Everything feels wrong. I came ready for a fight, but here I am swaying his baby in a tidy living room, staring at maps and paperbacks, and nothing about it matches the image I’ve carried all these years of Ben as some half-feral recluse, holed up with his old man, drowning himself in guilt.
Beside the maps, there’s a notepad with the baby’s schedule, written in neat, girly, slanted handwriting. I picture him moving through the day, measuring formula, coaxing tiny spoons of mush into this baby’s mouth, giving her lavender-scented baths in one of thoseplastic baby tubs. His hands, slick with soap, working through feather-soft hair.
For twenty-five years, I’ve imagined those same hands gripped tight around my sister’s throat.He’s, like, totally obsessed with me, Izzy had once said, and I went back to those words again and again. Because Ben had loved Izzy. He would have done anything for her, and when she broke his heart, I could imagine the dark wave of anger filling him. The feeling of losing something that was supposed to belong to him. I could imagine him not letting her leave, imagine her struggling, his hands finding themselves around her neck. Imagine the squeeze. Strong, firm fingers gripping her windpipe. I have. I have so many times.
It’s an image I can’t get unstuck from my mind. And yet, standing here, trying to rectify the boy I knew with the man in front of me and the monster I’d conjured in between—everything inside me is starting to feel unstuck.
The warmer gurgles softly as the water heats.
Ben pops open a can of Shiner and leans against the counter. He knocks his cowboy boots off heel to toe, then runs his fingers through his shaggy hair. For the first time, I get a good look at him. He’s put on weight—less wiry and more solid than when we were young. Time has carved lines into his face, creases linger around his squinty eyes. But still, there is something familiar about him—the eyes, the mannerisms—I can picture him at some party at The Hollow, leaning back on a boulder in that same way, sipping from a beer.
“Laurie’s out of town,” he says. “Delayed the honeymoon until after they had Mabel.” He tips the beer at the baby. Ben’s little sister is eight years younger than us. Back then Laurie wore hand-me-down cargo shorts that hung to her knobby knees and had waist-length hair she let tangle behind her when she ran around the scrubby property of the Sherman Ranch. Ben kept a brush in his back pocket, and I think of how he’d hold her hair by the roots so he could comb out the knots without hurting her. I glance down at Mabel, and I recognize Laurie’s upturned nose.
The bottle warmer hisses, snapping me out of this mirage.
It makes me suddenly livid that Ben gets to be an uncle, when I’ll never have the chance to be an aunt. That was taken from me. “I thought Laurie and your mom moved away. Figured they didn’t want anything to do with you.” There’s venom in my words, and it shifts the air in the room.
Ben just watches me a moment, the way he always did, careful with his words. “When I got back from Odessa, Mom wanted me to move in with her. I still talk to both of them all the time.”
“Then why’d she leave?” The words come out like an accusation, like the proof I’d always thought they’d been. Carol fleeing that house, this town, everything I knew she loved because she couldn’t stand looking at her son, knowing that he was a killer.
Ben breathes an unamused laugh through his nose, gestures toward the door. “Everywhere she went, people looked at her like—” A muscle in his jaw tenses. He takes a sip. “She just couldn’t stay here.”
I think of Mom’s story. Running into Carol at the grocery store. The way Carol had left her full grocery cart just sitting in the aisle. I’d always thought it was out of guilt, simple. And maybe guilt was a part of it, but layered between so many more complicated things. I think of how close Carol and Mom were back then. How Carol must have felt, seeing her best friend, and not being able to comfort her, not being able to face her. I think of Mom too, and how the loss of Izzy was like a pebble tossed in the water, the ripples unending.
“So why didn’t you?” I ask, shifting the baby in my arms as she starts to fuss. “Move in with your mom when you came back?”
He looks at the beer in his hand, finger fidgeting with the metal tab. “I couldn’t leave Dad alone, and he wouldn’t leave the ranch.” He shrugs, like it just is what it is, like it doesn’t matter that his life has been on hold since he was seventeen. That both our lives have been, like a part of us stayed behind with Izzy. “But that’s all changed. I’m planning on getting us some land, maybe closer to Laurie and Mom, building us a house.”
“Makes sense you’d run away again.” I fling the words at him. The bottle warmer starts to spit and fizz. “Now that they’ve found her.” I say it to remind myself too—that’s why I came here today.
He fixes me with a look. “Have a seat.”
I sit, nestling Mabel into the crook of my arm.
Ben rolls up his sleeve and tests the milk on his wrist before holding the bottle out to me. “Tilt it, so she isn’t sucking air. The last thing I need is her screaming through nap time again.”
I glare up at him. “You think you can just hand me a baby, and what? I’ll melt? I’ll believe every word you say?” Mabel starts squirming at the sight of the bottle, and only seconds later begins crying for it.
“No.” He sets the bottle on the table. “I just think it’s time for her bottle.”
I give in. Mabel relaxes as soon as the nipple touches her lips.
For a long while, there’s only this moment. The faint hum of the fridge and Mabel’s tiny, satisfied gulps.
Ben takes the armchair. “Izzy never showed up that night. That’s all I know.”
“You left.” My voice cracks—because I’ve never been able to speak that hurt out loud—but I force it down like a pill. I focus on the anger instead. I picture my sister’s bones, organized into evidence bags and boxes, labeled neatly. “You left,” I say again, my voice steady this time. “And I didn’t hear a Goddamn word from you. For twenty-five years, Ben.”
“What was I supposed to do? Call your house? Ask your dad to put you on? I was scared, Iggy. I was seventeen. Okay? I’m sorry.” He tosses it out roughly, moving on quickly, but I don’t miss the words. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on, and it all happened so fast. Dad. He just… hunkered down. You know how he can be.”
I shake my head. “If Abel thought Izzy was alive, he would have been out there looking for her. But he knew she was already dead. Didn’t he?” Mabel is beginning to doze off, but her eyes pop open wide at the sound of my rising voice.
He scrubs a hand over his jaw. “I don’t know. Okay? I don’t know why Dad…” He exhales. “But I did try.”
I scoff. “You tried what?”
“To talk to you.”