Chapter Twenty-Six
The evening has taken away the protective layer of my skin, leaving behind a raw, sulking mass of inadequacy.
Each step farther away from Lewis deepens the crack in my chest and makes me sick with guilt for what I said, but I force myself to breathe through it and remind myself of what he did—what he kept from me.
What he said yesterday about how he feels isn’t important. How I feel isn’t important.
Not when he wasn’t honest about something so big, pushing me back into the corner I’d been fighting my way out of ever since my breakup with Jacob.
For about ten minutes after I leave campus, I’m in denial about everything. Ten minutes, or about as long as it takes to get to my studio and realize that my fingers have twitched for my phone too many times to count, eager to call Karo so she can make sense of everything for me.
Except I’ve already messed up her honeymoon.
Except what she said boils down to: Grow the fuck up and handle your problems on your own.
Shame pinches in my stomach as I think about Karo, and when I’ve toed off my sneakers at the door, I finally allow my brain to flip through the last years.
Our almost daily phone calls, my short visits to Berlin, our trips together.
I was proud of myself for keeping such close contact with her, my anchor point amidst all the changes.
But through the new filter her words have given me, I see that all these memories are tinged in my work.
Ranting to Karo about failed experiments, racing to meet conference submission deadlines while sitting at her kitchen table, and pushing off visits because I had too much to do.
A trip with Karo tacked onto a conference abroad, off-loading my worries onto her while she was supposed to celebrate her honeymoon with Lennart, fitting her in around the biggest constant in my life.
I used her to fill up my social battery and to solve any emotional problems without caring for her needs.
Karo cheered me on toward my goals, but I’d stopped asking about her life and what future she was dreaming of.
I think back to my relationship with Jacob. How he’d become so focused on himself and his career that he only cared about my use for him and nothing else. Now, I’d done the same with Karo—I’d taken my own sister, her kindness and emotional support, for granted.
And for what?
An offer to work in a lab with a professor I admire and a topic I care about. A way to tackle the research questions that have hovered out of reach, a way to finally make a difference.
Yet all I feel is this churning sense of dread. A scratching doubt. That whisper in the back of my mind.
Has any of it been worth it?
Was it worth all the stress, the late nights and long weeks?
Packing up my suitcases over and over again?
Never making a home anywhere because soon I’d be moving to a new place?
Prioritizing my data over making friends, over finding true connection?
Yanking a colleague into this ridiculous charade that risked both of our careers? Hurting my sister?
I want to cry, but I’m too stunned, too disappointed, and too disgusted with myself to give in to the urge.
I’m not ready to reevaluate the last five years yet, and even less ready to get close to that tender spot behind my ribs that pulses whenever I think about Lewis.
But as I put myself under the icy spray of the shower, I realize that there’s one thing I can change.
I can show Karo how much I care about her.
That she’s not my emotional trash can but the most important person in my life.
My flight gets into Seattle at midday tomorrow, just a few hours after Lennart leaves back to Germany for the summer concert series his orchestra is playing. Two weeks of uninterrupted sister time. Two weeks that’ll hopefully allow me to make up for all the ways I’ve been absent.
I have eighteen hours to push all these overwhelming feelings down, so I can focus on Karo. I can pile up the weariness, the anger, and the disappointment and deal with them at a later time.
For now, all that matters is my sister.
Karo doesn’t come running toward me when she spots me in arrivals at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. She doesn’t do anything at all, no excited wave, no upturn of her mouth, just a slight turn of her body in my direction showing that she acknowledged my presence.
My hand is clammy around the handle of my suitcase, thoughts flitting nervously through all the options: Can I still hug her, or do I just stop in front of her and say, Hi? And: How have we coexisted for thirty years in this world, but never had a proper fight?
I suspect the answer to the latter can be traced back to Karo’s patience and goodwill.
Next to me, a couple falls into each other’s arms, and ahead, a girl with pigtails waves a star-stickered and glittery Welcome home cardboard sign to someone walking behind me.
