Page 86 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

I take the deepest breath I can manage,one two three, and then I throw my mother’s shoes through the window.

CHAPTER

25

August 23rd

3:43AM

SUNGILALAKE ISquiet and dark. I will jump into its unknowable water. I will sink down until my feet touch the bottom, and then I will spring up and haul myself back onto the dock, safe as houses.

My clothes are folded on a dock piling. I’ve texted Sara that I’ll be coming back to the trailer in a little while to sleep. Should I overestimate my innate swimming prowess and drown, at least someone will come looking for me. Regardless, a watery death seems unlikely. The dock reaches only twenty or so feet out from the shore. Even if I can’t pull myself back onto the dock, I’m sure I can drag myself to dry land.

I run down the dock and jump. I am suspended in the air for a small eternity before I plunge into the water. The cold chokes out all the air in my lungs. My first instinct is to breathe. I have to clamp a hand over my mouth to keep from inhaling water. Once the panic subsides, I lift my arms upward and allow myself to sink. The water moves around me in a delicate embrace, a dangerous slow dance in the blackness.

Mother, I wish you had taught me how to swim.

Mother, I wish it could have all been different.

Mother, I failed you and you failed me too.

Mother, I hate you, yet I would sacrifice anything to run into your arms one last time.

And Mother, Mother, I am sorry. I have never said it before, but I am sorry for what I did to you. I’m sorry it was you and not him.

My feet touch the bottom, and I realize, with immense relief, that the water is not as deep as I feared it would be.

Only the dogs welcome me when I come back to the trailer. I reward their loyalty with treats. Sara’s bedroom door is shut, but if the graveyard of fresh cigarette butts in her ashtray is any indication, she hasn’t been in bed long. I want to wake her, to sit at the foot of her bed and cry in her arms, comforted by the friend I love most in this world, but that is what ghouls do. It feeds our misery to share it with others.

My sorrows are my own.

I count my breaths in the pitch black. Zenobia paws at the door and joins me on the air mattress, stretching her legs as far as she can before going limp with exhaustion. Occasionally she smacks her lips to reassure me she is still alive, and I twitch my foot to return the favor.

Sleep comes to me in fits and starts. When the dog shifts, I jolt awake because, for a split second, I can trick myself into thinking it is my mother on the bed, come to sing me to sleep.

CHAPTER

26

August 23rd

10:21AM

NO TIME TOmourn, 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 morethan 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.

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