The Leaving

The parking lot outside the Astrodome at eleven o'clock at night in mid-September still held the day's heat in the asphalt, coming up through the soles of Camille's shoes while she stood by Richard's car saying the kind of goodbye that has no adequate shape, because there is no rehearsed sentence for I have to go back to my life now and you have to stay in yours, not when the two lives have just been standing thirty feet apart in the same building, close enough to touch, and are about to be pulled back to their separate distances by a car with gas in the tank and a destination decided.

"Y'all gonna be okay?" Camille asked. She meant it as a real question. It came out, as questions asked from inside safety toward someone standing outside it so often do, sounding smaller than she meant it, almost rhetorical, a thing you say on your way somewhere else.

"We'll be alright." Odessa said it the way Yolanda said it, flat, unconvinced, delivered anyway because the alternative was standing in a parking lot admitting out loud, in front of the sister whose whole life had just kept humming along uninterrupted four hours east, how not-alright things actually were.

"I wish I could..." Camille started, and didn't finish, because she genuinely did not know what the end of that sentence was supposed to be. I wish I could take you with us was not true, exactly, or not simply true; there was no extra bedroom being offered, no version of this night where Richard's car held four people back to Baton Rouge instead of two, and some deep, ashamed part of Camille understood that the sentence, left unfinished, was actually kinder than whatever true ending it would have had.

"You wish you could what," Odessa said. Not sharp yet. Just tired, and honest, in the specific way people get honest at eleven at night after the worst three weeks of their life.

"I don't know. Help more. Do something that actually..." Camille gestured, uselessly, at the whole building behind them, the cots, the smell, the entire scope of what her sister was going back inside to sleep another night in. "I feel so useless right now. I've felt useless this whole time."

And here is the sentence, arrived at not out of cruelty but out of exactly the opposite, out of a seventeen-year-old's desperate, badly aimed need to say something that would make both of them feel less powerless, standing in a parking lot at the edge of a disaster too large for either of them to actually fix: "You'll figure it out, though. Y'all always do."

There was a silence after it that had a different quality than any silence that had passed between them before, in eleven years of summers and porches and paper boats. Camille heard the sentence land, heard it, actually, a half-second after she'd said it, the way you sometimes hear your own words only once they've already left your mouth and can't be called back, and understood, watching her sister's face, that it had not landed as the comfort she'd meant. "Y'all always do," Odessa repeated. Not loud. Louder would have been easier to absorb, would have felt like an argument Camille could actually participate in. This was quiet, and flat, and worse than shouting. "You mean we're used to it. That's what you mean. You mean we're good at being poor, so this is just Tuesday for us."

"That's not what I..."

"I know what you meant." Odessa was not crying. This would matter to her later, that she managed, in that parking lot, not to cry, because crying would have felt like giving Camille something she hadn't earned the right to see. "I know you meant it nice. That's the thing, Cam. You always mean it nice. And it don't matter, because you get to go home tonight in your daddy's car—" she caught herself, the word wrong, correction and its own wound both arriving in the same breath, "—your stepdaddy's car, and I'm going back in there to sleep on a cot next to a lady who's had a stroke and can't get nobody to look at her yet, and you get to feel bad about it for exactly as long as the drive home takes, and then you get to stop, because you get to. I don't get to stop. This is just where I live now."

"That's not fair."

"Ain't a lot fair right now, Camille." Odessa said her full name, which she almost never did, a small formal distance dropped into the sentence like a door closing partway. "You didn't do nothing wrong tonight. You came. Nobody made you come, and you came, and I'm grateful, I am. But don't stand in this parking lot and tell me I'm gonna figure it out like figuring it out is a thing I chose to be good at. I didn't choose none of this. Neither did you. But you get to go be not-chosen in an air-conditioned car and I get to go be not-chosen on a cot, and it's not the same, and I need you to just not pretend, right now, that it is."

Richard, from the driver's seat, said gently that they really did need to get on the road. Neither girl heard him, not fully, both of them caught in the specific gravity of a fight that had needed to happen for years and had chosen, of all possible nights, this one, in this parking lot, to finally arrive.

"I didn't mean it like a competition," Camille said, quieter now, some of the defensiveness draining out of her as the actual size of what she'd said finished landing. "I just didn't know what else to say. I still don't."

"Then don't say nothing. Sometimes that's better." Odessa looked at her for a long moment, and something in her face softened, fractionally, enough that Camille would spend years afterward unsure whether what came next was forgiveness or simply exhaustion outrunning anger, the way exhaustion so often does. "I gotta go back in. Mama's waiting on me."

"Can I call you? When you get settled somewhere?"

"Yeah." Odessa was already turning back toward the building. "Call me."

Camille did call, three weeks later, the number ringing at what turned out to be a shelter phone that had since been disconnected, the family already moved on to the FEMA trailer outside Beaumont, a number Camille did not have and would not manage to get, through any channel available to a seventeen-year-old with no working postal address to send anything to and a mother who did not encourage the search, for the better part of the next four years. She called again around Thanksgiving, and again the following spring, always reaching either nothing or a disconnected line, and somewhere in that stretch of unanswered calls, without either girl choosing it outright, the not-reaching-each-other calcified into something that felt, after enough failed attempts, less like circumstance and more like an agreement neither of them remembered making.

Odessa, for her part, did not call the Whitfield house. She told herself, in the FEMA trailer that first winter, in the specific hard clarity of fifteen going on thirty, that Camille knew how to reach her if she really wanted to, that the effort, whatever effort there was left to make, ought by rights to run the other direction for once, from the sister with the working phone and the fixed address and the parents with resources, toward the sister who had none of those things, and when that effort did not come, or came late enough, disconnected enough, to feel like it hadn't come at all, Odessa filed the silence the way she'd learned, years before, at Mama Ruth's table, to file most of the family's unspoken things: as simply how it was, not worth the energy of being surprised by.

Neither girl told the other, in the years that followed, how many times she'd almost called anyway. Neither girl knew, until a July afternoon nineteen years later, on a porch that no longer had the same house behind it but somehow, impossibly, still had the same step, that the other one had spent those same nineteen years carrying her own version of that parking lot: one sister certain she'd been the one who kept reaching and hadn't been reached back, the other certain the exact same thing, both of them right, in their way, and both of them, for nineteen years, entirely wrong about who owed whom the next call.