’t help but wonder why she wasn’t calling the police. Why she wasn’t even threatening to.
“She used to do this when I used to live next to her,” she declared. “That’s why I moved here: to just get away from her.” Tears of frustration were drying on her cheeks. Fiercely, she backhanded them away.
Roused by this accusation, Lillian, who was mumbling something about auras and chakras while Barry leaned against the Cadillac, sipping bourbon through a bendy straw, leapt forward before I could stop her. “Remember your strength, Hon!” she roared, seizing the girl by the shoulders. “Dig deep! Breathe! Remember how strong you used to be!”
The girl jerked away. “You put your hands on me one more time, I’ll shiv you!”
Replaying the scene as we wait for the Lyft in Barry’s parking lot, I measure out the possibilities: either the girl’s older than she says she is and was only claiming to be underage to scare off my sister-in-law, or else she gave her age correctly, meaning either that she got herself emancipated before the age of fifteen or that she somehow managed to rent three different apartments with documents she’d forged. Implausible as the latter sounds, her not calling the police has got me leaning that way.
I set UMKC as our destination, hoping that the police will call back while we’re still on the road and share the Cadillac’s location, or at least that the girl has got an apartment within walking distance of campus. The trip puts me out almost four hundred dollars and does not get off to the smoothest of starts, with Barry throwing up as we merge onto I-49, but thankfully the driver is patient and foreign. He doesn’t charge us extra, doesn’t even call us good-for-nothings, just pulls off at the first Shell station and scrubs the plastic seats with alcohol wipes and paper towels. I buy my brother a beer to make up for the booze he’s lost, and we sit beneath the awning, passing the tallboy back and forth. There’s something in this worth savoring. The nostalgia in the making. The way the shade and sun and breeze from passing cars together make the perfect temperature. The sweetness of a moment shared. I wouldn’t have things any other way. We’ve had our share of adventures, me and Barry, and we’ve always been there for each other, never let each other down.
Back in the Lyft, with Barry snoring hard against his window, I can’t get the girl off my mind. Renting alone at fifteen. Three different apartments. Then med school. Out of state, too, which probably means financial aid—more paperwork that would require a parent or guardian. She’s got some fire in her, this one. She’s resourceful. I admire that, and her—can’t help it—but there’s another feeling, too. “Emancipation.” At fifteen, it was a foreign word to me, and it remained that way until I didn’t need it anymore. My brother and I spent four years in and out of the foster care system, from our father’s first collapse to Barry’s eighteenth birthday, because no one ever said that word where I could hear it. If someone would’ve told me then what I know now, I would’ve gone for it, but that was back before I realized that I am my mother’s daughter: the responsible one.
Two hours in, my phone begins buzzing. It’s Lillian’s name on the screen, but not her voice that says, “Hello?”
“Annelise?”
“How’d you know?”
“My brother’s car’s missing,” I tell her. “He says you started med school. We’re on our way to KC.”
“Oh, thank God.”
“How’d you call me?” I don’t remember ever giving her my name.
“She always calls you ‘That Bitch.’” There’s a shrug in Annelise’s voice. “That’s how you were in her phone.”
“I’m flattered. Where is she?”
“Conked out in my bed. Which is great ’cause it’s a twin and she’s quintuplets.”
I stifle a snort at that one. Lillian’s not heavy. She just knows how to take up space, that’s all. Even while fast asleep.
“She said she’d head home once she gets her beauty rest,” the girl goes on, “but I don’t believe her. She showed up knocking on my door at eight this morning, and I was like, ‘What are you doing here? You can’t be here,’ and she was like, ‘It’s okay you don’t remember, but we used to be lovers, we really were, we’re connected,’ and I was like, ‘Leave me alone,’ and she was like, ‘You sound stressed,’ and I was like, ‘’Cause of you,’ and she was like ‘Just let me give you a massage and you’ll remember, okay?’ and I was like, ‘I’m going to get a restraining order,’ and I had to leave her there ’cause I was late for class already, and now she says she drove all night and can’t drive anymore, she was like, ‘It’s not safe! Do you want me to die on the freeway?’ and I was like, ‘I mean, I really don’t care, and who the hell says freeway?’ and she was like, ‘But we’ll have to find each other all over again in my next life, and then what if I don’t remember?’ And I was like, ‘That would be good for both of us.’”
