After She Left by Claire Amarti

Author:Claire Amarti [Amarti, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

I see her as the glass doors slide open, her hands clasped behind her back, her face taut. I’m struck again by how beautiful she is, my sister. Beautiful the way a sheer cliff is beautiful. Or a stormy sea. She steps towards us, fast and hesitant at the same time. Her eyes travel quickly over mine, over Mom’s. And then they lock on the person beside me.

“Sam.” His name is a question.

“Hi, Mom,” he says, steady and careful. If her voice was a question, now his is the answer: no, I haven’t forgiven you yet, not completely. I see how much she wants to hug him and instead, rests a hand over his shoulders, half-ready for him to shake her off.

“Gillian.” She looks at me and I see the thank you in her eyes, for bringing Sam to her. But there’s something else too—almost a defiance, a so now you know in the set of her chin, the narrowing of her eyes.

Does she still see me as her sister? I feel like someone’s taken scissors to the threads that link us together. Threads that for years we haven’t truly been nurturing…but I’d always just assumed were there, would always be there, because you can’t undo blood. But now everything feels unstable, like my sister could shake us off if she wanted, and maybe it wouldn’t take so very much at all.

“Abigail…” Mom says.

My sister reluctantly meets her eyes.

“Hi,” she says. Not hi, Mom. She says nothing to her, just looks back at the rest of us.

“Ready?” she says. “The car’s outside.”

*

As we drive I see Abigail’s eyes in the rearview flicking towards me, skittish and questioning. All these years, I think, and we still haven’t found a way to trust each other, she and I.

“Sam, you and I have a lot to talk about.” Abigail glances over at him in the passenger seat. “A lot. So the two of us are going to go out for some tacos—they have a taqueria by the hotel that you’re going to love—and do some catching up.” She glances back at Mom and me. “And I’m sure Gillian and—and your grandma—” she says, but the words seem to stick in her throat, “will be fine making their own dinner plans for tonight. Okay?”

The airport’s not far from the downtown, and soon we’re off the expressway and on city streets. It feels like another country here—people outside in summer-weather clothes, strolling, relaxed. Holidaymakers. Mom has rolled down the window and the Florida night air drifts through the car, warm even in the evening.

The hotel is low-budget and nondescript, the lobby a large rectangle with a bar at one end. We wait at reception under yellowish lights and I look around at our little group: my sister, beautiful, tired, angry; my mother, looking out of place in this slightly shabby environment and trying not to show just how out of place she feels in her whole life right now. And Sam, staying close to his mother but keeping a distance still, like a tiny force-field: the distance of not yet forgiven.

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