“Anyway,” my grandmother continued, “she started dating him, and next thing we knew she was getting in trouble, too. Ending up in jail. Once she got arrested for taking off her bikini top and throwing it up onstage at a concert. She was so drunk she didn’t even care that she was topless. We tried putting our foot down, but she pushed back harder. Found ways to be with him no matter what we did. He had a hold on her like we’d never seen before.”

“So you disowned her because she wouldn’t listen to you?”

“No,” she said. “She got pregnant, but she was still doing all the same old destructive things. We got worried. About you, Jersey. We were afraid she was going to hurt you. So we tried to get her some counseling, but she said if we insisted, she would run away and marry Clay. We told her if she did, she might as well never come back. And she ran away. And she never came back.”

“But you told her she couldn’t.”

My grandmother glanced at me. “If there was one thing we wished we’d never said, that would be it. We immediately began searching for her, but she’d moved out of Waverly and we had no idea where she’d gone. When we finally found her in Elizabeth, she’d already had you. We were so excited and ready to put everything behind us. But he still had such a hold over her. She wouldn’t come home, and she called the police. So we left. And we worried so much about you, but Chrissy wouldn’t budge. She loved him, and the way she saw it, we were the enemy.”

These things didn’t sound like Mom, and I had a hard time imagining her turning her own parents away in favor of that disgusting man I’d met in Caster City.

“But they split up, eventually,” I said. “Why didn’t she come back after he left?”

“I don’t know,” my grandmother said. “I really don’t. We sent some… letters… some packages over the years, but we never heard anything back. We worry that we gave up too easily. Like I said, if only we could do it all over again.”

“The kittens came from you.”

She paused, then nodded. “Yes. You got them?”

I opened Marin’s purse and pulled the black-and-white kitten out and held it up. She glanced at it several times, trying to keep her eye on traffic. “This is the only one that survived the tornado. I thought they came from Clay.”

“They were from us. Chrissy had a set. She loved them, and they were the best way we could reach out to you and let her know that we still loved her, too. They were our way of saying we were thinking about you both the whole time,” she said. “And praying that you were okay.”

All those years, Mom and I were alone. I’d grown up believing that our aloneness was something that had happened to us—something we had to prevail over—but really it was only something that had happened to me. Mom had wanted it, and she had not given me a choice in the matter.

And all the time there was this family out there wondering about me. Caring about me. Wishing me safe and imagining what my life was like and giving me a place to belong in their hearts, even if I never showed up there.

But now here I was, and it was up to me whether I wanted to claim my spot.

“What was my mom like when she was my age?” I asked. “Before she met Clay, I mean?”

My grandmother smiled wistfully. “She was a ball of fire. Independent, outgoing. She was a cheerleader in junior high, you know.”

I blinked. Mom, a cheerleader? I tried to picture her hopping around in a short dress waving pom-poms. I couldn’t do it.

“She always thought she was going to be a hairstylist,” my grandmother continued. “One time, in elementary school, she cut her own bangs. Chopped them so short the other kids teased her mercilessly. They called her T-square for months. But Chrissy didn’t care. She was the kind of person who was going to do what she wanted, the whole world be damned.”

“She pretty much stayed that way,” I said. And then, thinking about Marin’s relentless begging for me to dance with her, added, “My sister was like that, too.”

My grandmother glanced at me, her mouth turned down at the corners. “I wish I’d met her,” she said.

And I couldn’t help thinking that Marin would have liked our grandparents. “Yeah,” I said softly. We drove along for a while longer. I held the kitten in my lap, stroking its side with my thumb. “Are there other relatives?” I asked, breaking the silence. “Like, cousins and stuff?”

“Yes,” she said. “I have a sister and a brother. Barry has two brothers. But they’re all in St. Louis, where we both grew up. Maybe we’ll take a ride out there someday,” she said, then amended, almost shyly, “if you want.”

I didn’t know if I wanted to do that or not. I was curious, but this felt like it was all happening so fast. I shrugged. “Someday,” I said. “If you grew up in St. Louis, why are you here?” To me, St. Louis seemed so much more exciting than Waverly.

And as we drove along the highway toward Elizabeth, my grandmother told me stories about my family. She talked about how she met my grandfather and their move from St. Louis to Waverly and everything that led up to having my mom.

She told me more things about my mom—that she hated being an only child and asked Santa for a baby sister every year, that she could swim like a fish and do splits in both directions and that, before she started smoking, she could outrun every girl in her class, and most of the boys, too.

And then she talked about Clay’s family, how they were notorious throughout Waverly as being a nuisance. How they always had so many babies around you wondered where they all came from, but there was never any mistaking a Cameron baby because they all looked alike. We all looked alike.

Before I knew it, we were driving up the exit into Elizabeth, all at once the surroundings looking familiar and unfamiliar to me, as if I’d been gone forever. This part of town had been untouched by the tornado, and other than a few downed trees, you would never have guessed that anything unusual had happened here. We stopped at a grocery store and bought flowers to put on the graves. I picked out pink carnations for Marin’s, because the florist had sprinkled glitter across them. I knew how much Marin had loved pink and sparkles. My grandmother bought red roses, because those represented love.

We shared memories, and picked out the perfect flowers, and by the time we reached the cemetery, my mom and sister were in some ways more alive to me than they’d ever been.

We both stopped talking as we drove through the cemetery. There was a very somber feeling about being there, so somber I almost felt a buzzing in my ears. Someone was being buried near the entrance; the mourners’ dresses fluttered in the breeze as they stood with their heads bowed.

Everywhere I looked, it seemed, there were mounds of new dirt. New graves. My grandmother had told me that the final death count from the tornado was one hundred twenty-nine. One hundred twenty-nine lives stolen, only two of them from me. It seemed so weird to think of so many families grappling with the same sadness I’d been wrestling. This was the only cemetery in Elizabeth, so most of them were likely buried here.

“Let me see…” my grandmother said as she turned right down one of the little side roads that snaked deeper into the cemetery. “I think it’s over by that fence back there.”

I gazed out the window, trying to find two fresh mounds near the fence, swallowing against the lump in my throat. This was where they were—my mom and my sister. This was where they would be forever. The finality of their deaths hit me on a whole different level. This wasn’t temporary. They were really gone. They were never coming back. At the end of this nightmare there would be no happy reunion.

Finally, my grandmother put the car in park and turned it off. She let her hands rest in her lap, gazing down at them for a few minutes. The only sound in the car was the crinkle of the plastic around the flowers as I squeezed them tighter.