My mother and I had a fight before I got on the plane. She left Florida years ago, as soon as we finished high school. She lives in Texas now with a rich man who in his one short life has managed to marry four wives and produce six daughters, remaining friends with all of them. We used to visit her for the holidays, before Jody got married. Both Jody and I found comfort in Texas, I think, in the sheer force of the rich man’s wives and daughters and the magnificent examples of their labour. The Christmas tree touched the ceiling and the surfaces were so clean they seemed to shimmer. The house stunk of perfume and masked any human scent. The cut flowers were pumped with sugar water so they were preserved perfectly in the moment of their decapitation. The dogs were small and quiet as toys. There was so much decoration, distraction, but we always ended up somewhere, the three of us, clustered around the kitchen island or huddled on the couch. Music played loudly and there were so many people, so many voices saying the appropriate lines, that the three of us did not have to talk. Sometimes I think my sister, my mother and I are like one body. My distance from them causes me physical pain, but it is terrible to try to cross it with words. Only when we stand together, close and silent, do I feel whole, and also terrified, because eventually one of us is going to have to speak or move and ruin everything.

  My mother agrees that the past is dangerous, which is why she does not understand why Jody is still in Florida, or why I am going to visit her there. She does not understand why none of us talk, except for these strained phone calls where none of us can seem to lie to each other enough to keep a conversation going.

  ‘You idolise something that did not exist,’ she said when I called her at the airport. Planes carved their way through the sky. ‘You were miserable children and made my life hell. Why are you acting like your childhood was some glorious place to run back to?’

  I hung up on her, because there is no point engaging when she begins to ask questions. My mother is an efficient dictator in her middle age. Her questions are rhetorical and responses will result in excommunication.

  Still, a message bloomed before I switched my phone to airplane mode.

  Fly safe, she wrote, followed by a tiny emoji of an airplane and a yellow face blowing a red heart like a bubble of gum. I sent a heart back.

  If I remind my mother of something she has said to me in the past, her answer is always the same: I never said that. I used to be amazed at her self-deception, but now I see I am exactly the same. I used to think people only lied to make their lives mean something. Now I think people lie to make their lives meaningless, because it makes them so much easier to live.

  ‘How can you say that to me?’ Luke said before I left. He was sitting on my suitcase to make it shut while I tugged at the zipper, my head next to the stringy waistband of his boxers. It was a less dignified position than I would have liked us to assume for this scene, which I would have summarised as leaving the asshole love of my life. I hated how tragedy always turned to comedy in the last act.

  ‘Say what?’ I said. ‘I haven’t said anything.’

  I recognised his wide eyes, the look my mother used to give to Jody and me when we were cruel to her, when we pretended we did not love her to make her cry.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ I snapped.

  ‘You just said that you never loved me,’ he said. ‘You say things like they mean nothing and then pretend you didn’t even say them.’

  This was true, and also, exactly like my mother. I did not want to admit this, so I left.

  When I get off the plane, the air is hot and still, like a person standing too close. I gulp it into my lungs, feeling it weigh down my whole body. I am so relieved that I feel tears itching at my eyes, to feel warmth flow through me, to feel myself expand with heat. I can’t believe I have spent so long trying to live through winter. Why would anyone choose a life where it’s cold? I take the shuttle to the main terminal. Through the windows, lush green bursts out in carefully manicured pockets, dotted along the tangle of highways, the shiny stretches of car showrooms, the terracotta-coloured outlet malls. We slip past billboards. There is an anti-abortion one, a white baby and a black baby smiling gummily, a fake X-ray image over their chests revealing two grey hearts. Our hearts are beating at six weeks!, the board reads beneath in bright red writing. The next one encourages visitors to Get Up Close and Personal with the Ocean. There is a picture of a blonde girl resting her forehead against a dolphin’s, her eyes closed in seeming romantic ecstasy. The next one simply reads, Your Wife’s Hot, Better Get the A/C Fixed, with a 1-800 number. I feel the weight of my phone in my pocket. I immediately want to send photos of these to Luke, and I think how ridiculous that is, that I’ve spent five years of my life valuing everything I see in terms of how much enjoyment he will get out of it, constantly sending him dumb reminders to love me. I close my eyes.

