The Strong One by Danielle Altman (California, 44)

           My sister’s hair, honeyed from the hair salon, fell between us. The tips of it brushed the
menu we shared. We sat side by side since the booths were comically huge, like everything else
at The Cheesecake Factory in Pasadena. I almost tucked her hair behind her ear, my older-sister
instincts rearing up even though we weren’t kids anymore and hadn’t been close for years.
​           Her lunch invitation hadn’t been unexpected. It was the summer of 2007. I’d traveled
from Florida where I was in graduate school to our home state of California to be the maid of
honor in her wedding. The event was three days away and there was so much left to do. Tanning
bed appointments, mani-pedis, a champagne brunch, bridesmaid dramas I’d been tasked with
diffusing via flip phone, eyebrows to be waxed into thin perfect lines. After we ordered our
salads, I thought we would talk about those things. Instead, she stared straight ahead out a picture
window that faced onto Colorado Boulevard and roped me into helping her reconstruct the plot
of One Magic Christmas. It was her favorite holiday movie as a kid. A father shot to death on
Christmas Eve. His children driven off a bridge into an icy river. A mother grieves. The angel
Gideon appears.
​           ​“I need to tell you something,” she said after the waiter left our salads. I perked up,
wondering if it had something to do with her fiancée. His favorite things were green smoothies
and making fun of ugly people and he always pointed out when my sister had seconds. I put
down my fork, hoping for a called-off wedding. She was a quietly intelligent nursing student. A
hot girl who had been getting into Jesus. She was only twenty-two.

​           ​​“Seth did stuff to me,” she said, referring to our stepdad. “When I was a kid.”
​           ​A hole opened in the bottom of my stomach. It sucked me down and I had to fight my
way up out of the darkness into the overly bright dining room, with its bending waiters in black,
carelessly clanking dishes and dropping checks. Phrases and questions popped into my
mind—I’m sorry, I’m here for you, who else knows, what are you going to do about it, do we
need to report this—but they came in such a tumble that it was impossible to choose one. She
blinked a couple of times with an expectant look. The worst part was that I wasn’t surprised.
​           ​“I’m so sorry,” I said. I did the math. We’d moved in with Seth when she was eight.
“Does mom know?”
​           ​“I told her last night.” She sipped her water. Her hands and tone were calm. Nothing in
her behavior suggested the impulsive sharing of information. I wished she hadn’t picked a place
so public, with laughter, baby showers, and cake. And it was too hot. Not enough air
conditioning for the dead middle of summer. I tugged at the straps of my layered tank tops. Fuck
this layered look, I thought. Fighting an overwhelming urge to walk out, I reminded myself this
was about her. Not me.
​           ​“I’m glad you told me.” My hands shook. I put them in my lap. “You can tell me
anything. I’m always here for you. Can I do anything?”
​           ​She took a bite of bacon. I wasn’t sure how she could eat. My salad was untouched, the
ranch dressing gaining stench the warmer it got.
​           ​“I just wanted you to know in case it comes up.” She speared an olive.
​           ​“Is he still coming? To the wedding.”
​           ​She shrugged and took another bite. “I asked mom. She said it would be weird to
disinvite him. Seeing as he paid for it.”
​           ​A glass jar thudded over me, dulling the sounds in the cavernous room. The only thing
that seeped in was guilt, thick and pernicious as poisonous gas. My desire to avoid what I
recognized, with increasing panic, as my potential culpability, revved me up like an engine,
making my heart flap and my mouth motor. I asked all my previously discarded questions
quickly. She answered all of them to a degree, with the avoidant steadiness of someone who has
been in therapy.
​           ​“Are you in therapy?” I asked.
​           ​“Oh yeah,” she said. “For a while.”
​           ​I’m here for you, I remember saying repeatedly, through fast sips of water, my throat
rankled by a nasty ragged feeling like I’d done one too many lines of shitty cocaine. But I was a
liar. I hadn’t been there for her way back when. Back when it mattered.
​           ​​After lunch, we went shopping at a newly opened H&M down the street, our reason for
driving half an hour west to Pasadena for lunch. It surprised me how quickly we changed the
subject. We scoffed at her crappiest bridesmaids. As we thumbed through the racks, we talked
with great length and depth about where her friend Jenny bought her jeans. I bought a silver
party dress that set off my long dark hair and fashionably starved arms. The dress cost a quarter
of my rent. I only wore it once, before stuffing it deep in a trash can, even though I was broke
and I loved party dresses.
​           ​When I got back to my mom and my stepdad’s house that day, where I was staying, my
mom said nothing. Her eyes were wide that night and the next day, hands flitting over the gift
bags of pale pink Jordan almonds for the wedding, making sure each ribbon was just right. I said
nothing, pretended I knew nothing. On the day of the wedding, hot wind gusting the chaparral in
the foothills of the San Bernardino mountains, my sister and I posed for photos with our mom
and stepdad. In the pictures, we’re smiling.
