Chapter Four: Ashford
Iris Callahan's hands were covered in potting soil up to the wrist, and she did not look up when the bell over the nursery door rang, which was why Wren got a full ten seconds to stand in the doorway of Green Bank Nursery and simply look at her sister before the moment was ruined.
That was the second thing that happened in Ashford. First, there was the bus.
Wren had told her father she was spending Saturday at Sam Okonkwo's house, studying for a chemistry test that did, at least, actually exist, and had then walked the four blocks to the bus station instead of to Sam's, feeling the particular guilty thrill of a lie that was mostly true, which was somehow worse than a lie that was entirely false. The bus to Ashford took fifty minutes and cost eleven dollars, money she'd saved from three months of babysitting the Marsh twins, and she spent the whole ride with her forehead against the cool glass, rehearsing sentences that all sounded wrong the moment she imagined saying them out loud.
Hi, I'm your sister, remember me.
I know you don't want to talk to Dad or Grandpa but I'm not them, I'm just me, and I miss you.
Grandpa had a heart attack and I don't want you to hear about it from a stranger the way I almost did.
None of them felt right. She arrived at Green Bank Nursery with no plan at all, just an address she'd found from a tagged photo and a stubbornness that had gotten her exactly this far and no further.
The nursery smelled like wet dirt and green growing things, rows of ferns and hostas under a long plastic tunnel that let the September light through in soft diffuse waves, and there, at the far end, kneeling over a tray of seedlings with dirt under her fingernails and her dark hair pulled back in a bandana, was Iris.
She looked older than the photos, which made sense, Wren supposed, since four years was a long time to freeze someone at nineteen in your head. Her face had the same sharp cheekbones as their father's, the same stubborn set to the jaw that Wren saw in the mirror some mornings, and for one dizzy second Wren felt the strange vertigo of looking at a stranger who was unmistakably, undeniably family.
"Iris?"
Her sister's head came up fast, and for a moment there was nothing on her face but blank confusion, the look of someone trying to place a voice from a life that had gone quiet a long time ago. Then recognition landed, and with it something harder, more guarded, that made Wren's stomach drop.
"Wren." Iris stood, wiping her hands on her jeans, leaving dark smudges. "What are you doing here."
It wasn't a question, not really, any more than her father's had been the week before. It was the same closed-off, defensive shape her whole family seemed to make when they were afraid.
"I texted you," Wren said. "About Grandpa. You read it."
"I read it." Iris's jaw worked. "I didn't know what to say back."
"You could have said anything. You could have said you didn't care, even, that would have been something."
"I do care." It came out sharp, almost angry, and Iris seemed to hear how it sounded and softened it, barely. "I care. That's not, that was never the problem, Wren, whatever you've been told."
"Nobody's told me anything, that's the whole point, everybody in this family just goes quiet and expects the rest of us to fill in the blanks ourselves." Wren heard her own voice rising and made herself stop, made herself breathe, the way the school counselor had taught her after her mother died, when everything in her had wanted to shout at a world that kept right on turning like nothing catastrophic had happened at all. "I came because Grandpa's out of the ICU but his heart is still weak and Dad still won't visit him and I am so tired of being the only person in this family who's willing to just show up somewhere. So I showed up here."
Iris looked at her for a long moment, something complicated moving behind her eyes, and then glanced toward the front of the nursery, where an older woman with a green apron was watching them with the particular tact of someone who has learned not to interrupt a family conversation happening near the ferns.
"I get a break in ten minutes," Iris said finally. "There's a bench out back by the greenhouse. Wait for me there."
The bench, when Wren found it, looked out over a small pond ringed with cattails, and she sat there for what felt like considerably longer than ten minutes, watching a heron stand with terrible patience at the water's edge, before Iris finally came around the corner of the greenhouse with two paper cups of coffee from a machine that had clearly seen better decades.
"It's bad," Iris said, handing one over and sitting down at the far end of the bench, putting deliberate distance between them. "The coffee. Fair warning."
"I don't care." Wren wrapped both hands around the cup anyway, grateful for the heat, for the small ordinary kindness of it. "Iris, can I ask you something?"
"You've been asking me things since you walked in."
"Why did you leave? Really leave, I mean. Not the version I got from Grandpa, or the version Dad half told me, I want to know what you remember."
