“I sent you down here to stay with Clay,” Ronnie grumbled, looking straight ahead, his dashboard rattling on the road. “But I know how headstrong you can be, and your mother would not want you being a runaway.” His mouth straightened into a tight line at the mention of my mom.

“Thank you,” I practically whispered. Something about being with Ronnie didn’t feel right, but it felt so much better than being with my father. I didn’t mention the things I’d wanted to say to him all this time. Why didn’t you ever call me back? Why didn’t you let me come home for the funerals? Why did you make me leave in the first place? I wanted to ask him if he had himself under control now, if his grief was still consuming him. Have you brushed your teeth? I wanted to ask him. Have you changed your clothes? Is the motel room a rotting mess of empty food containers and filthy sheets?

But instead I asked, “Can I get a Coke?”

He pulled over at the next fast-food restaurant we saw and bought me one, handing it across the seat, our fingers brushing. His fingernails were dirty. His hands were dry. Meg’s blood was still under my nails, but I didn’t care.

“Have you cleared out the house?” I asked when we got back on the road.

“Some,” he said, and I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it, but I pressed. It was my house, too, and I had a right to know.

“Did you find any of our stuff?”

“Some,” he said again.

“Anything worth keeping?”

He shook his head, took a deep breath. “Total loss.”

“You didn’t keep anything?”

Annoyance crept into his voice. “No, Jersey, it’s trash.”

I pondered that. Our whole lives, the lives of four people, tossed in a landfill with all the other garbage. Why do we spend so much time collecting stuff, anyway, if that’s what it comes down to in the end?

“So are you still living at the motel?” I asked.

“If you call it living, sure,” he answered.

“Is there power in Elizabeth yet?”

“Yes.”

I sipped my soda, feeling the cold sink down into my fingers and toes, the sugar and carbonation rushing to my head. I kicked off my shoes and held my feet under the floor vent, letting the air-conditioning dry my sweaty toes. I’d run out of things to ask him. He wasn’t going to give me answers—not real ones, anyway—so what was the point? We both slipped into silence. I leaned my head against the window and watched the lines being eaten up by the front of the truck, until my eyes were too heavy from watching and I fell asleep.


I awoke when my body sensed that we had stopped moving. I sat up straight, stretching my stiff neck, and looked around. We were in a parking lot, but not one I recognized. I peered out the window. We weren’t in Elizabeth, I could see that much. Ronnie had put the truck into park and was staring straight ahead through the windshield, his hands resting on the bottom loop of the steering wheel.

“Where are we?” I asked on a yawn. I grabbed my soda and took another sip. It had gotten warm and watery, but it still tasted like heaven. A sign on the side of a nearby building said WAVERLY PUBLIC LIBRARY.

“Waverly,” he said, as I made the connection. His voice was rough and scratchy. He was born in Waverly, Grandfather Harold had said of Clay. About an hour thataway.

“Waverly? Why?”

Waverly was about an hour southeast of Elizabeth. We’d driven through it once or twice on road trips, and Mom had always pointed out that she’d grown up there.

“Godforsaken hellhole,” she’d always say. “Hold your breath. You don’t want to breathe in judgment. Oppression is contagious.” And even though we had no idea what she was talking about, we’d always make a game of it—see who could hold their breath the longest. See if we could make it all the way through the town without taking a breath.

Ronnie picked at the steering wheel with his dirty thumbnails. “At the funeral…” he said, and then he paused so long, I wasn’t sure he’d ever finish. He reached up and wiped his jaw with his hand a few times, then went back to picking. “Some people showed up, Jersey.”

“I wanted to be there. I should have been.”

“I was trying to keep you from being hurt.”

“My mother died. It’s too late to keep me from being hurt. I should have been there.”

“Your mom’s parents came,” he said, leveling his eyes at me at last.

I sat back, stunned. I had never met my mom’s parents. Mom hadn’t seen or talked to her parents since before I was born. They’d told her that if she wanted to run off with that drunk troublemaker Clay Cameron, she no longer had a family to come home to, and Mom had taken them at their word. She had been glad to do so. She always talked about how they judged her, how she was never good enough for them, how they never understood her and forced her to be a perfect little princess when all she wanted was to be normal. When they disowned her, she was glad to be done with them. To hear her tell it, she had no idea where they lived, much less if they were alive or dead. I think in our hearts we all assumed they were dead.