​           ​At the Cheesecake Factory, I had told my sister about the time I broke my foot. It was
1999, a week before the end of my sophomore year of college. It was late at night, cool fog rising
off the ocean, and I was drunk, leaving an abandoned church in Santa Cruz that had been turned
into an art space. I was in platform shoes, and even though I was holding on to the arm of a tall
strong boy I liked, I slipped. The doctor had laughed at the x-ray. I don’t know how you did it, he
said. Breaking your foot falling out of a shoe. He gave me a prescription for Vicodin.
​           ​Driving was uncomfortable. I had to wear a walking boot to support my foot. As soon as
I got home to Southern California, Seth offered to give me rides. He had been in the Marines in
Vietnam, and the hard edges had never left him, not his boxy head, not his clean-cut blonde-
going-gray haircut, and not his tight grip on whatever he touched, whether it be a radio dial or a
steering wheel.
​           ​On one of those rides, he put his hand on my knee. Even though it wasn’t a total surprise,
he had always seemed like a creep, my stomach twisted and rose into my throat.
​           ​​“You’re such a pretty girl,” he said. “If you ever want to get together, I’m sure we could
find a way.”
​           ​I edged away and grabbed the door handle even though we were going 30 miles per hour
in a suburb. For two minutes, I shook, saying nothing. Identikit homes and glossy lawns flashed
by. The concrete landscape rendered the sunlight into a painfully bright gauze that blurred the
sidewalks and passing families. The development was so new that the trees hadn’t grown up yet.
​           ​He pulled up to their McMansion. We got out.
​           ​“You’re disgusting,” I spit at him in the driveway. Before he could say a word, I hobbled
into the house. I pulled my mom by one of her tiny wrists into the kitchen. He went into his
office. I told her what he did.
​           ​“You must be confused,” she said.
​           ​“I’m not confused.” I reached for her hand.
​           ​She flicked an invisible crumb from the spotless counter. “You must have misheard him.”
​           ​We snarled at one another, a near mirror image of the same woman, the mother more
refined and faintly etched by age.
​           ​“I heard everything,” I said.
​           ​“I don’t believe you.” Her face crumpled, her voice weakened, and she began to cry. “It’s
not true.”
​           ​“Of course, you would say that.” I got in her face. “You always side with him.”
​           ​I barged into his office. “Tell her what you did.”
​           ​He went to the kitchen. I followed him, screaming at him—what exactly, I don’t
remember. My mother cowered in the corner, dazed. He ground coffee beans, the clatter of it
competing with my voice. The doors down the hall, two of them, hushed shut. My fifteen-year-
old sister was behind one of them, and my twelve-year-old brother was behind the other. They
were hiders. He’d trained them that way.
​           ​He drank his coffee. I called my best friend and asked her to pick me up. In the car, I told
her everything. At her house, we told her mom what happened. Her dad was there too, in the
living room with the big Oriental rug, listening. It must have been a Saturday if he was there,
home in the afternoon.
​           ​We decided I wouldn’t go back. I could stay with them, or another friend, we would
figure it out. It was only for a summer. And then, the topic was broached: Should we call the
police? I vaguely remember us debating it. Everyone knew I had two younger siblings at home,
but we couldn’t identify a crime. Maybe the hint that a real crime, one of the worst, did lurk was
too much for us to accept. At no point do I remember any of us calling the police or family
services. I didn’t know back then it was possible to call family services if you came from a
“good” family. Mostly, I remember a numbness so pervasive and hallucinatory that it crept under
my skin and around my head, deadening my sense of touch and hearing. I don’t remember
thinking about my sister at all.
​           ​When we went back for my things, they were already waiting for me on the perfect lawn.
My stepdad had put my stuff, and there wasn’t much of it, into Hefty garbage bags. The thick
black shiny kinds that are used for yard waste.
​           ​I know what you’re thinking: I didn’t do anything wrong. It was a different time. I was
young. But it’s hard not to imagine an alternate reality. I make a phone call. A social worker is
dispatched. She’s a kind, observant lady with a tight perm and a bad dye job, and a purse her
granddaughter crocheted for. She cracks the shell, and the truth spills out. I hold onto the fantasy,
even though we all know it usually doesn’t work that way.
​           ​I moved in with a friend and her parents, rent-free. I sat on the scratchy carpet in her
brother’s recently vacated bedroom and counted my Vicodin on the back of a Jawbreaker CD.
The Cure and Morrissey stared down at me from tattered posters. I had almost a full bottle,
something like twenty. That would buy me six hours of relief a day for a while at least.
