How to End a Love Story(101)
Mom had shown her how to use chopsticks to mix up the eggs and cake flour, introducing her to the concept of bonding agents and chemistry, and she had sat cross-legged in front of the oven as delicious, golden-brown, sweet smells filled the air. This is what it feels like to be truly happy, she remembers thinking, and Helen wonders if some part of her remembers this feeling every time she walks past the boxed cake mixes in the grocery store and doesn’t buy them.
Something flickers in Mom’s expression when Helen asks if she can bring some of the cake back to her Airbnb host, but Mom just sniffs and says, “Suit yourself.”
She moves off to hand wash all the dishes and place them in the dishwasher for storage, and Helen sits with her cake and tea across from Dad as he frowns at things on his phone. After she finishes her tea, she goes to the kitchen and starts toweling off the cups that Mom is setting down.
“You don’t have to do that,” Mom says.
“When has that ever stopped you,” Helen answers, and she thinks she almost catches a smile at the very corner of Mom’s mouth.
They clean in silence and finally Mom gets out a stepstool. Helen tries to do it for her but Mom insists—“I know where everything is”—and pulls down their old Tupperware from the top cabinets.
“Why do you put stuff you need so high out of reach?” Helen marvels, and Mom lets out a soft “ha” to herself.
“We need a lot of things, and there isn’t enough space for everything to be convenient,” she says. “I get them when I need them.”
Helen thinks sometimes Mom sounds like she’s talking in metaphors, but the Tupperware is thoroughly rinsed and carefully dried with a paper towel before Mom cuts off a large chunk of the cake.
“For your Airbnb host,” Mom says, her eyes blinking rapidly.
Helen feels like she wants to cry just then, thinking suddenly of all the fruit and cake and sugar they’ve exchanged over the years instead of I’m sorry and I love you, and she excuses herself to use the restroom before she gets on the road.
When she arrives back in her temporary bedroom, she puts on her favorite stolen T-shirt (she has a flannel button-up he left at her apartment too, but she didn’t pack it) and brushes her teeth.
As she crawls into the creaky bed, she thinks about that old haunted hard drive and ugly last words she can’t delete.
Sometimes I wish you weren’t my sister.
If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have one.
Helen thinks of what she’d say to Michelle if they could have one more conversation, now. They wouldn’t linger on the past. She would tell her about Dad and how she’s worried about him getting older. She’d tell her about Mom snubbing her cupcakes, and Michelle would say that bitch while rolling her eyes. Helen would admit she didn’t go upstairs to pay her respects this trip, and examine the strangeness of wanting to apologize for that. She’d tell Michelle about Grant, and ask her sister if she thought she’d fucked up horribly where he was concerned, and Michelle would say, yes, obviously, and I forgive you for fucking him so many times and falling in love with him.
Maybe not that last part.
Helen opens Facebook on her phone and scrolls back through her old profile pictures, watching herself age in reverse until she lands on one of the earliest photos, from 2007. Her own too-thin eyebrows and aggressive side bangs greet her, and her head is tilted, pressed against her sister’s. Michelle wears impressively applied winged eyeliner, considering it was an age before beauty tutorials and YouTube. Her hair is piled into a ponytail at the top of her head, and she still looks so cool. Helen wears a cardigan and pearls in the photo, and she vaguely recalls them snapping this before heading out the door to her National Honor Society induction ceremony.
That had been a promising day that had soured at dinner, she remembers, when Michelle had gotten into a fight with Mom and Dad because of something she said to their waitress. Helen had been pissed at her little sister for always finding a way to make things about her. But she’d still made the photo her profile picture, because she had liked the way her cheekbones looked.
I miss you, she thinks, and it doesn’t feel as unbearable to admit anymore.
Helen takes a deep breath and does the only thing that seems to make sense now.
She opens the notes app on her phone and starts typing.
Dear Michelle,
She pauses and tries to think of how to continue.
How to address her dead little sister, after all this time.
Dear Michelle,
You dumbass idiot.
No. That’s more likely how Michelle would respond. Helen laughs at her phone screen—it sounds strange in this cold, empty room, devoid of even the hope of old, familiar ghosts—and she starts over.
Dear Michelle,
It’s been a minute . . .
Thirty-Two
Four Months Later
Helen flies into Bob Hope Airport in Burbank when she returns to LA in August for the press tour and premiere. It’s a much smaller airport than she expects, possibly the smallest airport she’s ever been to that still deserves the name. The walls have a sandy beige carpeting to them that looks like it’s been there since the days of Mad Men and hasn’t been cleaned since. There’s exactly one kiosk with no good food options, and she thinks better of buying a five-dollar bottled water at the last second. But she gets from her gate to the baggage claim in under a minute and it’s an easy shuttle ride to pick up her rental car from the structure up the street. She probably could have walked, honestly.