I Let My Sister Answer One More Call

Chapter 2 The Chain

I spent the next two weeks trying to understand the rules.

Rule one: I was six. I had a six-year-old's body and a six-year-old's bedtime and one pair of shoes that fit. I could not drive. I could not call anyone. I could not walk out the front door without my mother asking where I was going.

Rule two: I remembered everything. My first life. The cave. The chain. The bathroom mirror. The years of my parents dying slowly in a house that had stopped being a home.

Rule three, and this was the one that mattered: I did not know how to use any of it.

What was I going to do, tell my mother that I had been twenty years old and watching my father's lungs fill with nothing? That I had already sat at two funerals before I turned twenty-one? That in another version of the world my sister was a name on a missing persons poster for ten years and then a name on a death certificate?

I was six. Nobody was going to listen to me.

So I did what children do when they have no power. I watched.

I watched Hannah come home every night and hang her jacket on the hook by the door. I watched her eat cold pasta at the kitchen counter. I watched her sit on the back step in the dark, the way she did when she thought nobody was looking, with her phone face-down on her knee.

She was not okay. She had not been okay before the call, either. I had been too young to see it the first time around. Now I was old enough to read the signs.

I started keeping a list in my head. Not on paper, because a six-year-old's notebook gets read. In my head, the way I used to memorize anatomy for my nursing prerequisites.

Hannah bit her nails when she was worried. Hannah chewed mint gum only on shift, which meant she never chewed it at home, which meant home was the only place she felt safe. Hannah had a bruise on her right forearm the color of a plum, three days old, that she tried to keep under her sleeve. Hannah flinched when the firehouse phone rang.

On the twelfth day after the call, I found her in the garage at midnight, sitting on the bumper of our mother's station wagon with her shoes off, staring at nothing.

"Annie," she said, without turning. "You're supposed to be asleep."

"So are you."

She laughed, but it had no bottom to it. "Fair."

I climbed up onto the bumper beside her. The metal was cold through my pajamas. I thought about all the things I could say. I thought about the bottle of pills I had found in her duffel bag two days before, buried under a spare pair of socks. I had not touched it. I had not asked. I had been waiting for the right moment, which had never come, which is how the worst things in a family get to happen.

"Hannah," I said.

"Yeah."

"Are you okay?"

She was quiet for a long time. Then, in a voice I had never heard her use, she said, "Not really."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I just." She turned her hands over, looking at her palms. "I keep thinking about that night. The call I didn't take. Dave went in. Dave didn't come out."

"It wasn't your fault."

"That's what everybody says."

"It's true."

"Annie, you're six." She looked at me sideways, and there was something in her face I could not read. "You don't have to do this. You don't have to be the one who takes care of me. That's not your job."

"I know."

"Then go to bed."

I did not go to bed. I sat on that bumper with her until the cold worked through my pajamas and into my bones. I sat there until she put her shoes back on and walked me inside. I sat there, which was the only thing a six-year-old could do.

But I made a decision that night, and it was the kind of decision that does not feel like one when you make it, only later, when you see how much of your life got bent around it.

I was not going to save Hannah from the cave and lose her anyway.

I was going to find out who she was before I brought her back.

There was a man who had done it. In the first life, they caught him.

His name was Martin Blakely. He was forty-six years old. He lived in a house on Ridge Road with a chain-link fence and a dog that never stopped barking. He was a former security guard who had lost his license after a complaint he did not think was fair. He had a storage unit in El Cajon. He had a list.

The list was what made the news. The police found it in a filing cabinet in his bedroom. Names of women. Addresses. Dates. Hannah's name was on it, with a checkmark beside it, drawn a year after the cave. He had been watching her for two months before the call.

He had called dispatch himself. He had made the report that brought the ambulance to the house on Ridge Road because he wanted to see who would come.

Hannah was not the first woman on the list. She was the fourth. The first one had never been found. The second had been found in a ravine three years after her disappearance. The third had been found alive in the storage unit, which is how they had known to look for the others.

I had read all of it in the first life. I had sat in a newspaper archive at twenty years old and read every article, because I thought if I understood it well enough, I could undo it.

I was six now. I could not drive to El Cajon. I could not read archived police reports. I could not do anything except remember Martin Blakely's face from the one photograph that had run with the story, and the address of the house on Ridge Road, and the fact that he had kept his list in a filing cabinet and his truck was a silver Ford with a dent in the passenger door.

If I could get that truck reported. If I could get a police officer to drive by the house. If I could get somebody to look at the filing cabinet.

I was six. Nobody was going to listen to me.

But I had something else. I had a sister who was still alive, and a mother who was not yet sick, and a father who was still waking up in the morning. I had a window. I did not know how long it would stay open.