Little Universes

by Heather Demetrios

  “We got here as fast as we could,” Micah says. “Fucking 405. You know.”

  Nah pulls away, just a little. “Have you heard anything? Like, anything?”

  I didn’t notice at first: the smell. In my rush to catch our fall, with my nose pressed against the clothes she left the house in yesterday, my olfactory system was hoodwinked. But the breath is an excellent carrier of alcoholic substances.

  I check her pupils first: normal-sized. No opiates. But that just means no pills in the past few hours. I couldn’t check her pupils last night, because she didn’t come home. Didn’t check in.

  I should have known. When she didn’t check in. But I trusted Micah—and I shouldn’t have.

  I am perfectly capable of handling a natural disaster. My sister is another matter entirely. All those nights, holding back her hair. Lying to Mom and Dad for her when I caught her buying from Priscilla because, she promised, this was the last time. Becoming smaller to help make her feel bigger, talking less at the dinner table, after she made that joke that wasn’t a joke about how, since I’m six months older, I’m the heir and she’s the spare. “You’re the Elizabeth,” she said, “and I’m the Margaret.” I don’t read the magazines my sister does, but because of my extensive research for an AP Euro paper on sibling dynamics in the monarchies of Europe between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries, I did get her reference about sibling rivalry in the House of Windsor.

  I have never been angry at my sister for the drinking, the drugs. I have felt scared and sad and sorry for her, but never furious. Until now.

  How can she choose to drink instead of look for our parents? What kind of person does that?

  I pull away from her. “I have been trying to call you since 8:17 last night.”

  “That’s my fault,” Micah says. “My phone wasn’t on.”

  I am just now realizing how often we all make excuses for Hannah. It is Micah’s fault because his phone wasn’t on, not her fault because she didn’t bring one in the first place.

  It was Dad’s fault—according to him—that Hannah had a drug problem, because he worked such long hours. Or Mom’s theory: Pappoús was also tempted by the devil more than once. Like grandfather, like granddaughter. It’s in the blood. Their blood, not mine, since mine is different. Hannah’s addiction, the counselor said, was also, in part, attributed to me: Having a high-performing sibling can, she noted, trigger a user’s lack of self-esteem.

  The literature on addiction says it’s no one’s fault, that you can’t blame yourself for a loved one’s substance abuse, but I don’t buy that theory. Every time a rocket goes down, there is an inquiry. Someone is always to blame.

  Hannah’s lower lip trembles. “I’m here, okay? I’m sorry. I’ll start … doing whatever you think I should.”

  “I’m not sure how much assistance you’ll be if you’re not sober,” I say.

  “Dude, Mae. Lay off her—” Micah starts.

  “Don’t.” I give him the look my father gives exceptionally obtuse graduate students, then turn back to Hannah. “Have you seen the videos online? Of the wave?”

  She nods.

  “And you thought the best way to help our parents survive that was to get drunk?”

  Hannah steps back, as though I have hit her. And I want to. I have never wanted to slam the back of my hand against her cheek, but right now, that would feel really excellent.

  “Hey.” I have never heard this edge in Micah’s voice. “She is not drunk. We had some drinks last night. Responsibly. Don’t make her feel worse than she already does. It’s not helping anyone.”

  I cover my face with the palms of my hands because I am very, very tired. And perhaps I have made a tactical error. The psychologist would say this response of mine could result in Hannah falling into a shame spiral—and more nights of me looking for her on the boardwalk at three a.m. before Dad and Mom realize she’s not in bed.

  “I’m sorry, Mae,” Nah says. “It was just one night. Just drinks. I’m here, okay? How can I help?”

  Does this mean it all starts again? The using and the lying and the detoxing and the days when there is even less light in my sister’s eyes? And will it be the wave’s fault—or mine?