“How did she find you?” I ask, switching the phone to my other ear. “Where are you?”
“I don’t know. I mean, she knew I was going to med school, that’s public and all, it’s on Facebook. Let me send you my address. Seriously, thank God you’re on your way. Can you please hurry?”
“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” I assured her. “Just a minute. I’ll give you an ETA.”
We keep texting after I share her address with the driver, long, blocky texts full of comical autocorrections and no punctuation—the sort of back-and-forth I haven’t had with anyone in years, not since me and the other nurses used to blow off steam, hitting the bars after twelve-hour shifts and shit-talking the patients who blew off their fingers with fireworks or got their kneecaps crushed while trying to make off with vending machines, until COVID drove me to early retirement and I lost touch with everyone who didn’t retire, who stayed in the trenches, who came out of retirement, even—braver souls than me. The only difference was those patients were a dime a dozen, not the same asshole over and over for years. When you and someone else both have been dealing with the same asshole over and over for years, it puts you and her on a wavelength together. There’s a sisterliness to it all, uncannier still with Lillian’s name at the top of the thread, which I do not know what to do with. I have no sisters. Barry’s not the kind of guy who sends such texts—is more likely to have such texts written about him—and while I don’t mind dragging Lillian’s name through mud, I wouldn’t take too kindly to this girl turning on my brother. She has no way of knowing this, of course, but my allegiances would have to shift, and very quickly.
I don’t ask her what I really want to know, about her age, her situation, hoping that she’ll volunteer it, but she doesn’t volunteer. She’s got a knack for managing the conversation without seeming to, opening certain doors and keeping certain others shut so that, if I were to press a little harder, I would come off as the tactless one. My admiration for her grows, but so does that other feeling.
We’re about ten miles out of KC when the texts stop coming in. Lillian must be awake and asking for her phone. I lean forward through the gap between the seats and get a load of the oncoming cityscape and rush-hour brake lights. We slow to a crawl, inching north behind a sea of Kia Souls and Honda Civics. Even though I’m in the backseat, my right foot presses an imaginary pedal to the floor.
The girl’s address takes us to a stone house, three stories tall and anorexic-looking, on a tree-lined street. It’s clear at once which one is hers, for although it has a driveway, an alleyway just wide enough to squeeze a single vehicle, my sister-in-law has declined to make use of it. The Cadillac’s tailfins jut into the street, blocking traffic, its right front tire resting on the curb. I’ve witnessed this spectacle plenty of times before, at plenty of shithole apartments in Fayetteville, but this is the first time that it’s made me want to hide. Most of the houses on this street could use a coat of paint, and the sidewalks have been broken up by roots, but there are no prefabs here, no dilapidated shacks, no mobile homes. Wind spinners rust in the gardens, red ants swarm on the patio stones, and the breeze that stirs the elms above sounds like the whispering of once and future kings. Half a beer is all I’ve got inside me, all I’ve had since noon. I wish I snagged a pack of crackers at the Shell.
Our driver comes around to let us out, courteously offers me his arm, even catches Barry as he starts to topple headfirst into the storm drain. The two men clasp each other as if about to waltz as I stand to one side, taking deep breaths, getting my bearings. It must be the trees that are making me feel small, enormous old-growths overshadowing the homes. Or maybe it’s the homes themselves, colonial and stately. This is the very sort of place I would’ve lived when I was young—would’ve, I say, not did, because I was not me then, was a former self, a stranger who just so happens to have shared my name, another girl fighting for survival in another time. That girl had a whole life ahead of her, a life that she did not yet know was destined to be this one. All she knew was that she was her mother’s daughter, and while her mother might have demons of her own, she was not the reason they were in the foster system: that when things really fell apart, she and she alone—meaning her mother, meaning her—would be the one to hold her liquor long enough to hold it all together. This knowing took up all the space there was inside that girl. It became her one and only axis. It crowded out whatever else she could’ve been.
