Chapter 1: Naming You

I have memories of you before you were even born. Maybe that's normal for mothers but I doubt big sisters feel that way too often. I just remember sitting around the kitchen table with Mom and Emily (who was barely four at the time) arguing about what your name was going to be and how that somehow made you into a real person before I ever saw your face. Mom asked Em and me for help because she felt like she had this power with names she had to be careful with. Her middle name is Tess and that's what she named me when she had me at only nineteen --- "With big hair and big dreams" she says --- and I think sometimes she's afraid that's why I'm turning out the way I am, so much like she was when she married my real Dad instead of how she is now with David.

I was five when Mom and David got married, seven when Mom finally got pregnant with Emily, and even I could see that she was becoming a different person, like a real grownup. She never looked glamorous anymore --- just pretty. She stopped wearing eye shadow and she got a blunt cut that made her look like someone from Connecticut. David had gotten Mom to start reading and she couldn't stop. They read every night and when Mom named Em after Emily Dickinson she felt like that's what she got --- this quiet, fearful child who clung to her and seemed to be lonely for no good reason from the day she was born. Never mind that everyone was naming their daughters Emily at the time. Mom had a certain kind of Emily in mind while Em grew inside of her and that's what she got. I was already nine by the time Em turned one and I could tell even then that she was smarter than I'd ever be. But Mom knew that life would be hard for Em, or that she'd make it hard for herself, and one child who already seemed to know there was sadness in the world was enough. You were going to have a name that would protect you from that.

I guess we didn't argue so much as we worked at it, Mom, Em and me. Em seemed to know that this was the first important decision of her life and she didn't fidget or anything. She just sat at the kitchen table with us every evening waiting for her turn. We would each suggest a name and it was the other two's job to say why it was a good or bad idea. Like I would say "Megan" and Mom would say that a Megan in her high school class got pregnant her junior year. Then Em would say "Jodi" because that was her best friend's name and I would remind her that the big slobbery dog down the street was named Jodi and so Jodi was out. Or Mom would say, "How about Jessica?" and Em would say that a Jessica in her preschool class eats paste and that would be enough. "Faith" was too religious, Mom said, and might make her prone to self-righteousness. "Hanna," even though it was becoming popular again, was an old woman's name. "Virginia" was a state, not a name, and ugly besides and even if you called her "Ginny" for short that was another dog name and you might just as well call her "Trixie" and get it over with.

We settled on "Zoe" for you not so much because we loved the name but because we didn't know anyone else who had it. Mom thought that would make you your own person. Confident, unique, independent. The weird part was it seemed like it worked. From the time you could crawl we called you "Z", not just because of your name but because that was the shape of your life, always darting from one thing to the next. It wasn't like you got bored easily. It was more like you'd see something else that made you even more excited than you already were and you just had to go do that other thing right away. We couldn't look away from you for a second.

It wasn't until we were studying family trees one day in school that I learned you and Em were called my "half-sisters," but I could never think of either of you as a half of anything. Mom and David and I always felt kind of pasted together until Em. She shared blood with all of us and made us a real family. She completed some kind of circle and when you came along you fit right inside it. It's different now. Now it feels like we're just the circle with nothing inside.

Even so, I pretty much knew when I went to live with my Dad for a while that it wasn't such a great idea. I love both of my fathers but it's strange sometimes because I don't really love either of them all the way. It's almost like they're one dad split in two. Mom left my Dad when I was only six months old and we met David when I was three, so he's really all I've ever known as far as a live-in dad, but it's still not the same as the real thing. David is the disciplinarian, the one who makes me rub some of the makeup off my face, the one who's saving for my college education. He never got to hold me when I was a baby and he'd never been a dad before he met Mom, so I think he just thought it was his job to make rules. He was totally different with you and Em, holding you all the time, talking to you like you were adults. I'm not mad about it or anything and I still love him, but it just doesn't feel the same when he hugs me as when my Dad does. My real Dad is a mess, but every hug from him feels like he's never going to let go. David always feels like he's trying to figure out when he's supposed to let go.

David likes to write and he wrote a story about me once. At least I guess to him it was about me but he got me all wrong. I mean, the events that happened were sort of like something that happened to me. When I was twelve I had this friend --- another stray, Mom would say --- who was always getting in trouble. Her dad had left when she was born and her mom had ditched her with her grandparents when she was ten to go out to California chasing some guy. She went through puberty pretty much pissed at the whole world. She was tall and had boobs by the time she was twelve and decided she liked me for some reason. When Mom suggested she didn't want me hanging out with Kasey anymore I called her a snob, but when she got arrested on our porch (where she'd brought three guys she'd met on work-release from the local juvy center) Mom didn't suggest anymore. She told me if she ever saw Kasey or heard her voice on the phone again I might as well get used to my room because she'd be sliding my meals under the door on a tin tray until I graduated from high school. In David's story he makes himself the bad guy and he and I make some connection out of the situation that changes our relationship forever. He sees that I'm not a little girl anymore, that there is real grown-up danger in my world, and I see that he is doing more than making rules for the sake of making my life miserable. I'm sure there was more to it than that, I'm not much of a reader, but that's what I got out of it. Anyway, like I said, he got me all wrong. The girl in the story is totally naive about her friend --- even though there are all kinds of warning signs --- until the event with the police, and it's only that event that changes everything. I don't think stuff happens like that. Nothing changes everything. I'd been afraid of Kasey for months and if Mom and David had known about some of the crazy stuff she did and tried to get me to do, it would have ended a lot sooner. But I was scared to stop being her friend too. I was happy when she was screaming at those cops because I knew I was out. It was the last in a whole series of events that ended our friendship. But nothing changes everything by itself. Even things that seem like they do. Like me missing the bus on what looked like any other September morning until those planes flew into the tallest buildings in the world. Even you dying, that same day, when I was supposed to be watching you. Or go back to the beginning, around the kitchen table. We could have named you anything and it would have all come out the same.

On the news they say that history is going to be separated by what happened before that day and what will happen after it. But they don't know what they're saying to me.