She's Lost Control

  ***

  I sit inside my sister’s ear and beg her to explain herself as she stands in the shower scrubbing every inch until her skin is glowing red and raw. Why were you so cruel to him? I ask. You always liked him. She shakes her head so hard that I tumble down into her pelvis.

  Once she’s satisfied and clean, a growing hunger tosses me around in June’s belly, and the heat spreading through her chest makes her lungs too stifling for me to rest. I’m in her mouth, dodging behind teeth and under her tongue as she rampages through a box of saltines then so many eggs fried in butter that I feel a nausea that makes me believe that I have a body again. She sleeps fitfully, sweating even though I make a point to settle in her always-cold feet. She’s anxious for morning, and I’m afraid of what’s going to happen when she’s up at dawn and already rubbing my perfume along the length of her neck.

  The bakery doesn’t open until seven, but June is there just after six, tapping daintily on the door before the employees arrive. Of course I’ve been in her eyes, watching through the glass as Louisa heaves enormous trays of mantecados and almond schnicken and cinnamon apple empanadas into the cases. She’s already wiped her hands on her apron so many times that the pink-frosting streaked fabric is wadded like a corsage at her waist, and every time she bends to adjust a row of pastel tea cakes I can see the outline of her breasts swing inside her white tee-shirt. I didn’t fall in love with Louisa because her sweat smelled like yeast dough or her lips tasted of powdered sugar. I loved her because she was generous and stubborn, and she put her back into everything she did, and for a brief time she gave me something better than what I had at home. June was the one who held me and promised me my heart would heal as she pushed her fingers along the back of my head, unaware that Louisa used to do the same for me.

  “Hey, sweetie,” Louisa greets June as she unlocks the door for her. “The register’s not up yet, but I can give you some schnicken for breakfast if you like.”

  “Yes, that would be nice,” June agrees.

  My sister sits at a table by the window, absently picking at her pastry while watching my boss putter behind the counter. We take in the smell of warm milk and sugar-frosted steam from the ovens in the back. Louisa starts a pot of coffee and pours June a cup, jovially teasing my sister for being up so early and how it must be because she couldn’t wait for one of her famous treats. June doesn’t respond, doesn’t even smile. She turns her gaze out the window, observing the sky as it lightens in warm bursts of orange into blue into white.

  “Did you love my sister?”

  Back behind the counter, Louisa drops one of the little cards meant to label a tray of ham and cheddar tarts. She keeps her eyes on it as she retrieves the paper and brushes it against her skirt. “Of course I did. She was a lovely girl, a great employee, she—”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “She was a good friend.”

  Now I’m on June’s tongue, and I’m rolling and bouncing and screaming as if her mouth were my own. I’m screaming liar and coward and you told me you loved me every night, but my sister’s teeth don’t so much as rattle. Louisa keeps the counter between herself and June as June rises and crosses towards her. I move to my sister’s ear so I can hear Louisa’s breath quicken as she glances nervously at the clock, expecting JoAnn or Terry to walk in any minute now. “What would he think?” she had asked when I grew tired of after-hours gropings and dropped kisses every time her son arrived to take her home. “He’d never forgive me,” she had sighed more than once into my hair. Even though I knew he was just an excuse, I joined my mother in hurling vulgarities at the sweet boy who would sometimes deliver his mother’s apology cakes to our house.

  Why were you so ashamed? I whisper before sliding from June’s ear.

  Louisa jumps when June slams her palms down on the counter.

  “Why were you so ashamed?”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “Don’t lie. I know everything.”

  Louisa’s shoulders slump first, this folding in on herself as if her lungs have completely deflated, taking a couple of inches off her already small stature. A tendril of her long black hair slips from the loose bun at the back of her head, a thick loop of shiny silk snaking around her neck, threatening to tighten around her throat.

  “You’re a coward,” June chastises her. “Your son, he’s a grown man now—he knows about these things. Don’t you think he’d want his mother to be happy? You broke my sister’s heart.”

  “She . . . she got married. She moved on,” Louisa stammers.

  “Edie moved to the city. Edie ended up dead.”

