“Oh my god,” Ty growls. “Why did you have to say it like that?”
“Because I like fucking with you.”
“If you want, I can tell you exactly how he’s my lover—”
“It’s good to be home,” Otter says with a sigh.
IT TAKES a couple of days. To get things right. Or at least on the road to it.
She’s bossy and demanding and completely amazing. We unpack her life, mixing it with our own, and she’s unsure about how she fits. But we tell her again and again and again that this is hers too, all of this. Our house. Us. Ty. Everyone else in our crazy, stupid family. All of us are hers.
She cries when we tell her about what Erica’s done for her so far.
Then she punches us each in the arm and says she wasn’t crying, that it was just her allergies, but she’s okay with staying here with us if we really want her to. “You don’t need to beg,” she says, sniffling prettily. “I know I’m amazing and you would be lucky to have me.”
We just smile at her.
Ty’s room becomes her room, and it’s not quite the same, but so close it’s like the lines are blurred. She’s got books, so many damn books, and they’re all worn, like she’s read them over and over again, dog-eared and wrinkled. She seems to have a soft spot for Wuthering Heights, which the Kid and I tease her mercilessly over. Otter, of course, tells her that I cried while reading The Notebook, because he’s an asshole like that, and she laughs so hard that she bends over, hands wrapped around her stomach.
She has her posters that she hangs on the wall, and it’s that weird dissonance again, because it’s not Einstein, it’s Nikola Tesla. It’s not Anderson Cooper, it’s 1970s Tom Brokaw. (“He was such a babe,” she says dreamily as Otter and I stare wide-eyed at each other over her head.) It’s all these little things that are almost the same but not.
Ty notices it too but doesn’t say much about it.
When we get to the pictures, the ones Julie McKenna had kept on a shoddy bookshelf, Izzie’s face tightens a little, and I wait to follow her lead.
She only takes one frame out of the box. It’s her and Julie, and they’re smiling at the camera, Izzie maybe four or five years old. They’re happy, or at least some facsimile of, and it’s this one she sets on the nightstand next to the bed. “Is that okay?” she asks me, wringing her hands.
“Yeah, kid,” Ty answers for us. “That’s okay.”
The rest stay in the box. It goes in the attic, and I know that it’ll probably stay there for a long time to come. But whenever she wants them, whenever she’s ready for them, there they’ll be.
Once everything is done, the trailer unloaded and returned, everything she owns firmly in place in the Green Monstrosity, the weight she’s carried on her shoulders since she showed up on our porch seems to fall away.
“I’m tired,” she mutters, rubbing her eyes.
It’s not late, but it’s getting there.
She brushes her teeth, gets into her new pajamas that Anna bought her, and is in bed, comforter pulled up to her chin, when I come in to say good night.
“You need anything else?”
She shakes her head.
“You know where we are if you do.”
“I know.”
I smile at her and say, “Good night, Izzie.”
I switch off the light. I’m shutting the door when she says, “Bear?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I… ugh.”
“Can you ugh? I’m sure you can if you want to.”
“You’re not funny.”