Shelter in Place by Alexander Maksik

it was the bird and it was the tar and it was the ecstasy.

22.
    C laire called.
    At first there was static on the line and then an echo. Everything we said, repeated.
    â€œI don’t understand,” she kept saying.
    Tess and I were looking at each other.
    I said, “You should come home. You should just come home.”
    It had been nearly a week since my father called. Neither of us, not me, not Claire, had been to see him or our mother.
    This was her third phone call, each the same.
    â€œ
You
haven’t even been home.”
    â€œBut I’m going,” I said. “I’m going soon.”
    â€œSo you say, Joey.”
    â€œCome back and we’ll go together. We should be there.”
    There was a long silence. Tess was watching me. She’d been telling me the same all week, “You have to go see him, at least. You can’t stay here.”
    But I was paralyzed by the prospect of leaving her, of seeing my father’s face, and most of all, of visiting my mother in jail.
    â€œClaire,” I said. “Listen to me.”
    â€œI’m not,” she said.
    â€œYou’re not what?”
    â€œComing. I’m not coming home.”
    â€œEver?”
    â€œI’m getting married. We’re getting married.”
    I imagined Henry smoking at a window. Henry studying my sister the way Tess was studying me. My sister whose mother was now a killer. Henry’s pink face, Henry so full of second thoughts.
    â€œClaire, listen.”
    â€œI have to get off the phone now, Joey. I’ll ring you,” she said and hung up.
    Tess raised her eyebrows.
    â€œShe’ll ring me,” I said.
    Tess smiled. “She’s not coming?”
    â€œNo. She’s getting married instead.”
    Tess shook her head. “You two.”
    I looked away.
    â€œStep up, Joey. You’re going to have to step up.”
    I nodded.
    â€œAre we invited to the wedding?”
    Tess undressed and got into bed with me.
    â€œShe didn’t say. She didn’t mention it.”
    Tess saw Claire as a coward and a traitor.
    That was that for her.
    But not for me.
    There is comfort, cold as it may be, in knowing that my sister remains alive. In many ways, despite her disappearance, she is what I have left. After all this time I have refused to condemn her, and even then, I was incapable of any true anger.
    I hated seeing her leave for college, and then for England, and then to learn that she was being swallowed into some moneyed world none of us knew a thing about, rising in class, up and away from me, from us.
    All during that time I was watching my mother. Through the phone calls. Through the sentencing. Through the haze of those weeks. Tess coming and going from work, the newspapers, the television.
    Through those days of the thickening tar, I watched my mother. I listened for her at night. I saw her in the air.
    In those first days, I wanted Claire with me more than I wanted Tess. More than anything. I wanted my sister home. I wanted her back to explain our parents, to take care of me the way she had when we were young, when our secrets were too great for mothers and fathers.

23.
    U nlike many of her friends who’d returned home from college posing as young anarchists with blue hair and pierced nipples, my sister came carrying a handbag, wearing expensive black clothes. Her last Christmas home from NYU before moving to London. I would have been sixteen, and she twenty. There was something damning about her presence even then. I think my parents felt like country slobs around her, which I’m sure is exactly what she wanted. They would have had a much easier time if she’d blown all her money at CBGB, but the idea of her spending it on clothes and haircuts baffled them both. It particularly irked my mother.
    The four of us sitting around the kitchen table eating take-out Chinese, my mother exhausted, just home in her blue scrubs, and Claire wearing heavy dark eyeliner,