Read When You Go Away for Free Online

hers and Ryan's in looser, more colorful piles.  Carly faced the front door as she worked, and when someone walked up the concrete stairs, the noise a pound, boom, pound as the steps echoes through the building, her heart thudded with the hope her mother was back.  She'd stop folding and watch as shadow feet passed by the door.  Each time, though, she caught her breath, thought, please, please, please .  But the feet kept on moving to some other door, to some other family.  Someone else’s mom or dad.
         When she was done folding the laundry, Carly made herself stand up and walk back into her mom and Brooke's room, and again she tried to conjure something, Brooke's fever down, gone, her sister's skin back to its normal pasty pale white.  Each time she'd checked on her sister during the day, Carly had closed her eyes, hoping for this very thing, but each time instead, Brooke's fever was up, 100.4, 100.9, 101.3, the skin under her diaper boiling.  Finally around four, Brooke had dug through her mother's medicine cabinet and found the baby Tylenol, reading the bottle and measuring enough into the syringe.  Brooke hadn't even noticed her pushing the medicine into the peg, and for a couple of hours, Brooke seemed better.  And with the cool washcloths Carly put on her forehead, Brooke almost seemed normal.  But then, her temperature began creeping up, her skin hot and red.  Carly searched her sister's body for an explanation.  There was none, just those strange round red patches.  Her peg was fine, no red streaks, no hardness.  Only her breath seemed different, deeper, full of something wet and sticky.
         Carly was soothing Brooke when Ryan pushed into the house, throwing his backpack on the floor with a thud.  Leaving the washcloth on Brooke's forehead, she went into the kitchen, where Ryan stood looking into the empty refrigerator.
         "There isn't a fucking thing to eat around here."  He closed the door and leaned against the counter, avoiding her eyes.  "Did she call?"
         "It's Brooke.  She's sick, Ryan.  I don't know what to do."
         "Like I do?"
         "We've--we've got to call someone.  We've got to call Grandma Mackenzie.  Maybe Dad."
         Ryan rolled his eyes.  "Yeah.  He'll care.  He'll come racing up here from Phoenix any second now."
         "She's sick.  She's really sick.  Worse than the time you gave her that chocolate syrup."  The sentence stuck hard in her throat.  She could have brought up another illness, but she didn't.  She needed him to see everything.  He'd given Brooke a taste of chocolate syrup when she was two, and she'd thrown up all her formula, breathing in some of the barf and getting really sick.  Carly could still remember the way their dad had looked at Ryan, his eyes hard and small, his finger pointing to the middle of Ryan’s chest.
         Ryan bit his lip and stared at the yellowed linoleum.  "What’s wrong with her?"
         "A fever.  I can't get it to go away."
         "Shit.  Shit!"
         "Come and check her."
         "I'm supposed to kick it with Quinn.  I've gotta go."  He started to walk past her, but Carly grabbed his arm hard, feeling how he'd changed, his arm not skinny any more but more like her dad's, or at least what her dad's used to feel like.
         "Please.  I--I can't do it.  I can't do it anymore ."
         He clenched his fist, his muscles moving under her fingers, and then he relaxed into the brother she remembered from long ago, the one who used to play foot war with her on the couch.  They used to name their feet Graham and Peri, their feet fighting out the marriage, as if one contest could answer the question of why they were all unhappy.
         "Fine.  Whatever.  Okay.  Let's go check."
         They walked together into the room, the smell of Brooke's hot skin--lotion, formula, peroxide--reaching them before they made it to the door.  "Fuck."  Ryan pushed