*
Hazel left in the pink blush of sunset. She cracked the car window open, let the autumn air rush in as she pulled onto the highway.
I don’t know what to do at night, Jenny had said over the phone just last week. I’ve been drinking so much tea. She’d said it spitefully, like the cups of chamomile were to blame for the nervous tremble, her racing thoughts. What does Tricia think? Hazel had asked. Jenny’s sponsor had been sober nearly twenty years. Hazel had never met Tricia, but Tricia met Jenny every morning at the café across the street from the hospital. It was Tricia who urged Jenny to call Hazel in the first place, to start these nightly confessions. Tricia, whose voice Hazel heard in the background as Jenny cried into the speaker. I always wanted kids, Jenny said during one long sniffling call. But I never thought I could go nine months without it. Ansel claimed ambivalence about fatherhood, though he seemed distinctly put off by the rowdiness of Hazel’s children—she could never picture him as a father, and Jenny had always shrugged off the question. Only now did Hazel understand the extent of her sister’s disentangling.
Hazel did not have advice. She couldn’t tell Jenny about the fairy tales whispered in the glow of Alma’s night-light or how it felt to stand over Mattie’s crib at naptime, his lashes fluttering delicate. Jenny adored Alma and Mattie, but Hazel knew the longing she saw in Jenny’s eyes. It was envy. She was mortified by how good it felt, to hand that feeling finally over to her sister.
She passed wide fields, outlet malls. The evening dimmed to a lilting, satin blue.
*
Jenny stood over the pastries. The café was closing, the chairs already stacked on their heads as a barista skirted the corners with a mop. The light from the pastry case glowed Jenny’s scrubs gold—her face was bloated and puffy, ponytail mussed from a busy shift. Aside from their hair, which had always been a similarly wavy chestnut length, Hazel realized: she and Jenny looked nothing alike. Jenny had gained weight the past few years, and Hazel felt guilty for noticing. Her sister was wide around the middle, veering viscerally toward middle age. For the first time in her life, Hazel looked at Jenny and did not see herself at all. A stranger would never stop to ask: Are you twins? The fact struck Hazel with an acidic devastation, her mouth already unbearably sour from the highway.
Jenny turned.
“You’re here.”
Hazel gathered her sister up, held her shoulders close. It was still there, beneath the scent of croissants and coffee grounds. That Jenny smell: fruity hair, cigarettes, generic laundry detergent.
*
“Maybe we should come back later,” Jenny said from the passenger’s seat.
Hazel’s car idled on the curb—the squat, single-story rental looked definitively menacing. It was Jenny’s last day at the hospital, and Ansel was supposed to be at work. But when they pulled up on Jenny’s lunch break, Rihanna crooning from the car radio, Hazel’s gut dropped: Ansel’s white pickup truck was parked around the side. Looming, waiting.
“We have our list,” Hazel said, unconvincing.
They’d been talking it over for months. They’d made the plan carefully: load the car while Ansel was at work, drop everything at the hotel, come back to tell him right before the flight. The plan had not included a midnight screaming match or Jenny’s email pulled up on the computer in the corner of the living room, now cracked across the dusty screen.
“Come on,” Hazel said. “We’ll be quick.”
Hazel stepped from the car, hands clammy. She tried to tamp down the terror, to stand a little taller as Jenny followed her to the door. The scent of Jenny’s house hit her right away, remembered instinctually from visits years ago. Unwashed sheets, garbage sitting too long in the bag. Musty carpet, thrift-store furniture.
“Hello?” Hazel called.
Ansel sat on the flaking leather couch. He had his cell phone in his hand, like he’d been waiting for a call, or maybe just for this. Hazel had not seen him in nearly two years, and she was surprised by what time had done to him. Ansel had always been handsome, a prize Jenny could drag to work functions, flushing while the other nurses whispered jealous. But he was getting older. Gravity had begun its work. Ansel’s stomach folded over his jeans in the faint shape of a beer belly, and his skin looked sallow, tinged a sunless yellow. His glasses were smudged with greasy fingerprints, and his face had rounded out, sagging beneath the chin. For the first time, Hazel could picture exactly how he’d look as an old man. Gruff, gnarled. Devoid of any surface-level charm.