The Brightest Stars

“Kare,” she said to me one day. “Listen to this: ‘Schönes wetter heute, nicht wahr?’” She was beaming from ear to ear. “I just said, ‘It’s lovely weather today, isn’t it?’”

“Mom,” I kidded her. “It’s raining.

“Oh, don’t be so literal,” she said, laughing. How about this one: “Das sind meine kinder, Karina und Austin. Ja, sie sind sehr gut erzogen. Vielen dank.”

Austin ran into the room when he heard his name. Mom beamed at him. “I just said ‘These are my children, Karina and Austin. Yes, they are very well behaved. Thank you.’”

“You just said that Austin is well-behaved? Mom! You’re hilarious. You can’t deceive those poor Germans like that. I give Austin three days before he’s breaking some international law or something.”

“Ha. Ha. Ha. Karina,” Austin said.

We laughed and my mom made homemade spaghetti that night.

It was easy to remember that happy time. There were so few of them.

MOM WAS BACK. She was lively without being manic. Clear and in charge without being hyper-focused. Understanding and forgiving, she was like those TV moms who always seem to know the right thing to say. She spent her time cleaning and sorting, boxing up all our stuff. Her collectable dishes and vintage jewelry. Our toys and clothes. The TV hadn’t had a break like that since before she started to fade.

“They’ll be worth something someday,” Mom said, going through her old magazines. “Once the printed word is completely extinct.” She liked to warn us about the future almost as much as she liked us to know how well-prepared she was for it.

I was sitting at the kitchen table that afternoon; Mom was standing behind me, pulling my hair through a sadistic highlighting cap. I suffered through it gladly, though, just to have hair like the girls named Ashley and Tiffany. Our house was packed up well before the movers were scheduled to pack everything for us. Mom kept her vinyls out though, and even started singing along again when Alanis Morrissette was at her feistiest.

“It only takes two hours from Paris to London. Can you believe that?” she asked. She was dancing around me wearing those weird plastic gloves. When “You Oughta Know” came on she punched her hands through the air like it was her fight song. I remember how she looked that day. She was wearing eyeliner and had decorated her long brown hair with little braids randomly scattered. She was beautiful, happy.

“Karina, we are going to have so much fun. Imagine the people we will meet. Everyone is different there, mixed around, and no one cares like they do here. People won’t judge us. It’s going to be incredible, Kare,” she promised.

Why is it that happiness is always so short-lived when despair seems to stick around like an unwanted guest?

It was the next day while Austin and I were at school that my dad broke the news. We were no longer going to Europe. A change of command meant that we would be stationed in Georgia, just two states away. My dad said it was better for his chances of promotion. My mom said it was worse for what was left of her soul.

The next morning, I found an empty bottle of gin in the bathroom. I bagged it up and carried it outside to the big trash can, helping her hide the evidence. Enabling, I think they call it. At that point with my mom, it wasn’t the empty bottle that worried me, it was the fact that since it was gin, it meant she must have run out of vodka.

“DO YOU WANT TO STAY here for a little bit?” I looked at Austin and for a second, I could see her in him, something around the eyes, about the shape of his mouth. We’d always be a mash up of our parents and that horrified me.

“No,” he sighed. “I don’t know. I need to figure my shit out. I can’t do that from your couch.”

“It’s cheaper than Barcelona,” I joked.

“I was thinking about staying with Martin.” His words punched me. A sucker punch.

“Martin?”

I was going to make him say his name.

“Kael.”

“Since when are you two friends like that?” I couldn’t even hide the hurt in my voice.

“I don’t know, a week or so.” He laughed. I couldn’t breathe. “He’s been at Mendoza’s a lot.”

“Seriously?”

I couldn’t believe him.

“Look, I know something happened between you two and I know it ended. And that’s all I know. You told me it was nothing serious, that the shit with Dad was a mix-up, right?” he looked me straight in the eyes. Daring me to be honest.

That was a dare I wouldn’t take.

“So unless there’s more to it, more that you want to share with me, I don’t see the problem with me crashing with him. He’s the only one beside Mendoza who just chills at home and doesn’t bring chicks home every night. He doesn’t get in trouble.”

