Page 53 of High Season
The second thing she thinks is that sheknowsthis woman, an enormous sense of déjà vu that disappears as soon as she arrives.
But then, in a way, Ninadoesknow this woman. She has said her name over and over, every time she has explained the death of her sister. She has stood across from her in a courtroom, as she told a story that would change both their lives. She doesn’t remember a time before she knew Josie Jackson.
And now, when Nina looks at Josie Jackson, she is five years old again.
She is out by the pool, the sun against her skin, Josie strapping her into her armbands.
She is six years old, standing in that courtroom, the drawing of her sister’s death in front of her.
She is seven, and eight, and sixteen, and twenty-one. She is all the ages of her life when she did not have a sister. When she knew that the story she had told had changed this woman’s life. When both of their existences were irrevocably rerouted from what they could have been, all because of what did, or did not happen, on that hot August day twenty years ago.
“Josie,” Nina says.
But Josie is already stepping back from her. Her eyes are wide. Her mouth, a set line. She looks, Nina thinks, like something preparing to pounce. To fight for its life.
“Josie,” says Nina again. “I think we need to talk.”
Nina expects to be invited inside, but instead Josie leads her to a threadbare patch of ground at the side of the house. There’s a rusted metal table and chairs, an ashtray, a light that trembles with a too-white brightness when they walk beneath it. An olive tree, its trunk ancient and knotted.
A man, who must be Josie’s brother, hovers for a moment until Josie tells him he can go.
“We’ll be right inside,” he says, his arms folded across his chest. “If you need us.”
Nina thanks him, even though she knows he isn’t talking to her. It is clear that the offer only extends to Josie.
They sit opposite each other. It strikes Nina, as she lowers into the uncomfortable seat, how ordinary this woman looks. Josie Jackson has always been the ghost in everything that Nina’s family says and does, but now it occurs to Nina that she could probably pass this woman in a supermarket without a second glance. She is so much smaller than Nina had thought of her as. Freckles along the lengths of her arms. A bad blond dye job. A thick, straight line of dark roots against the white of her scalp. A small, heart-shaped necklace resting in the center of her chest.
Nina waits until Josie’s brother has disappeared behind the house before she speaks. Josie’s eyes are staunch. Wary. She doesn’t break Nina’s gaze.
“I almost couldn’t find this place,” Nina says, trying to keep her voice light. Trying to put Josie at ease. “I was convinced I was waiting at the wrong house.”
It isn’t just small talk. The walk really had taken her longer than she expected, her calves aching with the tilt of the hill. She had imagined Patricia Jackson as she climbed, a woman whose face she knew more from newspaper articles than memory, walking this road every single day. Before the sun came up, and long after it set.
She had imagined Josie, just sixteen, trudging up the path to babysit Nina when she should have been doing all the things that sixteen-year-olds do—going to parties and falling in love with the wrong people; sneaking alcohol and staying out too late. All the things that Nina had missed out on, too; her once permissive mother overprotective, after what had happened with Tamara; the notoriety of her name preceding her in every new friendship, interrupting every teenage crush. Her anxiety and the creeping, terrible fears that so often slipped between her and many of the teenage experiences she should have had. Her mother keeping her home from school when her worries felt particularly sharp, entire terms learned from textbooks. The psychiatrist appointments and chemists and one terrible stay at a private hospital for teenage girls who were, as Evelyn said, “unbalanced.” Nina had looked at the other girls with horror, their wasted bodies from starving themselves, their skin scratched with the same compulsions that Nina suffered from, their dazed expressions from the cocktails of medications that were handed out with breakfast. She hated that she saw herself in them. That she, like Josie, was locked away.
But the similarities between Nina and Josie ended there. For Nina, there had been recovery. The relative freedom of her late teens and early twenties. University. A relationship. The promise of a career. Things that Josie likely never got to have. The guilt of it filled Nina up in the same way that it did when she was a small child, immediately after the trial. Josie Jackson had served ten years in prison, a stretchof time that had been unimaginable to six-year-old Nina. Now, she understands all the things that can be lost in ten years. All the things that her words took away from Josie Jackson.
“I’m not here to cause trouble,” Nina says.
One of Josie’s eyebrows lifts, disbelieving.
“I’m not,” says Nina. “I just want to talk. You’ve probably seen everything that’s been happening online. People talking about Tamara again. About the case.”
Josie shrugs.
“I don’t really bother with all that stuff,” she says. “Social media.”
“Right,” Nina says. “Well, there’s been this online video series. And it’s attracted a lot of attention. And—”
Josie is holding up one hand to stop her.
“I said I’m not on social media, not that I live in a hole,” she says. “I know what’s going on. And I can take a pretty good guess why you’re here. You’ve heard about the documentary, and you’re scared that something’s going to come out, right? You’re scared I’m going to participate, and I’m going to say something that will make everyone doubt what really happened.”
She pushes back her chair.
“Well, you don’t need to worry,” she says. “I’m not doing the documentary. And I wouldn’t have anything new to say if I did. So if that’s why you’re here, I don’t think we have anything to say to each other. You can rest assured that I’m not going to be the one to call you out.”
“No,” says Nina. “That’s not what I want.”
