“Just thought we should check,” Ex said. He sounded a little petulant. I had the momentary urge to put my hand on his, to reassure him. I’d spent weeks traveling with him, just the two of us together. I didn’t know if the distance I felt in him now was from being back with other people or if he was still grieving for Father Chapin, his old mentor who’d died in my arms less than a month before. Or if he still thought of me as an innocent woman possessed by a demonic force from which he had to save me. Whatever it was, I didn’t put my hand on his, and if he noticed, I couldn’t tell.
The waiter came, and I settled the bill. Twenty minutes later I was turning the SUV down the familiar streets, my breath shallow and my brain spinning. There was Mr. and Mrs. Mogen’s place, but the old green truck he’d driven had been replaced by a red Impala. A younger man’s car. I wondered what had happened. We passed Carol McKee’s house, where I’d gone for Wednesday Bible study from the time I was twelve until I was sixteen. I was driving down two different streets; the one I saw with single-story houses with no fences to divide the yards, one-car garages built back when cars must have been about a foot thinner, and then I was also going down my street where I’d always been. Where I belonged.
There’s a way things are supposed to be, and it’s how it was the first time. A city was supposed to be like this. I’d been to Denver, Chicago, New York, New Orleans. I’d traveled through the winter desert of northern New Mexico. I hadn’t thought about the ways they were exotic for me. Now, for the first time, I could see. They were strange and rich and uncanny because they weren’t Wichita. Until I saw it all, I didn’t know how much I’d missed it, and after about three minutes I wanted to get the hell away.
I turned right, went two more blocks, then left. The houses got a little closer in. More had another story, or half story. And then there it was. A green house with blue trim, a small covered porch with a swing, tight-mowed buffalo grass. The tree I’d climbed in the summers to get away from Jay and Curt. Over on the side, the window I’d gone out of. Home. The driveway had a white Nissan I didn’t recognize, and my dad’s truck was on the street. There were about half a dozen other cars parked by the curbs too, so I had to go down three houses before I found a space big enough to swing the SUV up to the low curb.
“Are you all right?” Ex asked.
“Right as rain,” I said. “Spiffy.”
“Because you’re looking a little pale.”
I killed the engine and sat for a few seconds, listening to the car click as it cooled.
“This is usually where you put in some inappropriate humor,” Ex said. I couldn’t tell if he was making fun of me or being gentle. Maybe both.
“Why didn’t the chicken cross the road?” I said.
“I’ll bite.”
“Because it was too chicken,” I said, and opened my door. “Everyone out. Let’s get our travesty on.”
I stood on the doorstep for ten or fifteen seconds. It felt like forever. The house was smaller than I remembered it. Like going back to a grade school classroom. Like walking into a recurring dream. I pressed the doorbell.
It wasn’t a breath before my mother opened the door. The smells of pinesap and woodsmoke mixed with the generic soap she always bought wafted over me. She looked older, her hair more white than not, her skin thinner. She looked like an older version of my mother. Not the same woman.
“Well,” she said through a tight little smile. “I suppose you should come in. Cold out there.”
“Thank you,” I said, but not in much more than a whisper. I ducked my head as I stepped in, like I was sixteen and late for curfew. I hated that I was doing it, and I could no more stop than I could fly through the air like a sparrow. “This is . . . Jake. And Ex. They’re my friends. They’ve been helping me.”
Mom nodded to them both as they stepped into the atrium.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you both,” she said. “Can I take your coats for you?”
As Ex and Chogyi Jake made their mixed chorus of yeses and thank you ma’ams, it hit me just how lost I was. I’d come here to grill this nice, polite, brittle brick of a woman about screwing around on her husband over two decades ago. I didn’t have any idea how I’d even start a conversation like that. So I heard from this psychic kid in New Orleans that you were knocking boots with someone besides Dad. How’d that happen? My God, the woman had barely been able to tell me how tampons worked. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come.
“Who is it?” Jay called from the kitchen.
My mother’s eyes locked on mine; hers were the same brown as the woman I saw in the mirror every morning. She didn’t turn her head when she shouted back.
“It’s your sister.”
I stepped into the living room. The Christmas tree was still up and bright with tinsel, even if all the strands of colored lights were dark. Jay stepped into the doorway from the kitchen at the same time a long-limbed, lanky boy with a ghost of a mustache came around the corner from the dining room. Jay’s alarm and astonishment looking at me couldn’t have been more than mine on looking at my baby brother, Curtis.
“Jayné?” he said, and the voice was deeper, but it was him.
“Hey,” I said, and put up my arms. We hugged like it meant something, and for the first time in a long time I felt my anxiety ratchet down a notch. I might be wasting my time looking for answers. My parents might think I was the Whore of Babylon. But I’d gotten to hug my little brother, so no matter what, the trip couldn’t be a total loss. And then I felt Jay’s arms around us both. We stood there for a few seconds, the three of us, like old veterans who’d shared the same foxhole.
“Jaybird?”
The brown-skinned woman in the kitchen doorway was maybe two years older than me, with a round, pretty face and a baby bump. Jay stepped to the woman’s side, his hand on her shoulder.
“Jayné, this is Carla. Carla, this is my sister, Jayné.”
The woman seemed hesitant about taking my hand, but my brother damn near crushed me.
“You came for the wedding,” she said.
“I . . . ah. Did,” I said. “I came for the wedding.”
I introduced Chogyi Jake and Ex all around. They were greeted with the friendly confusion that came from being at a family gathering without being family. Normally in situations like this I called them my employees, which was technically true and made people look at me differently, but I knew the next question would be what I employed them for. I didn’t know yet how I wanted to bring in the whole demon-hunting thing, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t it.
They’d been sitting in the kitchen, all except for Curtis, who had his laptop open on the dining room table with three flavors of social media connecting him, I figured, to other bored teenagers trapped at home for the holidays. The things that jumped out at me were the changes: the old white fridge that I’d stuck notes and kid art on had been replaced by a brushed-steel model. The chairs around the kitchen table had new pads on the seats. Looking down the three steps into the TV room, they’d invested in a massive flat-screen on the back wall. The couch was the same one I’d napped on. The table had the scratch where I’d failed to successfully carve a jack-o’-lantern.
“Can I get you and your friends something to drink?” Mom asked as we filed in.
“That would be great,” I said.
“Just water,” Ex said, with a smile.
“Ex,” Carla said. Her smile seemed forced, and her gaze kept cutting back to me. “That’s an interesting name.” The way she said it made it a question. Ex smiled.
“Short for Xavier,” he said. “Some friends made it into a nickname, and it stuck. Not the worst thing they’ve called me.”
“How interesting,” my mother said. “I hope you’ll be coming to the wedding too?”