Now, in its place, there’s a new kind of knowing: thin, translucent, overlaid upon the old. That girl was parentless, and renting a room in a stone house, and going to med school, and now this girl is parentless, and renting a room in a stone house, and going to med school. That girl was making a break for it, and now this one’s making a break for it, too. But no matter how fast and far she ran, that girl never stopped scattering breadcrumbs behind her, and now this girl is scattering breadcrumbs. And I do not know what to make of this. I do not know.
My brother’s weight against my arm becomes an anchor pinning me to now, demanding that I give my full attention to him. Obliging, I guide him up the concrete walkway, over roots and jagged edges. Their voices reach me as we scale the steps, Lillian’s and Annelise’s, raised in altercation, and for a moment, I’m disoriented, searching high and low, before I spot, behind the hedge, an open basement window.
“…not allowed to have guests,” the girl’s saying. “If you don’t leave, I swear, they’re going to double-charge me, maybe even kick me out. Do you want me to be homeless?”
“You’ll never be homeless, Hon. We are each other’s homes, each other’s sanctuaries! Why are you pushing me away?”
I ease my brother down onto the steps and make a beeline for the basement window, clearing my throat aloud. “Lillian?”
The argument breaks off. Annelise’s face appears behind the screen. “Oh, thank God!”
In the background, footsteps go thumping up a flight of stairs.
“Annelise,” I say, crouching by the window, where everything smells of sewage, dry rot, loam, and mold. “You got to tell me something.”
There’s more light on my side of the window than hers, but over her shoulder, as best I can make out, the room appears empty. Before I can form my next words, the front door behind me flies open and Lillian comes bursting through, trailing a peacock’s tail of lurid silken shawls. Silver flashes in the sun, car keys arcing past my brother’s shoulder, off into grass, and Lillian’s shrill howl shatters the afternoon: “You want the goddamned car? Just take it already! Take it and go!”
“Annelise,” I say, but my attention is divided now, half on the girl, half on the possibility that Barry, rising to his feet and whirling to confront his wife, may teeter off balance and crack his skull on a patio stone.
“Guess what!” he slurs triumphantly, plunging a hand into the patchwork denim jacket that he wears all year round, rain or shine. “You might’ve stolen my car, but I—” and here he whips out something small and pink, which he brandishes in Lillian’s face, “stole your under-wear!”
“Where did you get that?” She lunges for him, but he jerks his fist away. “Pervert!”
In a flurry of windmilling limbs, they both go down, not onto the concrete, thankfully, but into the hedge, Lillian keeping up a steady diatribe—“That isn’t yours! That’s the sovereign property of my long-lost beloved, my one-and-only, my rightful husband in the eyes of God—Annelise!”—while Barry splutters and snickers and chortles and makes a valiant effort at stuffing his wife’s stolen underwear into his own.
“You’ve got to do something,” Annelise hisses, her eyes bulging from her skull. “Get them out of here! I’m going to get evicted, for real.”
“Annelise,” I begin again, doing my best, for once in my life, to give my full attention to someone other than my brother. “Annelise, I need you to tell me something. I need you to be honest with me. Tell me, how did she know you were here.”
The question hits her like I was afraid it would. A deer-in-the-headlights look blooms on her face, all freckled and moony and stunned, and heat explodes inside me, too, burning up my insides, which means the same look is hijacking my face, too. I fend it off, knowing that I still take after my mother, nothing to be done about that now, but also that my mother’s dead, and I’m alive, still here, still me, still face to face with this world, still choosing. If I’m not the wide-eyed girl fighting for her life in med school, carrying herself like no one ever carried her, finding out she’s sturdy that way, good at bearing weight, and that the more weight’s piled on, the stronger she will be—if I’m not that girl, then maybe I’m not myself anymore, either. Maybe the nurse who kept a hipflask in the ER all those years, who shit-talked patients behind closed doors, and who threw in the towel at the first sign of trouble, is gone. Maybe the sister who used to keep her brother in booze is dead and buried. Maybe the woman who hasn’t got anything better to do is no more. Maybe, just maybe, for once in my life, I can be the wise old lady I always meant to be, the one who’s learned to say a good, hard “No” to all the shit that’s ever tried to drag her down, the one who’s only willing to extend a helping hand to those who need it most, the most deserving—those who help themselves.
