“No, not hard. But it’s still kind of a thing that I’m doing it.”
“Okay.” He nodded. “I am appropriately honored.”
She took a moment to begin her meal, and drink from her glass.
“So the long and short of it is, my sister and I ended up in Idaho, in the town where our mother grew up. We were both pretty young, so we didn’t remember a lot about her. She committed suicide, unfortunately. She drove her car into a lake.”
Jake let out a breath. “Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.”
“And after that our mother’s sister came to take care of us. But she was very strange. She never mastered the art of taking care of herself, let alone anyone else, let alone two little kids. I think we both understood that, my sister and I did. But we handled it different ways. After we started high school I could feel the two of them moving farther and farther away from me. My sister and my aunt,” she clarified. “My sister pretty much stopped going to school. I pretty much stopped going home. And my teacher, Miss Royce, when she figured out what was happening in my house, she just asked if I’d like to live with her, and I said yes.”
“But … wasn’t there any kind of intervention? I mean, social services? Police?”
“The sheriff came out a couple of times to talk to my aunt, but it never quite connected with her. I think she really wanted to be capable of parenting us, but it was just beyond her abilities.” Anna paused. “I bear her absolutely no ill will, by the way. Some people can paint or sing, others can’t. This was a person who just could not be in the world the same way most of us can. But I do wish …” She shook her head. She reached for her glass.
“What?”
“Well, I tried to get my sister to come with me, but she refused. She wanted to stay with our aunt. And then one day the two of them just left town.”
Jake waited. As he did, he grew more uneasy.
“And?”
“And? Nothing. I have no idea where they are. They could be anywhere, now. They could be nowhere. They could be in this restaurant.” She glanced around. “Well, they’re not. But that’s just how it is. I stayed, they left. I finished high school. I went to college. My teacher—I got into the habit of calling her my adoptive mother, but there was never any formal process. She died. She left me a little money, which was nice. But my sister, I have no idea.”
“Did you ever try to find her?” Jake asked.
Anna shook her head. “No. I think our aunt had been living a pretty marginal life before she came to take care of us. Or try to take care of us. I think, if they’re still together, they’re not going to be paying rent or using an ATM, let alone on Facebook. But I’m on Facebook and also Instagram, mainly for that reason. If they want to find me, I’m a few clicks away from any public computer in any library in the country. If they reach out to me I’ll get an alert through my email. I try not to think about it, ever, but even so … every single time I turn on my computer or my phone, some part of me is wondering: Is today the day? You can’t imagine what that’s like, waiting for some message that’s going to totally upend your life.”
In fact, Jake absolutely could imagine it. But he didn’t say so.
“Did it … I mean, did all of this make you feel depressed? As a teenager?”
She seemed not to take the question all that seriously. “I suppose. Most teenagers get depressed, don’t they? I don’t think I was all that introspective as a kid. And frankly I also wasn’t very ambitious back then, so it’s not like I felt I was being kept from something I really wanted. And then one morning, the fall of my senior year, I picked up an application off a bench outside the guidance counselor’s office at my school, for the University of Washington. It had these pine trees on the cover and I just thought … you know, that looks so nice. It looked like home. So I filled it out right there in the office, on their computer. Three weeks later I got my letter.”
The waiter returned and took their plates. They both declined dessert, but asked for more wine.
“You know,” Jake said, “if you think about it, you’re amazingly well-adjusted.”
“Oh, right.” She rolled her eyes. “I hid away on an island for the better part of a decade. I got to my mid-thirties without ever having a serious boyfriend. For the past three years I’ve devoted myself to making a complete imbecile sound semi-cogent and semi-informed on the air. Does that sound amazingly well-adjusted to you?”
He smiled at her. “Given what you’ve gone through? I think you’re some kind of Wonder Woman.”
“Wonder Woman was a fiction. I think I’d prefer to be an ordinary real person.”
