Page 13 of That Last Carolina Summer

“The arctic tern is a small bird that flies from the North to the South Pole each year, logging thirty thousand miles. These incredible birds live as long as thirty years, but what is even more remarkable is the reason known only to them that they leave one pole for the other. Is the North Pole really so different from the South Pole that this tiny bird can’t decide where it wants to call home? ”

Excerpt from the blog The Thing with Feathers

Phoebe

THAT NIGHT I had the dream again, catching me by surprise. It had stayed away on my first night home, so I’d convinced myself it wouldn’t come back at all.

Nothing had changed. The lone car. The rain-soaked bridge.

The single survivor walking away into the night.

The stillness of the water over where the car had vanished.

I awoke with my heart pounding and my body soaked in sweat as a tiny memory skirted across my brain, too faint for me to retrieve.

Bright moonlight illuminated my childhood bedroom as shadowed shapes of familiar furniture stared back at me like ghosts from my past. I shivered, knowing that I wouldn’t be going back to sleep.

I sat up carefully, not wanting to awake Ophelia, who was pressed closely against me.

She sighed then rolled over, and I waited until I heard the gentle pattern of her breathing before sliding from the bed.

I had planned to move to the guest room the previous night, but when I’d checked to see if there were sheets on the bed, I’d discovered it and most of the floor had been covered with packages from various online retailers, many of them unopened.

I’d closed the door so I could ignore—at least temporarily—one more sign that things were not all right in my childhood home.

Standing in the quiet upstairs hall, I took a deep breath, grateful for the silence. After Ophelia and I had returned from the bridge earlier that evening, we’d found my mother in the front yard wearing only her nightgown. Addie and the car were gone.

I’d spent the next two hours coaxing my mother into bed with the clean set of sheets I’d washed that morning. I’d searched again for adult diapers, knowing I’d told Addie to get some at the store, but gave up after looking in all the most obvious places.

Finding something for us to eat for dinner had been a similarly frustrating experience.

Addie had restocked the fridge with beer and bottled water.

There was also a package of individually wrapped processed sliced cheese, two large bottles of Diet Coke, hot dogs, and cheese in a can.

The freezer remained empty except for three frozen cans of margarita mix.

I’d had Ophelia order pizza again, and by the time it arrived I’d already downed one beer and was considering a second when I’d seen Ophelia watching me. It had been enough to remind me that someone needed to be the adult. I’d put the beer back in the fridge and closed the door.

Now I tiptoed to my mother’s bedroom and cracked open the door to peek inside, feeling reassured when I spotted her still form under the sheets, her breathing slow and rhythmic.

As I moved toward the steps, I saw Addie’s door was still wide open, her window blinds allowing the moonlight to highlight the piles of clothes on her floor.

The unmade bed was empty, the sheets wadded against the footboard.

The height of the moon told me that we were nowhere near dawn, but late enough that my sister would have finished her shift and come home. A twitch of worry made me reach for my phone, but I was wearing only my long sleep shirt without pockets and had left my phone charging on the bedside table.

As I walked toward the top of the steps, I told myself that I would call Addie from the landline in the kitchen. Hopefully she’d answer so I wouldn’t have to call the police, a familiar scenario from Addie’s teen years.

I made my way downstairs in the dark, avoiding the squeakiest floorboards.

Buttery light spilled through the windows as no one had thought to draw the curtains.

That had once been my mother’s ritual, just one more thing she didn’t seem to be doing anymore.

An unfamiliar sensation tightened my throat.

I leaned against the banister and rubbed my neck as I stared through the front window at the tangled outlines of the old oak tree’s branches, trying to identify the feeling and wondering why I suddenly felt so bereft.

I continued into the foyer and stopped at the round hall table.

A decaying bouquet of flowers bent over the edge of the porcelain vase, the old water reeking.

I reached for the vase to take it into the kitchen to throw out the flowers and empty the rancid water.

Instead I picked up a small oval frame next to the dead flowers.

