Grim

UNTETHERED by Sonia Gensler

Grief hangs heavy on my bones, at times nearly suffocating me. My world has turned shadowy and muted, and the strongest emotion I can muster is confusion. There’s anger, as well, but it lurks under the surface, too smothered by weariness to ignite.

Ben’s patience must be wearing thin, but I don’t know how not to be this way.

“How’s your mom?” he asks.

“The same.”

“Still sticking to her room?”

“Yeah.” I nestle further into the crook of his arm. His finger traces my eyebrow and cheek. These days Ben is my only comfort, but even he can’t fill the void entirely.

“I saw her again,” I whisper.

He doesn’t ask whom. Instead, he lifts my chin, turning my face so our eyes meet. “And?”

“She came just before midnight, like before. Walked past our bedroom, almost in slow motion.” I have to swallow because the words are thick in my throat. “She was so pale and beautiful, it made me ache.”

He nods. “You miss her.”

“Miss her? It’s more than that.”

“I know, Claire.”

But he can’t know. Not really.

I don’t tell him my plan. As much as he claims otherwise, Ben doesn’t understand my need for my sister. He only remembers our shouting and door slamming. The chill of our punishing silence. Can I expect him to forget how I groused about Julia changing the way she dressed, the books she read, for her drama-geek boyfriend? Or how her narrowed eyes burned a hole of resentment straight through Ben every time they were in the same room?

Ben saw her as my enemy. Our enemy.

And I encouraged it.

But I’ve let go of all that. My brain may be murky and muffled, but the loss of her has brought certain things into sharp focus. We shared the same womb. Later it was the same crib, clasping fingers and toes as we slept. When our drooling mouths first formed words, we spoke our own language. The two of us made a world of our own, leaving others—even our own mother—feeling like intruders.

Shadows fall as I ponder this, and the bedroom turns dark and still.

“Mom’s gonna be home soon,” I say. “She never liked you being here.”

“Let’s go, then.”

I shake my head. “I need to stay near, just in case.”

“From what you’ve told me, she won’t even notice.”

“I have to stay. But I’ll see you later, right?”

He frowns. “Claire....”

I pinch him. “Stop worrying. Kiss me instead.”

He sighs sadly before his lips meet mine.

I kiss back, trying to melt into him like I did before. His body is a comfort to me, but also dangerous in a way I once found exciting. I still do, but in the back of my mind there’s that vision of Julia, pale and fragile. Walking the hallway over and over. She’s lost, unanchored, and somehow I must ground her. But how do I bridge the divide between us?

Mom seems more mechanical than human, her face blank as she makes her slow, jerky way through each day. I’ve given up trying to talk to her. When she’s not hiding in her room, she slams kitchen cabinets and wipes counters that were never dirty in the first place. Occasionally she slumps in the living room recliner, staring at nothing. I tried to sit with her once, but her slack-faced silence was unsettling. I might as well have been sitting next to a corpse.

I prefer to stay in my room. Our room, minus Julia. Mom can’t stand to come in here, but I need to be near my sister’s things. Seeing them hurts like hell, but the pain helps me focus.

Julia will come, and this time I will somehow anchor her.

I will make her see me.

I’ve never been patient, but lately I’ve learned stillness. I sit at the foot of my bed and concentrate, trying to be as present as possible. The digital clock hums faintly, and beyond that I hear the leaves rustling outside. I sniff the air and try to parse the different odors. A vanilla candle. Nail polish remover. The mushroomy smell of gym shoes lying in the corner. The perfume Trey bought for her last birthday. I’d never liked its heavy floral notes—overdramatic just like the giver—but now the elusive whiff of it brings tears to my eyes.

Julia, please come.

After a long silence, the floor creaks.

A door opens down the hall, and my heart plunges. It’s only Mom. She’ll make her bumbling way to the bathroom and ruin everything. Julia won’t come near now.

But no...Mom is coming my way, toward the bedroom that she hasn’t entered since it happened. She’s in the doorway, her body backlit by the hall night-light. The bedroom curtains are open, and the moon casts a faint glow on her face. I’ve never seen her eyes so wide.

