“Yeah,” Claire says. “She’s Tess. But still, she could never bring herself to do anything she thought someone, somewhere, might possibly think was wrong.”
“You know, Mom used to say Tess wanted things to be perfect,” I say. “Do you think that’s why she acted the way she did when you got pregnant? Not that I think you getting pregnant was bad or anything, but Tess—”
“I know,” Claire says, her voice bitter. “Believe me, I know what Tess thought.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, I know you did too. You never told her about Jack after all, did you?”
I shake my head and force myself to laugh. It comes out rough, broken-sounding. “No, I didn’t. She wouldn’t—she wouldn’t have understood. I mean, look at how she treated you. And she liked you. Me and Tess just aren’t—we’re nothing alike.”
“I think … I think that you two aren’t as different as you think. I mean, look at this plan of yours. You’re expecting a happy ending, aren’t you?”
“Because I know Tess does,” I say. “Because she believes in them. I don’t.”
“Abby,” Claire says, but I shake my head again, as if I can shake off the pity in her voice.
“Don’t. Just … don’t. I know Tess was mean to you and she—I didn’t always like her, but she’s my sister. I’m supposed to want her to—”
“Supposed?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s what you said.”
“I have to go,” I say, and head back to my bike. I stare out at the water, at the Ferrisville dock growing closer and closer.
I don’t want Claire feeling sorry for me. I don’t want her saying that she knows I used to believe in love and all that crap. I don’t want to be reminded that I used to think it was possible for a guy around here, around Tess, to look at me and not see her.
I don’t want to think that once I was stupid enough to believe I could be with someone who wanted my sister and make them want me.
eleven
My parents get home earlier than usual and catch me in the kitchen poking pieces of toast into the jelly jar and then eating them.
“You’re supposed to put jelly on bread, not put the bread in the jar. And you did eat something else besides that, right?” Mom says, and sits down across from me, giving me her Mom stare. She’s really good at it.
“Why are you home early? Is Tess—?”
“She’s fine. Your father and I—we decided to come home after we talked to the doctor.”
I look around for Dad, but he’s come in and gone straight into the living room. Something’s definitely happened. “What did the doctor say?”
Mom gets up. “I’m going to make a sandwich. Do you want one?”
“Mom,” I say, and she looks over her shoulder at me from the counter and gives me a small, sad half smile.
“It’s nothing you need to worry about. We just … the insurance isn’t going to cover as much as we thought and—well, Tess’s been in the hospital for long enough that we’re being asked to consider other options.”
“Other options? Like what?” I know for a fact that Mom and Dad have read everything they could get their hands on about comas. I also know that they’ve gone to see a bunch of other doctors, and always come back from those meetings grim-faced.
Mom doesn’t answer.
“Mom?” I say again, and Dad comes in from the living room, his mouth curved up in this weirdly familiar smile that, for some reason, sends a shiver racing through me, a flash bolt of panic-fear under my skin.
“I bet you have homework,” he says.
“Yeah,” I tell him, getting up and turning away so I can’t see his face and that smile. “I do.”
It’s silent, so silent, as I walk up to my room and shut the door, but as I creep out of it and back toward the stairs—I shut my door before I went through it because I knew what was coming—I hear my parents start to talk.
“I hate the idea of Tess going to a home,” Dad says. “She’s not—there’s still a chance. She could still wake up. And I don’t want her to think—”
“She knows you love her,” Mom says. “She knows you won’t give up on her. We all know that.”
“Katie—” Dad says, and Mom cuts him off, says, “Dave, I just—I’m not you, all right?”
Silence falls again, and then I hear Mom sigh, hear her cross the room.
“I wish—” she says, love and sadness in her voice, and Dad says, “Me too,” his voice smothered-sounding, like he’s speaking from somewhere far away, or holding something back.
Like he’s trying not to cry.
I creep down the stairs a little more, and when I crane my head toward the kitchen I see them holding each other, Dad resting his head against Mom’s, mouth pressed to her hair.
The smile he was wearing before is gone, wiped clean, and I realize where I’ve seen it before.
Tess. Her senior year, and especially before graduation, before she left for college, that was how Tess usually smiled. I just—I never realized it was strained. That it wasn’t real at all.
My skin prickles even though it isn’t cold, and I’m chilled to the bone.
I move silently back up the stairs, head into my room, and close the door behind me.
twelve
Until I was fifteen, I wanted to be Tess. I wanted her straight, shiny hair. I wanted her ability to always look perfect. I wanted her smile to be mine, I wanted people to see me and have their eyes light up.
I wanted all of those things, and never got any of them.
Tess was kind about it, though. It was her way. She would loan me her clothes, and not tell me to go away when I saw her with her friends. And when guys came to see her—and they always came to see her—she’d introduce me to them.
People in Ferrisville see Tess, even think “Tess,” and they think “perfect.” And she was perfect.
At least, she was in public.
At home though, sometimes, Tess would—well, she had a streak of darkness in her. Sounds normal actually, I think, but the thing is, she never showed it outside the house, never took it anywhere that people could see. Not ever.
