Half of me wishes Adam were here with us, instead of in his own room next door, but half of me is mad at myself for wishing it.
Haven’t I let him handle enough for today?
Aren’t I already relying on him too much?
My body practically aches for comfort from him. A hug, a warm hand on my neck. His low voice in my ear while he holdsme.
My craving for it is almost as terrifying as the rest of today has been.
I press select on the remote and go to my own turned-down bed, trying to let the sound of canned laughter calm me down.
“Jessie,” Tegan says after a few minutes of us both watching in silence, and I tilt my head toward her. She’s watching me, and I have the feeling that maybe she has been for a while.
“Yeah?”
She reaches for the remote on the nightstand between us and mutes the laughter.
For a long time, she doesn’t say anything. She turns the remote over and over in her hands. Good thing I cleaned it with a Clorox wipe when we arrived.
Maybe Ihavestill managed to hover.
“Did you ever wonder before today if Mom was . . . if she’d maybe . . .”
She trails off, not willing to voice any version of the word I know she’s thinking.
Dead.
Died.
And that, finally, is what slows me down.
Because it’s exactly the line of thinking I’ve been running from since my dad mentioned the doctor this morning.
My first, fast instinct is to pivot, to turn her away from this and find some way to not answer her. In my whole life with Tegan, that’s been my way, whenever we’ve gotten close to my feelings about Mom, to my feelings about almost anything. During my own childhood, my mother too often treated me as a friend—telling me too much about her and my dad’s divorce, crying dramatically on car rides to school after some boyfriend broke up with her, pulling me into a gleeful dance around the kitchen after her second date with Tegan’s father. Back then, I thought her relentless sharing of her feelings meant we were close; we werebestfriends; we were inseparable.
Later—after the first time she left—I realized it hadn’t meant that at all.
I realized that most of the feelings she shared weren’t the sort a kid was equipped to deal with.
After the second time she left, I vowed I’d never do the same to my sister.
Except when I look at her now, I can see so clearly that she’s not a kid anymore.
It’s strange, in some ways, to realize it here—in a nondescript hotel room that’s another stop on this trip I never wanted to go on but that I can already tell has changed me forever. I look at her now and I think of the last few days we’ve spent with Adam and Adam’s family, people who somehow manage to have big feelings with each other and also boundaries about it, calibrations they make for the youngest among them. I think of Mace hugging Katie after camp and telling her he sometimes gets stomachaches when he’s nervous, too; I think of Adam telling Sam he’d miss her when he said goodbye this morning.
No one in the Hawkins house wields a feeling like a weapon, or like a leash.
So instead of pivoting, I look up at the ceiling and think about my honest answer. I offer it to her at the same time I’m admitting it to myself.
“I never did. I never once thought she might be . . . gone. Not until today.”
“Me neither!” she says, an exclamatory, relieved agreement. “Notonce. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t it weird that we didn’t?”
When I look over at her, she’s sitting up and facing me, her legs crisscrossed, her eyes bright and hopeful. I turn onto my side so I’m facing her, too.
“Maybe it’s weird. But also—” I break off, swallowing, still unsteady in this sharing. “Also, I think it was easier for me if I only ever thought about the possibilities that made me more angry at her than I already was.”
There, I think.There, you said it.
