The Comeback

by Ella Berman

  My sister is bobbing in the ocean, about twenty yards out, her hair fanning around her. I fall onto the wet sand, the word no caught at the back of my throat as fear tears through me. The feeling is primitive, raw, unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. Before I know what I’m doing, I’m up again and running into the icy water as thick raindrops continue falling from the sky. Seaweed snakes around my ankle, and I trip over a large rock embedded in the sand, landing on my bad knee as the waves crash over me. I propel myself forward with my arms until I’m swimming, the wound above my eye stinging from the salt as the water whips my face. I push through the fiery pain until I’m slipping underneath the waves, swimming like a mermaid through the darkness. I must be close. I break through the surface again and look around. I can see Esme’s black hair drifting in the water around her. She’s so close. I reach out and grab my sister by the shoulder, pulling her toward me. She gasps for air as I wrap my arms around her.

  Esme shouts something over the sound of the rain hitting the water, and I think she’s fighting me off, splashing and writhing under my grip.

  “Come with me,” I say, tears streaming down my face. I wrap my arms around her again.

  “What are you doing?” she shouts in between coughs, but I won’t let go and we both sink beneath the waves again. I kick hard, my arm gripping Esme around the waist, and I only let go of her when I feel the sand beneath my feet. We break through the surface at the same time, and Esme spits out salt water while I rub my eyes.

  “We’re okay,” I say, breathing heavily as Esme shakes her head, staring at me as if I’ve lost my mind.

  “You’re psychotic,” she says, but she lets me throw my arms around her neck.

  “I’m so sorry. I should have told you. It was a really bad plan,” I say, half sobbing and half laughing with relief.

  My sister lets me hold her for a minute, and then we both sink onto the sand as the rain tumbles down over us.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Esme doesn’t speak to me for most of the journey home, closing her eyes and pretending to be asleep almost as soon as we get inside my car. It’s just as well, as the adrenaline-fueled fight through the waves has left me drained, and I don’t yet know how to form the words I need to say to her.

  We’re on the freeway when my sister opens her eyes again.

  “Where are we going?” she asks quietly, because the gunmetal sky and the rainwater rivers flowing next to the freeway have rendered Southern California unfamiliar, turning it into anywhere else on the planet.

  “Home. I’m taking you home, of course,” I say, and maybe because she knows I don’t have one, she doesn’t argue with me.

  “Do you remember when I used to make up stories about Patrice the mermaid for you when you were a kid?” I ask when we’re almost at my parents’ house.

  Esme is quiet for so long that I think she’s asleep, but after a while she shifts in her seat.

  “Yeah, except I thought Patrice was a pirate,” she says.

  “No! Patrice was a mermaid. She stole from the pirates,” I say, horrified.

  “Doesn’t that make her a pirate too?” Esme is staring at me strangely. “She even had her own ship. Her name is practically an anagram of ‘pirate.’”

  “Patrice used to steal the booty from the pirates to hide in her shipwreck under the ocean,” I say, trying to remember. I shake my head. “Shit, I guess maybe she was a pirate.”

  Esme smiles slightly and closes her eyes again.

  * * *

  • • •

  My parents nearly buckle at the knees when we walk into the house, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on both their faces when they see my sister. Even through the protective shield of my own relief, I understand that I will never be the person to trigger such a simple, primitive response from them—that too much has happened, or hasn’t happened up to this point.

  Esme already seems panicked by the display, frozen in the hallway with her hair hanging in clumps around her shoulders and her mascara smeared down her face in spindly spider legs.

  “What happened to you?” my mom asks, horrified. She turns to me. “What did you do to her?”

  “Mom,” Esme says loudly before she slides down against the wall in the hallway, ending up next to a pile of shoes and the old newspapers my parents keep forgetting to recycle. We all stare down at her, none of us knowing quite what to do with our love for this small, broken girl. I meet my mother’s eyes, and a flash of recognition passes between us.

  My dad steps forward to scoop Esme up, and, to my surprise, she lets him. He walks with her down the hallway to her bedroom, leaving my mother and me alone by the front door. My mom stands with her arms hanging by her sides, like she doesn’t know what to do with them if they’re not reaching for my sister.

  “Thank you for bringing her home,” my mom says quietly, and even though her words are simple, I’m surprised by their force.

  “You’re welcome,” I say, then, after a moment: “You painted the house.”

  “Your father did it after you left,” she says.

  “I kind of miss the pink.”

  “I knew you would say that,” she says. My dad has appeared in the hallway, and my mom turns to him. “I told you she’d say exactly that.”

  “I’m not getting involved,” my dad says, and we all just stand there for a moment because none of us has the energy to keep it going.

  “Is she okay?” my mom asks, making a move toward Esme’s bedroom.

  “We have to let her sleep,” my dad says, gently steering my mother back toward the kitchen.

  We sit down together at the kitchen table, and nobody offers to make tea.