  I had always thought love was supposed to make you selfless, but it made me ridiculously vain.

  When we started dating, everything I did that had seemed normal, even dirty, became charmed overnight. My sock drawer, my chipped nail polish, my bad singing voice, eating dinner in bed. All these facts about myself that had rattled around inside me unnoticed were suddenly his to witness. To be loved was just to be watched, or in my case, to imagine you are loved is to imagine you are watched all the time. I preened. I strutted. I imagined he was obsessed with me and so I was obsessed with myself.

  The stupid thing was I didn’t think about him at all, except once, maybe, right at the end, when I rearranged the living room. I was convinced I could remake our life if I moved the couch far enough from where it usually sat. I shoved the couch out from the wall and screamed. There was a white pile caught up in the carpet. I thought they were maggots, but they were so still. I crouched down. When I got closer, I saw they were fingernail clippings, five years’ worth of fingernail clippings dropped behind the couch, chewed off and discarded back there without me noticing, forming this impressive mound. I hadn’t even realised he bit his nails. It seemed the first true thing I knew about him. I left them there. The couch stayed where it was.

  It was all a lie, which was a relief, in a way, but it still makes me feel like vomiting.

  He went to visit his younger brother in college, went to some party and slept with a girl in her senior year of high school, someone’s sister. I only found out because the girl messaged me to tell him to please stop messaging her. I looked through her pictures, found the night in question, saw her, a girl in short-shorts, hair as healthy as a horse’s tail, a video of her dancing. She danced the way teenagers dance now, barely moving, their wrists, heads, hips juddering in apathetic zigzags.

  Can you make him stop? she wrote. It’s creeping me out.

  Underneath, she wrote, sorry btw.

  I found the apology moving. I said it to myself aloud, like a mantra against the bad thoughts crashing against my brain. Sorry btw. Sorry btw. The btw. She could have gotten away with saying nothing, but she remembered my feelings in the end.

  He did not say sorry.

  ‘She’s psychotic,’ he said, when I showed him the message. First, he denied it. Then, he admitted to the sex but denied the messages. Finally, he said it was her who started it.

  ‘She’s eighteen,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t, like, weird.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘Mh-mhm,’ I said. I felt like a therapist assuring him I was listening. ‘Mh-mhm, mhm-mhm,’ I said. Eventually, I liked the sound of the mh-mhm’s more than what he was saying, that this flimsy love, three thrown-out sounds, was what I had sacrificed my life for. I started mh-mhm’ing louder and louder, until I was screaming at him.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he said.

  I told him about finding the fingernails.

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ I said.

  ‘That was you,’ he said. ‘You bite your nails and then you’re too lazy to get up to throw the pieces away. I see you do it all the time.’

  He held up his hand.

  His nails were long and beautifully mooned.

  I looked at my own.

  The nails were ragged and torn, soft and chewy.

  Somehow, this relieved me.

  ‘I never loved you,’ I said. This was not true, exactly. I loved his body, that soft, familiar sack. How many times had I burrowed into him, wishing only to be smaller, to chisel myself down until, cell-like, I could slip inside him? I did not love the stranger he turned out to be, but I loved the parts of him he had no control over, his bones, the way he moved. I called all the girls, seeking refuge, a quick escape. I sent old pictures of us, our glossy arms around each other, hair ties burrowed into our wrists. They wrote, Aw. They wrote, I miss you. I called and they did not answer. They had families, jobs, and lives. I called Jody last, the same meanness in me, or fear, of never picking her first. ‘You’re the only one who ever really loved me, aren’t you?’ I cried, drunk into my phone, curled on the couch while Luke snored on the bed. She didn’t say anything for a long time. I became angrier, wondering why she couldn’t be the kind of sister to tell me things were okay, that I was amazing and he was a douchebag, why we couldn’t laugh or reassure each other that life and people were ultimately good. But none of the women in my family think this. Finally, she coughed, awkwardly, and invited me to come over. ‘I have something to show you,’ she said. ‘The baby?’ I said. She’d had a baby not long before. I tried to sound more excited, like that was why I had called. ‘The baby!’ I cried. ‘Of course!’ ‘Not the baby,’ she said. I was relieved. I booked a ticket straight away.