But they were alive.

And she was the dead one.

Ronnie went back to picking, I think because it kept him from having to look at me. “They didn’t even know about Marin,” he said. “They knew about you because your mom was pregnant when she ran away. But they didn’t even know Marin existed.”

“She didn’t run away. They disowned her,” I said, not caring a bit. “That’s their own fault.”

“They live here in Waverly,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all, and my insides started to turn cold as all the pieces fell into place. Mom growing up here, telling us to hold our breaths so we didn’t catch the oppression and judgment alive and well in Waverly. Ronnie was driving me to the very town where my grandparents lived. “They’ve always been right here. They still live in the same house your mom grew up in.”

“But they didn’t bother to come by until now?” I wanted to keep him talking, to turn the conversation around. Maybe I could stop what I knew was coming. Maybe if I made him understand how much Mom hated them, he wouldn’t do what he was about to do. Again. “They didn’t care enough to try to see us until after she was dead?”

Ronnie shrugged. “They said they tried. When you were a baby. But according to them, your mom called the police to have them escorted off her property. She told them she never wanted to see them or speak to them again. Of course, this was when she was still with Clay. They… gave up.”

“You don’t do that,” I said, and I realized that I wasn’t sure if I was talking about my grandparents or about Mom or about Ronnie himself. “You don’t give up on your family. You don’t just… leave… when your child… needs you.” My breath hitched every few words as tears and dread fell over me.

“I’m sorry, Jersey,” Ronnie said, letting his hands rest limply in his lap. “I called them this morning. They’re willing to take you in.”

“No,” I said. My nose dripped and soaked into my jeans. I clutched at his elbow. “Please, Ronnie. I want to go home. I’ll be good, I promise. I won’t cause any problems. Ever. I don’t know them, and Mom hated them. This isn’t fair. Why do you hate me so much? Why do you think it’s so bad to have me around?”

He shook his head and put the truck into drive. My hand slipped off his arm and landed in my lap in defeat. “I don’t hate you,” he said. “But I can’t take care of you. Every time I look at you, I see her. Every time I hear you talk, I think about how I let everyone down. I think about how I couldn’t save any of you. Not one.” He glanced at me as he turned down a side road, the street sign reading FLORA. The houses were tidy, landscaped, painted. Not big, but bigger than our old house. “What good am I to anyone if I can’t be there when it most matters?”

“But I’m still alive. You can still save me. It matters now.”

He pulled into a driveway. My tears slowed as I took in the white-and-brown Tudor-style house, flowers blooming in orderly raised beds surrounding the swept sidewalk. More flowers blooming in quaint window boxes. A saintly-looking statue on the front porch. The door opened slowly. I wiped my face with my palms.

“I know you don’t understand,” Ronnie said. “But you’ve got to make this work, Jersey. I’m selling the property, anyway. Going back east. I’ve already got the transfer okayed at work. You can’t come home. There’s not going to be one.”

I tore my eyes away from the pale hand that still clutched the door. The hand must have belonged to one of my grandparents, but the shadows kept me from seeing who.

“You’re not going to stay where they’re buried?”

“Every time I look at that neighborhood, at the house, at every business and building I pass, I’m reminded of how I failed them. I can’t live a life that way. I’ve got to go.”

“So you’re abandoning all of us,” I said, not a question, but a statement.

“I’m saving myself,” he said very quietly.

It dawned on me that on some level I had expected Ronnie to change his mind. To get a little distance, heal, see his mistake, want me back. In some ways, I was more aghast at the realization that he would never change his mind than I was at seeing Mom’s lipstick smeared across Meg’s and Lexi’s faces. I was more insulted by this than I’d been by Clay and Tonette insulting me and saying I didn’t belong. I was more shocked by Ronnie’s selfishness than I had been by the tornado itself. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Life wasn’t supposed to work this way. He wasn’t supposed to choose himself over us.

“You’re a coward.” But before I could say any more, a gray-haired man wearing a plaid shirt and a baseball cap knocked on Ronnie’s window. My mouth snapped shut. The man had a large, bulbous nose and huge eyebrows. But he also had wet, pouty lips that sort of reminded me of Marin’s, and out from his cap, several curly strands of hair snaked around his ears.