Total pages in book: 168
Estimated words: 159420 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 531(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 159420 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 531(@300wpm)
Something about seeing my sister in her old room, among the things that were hers years ago, brings the kind of peace that has escaped me for the longest time. Again, I know she’s grown up and none of these things—her old desk, books, her outdated dresser and so on—are of any use to her, but these are her things. Things that she grew up with, and seeing her with them is surreal and also has been a long time coming.
But she’s right. I should say something rather than simply standing at the door. Or at the very least, enter her room. Which I do. For the first time in sixteen years; haven’t been back here since she left. I also walk up to her bed and take a seat in one of the chairs that Haven dragged over from a corner.
Lynnie straightens up in bed, the blanket covering her—not hers but a brand-new one that Haven got from town yesterday—rustling with her movements. I eye the empty lunch tray on her nightstand and ask, “How are you feeling?”
She swallows, looking at me, or rather in my general direction. One of the many, many things I hated back then. That my sister couldn’t even see me. That she had to fumble her way through things, rely on sounds and other things to navigate the world. Now it only makes me sad. It makes me so fucking sad that I couldn’t be one of those things. Things she could rely on to find her way in the new life she’d been so cruelly thrust into.
“Good,” she says, nodding. “Better now.”
I nod, putting my elbows on my thighs. “If you want more food or anything—”
“No, I’m full,” she assures me, smiling slightly, and it both makes me feel relieved and mad at myself that I still know her well enough to gauge it as fake. Her smile. In truth, she’s probably afraid of me. She probably thinks I’m going to turn into a raging asshole, the kind I was just after the accident. Angry and violent, refusing to see her or anyone else, throwing things, breaking things. I’m not proud of who I’d become, and I wish I could go back and change so many things. But I can’t. All I can do is… live. With what I have now.
They’d want you to live…
Before I can gather my words, think them through and arrange them in my head so I can say them to my sister, she speaks, her voice tentative: “Do you still do that thing? With your forehead?”
“What thing?”
“Where you scrunch up your brow,” she says, scrunching up her own forehead as if to demonstrate. “And you do it so hard that even the roses fall and die in our garden.”
I scoff. It’s involuntary and so foreign. Still, I remember it well. Possibly because it’s something I used to do back when Lynnie would tease me for this very thing, for being grumpy and silent all the time. Emotions swell up in my throat to the point that I almost can’t take my next breath. Then, shaking my head, I mutter, “You and your fuckin’ roses.”
“Hey,” she says, smiling her first genuine smile and stabbing her finger at me. “Ma wouldn’t like you cursing.”
I chuckle softly. Even though there’s very little humor in it. “Yeah, Ma wouldn’t like me doin’ a lot of things.”
And isn’t that the truth? Something I never really thought about. Not until recently. Not until she forced me to. What my parents would’ve wanted. For me. For Lynnie. They surely wouldn’t have wanted us to be apart from each other.
But also, my mother wouldn’t like the things I’ve done over the years, more so in the recent weeks, and the man I’d become. Hopeless and dead inside. My father also wouldn’t like the fact that while I remembered everything he taught me, I had completely forgotten the spirit in which he gave me those lessons. Both my parents brought me up to be a protector. A nurturer. Of the land, of my sister. And I’ve failed on all those counts.
But mostly, I think they both would’ve hated me living in the past. Being resigned to my fate, to my history and all my faults and failures. My daddy would’ve wanted me to get up and grab fate by its horns, the way a cowboy would. And my ma would’ve wanted me to break out of my self-imposed prison and punishment, make amends, and build a new life because I still have a life to live.
“She’s pretty,” Lynnie says, jolting me out of my thoughts.
My body tightens as I focus back on her. “What?”
She’s smiling and it’s genuine, albeit sad. “The Turner girl. You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
I expect shock to flow through my system because my sister knows. When I haven’t said a word about it. But it doesn’t. Even though we haven’t seen each other for years, she’s still one of the few people who know me well. And aside from becoming a violent motherfucker with a dead heart in his chest, I haven’t really changed all that much either. Just because Lynnie can’t see anymore doesn’t mean she can’t read my moods. Or that she didn’t guess that when Brecken Turner announced he was taking his sister, the girl I love, back to his ranch last night, I wanted to beat him up.