When I was seven, and Mattie was one, she whispered my name.
I was her first word.
When Mattie was seven days old, and I was six, I stood over her crib and listened to her breathing, watching the rise and fall of her tiny chest. I pressed my palm against it and I felt myself through her. She was breathing, alive.
And I was too.
Langford is miles behind me, a place called Farfield in my sights. Keith is there, Ellis told me. Last I heard from him, he was there. I don’t know if he’s called the police or warned Keith since I left, but any head start I had for myself is gone by now. I lost it when I realized I’d left my photo in Keith’s room. My stomach turned and then it turned again and next thing I knew, I was jerking the car onto the shoulder and then I was out of the car and on my knees, on the ground, throwing up bile into the dirt.
I can’t seem to get back inside the car.
I crouch back on my heels and wipe my mouth on my sleeve. I dig into my bag and find the IDs, the tags, and sit there with them, spread them out on the side of the road. It feels wrong to have them together. I separate his faces from their names.
I don’t want to take them with me.
They’re too heavy to carry.
When I was eleven, and Mattie was five, I didn’t sleep for a year. Keith and Mom would come home so late from the bar—him sober, her wasted—neither of them trying to be quiet, but her especially. I’d listen to her shuffling steps to the bedroom, to the clatter of Keith tidying up the kitchen, and when all that sound was gone, I knew what would happen next and I knew what would happen if I refused. If it wasn’t me, he’d go to Mattie unless I said, W—wait …
Wait.
Until one night, I couldn’t.
And I’d had the knife that night, had it tucked under my pillow, my fingers clutched around it and instead of doing what I should have, I sent him to her. The next morning, Keith was gone, and the dirty shame of my weakness was all over me and I think Mattie sensed it somehow, that there was some part of me that had given her up, that I couldn’t protect her.
I held on tighter to prove myself wrong.
I felt her breathing, alive.
And I was too.
When Mattie was ten, and I was sixteen, Mom left and took Mattie’s heart with her. Mattie spent every night crying herself awake and was it really so bad, Mattie, just the two of us together?
And then that postcard—
Mattie came back to me with her heart in her hands, there, breathing, alive …
And I was too.
When I was nineteen and Mattie was thirteen, Keith came back.
Guess who I saw, she’d announced, still angry, always angry for the lengths I wouldn’t go for Mom, and never seeing the ones I went to for her. I told him about Mom. He said he’d take me to L.A., to find her. And I asked her who she thought raised her, because in that moment, it couldn’t have been me.
When Mattie was thirteen, and I was nineteen, she crept away into the night, to the truck parked under the streetlight on a corner in Cold Creek, and climbed into the passenger’s side. I don’t know what happened next. If, when the apple orchard appeared on the horizon to mark the growing space between us, she finally felt the distance and changed her mind. If Keith wouldn’t let her change her mind, and dragged her, kicking and screaming out of the truck and between the trees, where he had her, breathing and alive, until she wasn’t.
And I wasn’t.
I am going to kill a man.
“I am,” I whisper into the ground, over and over again.
I am, I am, I am.
I have to.
I’m going to kill the man who killed my sister.
And I’m not leaving the side of the road until I can make myself believe it.
I sit on the ground, feel the gravel press into my jeans. It’s windy, air pushing my hair from my face. I listen to the way it moves the world around me; the trees off the road, leaves rustling their soft song into the night. I stare up at the sky, its stars. Small miracles.
I get to my feet.
Looking at the stars is looking into the past. I read that once. I can’t remember where and I don’t know much about it, but it’s strange to think of the stars above as from a time that is so far removed from Mattie and me, from Mattie being dead.
From the thing I am about to do.