  “Is this about the suspension?” my mom says, staring blankly at me. “Because I can email the school about it. I’m sure it was all a misunderstanding.”

  “Not really,” I say, and maybe it’s cowardly, but right now I can’t handle being the one to tell them that they couldn’t protect their daughter. The thing is, I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to shield them from that very realization, and I suddenly feel exhausted, as if all the years of effort have caught up with me at once. I don’t know how to pretend anymore.

  “I’m so tired,” I say. “I think I have to rest for a while too.”

  “How long is a while?” my mom asks, and both the hopefulness that has crept into her voice and the guilt it elicits are too much for me to bear right now.

  “I don’t know, Mom,” I say, and I start to limp down the hallway to my old room. My parents follow me right up to my bedroom door, and I can hear them hovering in the hallway, between the two rooms, as if they can somehow now protect us both from the intruders and monsters and evil spirits that have already chewed us up and spat us out.

  * * *

  • • •

  My dad brings my dinner to me on the beanbag tray with the spaniels on it, softly knocking before he opens the door and places it at the foot of my bed. On the way out he squeezes my shoulder as he passes, but he doesn’t ask anything of me and for once I’m grateful for it.

  After he’s left, I trail down the hallway to Esme’s room with my tray. I knock before opening the door with some difficulty because of the crutch hanging from my arm.

  My sister is sitting up in bed, eating an identical dinner of grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup, off my mom’s tray with the poppies on it. Her hair is scraped back and she has no makeup on, and she moves her legs slightly so that I can slip onto the foot of her bed like she used to sit on mine when we were kids. The walls of her bedroom are covered with posters of boy bands and Olympic ice-skaters, and there is a framed photo of the four of us at Disneyland on her bedside table. I wonder if I’d been in her bedroom before I left, whether I would have realized how young she still is and have spoken to Mom about what she told me. I like to think it would have changed things,
but it probably wouldn’t.

  “Do you wish you’d killed him?” Esme asks before I’ve swallowed my first mouthful.

  “I don’t know,” I say, trying not to lie to her anymore.

  “They said that if you’d crashed in the tunnel, you would have both been killed instantly,” Esme says, pretending not to look at me.

  “I really didn’t think it through that much,” I say, and she lets out a snort.

  “It’s still raining,” I say, and Esme ignores me, dipping the corner of her sandwich into the soup. “Do you want to talk about what happened at the party?”

  “No,” Esme says through a mouthful of cheese. “I guess it’s like you told me, sometimes the bad guys were always supposed to win.”

  “When I found you, Esme, were you . . . trying to hurt yourself?” I ask, because I have to.

  “I don’t know,” Esme says quietly, taking her mood ring off and turning it over in her fingers. “I don’t think so. I just wanted to feel anything, I guess.”

  “I’m so fucking sorry. I should have stopped you from going to that party.”

  “It’s okay,” Esme says.

  “It’s really not,” I say. “I messed up.”

  “Why are you making this about you?” Esme asks, rolling her eyes.

  “Because I’m your sister,” I say, and I wipe at my eyes roughly with my sleeve, embarrassed. “And I’m an adult and I let you down.”

  “Well, you’re not exactly an adult,” Esme says, shifting a little next to me. “Remember you froze in time when you became famous. So you’re actually younger than me.”

  I smile gratefully at her, and she concentrates on her food for a moment.

  “I did catch their setup on camera,” Esme says dully, after a moment. “They said some pretty enlightening things about me. Really pushed the English language to its limits.”

  I turn to her, something snapping in my chest. “Can I kill them? I will literally kill them if you just say the word. I’ve got money, I can pay someone to do it.”

  Esme looks at me like I’m completely and hopelessly insane, and for just a moment, everything slots perfectly back into how it always was. The moment only passes when I remember that it’s raining outside, and that everything has changed, and that Esme and I will probably always have the scars to prove it, visible or not.

  “I’m so sorry. They’re cretins.”

  Esme closes her eyes.

  “At least you can use that footage for the movie,” I say.

  She opens her eyes for a brief moment before closing them again.

  “There is no movie.”

  “What do you mean? Of course there’s a movie,” I say slowly.

  “There is not going to be a movie,” Esme repeats. Then she raises an eyebrow. “Are you going to the awards?”

  I shrug, but after a moment I shake my head because I don’t want to lie to her again.

  “See? It’s over. All of it,” she says, just before she closes her eyes.

  I think she’s fallen asleep when Esme speaks again, softly. “Grace?”

  “I’m here,” I say.

  “Your apology wasn’t entirely horrible. I think you could be growing up,” she says, and there is a faint shadow of a smile on her face.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  So you were just swimming,” my mother says, frowning at my sister and me over a breakfast of Lucky Charms with diced strawberries.

  “I was just swimming,” Esme says authoritatively.

  “In the torrential rain.”

  “In the torrential rain,” Esme repeats.

  “Like your sister was just driving off a mountain on Christmas Eve.”

  My sister and I exchange a look. I swallow a mouthful of milky, powdered chemicals.

