Chapter Five
THERE'S A DOOR IN THE penthouse I'm not allowed to open, which, if you know anything about me at all, is the door I'm currently standing in front of.
In my defense, I was looking for the linen closet.
Rule six says I'm to stay out of the east hall. Rule six didn't mention where the towels live, and a girl can't shower and then drip-dry through sheer force of personality, so here I am, easing open a door that turns out not to be a linen closet at all but a girl's bedroom.
My first thought is that someone still lives here because the bed is made and there's a hoodie thrown over the back of the desk chair like its owner just stepped out for a minute. Then my second thought catches up to my first and taps it gently on the shoulder.
Nobody has stepped out of this room in a very long time.
I can tell by the way the air holds itself.
By the too-perfect corners of a bed nobody sleeps in.
By the little crowd of framed photographs on the desk, dusted and dustless, the same laughing girl in every one of them, gap-toothed at seven and beaming at seventeen and always, in every single frame, hanging off the arm of a tall unsmiling boy I'd know anywhere because he still hasn't learned how to smile.
Maximo had a sister.
Has. Had. I don't know the tense. Grief is terrible at tenses.
And standing in the middle of all that carefully-kept hush, my chest does a thing I can't explain, a slow hard knock behind my ribs, the kind that earns me a lecture at my next checkup, this secondhand heart of mine leaning toward the room like it already knows the way, and I flatten my hand over my sternum and tell it, without a sound, to behave.
Because whatever this is, it's not mine to feel.
"Get out."
I whirl around. He's in the doorway, and I've never once seen his face do this. Every wall the man owns is up and manned. "I'm sorry." I'm already moving, hands lifted like he's the one who needs calming. "I'm so, so sorry, I was looking for towels, I didn't know—"
"Get. Out."
"Okay." I slip past him without touching him because he looks like touch would break something load-bearing. "I'm sorry."
He shuts the door behind us. I hear the lock turn over.
He doesn't look at me again for the rest of the night.
I lie awake in a bed that isn't mine, down the hall from a door with a lock in it, and I think about the gap-toothed girl and the boy who never smiles, and I do the math I don't want to do.
That's who taught him the rules, I think. Not how to make them. How to need them.
So I decide, somewhere in the part of the night where you make the decisions you actually keep, that I'll never ask him about her. Not once. He can tell me or he can carry her alone forever. But I'm done being one more thing he has to brick over.
I just wish my heart would quit trying to walk itself down that hall.
MAXIMO WAITED UNTIL the apartment went dark before he let himself do the one thing he only ever did alone.
He sat in the study, in the good chair, with the bad memories, and he opened the videos.
He knew how many there were, down to the last one, the way you know the count of a thing you can never make more of.
He played them in order. Mary at the piano, botching the same bar and blaming the bench.
Mary narrating a rainstorm like a sports commentator.
Mary turning the camera on him across some restaurant table, smile, Max, your face won't crack, and his own younger voice telling her to behave.
Behave.
He'd heard that word two days ago, in a diner, aimed by a stranger at herself.
He tried to hold his sister's laugh in his head, the exact pitch of it, the way he had held it every night for two years like a stone in his pocket.
And tonight, for the first time, it came back to him wrong.
It came back brighter. Louder. It came back sitting on a kitchen floor with mascara running, laughing at nothing, laughing like the whole world was still worth it.
Maximo shut the laptop hard.
He had come home to grieve his sister and let her go.
Instead he was losing her in real time, one crowded, cheerful, unforgivable memory at a time, to the girl she had died to keep alive.