Swinging

Grayson was sitting on a swing at the local playground, about four blocks from our house. Normally, I might’ve poked fun at her, squeezing her too large frame into the seat obviously designed for a much smaller girl, but today, I said nothing, only sat down on the swing next to her, waiting for her to speak. I knew, given time, she would say something. 

It took longer than expected, but eventually, Grayson opened her mouth. “I don’t want to move,” she said, her voice heavy with unshed tears.

“I know. I don’t either,” I said, wishing there was something I could say to change the fact that we didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t as if we could stay behind. I was seventeen, but not an adult. And she was only fifteen, barely that. There was no way I could take care of her, get a job, find a place to leave, and still finish high school. I still had no idea why my parents had suddenly decided to pack up and leave, but we would have to go with them.

“Grandma’s house is so… weird,” Grayson continued, bending her knees to move the swing back and forth, even though her tennis shoes were still planted firmly on the ground. “She lives in the middle of nowhere. Is there even a school there?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. We had only visited Grandma’s house in the summer, so there’d never been a reason to think about school. Considering she lived in the middle of the woods, far away from the closest town, in a setting that looked more like something a person would read about in Grimm’s Fairy Tales than the modern world, I couldn’t imagine there being a school building nearby. If there was one, it was probably miles away, and we would have to walk--uphill both ways or something. It would probably be shaped like a giant shoe or be carved out of a large, twisted tree trunk. “We can always do online school,” I reminded her.

Grayson groaned. “What about our friends? If we can’t go to school, we won’t be able to make any new ones. Not that I want to be friends with anyone who lives there.”

She said the words like she was uttering a curse on my grandmother and all of her neighbors. “Grayson, maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe… this will turn out to be a blessing in disguise.”

She groaned and rolled her eyes at me. I knew it was a stretch. Even as the words left my mouth, I realized I sounded way too much like our mother. I couldn’t help it. Grayson might not be that much younger than me, but I still felt protective of her, like she was my own child. Come to think of it, I felt that way about most people in my life, like I needed to keep them safe, even my parents. That’s probably why I had volunteered to find Grayson and try to convince her to come back home, despite the fact that I also didn’t want to move and couldn’t understand why my parents had decided to suddenly pull up all of our roots and run away. None of it made any sense to me either, yet, here I was, trying to convince my sister that everything would be okay.

“At least, you’ll be able to keep in touch with your friends over the phone. You can FaceTime.” I smiled and patted her on the arm.

Grayson shrugged away from me, rolling her eyes again. “What makes you think Grandma has a signal out there in the middle of nowhere?”

She had a point, one it would be difficult to argue against. “Max will need the Internet to work, right?” I assumed he would try to do his job remotely, like he had before, during the pandemic when no one could drive into work. All of that was over now, but he had proven he was capable of working from home, so his company, which designed advertisements for apps, would probably let him keep doing that. My mom, who was a nurse at an extended care facility, had continued her work even when the rest of the world had stopped. Obviously, she had to have quit her job today, one she’d had for over ten years. It was so strange to think she’d just walk away from her career that way, all of her patients that she loved. None of it made any sense….

“Why is this happening?” Grayson demanded from me, stopping her erratic swinging and looking into my face.

“I don’t know.” I sounded like a recording, saying the same thing over and over again. “But it must be important for them to be willing to make these kinds of changes, Gray. Maybe Grandma is really sick, and they don’t want to tell us.”

“It’s not even Mom’s mom,” she reminded me.

“I know, but Mom has always loved her like she was.” Grandma Agnes was our father’s mom. Technically, Mom wasn’t related to her, but she’d known Grandma Agnes since she was eighteen years old, when she’d met our dad, Gordon Nightingale, their freshman year of college. They’d gotten married before the end of their sophomore year and been happy together for about five years before our dad had been killed in a car wreck when Grayson was only a baby. It had been devastating for all of us, but then, when I was seven, Max Miles had come into our lives, sweeping Mom off of her feet, and soon enough, we had a new dad. Now, the memory of my true dad was fading, and if I didn’t look at pictures of him every few days, I’d begin to forget what he looked like. The idea frightened me, but I pushed it aside. There were more important things to worry about right now, like the fact that our world was being turned on its side, and there was nothing either one of us could do about it.

I decided to use those tragic memories to empower my sister. “Come on, Gray. We can do this.” I wrapped an arm around my sister’s shoulders. “We’ve been through tough times before. We’ll make it through.”

Grayson dropped her head so that she was staring at her Converse. “It isn’t fair. How come we are always the ones facing tough times?”

“You’re right, it isn’t fair,” I said, not able to answer her question. “But it will be all right.”

She wasn’t convinced, but Grayson knew as well as I did that there was nothing either of us could do to change the situation. Reluctantly, she drew herself up out of the swing, and slowly started walking back toward home. Wrapping my fingers around her wrist, I walked alongside her, praying that both of us would be able to handle the inevitable changes to come.