  “Just like that,” I say, shrugging.

  “I don’t know how we raised two such thrill seekers,” my dad says, pouring more cereal into Esme’s bowl, “when I’ve never even smoked a cigarette.”

  There is a long moment of silence before Esme and I start to laugh, and it’s the kind of laughter that comes after a funeral, loud and grateful, checking you’re still alive. While I’m laughing, I have this strange notion that one day we might discover how to stretch time, and if we do, I would be happy to just live this one little moment over and over again.

  “Will you be staying over again tonight, Grace?” my mom asks, once we’ve stopped laughing.

  “I don’t know,” I say, looking down at my hands. “I should probably get back for . . .”

  “Nothing?” Esme says, staring me down.

  “I guess nothing.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I find my dad in the kitchen later, preparing lunch. He’s standing in front of the oven, frowning down at a stick of homemade garlic bread. The outside of the loaf is dark and crispy, but there is a hard lump of butter stuck in between each groove he has made in the baguette.

  “The butter won’t melt,” he says, looking up at me.

  “I think you set it to broil instead of bake,” I say, switching it over. My dad smiles gratefully and I sit on the chair by the window, stretching my bad leg out in front of me.

  “Why didn’t you guys ever make friends here?” I ask.

  My dad breaks the baguette into smaller sections and then puts it back into the oven, burning his hand on the way out. I hear his skin fizzle, but he doesn’t even make a noise. He just walks over to the sink and runs his hand under the cold water.

  “We were at a different stage when we moved here; it gets harder to meet people as you get older. Neither of you were at school in the area, and we couldn’t work at first because of the visas, then your mother just never started up again.” He shrugs. “You know she doesn’t like many people anyway.”

  “How’s she doing?” I ask. “Current drama aside.”

  “Good, actually. She’s started Pilates classes with one of the neighbors. Joined the local theater company against all the odds.”

  “Is she eating more?” I ask my dad.

  “A little more,” he says, shrugging.

  “We’re all going to be okay,” I say, even though we both know that I have no idea.

  “She was upset when you didn’t call,” my dad says, moving his hand from under the tap to open a can of tomatoes. “We both were.”

  “It was only six weeks,” I say, but of course I’m aware that I’m in the wrong. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. We never asked you and your sister to be perfect, but we do need to figure out how we can rub along together as a family. Keep talking, keep moving forward,” he says, emptying the can into a saucepan. “I know it’s not easy coming home.”

  He starts to messily chop an onion. It’s the opposite of watching Emilia cook with her measured movements, each piece of onion precisely the same size and shape as the one next to it. I try not to pull a face when he squeezes a generous portion of tomato ketchup on top of the chopped tomatoes.

  “You know I sometimes catch your mother in here sneaking chocolate and cakes, so maybe it’s just my cooking she doesn’t like,” he says, smiling, and then he puts the knife down and stares at the pile of different-sized onion pieces in front of him.

  “I hate cooking,” he says after a moment, more to himself than to me, and, as I watch him pick the knife back up to start chopping again, I feel a surge of love for him that nearly knocks me over with its force.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  After lunch, I tell my parents that I’m going out for a couple of hours. I hobble to the Ralphs at the end of their street in the rain, my face slick with sweat by the time I reach it. I collect the ingredients I need as quickly and economically as I can, scanning the signs in between the aisles carefully before I commit to anything. Once I’ve paid, I slowly make my way back to my parents’ h
ouse. When I get there I sit on the porch for five minutes, until all signs of pain are erased from my face, and then I let myself in and join my mom and Esme on the sofa.

  We all watch a made-for-TV movie together, and I try to focus on the awful storyline without thinking about Emilia’s fictional vets falling in love with cowboys in Montana. If I stop to think about it, I might have to admit how hurt I am that she hasn’t been in touch. I should have known she wouldn’t believe me for long.

  When I see my dad stand up to head into the kitchen, I stop him.

  “I can make dinner tonight . . . if you want.”

  My parents and sister stare at me as if I’ve just offered to raise, kill and roast a suckling pig for them for dinner with my bare hands.

  “Nothing spectacular, just scrambled eggs,” I say, rolling my eyes. My dad smiles and sinks back into his armchair, relieved.

  “That would be wonderful.”

  Once I’m in the kitchen, I get to work making eggs the way Emilia taught me. I remember how she cracked them softly because it takes less force than you think, and that way you’re less likely to get the gritty fragments of shell in your mixture. I can see the way she spun across the tiled floor of her kitchen to drop the shells in the food disposal and then back to whisk, season and pour the eggs, practically in one seamless movement. She could maintain a conversation with me while she was looking after the girls and cooking, and I still always felt as if I had her undivided attention.

  I toast the bread until it is golden on both sides, then I spread the wafer-thin pieces of butter I’ve already prepared onto each slice. I dish the eggs onto the toast before garnishing each plate with a sprig of parsley and some pine nuts.