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I can't recall when my little sister took her first steps. When I learned of the last ones she had taken, I was often preoccupied by that thought. I was eleven years old when Victoria was born. I had to be around 12 when she took her first steps. This means I was living at home, in the same space as she was, and when I try to remember that huge milestone, it's all black, a void, nothing. I remember her first word. She used to say "coo." I was the only one who thought that should count. I even tried to get her to add a "p" sound to the end of it, thinking people would take her first word more seriously if it had a definitive end.I remember her second birthday, but I only recall holding her and not her walking. Her party was Blue's Clues-themed. My step-father recorded it. I ask her how old she is in this video. Her lips are blue from cake icing, her hair is braided in pigtails, and she says triumphantly, thrusting her chubby arm and positioning her little fingers into the "peace" sign, "TWO." I remember her small weight on my hip, but it's been awhile since I've seen the video. I wonder if there's a shot in it of me putting her down on the ground, her toddling off. If so, maybe based on her mastery of the steps displayed in that video, I can narrow down the timeframe of when her first steps were. Probably not the most accurate way to judge, but at least I could definitively say that sometime before two years of age, my little sister took her first steps. She had to've. There's got to be a video of her first birthday, too, but I don't remember the theme of it at all, either. My step-dad was fanatic about recording milestones, holidays, as soon as Victoria was born. Maybe there's a video of her first steps. I'll never know, I'd never ask, I feel the response would give harm. But I do wonder, when did she first walk?
I learned of her last ones on March 20th, around 5:30 am. My older sister, Jessica, called me on the phone at 5:02, and it woke me near the end of the ringtone. Instead of answering it, I chose to let it go to voicemail. I thought, in that weird space between awake and sleep, that maybe she had unintentionally called me. An early morning pocket dial, maybe one of her dogs did it: these possibilities seemed more likely than anything else at the time. When my phone began vibrating again, "Jess" lit up on my phone's screen, my husband stirred beside me. "Is someone calling you right now?" he asked, irritably. As I slid my finger across my phone to answer the call, I said to him, "Yes, it's my sister," and then "Hello?"
In the space between 5:02 and 5:20ish, my family was still trying to find her. My stepdad had woken around 4 am, saw the front door wide open, my mom's car gone, Tori's room empty. They had tried to find her between the two of them, had texted her, called her, called her friend's mom, woke her best friend, etc. My mom had called Jessica to see if she knew where she was, then told her to call me, to see if I'd heard anything, or if I would look on her facebook and see if there were plan with friends, a party, anything informative visible. Unlikely possibilities, but we were looking for anything that would make sense of her sneaking out of our parents' house. I said to my sister, after learning these details and briefly checking Tori's facebook, that my parents needed to call the cops. They wouldn't have to press charges, but we need to mobilize more people to find her, I said. I said, before she hurts herself or someone else. I hung up with my sister, and relayed to my husband what was going on. We exchanged phrases like: "teenage joy ride," and "she is being so rebellious lately," and "I wish I was sleeping right now."
My little sister didn't even have her license; she had her permit, though. Jessica and I would sometimes let her drive our cars, illicitly and unbeknownst to our parents. Once, Jess let her drive her car while I sat in the backseat and tried to suppress a chuckle as Tori experimented choppily with braking and accelerating on a turn. There was something thrilling about her learning to do something I'd grown numb to. She stirred up reflections of my own first uncertain turns of the steering wheel, the clumsy switching of the foot from brake to accelerator. I think she reacted to my tiny chuckle in good humor and said something like, "I'm still learning!" But she was still so insecure, as though she was expected to be master from the moment foot touched pedal. After we finished, Jessica and I had both told her she did a good job. She had.
Around 5:30, I called Jessica again. At first, I thought our phones were on a bad connection. Something sounded loud and muffled, wind-like, and I thought there must have been some technological glitch; our connection was sometimes bad. I don't know why I didn't hang up when I came to this thought, though. Maybe right as I was about to, I recognized the sound as a human one, and then: that something was terribly wrong and Jessica was crying, hysterically, in response to it. I could hear the effort it took her to gather her breath. And then to say, "Go to Mom and Kevin's." I said, "Why? Tell me." She repeated herself, adding "Just" to the front of the command this time. I steeled myself, repeated more firmly, "Tell me."
And then a wave of grief unlike any I'd ever known. And the new obsession with Tori's first steps. And the words I'll never forget, the ones that brought me to my knees, to which the only response I could muster was "Oh god please let that not be true," the ones that marked the end of something for our family and the beginning of an awful new something else.
My sister said, in one long cry, "Tori stepped in front of a train."
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