I didn’t need to look at it. I knew the frame contained a photo of my brother, Charlie, at the age of four with Addie, twenty-one months younger, sitting in a child-size electric jeep.

Addie is wearing a large bow in her hair and a prescream pout.

A blue cowboy hat is perched on Charlie’s head, and he’s grinning with all the joys of childhood illuminating his face.

I’d never met my brother. He’d died of a bacterial infection shortly after that photograph was taken.

Mother kept pictures of him everywhere, his round blue eyes and golden curls decorating the tops of book stacks, shelves of knickknacks, and various tables.

Even though he was older than me, I’d always thought of him as my baby brother, the perfect little boy and my father’s namesake: the child I was meant to replace.

Except things rarely work out the way they’re supposed to. Charlie and Addie were cherubs, worthy of Pampers commercials and Gerber baby food labels. I was the brown pelican in a nest of snowy egrets.

Addie enjoyed repeating the story of how I’d come to be.

How Mother and Daddy had expected another boy, to restore the matching pair they’d lost. Mother didn’t look during her sonograms, calling it amoral to know a baby’s gender before birth.

Which meant I was a double surprise. I was female, and one of those rare ugly babies, two things Mother hadn’t prepared for.

I’d spent most of my childhood trying to make it up to her until the day I’d been hit by lightning and discovered there were worse things than not measuring up to my mother’s expectations.

The grandfather clock in the front room chimed twice just as a pair of headlights turned into the driveway. I peered out the sidelights by the front door and saw the lean figure of my sister stumble out of our mother’s Lincoln then lean on the car door for a moment before closing it.

I listened as uneven steps climbed up to the front porch and waited as Addie fumbled with her keys, dropping them once before guiding the correct key into the lock.

I didn’t move until she’d opened the door, surprising her when she spotted me, making her drop the keys again.

She squatted to pick them up, spending longer than necessary returning to a stand before closing the door and leaning against it.

“You could have helped me.” Her slurred words slid into each other making them nearly unintelligible.

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.” She tried to move past me, but I blocked her.

“And you got behind the wheel of a car.”

“I can handle it.” She pulled away again and headed toward the stairs.

“You can handle it?” I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation with a thirty-five-year-old woman.

“You can barely walk. If you don’t care about your own safety, fine.

But what about the innocent drivers out there you might kill, not to mention, in case you forgot, you have a nine-year-old daughter who just might care if you don’t come home? ”

She stopped on the first step and turned to face me, holding tightly to the banister, and I noticed again the long-sleeved sweater she wore pulled down to her wrists.

“Don’t you dare tell me how to live my life.

” She swayed as she paused to catch her breath, her words bumping against each other like a train wreck.

“I’m the one who’s been holding it all together while you escaped to Oregon. ”

My breath shook, but I refused to engage because I knew that Addie was spoiling for a fight, and if I didn’t respond the way she expected, I’d take away her power.

A therapist had told me this was classic passive-aggressive behavior, most likely learned from our mother.

But I’d learned early on that it was my only defense against my sibling who had an arsenal of weapons to wield if I opened that gate.

If we were younger, we might have resorted to hair-pulling and scratching, but I liked to think that we were too old for that, regardless of how good it would probably make me feel.

I struggled to keep my voice low, aware of Ophelia and our mother sleeping upstairs. “I am not having this conversation now because you’re too drunk to remember any of it. So go to bed and sleep it off, and make sure you set your alarm so we have time to talk before you go to work tomorrow.”

She stepped down into the foyer, clinging to the newel post as she swayed.

“You think you’re so smart and know everything.

” She stopped in front of me, reeking of beer and men’s cologne.

“Well, you’re not. You might have all the book brains, but you don’t know anything about being responsible for another human. You. Have. No. Idea.”

Those last four words were delivered with an index finger jabbing me in the chest. I didn’t step back.

She dropped her hand. “I’m going to bed. Some of us have to go to work tomorrow.”

My plan to not engage disintegrated. “You forgot to get diapers for Mother.”