Page 87 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“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,Idon’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.”

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