I dug the brush down into the tin and smeared a red heart onto the left side of her head. The oily slickness of the paint and the smoothness of her scalp moved the brush along. I felt myself relaxing into it, the way I did when I was piecing something together in the shop: sculpting a nose, perfecting the tiny, intricate stitches on rabbit pelts. I smeared blue circles near each of her ears, dipping indigo, then violet, the orange and yellow mixing together to make a nearly radioactive triangle at the spot over her brow. I created a pink starburst in the center, as if I were parting hair. I almost enjoyed it.
My mother sighed and leaned back into my hands. “Remember when we used to do watercolors out back on the porch? When you guys were little?”
“Yeah, I remember.” It hadn’t been fun. Brynn dumped an entire cup of water on my work after hers fell into a puddle on the corner of the porch. We were eight years old; Milo had just turned seven and had the chicken pox. He couldn’t come out of his room—Brynn and I were going to slip the pictures under his door as get-well cards.
Those memories no longer gave me pleasure. Instead, there was a dull, constant ache, like a rotting tooth that had broken and needed to be pulled; a sharp fragment that I kept touching with the tip of my tongue. Every slide over the memories left behind the coppery taste of blood.
“I’m excited for you to see my art,” she said. “I worked really hard on everything. I want my family there.”
“Please don’t do this.” My voice broke and I paused with the brush pressed below her ear. “It makes me feel sick. I can’t stand it.”
“I’m sorry, Jessa. It’s happening.”
That was it. She’d left me no choice. I pulled the letter from my pocket and handed it to her over her shoulder, watching her reflection.
“What is this?” she asked.
“Open it.”
She unfolded it and I stood rooted behind her, wishing I were the one who was dead. That seemed easier. To be gone, no longer dealing with the stress and trauma of managing my parents.
I read it over her shoulder, watched her eyes follow the cramped text down the page. That single-spaced letter that felt more like a list of demands. Ways I had to behave. Things I had to do to ensure our family’s welfare.
She reached the end and looked up at me in the mirror. Then she ripped it in half; ripped it again, again. “This is garbage.”
She’d taken the last memory of my father and destroyed it. “Why did you do that? It wasn’t yours!”
Pieces littered the floor and the vanity. That last love at the bottom of the page; I’d never see it again. Gone forever.
“I miss your father, but I’m also very angry with him. He was a control freak. So uptight that he couldn’t ever let things go.” She met my eyes in the mirror. The glass needed to be cleaned. There were streaks filling up the oval, making the two of us look like specters. “Sometimes I wish he were still here so I could have the satisfaction of shooting him myself.”
“Is this what missing feels like?” I still held the paintbrush, globbed with acid green. “Mutilating memories? Making everyone else participate in them with you?”
She tilted her head and the brush skimmed the edge of her ear, dripping green down into the shell. I wiped it out with my finger and scraped it against my jeans.
“Your father was an asshole.” She shook her head, eyes tearing up. “What he did to this family, to you, is inexcusable. That he would kill himself and let his own daughter find him like that. To leave a letter? To force you to bear that kind of burden. It’s monstrous.”
I was still holding the paintbrush. It dripped on the floor between us. “I just want all of this to stop. No more talking, no more gross art.”
She slapped the top of the vanity so hard it upset a framed picture of Bastien and Lolee. “We have to deal with this.” She reset the picture and sighed. “When you don’t deal with things, like our family, people hurt themselves. They hurt each other. Look at what your father did. He loved you, and look what he did!”
“Dad had cancer.” I jabbed the brush at her reflection. More paint flung and hit the mirror, leaving behind bright spatter. “He shot himself because it was too much to bear. And now you’re going to show some strangers a replica of him that makes his whole life seem like a joke. People are going to think that’s my father. And it’s not.”
Her hand snaked backward between our bodies, gripping my wrist so hard her fingernails broke the skin. “Your father was a lot of things. He was a good dad to you kids and I loved him, but what he did was shitty. And what Brynn did to you and Milo was shitty.”
When I tried to yank away, she squeezed tighter. I couldn’t feel my fingers. “Stop it,” I said. “Stop talking.” The brush pressed between our bodies, leaving paint smears on my pants and on her dress.
“This has gone on too long, and part of it’s my fault for not making you deal with it. I had my own things that were hurting and I let your wounds fester. You and your brother.”
“If you won’t stop this, I will,” I said. “And you won’t like it. And I don’t care. Fuck, I don’t care!”
Straining backward, I finally broke free. I landed on the side of the bed and rolled downward onto the floor. The paintbrush jabbed into my belly, nearly impaling me. My mother tried to help me up, and I shook her off, half crawling to the door until I was able to pull myself up against the dresser. Bits of my father’s ruined letter stuck to my sweaty palms.
She called after me as I lurched down the hall, but my head felt too full of static to stay another second. Milo sat on a stool at the counter. There was a napkin tucked into the front of his collar, covering his tie.
We looked at each other. He stood up and kept staring, the napkin dangling, then falling down onto the table to cover his plate.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked. “You gonna tell me what that was about? Did you just threaten Mom?”
“Fuck you. I have to go.” I yanked my shirt up over my shoulder. The neck had pulled out wide and it lay strangely askew, as if I’d been attacked.
“I think you should stay,” he said. “Let’s get it all out in the open, right now.”
I grabbed my purse and left.
There were four beers left, and then there were three. I drank each one perfunctorily, not even tasting when it hit my tongue. I’d stopped off at the convenience store before driving out to the lake, buying the cheapest beer they had. Brynn had loved shitty beer. She’d loved sugar cookies and sweet tea and those little red strawberry candies that elderly women always kept in their purse. Shitty candies, for sure. Brynn had been shitty. My brother had been shitty. My parents were shitty. I was the worst one of all, the shittiest one.
The air was the driest it had been in months. Still humid, but bearable. It was the kind of weather we’d always liked when we were kids, when going outside and staying out was our best option. Away from our families. Me, Milo, and Brynn just riding our bikes, and later driving around in Brynn’s car with the windows down.
I wedged the can between my legs. Then I closed my eyes and listened to the drone of the cicadas in the oaks. Though the park was secluded, I could hear the steady buzz of the nearby highway. I wondered what life might have been like without Brynn. The decisions we’d made had wrecked us, keeping me here permanently, still attached to her, no matter how hard she’d tried to separate from me.