Chapter Two: The Back Room
The dots vanished for good. No reply came, not that night, and Wren rode her bike home at nine thirty under a sky gone the deep violet of a bruise, past the dark windows of Callahan and Sons Books, its brass bell silent on the door for the first time in as long as she could remember, and let herself cry exactly as much as she needed to and not one tear more, because crying past the point of usefulness had never once made her feel better, only more tired.
Her father was asleep, or pretending to be, when she got home. She left the porch light on for reasons she couldn't have explained and went to bed without checking whether he'd noticed she was gone at all.
Walter Callahan was moved out of intensive care two days later, and it was Ruth Okafor who told her, not her father, because Ruth had gotten Wren's number years ago from her mother and had, apparently, quietly kept it this whole time, the way people in small towns kept things they suspected might be needed later.
He's asking for visitors, the text read. Just so you know, sweetheart. Room 214. Come whenever you like, I'll be there most afternoons.
Wren went straight after school on Thursday, still in the green cardigan from her uniform, her backpack heavy with a chemistry textbook she had no intention of opening. She told her father she was going to the library. This was, technically, not entirely a lie, since the hospital had a small one on the second floor, though she doubted that would help her case if he ever found out.
Room 214 smelled like her grandfather's aftershave underneath the hospital smell, which struck her as strange and then made a terrible kind of sense; some habits didn't die just because a heart nearly had. He was propped up against pillows, an IV taped to the back of one big-knuckled hand, and he looked older than she remembered, the skin at his throat looser, his white hair thinner at the crown, but his eyes when they found her were exactly, precisely the same, sharp and pale blue and entirely too knowing.
"Well," Walter Callahan said. "Look what the tide brought in."
"Hi, Grandpa." Her voice wobbled on the second word, the g catching in her throat.
"None of that," he said, gruff, though his own eyes had gone bright and wet in a way he clearly intended to ignore. "Sit down before you fall down, you look like you've been running."
"I biked."
"Of course you did. Your father know you're here?"
Wren looked at the floor, at the ugly speckled linoleum, at anything that wasn't her grandfather's face. "No."
Walter made a sound low in his chest, not quite a laugh. "No, I imagine he doesn't."
"He wouldn't come with me. Ruth called him, the night it happened, and he just, he asked if you were okay and then he hung up and went back to scraping the porch railing like nothing happened." She hadn't meant to say all of it, but once she started it came out in a rush, three years of watching her father go quiet and careful whenever his own father's name came up, like Walter Callahan was a bruise you avoided pressing. "I don't understand it. I don't understand why you two won't just talk. It's been three years, Grandpa. Mom's been gone three years and you and Dad haven't said a word to each other in all that time and I don't even really know why."
Something moved behind Walter's eyes, old and heavy, like a stone shifting at the bottom of a pond.
"That's a long story, and not entirely mine to tell you the whole of," he said carefully. "Some of it belongs to your father. But I'll tell you my half, if you want it, and you can decide what you think of an old man once you've heard it."
"I want it," Wren said. "I want all of it."
Walter shifted against his pillows, wincing slightly, and Wren half rose to help him before he waved her off with the hand that wasn't taped to a needle.
"Your father was going to take over the shop," he said. "Callahan and Sons. Founded by my own father in nineteen fifty-eight, if you can believe a bookshop's lasted that long in a town this size. Danny loved it as a boy, loved it the way you love a place before you understand what it'll cost you to keep loving it. Then he met your mother."
"Mom worked at the shop?"
"For one summer, the summer she was twenty-two, restocking shelves to pay for art school. And your father fell for her so hard and so fast I used to tease him it looked like he'd been hit by a delivery truck." A ghost of a smile crossed the old man's face and vanished just as quickly. "Elena wanted to travel. Wanted to see things, paint things, live a life bigger than Port Ivy had room for. And your father wanted to give her that life, more than he wanted the shop, more, I'm ashamed to say, than I understood at the time that a person was allowed to want something more than the family business."
"So what happened?"
"I said some things," Walter said quietly, "that I have spent three years wishing I could take back and cannot. I told him if he walked out on the shop for a woman who'd leave the second something shinier came along, he needn't bother walking back in. I called her a distraction. In front of her, at Christmas dinner, with your sister sitting right there at the table."
Wren felt something cold settle in her stomach. "You said that about Mom?"
"I did. And your father took her hand and walked out of my house that night and didn't bring either of you back for four years, not until your mother herself insisted, because she was a better person than my pride deserved. And your sister." Walter stopped, and for the first time since Wren had walked in, he looked away from her, out the narrow window at the gray strip of harbor visible between two buildings. "Your sister was fifteen. She stayed with me a great deal in those years, because your parents were building a life elsewhere and I was, God forgive me, glad of the company and not careful enough about what I said to a girl who was already frightened of being unwanted twice over."
"Twice over?"
"Her own mother left when Iris was a baby. Did you know that? Before your father ever met Elena. Iris grew up believing she'd been left once already, and when your parents came back into her life with a new baby, with you, I think some frightened part of her decided she was about to be left again. And instead of telling her she was wrong, I let her believe things about her place in this family that were unkind and untrue, because it was easier than admitting my own mistakes to a child." His voice had gone rough. "The night your father and I fought, the Christmas you're too young to remember properly, Iris heard every word of it. Heard me call her stepmother a distraction. And I think she decided, right then, that if I could say that about a woman I claimed to love once, then nothing I'd ever told her about her own place here could be trusted either. She walked out in the snow without her coat and none of us have managed to bring her all the way back since."
Wren sat with that for a long moment, the machines beeping their steady rhythm beside the bed, and felt the shape of her family rearrange itself in her mind, the way a photograph looks different once someone tells you what was happening just outside its frame.
"I want to fix it," she said finally. "All of it. You and Dad. You and Iris. I don't care how long it's been."
Walter reached over with the hand that wasn't taped down and covered hers where it lay on the blanket, his grip surprisingly strong for a man who'd had a heart attack two days ago.
"You are entirely too much like your mother," he said, and this time when his eyes went bright, he didn't bother pretending they hadn't. "She never could leave a broken thing alone either. But Wrenny, listen to me. Some of this isn't a door a sixteen year old can force open by sheer will. Some of it your father has to choose."
"Then I'll make him choose it," Wren said, with a stubbornness that made her grandfather laugh out loud for the first time, a real laugh, that turned into a cough that turned into Ruth Okafor sticking her head in the door to ask if everything was all right.
Everything was not all right. But for the first time in three years, Wren thought she could see, faintly, the shape of what all right might eventually look like, if she was brave enough and patient enough and just plain stubborn enough to drag her family back toward it, one furious, frightened person at a time.
She just had no idea yet how much digging it would take to find her sister, or how badly that first reunion was about to go.