The Comeback(5)

My mom exhales helplessly next to me, and I feel sorry for her even though she’s probably already working out how it’s my fault. I do the math and figure that we wouldn’t have left England if it weren’t for me, so the connection shouldn’t be too much of a reach for her. It never is.

“What was it, bad grades?” I ask, trying to lighten the mood. Even when she was a kid, it was clear that Esme was smarter than the rest of us put together.

Esme shakes her head.

“Did you finally set fire to that vile uniform?” Esme frowns at me, and I realize too late that she’s still wearing the green pleated skirt underneath her wooly sweater. I remember now that my sister has this way of looking at you as if she can see through you to your blood.

“Alcohol?” I ask. “Not drugs?”

“I’m not you,” Esme mutters, just loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Well, I highly doubt that it’s sex,” I say, stung that she mentioned my sobriety in front of our parents, even though I already understand that I deserved it.

“Grace!” my mother says, before preempting Esme’s tears by taking her hand. I push my chair back and walk into the kitchen, debating whether or not I need to apologize already. I don’t know when it became so difficult for me to have a civil conversation with another human being. I pour myself the end of the jug of coffee, the part with the sludgy grains that get caught in your teeth, and figure I’ll probably just head back to bed instead.



* * *



? ? ?

I’m flicking through some old photographs when my mom knocks on the door. After less than a second she’s standing in my room, and it’s the first time she’s been in here since I moved back.

She hovers above the bed, and I move my legs so that she can sit on the end. She does so, folding her hands on her lap and leaning against the sparkly purple wall. This already feels too intimate for us, and I squirm under the sheets, wishing I wasn’t tucked back up in bed like an invalid.

“Who are these people?” she says, squinting at one of the photographs on the duvet.

“Her name was Anna.” I point at a pretty dark-haired girl standing next to me, flashing a peace sign at the camera.

“Oh yes, you did ballet with her. I remember her mother. Their TV was practically bigger than their house,” she says as she drops the photo back on the pile. This used to mean that they were low-rent, tacky, but I think she’s forgetting the sixty-two-inch screen she has hanging above the electric fireplace downstairs. She shifts her position on the bed, and I can see how thin she is underneath her cotton shirt.

“Esme’s had a rough year, you know,” she says.

“She’s barely been here,” I say. “How would I know?”

“You’re one to talk,” my mom says, and I realize too late that I walked right into her trap. Because I’m the one who made them move across the world and then left them behind, and the only way they knew how to punish me was to make their world smaller and smaller until there was no room for me in it anyway.

“I get it, I’ll apologize to her,” I say after a pause, just in case I can change the course of this conversation for the first time in my life.

My mom shrugs, as if I’m missing the point.

“I meant what I said the other day. You can’t hide here forever.”

“Mom, do we have to do this? I’m not a kid anymore.”

“Says the girl in the Disney pajamas, making her sister cry,” my mom says. “You never had to want for anything, that’s why you’re like this.”

Say what you like about my mother, but she’s never missed an opportunity to get a good dig in.

“I spent the majority of my teenage years alone on a film set, so don’t tell me what I’ve wanted for,” I say, trying to be calm but hearing something in my tone that I can’t control. Fighting with her is like muscle memory. The smallest thing used to set us off and we would spar back and forth, neither of us really caring what the other one said until suddenly we did. We say a lot of stuff that means nothing, but it’s like a coin-pusher game in an arcade, each insult edging us a little closer to the edge until all hell breaks loose.

“If you have something to say, then just say it,” my mom says, narrowing her eyes at me, but I look away, ignoring the adrenaline that is now coursing through my body. She shakes her head. “You had everything.”

“And I would still swap places with you in a heartbeat,” I say, and then we both realize what I’ve said, how small her life is because she had to accommodate mine, and how much more she would have given up for even one-tenth of what I have.

“You’ve always been selfish, Grace. It’s nice to see you haven’t changed,” she says.

“You know, I don’t expect you to give me any special treatment, but I thought you could at least pretend to like me,” I say quietly. “I already said I would apologize.”

We sit there for a few moments before she stands up. I think she’s going to leave but she starts to speak again with her hand on the door, her gaze unflinching.

“Do you want to know the truth, Grace?”

I shrug, because she’s going to enlighten me either way.

“I don’t think you’re a good person for your sister to be around right now.”