“Come in,” I say.
Aunt Nora is barefoot but still wearing her lawyer pantsuit. She looks a lot like Mom—dark hair, olive skin, mysterious smile. Uncle Tony’s behind her. He’s in his usual uniform of Red Sox shirt and jeans.
“Hey, kiddo,” Tony says. “You doing okay?”
“I’m tired, I guess.”
I wish Dad had left behind more Vicodin. I wish Priscilla delivered. It’s hard to sneak out to the boardwalk. Maybe there’s an app for that.
“Got time for a little chat?” Nora asks. I nod, and she perches on the edge of my bed.
Mae comes in. Plops down on the floor, leaning back on her hands. As usual, something has been decided without me. I don’t know what.
“Do you want me to lead up to what I have to say, or should I just say it?” Nora asks.
I like how blunt she is. Nora always cuts to the chase.
“Say it,” I say.
“Tony and I”—she looks at Tony, who nods—“want you to move in with us.”
“But you live in Boston.” I look over at Mae, panicked. She’s watching me with her thinking face on: brows furrowed, eyes a little glazed, biting her lip.
“They told you already,” I say to her.
“You were sleeping.”
The heir and the spare. Of course they told her first.
“There’s a really good high school by us—Saint Francis,” Nora is saying. “Nate’s in the dorms at MIT, but he comes home most weekends. We’ve got plenty of space in the house—you’d have your own rooms.”
“I can’t … I … Micah lives here,” I say.
Nora nods. “I know, sweetie.”
I close my eyes, see him and Dad painting the house sky blue. Days and days of them covered in paint, then trooping in like conquering heroes, Dad’s arm slung around his shoulder.
I see Micah climb through my window at night and act out all the waves he caught that day, me trying not to laugh too hard so Mom and Dad would hear.
I see the look of pure bliss on his face when he overhears Mom refer to him as “my son, Micah.” He turned to me and whispered, “We can still get married, right?”
Now I don’t have time to make things right between us. To bury what happened in March and stop blaming him for what that day did to me. I need time. More time. But it’s run out.
This is a nightmare. I’m living in a nightmare. Jesus, somebody wake me up.
“Why can’t we just stay here?” I say. “I mean, can’t Gram and Papa live here until … like, graduation or something?”
“It’s not good for Papa’s health,” Nora says. “It gets too cold at night. His rheumatism acts up. And I think it’ll be too much for them. They’re getting on, you know. They don’t really know how to live with teenagers.”
Mae clears her throat. The faintest blush spreads across her pale-as-milk cheeks.
“Is there…” She frowns, like she’s translating words in her head. “With my adoption. Is there any way that social services could—”
Aunt Nora stares at her. “No. Oh, Mae, honey, no. Have you been worrying about that?”
Mae looks at her hands, nods.
I feel like an asshole for not knowing she was stressing about that stuff. For not asking. Has she been worried this whole time that she was going to be taken away?
“I’d never let that happen,” I say. “Ever.”
“I was just … curious,” she says.
“You’re a Winters,” Aunt Nora says in her firm lawyer’s voice. “And my niece. And your uncle and I love you so much. It’s going to be okay, Mae. I know it doesn’t feel like that, but it will be. I promise.”
Her voice trips, stumbling in that way all of us do now.
Uncle Tony reaches out and squeezes Mae’s shoulder. “When we get to Boston—”
“No.” I grab the throw pillow Mom helped me make for a YMCA quilting class my counselor made me do when I first got sober. I hold it like a shield. “I’m sorry, but we can’t leave. I mean, this is crazy. We’ve been here our whole lives. It’s our senior year—”
“We have nowhere else to go, Nah,” Mae says. Her voice is so soft.
All my sympathy for her suddenly evaporates. I am so fucking sick of her these days, I really am. I used to have a sister. Now I have a narc jail warden.
“Can you just stop being logical for two-point-five seconds and have my back?”
Nora frowns. “Hannah—”
“I’m thinking about what makes the most sense for us,” Mae says. “We can’t stay here alone—”
“You’re not Mom, so stop trying to be.” Her face scrunches up and, for a second, I think I’m about to make my sister cry, which is impossible, but then she nods.
“Okay.”
The room is very quiet. Why do rooms get so quiet after I say things?
“I’m just trying to, like, articulate that I get a say in this. It’s not, like, Mae’s decision just because she’s smarter.”
Nora puts a hand on my arm. “Sweetie, it’s not a decision for either of you to make. Your parents would never want you to feel that kind of pressure. Their will is very clear: If anything happened to them, they wanted you to be with us. We agreed to it years ago, back when you were both really little.”
“So, like, legally we have to go with you?” I ask.
I need a pill. An escape pod. What would happen if I just got up and walked out of the room—if I just decided this wasn’t happening? Is there any universe in which my opinion on the subject would count?
“Yes,” Tony says. “Legally, you come with us. But we don’t want you to look at it that way, kiddo. We love you girls. That’s why we agreed to this. And Boston is a great city—you always have a good time when you come to visit. It’ll give you a bit of distance from all this. It can be really good to breathe new air, you know?”
I’ve heard the word hopeless so many times in the Circle of Sad. I used it myself. Then, I didn’t know what the word really means, what it feels like to live inside these eight letters, how they circle around you, a whirlpool.
I’m literally losing everything in my life.
There are no tears, like usual. It’s so bad that I can’t cry. I stare at them all as my entire chest caves in on itself, as I become hollow. It burns. How can you burn when you’re empty?
Mae stands and sits beside me, and I let her pull me against her and rub circles on my back with her palm.
“What about the house?” I ask.
We’ve lived here our whole lives. I learned to walk in the living room. Got my first period in the bathroom. Made soup with Mom and egg bakes with Dad and—
Nora puts a hand on my knee. “We’re gonna have to sell it, honey.”
Mae’s hand stops. “What?”
For a moment, she and I look at each other and I can almost see that event horizon thing Dad tried to explain to me once—can see Mae and I building mud pies in the backyard after an unexpected spring storm, can see her across the dining room table, helping me with my math, or on the roof, pointing out stars—Cassiopeia, Ursa Minor …