I stand quickly. “Mom?”

She leans against the doorjamb, pausing as if there’s a force field keeping her at bay. Then she seems to make an effort, pushing through, and steps toward my bed.

All I can do is stare.

She eases herself onto the edge of the bed, her posture stiff.

“It’s been so hard, Claire,” she says.

For a moment, I can’t think how to respond. “I know, Mom,” I finally whisper. “But you’ve got to pull it together.”

“Sometimes it’s just too much,” she says.

The silence deepens, and I resign myself to a night without a glimpse of Julia. I’ll stand here until Mom shuffles back to her room, and then I’ll endure the hours until the next chance of seeing my sister again.

But then I feel it—the strange charge to the air that tells me Julia is near. I draw closer to Mom, wanting to be fully visible through the doorway. A chill snakes through me, and I know it’s a shiver of fear and longing.

She has come.

As before, Julia rigidly faces forward when she passes by the door, but I still see the pale of her flesh, the bluish shadows under her eyes. Her body is slightly stooped, as if she’s tired...or broken. It hurts to see her this way—it isn’t the Julia I know. She seems lost, untethered. I focus on her face, pleading with her to turn.

Look at me, Julia.

She pauses. My heart swells as her head turns.

But her eyes don’t meet mine. They find Mom instead, and her mouth drops open.

Mom raises her head and gasps. “Julia?”

But my sister walks on, past the doorway, vanishing from our view.

The air stills. The electric charge is gone, and my spine softens. I concentrate hard on the room—otherwise I fear I might melt into the floor.

The silence drags at my limbs, weighing on my shoulders.

Mom shudders. “That was... I just...” She trails off, shaking her head.

“Yeah,” I say dully.

She’s quiet for a long moment. “Why’d she look at me that way?” she finally asks. She still faces the doorway, arms wrapped around her body.

I don’t say anything. She doesn’t want to hear my answer anyway.

Mom slumps. “She blames me.”

Right now, I blame her for barging in and ruining my moment with Julia...but it’s no good telling Mom that. She hears only what she wants to hear. When she finally lurches back to her own room and shuts the door, I stretch out on my bed and remember our raised voices in the driveway, car doors slamming and tires peeling out.

In the midst of arguments—and there had been plenty in the last year, though none as bad as that one—I knew our mother was crazy. She’d lost her grip on reality. She’d lost control. But seeing her face just now has made me less certain.

Mom has always been outnumbered. Excluded, even. Maybe that made her all the more tenacious, to the point of desperation, when she tried to lay down the law.

We were stubborn, too. So stubborn that sometimes getting our way was more important than having peace...or being safe.

“You saw her again?”

I nod. Ben knows without asking, but he asks anyway because he’s the sort who likes to verbalize. He thinks it’s unhealthy to repress emotion. Most of the time, I like this quality—every other guy I’ve known is tragically stunted when it comes to words and feelings.

“I know you’re hoping to get something out of these, um, encounters with Julia,” he continues, “but are they helping? Every time I see you, you seem more depressed.” He pulls me against his chest. “I wish you’d just come away with me.”

I tighten my grip around him, surprised at myself for smiling. “Would you take me away from all this if I asked?”

“Of course. But I’m afraid you’d just run back.” He kisses the top of my head. “So what happened last night?”

“Mom ruined it. She came to our room and tried to talk to me, and when Julia finally appeared, she saw Mom. Not me, Mom. You should have seen Julia’s face. Narrow eyes and forehead all wrinkly—like she was furious.” My eyes fill with tears. “I’m afraid she won’t come back now.”

“Hmmm,” Ben murmurs.

“What?”

“Did you ever think your mom might be the key to this?”

I wipe at my eyes. “How?”

He looks beyond me, his eyes thoughtful. “Why would your sister be angry with her?”

“Mom thinks it’s because Julia blames her.”

“Should Julia blame her?”

Anger flares in my gut. “Well, yeah. You know how freaking unreasonable Mom was!”

