Free The Most Wanted by Jacquelyn Mitchard

my only and beloved sibling. There had to have been more to it than that.
    There was more to it than that. I gnawed my pen. I’d given up too easily, possibly because, like every sister at some point, I wanted Rachie to stumble, trip herself up.
    And she did. Almost. For the first time, she’d gone to war with our parents. The slightest criticism about the merits of a long-term relationship between a Jewish doctor’s daughter from the Upper West Side and a dropout Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx with a thing for lighters and litter bins simply rendered Rachael as impermeable as an oyster shell. Long-distance, from law school in Wisconsin, I marveled at my parents’ restraint, as distinct from their ordinary behavior as Rachie’s obsession was from hers. I remember now how jealous I’d been of their gentle patience with the spoiled brat, always their fair one. Now, of course, I see that it was their very self-restraint that finally allowed Rachael the room she needed to turn around. Had my parents not let her alone, Rachael could easily be right now sitting vigil on Saturday nights in some parish church in Jersey.
    Once she was in college and dating solid citizens like herself, we both sort of behaved as if that time had never happened. I figured Rachael felt that she’d let everyone down. I guess I felt that I’d let her down. And I’d taken my cue from my parents: around me, at least, they’d never spoken Carlos’s name again.
    What the gap meant, though, was that there was a universe of things I didn’t know about Rachael and Carlos. All the things I’d wanted to know but never asked—or never wanted to know? My sister and Carlos met one summer when her temple youth group tutored a select group of bright JDs. He was two years younger, sixteen, and their relationship had lasted a full twelve hours before they made love, Rachael’s first time, standing up in the book-storage room of a public library—something my sister probably had imagined as likely to happen to her as running away with the Ice Capades. She’d confided as much to me, late one night over margaritas at our aunt’s place in Florida, when we were having one of those “first time vs. best time” sister talks. Those kinds of revelations weren’t ever off-limits between us. I’ve always thought Rachie’s secrets and motivations were mine by birthright. But I hadn’t taken the subject of Carlos further that time, nor had I since.
    Okay, there was the fact that the whole thing was creepy. I did know that Rachael’s adventure ended when Carlos finally had to choose between prison and the army. I imagined that I felt about the relationship the same way I’d have felt learning Rachael was bulimic but cured. Glad I knew. Glad I didn’t know too much. Glad it had all worked out for the best without me.
    Funny, at work I wasn’t squeamish in the slightest. Nothing stopped me from wanting to know about the depths of other people’s sordid experiences, down to the molecule. In lawyer life, knowing why people do things is my intoxicant, my power cell.
    It’s different, though, when it’s close. Some things you just don’t want to look at.
    The reason I couldn’t call Rachie right up, right now, and ask her about Carlos was that it would seem too little too late, to both of us. A dozen years and more had passed. How did she feel today about her passion for her free-fisted black-eyed pyro sweetheart, the boy she once swore to love forever? Did the self who loved Carlos seem, now, to have vanished in a puff of smoke, even the smell of sulfur little more than a memory? There were good and obvious reasons to talk about it today, a sort of need-to-know situation. But even a parallel with a professional incident didn’t seem like a good enough excuse to explore what was probably the major blank spot in my relationship with my sister.
    A trio of chewed-up Bics lay on the blotter before me. I was worn out: all that introspection isn’t easy for a