“Come on.” Walter smiled at Leigh. “It’s a little funny.”
“It’s libelslander, Walter, and, as a legal brainiac, you should recognize that.” Callie put her hands on her hips as she launched into a half-ass Dr. Jerry impersonation. “An ostrich will kill a lion with his foot for absolutely no reason. Except the lion is also a known murderer . I forget my point, but only one of us has to understand what I am saying.”
Leigh covered her face with her hands. Callie had said I got sober, not that she was currently sober, because she was clearly stoned out of her mind. Leigh couldn’t deal with this again. It was the hope that killed her. She had lain awake for too many nights strategizing, planning, laying out a path that took her baby sister away from a terrifying death spiral.
And every single fucking time, Callie jumped back in.
She told her sister, “I can’t—”
“Hold on,” Walter said. “Callie, do you mind if Leigh and I talk in the back?”
Callie waved her arms, theatrically. “Be my guest.”
Leigh had no choice but to trudge back to the bedroom. She hugged her arms to her waist as Walter gently shut the door.
She said, “I can’t do this again. She’s high as a kite.”
“She’ll come down,” Walter said. “It’s just a few nights.”
“No.” Leigh felt her head start to shake. Callie had been back for fifteen minutes and Leigh was already exhausted. “It’s not a few nights, it’s my life, Walter. You have no idea how hard I worked to get away from this. The sacrifices I made. The awful things that I—”
“Leigh,” he said, sounding so reasonable she wanted to run from the room. “She’s your sister.”
“You don’t understand.”
“My dad—”
“I know,” she said, but she wasn’t talking about Callie’s addiction. She was talking about the guilt, about the grief, about the How old are you dolly you can’t be more than thirteen right but damn you look like you’re already a full-grown woman.
Leigh was the one who had pushed Callie into Buddy Waleski’s clutches. Leigh was the one who had murdered him. Leigh was the one who had forced Callie to lie so much that the only relief she got was from a drug that was going to eventually kill her.
“Baby?” Walter said. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head, hating the tears in her eyes. She was so frustrated, so sick of hoping that one day, as if by magic, the guilt would disappear. All she wanted in the world was to run away from the first eighteen years of her life and spend the next part building her world around Walter.
He rubbed her arms. “I’ ll take her to a motel.”
“She’ll have a party,” Leigh said. “She’ll invite half the neighborhood and—”
“I can give her money.”
“She’ll OD,” Leigh said. “She’s probably stealing the cash out of my purse right now. God, Walter, I can’t keep doing this. My heart is broken. I don’t know how many more times I can—”
He pulled her into a tight embrace. She finally broke down sobbing, because he would never understand. His father had been a drunk, but Walter had never put a bottle in his hand. The guilt he carried was a child’s guilt. In many ways, Leigh carried the guilt of two scarred, broken children inside of her heart every single day.
Leigh could never be a mother. She could never hold Walter’s baby in her arms and trust herself to not damage their child as badly as she had damaged her sister.
“Honey,” Walter said. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to—”
Tell her to leave. Tell her to lose my number. Tell her I never want to see her again. Tell her I can’t live without her. Tell her that Buddy tried it with me, too. Tell her it’s my fault for not protecting her. Tell her I want to hold on to her as tight as I can until she understands that I will never be healed until she is.
The words came so easily when Leigh knew they were always going to stay in her head.
She told Walter, “I can’t get to know that cat.”
He looked down at her, confused.
“Callie is really amazing at picking out cats, and she’ll make me love it, and then she’ll leave it here and I’ll end up taking care of it for the next twenty years.” Walter had every right to look at her like she had lost her mind. “We’ll never be able to go on vacation because I won’t have the heart to leave it alone.”