by Lily Summers
A wave of nostalgia washes over me so strongly that for a second I think I might vomit. This is why I haven’t come back. If I tilt my head and squint my eyes, it’s like nothing’s changed at all. I’ll walk through the door and Iris will come bounding down the hall to throw her arms around me.
But everything’s changed, and Iris is gone, gone, gone.
I touch one of the dahlias. Its petals are soft and dewy under my fingers, and I’m tempted to crush its beauty out of existence. Before my fist closes, I back away and turn to the door.
My hand lingers in midair over the knocker. I consider turning around and driving directly back to Portland, pretending I was never here, but I have to stay. The wound Iris left is infected and aching, and I need to scald the rot out of it. What better place to do that than by walking directly back into the fire?
I hit the knocker one, two, three times, and wait.
My mother answers almost immediately, which catches me off guard. I thought for sure she’d be barely awake, but she’s dressed in a tracksuit and running shoes, her gray-streaked hair tied back in a ponytail. Her face looks drawn and tired, but when she realizes it’s me, her eyes go wide in surprise.
“Hi, Mom,” I say.
In place of an answer, she crosses the threshold and pulls me into a tight hug. I don’t react right away, mostly because I’m confused about why she’s dressed like a jogger, but then I wrap my arms under hers and bury my face against her shoulder. A cavern opens up inside me and my sadness starts spilling into it like a waterfall. It’s all I can do to keep from slumping against her.
Then she lets me go and I pull myself together.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” Mom says. “I’d have laid out breakfast.”
“Sorry. I should have called.”
She reaches out to touch my chin, her fingertips barely grazing my face. When I look at her, I can see wrinkles that weren’t there before and a mouth that smiles far less frequently than it used to.
That’s my fault, too. Mom and Dad never say as much, but I feel like they must blame me for bringing Damien into our lives at least as much as I blame myself.
Guilt is thick and bitter on my tongue.
“Come inside,” Mom says, stepping aside and waving me in. “I’ll make tea.”
As I walk into the foyer, I’m frozen in place. It’s like a time capsule of before. Everything looks and feels exactly the same as it always has. A familiar scent washes over me – candles that my mother buys from a vendor at the holiday craft fair every year. It’s cranberry and something herbal. It’s so completely normal that it reminds me how far from normal we are.
Nothing’s changed except for the Iris-sized hole in our lives. It’s the hole I’ve been trying to avoid all this time because I don’t know what’s on the other side.
My heart clenches in my chest.
My mom doesn’t notice, so she walks through the kitchen’s archway like nothing’s wrong. I put my things down, take a deep breath that feels like it stabs between every rib on the way in, and follow her.
Mom stands on tiptoe to pull down a box of tea from the cupboard. While her back’s to me, I sink down into a chair and clench my jaw shut. I’m worried that if I don’t, everything will come spilling out until I’m a howling mess.
I glance around nervously. The same knick-knacks are lining the shelf above the cupboards, and the same mega-old rotary phone is hanging on the wall by my dad’s beat-up work desk in the corner. It’s so strange how the more your childhood home stays the same, the more out of place you feel when you come back. Or maybe that’s just me.
“You didn’t answer when we called for your birthday last weekend,” Mom says, bringing me back to myself.
I put my hands on my legs, digging into the fabric of my jeans until I feel nails against my skin. “I was working, and then I forgot to call back. Besides, twenty-two isn’t a big deal.”
It’s true. No one cares about turning twenty-two, and we’re avoiding the real issue. I’m not sure what I expected. To pick up right where we left off before I moved to Portland? I’ve been gone too long. The sadness in my mother’s eyes makes guilt swirl in my stomach.
The kettle whistles and Mom goes to get it, bringing mugs and tea along with it when she returns to the table. She pours us both a cup and I inhale mine before sipping. Peppermint. That’s welcome, since I was such a mess when I left that I forgot to brush my teeth.