  That’s what does it. Dead, in the voice of my sister, a voice that sounds just like mine used to. Louisa’s lips press into a wavering line against each other and her eyes blur with the sudden weight of tears. I wonder if she’s ever really thought about it before this moment, about what she’s lost. I wonder if she cried alone like I did that night after she told me it was over. I wonder if she regretted spending her day kneading dough while my funeral took place across town with only my sister and the priest our mother complained was “too liberal” in attendance.

  Louisa wipes her arm roughly over her eyes. Flour mixes with tears across her reddening cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? That’s it? That’s hardly even an apology.”

  “I don’t know what else to say, June.”

  “Tell Edie you love her. Then tell your son. Tell him everything.”

  “I can’t . . . ”

  “She died thinking she was nothing to you, thinking you just threw her away.”

  Louisa doesn’t look scared or even surprised when June reaches across the counter and grabs the loose rope of hair curled around her neck. Her dark, wet eyes struggle to stay on June’s face as my sister drags the edge of her fingernail slowly across Louisa’s fat lower lip, and I race to June’s hand so I can relive the tremor of those lips against my skin all warm and soft and pliant. It occurs to me that I have all of eternity to think about those lips the same way I think about my husband’s hands.

  Louisa closes her eyes for just a moment. With her face now pulled close to June’s, I see the recognition surface as she breathes in my perfume. She looks confused by the intimacy, by something I used to do.

  “You’ll never be happy,” my sister says.

  I’m in June’s chest when she grips the back of Louisa’s head and slams it into the side of the pastry case. Nestled against her heart, every staccato beat jolts me like the glass against Louisa’s temple. There’s a little blood and a crack racing towards the cupcakes, and Louisa is flailing and screaming and grabbing more of her own hair than June’s hands. It’s easy for my sister, easier than it ever was for me.

  Once Louisa is quiet and slumped behind the counter, June grabs a handful of napkins and wipes the blood and stray strands of hair from the pastry case. I allow myself to settle in her lungs, surprised at how her breathing has slowed and how the heat in her chest has cooled to a perfect warm bath that cradles me. I still remember what it feels like to have a heart with its jackrabbit highs and smothering lows and the engine-beat of contentment in between. It’s this contentment that fills me, that gives me a shape again, when June smiles at the first employee in as she passes him through the bakery’s double doors.

  ***

  This is not my sister. This is not my June. This is all me.

  I was the one who pocketed cigarettes and lipsticks, and dreamt of humiliating revenge, and plotted arsons. June was the one who told me people are weak and not to dwell and to be patient. She took the hammer from my hands when I stood over Mother’s bed at night. She reminded me of who was worth my tears and who wasn’t. When I screamed and broke dishes and poured cold water all over the porch steps, June talked me down with promises of what we deserved.

  I try to make her expel me, make her cough me up into the bathroom sink like she did with our mother. After she eats, I push my way through her stomach, bouncing up into h
er throat and back into her gut over and over until she’s doubled over and retching, but she always manages to keep me locked in behind her teeth. While she sleeps, I lodge myself in her throat so that she’s forced to cough unconsciously, but her tongue always rolls me back inside. It doesn’t matter what happens to me, if I will become smoke out the window or if I will cease to exist once I’m outside of her body—I just have to get out so I don’t keep hurting my sister the way our mother did.

  “We were supposed to be happy,” June says one night as she stands in front of the mirror in her nightgown, her fingers busy working through her long blonde hair. I can see myself in her reflection, diffused and crackling at the same time, outlining her body like angry marker strokes over and over again as I race along her edges. I know she can feel me too by the way she rolls her arm, tumbling me back into her chest. “I tried, but I was too late, wasn’t I?” she sighs, her words a dull reverberation inside her ribcage.

  You have to let me go, June, I say inside her ear.

  “Again? Like I let you go when you said you knew what you were doing? Like when you said it wasn’t too much and you could handle it?”

  I made a mistake.

  June finishes braiding her hair, considers herself in the mirror, then shakes her hair loose again, knocking me into the base of her skull. I’ve been here before, of course, gliding over the surface of my sister’s brain, desperately trying to get inside, but never even able to work my way between the folds.

