The awkwardness lingered in the air, mixed with something else. Something Hazel recognized, from all those years onstage—how the audience used to need her. Ansel had them hooked. Mesmerized.
“My parents left when I was four years old,” he said. “I don’t remember holidays with them. I had a little brother, but he died.”
It was horrifying, how little Hazel knew. She knew nothing about this person, or the endless moments Jenny had spent with him. She knew nothing about the world as a whole. Here Hazel was, in the boring cozy house she’d always taken for granted, full of socks for gifts and food they’d throw away when the leftovers turned. In this pretty little town, where nothing bad ever happened. Her parents were not wealthy, but they were comfortable. She had never wanted something she truly couldn’t have.
“I’ve been reading a lot of philosophy lately,” Ansel said. “Locke, in particular. He rejects the concept of bodily continuity, the idea that our physical beings make us who we are. Instead, he latches on to memory. Memory as the thing that makes us individual, as the thing that separates my human consciousness from yours. I have this idea. This theory, I guess. There is no such thing as good or evil. Instead, we have memory and choice, and we all live at various points on the spectrum between. We are created by what has happened to us, combined with who we choose to be. Anyway, I wanted to thank you. All of you, for allowing me into your home. Jenny, for everything. If I’m simply a series of choices, I’m glad they led me here.”
Hazel understood it, then. A glimmer of the intrigue that had sucked Jenny in and was slowly stealing her away. Hazel herself was breathless, all stuttering adrenaline and stunned curiosity. Tragedy had a texture. A knot, begging to be unraveled. The things Hazel wanted were unspeakable, intangible, too blurry to touch—the things she wanted already belonged to her sister.
*
The bathroom was a cool black cave. Hazel stumbled in, her crutches clattering to the floor. She did not bother to turn on the lights—she did not want to see the beige paint, the crooked landscape on the wall, the little bowl of seashells her mother dusted every week. She hunched over the toilet and stuck her face right into the bowl, inches from the putrid water. Hazel gagged as the sound of clinking forks and polite voices came muffled through the door.
She hated Jenny. Actual hatred, stinging and aware. Hazel vomited, wishing she could expel everything from her body, all the grief and terror of such a bitter, selfish thing. But she knew it would linger regardless, dissipating until it transformed back into the boundless love she had always known. The love between sisters was not the sort of thing she’d read about in books or swooned over in movies. It embodied a category all in itself, a quiet knowing that swam in her veins, even when Jenny was miles away. Sister love was like food, or air, or memory itself. It was molecular. The very stuff of her. But it was not a love she chose, and for this, Hazel would always resent the part of herself that feared—maybe hoped—that she would never love anyone quite the way she loved Jenny.
*
A knock on the door.
Hazel lay flat on her twin bed, her Discman playing an old Springsteen CD she’d found at the record store downtown.
In the dim glow from the hall, Jenny was a shadow. She wore a pair of pajama pants and a faded, oversized T-shirt she’d left behind. Hazel was very familiar with this shirt. When she bored of her own clothes, she’d sometimes limp over to Jenny’s dresser and rifle through the drawers, slipping Jenny’s forgotten Nirvana concert tee over her own skinny ribs, wriggling her hips into the outdated jeans Jenny hadn’t loved enough to take to school.
Now, Jenny climbed onto Hazel’s bed, hugging her legs to her chest. Hazel pulled off her foamy headphones. Across the room, Jenny’s mattress sat naked—their mother had stripped the bed, though she’d left Jenny’s posters lined up along the wall.
“Are you feeling better?” Jenny asked, in the soft lamplight. “Mom wanted me to check.”
“I’m fine,” Hazel said, though the words came out serrated.
“You’re mad,” Jenny said.
“I’m not mad,” Hazel told her, and this was true. She was tired. Lost and withering. Hazel almost wished she were angry—that would be easier than this wide and lonely nothing.
“I saw,” Jenny said. “I saw how you looked at me at dinner.”
“Oh, you noticed? You haven’t looked me in the eye since you came home.”
A long, tense pause.