​           ​A few days later, my stepdad called and said if I didn’t come home, he would keep my
car, the old one he had given me, and cut off my student loans. I said fuck you, go ahead fucker,
and hung up. Since I had no money and no car, I got a job at a Hallmark card store within
hobbling distance. I made phone calls to my student advisor and filled out forms to fund my
education. When the Vicodin ran out, I scammed more. Over a few weeks, I banned my family
from my life. My summer of avoidance had no room for my sister. I left her alone in that house. I
didn’t even call.
​           ​Two and a half months later, my stepdad called. He apologized. He would take out my
loan that fall. In fact, I could have the car back. As long as I forgave him and let him drive me
back up north to school. In the constellation of all the worst things I did that summer, that star
shines bright: I said, okay. It’s one thing to fight a battle the best you know how and lose. It’s
another thing to make a deal with a man you suspect to be a pedophile.
​           ​On the drive, eight hours, mostly through the endless, dusty industrial farmland of
Highway 5, a kernel of worry lodged itself in my stomach that he would touch me. He didn’t.
​           ​I felt so vulnerable and poor that summer that I convinced myself I didn’t have a choice.
Looking back, nothing would have changed if I had taken out my own student loans and
financed an inexpensive car, except for more debt ($90,000 in current dollars) and less regret
(priceless). I would have ended up with the same grad school fellowships. I would have walked
into the same job in Washington, DC, where I passed Henry Kissinger in the hallway and talked
about basketball with US senators over tomato soup and grilled cheese. I still would have sipped
champagne on rooftops while dating one of Hilary Clinton’s speechwriters, expensed lunch at
Central, and danced at parties where guests arrived by helicopter. My only sacrifices would have
been a cheaper apartment in a less hip part of town and fewer separates from Ann Taylor Loft.
Others aren’t so lucky. For a long time, I believed I owed my career to my stepdad’s financial
help.
​           ​Through my teenage years and into my twenties and thirties, when I was home and we
would sit around accepting Seth’s Christmas and birthday gifts, pretending he wasn’t
emotionally and sexually abusive, my sister would pull me aside to tell me how much she had
looked up to me when we were growing up. She’d say, you always stood up for yourself and
fought back. You’ve always been the strong one, she’d say, while fixing my hair in the
bathroom, or laying across the ottoman in the guest room with her chin in her hands. I bathed in
those compliments. Back then, I was delusional enough to agree with her. I really thought my
screaming, which had evolved into avoidance, which had evolved into pretending everything was
normal for money, made me strong. Or maybe it’s my definition of strength that has changed.
​           ​My sister is the one who finally ended it. Eerily enough, when I got her phone call, I was
in my duplex blocks away from the very same Cheesecake Factory in Pasadena where she had
spilled the truth eight years earlier. It was 2015. I was five months pregnant. I’d been living in
Pasadena for three years then. The chain restaurant had lingered in my mind like a dark shadow
since my sister’s wedding. Walking or driving by it daily had escalated the haunting to a physical
one, and not just because the food was bad.
​           ​“I finally called the police,” she said. “There’s an open investigation. Have they called
you?”
​           ​“No,” I said. “I wish they would.”
​           ​My sister explained that as part of the inquiry, they had pulled over his biological
daughter, whom he had been estranged from for years, to question her in her upscale community
on the East Coast. Her toddler was in a car seat in the back. My sister learned this because his
daughter had called my sister afterward, upset. You are not wrong about him, she said to my
sister. But don’t drag me into it. I won’t talk to the police.
​           ​“And mom?” I asked my sister.
​           ​“I gave her an ultimatum. If she doesn’t leave him, she’ll never see me or my kids again.”
​           ​We didn’t talk much more about it. As it had been our whole adult lives, the call was
short. Too brief.
​           ​A few months later, my mom left him. My sister outsmarted her. She’d figured out our
mom struggled to act based on duty or love, likely because of some of the abuse she suffered
herself. But mom could be nudged if threatened, and no threat worked better on her than a
transaction. No one outsmarted him, though. Even though his crime was not limited by the
California statute of limitations, he was never arrested, and to my knowledge, no prosecutor ever
filed charges.
​           ​Less than a year after my sister’s call, I was in my parked car, about to leave my in-laws’
house in the hills above Los Angeles. My baby boy was in the back. I was so focused on his
cooing in the rearview mirror that I was startled when someone knocked on my window. It was
Seth, smiling and waving at me and my baby. I gunned it. Haven’t seen him since. I’ve heard he
lives with his new wife in Arizona, down near the border.





Danielle Altman studied fiction at Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio. As a medical anthropologist, she has worked in HIV/AIDs, child welfare, and LGBTQ+ activism. She lives in Murrieta, California.