A sneer curled across his stubbled mouth—Hazel stepped back instinctively, surprised by her own current of fear.
“Oh,” Ansel said, his face rearranging itself instantaneously back into a veneer of calm. It seemed he had mistaken her shadow for Jenny’s. “Hazel. I didn’t expect you.”
He stood. For a terrifying second, Hazel thought he might lean in for a hug. She tensed, bracing, the fear mixed with something else now: a dripping, metallic guilt. In that single glance, she saw a sliver of the complexity Jenny had been living. The sharp corners, the chilling subtleties. Hazel knew only the outline of her sister’s reality, and it was shocking to stand now in the depths of it.
Ansel brushed past her to find Jenny, who lingered paralyzed on the front porch, the door hanging open like a jaw.
“You fucking serious?” he called.
“We’re just here to get her things,” Hazel said. “Jenny, show me where the suitcase is?”
While Hazel fished the suitcase from the closet, Ansel hovered—he looked almost amused, hands shoved casually into his paint-spattered pockets. They tore down the list hastily, throwing everything sloppily into the bag: Jenny’s bras, her shirts, her shoes. A box of high school mementos, a tin of earrings that had once belonged to their grandmother. Jenny would leave her cast-iron pots and pans, she would leave the sheets she’d picked out years ago to match the shag carpet, she would leave her hair products in the bathroom cabinet. Hazel dumped a wad of dresses into the suitcase, still on their hangers, as she listened to Ansel’s breath. A whistle, loitering too close.
“You’re proving it, Jenny,” he kept saying, a repetition that grew louder. “You’re proving me right.”
The bedroom was alive with electricity, intimate and ugly. Jenny dumped an armful of T-shirts into the bag, shaking with a restrained sob.
“It’s just like my Theory,” Ansel said. Hazel pried the suitcase from Jenny’s tight white grip and lugged it back across the hall, beckoning her forward. “Like Sartre said. The very nature of love’s suffering makes the concept impossible. No one thing can be wholly good, can it?”
“I’m sorry,” Jenny croaked, a half whisper.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” he said, almost laughing. “Love cannot exist as something pure—the spectrum will always infiltrate. The badness will always sneak in.”
“Come on,” Hazel urged, so close to the car now. She tried to tune out Ansel’s rambling, so faux-philosophical it sounded psychotic.
“I’m sorry,” Jenny said from the stoop, snot running shiny from her nose as she stumbled down the front steps. “I’m sorry.”
Finally, they were outside, and Ansel was just a following mass. Toxic shadow. Hazel’s steps were heavy, panicked, and when she was certain she heard Jenny behind her, she broke into an involuntary run.
Ansel stood on the porch, so tense he looked like he might burst. Hazel hefted the suitcase down the sidewalk—when they finally slammed the car doors shut, Jenny burst into a frantic sob.
“Don’t look,” Hazel said. “Just don’t look.” While Jenny buried her face in her hands, Hazel took one last hesitant glance: framed in the door, utterly still, Ansel stood straight and tall, his face twisted into the purest expression of rage Hazel had ever seen. He was a wolf, gnashing teeth. Inhuman. She pulled away from the curb in stuttered spurts, her legs shaking so hard the car jerked, her gaze transfixed on the rearview mirror. Hazel knew she would forever think of him like this, a menacing form in reflection, the shape of a furious man on a porch, getting smaller and smaller until he was nothing at all. A pinprick, a thing of the past. As Hazel’s hands trembled on the steering wheel, she had the naive, comforting thought: she would never have to see Ansel Packer again.
*
The hotel room was faceless, with matching twin beds made up neat. It reminded Hazel of the vacations they used to take as kids, to vague affordable cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh—she and Jenny would share one bed, their parents would share the other, and during the day they’d drag their feet through museums. Hazel and Jenny would play Go Fish on the floor of the lobby while their parents took photos of art they didn’t understand.
Hazel was thankful now for the anonymity of the pleated lampshades, the bars of soap wrapped in plastic. Jenny came out of the bathroom wearing sweatpants and a thin cotton shirt, a towel wrapped around her head. Outside, the sun had set—car doors slammed in the parking lot, suitcases rolled over gravel. A child shrieked, the sound setting off a pang in Hazel’s core. She wished to conjure the smell of Alma’s hair. Mattie’s milky breath.