“What are you saying, Mackenzie?”
Her restless nerves popped at the prospect of a fight, and Mack threw out the words she’d been dying to say for years. “I’m saying that you flit around doing whatever you want, not coming home, not caring about anyone but yourself. Not caring aboutconsequences.”
Laurie’s eyes grew round. “I was a first-year associate at a cutthroat firm, working eighty-hour weeks with six figures of student loans when Dad had his accident. You said you were fine, that you could handle everything.”
“I could not fucking handle it!” Mack shouted.
They’d argued about their individual choices before, but never so bluntly. They’d bickered as teenagers, fighting over stolen lipsticks (Laurie, from Hooks drugstore) and smuggled joints (Mack, from a mechanic twice her age), but their disagreements over the last ten years seethed with quiet tension and barely hidden resentment. Mack wanted to have it out, to put all the shit between them out in the open so they could examine it, find the rotten pieces where they’d messed up, and excise them. Maybe then they could stop this sickening cycle of cold distance and hot argument. Mack kicked aside her gear bag, carelessly discarded on the floor, and crossed her arms.
“I was left alone with a terrorizing baby that cried all goddamn day and our shattered father. Do you know what a mind fuck it is to change diapers for your babyandyour dad? You were off sipping lattes and going to a fancy office while I was trying to keep Shaw and Dad alive. I almost ...” She stopped herself, too close to saying the thing out loud that she’d never told anyone else, not even Wes. “I had no one, and you didn’t even fucking care.”
Laurie blinked for several silent moments, the quiet crackling in the wake of Mack’s shouting. “I didn’t know,” Laurie said flatly, as if she knew how pathetic her words were.
“Must have been nice.” Mack knew she was being mean butfuckit felt good to say all the quiet parts out loud.
“That’s not what it was like,” Laurie said defensively. Inexplicably, she started to pull up the sheets of Mack’s bed, tucking the cotton into crisp corners. “I was trying to pay off my loans and make rent and—”
“Dad almost died!”
I almost died.And there it was, the bottom she’d hit that she never wanted to think about again. How she’d been so exhausted and overwhelmed, how Shaw had never stopped crying and wouldn’t sleep, how Wes had barely stayed alive, and Mack had thought,this would all go away if I went away.She’d considered pills, drugs, even looked up how to buy a gun. She felt sick anytime she remembered that day, and how she’d only chosen to live because she couldn’t puzzle out who would care for Shaw and Wes.
And over the years, she’d come to blame Laurie for that day. For leaving her alone with two helpless humans and her own terrifying thoughts. For years, she’d thought,Laurie would have made it better. Laurie could have fixed everything. Laurie should have kept me from that pain.
Only now, as she watched her sister tidy the mess on the nightstand, did she understand how incredibly misplaced her anger was, how she’d been so scared of her own almost-choice that she’d turned the blame on Laurie.
But in the end, she’d saved her own damn self, hadn’t she?
She was so lost in her own thoughts she didn’t hear Laurie at first. “What?”
“I couldn’t handle seeing Dad like that.” Laurie was crying, a sight as strange as her sister’s sparkling white apartment. She sat down on the edge of the freshly made bed. “I couldn’t, Mack. I know that’s awful. I know.” She gasped a racked breath. “Dad and I had a huge argument before I left for Georgetown, and the last thing I said to him was terrible. I was mean and hurtful, and then I saw him in that hospital and all I could think about was that he was going to die believing that I hated him. I’d been so shitty to him, ignoring his calls and refusing to come home on college breaks. When he got better, I was embarrassed. Every month I didn’t come home, I got more embarrassed until it was easier to not come home at all.”
Mack blinked. “So the reason you didn’t come home, the reason you let me fuckingdrown... is because you were ... embarrassed?”
“I was afraid, Mack. You were racing all over the country with Dad but I had to stay and go to high school in Haubstadt. You two left me behind to fend for myself. Half the time I was doing your homework. I hated it. I hated that I was scared to try kissing girls in a town where people saygayas an insult, hated that liking Beowulf made me a nerd, hated being the girl that didn’t look like the rest of her family. The day I left, I told Wes he was a stupid redneck and I hated him. I said I wished I knew my real dad because my life would have been better.”
“Wes is your real dad,” Mack said automatically.
“You never got it, how lonely it was for me. I don’t look like you and Dad. You two made fun of me when I was scared by your wrecks and made fun of my schoolwork. I was really fucked up about you and Wes and our mom for a really long time. When Wes got hurt and I’d said all those awful things ... I didn’t know how to face him. It became something too big to get past. And the more I didn’t come home, the more I felt awful, so I avoided coming home. And you. I was afraid—Iamafraid—that you hate me.”
Laurie wiped her face with the hem of her T-shirt. Mack’s perfect sister, who ironed her weekend jeans and wore red lipstick to the gym, was a mess. Thick mascara smeared her cheeks and angry red patches spread over her smooth skin. All these years Mack assumed Laurie thought she was too good for them, that she didn’t care about her family.
She sat next to Laurie. “I could never hate you. You could run away for fifty years and you would still be my only sister. I love you.”
“I’ve been in therapy for years. It took me five years to say, ‘I fear abandonment so I leave people before they can leave me.’ Just ask any of my many ex-girlfriends.”
Laurie scrubbed her face with her hands, making the mascara situation worse, and Mack barked out a laugh. She made a circle over her own face.
“There’s so much going on.”
Laurie glanced from her blackened hands to the clothes and wet towels on the floor of Mack’s room and puffed a small laugh. She carefully held her hands away from the white duvet of Mack’s bed. “Geezus, Mack, how did we get here?”
“Williamses are stubborn assholes,” she said with a shrug, as if that explained everything. Mack grabbed a towel from the floor and handed it to Laurie.
“I guess I still think of you as my wild little sister,” Laurie said, wiping her face. “But you’re an adult. You’ve taken care of so much for so long, and I never realized how much you’re doing. You know what you need, and if that’s a night out with ... whomever ... I hope you have a good time. Be safe.”
They’d spent so many years shutting each other out. So many years denying and shaming and blaming, but dammit if they weren’t still here trying. “I will never”—Mack emphasized the word twice—“never let a man come between me and the Indianapolis 500 again.”
Laurie reached out, pulling Mack into the steady circle of her arms. “You don’t owe me an explanation. I see it now.”