  “I had a plan, Edie. It was slow, but it was working. First Mother, then Louisa—I would’ve left Adam alone, but then all that shit you did together . . . If you had any kind of patience, Edie, we could’ve been happy.”

  Please, June. This isn’t you.

  “This isn’t me? You think Mother was controlling me? You think you’ve been controlling me?” She lets out a huge, gaping laugh, jarring and so much crueler than the ones I remember when she talked about smothering our mother in dog shit or the irony of Louisa’s son falling in love with a man. “I’m the one who pushed Mother down the stairs, Edie,” she tells me, going back to fussing with her hair. “I’m the one who made sure Louisa got what’s coming and I’ll be the one who does the same for Adam. All those things you wanted but couldn’t do—it’s me, Edie. Maybe this is who I really am.”

  I think about the day our mother died, seeing June frozen at the top of the stairs, one hand on the railing and the other braced against the wall as she stared down at the woman I’d wished dead a thousand times over. I remember envisioning myself there, close behind Mother as she rattled off that day’s chores and how I could do them better, my foot jutting out just enough to catch her heel and knock her off her feet. I remember holding June’s hand as her tears started right as the paramedics arrived, amazed at her capacity for tenderness towards the woman who had been so cruel to us. As a thick, choking haze falls between my sister and me again, I imagine Adam standing on the roof with her, drunk and leaning farther and farther over the ledge while she asks him if he can still see my blood on the sidewalk below.

  You have to let me go, June. You won’t be happy as long as I’m here.

  My sister smooths down her hair one last time then drops her hands, bracing her palms against the mirror as she leans in close to the glassy surface, squinting a little as if she can see me inside of her reflection. “What about you, Edie? You didn’t get to be happy when you were alive, but I’m fixing that now. Then we can both be happy.”

  We shared more than just blood—I see that now. All night and into the next day I roil and jump, struggling to break myself apart, to dissolve myself fully into the person who has always been half of me like I was half of her. Despite my efforts, she sleeps soundly, and she eats without nausea or vomiting, and I stay lodged in her body for days that could be weeks that could be months.

  When June walks by the bakery, I am afraid to look, so I tense in her ear hoping to hear Louisa’s laugh as she greets her favorite customers or wishes my old coworkers a good night.

  When June stops in the corner store, I’m in her fingers as she turns the heavy bottle of Adam’s favorite whiskey over in her hands.

  When June climbs the stairs to the apartment where I last lived, I linger in her feet so I can feel each weathered groove and remember what it was like to stumble and yell and laugh, tipsy from gin, cheeks and chest hot with anticipation as my husband tugs at my skirt.

  And when Adam opens the door and takes the whiskey and accepts my sister’s suggestion to enjoy a drink on the roof, I wonder if after this, if after we are done, June and I will finally be happy.

  SLEEPING IN PUBLIC PLACES

  Jacquelyn Mitchard

  THERE IS ONLY one of her, and she knows it.

  In the cool, arid darkness, she listens for Jeremy’s breathing, measures it, tests its familiarity, slow and direct with a customary slight hitch on the inhale, like a sneeze in reverse. He is really, fully asleep, sprawled: In the first days, he faked it sometimes, she could tell, his respirations a regulated pantomime. She can’t decide if she hates him more for faking sleep or for actually sleeping. Excited, she rises, and collects her kit, fuzzy throw and water bottle, paperback and pen flashlight, cranberry cookies furled in a paper napkin, ear buds, yoga pillow, the four flexible black poster boards rolled in a hair elastic. Her phone. The phone is a concession. The room is dimmer than a lake bottom, but she skirts the obstacles—throw pillows, her boots (“Hey,” she told Jeremy yesterday. “You were a high jumper in college, but I’m a low jumper. I jump over my shoes.” She’s funny. She’s fine. She’s funny and fine and even fancy), her lap desk, her great-grandmother’s primitive cherry cradle, filled with dead plants. She must make a note to burn it.

