I’m back in our old apartment, in those terrible weeks after Mom died, watching Libby fall apart, holding her tight while she sobs, until she can’t breathe, until she’s gagging.
I’m drowning in her pain, my own hardening, calcifying into my heart.
I don’t want to be alone, she sometimes gasps, or else, We’re alone. We’re all alone, Nora.
I’m holding her tight, burying my mouth in her hair and promising she’s wrong, that she’ll never be alone.
I have you, I tell her. I’ll always have you.
All those nights I jarred awake and found it all still there waiting for me: Mom gone. No money. Libby breaking.
Sometimes she cried in her sleep. Other times I woke while she was in the bathroom, and the cold spot in the bed beside me sent me into a panic.
In those days, pain waited like a shadowy monster, towering over our bed, and instead of shrinking night by night, it grew, feeding on us, getting fat with our grief.
Early one morning, we lay wrapped under the blankets and I smoothed my sister’s strawberry hair, and she whispered, I just don’t want to be here anymore. I want it to stop.
And that same cold panic grew too big for my body, swelling, throbbing angrily.
Without thinking about money or work or school or any of the millions of practicalities for which I’d become responsible, I said, Then let’s go somewhere.
And we did.
Bought round-trip, middle-of-the-week, red-eye tickets to Los Angeles. Checked into a seedy motel whose dead bolt didn’t work and wedged the desk chair under the knob while we slept each night.
Every morning, we took a cab to the beach and stayed there until dinner, always something cheap and greasy. We took some of Mom’s ashes and dumped them in the ocean when no one was looking, then ran away, shrieking and laughing, unsure whether we’d just broken a law.
Later, we’d split the rest of the ashes between the East River and the Hudson, bits of Mom on either side of our city, hemming us in, holding us. But we weren’t ready to let go of that much of her yet.
For one whole week, Libby didn’t cry, and then, on the plane home, during takeoff, she looked out the window, watching the water shrink beneath us, and whispered, When will it stop hurting?
I don’t know, I told her, knowing she’d see I was lying. That I believed it would never stop, not ever.
She descended into ugly, wrenching sobs, and the other passengers shot tired glares in our direction. I ignored them, pulled Libby into my chest. Let it out, sweet girl, I murmured, just like Mom used to say to us.
A flight attendant either overestimated our ages or took pity on us, and discreetly dropped off two miniature liquor bottles.
Through her hiccups, Libby chose the Bailey’s. I drank the gin.
Ever since that day, I couldn’t so much as smell it without thinking about holding tight to my sister, about missing Mom so much that she felt closer than she had in weeks.
Maybe that’s why it’s the only thing I really drink. Feeling that hole in your heart is better than feeling nothing at all.
I blink clear of the memory, but the pain in my chest, the ache deep in my hands don’t let up. I sink onto the hot metal of the bench and count out the seconds of my inhalations, matching them to my exhalations.
That was the last trip Libby and I took. It was the last trip I’ve taken, period, aside from that one ill-fated weekend in Wyoming with Jakob.
Once I got our debt under control, I started setting aside money here and there so I could take Libby somewhere amazing, like Milan or Paris, when she graduated from college. Once, she had all kinds of ambition, but after we lost Mom, it seemed like that all dried up. She stopped helping out at Freeman’s and cycled through a few other potential career paths, but none of them held her attention.
I spent her college years over her shoulder, pushing her, reading her essays for her, making her flash cards. We fought more than before, our new roles chafing on us, her endless grief warping from anger to exhaustion and back again. Sometimes, even years later, she still cried in her sleep.
And then she met Brendan, and she decided not to finish school.
When she told me they were engaged, I wasn’t surprised. All I could think about was that teenage girl, terrified of being alone.
I worried that she was too young, that she was making the decision more out of a need for security than because it was what she wanted deep down. But the truth is, she seemed happy. For the first time in years, I had my sister back.
Brendan settled her. I didn’t like that she’d given up the event-planning job I’d pulled strings to get her, but the hunted look left my sister’s eyes, and I could finally breathe.