Maggie carefully lowers her bag to the sidewalk and shrugs at me. “Why not?”
“You know why not,” I say, because finally, she does.
Maggie nods to herself. “Because of your brother.”
“Yes,” I say, kneeling in front of the brick wall again to continue scraping off dried cheese.
“Because you can’t leave him.”
“Because I can’t leave any of them.” Now more than ever, the thought of deserting my family is unthinkable to me. I can’t do it. I won’t do it. My hand stills. “They need me.”
“So you get to love them but they don’t get to love you?”
I turn toward her, frowning.
Sighing, she squats down to join me on the ground and picks up a wire brush to start scrubbing another section of the wall. She’s attacking it with more aggression than it deserves, and I know most of that is her redirecting that emotion away from me. “Does he even know, Brooke? Did you tell him what you’re giving up because of him?”
My scrubbing slows while hers intensifies. I didn’t tell him it was because of him.
Huffing, she goes on. “I don’t know a thing about your brother.” She side-eyes me without stopping her scrubbing. “I looked at one story online, and one was enough.”
My ears start to burn thinking of all the stories I read before Dad banned us all from looking at any more. Reading each one had felt like being stripped and publicly flogged. And those were just the ones that reported the facts. The ones full of wild speculation and expert analysis into the mind of a teenage murderer could cause me to break out into a cold sweat just from the memory. I’m too much of a coward to ask which one she read.
“But,” she continues, “where is the logic? How does it help him or your family to deny yourself something that you’ve spent most of your life working toward? You’re passing up the chance to skate professionally so you can stay near your family. Are you going to do that with every choice you make for the next thirty years, give or take depending on good behavior?” The air rushes out of me like I’ve been punched, but Maggie doesn’t stop. She tosses her brush down and twists to face me. “Not so nice to think about, is it? Maybe you need to.” Finally her voice softens, but with that softness comes the pain threaded through her voice. “Look what you’ve done since he went to jail. You’ve cut yourself off from almost everything. Skating was the one thing you held on to, and now you’re letting it go too.”
“I’m not—”
“Youare. And worse, you think you’re being noble.” She brushes one angry tear away with a slap of her hand. “You’re not. I bet your brother would hate this.”
My heart twists in pain, but Maggie gives me no chance to say anything.
“You say you love your brother—does he love you? Does he? Would it make him happy, seeing you out here like this when we all know you belong in there on the ice?” She lowers the arm she pointed with. “Would your parents be proud of you for this? Would your sister look up to you?”
I want to close my eyes, to block out the fierce expression on Maggie’s face. “My mom knows I have to stay here. I may want to skate, but she’s right.” I start to shake in the humid afternoon air. “Jason wouldn’t survive in that place without me and my mom visiting him. My mom would be a mess if she had to go by herself. My dad might never leave the basement, and Laura would find a cage just big enough for her and throw away the key.”
Maggie doesn’t say any more until we finish the wall and go inside. “Brooke. Do me a favor and skate. Try.”
I glance from her to the ice and back again. “It doesn’t matter anyway. My friend Anton, the guy who was supposed to skate with me, I told him I don’t need him anymore.” It was the first thing I did after I left Allison.
“You never needed a partner. Audition on your own. Partner stuff is nice but you don’t need it. You know you don’t.” She sighs. “I can’t make you audition. I think you should. I think you’re wrong about the people who love you. I hope your brother is one of them. If he is, then I bet he’d love to think about you on the ice, that it would make him happy even if it meant seeing you less.”
But she’s wrong. Nothing will make my brother happy again, me leaving least of all.
At home I stop midway to the kitchen when I hear Mom’s voice. Only it’s not Mom’s real voice, it’s the falsely bright one she reserves for only one person.
“—much better. I don’t know if it was the flu or food poisoning, but she’s fine and no one else got sick.” Pause. “I’ll tell her you’re glad she’s feeling better.”
I linger at the foot of the stairs, listening for a few moments from around the corner and wishing that the happy, carefree reality Mom relays to Jason on the phone were the true one.
Mom and I haven’t really talked since Saturday, but fresh off the heels of a phone call with my brother is not the time to do that. When I can tell the conversation is winding down, I tiptoe quietly up the stairs as quickly as I can and into the office to grab the handset before retreating to my room.
I press the button to enter into the call when I hear Mom laughing, hoping it’ll cover the sound from the phone.
“Good, Mom. That’s good,” Jason says. “I just wanted to make sure everyone is okay.” It sounds like he swallows. “And Brooke?”
Mom doesn’t miss a beat; she never does when she’s talking to Jason. “Of course she is.” And then, it’s so faint I’m not sure I hear the tremor of uncertainty weave into her voice. “Why wouldn’t she be?”
Jason passes off this question with an aplomb he could have only inherited from Mom. There are no more pauses and no more wavering words, my heart tries to break in two different directions as they say goodbye.
