In Her Skin(14)

On my own

Pretending he’s beside me.

My breath catches in my chest. I do not want, do not need a song to make me feel.

All alone

I walk with him till morning.

Too soon. I’ve had a year to learn how to swallow the pain of Momma, but not nearly enough time to take losing Wolf. This song and these words are choking me.

Without him.

I feel his arms around me

Tears, hot and fresh, well up. I need this to stop RIGHT NOW.

And when I lose my way I close my eyes

And he has found me.

The sobs seize and rack my body. I gasp to stuff the cry back inside. I leap from my seat and run for the nearest exit, climbing over bare legs and tuxedo pants and stepping on purses and breaking the things inside. I don’t know if I’m being followed and I don’t care: I should not make a scene, don’t want to make a scene, and I’m so out of control I can’t think myself out of this. I fly into the ladies’ room past an attendant with wide eyes and slam the stall door.

Resting my forehead against the metal wall, I push out a hard breath.

“Vivi?”

You. You followed me.

“Don’t try to talk,” you yell from behind the door. “I know this is hard. That song: ‘Pretending he’s beside me.’ The words trigger you. You miss your dad, obviously.” You pause. I imagine ladies in gowns passing in and out, and wonder if they are whispering Lovecrafts behind their hands.

“That’s it, isn’t it? You miss your dad?”

I brush my nose with my wrist, hard. It’s a gift, Jo. Take it.

I raise the bathroom lock and crack the door. “I do. I miss him something awful.”

“Would it help if I told you that performance—in fact, this whole place—kills me inside?”

I step out slowly, my puffy face reflected back in the mirror. You move to the mirror beside me. “What do you mean?” I say.

“That girl up there? That should be me. I had everything: an agent, a contract. But I busted my own voice and lost any chance I had.”

I turn to face you, but still you stare in the mirror, as though you’re talking to that girl, the prettier one without the snot and tears.

“My whole life, I’ve been able to make everything I want to happen,” you say. “By talent.”

Jo is a talented con.

“By luck.”

Jo was lucky to meet up with Wolf.

“Or by force of will.”

Jo forced herself inside Vivi.

“I get that,” I say.

“Except for the one thing I want,” you say.

Jo could not keep her momma alive. I swallow. “I get that, too.”

“My body betrayed me. My throat is thick with scars. I’ll never be able to force it to do what I want it to do again.”

“You can’t sing even one note?”

“Not in a way that’s worth it.”

“But if you really like to sing, isn’t any way worth it?”

You smile sadly in the mirror. “If only it were that simple.”

“I don’t understand,” I say, reaching for tissues to wipe my red nose.

You throw back your shoulders and puff your chest. “Anyway. It is what it is.”

I don’t believe you think it is what it is for a minute.

You lock arms with me, wordless now, and we walk back to the hall as sisters, me a little messier, you a little more relaxed, into the music and to our parents. The conductor is letting a man named Connolly conduct. The orchestra plays on while the guy obviously doesn’t have a clue, and everybody thinks it’s a hoot.

You laugh, lusty. “I never understand what difference it makes if the conductor waves his little baton or not.”

I squeeze your arm a little tighter. “Neither do I.”

*

I seem to be on lockdown.

Also: there is no discussion of school, or checking in with Ginny, or the cops, and will I ever get to be with you? I have never met anyone with so many places to go and things to do. I wish hard on spending time with you, and you seem to want to spend time with me, but day after day it doesn’t happen. How are we supposed to be sisters if your mother keeps us from being together, and she has done this, for seven days now, with excuses ranging from homework to lessons to getting more sleep. I can’t help thinking that it will happen every new day, that we will connect, you spreading your shine onto me, wanting to, even though my real self is in disguise. The intuit in me feels it.

On Friday when I hear you come in from school at the unusual hour of Actually After School, I nearly trip running down the stairs. Mrs. Lovecraft has her head in the refrigerator, asking about your homework.

“I have tons of precalc, and I can’t work here. I need to go to the library,” you say.

“I’ll call you a car,” Mrs. Lovecraft says, muffled.

“We’ll take the train,” you say.

Mrs. Lovecraft backs out of the fridge. “We?”

“Vivi and me. What, is she going to keep hanging around here day after day with you?”

I cringe. I can’t go to the library because of the small matter of Brown Tooth knowing where I belong, and it’s not with you. I might be clean, and in clean clothes, but I still look like me, if you knew me.