Iris was quiet long enough that Wren thought she might simply refuse to answer, might get up and go back to her seedlings and leave Wren sitting alone by the pond with a heron for company. But then she let out a breath that seemed to come from somewhere very deep and old.
"I remember being fifteen and sitting at that Christmas table and hearing our grandfather, the one person who'd told me a hundred times that I'd always have a place with him no matter what happened with my mom, call Elena a distraction. In front of everyone. And I remember thinking, if he can say that about a woman Dad clearly loved, then everything he ever told me about my own place in this family might just be words he says to make people feel better, right up until he decides they're inconvenient."
"That's not," Wren started, but Iris held up a hand, not unkindly.
"Let me finish, I've had four years to figure out how to say this and I don't want to lose my nerve." She turned the coffee cup slowly in her hands. "And then Dad, who I loved, who I thought would fight for both me and Elena, just took her hand and walked out. Didn't say a word to me. Didn't tell me I still had a place with him either. Just left me standing at that table with our grandfather's words still hanging in the air, and I thought, well. There it is. He chose. He always was going to choose the new family over the old one, and I was always going to be the complication from his first marriage that everyone was too polite to say out loud."
"You weren't a complication."
"I was fifteen and my own mother had already left once, Wren. You don't come back from that kind of afraid easily. Every time somebody in that family raised their voice after that, I heard the sound of a door closing, whether it actually was one or not."
"So you left first. Before anyone could leave you."
Iris looked at her sideways, something startled and a little wounded crossing her face. "Since when did you get so sharp."
"Since my mom died and I had a lot of time to think about who leaves and who stays," Wren said, and heard her own voice go thick, and let it, because pretending not to be sad had never once actually made her less sad, it had only ever made her more tired. "Iris, I don't remember any of what happened at that Christmas dinner. I was four. All I remember is you were my sister and then you weren't around anymore, and nobody ever explained it to me, they just let me grow up assuming it was normal to lose people and not talk about why."
Something in Iris's face gave way, just slightly, the way a wave gives way against a rock it's been hitting for years, wearing it down by degrees so slow you'd never see the change happen if you watched every single day, only if you came back after a long time away and saw how much the shape of the rock had shifted.
"I'm sorry," Iris said quietly. "I'm sorry you grew up in the wreckage of a fight you weren't even old enough to remember. That's not fair to you."
"Then help me fix it. Please. Grandpa's sick, and Dad's finally cracking a little, I can feel it, and I don't want to do this without you too, I don't want to get everyone else back only to still be missing my own sister."
Iris looked out at the pond, at the heron still patiently waiting for something beneath the water's surface to move, and Wren watched her sister's jaw work through what looked like four years of carefully built walls trying to decide, all at once, whether they were still worth keeping.
"I need to think," Iris said finally, and Wren almost laughed despite everything, because it was word for word what her father had said three nights earlier in the kitchen, the exact same door left the exact same fraction of an inch open. "I'm not saying no, Wren. I just, I need to think about whether I can walk back into that family without walking straight back into the version of me that got hurt there."
"Okay," Wren said. "That's fair. But can I have your number back, at least? Not to make you do anything. Just so it's not just me holding onto a thread that anyone could cut at any time."
Iris pulled out her phone, and for a moment her thumb hovered over the screen, and Wren held her breath the way she'd held it outside her grandfather's hospital room, the way she'd held it every single time this week that her family's whole fragile future had seemed to balance on one more person's willingness to stay in the room.
Then Iris typed, and handed the phone back, her own number added fresh under Wren's name, and something in Wren's chest unclenched for the first time in longer than she could remember.
"Text me when you're back safe," Iris said, standing, brushing dirt from her knees. "And Wren. For what it's worth. I'm glad you came. I don't know if I'd have had the nerve to come find you first."
Wren rode the bus home with her forehead against the glass again, the coffee gone cold and mostly undrunk in the cup holder, and felt, for the first time in three years, like her family was not simply a set of separate wounds but something that might, if she was careful and patient and stubborn enough, still be stitched back into a single shape.
She had no way of knowing yet that the letter waiting for her in the hall closet, tucked inside a box she had never once had reason to open, was about to make the whole fragile, careful thing so much more complicated before it could get any better.