Point blank

Letting Cheyenne out, turning the porch lights on, the hall lights off, happy to be leaving a good day and heading to a good night's sleep, the phone rings. I glance at the caller ID, don't recognize the number but do recognize the area code, decide it can wait.

Curiosity gets the best of me and I check the message. I've not heard the voice since I was in single-digit years. My sister's old boyfriend. She's amazing in that way and I'll never understand it but for witnessing and knowing it exists, this darkly magic whatever she has with men. She buried her seventh husband today. Tonight her first boyfriend calls me looking for her. How's your Mom, he asks, And how's your Dad? I was hoping to get hold of Marianne? It's a statement, but he makes it a question, the last word, her name, an upward lilt in his voice.

He does not say a word about the nerve it takes to dial my number. Maybe it doesn't take any nerve for him, I do not know. He's all Hey, how are you? It's been a while...

My brow furrows, knots in recollection, tangles in thought. I shake my head. I don't believe the message, so replay it. Yes, indeed, he says he's looking for her, misses her, hasn't seen her in over 30 years.

He was her first love, her first drink, her first drug, her first bruise. At nine years old, I walk in on them having sex, my father behind my young self, shotgun in hand. My sister was just 14, understand. The boyfriend was 18. I don't think the gun was loaded but he wasn't going to hang around long enough to find that out. I remember the brief blur of their bodies. His white ass and tan legs running through our front yard, my sister sitting up in her bed, her young breasts small and high, her eyes and heart sagging, crying, screaming, pulling her hair, imploring us to understand that she loved him. At 14, understand?

I was as confused about her then as I am today. I witness her life now as I did then. She's crying, needs understanding. She's angry, needs peace. She's thirsty, needs a drink. The math is simple enough but never really comprehensible.

Do I call him back? I don't know. I have my own story about this guy of hers. It's the way he always came to the house with full and unopened cans of beer in his pockets. It's the night they decided I needed to know what having a boy kiss me was about, and she held me down while he showed me. I was nine. I kicked my foot through the glass coffee table, ran out the back door, through the back yard to my pony, jumped on his back and together we galloped through the dark and through the neighborhood, along the bayou trails and away from them. I never once stopped to see if I was bleeding.

Hours later at the hospital, Mom and Dad grounded me for two months for my behavior that night.

Where were you?

I was riding Ajax.

Where did you go?

I just went for a ride, okay?

It was not okay. They wondered what happened. As my foot was stitched, I was crying for the night, for her, for me, for all I did not understand. But I was silent for them.

Snotty nosed and in tears, I never said a word in my defense. Would you?

I'm not quite sure why after so many years, a voicemail can unnerve me so. I'm not sure why her life is always the first one knocking on the door. This one really doesn't have anything to do with me. Jeez, it's been over 30 years. Except it does have something to do with me because he found my phone number and dialed it in effort to find her.

Would you pass it to your sister?

I want to stand on the porch and warn her that something is coming up the river, something I'm not sure of. As then, as is now. There is no place, no reason, no reaction but to hang on through the discovery of the answer to the question, What next?