He sits up suddenly, pushing me away. “Claire, did your mother cause the crash?”

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.

“Did she turn that wheel into the retaining wall?”

I take a breath. “No.”

Ben nods. “Well...there you go.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I don’t know.” He looks away. “It’s not really my business.”

I can’t bear the sudden gulf between us, so I tug at the hair that curls near his ear. “My business is always your business, buddy, and vice versa. You know you’re stuck with me, right?”

“I’m counting on it. I just...” He breaks off. “I want you to be whole again, or as whole as you can be, considering. If I could somehow make this better, I would.”

“I know. But it’s my job to fix things...if they can be fixed at all.”

He opens his mouth to protest, but I lean forward and silence him with a kiss. It’s one of my favorite tricks when he doesn’t agree with me. I feel his lips curve upward as his arms tighten around my waist. Sometimes I think it would be so easy to lose myself in this thing Ben and I share.

But the call of blood to blood won’t be ignored.

Maybe Ben is right, and Mom is the key. The key to reaching Julia...or to losing her forever.

I’ll find out tonight.

When the time comes—when the darkness and silence deepen and I feel the first crackle of that charge to the air—I go to Mom’s door. For once it’s open, and through the three-inch crack I see her sitting on the old cedar chest at the foot of the bed. Her shoulders droop, and it strikes me how much weight she’s lost. Her face is slack and sharply angled, her shoulders pointy rather than rounded. In that baggy sweat suit she looks like a kid in hand-me-downs.

For so long Mom has been an opposing force—a wall of anger, rather than a woman of flesh and feeling. A sour pang of guilt roils in my belly.

“Mom?”

She doesn’t lift her head.

“Mom, I need you.”

She shudders slightly and wipes at her eyes.

“Come to our room, Mom,” I say as gently as I can. “I want you there.”

I don’t know what else to do, so I go back to the bedroom and sit on the edge of my bed. It’s time to concentrate on Julia—on her laughter, her dimpled smile, the warmth of her skin, the scent of her hair. With each passing day the details fade a little more.

Moments later Mom stands in the doorway. She hesitates before stepping forward and easing herself onto the bed next to me. I reach out slowly, wary of startling her, and place my hand on her knee. She flinches but does not cry or push my hand away.

There’s a thump in the distance. The light changes, brightening ever so slightly, and I feel that static in the air.

Julia is coming.

I move closer to Mom, imagining a pulse of affection spreading from my heart, through my arm, and flowing through my fingers to enter her body. She straightens a little, as though bolstered by the infusion.

I concentrate on Julia, and it feels like Mom is doing the same. Together maybe we can create a beam of yearning to pull her into the room.

When Julia appears at the doorway, she is slumped and pale as usual. An amputated soul. My heart contracts. If only I could absorb her into my body and reunite our cells—somehow reweave the strands of our DNA—I would carry her with me always, our feuding spirits finally in harmony.

I shake my head and concentrate.

This time I don’t limit my thoughts to Julia. I think of Mom, too, and the happy times the three of us shared together. Curiously...there are more than I would have guessed. If I concentrate hard enough I can feel the sun on my face as we drive to the lake with the windows down, Julia’s voice cracking as we belt out Beach Boys lyrics along with Mom’s creaking tape deck. There’s Christmas morning when our giggles crowd behind our teeth as Grandma preaches a sermon. Mom rolls her eyes, and if I even dare glance at Julia, the laughter will explode from both our mouths. And there’s spring afternoons when I can taste the warm glop of chocolate hardening against ice cream as we eat tuxedo sundaes—two full scoops each—after Julia wins a tennis match.

I play these scenes on a loop in my mind—moments from simpler times before boyfriends and sports and college applications complicated everything. Before jealousy and arguments shadowed our hearts. Next to me, Mom sighs contentedly.

Like before, Julia pauses.

And she turns.

She sees Mom, and I want to believe her furrowed brow has more to do with confusion than anger.

Come closer, Julia.

Mom’s spine stiffens as Julia crosses the threshold into our room, and pauses, just out of arm’s reach. Mom doesn’t stand, and I stay near even though my heart practically leaps toward Julia.

