Silence.
Not the ordinary kind.
The kind where you can hear someone realizing they have stepped into something they do not understand.
Finally, the receptionist whispered, “Oh.”
I closed my eyes.
Rebecca and I had been twenty-two when her SUV went through a guardrail during a storm outside Boone, North Carolina.
The vehicle rolled down a wooded slope.
By the time emergency crews reached it, fire had consumed almost everything.
The medical examiner told my parents identification was complicated.
The damage was extensive.
Some personal belongings had been recovered.
Her necklace.
A partially melted purse clasp.
The license plate.
The wedding invitation she’d been carrying for our cousin.
My parents were advised not to view what remained.
We buried Rebecca in a white coffin six days later.
I stood beside that coffin.
I watched my father put his hand on it.
I watched my mother collapse at the cemetery.
I spent ten years learning how to exist without the person who had shared my face before we had even learned how to speak.
And now some stranger in a dental office was telling me Rebecca was sitting twenty-seven miles away.
“I’m hanging up,” I said.
“Wait.”
Something changed in the receptionist’s voice.
“She’s awake now.”
My heart began hammering.
“I don’t care.”
“She heard me say your name.”
I gripped the edge of the island.
“And?”
“She’s asking to speak to you.”
“No.”
The word came out immediately.
Then the receptionist said, “I understand.”
I almost ended the call.
Almost.
But somewhere beneath ten years of grief, logic, therapy, anger and common sense, another part of me refused to move.
“Put her on.”
There was rustling.
A chair scraping.
Someone murmuring in the background.
Then breathing.
Soft.
Uneven.
Familiar in a way I hated before a single word was spoken.
“Nattie?”
My knees nearly buckled.
Nobody called me that anymore.
Nobody.
Not Mom.
Not Dad.
Not my ex-husband.
Not even my oldest friends.
Rebecca had started calling me Nattie when we were five because she claimed “Natalie sounded like a grandmother.”
I grabbed the counter.
“Who is this?”
Another shaky breath.
“Please don’t hang up.”
I felt cold all over.
“Who are you?”
“You already know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Nattie—”
“Don’t call me that.”
She went quiet.
I could hear voices behind her.
A machine humming.
Then she said something so softly I almost missed it.
“Bluebird.”
My stomach turned.
When Rebecca and I were seven, we found an injured bluebird behind our grandparents’ shed.
We hid it in a cardboard box inside my bedroom closet because our father had forbidden us from bringing wild animals inside.
The bird survived.
The carpet did not.
Neither did a very expensive cream-colored blanket.
For years, “Bluebird” became our private word for keeping a secret.
Nobody knew that.
Nobody.
I whispered, “Where are you?”
She gave me the address.
I grabbed my car keys.
The drive should have taken thirty-four minutes.
I made it in twenty-six.
I remember almost nothing about the highway.
I remember red lights.
I remember gripping the steering wheel.
