“Mom?” I turn away from the feeling of the sun on my face and toward the sound of her voice.
But when I open my eyes, she’s not there, perched on the side of my bed like she had been so many weekend mornings. I stretch my arm toward where she was, where I wassureI’d felt the bed dip. But all I find in my hand is the sheet, balled up in my fist. I turn my face into the pillow to wipe the wetness away from my skin.
My insides are a mosh pit. Have been since Friday. And while I would never, in a million years, tell my mother about what I did with my boss on her desk, my need for her is an aching hole. I want her to put her arms around me, squeeze me like she did, even after I grew taller than her. Tell me she’s proud of me. Right now, just hearing the sound of her voice, telling me she loves me might help me figure out what the hell I’m going to do about it. The absence of her is a sharp pain right through my heart.
I should have known it was a dream, though. I haven’t fit into my Little League uniform for over a decade.
Amy has made an extra bacon-and-egg sandwich when I pull myself out of bed, so she can’t still bethatmad at me for missing our birthday party.
“Thank you,” I say.
She doesn’t respond.
“Did you want to go out for dinner tonight?” I ask around a bite of sandwich. “My treat. For our birthday.”
Her back is to me but I can practically feel her eyes rolling. “We have the same birthday, idiot. You can’t treat me toourbirthday.”
The kitchen echoes with slammed cupboards and drawers. She turns the music up too loud but she’s playing Beastie Boys so I’m not sure why she thinks that would bother me.
“Shamey,” I sigh. Her shoulders rise to her ears. She hates that nickname. But the urge to needle her anyway is a compulsion. Part of it is us—we’ve bugged each other our whole lives. But there’s a small corner of my mind that thinks it’s maybe something more. A festering little knot of anger. One I can’t quite explain but, I realize, has been there, growing larger and larger for the last few months.
“I’m sorry about Friday. It was shitty of me.”
Despite not really wanting to go to any birthday party, I should have shown up. Or at least answered her texts.
She turns around, pinning me with a look of admonishment that was originally perfected by our mother. Amy looks like our mom. I look like our mom, too, but since Amy’s a girl she’s the one who can really pull it off. I used to come home from school and yell a greeting into the house and wouldn’t be able to tell who’d returned the hello until I saw who it was because the two of them sound the same, too. And the way she’s leaning up against the counter now, her feet and arms crossed, her hair braided over one shoulder, she looks so much like Mom. My heart hurts, the throbbing ache returned.
I come around the island, lean down, and wrap my arms around her. She keeps her arms crossed but giggles when I lift her off her feet, jiggling her a few times. I set her back down and kiss the top of her head. “Love you, Amy.”
She pushes me with both fists. “You have to tell me what’s wrong.”
Hopping back onto my stool, I say around a bite of sandwich, “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Liar.” She points a spatula at me and scrambled eggs go flying. “You’ve been acting weird. You’ve been ditching me.” She sets the spatula down. “I’m your sister. I need to know who to beat up for you.”
Amy hasn’t had to beat anyone up for me since middle school, but I still appreciate the sentiment. I sit back—remember that this stool has no back and grab onto the counter at the last second. She pats my shoulder as she walks behind me and climbs onto her own stool.
“Idiot,” she mutters lovingly. “Chen was sad, you know. He wanted to hang out with you. I think he misses you. A lot.”
I shrug. My friendship with Jeremy feels like it happened to another me, those moments old, over. And yet, I ache to have them back, and new versions of them. But reestablishing a friendship like ours feels about as easy as wearing Yankees gear to a Red Sox game.
“Are you stressed?” she asks. “Because of the house?”
I gesture around at the house in question. “The house? What’s wrong with it?”
She shrugs, taking a bite of her breakfast. “We need to consider selling it soon,” she says around her food.
The way she can talk about getting rid of this home, so flippantly, feels like a betrayal.
It shocks me so much I can’t help throwing her a scowl, but she doesn’t notice.
“I don’t know. Maybe moving, selling, isn’t the best thing. We’ve got a lot on our plates right now and...”
“Wesley, the house might be paid off but we can barely afford the property tax on this place. And...” Her voice catches. “I don’t know how much longer I can stay here. This house? It’s full of Mom.”
Amy never talks about Mom like this, like her loss hurts. In fact, she generally doesn’t talk about Mom at all. She’s right, at least about the fact that this house is full of our mother. It still smells like her, for god’s sake. Sometimes I walk into a room and expect her to be there and then she’s not. It’s dizzying, the loss of her all over again. To know that Amy feels this way, to know that she feels like our mother is still here inside these walls, makes me want to leave them even less.
I want to hold on to her here. This house feels like the only thing I can hold on to right now.