“We’ve really missed you,” Mom says. She’s holding her mug in both hands and staring down into it like it’s going to tell her fortune. “It’s been too long.”
I gulp too much tea and burn my mouth. That’s just as well, since a million questions and sorrows are threatening to spill off my tongue. Sorry, Mom, I let someone in and he plastered Iris all over a gallery wall. Can you forgive me for letting another one of my boyfriends near her?
When I can speak again, all I can say is, “I know, I’ve been busy with work.”
She shakes her head and looks at me with tired eyes. “Your dad and I really needed you this year. You’re all we have left.”
“Don’t say that, Mom.” I press my palms against my mug, ignoring how much it burns.
“It’s the truth, Mia, and I’m sorry you don’t want to hear it. We’ve been waiting for you to come back one month, any month, so that we can go visit Iris as a family.”
I scrunch my eyes shut and turn my head away. I knew this would happen. To be honest, I need this to happen. I’ve been running away like a coward when I should have been here dealing with the guilt and the pain. I deserve all of it and worse. It’s because of me that she’s gone. It probably should have been me, but it wasn’t. I’m still here, and abandoning my family in their time of need was self-serving. Another thing to add to my tally of misdeeds.
Mom let’s me breathe for a few seconds before she starts in again. “This is hard on all of us. She was our baby, my baby.”
“I know,” I say, my voice tiny.
She leans forward to put her hand on my forearm. “And so are you. I need to have you in my life, sweetheart. What’s kept you away?”
I push away my mug and slump back in my chair. I don’t want to talk about this, but Mom’s not going to let it go. Not while she has me cornered.
“She was in the car that night because she wanted to talk to me, and I was too angry to let her. It’s my fault. I thought that you shouldn’t have to be around me.” I stare at the floor, my throat aching with unshed tears. There it is. The truth.
Mom blinks too much and I realize she’s trying to hold back tears of her own. She opens her mouth to say something and thinks better of it. Instead, she stands, gathers up our mugs, and dumps them in the sink. She turns on the water to start washing. My compulsion for cleaning things when I’m trying to avoid a hard conversation didn’t come from nowhere.
She’s only a few seconds into washing a mug when she drops in into the sink and turns off the water. She leans against the counter with her head bowed. When she looks back at me, a tear rolls down her cheek and she brushes it away.
“Mia, do you think your father and I haven’t spent the last year wondering what we did wrong?” she asks softly.
I don’t understand, so I shake my head. The lump in my throat isn’t letting me speak.
“Every day for weeks after the accident, we would look at old family pictures and ask ourselves what we could have done differently to prevent it. We were torturing ourselves, and it wasn’t healthy.”
“Mom,” I say, my voice cracking.
She comes closer and takes my hand. “There’s nothing we could have done, and there’s nothing you could have done, either. We don’t blame you, honey. It breaks my heart to know you ever thought we would.”
I lift Mom’s hand to my mouth and squeeze my eyes shut. “If I’d only come home a day later like I was supposed to, she’d still be alive.”
“There’s no way to know that,” Mom says. “I’m not going to pretend to know what happened t
hat night, but you have to forgive yourself. We all have to forgive each other.”
“I’m not upset at you and Dad,” I say.
“That’s not who I’m talking about,” she says. “Damien stopped by the other day. He said he tried to get in touch with you.”
My blood goes cold in my veins, making me tense up.
“I don’t want to talk about Damien,” I say, folding my arms tightly around myself.
“He came here to ask for our forgiveness as part of his program. We gave it to him.”
I look into her face, my jaw slack in shock. When I regain my composure, I sputter, “Why? How could you?”
She tries to squeeze my hand tighter, but I pull it away. “It’s not for him,” she says. “It’s for us. The anger and pain has been eating us from the inside out. Your father hasn’t slept through the night since the accident. Forgiving Damien gave us the closure we needed because we didn’t have to hate him or ask ‘what if’ anymore. It was time.”
