am I doing here?”
She advanced on Sage, her face red with fury, her eyes a little wild. “When I got hold of you in New York, you said you’d come. I called and called and called, but you didn’t answer your phone. I waited for you for two weeks, Sage. Two weeks.”
She glanced around the room, took in the suitcase, the handbag. The plane ticket. She picked it up and read the date.
Her jaw dropped. Her voice went faint and disbelieving. “You’ve been here all this time.” She looked up, stared at Sage. “You were here. Ten minutes away from us. I don’t believe this. How could you, Sage? How could you do this to Dad? How could you do it to me? You left me to do this on my own!”
Sage closed her eyes, the pressure in her chest so heavy she wasn’t certain she could fill her lungs with air. What could she say? How could she possibly explain? What was she going to do? Tell Rose what their father had said to her?
She’d rather slit her wrists.
So she did nothing. Said nothing. Tried desperately to feel nothing.
Rose let out a little mewl of pain, and Sage looked at her. Her big sister was crying. Big, fat tears spilled down her cheeks.
In that moment, Sage was jealous, furiously jealous that Rose could cry. Her chin came up and she said, “Go away. Just go away.”
Rose gasped audibly. For a long moment she stood frozen, not moving so much as an eyelash. Then she snapped her mouth shut, marched over to the bed, drew back her hand, and slapped Sage’s face. “I came to tell you that your father is dead. I pulled the plug on him this morning.”
Then she was gone.
Three days later, Sage attempted to attend her father’s funeral. Rose’s boyfriend met her at the door to the church and told her in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t welcome there. She didn’t see Rose to confirm the fact, but she didn’t have the heart to force the issue. It had taken everything she had to get dressed and make the trip to the church. She had nothing left.
Two weeks after the funeral, Sage managed to drag her brooding self to the grocery store. Paying little attention to her surroundings, she stepped out in front of a moving car—an accident, she insisted, not sure if deep down inside she believed it. She bounced off the hood and onto the pavement, conking her head. The world had faded to black.
She awakened in the emergency room of a civilian hospital near the army base where Rose practiced medicine. She gave her sister’s name as next of kin and asked the ER nurse to notify her sister.
When she returned a half hour later, the nurse was frowning. “I’m not sure your sister understood our message, Ms. Anderson. Her response doesn’t make sense.”
“What did she say?”
“She said that if you wanted medical care, you should call and make an appointment.”
Her head pounding, her heart broken, Sage closed her eyes and drifted away.
Now, almost five years later, she watched as the leaf floating on the surface of Hummingbird Lake grew waterlogged and sank.
Heaving a sigh, Sage leaned back on her elbows and lifted her face to the sky. What was she going to do? What did she want to do?
She missed her sister.
She missed her family. And yet she’d made a new family here in Eternity Springs. Nic and Sarah and Celeste. Ali, too. Over the past few months, she’d grown especially close to Ali, despite—or perhaps due to—the fact that she lived in Denver. Email offered a certain intimacy that had allowed them both to share things they might not have said in person, she believed. Part of it, too, might be that Ali and Rose were close in age. Ali had slipped into that big-sister role so easily.
Sage didn’t need Rose in her life. Shoot, Ali and the rest scolded as enthusiastically as Rose ever had. Sage had lost one sister and found four others. Well, three others. Celeste wasn’t exactly a sister figure. Not exactly a mother figure, either. She was a combination mother, sister, confessor, conscience, girlfriend, best friend, cheerleader, and more. Sage had filled in all the roles Rose had occupied with other people. She was doing fine in her life without Rose, thank you very much.
And still, she missed her. Maybe because one other aspect of sisterhood did exist and no one else could fill it.