Page 27
Story: Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter
CHAPTER 26
August 23 rd
10:21 AM
N O TIME TO mourn, no time to grieve. Life marches onward. Blessed are they that mourn, but cursed are they that withdraw and take private time to do it. The anger and sadness suffocate me—brutal, prolonged, spine-chilling suffocation, like a plastic bag has been thrown over my head and I am writhing hopelessly for a gasp of air, but I have no time to process any of my emotions. Today I see Harmony.
The red jumpsuit flatters my sister. The khaki she will be forced to wear in York will wash her out, consuming her frame and identity in equal measure. As the deputy shepherds her into the room, both hands gripping her bicep as if she is the Hulk, liable to turn green and burst free from her handcuffs at any second, I try to imagine what she will look like at her first parole hearing ten years on. She will be thinner, older, her cheekbones more sunken and her complexion more sallow. A life of confinement will age her more rapidly than a thousand cartons of cigarettes or gallons of liquor. The only thing prison will ravage more than her appearance is her spirit. She walks into this room with her chin held high, but she will lower it more with each passing year. Once her chin drops, her eyes will soon follow, and then her shoulders will slump, her gait will slow. She thinks she is strong enough to withstand the systematic crushing of her soul, but she isn’t. No one is. Prison is an institution designed to break you piece by piece, like eyelashes ripped out one at a time.
Graceless like a ragdoll, she lands in the seat. She flings her arms in the air to protest the deputy’s roughness and sticks her tongue out at him as he leaves. “Flinging me around like a sack of potatoes.”
“You look all right.”
“Liar. I look—what did the old man always say? Rode hard, put away wet.” She rakes her hair back with a hand. “They messed with the timing of my meds. They’re making me take the Seroquel in the mornings. I feel like a zombie.”
“When do they send you to York?”
“Thursday.”
“Long bus ride,” I say.
“Yeah, and I don’t even get a book to pass the time. I get to stare out the window at the world-famous natural beauty of Nebraska.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to read soon enough.”
Harmony scowls. “If that’s your idea of a joke, save it for another audience. Why’d you come here anyway?”
I want to tell my sister she is brave and stupid, noble and reckless, that I am at once frustrated by and in awe of the walking contradiction she has become, but those precise words reveal too much, and the deputy lurks nearby with golden ears. Today, I can offer only tepid praise. “You’re a force of nature, Harmony.”
A crooked smile flashes across her face. “Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“I’m not sure if I’ll be able to visit, but I’ll try to get cleared. It’ll probably take a few months.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I’m telling you I want to.”
“Providence, I don’t want you to visit.”
An incredulous laugh escapes me. “You’ll be dying for company, I promise.”
The emotion on her face vaguely resembles remorse. She brushes her fingers through her hair again, her hands gliding up from her ears until they converge in a rat’s nest atop her head. “I appreciate your offer, but I don’t want to see you.”
“Can I ask why?”
“I don’t need this relationship.”
She mistakes her clinical words for a clean break. She thinks she is amputating the limb, but she is tearing it violently from my body. “You really don’t mince words,” I manage.
“I never understood the point of beating around the bush.”
“Is it Mom?”
“I can’t forgive you. I wish I could, I really do. I’ve gone ’round and ’round with my therapist, with my psychiatrist, with Grace, and I …” She clenches her fists and then releases them, her palms turned to the heavens. “I can’t do it.”
“It was thirteen years ago, Harmony. I regret it every day, but I can’t take it back.”
“You know Mom never hugged me after you tried to kill her? Never once. She stopped loving me the same time she stopped loving you. She was just waiting for me to turn into you. She got over it by the time Grace was older, but me? As far as I’m concerned, you did kill her. You took her away from me. She had shortcomings—she drank, she was an addict, she was miserable, she had no business raising a kid, let alone three. But you’re the reason she couldn’t love me anymore, and that’s what I can’t forgive you for.” Harmony’s eyes are empty, two vast oceans, the depths of which cannot be charted. “You turned her into this cold, lifeless creature who loved painkillers more than she loved me.”
“Did Mom ever tell you the real story? About the day I ran her over?”
“She was standing at the end of the driveway and you put the car in reverse, unprovoked.” Her voice is colorless, like someone repeating the punchline to a joke they’ve heard a hundred times before.
“No,” I say. “He was the one I wanted to run over. He’d cracked her over the head with a beer bottle, and I … remember what you said to me in the house? That I should kill the right parent this time? I tried, Harmony. I tried to kill the right parent back then. She pushed him out of the way at the last second.”
Her frown deepens. “I don’t believe you, and I don’t forgive you.”
“I’m sorry. For doing it, and for everything that happened to you after.”
“Okay.”
My moment of madness still echoes through all three of our lives. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I never considered that by taking eyes and teeth from my mother, I would be taking them from my sisters too. Their suffering, like mine, is an existential torture: sorrow for the lives we never lived, grief for the people we were never able to become. It is Harmony’s right to deny me forgiveness for everything I’ve stolen from her.