  “Do you know who’s going to be blamed for you drinking when they get home?” I ask her. My vocal cords are masking my fear with the sound of anger, a higher pitch than usual, and I’m grateful for that. “Not you. Never you. It will be my fault. And maybe it is. You told me to lay off, and I did, but I shouldn’t have. I should have followed Mom’s rules, and now—”

  “Oh, like you’d actually get in trouble.” Maybe she is still drunk and this is why she says: “Besides, I wouldn’t worry, because they might not even come home.”

  I stare at her.

  “I didn’t mean—” Hannah stops herself, looks around in a panic, then lunges toward the wooden fence that forms a lazy barrier to our front yard.

  Three knocks.

  The thing about working the problem is that you can’t work all the problems at once. And I don’t have time to work the problem of my sister.

  I need to help my parents come home.

  there is no point to me.

  Bathroom Stall Door

  Peet’s Coffee

  Westwood, Los Angeles

  5

  Hannah

  On this first night, we sleep in Mom and Dad’s room. I lie on Mom’s side and Mae lies on Dad’s and we hold hands and watch CNN, which is the only light in the room. It’s on mute because they keep replaying the cell phone videos where everyone is screaming.

  We made up. It took ten hours, but when she offered to braid my hair, I knew we were okay.

  It wasn’t like the vodka just fell into my mouth. I know I made a choice, the wrong choice. But it’s hard to explain to my sister about why I did it. Hard to explain to myself. I’m not saying Mae’s lucky for what happened to her before she officially became one of us (Mom says she’s always been one of us, and I agree), but I think it made her strong. Maybe knowing you are safe and loved and that all your needs will be met is the trade-off for my weakness.

  If Mom and Dad were here, it would all begin again, right away: the random drug tests at home, more meetings in the Circle of Sad, extra appointments with Dr. Brown. As it is, Mae keeps checking my pupils, and her nostrils flare so much I know she’s checking for whiffs of booze on me.

  “It was just one time,” I say. “A slipup. It won’t happen again.”

  Mae’s eyes slide toward me, and you can almost see her brain working behind the bright turquoise of them, like her brain is a really fast, expensive computer: assessing, calculating, sorting.

  “I don’t think it works that way, Nah. All the websites say—”

  “Can you at least let me be the expert on my own shit? You can know best about everything else—space is all yours, okay? The whole universe.”

  Nobody gets under my skin like my sister.

  That thinking crinkle we both get—it’s like our bodies know we’re sisters, even if our blood doesn’t—forms between her two pale eyebrows. When Mae gets it, it means she’s confused. Which means you rarely see the crinkle on her face.

  “I’m just trying to help,” she says.

  “You can help by trusting me, for once.” In the blue light of the TV, she glows a little, milky-white skin and hair the color of wheat. Light to my dark. How cliché is that? “I’m clean. I didn’t take any pills. And I’m not going to. I just fucked up because Micah had the stuff and—”

  “He shouldn’t have let you.”

  “He’s my boyfriend, not my boss. Micah doesn’t let me do anything. Drinking isn’t my problem, anyway.”

  She gives me a look.

  “Legit addicts are way worse than I ever was,” I say. “I was the one who told Mom and Dad I was using. I wasn’t, like, stealing from them to buy smack on the boardwalk or something.”

  Everyone keeps telling me I’m an addict. I’m not. I had a problem, and now I don�
�t. I’m only seventeen—you can’t be an addict when you’re seventeen. What happened to sowing wild oats and experimenting and all that? They’ve written me off before I’m even legally allowed to vote.

  Mae squeezes my hand. “You can talk to me. Just because we’re not the same doesn’t mean I can’t understand.”

  “You can’t. This one thing, Mae—you can’t.”

  People that don’t wake up every morning feeling like what’s the point will never understand. It’s impossible. They say: exercise, meditate, think happy thoughts, snap out of it, wear this crystal, drink this tea, find your goddamn bliss. But I literally—and I am not exaggerating—do not remember a time when I was truly happy. Except for when I was on Percocet. Those fuckers in their fancy labs actually figured out how to bottle happiness. Thing is, when you don’t have those diamonds in you, it’s all worse. So much worse. The Sad is so big it’s like, I don’t know, it’s like that movie Mae loves where the astronaut can’t get back to the ship and he just floats off into the complete, utter, terrifying darkness of space listening to cowboy music. My sister studies the void—but I look into it Every. Single. Day.

