Her sister nodded again, though not toward her Audi parked in the driveway. She wanted to go for a walk, the same way they had gone for walks as kids when being out in the ’hood was safer than being around Phil.
Side by side, they started up the street. Without being asked, Leigh took the backpack. She looped it over her shoulder. Her purse was probably locked in the trunk, and Phil was probably squinting at the fancy car right now, trying to decide whether to break into it or strip it for parts.
Callie couldn’t worry about Leigh’s car or her mother or anything else at the moment. She looked at the sky. They were heading west, directly into the sunset. The heaviness of promised rain seemed to be lifting. There was a tinge of warmth fighting against the slight drop in the temperature. Still, Callie shivered. She didn’t know if the sudden chill was from the lingering effects of Covid, the fading sun, or fear of what her sister was eventually going to say.
Leigh waited until their mother’s house was well behind them. Instead of dropping an atom bomb on their existence, she said, “Phil told me a spotted panther has been shitting on the sidewalk to warn her something bad is about to happen.”
Callie tested the waters, saying, “She went across the street with her bat this morning, started banging on the boarded-up house for no reason.”
“Jesus,” Leigh mumbled.
Callie studied her sister’s profile, looking for a reaction that would tell her Phil had mentioned the man with the camera.
Leigh asked, “She hasn’t hit you, has she?”
“No,” Callie lied. Or maybe it wasn’t a lie because Phil hadn’t meant to hit her so much as Callie had been unable to duck out of the way. “She’s calmer now.”
“Good,” Leigh said, nodding her head because she wanted to believe it was true.
Callie stuck her hands into her pockets though, weirdly, she wanted to hold on to Leigh’s hand the same way they’d done when they were little. She curled her fingers around the goggles. She should tell Leigh about the white dude/nice car. She should let her know about the telescoping lens on the camera. She should stop shooting up methadone in tanning salons.
The air turned crisp as they continued their stroll. Callie saw the same scenes as the night before: kids playing in the yard, men drinking beers in their carports, another guy washing another muscle car. If Leigh had thoughts on any of the sights, she kept them to herself. She was doing the same thing Callie had done when she’d seen Leigh’s Audi in the driveway. She wanted to draw out this false sense of normalcy as long as possible.
Callie wasn’t going to stop her. The man with the camera could wait. Or he could get stored somewhere in the back of her brain with the rest of the terrible no-good things that haunted her. She wanted to enjoy this peaceable walk. Callie was seldom out once dusk started to settle. She felt vulnerable at night. Her darting days were over. She couldn’t turn her head to see if the stranger behind her was looking at his phone or running toward her with a gun in his hand.
She wrapped her arms around her waist to ward off the chill. She looked up at the trees again. The leaves were popping out like Skittles. Faltering sunlight seeped through the thick fingers of the limbs. She felt her heartbeat slow, matching the soft slap of their footfalls against the cooling asphalt. If Callie could stay in this quiet moment, big sister by her side, for the rest of her life, then she would be happy.
But that wasn’t how life worked.
And even if it did, neither one of them had the stomach for it.
Leigh took another left onto a crappier street. Yards overgrown. More boarded-up houses, more poverty, more hopelessness. Callie tried to take a deep breath. The air whistled through her nose, then churned like butter in her lungs. After the grind of Covid, Callie never walked for very long without being aware that she had lungs in her chest and that those lungs were not the same. The sound of her own labored breathing threatened to push her back into those weeks in the ICU. The fearful looks from the nurses and doctors. The distant echo of Leigh’s voice when they held up the telephone to Callie’s ear. The constant, unrelenting memory of Trevor standing at the aquarium. Buddy banging open the kitchen door.
Pour me one, baby doll.
She took another breath, holding on to it for a few seconds before letting it go.
And then she realized where Leigh had taken her, and Callie had no air left anywhere in her body.
Canyon Road, the street that the Waleskis had lived on.
“It’s all right,” Leigh said. “Keep walking.”