Chapter 41: Mitch

I decided to make pasta with pesto sauce. I’d missed pesto. The only way I could have it in Brazil was to make it fresh and my efforts never produced a good result. But today I went on a walk and easily found everything I needed to make a passable pesto. Once we got back to the condo, Bijou and I spent the afternoon hanging out. She slept, she pooped, she cried, and she sucked on a bottle. As for me, I cooked and tried to rid myself of the spinning sensation I’d had ever since Jo Beth died. The earth no longer trembled, but with Jo Beth’s absence, it quickly twisted around instead. I found myself suffering from vertigo, often grabbing the edge of the kitchen counter, or placing my palm against the wall to maintain my balance. Yet the instant Skylar hobbled in, I felt steady, as if my equilibrium had been regained.

It was dinner time and I could tell Skylar was hungry by her long, loud sniff of the garlic lingering in the air.

“I made pasta with pesto,” I said. “Do you want some? There’s plenty. I even added shrimp.”

“How did you get the ingredients?”

“I put Bijou in the snuggly and we walked to that market down the street. This condo is in a great location. There’s so much in the immediate area.”

Skylar nodded at me like I’d said something profound. “Where’s Bijou?”

I pointed to the living room, where Bijou had fallen asleep, safely strapped into her baby papasan chair. I could effortlessly see her from the kitchen. “So far, she’s pretty easy to care for.”

“Except for last night,” Skylar answered.

“Yeah, but that’s what babies do.” I stirred the pasta, my stomach grumbling in anticipation. “But hey, I’m sorry she woke you. I’ll try to wake up faster next time, so you don’t feel like you need to get up.”

Skylar used her crutches to come closer, but she stopped at the cabinets, balanced on one foot, and reached up to get two plates. “Don’t worry about it. I’m happy to help with midnight feedings if you’ll go downstairs and put together the bottles for me.” She handed me the plates and gestured toward the bowl of pasta. “That smells really good.”

I smiled and ladled a portion into both bowls, put them on the table, and then we sat. “I fixed that closet door that had come off its hinges,” I said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

Skylar’s cheeks turned pink. “The one in my room?”

“Yeah. But didn’t it used to belong to Jo Beth?” Jo Beth had pointed it out to me this morning, taking me around the entire condo once Skylar was gone, and showing me what needed repair or improvement.

“She gave the condo to me,” Skylar retorted. “Why wouldn’t I use the master bedroom?”

I speared a piece of shrimp onto my fork and then twirled the green pasta noodles until they formed a cocoon around it. “No, you totally should. I was just thinking out loud.” Skylar looked at me skeptically, so I continued. “Really. Jo Beth is proud of this place and she’s proud of you. It makes sense for you to be in her room. She even said it’s what she wants.” I slid the shrimp and noodles into my mouth and began chewing, enjoying the burst of garlic and basil, so much so that I didn’t immediately notice the stricken look on Skylar’s face.

“You talk like she’s still alive.”

I swallowed my food and it instantly formed into a lump at the back of my throat. “Sorry.”

Then I realized that while I could see Jo Beth, Skylar could not. I would have to be more delicate when talking about my encounters with her sister.

“I’ve had a rough day,” she said, after several moments of just staring at her plate. Skylar looked so glum, like lifting her fork to her mouth was far too much for her.

“Because you miss Jo Beth?” It seemed like an obvious question, but sometimes it’s the obvious questions that need asking.

“Yes, but there’s other stuff going on too and the worst part is that I can’t tell Jo Beth about any of it.”

“Well, maybe you can tell me and that will be like telling her.” I didn’t add that perhaps I could act as messenger and relay the information to Jo Beth, that maybe I could get an answer from her, and then I could share it with Skylar. Because what if that didn’t work out? The last thing Skylar needed was to have her hopes dashed.

Skylar started talking and it seemed as if her words were aimed at the walls as much as they were at me. “Last week I blew my shot at the Olympics. Then I hurt my knee, got drunk and had a slutty one-night-stand with a ski patrol guy, and now Gavin, who doesn’t know that I cheated on him, wants me to move to Chicago with him so I can—I don’t know—figure out who I’m going to be since I’m not going to be Jo Beth.” She met my eyes and my heart parachuted.

“Do you want to go to Chicago?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I used to want to go to Cornell and become a writer, but I blew that chance too.”

I set down my fork, thinking that Skylar deserved my one-hundred percent focus. “I don’t think you have to know what you want right now. It’s probably better not to know, and if nothing else, all this indecision will make great material for you to write about someday.”

Her face hardened, and when she spoke it was nearly in a hiss. “But I should know what type of person I want to be. More specifically, I should know that I want to be a good person. Right, Mitch?”

From the living room came the sound of Bijou’s fussing and I anticipated that soon her whimpers would turn to cries. “You can be a good person and still make mistakes. Just look at Jo Beth.”

“I can’t look at Jo Beth. Jo Beth is dead!” At that, Skylar clamped her mouth shut. Only a half second later her head fell forward and she sobbed. “My sister is dead, Mitch. She’s dead!”

Skylar’s suffering seemed massive, like a black hole sucking up anything that happened to be in her proximity and turning it into anti-matter. Then Bijou’s cries quickly escalated and equaled Skylar’s in both volume and intensity, so I did the only thing that made any sense. I went and picked up Bijou, came back into the dining room, and inserted her into Skylar’s arms. Skylar did not stop crying, but she held Bijou, and together, their wails formed a cacophony of need and despair that was more real, more immediate, than anything I’d ever heard. Their misery caused my own to overflow.

We didn’t have to speak. Our shared grief was strong enough to connect us. In that moment, Skylar, Bijou, and I became a family.

But families don’t always love each other, do they?