crowd at night than she did at home in the daylight. I imagined walking up to a teenager and discussing condoms, only to get hauled off by the cops for talking to the wrong girl.
Those teen-vampire romance novels she adored so much had left their mark on her generation. Most of the girls were dressed in black and red, tight low-slung jeans, lace and velvet blouses, long leather coats. A lot of makeup attentively applied to accent lips and eyes.
I made two complete circuits of the area before I finally homed in on her.
Dale seemed to be in her element among the crowd, weaving between tribes, drifting. I took up a perch beside a tree, lit a cigarette, and watched. She was the popular chick, everyone focusing on her, circling her, asking her opinion. She held a bottle of beer but sipped from it rarely. She was offered a joint and a cigarette and passed them both by. She laughed quaintly, almost shyly, but with a gorgeous smile and her neck tilted back. Her lips were strikingly red, cheekbones heavy with purple makeup that almost looked like bruises. Boys put their arms around her but only briefly. She kept on the move. I couldn’t tell which might be the boyfriend, if any of them.
Beneath a tight, short leather jacket she wore a skimpy black T-shirt that left her midriff exposed. She had a lot of shake when she walked. I saw that she’d gotten a small tattoo near her navel. At this distance I couldn’t make the tat out. You couldn’t get a tattoo if you were under eighteen, not even if a parent said it was okay, and my mother never would have. That meant she had a fake ID. That sort of shocked me and it shouldn’t have. Damn near everyone had fake identification. Fifteen seemed so much younger to me now than it once had.
I kept trying to see my little sister within the young woman before me. I’d missed out on some of the most important years of her life. I wondered how well she remembered me. I thought she must hate me. Not only had one of her brothers totally fucked himself and the family over and then vanished from her life, but almost immediately afterward so had the other. I wondered how I could have done it to her. I wondered how I could have done it to any of them.
A thousand fatuous questions wafted through my head. I tossed the butt and lit another cigarette. A hard breeze made the branches flap and residual rainwater shook across the field. Kids laughed. A bottle broke and hysteria-laced giggles erupted. Car engines rumbled. A drunk kid took a header and almost fell into the lake.
Dale was breaking from one group and heading toward another. I made my way toward her on an intercept course. She sensed me before I’d taken five steps and turned. She made a beeline for me. I saw that her tattoo was of her namesake, an Airedale. She had a ring through her navel, and the dog was posed as if leaping through it. I thought that was kind of cute. She wore no expression but her eyes blazed.
“What are you doing here, Terry?” she asked.
“You called me, remember?”
“Not here in New York. I mean what are you doing here right now.
At the lake.”
“I just-”
“Mom sent you.”
I’d be stupid to deny it. After all this time the first words out of my mouth shouldn’t be lies. “Yeah.”
She sneered. The flickering golden light threw pools of shadow across her face. “Did you really come two thousand miles just to check on me?”
“No,” I said.
“But you’re going to do it anyway.”
“I thought we could talk a little.”
Her lips flattened. They were as red as if she’d just chewed through her wrist. “Now you want to talk?”
“I do, Dale.”
“About what?”
She was like the rest of the Rands. Her anger and hurt had been locked so far down inside that when they sluggishly awoke and crawled out they became a monstrous and frightful thing. I saw them emerging. I turned my face aside.
It was my own fault. I shouldn’t have cut out and run this morning. And I definitely shouldn’t have let her catch me doing it.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Anything.”
“Anything.” The word hung there. “I don’t know that I like you following me. You’ve been watching me, haven’t you? You’ve been here for a while watching me. What gives you the right? You haven’t even said hello. You haven’t even asked me how I am, how I’m doing. You never called, Terry. Not even on my birthday. Never. You could’ve called.” Her voice was a low growl. “Even if you didn’t want to see any of us, you could’ve picked up the phone. You could’ve written. You could’ve let me know you were alive. You could’ve shown some concern, for even one minute. You could’ve done any of a thousand things, Terry, and you didn’t. Now you want to talk?”
I reached out and drew her into an embrace. My timing was off, as usual. I should’ve let her vent longer, bue d01D;t I thought that once she got started it might never stop. I was still avoiding responsibility.
She didn’t resist. She didn’t hug me back either. It was like holding on to a mannequin dressed like a young woman who sort of looked like my little sister. I kept at it, but there was no point. I let her go.
She said, “Is this where I’m supposed to forgive you?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just that I wanted to hug you, all right?”
“You going to give me a lecture?”
“About what?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either.”
“About whatever you think I need lecturing on, Terry. That’s really why you’re here.”
“You’re confusing me, Dale.”
I wanted to ask her what she felt about Collie. I wanted to know how his reputation had affected her in school and elsewhere. If instead of being known as a child of the nefarious Rand clan of thieves she was now marked as the sister of a thrill killer. I stared at that smear of blood-colored wax over her lips. I was as bad as the rest of my family. I didn’t want to ask anything of real consequence for fear of being asked something meaningful in return.
“What did Mom and Dad say?”
“They found condoms in the laundry and they don’t like your boyfriend.”
“Ah, shit. So that’s where that pack went.”
“Always double-check your pockets, Dale. Always.”
“So now you’re reporting back to them.”
“I’m here because I wanted to see you and say I was sorry for running out this morning.”
We locked eyes. I tried to let her read me. I didn’t know what it would mean or how it would go down, but I made the effort. She seemed about as satisfied as she could be under the circumstances, and her lips eased into a small, soft smile. She turned aside for a moment, and when she turned back the smile was gone.
“You really came back for Kimmy, didn’t you? Not us. Not Collie.”
“I don’t know why I’m here, Dale.”
“At least you’re telling the truth now. That’s something. Did you see her yet?”
“I saw her. I didn’t talk to her.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
I shrugged. It was my father’s gesture. It was meant to deflect honesty, intimacy, and insight. I couldn’t make it a habit. “She’s married to Chub now. They have a kid. It’s not my place.”
“But you watched her.”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“So what was the point of that?”
“Good question,” I said.
“Five years out there on a ranch beneath the big blue sky, lots of time to clear your head, and you come home with a brain as full of snakes as when you left.”
I lifted my chin and studied her face. “Fifteen and you know everything there is to know, eh?t? & br”
“Not quite.”
“Right.”
“Okay, so she found condoms. What parent is going to like the guy who’s having sex with their little girl?”