I stand up, the chair screeching against the tile as it slides back. “Not for me. I’m going to my room. I need some sleep. Thank you for making tea.”
As I leave the kitchen, she says, “I love you.”
My feet cement themselves to the floor and I turn back to look at her. A small smile plays at her lips even as another tear gathers itself on her lashes.
“I’m never letting you walk away from me again without telling you so,” she says.
My throat hurts something awful. I think of how I never got the chance to tell Iris that I loved her, that she was always the most important person in my world, no matter what. I can’t let that happen again, so I manage to say, “I love you, too.”
I drag my duffle bag down the hall toward my room. Not sleeping last night is catching up with me, and my body aches down to the marrow of my bones. Photographs line the walls of the hallway and I keep my eyes forward so I don’t have to look at them. It’s not as if they aren’t burned into my mind’s eye, anyway.
My room feels stale, the way it always did every time I came home from school. There’s a lingering smell of little girl perfume and strawberry chapstick that I’ve never quite been able to air out, and my walls are still covered in high school class pictures and experimental sketches of cartoon characters and crushes. I drop my things and walk to my bed, picking up an old fluffy blue pillow and squeezing it.
There’s one more thing to do before I’ll let myself sleep. The wound inside me is aching, and I’m pretty sure the only way past the pain is to go through it.
I toss the pillow aside and walk to the room next door.
Iris’s door is closed, still sporting all sorts of band stickers and cutout letters. Dad yelled at her for an hour about how they’d have to replace the door if we ever moved.
My fingers brush the doorknob, and I can’t tell if the metal’s cold or if my fingers are freezing. The door whispers over the plush carpet, the same way it did for every midnight conversation. My entire body feels weak and brittle, as if I’ll shatter to pieces once I step inside.
But if I have to break apart to rebuild, then that’s what I’ll do.
If my room’s a time capsule of my childhood, Iris’s is a time capsule of the night she died. Everything is exactly as she left it, down to the dresses piled up on the floor near her closet, tried on but never rehung. I don’t think Mom or Dad have even been in here. It’s like a shrine.
My breath catches in my throat and lodges there like a chunk of ice, choking me. I can’t help but think of how that pile is probably from that night. How hours before she lay broken in a wrecked car, these clothes were pressed against her still-warm body as she admired herself in the mirror to figure out which one made her look the best.
I take another step into the room.
There’s a very faint odor of weed beneath the scent of Nag Champa incense, reminding me how very eighteen she was. I picture her smoking on the floor beside her bed and hiding the ashtray beneath her side table.
Another step.
Unlike my room, where posters and photos and sketches are taped directly to the wall every which way, Iris used frames to create a matrix of imagery on her wall. It’s symmetrical, showing off ticket stubs in shadow boxes and framed pictures of her with friends, with Mom and Dad, with me.
There’s one of the two of us when we were twelve and fourteen directly in the center. We’re wearing swimsuits and smiling in the sun, the light highlighting our identical wet curls.
One more step.
Something cracks under my foot. In slow motion, I pick it up.
It’s a plastic jewel ring, the kind that you get out of the quarter machines at movie theaters or arcades at kids’ restaurants. The jewel is purple, and a piece of the band is missing, broken from when I stepped on it.
My hand shakes. I recognize it, because I had a dozen rings just like this before I threw them all away.
Damien bought one for me every time he saw those machines.
In an instant, my breastbone feels cracked open, my sorrow and guilt spilling out of me with every beat of my heart like blood. I clutch the ring to my chest and curve my body around it, sob after sob tearing its way out of me.
“I’m sorry,” I cry, the room swallowing my words.
I am so sorry.
26
Before
Damien’s going to be so surprised. I can’t wait.
I was supposed to come home for my birthday three weeks ago, but a last-minute pop-up art show I volunteered for kept me too busy. Since I have Fridays off from classes, I told him I was coming home for a long weekend.
Except I ditched my last Thursday class and I’m coming home a night early to surprise everyone.
