I catch myself looking for Micah, too.
It feels like he’s a ghost already.
Mae leans her head against my shoulder. “They have Toy Story. Want to watch together?” She tries to smile. “‘To infinity and beyond.’”
Our thing.
I look away. “Disney lied. Infinity doesn’t exist.”
“Well, actually, if you consider—” I give her a look, and she stops.
I don’t want to be conscious anymore. Then I have to think about new schools and a house that smells different from mine and a whole life of waking up and remembering they’re gone.
I push an eye mask over my eyes. Mae rests her head on my shoulder, and we sleep our way across the country.
i want to go home, but i don’t have one.
Baggage Claim Carousel
Logan Airport
Boston
12
Hannah
There’s a place between waking and sleeping, and I try to stay there.
It’s warm, like bathwater. It tastes like forgetting.
I just want to never leave, huddled under the blankets, curled in on myself. Floating.
I have three Vicodin left of Dad’s month supply. Mae kept me from going to the boardwalk to get more from Priscilla. I need to conserve them until I find a dealer here. I had a quit attempt yesterday, but by noon I gave up. I’ll get good again—I just need to get through the next … I just need to get through.
I hear the door open—it creaks, this strange, new door in my strange new room.
“Nah?”
I don’t say anything, just scoot closer to the wall. Mae lies down and throws an arm over me.
“I feel like I’m in a black hole,” I say. This is speaking Mae’s language.
“Did you know that a black hole is actually a collapsed star?” she says. I shake my head. “To escape it, you’d have to travel FASTER than the speed of light. Which is really fast.”
“How fast?”
“Six hundred seventy million miles per hour.”
“Fuck.”
“Right?” she says. “That’s why a black hole is black—not even the light can escape it.”
Mae sits up, pulling her knees against her chest. She’s wearing her favorite striped vintage pajamas, with embroidered roses stitched along the collar. “I keep thinking about Dad’s book. How he’s not going to write it.”
I’m scared to touch on Dad. I think I kind of hate him now.
“Maybe you can write it yourself someday.”
She bites her lip. “I’m not going into theoretical studies, though. I mean, maybe on the side, but when you’re in the space program, you give up a research career.” She brightens a little. “Maybe I could talk to Becca—you know, his research assistant. We could cowrite it, maybe. I bet she has all his notes. She’s super into axions.”
I close my eyes. I could tell her. I should tell her. I think Mae was pissed about not being asked to go to the clinic with me. About being left out of something so important. I don’t want her to feel like I’m hiding something from her. But when I look at my sister in the dim light of my room, I see a spark in her eyes that hasn’t been there for a month.
“What about Tim? He worked with Dad longer,” I say. “Or one of the MacDougal genius guys.”
“MacArthur. It’s a MacArthur Fellowship.”
“Okay, whatever—you know what I mean. Get the most qualified person. Not some assistant.”
She nods. Then, because she’s Mae: “Hey, you want to know what I just read?”
“Huh.”
“Apparently, one of the prettiest things in space is when the astronauts dump their urine and it flash freezes. So when the sun hits the drops of urine, they’re like these diamonds floating in the sky.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“But kind of awesome.”
We’re silent for a while, each lost in our own thoughts.
“I haven’t been able to cry,” Mae whispers.
The hurt in her voice carves out my insides.
“I know,” I say. “It’s okay. People, like, deal in different ways. You know?”
Like with prescription drugs you stole from your dead father. I want to tell her about Mom doing a headstand in my room, but I don’t want her to tell me I imagined it. That it’s not possible.
She nods. “I feel like … I think it’s a distinct possibility there’s something wrong with me. Just a hypothesis. I need to conduct some experiments.”
I sit up on my elbow. Mae is talking about feelings. This is … unprecedented.
“There’s nothing wrong with you.” I sit up all the way, cross my legs. “You came out fucking great. I’m the one with struggles. You know that.”
She shakes her head. “My parents died and I only cried once, when I was making the soup. I’m fucked-up.”
She never curses. This is serious.
I rest a hand on her knee. “Are you sad?”
“Of course.”
“Then you’re reacting in a totally normal way. Not everyone is a shit-show crier like me. If you’re sad, we can rule out total psychosis.” She laughs a little—my work here is done. Almost. I grab the bottle of Mom’s lotion off my bedside table. “Hold out your hand.”
She smiles. Runs a finger over the bottle. How many times did we see Mom hit the pump of this Jergens bottle after cooking in the kitchen, or gardening?
I squeeze a dollop onto her palm, then rub it into her skin, which is so translucent you can see bright blue veins running beneath it, like rivers on a map. My skin is darker, olive. Light, but with a dash of Mediterranean.
“Magic potion,” I say. “Remember how she used to stand by the kitchen window and rub it onto her hands for the longest time?”
“And she’d be playing Joni Mitchell or Enya.”
“Yeah.”
My sister’s hands are small, but her fingers are long and thin. Elegant and scholarly. Not stubby like mine. Her nails aren’t bitten and covered in chipped black paint like mine, either. They are neatly filed, bare with little half-moons peeking over the cuticles.
“Remember how Mom and Dad were always trying to get you to take piano lessons, because of your fingers?” I say.
She snorts. “And they didn’t give up until I proved that proficiency in math does not guarantee musical aptitude.”
Finished, I reach over and press the bottle once more, creamy white Jergens spreading onto my palm.
“Why Jergens?” Mae asks. “Always this cheap drugstore stuff.”
Original scent. Cherry almond essence. She never switched it up.
“It’s what Yia-yia used,” I say. “Her whole life, after she came to America. When she died, I remember Mom going into her bathroom at the nursing home and taking out the bottle. She was kind of hugging it to her chest. She told me how, when she was little, Yia-yia used to give Mom manicures, and she’d always rub this lotion on her hands first.”
“I never knew that,” Mae says. She runs her fingers over her palms. “Mom painted my nails the night Riley left for China. Do you remember? Each nail a different color.”