“Let’s go.” Leigh stepped over the plywood hurdle and, like that, she was inside the Waleskis’ kitchen for the first time in twenty-three years.
If it bothered her, Leigh didn’t say. She held out her hand to Callie, waiting.
Callie didn’t take her hand. Her knees wanted to buckle. Tears wept from her eyes. She couldn’t see into the dark room but she heard the loud pop of Buddy opening the kitchen door. The hack of a wet cough. The slap of his briefcase on the counter. The bang of a chair being kicked under the table. The ping of cookie crumbs dropping from his mouth, because everywhere Buddy went there was noise, noise, noise.
Callie blinked again. Leigh was snapping her fingers in front of her face.
“Cal,” Leigh said. “You were able to stay with Andrew in this house and pretend for an entire month that nothing happened. You can pretend for another ten minutes.”
Callie had only been able to pretend because she’d siphoned off alcohol from the bottles behind the bar.
Leigh said, “Calliope, sac the hell up.”
Her voice was hard, but Callie could hear that she was starting to crack. The house was getting to Leigh. This was the first time her sister had returned to the scene of their crimes. She wasn’t ordering Callie so much as begging her to please, for the love of God, help her get through this.
That was how it worked. Only one of them could fall apart at a time.
Callie grabbed onto Leigh’s hand. She started to raise her leg but, the second she was clear of the splintered plywood, Leigh yanked hard enough to pull her inside.
Callie stumbled into her sister. She felt her neck crack. She tasted blood where she’d bitten down on her tongue.
Leigh asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Callie said, because anything that hurt her now could be chased away by the needle later. “Tell me what to do.”
Leigh took out two phones, one from each of her back pockets. She turned on the flashlight apps. The beams caught the tired linoleum. Four deep indentations showed where the legs of the Waleskis’ kitchen table had been. Callie stared at the divots until she felt her face pressing into the table while Buddy stood behind her.
Doll you gotta stop squirming I need you to stop so I can—
“Cal?” Leigh was holding out one of the phones.
Callie took it, shining the light around the kitchen. No table and chairs, no blender and toaster. The cabinet doors were hanging off. Pipes were missing under the sink. The outlets were stripped out where someone had stolen the electrical wiring for the copper.
Leigh pointed her light up at the popcorn ceiling. Callie recognized some of the old water stains, but the gouges where the wire had been ripped out of the Sheetrock were new. The light scanned the tops of the cabinets. A soffit ran around the perimeter of the room. The air-conditioner grills had been pulled off. The holes were black, empty mouths that flashed when the light hit the metal duct in the back of the throats.
Callie felt the origami swan raising her head. The pointy beak opened as if to share a secret, but then just as suddenly as the creature had appeared, she folded back down her head and disappeared into the well of Callie’s untapped memories.
“Let’s look in here.” Leigh left the kitchen. She walked into the living room.
Callie slowly traced her sister’s footsteps, stopping in the middle of the room. No tired orange couch, no leather club chairs with cigarette-burned arms, no giant TV forming the apex of a triangle, cables hanging down like a coiled snake.
The bar was still hulking in the corner.
The mosaic was busted off, chips of ceramic littering the floor. The smoked mirrors had been splintered. Callie heard heavy footsteps behind her. She saw Buddy striding across the room, bragging about the money for a new job, slapping cookie crumbs off his shirt.
Pour me one, baby doll.
Callie blinked, and the scene was replaced with shattered crack pipes, pieces of burned foil, used syringes, and four stained mattresses laid out on shag carpet that was so old it crunched under her shoes. The realization that they were in a shooting gallery made every pore in Callie’s skin pucker, desperate for a needle to drown the origami swan in wave after wave of bright white heroin.
“Callie,” Leigh called. “Help me.”
Reluctantly, Callie left the sanctuary. Leigh was standing at the end of the hall. The bathroom door was gone. Callie saw the sink was broken, more pipes stolen. Leigh had her light trained up at the ceiling.
Callie heard the floorboards creak as she passed Andrew’s bedroom. She couldn’t look up. “What is it?”