“I’m staying, like, two blocks away. I didn’t know Tess would be gone already. You know it has nothing to do with you. It’s you and me and Roxanne all summer, okay?”
She’s asking me if it’s okay again, and I’m too hazy and sleepy to do anything but nod. I pull my feet onto the couch, which is mostly wood and silk, and I rest my forehead on my knees. I think it’s going to make the room spin less, but it makes the room spin more and I know so, so little about being messed up. I think I need pizza, but that could be wrong too. Maybe I need more water. Or Advil. Or sleep. Or a new sister.
Arizona crosses her arms over her new chest.
“Dad and I had a really good time tonight,” she says. “He’s been really supportive of everything.”
Everything means the surgery, and that means he knew about it even though I didn’t. It makes sense, of course; she would have used the money he offered all those years ago to do it. But it hurts on impact. And the hurt sticks.
I want to tell Karissa. If Arizona has a million people she goes to before me now, I want to have Karissa be my best friend, my sister, my person. I am certain Karissa will agree with how ugly and wrong this all is. I’m sure Karissa will pour us wine and we will toast to never changing and keeping promises and telling each other everything.
“Of course Dad’s been supportive,” I say. “You’re becoming exactly what he wants you to become.”
Arizona pretends not to have heard me. She presses on.
“He ate the pizza with me. We watched a movie. He told me he misses me. He said he’s proud of how well you’re dealing with Tess moving out.”
“He actually said Tess’s name?” I say. It’s not the point, but he never says the wives’ names after they’re gone. Like if we don’t speak of them, they never existed. It means most of my life is erased, whole swaths of time, zillions of tiny and enormous memories deemed unmentionable. Arizona’s telling me about her night with Dad to make me feel good, but I’m pissed instead. She missed what happened with Tess, she left me to deal with it, she didn’t come home to help deal with the aftermath, she should join Dad in pretending it never happened.
“Yep. No more stepmoms, I think,” Arizona says. She finally uncrosses her arms and puts her shoulders back.
Looking at her will never not hurt. That’s how I’ll open, when I tell Karissa the story of tonight.
Arizona hates the stepmoms. She’d set the apartment on fire to keep them away. And now she’s trying to become one. It sounds almost like she thinks her looking like one of them will keep the women away. I want to ask if this is the grand plan, but the crying starts without warning, and I don’t get a chance to wonder and hypothesize and calculate.
Apparently, I do a lot of crying when I’m drunk. My eyes hurt from it all.
“We used to be the same,” I say in a voice from the part of me that only Arizona knows. It’s the sudden, violent kind of teariness, and I grip the edges of the not-sofa and work to keep it in.
I wonder if Karissa will ever see me like this. If Arizona can move on from the world we created together and the secrets we kept, so could I. I don’t want her to be the only person who’s seen me cry like this. I don’t want her to have that part of me.
But it feels good to have her hand around my shoulder and her head close to mine.
“This is a good thing,” Arizona says. “And it didn’t even really hurt.”
But it does hurt, I think. It does.
three
Dad isn’t asleep, it turns out.
“Girls?” he says. “Are both my girls here at last?”
I can’t help it. I love when he calls us his girls.
He offers to make us popcorn, so I try to stand up straight in the kitchen and talk about going on a nice walk and eating some nice gelato, which is my excuse for where I’ve been all night, but all I really want to do is eat a whole bunch of Goldfish and un-dizzy myself before bed.
“You were supposed to be here for movie night,” Dad says. “I wanted the whole family together.”
There it is again, another phrase that zings me, heart-adjacent. The Whole Family. Like we could be all he needs, like the three of us aren’t waiting around for that perfect person to fit into the Dad’s Wife role. The Whole Family sounds complete. Finished.