But knowing she doesn’t have to forgive me makes this no less painful.
I blink back tears. I wish I had no more left to cry. “Even if—I mean, I can still send you money, if that’s okay. Maybe books. I won’t write letters or anything. I can give you things to help the time pass.”
“No letters.”
“I promise.”
She studies me for an ulterior motive before nodding. Behind her, the deputy observes us through the glass insert of the door. “You can send me a few things, long as you don’t do it out of pity.”
Every book I send and every dollar I deposit in her name will be an apology for a different sin, further blurring the line I draw between altruism and guilt. I will send her things throughout her sentence, even if I never hear a word of thanks. I don’t want the only kindness I’ve ever shown Harmony to be contingent on her forgiveness.
“There is one thing you can do for me,” Harmony continues.
“Name it.”
“Please look out for Grace.”
“What happened to leaving her alone?”
“Well, I won’t exactly be around, will I?” When she sighs, her breath smells of the stale remnants of sleep. “Someone has to stick around and look out for her. You’re not my first choice, but who else is there?”
“I’m going to go home soon, Harmony.”
“Take her with you.”
“She’s seventeen,” I say. “It’s kidnapping if I take her across state lines without our father’s permission.”
Her upper lip curls. “You can’t leave her with him.”
“I told her—” I stop myself when I catch the deputy again, looming at us from the other side of the door. I finish my thought in a frazzled whisper. “I offered to help if she needed to get out. Whatever she needed. I told her just to say the word.”
“She doesn’t know how to ask for help. You and I never did. Why would she be different?”
“The only option is …”
Her eyes are ferocious. She knows exactly what I am saying. “Finish what you started.”
“I’m not that person anymore.”
“But this time, it’s righteous, isn’t it? Listen to me, Providence. We are both lost causes, but she isn’t. If you can get her out of there and help her have a chance at a normal life, do it.”
“And traumatize her all over again?”
Her patience hangs by a thread. Every movement she makes is quick and twitchy, like insects are crawling on her. “Grace doesn’t hate you now, but I promise the second you drive out of town and leave her behind with him, she will. She will never forgive you.”
“What if something happens to me? What if I die? Then who does she have?”
“Is it fun for you to think of everything that can possibly go wrong?”
I speak softly enough for the incessant chugging of the air conditioning unit to drown out my words. “She will be fucked if something happens to me. You are gone. Mom is gone. We don’t have aunts or uncles or cousins. There is no one now that you’re going away.”
“She’s fucked if you leave her with the old man.”
“She doesn’t want it to end like this.”
“You can’t ask her to make the decision,” she says. “She won’t get there on her own, even if she wants it. She’s a sweet girl. You take the burden on your conscience, not her.”
“Harmony—”
She pushes her chair away from the table. The legs screech against the concrete floor, a sound so sharp I feel it in my teeth. “Do it, Providence. Do it. It’s the only way he’s ever going to stop.”
“You don’t have anything to lose.”
“And you do?”
I swallow the fuck you on my tongue because I don’t want it to be the last thing I say to her. “She said it would make me the same as him.”
Harmony shakes her head. “All three of us know that isn’t true.”
“If you feel this strongly about it, why didn’t you ever do anything?”
“Because I didn’t learn how to stand up for Grace until it was too late, and I’ve been scrambling to make amends ever since. I’m a lot like you that way, always looking out for number one.”
“Sometimes people just need to hear ‘I’m sorry’ for them forgive you.”
“She’s forgiven me,” she says. “I haven’t forgiven myself.”
We stare at one another, trying to commit our faces to memory, but we already doomed to forget. As soon as I peel my eyes from her, she begins to fade, like a photograph exposed to sun until it blanches white.
“I’m going to go now.” Abruptly, Harmony is on her feet. The handcuffs are looser than the last time I visited. If she manipulates her wrists just so, she could slide right out of them. “I need a nap. The Seroquel …”
I want to keep her in our slice of purgatory forever, but this is done. We will forever share blood, but we will never again be sisters. “Good luck, Harmony.”
“I’m a force of nature, remember? I don’t need luck.”
Cued either by a secret signal or by eavesdropping on our conversation, the deputy glides into the room. Harmony shoots me one last smile before being escorted from the room. I watch the back of her head until she rounds a corner. I hold my breath until I can no longer hear her footsteps. I tell myself not to cry because she will not cry, and because she would not want me to shed a single tear. She has given me the gift of closure. She jettisons me from her life with ease, and though it will not be as painless for me, now I must do the same to her.
It is the last time I ever see Harmony. I will tick the days of her sentence off my calendar, her absence a primal lack in my life, like hunger or thirst, but I will never speak to her again. In the future, when I think of her, a precious serenity will wash over me, and I’ll know she’s thinking of me too.
