I have eighteen hours to push all these overwhelming feelings down, so I can focus on Karo. I can pile up the weariness, the anger, and the disappointment and deal with them at a later time.
For now, all that matters is my sister.
Karo doesn’t come running toward me when she spots me in arrivals at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. She doesn’t do anything at all, no excited wave, no upturn of her mouth, just a slight turn of her body in my direction showing that she acknowledged my presence.
My hand is clammy around the handle of my suitcase, thoughts flitting nervously through all the options: Can I still hug her, or do I just stop in front of her and say,Hi? And: How have we coexisted for thirty years in this world, but never had a proper fight?
I suspect the answer to the latter can be traced back to Karo’s patience and goodwill.
Next to me, a couple falls into each other’s arms, and ahead, a girl with pigtails waves a star-stickered and glitteryWelcome homecardboard sign to someone walking behind me.
I stop in front of Karo, her fist tight around the strap of her tote bag. Except for the red around her irises and the smudged mascara, she looks less tired than when I saw her two weeks ago. Skin tanned, the red in her hair faded, and the strands sun-kissed.
“Hey,” I say when too much time has passed for her to hug me, and it sinks in that I won’t get a whiff of her citrus shampoo and a tickle of her short curls against my nose. That she won’t dislodge the sob out of my chest that’s been stuck there since our call yesterday.
I didn’t really think all that pent-up frustration she had about me would solve itself that easily, but I’d still hoped we’d be okay as soon as we saw each other again. Now I recognize how naive I was to think she’d help me navigate through this, when that’s exactly what she blamed me for: loading any emotional labor onto her shoulders.
“How was your flight?” she wants to know, her voice strangely monotone.
I nod. “All good.” The leftovers of my allergy pill cling to the edges of my brain, slowing me down.Snap out of it, I tell myself. It’s on me to make things right.
“What about Lennart?” I ask back. “Did he get out okay?”
Karo swipes her finger over one eye, smudging the mascara a little more. “Yeah, his flight left on time.”
I want to squeeze her elbow, give her some kind of reassurance, but she only turns her head and declares, “I need coffee.”
I swipe my credit card for her oat flat white and my triple-shot latte before we pick up the rental car. I know how much she hates driving—we both do, really—so I wordlessly take the key, and while I adjust the seat and mirrors, Karo connects her phone to the sound system. She turns up the volume when we roll out of the airport, filling the terse silence with strumming guitars and a deep male voice.
Loud music, windows down, conifers lining the road and infusing the air with their crisp scent—it’s how I’d pictured this trip when I planned it with Karo half a year ago.
But now the trunk holds all the unsaid words between us, my throat burns with the emotional pain I’m trying to swallow down, and my chest is a pressure chamber of sadness.
Awkward, barely speaking—that’s how we start our trip together, the first one in more than a year. I don’t know if I can handle two weeks of this, but I’ve already caused an oil spill on Karo’s honeymoon with all my preventable problems and work-related worries. I won’t spoil the second half of her holiday if I can avoid it.
When Karo has fallen asleep that night, I scroll down in my Notes app until I find the wishlist she has Lennart and me synched in on so we don’t accidentally give her books she’s already read. I buy credits on my audiobook app and download the top title on her list, a sweeping historical romance by an author called Rosalind Bellamy. Ahead of our drive out west, I head to the car early and hook up my phone to the speakers, but when I realize where we are and remember what started my sister’s obsession with books when we were teenagers, I download another book instead.
Over the next few days, we make our way around the Olympic Peninsula, listening to all the angst and heartbreak of theTwilightsaga. Back in the French mountain town where Karo had her concussion on that long-ago ski trip, I scoured the library and bookstores, trying to find her favorite booksin a language she could read, finally succeeding with a copy ofEclipsethat was almost falling apart. Bella, Jacob, and Edward got her through the confusing and lonely days of amnesia, and now they help me get her back, too.
Between the fresh mountain air, the shock of the cold Pacific, and the rhythm of our hikes, I don’t bring up our fight, and I push down all thoughts about Lewis. But as our trip goes on, I try to steer our conversation away from the things that need to be sorted out in the moment, and to the things that matter. When I ask about her life, Karo is cagey at first. From her honeymoon to her doubts about her job, from her and Lennart’s decision to try for a baby, to the spiciest books she’s read this past year, I don’t run out of questions, and though she only answers a third of them, hesitantly, sometimes monosyllabically, I’m content to listen, to have my sister back and learn about all the ways she’s changed when I was busy looking elsewhere.
One afternoon, after a three-hour-long hike, Karo stops me in front of a store window stacked with donuts. “Franzi, hang on a second.” Her hand grabs my underarm, and it’s the first time on this trip that she touches me casually, like it’s no big deal. The first time her voice doesn’t sound compressed, and her gray eyes look at me level, without darting away.
It makes me hopeful. It makes me ignore the warning bells that ring in my head when my nose detects the sugary fragrance. It makes me suppress memories of the last time I had donuts, and how Lewis had been there for me then.
I let Karo pick the flavors, and she carries the greasy brown paper bag back to our rental. We take a dirt road off the highway and polish off our donuts while we watch the fog swirl low above the churning waves of the ocean. I only realize my mistake when we’re on the way back. Something gives in my chest and the bridge of my nose begins to tingle, the donuts cranking open a valve. This time, I know what’s coming, and I quicklywipe the powdered sugar and butter off my fingers, before the first tears appear. A little croak spills from my throat.
Then I lurch forward, the windshield and dusty black hood of the car coming closer and closer until the seat belt digs into the space between my breasts.
Karo breaks into a full stop in the middle of the highway.
“What are you doing?” I cry.
“What areyoudoing?” she shouts back, fingers white in their clasp around the steering wheel, and eyes wide as she stares at me. “Your gasp gave me a heart attack. Are you okay?”
I check the rearview mirror, but behind us there’s only the empty stretch of tarmac below a cushion of gathering clouds. Only when I’ve smacked the button in the console to turn on the hazard lights, do I wipe the palm of my hand across my eyes.
“Franzi, are you okay?” Karo repeats, more insistently this time.
