What a fucking dump.

I can tell Liza’s made an attempt at cleaning, but Aunt Bonnie, sprawled on the sofa with a cigarette dangling from one hand and a bottle of wine—an actual entire bottle of wine—in the other, makes the place look grimy and bottom-barrel. We’ll need to open the windows to air the place out, too, for the smell.

Aunt Bonnie lifts her head when I come through the front door of the trailer, then drops it again like it’s just way too heavy. I think I hear her mumble something like: “Oh look, Malory’s home.” Does she even know where I went?

“Hey, Aunt Bonnie,” I say, lugging my cello through the open doorway and shutting the door behind me. I’ve left my duffle in the car, but I can go back for that. I wouldn’t leave my cello unguarded for two minutes out here at night.

My cello. Ha. My heart sinks. Last time I stood in this room I was overflowing with hope and optimism and anticipation. Tenacity was the word that kept coming into my head. Now…well, I’m a different person now, aren’t I? Or am I the person I always was, but just more honest about it?

Liza emerges from what used to be our shared bedroom down at the end of the trailer’s narrow hallway, and now she’s running at me, glee splitting her face into a grin. My insides light with happiness. I run to her like we’re in a daisy-filled, sunlit meadow and not a dark, smoke-filled double-wide with wood paneling and 20-year-old shag carpet.

Liza squeezes me so hard I can’t breathe for a second. She smells fresh, like cucumber and flowers.

“I’m so happy you’re home,” she says, and I almost correct her, tell her that this is not home, but I manage to hold my tongue. I roll my cello closer to the wall, out of the way. “Gonna get the rest of my stuff. Back in a minute.”

Later, after I’ve settled in, we eat dinner sitting cross-legged on Liza’s bed—pistachios, macaroni and cheese, and a family size bag of Doritos. God, I’ve missed my sister. I tell her what I can about school, editing out the ugly parts. Nothing about Garrett. She is much too pure even for the knowledge of his existence. I tell her about my anorexic roommate and my sweet cello friend, and Rome, the genius masquerading as a thug, and she gets a kick out of that, eyeballs me suspiciously, like she’s expecting me to reveal something juicy. But I don’t.

There’s a new picture of Mom on Liza’s dresser, one she must have put out since I left for college. Mom smiles placidly from beyond the grave, and I feel like she’s staring right at me, urging me to be a good, brave girl and do big things with my life. I can’t even look at her. The rest of the place echoes a whispered warning: Get out, get out, get out while you can, silent but adamant like a sinister playground chant. Even the dissonant chatter from the living room TV is an admonition against the life I left here. Left here for what? I’ve messed everything up. I’ve squandered my opportunity to make something of myself, to do something better.

I let my grades slip, valedictorian to washout. How does that happen? How did I end up with this…this fucking lunatic, this guy who practically beats me into submission, and why do I like it? And Rome, poor, gentle Rome, I’ve injured him in the worst way, let him love me while I wished he were Garrett. But maybe this is exactly the trajectory my life was supposed to take, to have one more man prove I’m worthless while another man proves I’m cruel.

I’m having trouble settling on any sort of truth about myself right now. The Malory that breaks under Garrett’s touch and melts under Rome’s is not the same Malory who sits in bed emptying a bag of Doritos with her little sister. This Malory, the Malory I am now, is a blank notebook, waiting to be filled. But the other Malory, Bad Luck Malory, her future is already set. Her notebook has been scribbled in, defaced, torn. And I know, the same way I knew my mom was dead the second I laid eyes on that bathtub—I know that I will go back to Garrett. It feels inescapable, like something that has to happen, as inevitable as…well, as inevitable as death.

I wash the Dorito dust off my fingers and play the Elgar for Liza.

When I finish, she claps for me, her cheeks positively glowing with pride. “You’re going to be famous,” she says. “I just know it!”

Then she sings for me. First, two songs from 42nd Street, fun and upbeat, and her voice is like Mom’s: clear and in tune and free of affectation. I clap for her too, because I think she’s finished, but then she blushes and says, “So, I have a surprise for you,” and brings out a ukulele from the tiny bedroom closet.

“No way.” But now I’m smiling so hard my cheeks are going to burst.

“It’s an easy instrument to learn,” she says. “Not like cello. But I’ve been practicing since school started.”

And then she begins to strum, sweet little plinks like we’re on a tropical island somewhere: “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie which we watched a hundred times when we were kids. I know the tune but can’t remember all the words, and Liza’s perfect, childlike voice is piercing me, gutting me, as she sings of voices in the night and people inventing faith and of a beautiful mystery that awaits on the other side of a world built on false hopes. It’s funny that I used to think this song was about optimism. Now I can see it is about letting go.

When Liza finishes, she thinks I’m crying because the song was so beautiful. I let her believe that’s all it is.

That night, my father creeps into my room, into my dreams. It is not a surprise. Even before I fell asleep, I laid there shivering, crushing my old sheets up under my chin and scrunching my eyes closed like a little girl afraid of ghosts. But my father is no ghost. He’s alive, somewhere, and one night he could come creeping into my room just like he used to.

Very weak, not the kind of person who will leave a special mark on the world.

Like your mother.

He sits on the floor beside me now, his shoulder pressed up against the side of the bed in the dark, a memory I can almost touch. I freeze, exactly as I always have, exactly as he hopes I will.

And he says all the things I’ve been expecting him to say, confirms what I’ve known all along: “I knew you couldn’t handle the pressure. I knew you’d go around fucking every guy you met. You like it rough, don’t you, little girl?”

