I stare out at the long lines of the gray beach unraveled before me. The sky is tall and overcast above a brooding sea of waves, whose withdrawn tide is making the stretch of silvery sand seem endless. It’s chilly and confining in the way only mornings of the last days of summer can be, yet burns with pangs of nostalgia from every end-of-August trip we spent here since we were kids. I wrap my arms around me, but a cool finger finds its way down my back.
“Jane.”
I turn around. She’s walking towards me, her pale face a flag of truce. I watch as it flutters down the slope of sand until it reaches my side, but I say nothing, even when it hovers in surrender in the space between us.
“Jane, come on.” She’s not pleading; she’s making it seem as if the wall I’ve propped up to keep her out has been built on nothing. I could almost laugh. Everything is different now, because of what she did, all in the span of a single moment of a single night. As I continue to look at her, time seems to dance mockingly in the air, throwing us into the present and pulling all the warm memories out of the air as if they never existed at all. Her face has turned haggard, worn, and my hands have become etched with lines I’ve never noticed before. I let out a silent sigh.
She clicks her tongue, sighs, “Fine. Look, I’m leaving in a few minutes.” “Cool. Bye,” I say. I expect her to stiffen, stare at me in disgustedly impatient dismay. But, she doesn’t. She turns to look out at the sea, and I wonder if she sees the same one. It’s starting to roll back in now, in small waves that are whispering up the shore. In another world, that sound would be doing all the speaking for us, repairing our rift, but here, all we share is the reality of two women who don’t know how to talk to each other, who are caught in the cross-hairs of a betrayal for one, and a perceived gesture of help for the other.
She exhales, “I did what needed to be done.”
I shift, but say nothing.
“I gave you a chance, okay, to tell them. I told you I would, if you didn’t. You didn’t. So I did.”
Her words draw circles in the sand, empty and temporary as the castles we once built. I can almost see us working on one not far from where we stand, but from here, I don’t know those moments anymore. It’s as if they belong to someone else, now.
“You shouldn’t have said anything,” I finally say. Her voice is louder now, almost exasperated, “I was trying to help!” I turn to her and scoff, “Oh? And you help by…giving threats and ultimatums?” I could almost laugh when I look at her. Her eyes are wide and afraid, her hands are open and helpless at her sides. Like she’s the victim here, like she’s the one needs rescuing. I snort, shake my head at her, “You don’t fucking get it.” “Then help me to understand,” she said, “I want to understand why you do…it.” I shake my head, and the wall hardens around me, “Yeah? Where was this last night? Where was this when you found out last week?” I look at her almost with pity, “Don’t act like you’re coming from a good place. You fucked me over, and now you wanna be the sympathetic ear? Fuck you.”
She stares at me, waffling between that irritatingly naive ingenue waif, and wanting to grow ten feet and yell at me. But she does neither. She deflates. She pulls the flag from her face and throws it to the ground, in a startlingly intense moment of finality. I could almost feel guilty, sad, and a small part of me wants to reach out desperately and try to…fix this, communicate, not let this wall reach up to the cold, gray sky. “Fine,” she says, “Then I’m done. I tried to help you. But clearly, you don’t get that.” And clearly, you don’t get it either, I think to myself. Addiction isn’t something that can just be thrown onto the dinner table like a meal, sliced into, divvied up, and discussed to see which wines would pair with it best. It’s fiercely personal, it’s mine, it’s moments of dark and secret places that no one knows but me. And she put it on a pan, ran down to the kitchen, and plopped it onto the table like a Christmas ham. But here we are, stuffed from the pain of it, and hungover from the emotions. I realize, even with her being my sister, I don’t want this. Not for a long, long time.
“I hope you figure it out,” she says. I turn to her, almost chuckling, “Yeah. I hope you do, too.”
She walks back up the beach, her back to me and the sea and the sand. Her feet hit the wood of the boardwalk entrance, and then, the hard pavement beyond. Then, she’s gone. I stay where I am, the coolness of the sand having never felt more soothing than now. I start to walk towards the water. The sand becomes firmer. The wetness of it just barely curls around the bottoms of my feet, peeks in between my toes, and as I close my eyes, I can almost feel solace. I reach the water. It circles around my ankles and for a moment, I feel like I'm reclining into its briny bath. I open my eyes. All I can see now is the horizon, and here I stay, waiting for the sun.
No comments:
Post a Comment