  The universe is so big and terrifying, and we are so small and weak. What is the point of getting out of bed in the morning when you are so utterly insignificant?

  I turn away from her, push my face into the pillow, and the tears come fast and hard because—

  “It smells like her,” I say into the cotton, into the pretty forget-me-nots Mom picked out.

  Mae scoots closer and presses her nose to the pillow. “Roses.”

  She rubs her palm between my shoulder blades, which always makes me feel better, I don’t know why. After a while, after she smooths away my crying, I hear her sit up, and when I look over, Mae is holding Dad’s pillow to her face. I know exactly what it smells like: my great-grandpa’s cologne, Brut, which Dad started wearing after he died. Sweet and cedary. Dad says it keeps his feet on the ground, since his head is mostly in space.

  “It smells like morning hugs,” Mae says.

  He’s a scientist, but I’m pretty sure Dad thinks it’s bad luck not to hug people when they leave the house in the morning.

  And I realize: “I didn’t get to hug him. When he left.”

  Mae got up early to see them off, but I slept in. Why do I always do the wrong thing?

  “I hugged him for both of us,” she says.

  I wish the bed didn’t smell like them, because I know that if they don’t come back, there will be a moment when it stops smelling like them, and I don’t want to know that moment, not ever.

  I curl back into the pillow.

  Sometime around eleven, Micah comes back from his shift at the restaurant and squishes onto the bed next to me without a word, him on one side, Mae on my other.

  I can’t even look at him, I can’t, because I hate him. I suddenly just hate him. Fuck you for fucking me while my parents were dying.

  There is nothing rational about grief. I’m already learning this.

  I’m also worried his scent will eat up Mom’s.

  “Anything new?” Micah asks.

  “I don’t think so,” Mae says. “Let’s see.” She turns the sound back on.

  “It’s hard to believe, but this is even worse than the tsunami that hit Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka back in 2004,” a reporter is saying.

  The landscape behind her is still bright, since it’s not even sunset yet over there. Every few minutes, they cut to footage of the wave. I’ve memorized all the cuts they have—I’ll never forget them. Her voice talks over someone’s cell phone video, the camera jumping around as they run, and you keep hearing oh my God, oh my God and then crying and screaming. There’s one taken by someone who was standing on the roof of a resort while the wave covers the pool below, a perfect, clear shot. There’s the one of the wave surging up over a dock, taken by someone too fucking stupid to run. There’s the satellite map, the graphs showing the earthquake’s radius on the ocean floor. And dozens of other things people caught and sent in.

  “Malaysia’s never seen this level of devastation, and aid workers are struggling to respond,” the reporter says.

  The wave is a monster, devouring everything. It covers whole hotels, throwing cars around. It moves like a starving, wild beast. I try to picture my petite mother in that water. I try to picture her swimming, but I can’t. You can’t swim in that.

  “Fuck,” I say. I draw my knees up and push my eyes against my kneecaps. Micah rests his hand on my back. I hate you! I hate you!

  “Hannah.” Mae presses closer to me on my other side. She smells like oranges and sugar. “Listen, the chances of dying in a tsunami are one in five hundred thousand. Obviously the fact that they actually experienced a tsunami raises the odds, but even so, people survive these things all the time. I mean, look at all the survivors they’ve interviewed so far. A lot of people are going to live, so why shouldn’t Mom and Dad be two of them?”

  This is self-preservation. This is Mae hiding in her books, behind her telescope. Numbers and formulas and theories. She has to say this because nothing else is allowed to be true.

  I look at her so I can’t see the images in my mind: Mom choking on the ocean she’d been deliriously happy about—Did you get the pictures, Nah? Look how BLUE it is! Dad, his body bashing into a wall that surrounds the seaside bed-and-breakfast they were staying at. He’d lose his glasses. Wouldn’t know which way was up.