  “Hello,” she says to the owl that sits white on the creaking branch just outside their door. It never flies off, just regards her with bored, reptilian eyes. “Hello and goodnight.”

  There is a style to these things. She lets the car roll backward down the slight short slope to the blacktop, engaging the motor only when she knows that the stand of wizened evergreens the realtor grandly called a privacy privet will block the murmur of the fine and fancy Volvo motor. Now she is on her own.

  The edge of a residential area is sometimes best, but she can’t go back more than once or twice in a two-week period. People will notice. They watch cold-case shows: They’re nervy; they’re curious; they’re insomniacs; they’re the future foilers of felons. She often searches out the edge of a tree-bowered neighborhood: Holiday times are good for this. Family and friends, everyone’s here, cars up on curbs and lawns, as if she’s invited too! On weekday nights, a church or a synagogue is just the thing. Ecumenically enough, the big lots at the big box churches always have room for one more pilgrim. Who’s to say, after all, that she’s not one of the devout, grooming God’s house before the Sabbath onslaught? Hotel parking lots are golden, too, bathed in cheap light, angled in next to mini-vans with roof racks and side windows decaled with six stick figures . . . Mom, Dad, Sis, Bro, cat, and baby on board! The rub comes if someone from the desk notices her car; but hotel desk workers are desperate. How can they have paid for an associate’s degree in hospitality for this, sick drunk hockey fans flapping naked in the pool at three in the morning? They have bigger fish to fry than her. And hotel rooms? Hotel rooms are simply not public but instead like little houses. You stay in hotels with someone you love, on a visit, on a journey, or on business. They are all you need, a nascent environment. They constitute a commitment, to some future. Temporary, but not tenuous. They won’t do.

  Except for the politics she fashioned for herself in college days, she would always go to the parking lot of the Wal-Mart. Wal-Marts never close: They proudly welcome weary RV travelers, and some even boast cable and hookups. Though her snobbery shames her, she does have to admit that on weekends, Wal-Mart parking lots can be upsetting, aromatically, because of the collision of all the gassy smells pizza burritos cheesy popcorn belches.

  Roadsi
de parking areas terrify her. Killers cleave to these places, seeking wounded.

  She goes to them most often.

  She goes to one now.

  It’s far, maybe a drive of fifteen minutes. When she sees the flirty leafed wink of the caged lights above the toilets, her breath comes faster. This could be anywhere. There’s a big truck, a big furniture truck and in her humble opinion, furniture trucks and milk trucks are just somehow a cut above. Two mini vans hump nose to tail, like beetle mates. She chooses a spot next to a huge holly bush. She’s been here before.

  One time, someone showed up. There came a tap tap on the window, and, her eyes shocked open, she went whaling around in the glovey leather front seat. “Please don’t get out of the vehicle, miss.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is everything all right here? Do you mind passing me the vehicle registration and your license?”

  “I’m just taking a break. The signs says: Plan your next rest.”

  “That’s fine, miss. Please stay in the vehicle.”

  After an interminable wait, during which she reviewed all of her possible toll violations and near misses, the officer returned and said, “This address is in Kirkwood. It’s only two exits from here.”

  “Oh, I’m moving,” she explained. “I’m moving on. I got a late start and I really needed a short nap.”

  “Well. Lock up,” said the police officer. “Drink lots of water.”

  “I do,” she said. “I stay hydrated.”

  That night, she couldn’t go back to sleep. She fidgeted, and finally went to the doughnut shop, sitting in the window reading season-old celebrity magazines that predicted the breakup of couples already divorced, jangled as an Edward Hopper dame.

  Now she tucks her poster boards against the inside of the windshield and the two side windows. They’re bent just right, and she doesn’t really need the tape she keeps in the glove box. She stuffs her backpack and extra pillow up on the package shelf so the car looks full. For a while, she’d had a car cover, but it was almost impossible to get into the car with it on and she found herself fixated on the notion that some vandal would think hers was a costly car worth hiding, like a Mercedes, when a 2005 Volvo was its own best camo. She reclines the seat and tucks the throw around her shoulders, around her neck. Her arms are as stiff as the skin of a frog. There.