I follow Sara around the trailer like a shadow. When we go outside to throw tennis balls for the dogs, I finally break our silence. I want to tell her everything—how extraordinarily fucked up my life has become, how I am choosing to uphold a grievous injustice, how I am indeed the selfish and stupid bitch she thinks I am—but it would be another act of selfishness on my part, more emotional waterboarding that my friend does not deserve. As we settle into her metal patio chairs, all I can tell her is: “You’re in my will, Sara.”
She wipes the slobber from one of the tennis balls onto her sweatpants. “Gee, fantastic. That’s not ominous at all.”
“I thought you needed to know.”
“Providence …”
The dogs confuse the pause in our game of fetch for ending it entirely. Left to entertain themselves, they roughhouse in a patch of dirt. Every time it looks like one of the boys has her pinned, Zenobia breaks free and turns the tables. “If I had a house and a yard, I’d steal Zenobia from you. I like her.”
“Don’t try to distract me.”
“You’ve always been in my will. I have no one else to leave anything to.”
“What about Grace? Harmony?”
“Harmony and I are not going to have a relationship.”
Her frown softens into pursed lips. “Did something happen?”
“Everything and nothing. She doesn’t want anything to do with me, and I’m going to do my best to respect that.”
“You can still leave things to Grace when your time comes.”
“I mean if something were to happen soon,” I say as I fish a cigarette from the carton in my lap, “before I could change anything. I don’t have much, but everything goes to you.”
“Why are you giving me a verbal suicide note?”
“I have to get Grace out of that house, Sara. If it’s the last thing I do on this earth, I have to do it.”
She withholds her lighter, as if denying me a cigarette will make me see reason. She flicks the flame on and off. “You’re going to kill your dad,” she says at last.
“I’ll try to reason with him first.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll get real far with that.”
“Stop acting like you know him the way I do. You weren’t raised by that monster.”
Sara relents by lifting both hands like a criminal apprehended at the end of a manhunt. She drops the lighter in my lap. The metal, still hot from the intermittent flames, scorches the moth tattoo on my thigh. “If you’re only planning to ‘reason with him,’ ” she says, sharpening the words with air quotes, “then why are we talking about your will?”
“Because I think he’s going to shoot me when he sees me. He said that’s what he’d do if he saw me again, and he said if I talked to Grace, he’d shoot us both.” I exhale an unsteady breath. “And my gun is gone.”
“ Gone? Did it grow legs and catch a bus to Denver?”
“The less you know about the gun, the better.”
She shakes her head. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“As fucked as you think this is, multiply it by a thousand.”
“And Grace is a minor, so you can’t just run off with her like a thief in the night.”
“That’s kidnapping, and I’d get twenty years, easy.” The first drag of my cigarette calms my racing heart. I wish I could find this comfort elsewhere, preferably in a way that isn’t going to give me cancer untold years down the line, but nothing ever comes close. Simple pleasures. I’ve relied on them to keep me going for a long time.
“When’s her birthday? Maybe you wait it out.”
“January.”
Sara lights her cigarette with the cherry of my own. “When I said you were selfish, I wasn’t asking you to die for someone to prove me wrong.”
I don’t want to die either, but I’m also not scared of it. I have too many bruises and badly healed broken bones to be scared of death. “If I leave her with him, then I’m just as much a monster as he is, and Harmony … she has never asked me for anything, but she’s asking me for this.”
“You’re not obligated to fulfill Harmony’s last wishes because you’re sisters, same way she’s not obligated to forgive you or love you.”
“I can’t tell you why, but I owe this to Harmony.”
We finish our cigarettes in silence and watch the dogs bounce around the yard, connected at the hips to form a multiheaded beast, like a Hydra from Greek mythology. They separate to drink water and catch their breaths. Julius and Augustus flop down on the porch while Zenobia lies down at our feet, her head on a swivel to monitor the perimeter.
“If something does happen to me,” I begin, “will you please be there for Grace? I know legally you can’t do anything, but I want there to be a safe person for her to go to if she needs it. And—and you’re the only one in my will, but I want you to give some money to Grace. I don’t have much. Tattoo artists don’t get life insurance.” I smile, but the levity does nothing for Sara. “She mentioned she wanted to go to the community college in Scottsbluff. Maybe enough money to help her with that.”
“Please don’t die on me.”
“Just in case, Sara. Please. Promise me.”
She closes her eyes and chews on the words. “I promise.”
Before I can impose another demand upon her, she marches into the trailer. One by one, citronella candles appear in the open windows. I practice an apology in my head. I refuse to end this conversation on anything but good terms, because if I do die, I don’t want my best friend’s final memory of me to be a bitter one.
She reappears a minute later and presses a cool, slender object into my palm. As my thumb passes over the telltale button on its handle, she tells me what it is. “My switchblade.”
“What would Daniel say?”
Sara holds her arms across her chest. “Nothing. They’re legal for felons to carry in South Dakota.”
“Is this your blessing?”
“Clearly I can’t talk you out of this,” she says, “so it’s me making sure you have a snowball’s chance in hell at fighting back.”
I hit the button. The blade jumps out. Sunlight glints along the polished metal.