It wasn’t anything big at first. She’d get upset over something and just retreat, fall silent and go into her room, act like she’d vanished even though she hadn’t. And then, if someone called or came by, she’d … I don’t even know how to explain it right. It’s like she’d smooth something over herself, push it away, maybe, and she’d be Tess again. The Tess everyone knew, the one who was always so happy, who always showed a smiling face to the world.
But that was for the world. For me … well, I remember this one time, when I was twelve and she was fifteen, I went into her room without knocking, hoping she’d let me sit with her and Claire, and she just stared at me like she’d never seen me before.
“Hey,” I said, and then she’d smiled, a too-bright and too-sharp curve of her mouth, like she’d forgotten how to smile and couldn’t even fake it, and got up, came over to me, and said, “Get out.”
She didn’t yell. She spoke in this weird, flat voice, almost like speaking hurt her, and when I said, “But—” and Claire said, “Tess, relax, okay?” Tess swung around and looked at Claire. Just looked at her, didn’t say a word, and Claire looked away from me, looked at the floor.
I took a step back, and Tess shut the door again, still looking at Claire and never once at me. It was like she’d forgotten I was even there.
That night, at dinner, I asked Tess something—what she was going to wear to school the next day, maybe, or about her hair, things I knew Tess loved talking about—and she ignored me.
“I think Abby asked you a question,” Dad said, and gave Tess a playful nudge with the bowl of salad he was holding.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Tess said, and again, she didn’t shout. She didn’t even sound angry. She just sounded … gone. She got up and went to her room and wouldn’t come out for two days. She didn’t go t
o school, didn’t take calls other than to tell people she wasn’t feeling well but that she was so glad they called. She was “asleep” if anyone came by. She didn’t eat, and I don’t actually think she even slept at all. She just did … she just did nothing.
Mom stayed home from work the second day, and when I got home from school Tess was out of her room and smiling again. When I asked her if she was okay, she looked at me like I’d asked her a question she didn’t understand and then said, “Mom says you have her mother’s eyes.”
“Oh,” I said, hurt because Mom never talked about her parents with me, not ever. I knew they were both dead, but that was it. I hadn’t even known my eyes looked like my grandmother’s.
“Yeah,” Tess said. “Did you know she killed herself?”
“What?”
“She did,” Tess said. “So maybe you’re haunted.” She leaned in toward me. “Maybe you’ll end up just like her.”
Normally this is where I’d have hollered for Mom or Dad or both of them, but I couldn’t. Tess was just—she looked so normal, so Tess-like, but what she was saying—it scared the crap out of me. I didn’t want to be haunted.
I didn’t want Tess to sound so happy about it.
So I just stood there, staring and scared, until she walked away.
When I finally worked up the nerve to ask Mom about my eyes, she said that yes, they did look like her mother’s, and then, “Why do you ask?”
I shrugged.
“You’re not like her, though,” Mom said, leaning over and smoothing my hair away from my face. “You’re like your father. When he decided to be who he really was, when he stood up for himself, he—well, let’s just say you can tell he’s your dad.”
I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but didn’t ask. I figured it had something to do with Dad’s brother, John, who’d died when Dad was in high school, and how Dad had left home for a while afterward. Mostly—after hearing that and what Tess had told me—I decided my parents hardly ever talked about their pasts and their families for a reason.
I still wanted to be Tess, though. I wanted to be able to make people smile like she did, wanted to always know what to say or what to wear. I wanted to have that mysterious something she had, I wanted her ability to make everyone who met her turn to her, like her. I suppose I could have told someone about Tess’s moments of darkness, the ones that only happened at home, in private, but my parents never talked about it to anyone and I—well, everyone would have said I was jealous. Younger sisters who aren’t as pretty and perfect as their older sisters always are, right?
And the truth is, I was. Those few moments at home aside, Tess was everything you could ever want to be.
Then Claire got pregnant right after the start of her and Tess’s senior year and Tess … she changed. Not on the surface, not in the glossy self she dressed up every day and that she let everyone see. But at home, in private, she was different. She was silent. She was angry. She was careful to never show it except at home, but at home, being around her was like—it was like being around someone who was so angry they were sick with it.
And I didn’t want to be like her anymore.
Sometimes, especially as Claire’s pregnancy really started to show and Tess was waiting to hear about college, she’d just lie on her bed and stare at the ceiling. And not just for a little while. For hours.
And once, we ran into Claire and her mother at the grocery store when Mom sent us to get hamburger buns. Tess acted like she didn’t see them, but the whole car ride home, all she talked about was how much she hated Claire. She spoke so much and so fast spit flew out of her mouth, dangled from the corner of her lips, and when she ran her hands through her hair, she did it so hard that thick strands of it were wrapped around her fingers when she lifted them away.
That wasn’t the worst moment, though. Not for me.
The worst was the summer night I came home after I broke my own heart—and how stupid I’d been back then, at fifteen, to not see that you could do that, to not see that you could destroy yourself more thoroughly than anyone else could—and found Tess sitting in the living room.