  I walk out of the airport. The heat is thick and uncomfortable, like the air is made of Styrofoam.

  Jody is directly outside the doors. When she sees me, she screams, runs out of the car and throws her arms around me. We are the same height but she tucks her head down like a turtle so it is pressed into my neck. She smells slightly expired, a smell I’ve noticed on all people with babies.

  I go rigid in her arms, and then try to overcompensate by swooping my arms around her too tightly. I did not expect her to hug me. ‘Hey,’ she says, pushing me back to arm’s length. We hold the pose a second longer until it feels false. I’m relieved when she lets go of me to take my suitcase and strides over to the back of the car.

  It has been five years since I have seen her, five years since I have been my actual self, an unloved, alone person. I slide into the SUV and slump into the seat. There is an open can of iced tea in the cupholder, a few brown envelopes, a cell phone. I look back. A baby stares at me, his eyes a deep gold beneath a thick crown of black hair. I realise with a shot of cold horror that I’ve completely forgotten his name. She did not tell my mother or me that she was pregnant and we’ve hardly spoken since he was born. I did send her a cheap teddy bear from my mother and me, a clear plastic cover over the chest revealing a light-up heart inside it. I knew she would hate it.

  ‘I’m an auntie!’ I say. I reach back toward the baby, but do not know what to do with my hand when it arrives close to him. I pause, then tap him on the knee, and a thought appears whole in my mind, one that is summoned without my control or consent, she is my sister before she is your mother, and she belongs to me. He does not start to cry, even though the tap is more of a knock. I withdraw my hand quickly, embarrassed, and turn around.

  ‘You want to pick something to listen to?’ Jody says. She has put on sunglasses which is a relief. I don’t want to think about how our faces have changed.

  ‘The radio’s fine,’ I say. I lean over and turn it up. She’s concentrating on getting out into the mania of the lanes. I wind down my window slightly to feel the trash-infused air blow past my face. At least this is familiar.

  Jody has been a great driver since she was thirteen, and our mother used to get her to park the car when we had dinner at the mall food court and she drank too many beers. Jody veers between lanes, one hand on the wheel, the other used for taking slugs of the can of iced tea. I am relieved that she has not asked me about my flight or how I am, and then as the silence continues, I am offended she hasn’t.

  ‘How are you?’ I say, finally, as we soar past a steakhouse, an indoor skating rink, a giant grocery store, a pastel yellow motel claiming, We’re Cheap and Discreet. A homeless man sits beneath a traffic light in a camping chair, holding a cardboard sign reading, There Is No Ocean In Ocean World.

  ‘Oh, I’m okay,’ she says. ‘I’m excited you’re here.’

  I think she is going to tell me how lonely she is, how glad she is to see me, how much she loves me. Perhaps she will share her own tale of heartbreak and woe. Postpartum blues. An impending divorce. Perhaps her husband also fucked a senior in high school. Maybe even a junior. I feel my old beautiful feathers rustle and puff up a little, see myself in the wing mirror, ready to pity her. I smile. My greasy hair! The bags under my eyes! The sauce stain on my shirt! Charming, beautiful, loved by at least somebody.

  ‘I’ve found something in the lake,’ she says. ‘I told the girls, too, but none of them would come see it. Can you believe that? Not one of them. They all think I’m crazy. But I’ve been watching it.’

  The baby begins to cry.

  Even his cry is weirdly beautiful, plaintive as a pop ballad.

  She leans over and turns up the radio to drown him out, and then reaches over to grab my hand. I notice her nails are long. They dig into my hand like someone trying to hang onto a cliff.

  ‘I knew you’d understand,’ she says.