  Micah tries to hold my hand, but I pull away and stick my hands in my armpits and stare at the TV. He doesn’t get mad. Just keeps calling the embassy in Kuala Lumpur again and again while Mae turns her focus to the Red Cross, since they already have people on the ground. I can hear through their speakers: Due to high volumes …

  “I love you,” I say to him, after a bit, because I do, right now I do, and because I feel guilty for hating him, too. He’s not perfect and I’m not perfect and maybe I’ve just been too hard on him all these months.

  “Love you back.” He kisses my forehead. “They’re alive. I know it.”

  I nod. “Right. Yes. You’re right.”

  “The death toll is astronomically high—at least two hundred thousand people,” a doctor is saying when I change the channel.

  His scrubs are bloody, and his eyes are so heavy I’m surprised he can still stand up.

  The anchor’s voice cuts in. “Please be warned that what you’re about to see contains graphic imagery that may not be appropriate for children.”

  Hell.

  Behind the doctor, there are bodies covered in white sheets, and people crying and brown skin and white skin and chaos. A little boy is screaming for his mom and he hasn’t got any pants on.

  “How can people find their loved ones?” the reporter is asking. She shoves a mic in the doctor’s face.

  “We’re working around the clock to update our list of patients. At this point, anyone being brought in is … They are beyond our help. Most bodies don’t have any identification, of course, so we’re taking photographs.” He gestures toward a wall filled with Polaroids. Tons of people are gathered in front of it, and every now and then someone sobs as they recognize someone they’re looking for.

  “They’re taking pictures of dead people?” I say.

  Mae begins typing furiously. “It’s probably unethical to put the photos online, but…”

  “We’re not looking at them,” I say.

  “But—”

  “Mae. We are not looking at photos of dead people because our parents are not dead. Okay?”

  She hesitates for a second, the knowledge-seeker in her warring with the sister in her, then finally nods. “All right.”

  “The worst damage is in Langkawi Island,” the reporter is saying. “We expect—”

  “Where are you going again?” I ask Mom.

  “Langkawi,” she says.

  “Ohhhh,” I say, sounding snooty. “Lang-cow-eeee.”

  She hits my arm, playful. I hit her back.

>   “—been over thirty hours since the tsunami hit,” a reporter says. “The American embassy in Kuala Lumpur says they’re making every effort to—”

  “Why can’t anyone fucking answer this shit?” Micah growls into his phone.

  Due to high volumes …

  A McDonald’s commercial comes on. Fuck Happy Meals and Ronald McDonald, that creepy-ass clown. Probably a pedophile. My eyes fill, and when Micah reaches for me, I let myself collapse.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  Why can’t I be strong like Mae? Why do I always have to be an open wound?

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” he murmurs, fingers in my hair.

  Later, half-asleep, I hear Mae and Micah talking.

  Mae tells him how she just read on the National Geographic website that many bodies are never found after a tsunami because they’re washed out to sea. Jesus fuck. So there’s actually something even worse than them dying.

  I get that Mae has to know how things work so she can form a hypothesis—If many bodies wash out to sea, then we may never find our parents—but I don’t care how things work, just that they actually freaking work. I need unicorns in the sky shitting rainbows, not data.

  “Do you think they made it?” Micah asks quietly.

  I stop breathing. There’s a long pause. Too long. Remember: Mae knows all the things.

  “Ask me at ninety-six hours,” she says.

  Four days. In the modern world, if you can’t contact someone within that amount of time, you are incapable of contacting them.

  “But what’s your gut feeling?” Micah says. His voice is so hopeful, so broken.

  I can imagine the look on her face. “I need more data.”

  my mom is terrible at holding her breath.

  Death Tarot Card

  4302 Seaview Lane

  Venice, CA

  6

  Hannah

  I think I might fall off the wagon again.

  Preferably today. Preferably now.