I stop in front of Karo, her fist tight around the strap of her tote bag. Except for the red around her irises and the smudged mascara, she looks less tired than when I saw her two weeks ago. Skin tanned, the red in her hair faded, and the strands sun-kissed.
“Hey,” I say when too much time has passed for her to hug me, and it sinks in that I won’t get a whiff of her citrus shampoo and a tickle of her short curls against my nose. That she won’t dislodge the sob out of my chest that’s been stuck there since our call yesterday.
I didn’t really think all that pent-up frustration she had about me would solve itself that easily, but I’d still hoped we’d be okay as soon as we saw each other again.
Now I recognize how naive I was to think she’d help me navigate through this, when that’s exactly what she blamed me for: loading any emotional labor onto her shoulders.
“How was your flight?” she wants to know, her voice strangely monotone.
I nod. “All good.” The leftovers of my allergy pill cling to the edges of my brain, slowing me down. Snap out of it, I tell myself. It’s on me to make things right.
“What about Lennart?” I ask back. “Did he get out okay?”
Karo swipes her finger over one eye, smudging the mascara a little more. “Yeah, his flight left on time.”
I want to squeeze her elbow, give her some kind of reassurance, but she only turns her head and declares, “I need coffee.”
I swipe my credit card for her oat flat white and my triple-shot latte before we pick up the rental car.
I know how much she hates driving—we both do, really—so I wordlessly take the key, and while I adjust the seat and mirrors, Karo connects her phone to the sound system.
She turns up the volume when we roll out of the airport, filling the terse silence with strumming guitars and a deep male voice.
Loud music, windows down, conifers lining the road and infusing the air with their crisp scent—it’s how I’d pictured this trip when I planned it with Karo half a year ago.
But now the trunk holds all the unsaid words between us, my throat burns with the emotional pain I’m trying to swallow down, and my chest is a pressure chamber of sadness.
Awkward, barely speaking—that’s how we start our trip together, the first one in more than a year.
I don’t know if I can handle two weeks of this, but I’ve already caused an oil spill on Karo’s honeymoon with all my preventable problems and work-related worries.
I won’t spoil the second half of her holiday if I can avoid it.
When Karo has fallen asleep that night, I scroll down in my Notes app until I find the wishlist she has Lennart and me synched in on so we don’t accidentally give her books she’s already read.
I buy credits on my audiobook app and download the top title on her list, a sweeping historical romance by an author called Rosalind Bellamy.
Ahead of our drive out west, I head to the car early and hook up my phone to the speakers, but when I realize where we are and remember what started my sister’s obsession with books when we were teenagers, I download another book instead.
Over the next few days, we make our way around the Olympic Peninsula, listening to all the angst and heartbreak of the Twilight saga.
Back in the French mountain town where Karo had her concussion on that long-ago ski trip, I scoured the library and bookstores, trying to find her favorite books in a language she could read, finally succeeding with a copy of Eclipse that was almost falling apart.
Bella, Jacob, and Edward got her through the confusing and lonely days of amnesia, and now they help me get her back, too.
Between the fresh mountain air, the shock of the cold Pacific, and the rhythm of our hikes, I don’t bring up our fight, and I push down all thoughts about Lewis.
But as our trip goes on, I try to steer our conversation away from the things that need to be sorted out in the moment, and to the things that matter.
When I ask about her life, Karo is cagey at first. From her honeymoon to her doubts about her job, from her and Lennart’s decision to try for a baby, to the spiciest books she’s read this past year, I don’t run out of questions, and though she only answers a third of them, hesitantly, sometimes monosyllabically, I’m content to listen, to have my sister back and learn about all the ways she’s changed when I was busy looking elsewhere.
One afternoon, after a three-hour-long hike, Karo stops me in front of a store window stacked with donuts.
“Franzi, hang on a second.” Her hand grabs my underarm, and it’s the first time on this trip that she touches me casually, like it’s no big deal.
The first time her voice doesn’t sound compressed, and her gray eyes look at me level, without darting away.