Forever

Next to me, Rachel opened her beaded smiley face purse and removed some strawberry lip gloss. She applied two coats of fruity armor with fierce determination, and ferociously zipped it back into the purse. Then we marched to the front door, sisters in battle, the sounds of our shoes on the concrete sidewalk our only war cry. I didn’t have a key, so I had to knock.

Now that I was here, I really didn’t want to go through with it.

Rachel looked at me. She said, “You’re like my favorite older sister, which doesn’t make sense, because you’re the same age as me.”

I was flattered, but I said, “Rachel, you say weird things.”

We both laughed, and our laughs were uncertain creations with almost no sound.

Rachel dabbed her lips on her sleeve; in the yellow glow offered by the moth-filled porch light, I saw evidence of where she’d done it earlier, a small collection of kisses on her cuff.

I tried to think of what to say. I tried to think of which of them would open the door. It was almost nine. Maybe neither of them would open it. Maybe —

It was Dad who opened the door. Before he had a chance to react to the fact that it was me, my mother shouted from the living room, “Don’t let the kitten out!”

Dad stared at Rachel and then at me, and in the meantime, a brown tabby cat the size of a rabbit crept around the doorjamb and shot into the yard beyond us. I felt ridiculously betrayed by the presence of the cat. Their only daughter had disappeared and they’d gotten a kitten to replace me?

And it was the first thing I said. “You got a cat?”

My father was shocked enough by my presence that he answered honestly. “Your mother was lonely.”

“Cats are very low maintenance.” It was not the warmest of replies, but he hadn’t exactly delivered the warmest of opening lines, either. I had expected, somehow, to find evidence of my absence on his face, but he looked as he always did. My father sold expensive real estate and he looked like he sold expensive real estate. He had well-groomed hair from the ’80s and a smile that encouraged sizable down payments. I didn’t know what I was expecting. Bloodshot eyes or pouches beneath his eyes or ten years added to him or weight gain or weight loss — just some concrete evidence of time passing without me, and it not being easy for him. That was all I wanted. Concrete proof of their anguish. Anything to prove that I was making the wrong decision confronting them tonight. But there was nothing. I sort of wanted to just go then. They’d seen me. They knew I was alive. I’d done my job.

But then my mother came around the corner of the hall. “Who is that?” She froze. “Grace?” And her voice broke on that one syllable, so I knew I was coming in after all.

Before I had time to decide if I was ready for a hug, I was in one, my mother’s arms so tightly around my neck and my face pressed into the fuzz of her sweater. I heard her say, God thank you Grace thank you. She was either laughing or crying, but when I pulled back I couldn’t see either a smile or tears. Her lower lip trembled. I hugged my arms to keep them still.

I hadn’t thought coming back would be so hard.

I ended up sitting at the breakfast table with my parents across from me. There were a lot of memories living at this table, usually me sitting by myself, but fond nonetheless. Nostalgic, anyway. The kitchen smelled weird, though, like too much take-out food, odors from eating it, storing it, throwing it away. Never quite the same as the smell you got from actually using a kitchen to cook. The unfamiliar scent made the experience seem dreamlike, foreign and familiar all at once.

I thought Rachel had abandoned me for the car, but after the first couple moments of silence, she came down the hall from the front door, holding the tabby kitten under her arm. She wordlessly put it down on the couch and came to stand behind me. She looked as if she would rather be anywhere but here. It was rather valiant, and my heart sort of swelled to see it. Everybody ought to have friends like Rachel.

“This is very shocking, Grace,” my father said, across from me. “You’ve put us through a lot.”

My mother began to cry.

I changed my mind, right then. I no longer wanted to see evidence of their anguish anymore. I didn’t want to watch my mother cry. I had spent so long hoping that they had missed me, wishing that they loved me enough that it would hurt that I was gone, but now that I saw my mother’s face, guilt and sympathy were making a solid lump in my throat. I just wanted to have had the conversation already and be back on the way home. This was too hard.

I started, “I wasn’t trying to put you —”

“We thought you were dead,” my father said. “And all this time, you were with him. Just letting us —”

“No,” I said. “I was not with him all this time!”

“We’re just relieved that you’re all right,” Mom said.

But Dad wasn’t there yet. “You could have called, Grace,” he said. “You could have just called so we knew you were alive. That was all we needed.”

I believed him. He didn’t really need me. He needed proof of me. “Last time I tried to talk to you, you told me I couldn’t see Sam until I was eighteen, and completely talked over the top of m —”

“I’m calling the police to tell them you’re here,” Dad said. He was halfway out of his seat.

“Dad,” I snapped. “First of all, they know. Second of all, you’re doing it. You’re not even listening to half of what I say.”

“I am not doing anything,” he said. He looked at Rachel. “Why did you bring Rachel?”

Rachel twitched a bit at the sound of her name. She said, “I’m the referee.”

Dad put his hands up in the air like he gave up, which is what people do when they’re not really giving up, and then he pressed them against the table like we were having a séance and the table was trying to move.

“We don’t need a referee,” Mom said. “There’s not going to be anything unpleasant.”

“Yes, there is,” Dad said. “Our daughter ran away from home. That’s a crime, Amy. An actual crime in the eyes of Minnesota law. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen. I’m not going to pretend that she didn’t run away to live with her boyfriend.”

I wasn’t sure what it was about that statement that made me suddenly see everything with perfect clarity. Dad was going perfectly through the motions of parenting: an autopilot setting that was completely reactionary and probably learned from television shows and weekend movies. I studied them: Mom huddled with her new kitten, which had wandered from the couch to jump on her lap, and Dad staring at me as if he didn’t recognize me. Yes, they were grown-ups, but I was, too. It was like Rachel had said about me being her older sister. My parents had raised me to be an adult as fast as they could and they couldn’t be offended when I turned into one.