Undone by Elizabeth Norris Read Free Book Online Page B

anything. She glanced at Eli and then back to me. Her mouth parted, her eyes widened, and she gasped.
    I opened my mouth to explain, but she reached through the door and touched my face, as if she wasn’t quite sure I was real. Then she started to cry.
    I moved in, circling my arms around her, pulling her to my chest. She was smaller and thinner than I remembered. Her skin was soft and papery, and my chest contracted. Those seven years had been long for her.
    When she pulled back to look at my face again, she shook her head.
    I smiled. “I’m home.”

I held her until she’d calmed down, then the three of us went inside.
    My mother held my arm, leading me, and she turned on the lights as we moved through the house. “The portal,” she said. “We figured out that you went through. We looked for you. We did everything we could to try to get you back. . . .”
    “I know,” I said, squeezing her hand.
    She gasped when she looked down and saw mine were stained with blood.
    “It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I tried to save someone who was hurt.” The blood as it washed over Janelle’s and my hands, warm and thick . The image made me shiver.
    Eli and I took turns washing our hands.
    “Are you hungry?” she asked as she stood in the kitchen by the sink. Under the lights I could see the lines around her eyes. She looked older than I thought she would.
    I shook my head.
    “How . . . ,” she started. “How did you . . .”
    “Where’s Dad?” I asked. I wanted to tell them everything. We could sit in the den and drink hot chocolate. I would tell the story. It would be like every Friday night when I was a kid and we talked about the best and worst things that had happened in our week.
    She didn’t answer me, though. Not right away. She moved into the den, turned on a floor lamp to its lowest setting, and then turned around. Her face was even, too even, like she was trying to keep her emotions safely guarded. “He’s not here.”
    I heard her, but she sounded strange. There was an emptiness to her voice, like it was something she had said a lot. She wasn’t just saying he was out or that he was away on a trip. She was saying he didn’t live here. She sat down in an armchair.
    I held my breath and waited for her to say something. For the first time it occurred to me to think about them in a different context. What if they hadn’t been sitting around waiting for me to come back? What if something else had happened? What if my father had died?
    I looked around the room. It was the same beige carpet, the same comfortable brown suede couches, the same cream-colored walls. They were decorated with a few paintings that I didn’t remember, but that wasn’t the only thing that made the house seem different. It took me a second to put my finger on it. Things looked the same, but . . . shabbier. The carpet was worn, fraying at the edges, like it wasn’t nailed down properly. The couches were sunken in and droopy, the walls were scuffed, and some of the edges looked like they were yellowing. No one had taken care of this house. Not with the same love and pride we had taken care of it when I was a kid.
    Something was wrong. Very wrong. I sat down on the couch, just a foot from the chair. Eli stood next to me.
    “Is he . . .”
    I couldn’t bear to finish.
    “We’ll call him,” my mother said. Her voice was even, but she was wringing her hands. “I’ll have to make a few calls, though. His number isn’t listed.”
    I looked at my mother and couldn’t find the words.
    “We haven’t spoken in a while.” She frowned and looked away from me. I could tell she was understating, that “a while” meant “years.”
    “What happened?” Eli asked, and for once I felt grateful that he wasn’t the type of person to just dance around the issue. It didn’t matter if my mom looked small and fragile. He could still ask the hard questions.
    “Your father and I got an annulment,” my mother said.
    At first I couldn’t