I have a horrible thought, one I try to get rid of as soon as it comes into my head: If Mom is gone, really gone, Hannah will get the jars. Because she is connected to the line of Karalis women in a way I will never be. Mom would say that’s ridiculous, that I am as much a Karalis as Hannah, but I’m not. Put my blood under a microscope and you’ll see that we’re the same species, and that’s where our similarities end. I don’t have those telltale Greek purple circles under my eyes and black-as-deep-space hair like Hannah does. I don’t have ouzo in my blood.
My hair is haystack blond, and my hips are just two bony protrusions, and when we’re on the beach, I burn instantly while they just lie there, turning bronze, like perfect plates of saganaki.
“Stop,” I say to myself, out loud, because out loud feels four-dimensional.
I scrub the peppers clean, then set them on the cutting board. I turn off the Tallis Scholars, too. I begin to chop, and the sound of the knife against the wood is a lullaby. It’s Einstein’s bow on the strings.
For so long it didn’t matter, not a ton, that I didn’t come from my mother’s womb. Now it does. I can’t shake it, this little voice that keeps whispering they don’t belong to you—they never did. If I had one wish, it would be to have the same genes as the rest of my family, to share the same blood. To look at old black-and-white photos in the green leather album in the living room and see myself in all the faces. Hannah and I have been treated like twins for as long as I can remember, because my parents got me when we were both three. We have always been the girls. Lila, can you pick the girls up from school today? Greg, the girls need some lunch money—do you have any cash?
When I was little, I tried to color my hair black with a marker. It didn’t work. The good thing about Dad being a direct descendant of a Puritan on the Mayflower is that people assume I just take after him. So we never get the confused looks from strangers that Lisa, my friend who’s also adopted, gets. Her family is white as cream, and she’s got skin the color of the cello she plays. So they get lots of questions. One time she snapped at a lady in a grocery store, “No, I’m not my parents’ starving African charity case—I was born in Riverside, but thanks for filling my ignorance quota for the day.”
I was very impressed with her for producing such an articulate zinger on the fly.
I only have one memory from before becoming a Winters. It’s just a shard: I’m being put in a car—a red car. I think maybe someone was smoking—something about the scent of cigarettes always brings this memory right to the surface of my mind. Was this my birth mother? A foster family? I don’t know, and I’m glad for that. I don’t want to remember being left.
Hannah is all I’ve got now.
As though I’ve summoned her, my sister shuffles in, those dark circles under her eyes the color of the fried eggplant she loves so much, Mom’s melitzanes tiganites. Her hair is a tangle of waves, and she looks so much like Mom it hurts. She’s wearing one of the UCLA shirts Dad bought both of us, the same one, but hers is a size bigger because she’s five-eleven. I get a crick in my neck just looking her in the eye. She got Dad’s height. Mom thinks I’m so short because I wasn’t held enough as a baby, which has been proven to affect growth.
“What are we making?”
“Chili.”
She nods, then crosses to the pantry to get out the stewed tomatoes and beans: kidney, pinto, cannellini. She grabs a can of sweet corn, then another. Dad likes it with extra corn.
Hannah opens cans while I keep chopping. It feels good to be in here, to be doing something so familiar. We can control at least this one thing.
I throw the onions into the pot with some olive oil and let them sting my eyes as I stir them. What are the odds, I wonder, of being orphaned twice?
The last time a parent left me, child protective services came and took me away. Could they do it again?
And what happens to Hannah? Based on my extensive research, a traumatic event can trigger a relapse into addictive behavior. No one in the family knows about Nah’s addiction—Mom said that was my sister’s story to tell, when she was ready. She said it wouldn’t be fair to Nah, for her to be seen as this one thing. And that’s true, but now I am the only Winters who knows how to check her pupils.
What if the end of my parents’ lives is also, in a way, the end of ours?
When the onions are soft, I add the garlic, and the sizzle sounds like hope. We wait until the kitchen fills with its meaty scent, and then we pour all the other stuff into the pot, plus Mom’s bell jar mix of cumin, chili powder, garlic salt, pepper, oregano. Hannah reaches up and grabs Mom’s secret ingredient—coffee. She sprinkles it over the top. Then she looks over at me, holding the open jar.
“You want a cup?” she asks.
“Okay.”
I stir the chili while Nah takes down the French press, Mom’s favorite way of drinking it. When the coffee’s ready, we pull ourselves onto the counter and watch the chili simmer. There’s a draft in the window behind us and cold ocean air slips up my spine.
“They’re dead, aren’t they?” Hannah says.
I take her hand in mine. Her nails are covered in chipped blue polish.
“Yeah,” I say, soft.
I keep my hand in hers as silent sobs roll through the body beside mine, the one my parents made.
i will never see them again.
Windowsill in Bedroom
4302 Seaview Lane
Venice, CA
8
Hannah
The universe didn’t uphold its end of the bargain, so I’m not upholding mine.
That’s why I’ve been in my room all day, floating on the hooked rug that Mom found at a garage sale in the Valley.
There’s a crack in my ceiling. I never knew that.
Outside my door, there are voices. Mae, Papa, Gram. Doors open and shut. A phone rings. On the street, cars drive by. A skateboard rolls. A dog barks. Somewhere at UCLA, Micah is riding his bike to class. He has texted me ten times, all variations on: I love you. I’ll be there soon.
That is all in the world. I am not in the world. I am somewhere else. I think I’ll stay here for a while.
It’s time for another pill. I know this because I can feel my body again. I can feel the knife in my heart and the hollowness in my belly. I know it’s time for another pill because I can remember.
Everything.
If I close my eyes, I can hear Mom reading us The Little Prince. It was always Mae’s favorite because it’s about space and planets and stars. It was always my favorite because it’s a love story.
It’s about this boy, the Little Prince, who lives on an asteroid. He’s got itchy feet. He wants to see the world. And there’s this rose on his planet and she’s kind of high-maintenance, so he ditches her and goes exploring the universe. But it’s not all it was cracked up to be. The universe. It’s full of all these funky planets that he’s not into, with the kind of people you meet on the boardwalk every day—dropouts and weirdos. Then he lands on Earth and meets a downed pilot—which to me feels like stranger danger, but it ends up being all good—and the Little Prince is sad because he realizes he does love his thorny rose, even though she’s needy as fuck. He wants to go back to his asteroid and be with her, only now he’s stuck on Earth.