Family

This is a longer one - a "sudden fiction" rather than a micro or flash piece. If it's indistinguishable from a short story, well, the answer to your question is "Yes." (Also, this shouldn't need to even be stated, but this is a WORK OF FICTION.)

Family

“We’re having trouble with Beth,” my father says to me. “She’s going to kill herself if we’re not careful.”

It is February. I am home in Connecticut from my freshman year of college for Spring Break. We are driving over the Thames River, and it is beginning to snow. I look at him, wondering why this is the first real thing he has chosen to say. Beth is my younger sister. She is a type I diabetic. We’ve known for three years.

I don’t know what he expects me to say. I ask him what he means.

Her grades are dropping, he tells me. Her blood sugar is on the rise, and she’s gaining weight. She fights with my father over everything – this especially I hear the most about. She doesn’t respect my mother. They are at wits end, he tells me. Nothing works. This is his mantra. The subtext is that they don’t understand what is going on.

I know what he wants me to do before he says it. I hate him a little for it.

“We need you to talk to her,” he says. “To try and convince her she’s endangering herself.”

His word, endangering. I wonder if somewhere in his head he’s proud of that one. Just like that, I’m a tool for my parents again. Useful. I look at my father looking at me, his eyes cold.

I want to tell him no – and not just no, NO, fucking NO WAY – that they’re the parents; I want to ask him if they’ve tried talking to her, if they’ve tried to see it from her point of view. I watch the road, and say, “Sure, Dad. I can give it a shot.”

It’s family, I think. We drive in silence the rest of the ten-minute ride.

When we get home, I lug my duffel bag through the slush and into the front door and I hug my mother. She’s small in my arms, smaller than I had remembered – she’s draped in a huge brown sweater; one of my father’s, I realize. Her dyed red hair is darker now. She always has it darker during the winter.

She asks me things, talking into my shoulder. How am I? How was my train ride? I answer her as I extract myself from the hug and drop my duffel bag in the hallway. I unzip it and take out the college coffee mugs in their cardboard boxes which I have bought for my parents. I stand back up and Beth is at the bottom of the stairs, smiling at me. She almost jumps forward and hugs me. I manage to put the coffee mugs down again, but just barely.

I smile and say, “Hey kid. Good to see you.”

“Good to see you too,” she says.

Her voice is muffled into my chest. We stand there, hugging each other alone in the hallway. If she’s gained weight, I can’t tell. Her face is pale and her hands and arms are cold wrapped around me. I step back from her and she smiles.

“I’m glad you’re back,” she says.

I smile. “Glad to have somebody else to take their fire for you?”

She nods. We both know it’s not a joke. Right then, looking at my sister, at her pale face and the deep rings under he eyes and the way her shoulders stoop and pinch together, I make a decision.

I look her in the eyes – the same hazel as mine. “Can you go be somewhere else for a while? Just go see a friend?”

She’s staring at me, trying to figure out what I’m thinking. “Sure,” she says finally. “I can go over to Hannah’s house.”

“Do it,” I say.

She tries to read my face for another moment, then nods. She pulls a thick winter coat off of the hall stand and bundles up. She’s putting on boots as I pick up the coffee mugs and take them into the kitchen where my parents have carefully not been listening.

After my sister has left, and my mother has unpacked the coffee mugs, we sit down to eat lunch at the big dining room table, my mother and I across from each other, my father on my right at the head of the table. She has made black bean soup, and we eat quietly. It is warm and delicious, and for the moment, I am happy to be home.

I eat two bowls of soup and then get up to make a sandwich. I had no money to buy food on the train, and I am starving. As I’m layering cheese and deli turkey onto a slice of wheat bread, my father asks me – if I haven’t already – what I’m planning on saying to her.

I ask him what he wants me to say to her.

And just like, that, I overplay my hand. It slips out because I am absent-mindedly making the sandwich, but I realize that I’m glad. If they want to use me, let them know I’m aware of it. I never have been any good at intrigue.

There is silence from the dining room. The air is grey and shading darker as I sit back down, thick sandwich in hand. I ask him again, I ask my father what he wants me to say to his daughter so I can solve his problem.

He looks at me, his eyes colder than ever. It’s the way he looks when he knows he’s wrong, I think. I have no way of knowing if I’m right.

My mother says nothing. I stare at my father, my jaw tightening, and I’m angry. I am fucking angry because I’ve been home for two hours, and already we’re here. Because it’s not just about family for him. Because he wants to control Beth the way he tried to control me, the way he already controls my mother.

“I want you,” he says, and here is something different, here is a rending of that ice, now he is angry, and he says, “I want you to say whatever you have to. Make her see that she needs to behave.”

“Behave?’ I ask. “Jesus, have you ever thought of how she feels? She’s fifteen, and she’s walking around with a disease that she barely knows anything about, and you expect her to act like she’s a goddamned robot.”

“Of course we’ve thought about it,” he says, but I run right over him – I know this is a bad idea, maybe even a terrible one, but it barely seems to matter.

“When?” I ask, “When you’re yelling at her? When you’re busy not giving her a chance?”

I’m close to shouting, and I stop, breathing in, lowering my voice. “Did you ever once consider the ever-fucking fact that she’s scared? That you’ve made her afraid of you?”

“You watch your mouth around your mother,” he says, pointing a finger at me, but she stops him.

“We know she’s afraid. We’re afraid of her, too.” My mother’s voice is soft, but its scripted, italicized font threads its way through my bolded statements, ripping them to pieces. All I’ve said falls to the floor in a heap.

“We’re not villains. Neither is she.” She moves from staring at my father’s hand where his wedding band is glinting dully in the brief lightening of the afternoon sky, bringing her eyes to mine, and they are blazing, and all of a sudden I am afraid.

“We know. We’ve tried. That’s why it is your turn. Because we’re failing.”

This, and silence. My father’s face is red out of the corner of my eye. I stare at my mother. The snow begins to smack against the glass, wet and meaty.

My mother and I stare at each other across the dark hardwood table. All I can think of are my sister’s shoulders and her sleep-heavy eyes. It’s been two hours, and we’re already here. The gulf of adolescence opens behind me. I can hear the maelstrom whipping up, the screaming tendrils of wind and chaos swirling behind me, ready to swallow me and keep me trapped. I only need to step back from the line I’ve drawn, staring into my mother’s eyes. I breathe in, and out, slowly. I see Beth’s face. I do not blink. I refuse to turn and look.