“I…” says Annelise, “I mean…she just showed up—”
“Cut the shit, kid. How’d she know where you live?”
Her body’s telling her to slam the window in my face. I half-expect her to. Instead, to her credit, she mumbles something I can barely hear.
“Say what?”
“She said she had something for me.” The girl’s face has gone a good shade redder than her curls. “She said she was sending me a package, that’s all. She never said nothing about showing up here.”
“You knew if you told her where to find you, she was coming.”
“She said she was a witch.” The girl’s dabbing at her eyes. “She said she’d help me get the best grades if I told her where to send me something. I’m not stupid. It’s not…You just don’t understand. I was scared. I’ve got to do good in school.”
“Listen.” I glance over my shoulder and catch sight of my brother, face-down in a pool of red ants on the concrete, scratched and bleeding ass cheeks on display for all to see, and Lillian’s dragging his pants toward his ankles, raking his buttocks with her acrylic nails, still trying to get at the thin scrap of fabric he’s stashed there, but her lingerie is tangled with his underwear, and she can’t seem to separate them. His body jerks from end to end, not because he’s trying to buck her off, I realize, but because he’s got no control of his muscles. He’s laughing his ass off. He’s practically having a seizure.
Before I can unsee it all, a number flashes red-hot in my retinas: sixty-three. That’s how old my brother is this year. Sixty-three years on this planet, and this is what he’s got to show. And Lillian, who’s been here for fifty-nine, is on top of him, clawing at the backs of his legs as if this will encourage him to restore her stolen property, oblivious to or maybe even fueled by the eyes that peer from windows up and down the street. And then there’s me. I’m sixty-one.
“You’ve got to get the hell out of here,” I tell the girl framed and frozen in the window, trembling and pale. “Break the lease if you have to. Just go. Do not share your address next time. Do not let her back into your life. Delete her number. Block her calls. She can’t save you. She won’t. Do you hear me?”
Annelise goes quiet, maybe retreating back into herself—not the worst place to hunker down and ride out a storm, but I can’t help but wonder, if my sister-in-law were in the basement with her, not out here grappling with my brother on the lawn, whether she’d be retreating, instead, into her.
“Do you hear me?” I rap on the window.
She starts. Gives a sharp, almost soldiery nod. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And you can’t save her,” I say, hearing my own voice beginning to fray. I can’t seem to catch a good look at myself just now, can’t guess whether I’m desperate to get the hell out of here or desperate to stay, to place myself between this girl and whatever’s coming at her from all sides and everywhere, making her desperate for someone to save her and someone to save. “The only one you got to save,” I tell her, “is yourself. You hear me? You. Not her. Not patients. No one else. Just you.”
“I know.” She damn near chokes on that bedraggled pair half-drowned words. “I know.”
“I know you know,” I tell her. “I’m reminding you, that’s all. You forget, there’s nothing anyone can do.”
A plump young man’s watching from the doorway that Lillian just tumbled out of, probably one of Annelise’s roommates, looking like this is the best show he’s seen since the Superbowl, and others are emerging onto porches and patios up and down the street, some filming, some simply staring in slack-jawed amazement. Sirens throb in the distance, maybe off to some other emergency, but more likely headed our way. It’s not easy standing up into that spectacle, emerging from behind the hedge, and walking slowly, with something like dignity, back toward the two full-grown children whose lives I’ve let become entangled with my own as they lie wrestling on the lawn. Not easy. But I have led the life that leads to now, and so I do it anyway.
About the Authors
Itto and Mekiya Outini write about America, Morocco, and all those caught in between. They’ve published in The North American Review, Modern Literature, Fourth Genre, The Good River Review, MQR, Hobart, Lunch Ticket, CommuterLit, Chautauqua, Mount Hope, Jewish Life, The Stonecoast Review, The Brussels Review, New Contrast, Eunoia Review, ExPat Press, DarkWinter, Lotus-Eater, Gargoyle Magazine, and elsewhere. Their work has received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship Program, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the New York Mills Cultural Center, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books, running The DateKeepers, an author support platform, and co-hosting the podcast Let’s Have a Renaissance.
