Gracie Abrams is eking out a solitary existence, fighting day-in, day-out against the drain of working customer service and nursing two newborn kittens in her off time. Out on her own ever since her sister moved in with her boyfriend, the burden of...
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"Um...Gracie?" Tenna's sweet voice was unimpeded by any background noise. The connection was clear, her tone peaceful. It was the twilight hours before bed, which drew cozy shadows around all the furniture in my room, combining them into one solid mass.
"Yeah?"
Tenna's new timezone was an hour behind Mayhop. It was the post-dinner calm where the little ones were lazing before the TV, their bellies full right before that last burst of activity threatened to end all the calm that had never actually existed in the first place.
"Why is your voice like that?"
Tenna's question settled like sand in my gut, hardening into a shiny, reflective piece of sea glass that showed all of my secrets to whoever so wished to glance my way. Even separated by one thousand miles off I-80—the sound waves transferring each of my syllables across space and time to reach my little sister in her new home with a man she didn't fully trust—Tenna could see the glass.
I sat on my full laundry bin nestled within my closet, eyes on the blinds and the burgeoning darkness outside my window. "What do you mean?" I whispered into the phone, knee jangling against the rough edge of my folding door.
"Are you...are you whispering?" Tenna asked, her own tone turning into the merest of whispers. "What the heck is happening?"
"Ah," I hummed as if I didn't know that I was, in fact, whispering. "I'm just—just taking a break. Yeah. That's all."
"O...kay."
Silence took the reins of conversation, both sides stuck on trying to scoot around the obvious elephants in the room, yet neither of us quite willing to acknowledge the hidden ones.
With a long sigh, I felt the tension drain out of me. My knee stopped jiggling, and I refocused my mind. I had promised to be more present in my sister's life; more openly supportive. She was alone in Colorado with a man she didn't love, with two kids she didn't really know, next to in-laws that weren't actually her in-laws.
"How have things been?" I started, awkwardly, wishing I had the list of specific questions I had come up with to ask Tenn every time we spoke on the phone.
I had created the list after she left, researching simple questions to ask a person you suspected of being emotionally or physically abused without having them leave their comfort zone. Not like I thought Evan was some diabolical monster, but I really couldn't be too careful. Their relationship had always been the kind of unsteady tempest that could oscillate violently from one end to the other in the time it took to blink five times.
My list of carefully cultivated questions sat in my notebook that was stashed carelessly on one of the few open spaces of my kitchen counter. I wasn't going out there right now, so, horrible big sister that I was, the questions would have to wait for next time.