A strange noise erupts from Mom, something between a moan and a growl.

Julia stares at her. “Why are you in here?”

Mom swallows hard before speaking. “I’m here because I feel her.”

My sister blinks.

“Don’t you?” asks Mom. “That’s why you sleep in the living room, isn’t it?”

Julia’s face falls. “Mom...you have to move on.”

“How can I? You haven’t. And you blame me.”

A curtain of silence falls, and I remember to concentrate again on love and good memories. I stretch my left hand toward Julia—she’s just out of my reach, but I know she somehow senses me, for she straightens and seems to gather herself.

“Mom,” she says softly. “I remember what came out of my mouth that night. I said you ran them off...that you pushed them too far....” She pauses, her eyes shining with tears. “But I wasn’t thinking right. I don’t blame you. Ben was driving the car. You know what the police said. It was an accident—a deer or something on the road.”

Mom shakes her head. “I started the argument. That’s why they left in such a rush.”

“But you didn’t turn the wheel,” I say.

Mom wipes her nose and says nothing.

“I’ve tried so many times to talk to you,” Julia says. “I’ve tried to think of ways to explain, but it’s like you’re not there. You shut yourself away. Even when we’re in the same room together, you’re...absent.”

“Don’t you miss her, Julia? You never cry. It’s like you’ve pushed Claire out of your mind.”

“I think of her every second.” The bedsprings squeak as Julia sits next to Mom. “During the day, when I hear or see things she’d like, I remind myself to tell her. That’s when it hits me all over again. At night my mind echoes with every mean thing I ever said, every criticism and complaint.” Her chin drops. “And when I do finally sleep, I dream it’s all a misunderstanding, and she’s fine. I hate waking up from that dream.”

Mom nods. “I have it, too. Nearly every night.”

“Then why won’t you talk to me?”

“I don’t know. Talking makes it...permanent.”

Keeping hold of mom’s bony knee, I crouch before both of them and place my other hand on my sister.

Julia sighs and slips her arm around Mom’s waist.

“Do you feel her here?” whispers Mom. “Or am I insane?”

I concentrate so hard on them both, on our bodies—no, our souls—as a closed circuit. A circuit that vibrates with a current of love. For the first time, the Beyond pulls at me, and I have to resist it.

“I do feel her,” whispers Julia.

“It’s okay,” I say. “You’ll both be okay.”

A tear trails down Mom’s cheek. “If I could just see her...one more time.”

“You can’t bring her back, Mom. You—” Julia breaks off, to sniffle wetly. “We have to let go.”

“But I don’t know how to make a life that doesn’t include her.” She turns to wrap her arms around Julia, sobbing into her shoulder. My hands slide toward my lap and the circuit is broken.

“Our lives will always include her.” Julia lays her cheek against Mom’s head. “Just...in a different way.”

I stand.

The pull is even stronger now that the living have eased their grip.

I leave them to their embrace, moving through the door to the hallway, past Mom’s room, the bathroom, past the living room and the couch with Julia’s pallet of quilts and pillows. She will go back to sleeping in our room now, and I wonder if they’ll replace the saggy twin beds with a double.

Ben waits for me, his mouth curved in a half smile. “You did it?”

“They understand now.”

“So...we can leave?”

I pause to look back—the two-bedroom house droops a little, as though ashamed of its dusty brick and cracked concrete steps. It always was too small for our lanky bodies, our books and clothes and sports gear. Certainly too small for three fractious personalities. Is it now too large for two? I wonder if Julia has truly come to ground, or if she will continue to float away from Mom.

“Claire, if you’re not ready...you know I’ll wait as long as it takes. I’ll wait forever.”

I turn back to him. “You don’t have to.”

He opens his arms, and every particle of my being longs to rush into him. Mom and Julia will find a way to mend and thrive, and someday we may meet again. I don’t know how this works, but I’ve done everything I know to do. For now Ben is all the warmth and light and love that I need.

I am ready.

* * * * *