Madly (New York 2)

“Can I use your bathroom first?”

He just stared at her, his eyes as flat and mean as a snake’s, and Allie slipped out of her shoes and padded down the bare wood floor of the hallway to the bedroom where her sister was waiting.

May sat in a chair by the window—a good window, floor-to-ceiling set into brick, probably the only truly nice thing about the apartment aside from the kitchen. An end table beside her was stacked with notepads, a laptop computer, a jar filled with artist pencils, a gummy eraser stuck to the lip of the wooden top.

May’s hair was piled on top of her head in a sadness bun, her eyes red-rimmed, her face pale and slack.

“Hey,” Allie said.

“Hey.”

Allie’s heart hurt so much, it was difficult to breathe.

She sat cross-legged on the floor at her sister’s feet. There was only the unmade bed, and Ben and May’s unmade bed wasn’t somewhere she could insert herself into right now, or possibly ever.

Besides, it felt about right, sitting at May’s feet. She wanted to wrap her arms around the wide legs of her sister’s soft sadness pants and rest her cheek on May’s shin.

“I’m sorry.”

May looked out the window. “I know.”

“I fucked up.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t be mad at me.”

“I can’t help it.”

“I know. I know you can’t, but you have to try not to, because I need you.”

May’s mouth hardened. “Now you need me.”

“I never stopped needing you. It’s—That’s the thing you don’t get, that I didn’t tell you because I need you, because I love you and I wanted to protect…us. Like, I found out this thing, this terrible thing, about Mom and Dad, and it changed absolutely everything. Like some bulldozer had come and knocked the house down, and Mom and Dad were already used to living in the rubble, and I had to get used to it, obviously, but you…you could be the one person who still had everything, right? You could be the one who got to have the gift of not knowing.”

“Jesus, thanks. Thank you for the gift of not knowing. Best gift ever.”

“I don’t mean it like—”

“Thanks for letting me live in ignorance for years while everybody else kept me safe and innocent, because that always worked so fucking well for me, having somebody keep me innocent and safe. That’s just exactly, exactly, what I wanted from my little sister.”

May’s arms were crossed, her knuckles white where she gripped her bare arms. She hadn’t looked at Allie even one time since she came in the room.

“I wanted to keep the worst thing that had happened to me, ever, from also happening to you.”

“You wanted to protect your idea of what I needed, which means who you wanted to protect was yourself. You didn’t trust me.”

“Oh. Yeah, I can see that. But…” Allie stopped, because what May had said was true. She hadn’t trusted her sister. “But you didn’t trust me, either. You’re mad at me because I couldn’t tell you these things, these big and terrible things, but you did it, too.”

May shook her head. “I don’t think I’m ready to do this. I don’t think—Ben said to, but he doesn’t have a sister, and I can’t. Today. I can’t today.”

Allie looked down at her hands and made herself keep talking. “It’s not like anyone could ignore how Mom would treat you, sometimes. What she would say about…your body. How she would act like we all needed to eat healthier and start making chicken breasts, or talk about how much weight someone at church had lost on Weight Watchers. Not just that. All the comments about how art classes didn’t lead to a stable career path, especially for women. Badgering you to go out with that asshole, Zach, from youth group who kissed up to her but talked shit about you behind your back. Dan.”

May’s jaw was set. She didn’t turn, didn’t soften.

“You never, never talked to me about it, May. Never. I’d follow you to your room when you shut yourself in after one of those fucked up things with Mom, and I’d knock and you wouldn’t answer. When you would come out, you were always all sunshine and daisies, and I’d ask you if you were okay, and you always said yes, but I knew you weren’t. You didn’t trust me. You didn’t need me. You didn’t tell me. So…I didn’t tell you.” Allie’s eyes filled with tears. “This can’t be where we end up.”

She didn’t have to look at May to know that she was crying. Her toes were curled tight into the rug and her body had gone stiff. This is what May did. She compressed everything that hurt her into some horrible pebble so she could drop it down some well inside of her.