She was sitting there, eighteen and golden, and she smiled at me, a real smile, a beautiful, heart-stopping Tess smile, and then said, “Abby? Are you—is something wrong?” her smile fading like she understood how I felt.
“Nothing,” I said, wanting to destroy her, the world, everything. As if Tess could ever understand how I felt. As if anything truly bad had ever happened to her.
“Okay,” she said slowly, clearly not buying it, and then moved her feet from the sofa to the floor, making space for me. “Want to watch a movie about aliens trying to destroy the world?”
I looked at the television screen. “You’re watching that stupid ‘modern’ version of Cinderella starring the actress whose head weighs more than her whole body for the ten millionth time.”
“I know,” she said. “But I can change the channel. And hey, you can laugh at me when I get scared.”
“I don’t want—”
“I know how you feel,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me, but just—I really do know, okay?”
I didn’t believe her—I’d spent my whole life watching her break hearts, not getting hers broken, after all, but she sounded so sincere. That was another thing about Tess. She had this way of making everything and anything sound true, sound like she knew what you meant, that she understood you.
She had a way of making you feel like she needed to be there for you. Like she wanted to. And that night, I needed to believe that someone was there for me.
Even if it was her.
And so I sat next to her, and we watched a movie where people got eaten by aliens. Tess hid her face behind her hands for most of it and never once said a word about the sand on my clothes or how the mascara she’d seen me put on before she left for work had washed into muddy smears under my eyes. She was so nice, so understanding—so Tess. And I hated her for it. For being so perfect yet again.
When I went to bed that night, I lay there, dry-eyed because I wasn’t going to cry. I wouldn’t let myself, and wondered if Tess would ever know what heartbreak was.
If she would ever know anything unpleasant, and how much I wished that she would.
And now she does.
I know I didn’t cause the accident, I know I’m not why Tess’s in the hospital. But now I wish I could take all the anger I’ve ever felt when I looked at Tess, when I thought about her, and make it disappear.
I wish a part of me doesn’t still feel that anger when I look at her lying silent and far away. I wish I wanted her to wake up only because I miss her.
But I don’t. I miss her, but not like I should. I … I want her to wake up so I don’t have to be tied to her forever.
I want her to wake up so I won’t forever be reminded that I’m not her.
That I’ll never be her.
thirteen
“Hello, sunshine,” Clement says when I come into the hospital the next day, frowning because my bag got wet on the ferry and the lone bathroom on it was out of paper towels.
I curve my mouth into a huge, fake smile, and he laughs and pulls out a cough drop.
“Found someone to work in the gift shop starting today,” he says. “Have something you’d like to say to me?”
I grin at him. “I hear that eating too many of those things you like so much gives you gas.”
He laughs. “My wife would have loved you. Do you like Jaffa Cakes? Harriet loved them. Used to be hard to find them over here, but now the supermarkets have international aisles and you can get anything.”
“I love them,” I say, and wonder what the hell Jaffa Cakes are.
He grins at me. “Now what are you going to do when I bring you a box of them?”
“Tell my parents my new boyfriend is a little older than I am.”
Clement laughs so hard he chokes on his cough drop, causing the reception area people to come running with water and offers of h
elp. Sometimes I think he gave more money to the hospital than even rumor says, because normally the people at reception don’t and won’t move unless someone’s bleeding all over the place. Or if it’s time for their breaks.
“Go on,” he says, waving me off through a sea of faces watching him. “Tell Eli I said hello.”
I go up to Tess’s unit, and see Eli sitting in the small waiting room outside. He’s easy to spot because a couple of nurse’s aides are busy organizing carts by the door and gawking at him.
I ask them if they’ve seen Claire, and they both shrug and go back to gawking. I squeeze past them and into the room where Eli sits, tapping the fingers of one hand against a chair as he stares at the television bolted to the wall.
“Hey,” I say, and tell myself the kick-in-the-gut drop I get when he looks at me is just an involuntary reaction. Like stomach cramps after eating bad food.
I don’t really believe it.
“Hey,” he says, voice as low and steady and sweet as I remember, and the aides out in the hall are gawking so hard I can feel their gazes boring into me.
I can feel them wondering how and why someone like him is talking to someone like me.
“You ready to go?” I say, and they’ll stop wondering as soon as Tess wakes up and they see him with her.
“Did you see Clement?”
“Yeah. He says to say hi.”
Eli gets up then, unfolding from the chair like a work of art come to life, all grace and skin the color of caramels my mother used to buy, individually wrapped golden candies that she’d melt down and pour onto ice cream.
Tess would eat spoonfuls of the stuff.
“I—you—are you okay?” he says, looking a little hesitant, and I nod, say, “Yeah. Let’s go see Tess, you’ll love her, trust me,” willing my voice not to crack, willing myself to sound normal, like I’m not hoping so hard my heart hurts.
Like I’m not noticing him.
We head out into the hall and I punch in the door code that lets the nurses know someone’s waiting to be buzzed in.