weeks ago, remember? Why was I trying to control my sister the way our family controlled us? Hadn’t I spent my whole life telling other people how to live? Who did I think I was?
It quickly became a moot point as everything unraveled at once. The relationship between Justin and Grace existed mostly by text, and lasted about two weeks before Grace ended it—but after it was over, Lindsey found out. The email came a few days later.
“Dear WBC…”
* * *
November 11, 2012. 3:55 P.M. Sunday.
I knew we had come to the end of the line as soon as I heard my father’s voice. Stern. Gruff. Urgent.
He threw open the door to my bedroom, and my head snapped up. Grace and I were crying again, and she was scratching my head.
“You need to come talk.” Eyes wide. He turned on his heel and headed down the hall. Grace and I looked at each other and tried to dry our faces.
We followed him to my parents’ bedroom, where Mom was sitting in the new rocking chair. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Her words were quick and urgent, too.
We all sat down in their little sitting area, Grace and I on one side and our parents on the other. Dad started reading an email that Lindsey had sent him. About Grace and Justin. About our plans to leave. Things that were true mixed with things that were not. I was looking down, listening, shaking my head, knowing that we had to leave immediately.
I looked up, and my mother was holding her phone. A moment later, I heard the sound that an iPhone plays when you start recording a video.
“Please don’t,” I whispered.
She apologized. She’d meant to take a photo.
My father continued to read.
I understood why my mother had said, It’s okay, it’s okay.
Because there was hope for me.
I could have repented.
But there was no saving Grace. After this email, there was no possibility she wouldn’t be voted out.
I looked at my sister and spoke in a low voice. “We need to go.”
Our father hadn’t heard. Our mother had.
I looked up.
I watched her mouth drop open in a look of shocked horror that will haunt me until I die.
I’d thought she might know. After all our talks, I’d thought she might see it coming.
She had not.
We filed back to our bedrooms to pack. We’d moved around twenty boxes out already, but there was so much more.
We tried to stay together. We knew people would come to try to talk us out of leaving. But we were sobbing, not thinking clearly, and Grace darted into her room next door.
Sam and Steve in the hall. Steve pushed the door open. I pushed it closed and kept packing. He pushed it open again, and wouldn’t let me close it this time. They were yelling, saying that I knew better than this. My face was so contorted that I couldn’t form sounds to make words. They left. Grace would tell me later that she’d asked our father to make them go. She’d heard them yelling in the hall. “She doesn’t want to talk to them!” she told Dad.
My mom came in and asked that I go talk to Gramps. That didn’t I owe him that? I’d known this was coming. Mom had made others on the cusp of leaving do it in the past. A last-ditch effort to convince them to stay. How could anyone look at our beloved Gran and Gramps and say they were leaving? I wanted to say no. I looked at her face. I couldn’t.
I walked across the yard with her, not registering that this would be my last time. This path I’d traversed, often several times a day, since I was a child. Down the sidewalk, past the trampolines and the green cover over the pool, in the kitchen door, and up the stairs. My mother was telling me that I didn’t have to follow Grace out the door.
We sat down with Gran and Gramps in his bedroom, the television blaring as always. He shut it off. Mom tried to explain. She thought this was because of Justin. She didn’t understand that he was nothing. Absolutely nothing. That we would never give her up for a boy.
That we would never hurt her for a boy.
Gran, so quiet, disbelieving. “You don’t want to leave us, do you?” I wept harder at her gentleness. I couldn’t breathe. “You’re not gonna do this…?”
I hugged her as hard as I could. “I’m sorry, Granny!” I sobbed into