“Tough love isdefinitelybullshit. For people.”
“But not animals?”
Andi slides away from me, her hand drifting over the back of my neck and down my arm until she takes my hand and faces me, leaning against the sliding glass door, her face in front of the darkness. She looks at me for so long I start to feel transparent, and it makes panic fizz somewhere behind my sternum for the first time since—
Fuck. Since the cabin.
“Different beings need different kinds of care,” she finally says. “Eagles need to be treated like eagles. Foxes need to be treated like foxes. People like people. You’d have given a person a heating pad.”
“I wouldn’t have kept a person in a cage,” I point out, and she grins.
“True. Reid’s even got his own bathroom,” she says, and I snort.
Then I lean forward and press my forehead to the cold glass over her shoulder, my mouth going close to her neck, to the knit of my sweater. I keep thinking about how I’d apologize to my parents. How I would start. Where they would both be: in the living room, my father in his armchair, my mother on the couch while I stood? In the kitchen, newspaper and sink, dish gloves on? On the front porch, in the foyer, outside in the driveway?
I’ve thought of a hundred starting lines, easily, and they all feel like sand on my tongue. The whole thing feels like tissue paper in my mind; I could tape it once, twice, a million times, but it would just tear around the tape. I can’t fix the fact that I’m the child they chose to cut off.
I think, for a moment, of telling Andi but the words stick in the back of my mouth.My parents stopped speaking to meand I don’t think I’ll ask them to start again, but Andi would never understand. If Andi murdered someone, her dads would come hug her in prison.
“I wish Bethany hadn’t said those things to you,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
Andi swallows, her other hand drifting to the base of my skull, where she twists my hair in her fingers.
“It’s fi—”
“Don’t,” I cut her off. Her chest heaves once with a laugh or a snort or something.
“I also wish she hadn’t, then,” she says. “But she did, and it’s not really our problem.”
“I wish she wasn’t like this,” I say. My eyes are closed but I know my breath is fogging the glass, blocking the view of the backyard. “But she always has been. I remember her being three years old and lecturing us that we weren’t putting together the Tinkertoys the way it said to in the instruction manual.”
“Those were suggestions.”
“Tell Beth that,” I say. “I remember once me, Matt, Elliott, and Zach all went fishing, and Mom made her stay home because they were making strawberry jam. She was so pissed that she reported back to Dad every single time one of us took the Lord’s name in vain for the next month.”
She and Zach are twins. I wonder if she would have been less angry if they weren’t.
“I’d have resented you, too,” Andi says. “You know it’s not your fault, right?”
She knows, I think for a moment, and the panic fizzes and my heart kicks.She knows and she’s about to be too gentle and incorrect with me—breathe.
“I know,” I say, and my voice doesn’t shake.
“I don’t envy her,” Andi goes on, quiet and low, her fingers tugging gently at my hair.
“She lashes out,” I say, which is probably obvious. “She’s got no right to, but she does.”
Andi doesn’t answer.
“I’m not excusing her.”
“I know.”
“I’m just…” I don’t know. I feel like this is a knot made of smaller knots, the ends looping back into themselves. It feels infinite.
“You’re being her big brother,” Andi says after a while. “You still love her, even if she’s an asshole.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It sucks.”