I wanted to throw up. I was relieved and devastated. It was a wretched combination.

“I’m not saying not to be friends with him.” I let out a breath of frustration. “I just …” I couldn’t think of a valid reason to tell Austin not to stay with Kael unless I wanted to tell him everything and that just wasn’t possible. He would hate all of them, maybe even Mendoza too.

It was enough that I hated them.

“If you don’t want me to, just say it. Just know that I can’t stay at Dad’s anymore, Kare. I can’t do it.”

I nodded. I understood needing to get away from our dad’s. He should stay at Kael’s house. Or Martin’s house. I liked to think of him as Martin, as the soldier who was just doing what he was told, who had offered to help my brother when he needed it. Not the man who I fell for, the man I fell too deeply and foolishly for.

I hadn’t seen him for a while, except when I scrolled through my Instagram, looking at the row of pictures of us.

He had changed me so much in such a short amount of time. The captions seemed so clever then, “Atlanta refuses to see us now,” I wrote under a picture of us in the car, a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey on the dashboard. Preparing for the upcoming movie, I was doing a reread, and it was even more exciting when I had a man who liked to get bossy in my bed when I closed the book. My tire blew right as we were leaving for our trip to Atlanta, the trip that never happened.

I had to shake it off, to actually shake my head, to stop the thought of Kael invading my mind. My hands were trembling. I thought I was over this.

“Dad’s calling me again,” Austin said, changing the subject.

“Are you going to answer?”

“No.”

A car drove by, a little boy in the backseat waved at us. Austin waved back, even smiling for the child.

“I got a job, too,” Austin told me a minute or so later. The sun was going down and the sky was changing colors around us.

“Really?” I pepped up for him. “That’s great news,” I told him. I meant it. He hadn’t had a job since he got fired from the drive-in. “Where is it?”

He hesitated. “It’s with Martin.”

“Of course it is.” I hung my head between my knees.

“He’s flipping that duplex, you know? The one he lives in. He’s paying me, Lawson, everyone to help him. I’m going to get more hours in than everyone else since they all have to work during the week. It’s just like tearing up carpet, shit like that.”

I needed to be happy for my brother, even if he was wrapping his life around the one person I was trying to detangle mine from.

“You two are a lot alike, you know that?” he said, a smile on his face. It was the first time he looked even close to happy since I walked up.

I shook my head. “That’s so not true.”

“Whatever you say,

Karina.”

“How’s Katie?” I asked, flipping the attention back to him. I knew they were back together, I saw it on his Facebook. I guess her ex-boyfriend was out of the picture for now.

“Good. She’s good for me. She keeps me in line. And she wakes up early for school, so I go out less, you know?” He sounded so proud of himself and I let him be. We were two totally different humans even if we shared a womb.

“That’s good. I’m happy for you,” I said to him. I laid back on the porch, resting my head close to his. We were almost kids again.

“Thanks. I won’t bring him around if you don’t want me to, but he’s really helping me out.”

I stared at the sky, begging for the stars to come out and play. I wanted to know that I could count on them. I wanted to be certain of something.

“It’s fine. I’m seeing someone anyway.” The words slid from my tongue, devious as the lie itself.

“You are?” he asked.

“Yeah. I don’t want to talk about it,” I told Austin, knowing he would shy away from anything complicated when given the chance.

“Okay,” he agreed. “So you can’t be mad that he’s picking me up here like any minute.” He said the words fast, as if it would change their meaning.

“Austin,” I whined his name, twisted it around my tongue. “Fine. I’m going inside. You really need to get a car.”

“I will, now that I have a job.” He beamed, easing my pain a little.

“I’m proud of you, really. And see, you didn’t have to join the Army after all,” I joked. I knew he wouldn’t have gone through with it, no matter how much our dad tried to force it on him.

I heard the roar of Kael’s truck before I saw it. My body reacted at the same lightning speed as my mind and I had to actively force myself to go inside the house before he turned on my street.

Go, I told my feet.

Now, I told them.

But he was out of the truck and walking up the grass before I had moved even an inch. His eyes were hooded. He wore a baseball cap. I saw the confusion flashing across his face when I didn’t run.