  My hand is limp and unenthused, toeing her over the edge.

  ‘I might have to leave tomorrow,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. Work’s really crazy, I just came—’

  ‘It’s okay, we’ll go see it tonight,’ she says.

  I drop her hand. I have ignored her weird messages for a long time, although she has started sending them more frequently over the past year. Long links that take up the whole of my phone screen directing me to incomprehensible forums with names like, ‘The Truth About Bigfoot’. Expired video links, blurry photos. I used to send back thumbs-up emojis without looking at them. I remember my mother forwarding me one of these messages, asking me to speak to Jody about it, explaining that she wasn’t answering my mother’s calls, but I did not. I did what I always did, which was to disappear for a few months, then text, miss you!!!!! with no explanation. I used exclamation points instead of excuses. Perhaps this is why I haven’t made any friends since I was thirteen, and technically, they were my sister’s friends anyway.

  The baby’s cry harmonises the disco beat of the song. Jody starts to sing over it, too, making up words and notes.

  The whole plane ride I had prepared my spiel about the tragedy of my life. I was sure she’d be fascinated but I have forgotten that she has never been fascinated by me, and that no one is fascinated by someone who is alone.

  She looks at me, wriggles her sunglasses, as if daring me to join in her song.

  What the hell? I think. I do. I go low when she goes high. I warble when she belts. We always used to sing together. I still can’t believe how wonderful I thought we always sounded, doing performances for our mother, until we applied to be on a reality show when we were teenagers and our mother had to tell us that we could not sing. We still sound beautiful to me, so loud and determined. The baby stops crying and listens, eyeing us warily. The city streams past us, the endless palms and suburbs. I stick my hand out of the window and hold the air, squeeze it like a stress ball. I want the drive to last forever, for us to be suspended in this singing, the baby silent, but then we’re turning into her house, and her stepdaughter is sitting on the driveway, throwing a tennis ball against the garage door. There is a stand-off as Jody honks the horn and turns in, but the girl doesn’t move. I’m surprised at how far Jody noses the front of the car, almost against the girl’s back, until the girl gets up and throws out both middle fingers, her whole face taut with fury. The girl runs away into the house. The baby starts to cry again.

  ‘He’s like a weathervane for feelings,’ Jody says, getting out of the car and hoisting him out of the backseat like he’s a grocery bag. ‘And I’m always pissed off.’

  The house is designed in the way of old Florida houses to be as dark as possible. The blinds are down and brown linoleum puffs up under my bare feet. By the door, there is a pile of shoes, and the floor beneath is covered in grey grit, relics from beach days. The furniture is mostly dark wood, chipped, missing knobs or panels, and full of plastic cups, dishes, newspapers, wires, grocery bags. Socks, notebooks, flashcards, receipts, coins are littered along the hallway. I notice a few curled shells of dead roaches in the carpet borders. There is a specifically Floridian smell, the stink of America (microwaved plastic, air freshener, hot oil) mixed with mildew and something else, something ancient, rotting, and sweaty, possibly life. I want to lie down in the hallway and close my eyes. The smell is so familiar it’s like I’m rocking back in the womb.

  I follow Jody into the kitchen. She immediately fetches two wine glasses, retrieves a half-full bottle of yellowish wine from the side of the fridge, and pours two glasses. The baby seems to accept his fate to be bounced around as long as he is close to her. A laptop is open on the counter, surrounded by what looks like a child’s homework. I recognise the careful date in the corner. Jody opens the computer, types, then swings the screen around to face me.

  The video is called ‘Unidentified Florida Object’. She presses play.

  I watch, pick up my wine.

  There is a family, passing around a camcorder and waving, the footage grainy, flashes of sunlight intermittently clouding the shot. They are backing up a boat toward a lake.

  The shot is terrible, the camcorder having been handed to the little girl, who is swinging it around and making the landscape swirl. Still, I notice the beige towers, the fertiliser factory, the wide black expanse of water, completely still.

  ‘Is that—?’ I say, but I feel stupid for asking. It obviously is.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17