I should say something. I should tell him to shut the fuck up, get the fuck out of my head. But I never could before, and even now I’m paralyzed, my throat tied up in a knot so tight I can’t swallow. I want to tell him. I know if I could defend myself against him that it would change everything. Or it would have. It would have saved us all. It would have saved my mother.

My father turns then, and I can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t look at him, but I feel him rise until he’s hovering over me, and then I have no choice but to see—he has no face. No face, just a black hole, and even though he has no eyes I know he’s looking at me. He whispers, “Of course you didn’t know she was about to slit her wrists. You never were very observant. Now shh, Malory, lie still.” Then his face is coming at me, and he’s going to kiss me, no, no, he’s going to consume me…

And then I’m on the floor of my room in the trailer, on my hands and knees, sweating and crying with my hair all in my face. I’ve managed to buck myself right out of bed, trying to get away from…that thing in my dream. Fuck.

I don’t care that it’s the middle of the night; I get in the shower with the water as hot as it will go and wash myself three times. I feel like he touched me. I don’t want him to touch me, not ever again. I scrub so furiously that when I get out of the shower my skin is flaming and raw.

I’m aching to play my cello, but it’s still hours before sunrise. I get it out of my case in the dark and pull it into bed with me, wrapping an arm around its waist as if it were human, careful not to jostle the strings or the bridge. If Liza has heard any commotion from her bed on the other side of our tiny room, she pretends not to notice.

---

Aunt Bonnie did not think to get a Christmas tree, or, if she did think of it, she decided against it. That money could buy her a reasonable stash of pills. So Liza and I head to downtown Sarasota, which, although busy with seasonal shoppers, feels dilapidated compared to Conch Garden. I play for two hours while Liza reads Age of Innocence in the shade of a nearby oak, and then we head to the local Christmas tree seller, who is set up under a temporary tent on a street corner down the road from the trailer park.

The two of us lug the tree inside the trailer and get it set up with decorations we pull from the back of the closet in Liza’s room. I don’t know how she managed it, but she saved several cardboard boxes’ worth of stuff from the old apartment, from when mom was alive. The ancient holiday décor, with ornaments dating from around the time I was born, but also some of mom’s personal possessions—the billowy, weightless sundress she used to wear so often, her hairbrush, her old flip-phone, a pair of slippers. We play Christmas songs on the radio, and even though we cry on and off the entire time we’re decorating, our overall mood is festive, almost…normal.

Aunt Bonnie comes home late that night and draws up short when she notices our efforts. “Damn,” she says, and that’s it. We’re not sure if that means she likes it or hates it. Fuck her, anyway.

---

Liza and I wake early Christmas morning like there is some residual childish anticipation still buried within us, a hope that there might be a surprise gift leaning in the corner—something to reaffirm our faith in miracles. But there is no such gift, no big red bows. Instead we exchange our little trinkets, a gauzy scarf and a leather-bound edition of A Tale of Two Cities from me to Liza—she loves that stupid book—and a bottle of pricey perfume and an album of photos from her to me.

“I have tons of pictures in my phone,” I tell her, and she says, “I know, but it’s better this way.” I flip through the album and choke a little when I realize it’s filled with pictures of Mom. Liza is right; it’s better this way.

In the afternoon I’m practicing in Liza’s room with a heavy mute attached to my bridge to dampen the sound. Aunt Bonnie trudges down the hallway and leans on the door frame with her arms crossed and her eyebrows up, and it sends a chill down my spine because her posture, the look on her face, is exactly like my father’s. It’s like he off and died somewhere and has since taken possession of Aunt Bonnie’s body.

I want to tell her to fuck off, but I’m just as paralyzed with her as I was with him. I stop moving my bow and let it swing down, its tip landing on the shag carpet while I wait for her to say whatever it is she’s come here to say.

“It’s your life,” she finally says after a prolonged, awkward silence. She shakes her head while she says it, and, again, I have no fucking clue what she means. My father was the same, always saying things that could be taken a hundred different ways. No wonder I’m such a basket case.

When she leaves I keep playing, crunching out impossible Popper runs, going through etude after etude, singing through the entire Bach Cello Suites and all my orchestral music from college and all 48 versions of major and minor scales, for hours and hours. My fingers go raw and my wrists and back ache from the prolonged abuse, but I have to play it all, have to let my fingers touch every note. I can’t let a single pitch go unplayed.

Because when I stop playing, he will be there, crowding himself into my thoughts. Garrett. He’s always there anyway, always hovering at the edge of my awareness. I imagine what I’ll do when I get back, how he’ll receive me after that last visit—You’re a fucking plaything. You are a nothing. I can dispose of you anytime I want. I fantasize about how it might happen, how I’ll die, and in most scenarios Garrett hovers over me, admiring me with his icy eyes while I float in a tub of red water. He still hasn’t messaged me.

I think about Rome, too. He messaged me to say “Merry Christmas” as did Bethany and Daphne. I miss them all in a surprisingly intimate and fierce way, even Garrett, though I know this is probably the wrong thing to feel. But I can’t help myself; Garrett is another world, clean and organized and beautiful and full of purpose, even if his purpose is at times cruel. He is something so far removed, so dramatically different from the hellhole where I started out. And yet coolly, sharply familiar.

That thought, that word, familiar, rings in my head like a bell, and I have to remove my practice mute and whale on my cello to cover the racket in my brain. Soon enough, none of it will matter anyway.