I haven’t been home since the beginning of the semester. Maintaining a long-distance relationship has been so hard, but we make it work. Everyone kept telling me that a summer fling would never last, yet here we are three years later, still going strong. Kimber thinks I’m nuts to date a boring business major when there are so many cute artists at school, but I wouldn’t trade Damien for the world. He understands when I need to sit and sketch leaves in the park for hours so I can get them just right. Besides, no one else’s dimples make me melt the way his do.
I fiddle with the plastic ring on my pinky finger as I drive. This one’s orange. It’s such a goofy little thing, but it reminds me that he’s thinking of me, even when I’m not here.
When I pull into the driveway, I can already tell no one’s home. The lights are all out, even though it’s only 7:30. Iris got her acceptance to U-Dub last spring and started her first semester a few months back, so she’s at the dorms. Mom and Dad are probably having a date night. No problem. I just needed to pick up Damien’s key.
It feels like it takes forever to get to his place, despite Maple Valley being pretty much a suburban ghost town after seven o’clock on a weekday. The parking lot of his complex is absolutely packed, and if the thumping music is any indication, it’s because someone’s having a rager.
My heart’s going a mile a minute as I climb the stairs to his floor, and it’s not because I’m out of shape. I have to dodge around a couple making out, which would normally annoy me, but this time I smile. I’m going to be doing that very soon, I hope.
People are spilling out from the apartment across the hall from Damien’s. That’s clearly the eye of the storm. Damien loves scenes like this and I wonder if he’s in the crowd somewhere. Either way, I don’t do crowds, so I’ll wait for him inside. Maybe I can even make myself comfortable in the wink-wink nudge-nudge kind of way.
I unlock his deadbolt and slip inside. The music from the party is barely muffled by his door, and there are a few empty beer bottles on his counter, along with several cups. Looks like people were in and out of here, too.
There’s a noise from his bedroom and I can’t help but grin. Good, he’s home.
I’m walking toward the room when I hear another noise, one that confuses the hell out of me because it so
unds an awful lot like a girl laughing.
I stop in my tracks.
That can’t be right.
There it is again, and it’s definitely feminine. He must be watching a video. He has to be.
Even though my brain’s trying to convince me nothing’s wrong, a sick feeling starts to twist in my gut.
I take the last few steps and open the bedroom door.
There’s a gasp.
It takes me a few seconds to really register what I’m seeing. Damien’s shirtless and disheveled, blinking at me like a deer in headlights. The girl next to him is down to her underwear, her polka dot bra half covered by her hands.
I recognize that bra. I’ve changed next to the owner of that bra a hundred times.
“Mia,” Iris says, her eyes wide with shock and her hair standing out every which way. “Oh God.”
Oh God.
The excitement that’s been buzzing in my veins for the better part of a day turns sour, digging claws into every nerve until I want to scream. Nothing about this is right. I try to say something, but my mouth won’t work. All I know is my hands are cold, shaking, aching to lash out. Iris committed an ultimate betrayal of sisterhood in the most literal sense, and she may as well have gutted me. My brain can’t compensate for this. It can’t make up a pretty little story for why my sister is in my boyfriend’s room in her underwear. There’s only one answer.
I turn on my heel and I run. On the way out, I hit a chair, hard, but the sharp sting across my leg doesn’t even slow me down.
There are too many goddamn people in this hall. I push past them, through them. A drink spills all over me, someone’s yelling, it doesn’t matter. It’s all a blur.
My boyfriend’s screwing my little sister, and I need to be as far away from them both as possible.
I can feel the tears building up inside, pressing against the walls of my body, but I’m too angry to cry. I’ll cry later.
I’m halfway across the parking lot when Iris catches up to me, her fingers tangling in my sleeve. I jerk my arm away and whirl on her, my teeth bared.
“Mia, wait, this is a misunderstanding,” Iris says. At least she put her dress back on before following me. Her curls are sticking out every which way and her skirt’s all crooked. She’s so beautiful, and I hate her.