But I’m already wondering what she smells like. What she’ll feel like in my arms. I don’t know if that makes me a bad daughter, a good sister, or both.
We go home, and I help Mae make Italian wedding soup. Ben’s favorite, she says. It has been so long since we made soup just the two of us, but here we are, side by side, chopping and sautéing and stirring.
This isn’t crisis soup. This is happy soup. But I can’t help thinking about the last time someone in our family made it. That was my-husband-is-cheating-on-me soup. Now it’s I-love-you soup. At least, I think it is.
“You have to tell him,” I say, ladling Dad’s favorite food into the large glass mason jar Mae is taking on the train with her.
“I know.” She looks into the pot, wistful. “I wish I’d worked the problem sooner. Four whole months.”
I rest a hand on her arm. “All you have is now. Go get your boy, Mae.”
“You really are the genius of the family. I have to work so hard to know the things that are so obvious to you.” She brightens. “Have you considered theological studies? Or psychology? I think you’d be a great—”
“Okay, now you’ve lost it. Go! Grand romantic gesture, remember?”
She kisses me on the cheek, grabs her mason jar of soup, and skips—actually skips—out of the kitchen.
When Mae crosses the Charles with Nate, I go upstairs.
This house used to be the place we sometimes stopped by on our way to the Cape for Christmas or Thanksgiving or summer vacation. Now it’s this other thing. Not my home. But also not just a place to crash for the night after a long flight across the country.
This idea of home has been getting to me a lot lately.
This past week, to be exact.
I’m so proud of my sister. So proud. And happy for her. It makes me smile to imagine her one step closer to space.
But I don’t know where that leaves me.
For a minute there, I thought I was okay. That everything would be okay. Going to meetings, counting my fingers. Jo is cool. I missed Drew, but I was really okay. Now I’m beginning to feel what it will be like when she’s gone and it’s just me and Aunt Nora and Uncle Tony. Nate will be around, but only on weekends, and only until he graduates. And I can’t bear it. I really can’t.
I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life. I have no plan. Nowhere to go. No dorm to move into. No apartment with Micah. No best friend that I’m getting a place with.
I have money. My parents made sure of that. I know I’m lucky in that regard. Drew has to make his own money to help chip in for rent, to buy tea tree soap and deodorant. But what good does the money do me when I have nothing to spend it on but pills?
Everyone keeps telling me they’re proud of me. For what? Not getting high? Not killing myself?
Seeing what Mae’s accomplished just underscores how much I have utterly failed at life. We had the same parents, the same schooling, the same chances. I even had a leg up, since she didn’t even become a part of our family until she was three. But she never lets being adopted bring her down. Didn’t let Mom and Dad’s death ruin her life. And now she’s going to Annapolis, and she’s about to figure things out with Ben. And I am here in a big, empty house. Alone.
My head is starting to hurt, and I reach up to pull the rubber band out of my hair, but it gets tangled, and I can’t get it out, I can’t even get a fucking rubber band out of my hair, and suddenly it’s too much, too fucking much.
I remember throwing up all over this hair in the snow after they woke me up under the angel, and Mae trying to hold it back, and I was so disgusting that night.
And I decide, right now: One of us has to go. Me or the hair.
A haircut is easier.
I go to the kitchen and grab the shears. For a while, they were hiding all the knives and such, but it’s been four months since I overdosed, and everyone thinks I’m okay now.
I’m not.
But if you tell people that, they never stop watching you and asking you stupid questions and using that pity-grief voice, so I don’t tell them. I mean, my aunt and uncle took off my bedroom door when I got back from rehab to make sure they could check on me all the time. And there are random drug tests each week, sometimes more than once, here and at school. I don’t know what else the adults in my life could do to me, but I don’t want to find out.
I sit in front of the mirror in my room, and I see my mother’s face. This is the thing no one thinks about. When you look like your dead mother, you stop wanting to see yourself. It hurts to look at you. It hurts everyone to look at you.
Aunt Nora calls me Lila sometimes, by accident. She doesn’t always realize it. One time she did, and her face got so sad. Because just looking at me reminded her of Mom.
I am tired of looking like my dead mother.
I am tired of seeing her when I brush my teeth, when I walk by clean windows.
I grab a chunk of my hair, but just as I’m about to cut, I remember Mom running her fingers through this hair. Braiding it. Helping me dye strips of it in funky Venice Beach colors: blue, pink, green. Putting those pink foam curlers in it when I was little. Bows, rubber bands, scarves. Twisting it idly around her finger when we had our long talks. I haven’t cut it since before the wave. It goes all the way to the middle of my back.
The scissors fall from my hands. I scratch at my arms, the monster inside me that wants more diamonds clawing at me from the inside out.
“I hate you.”
I don’t know who I’m talking to: myself, the monster inside, or Mom, for leaving me.
I pick up the scissors and I start chopping. Chopping and chopping, waves and waves of my mother’s black hair falling off my head and the tears pour out of me so fast and hard that I can’t see what I’m doing but I still keep cutting until there is no more hair to grab, there is nothing left, just little stubs. As if the wave has come by and torn me up by the roots.
When I’m done, I feel lighter.
So light I could fly away.
41
Mae
ISS Location: Low-Earth Orbit
Earth Date: 16 April
Earth Time (EST): 22:23
Nate lets me into the dorm room he shares with Ben, grabs a duffel bag, and says he’ll see me in the morning. He adds an exaggerated wink and hip shake because he can’t resist.
Ben won’t be back until late, it turns out. Lab, class, study group. Nate doesn’t tell him I’m here. A little surprise, like a bit of outer space in a gift bag.
I put the soup on Ben’s desk, then wander around his side of the room, which is much tidier than Nate’s. I am not surprised by the rock collection on the windowsill, or the meditation cushion. There’s a picture of us pinned to the corkboard above his desk, one Nate took when we were at Castaways. I stare at the girl in the picture, at her huge smile, at the way she looks at the boy. And I think, once again, that I am the dumbest smart person I know.
Ben has a copy of Dad’s book—Dark Diving—on his shelf, and I pull it down. It’s filled with underlining and highlighting, sticky notes. For me. He read this for me. I turn to the back, to Dad’s picture. I remember when Mom took it, how she had him lean into the sunlight just so, how she’d brushed back a lock of his hair and he’d caught her hand and kissed it.