“So this is Karissa,” Natasha says. I shake my head at her, begging her silently not to tell Karissa who she is. I’m clenching my jaw so hard I can’t open it to speak. If I grind my teeth hard enough, maybe I’ll magically leave this place, like Dorothy clicking her heels. I have to believe there’s a miraculous escape.
“This is Karissa!” Karissa says. Her drunkenness hits every sense. You can see it, smell it, hear it, touch it. I’m sure my dad will taste it later if he has his mouth near hers.
“Okay, well, good to see you guys!” I say.
“Monana!!!!” Victoria says, loud and insistent and undeniable.
“I’m Natasha,” Natasha says. “I’m sure you’ve heard of me.”
Karissa is the worst amount of drunk. Too drunk to be presentable, but not drunk enough to miss what’s happening. She looks at the girls and at me and back to the girls.
“They know your name,” she says.
“Monana!” Victoria says again.
Karissa looks Natasha over like she has all the time in the world. Like she could take notes on her if she felt like it. Open up a notebook and go for it, right here and now.
“And how’s Sean?” Natasha says, not wincing or shying away from Karissa’s gaze. If anything, she sticks her chest out more. Even messy and late night and mother-y, she’s hot in the Sean Varren wife way.
“Happiest he’s ever been,” Drunk Karissa says. Drunk Karissa wants to be strong and powerful and messing with Natasha. Drunk Karissa is shooting eye-daggers my way every few moments, too. Drunk Karissa can’t stay steady. She swings like a pendulum, back and forth and all around.
“Montana? I’ll see you soon, I hope? The girls would love to spend another day in the park with you,” Natasha says.
“Montana and I love going to the park!” Karissa says.
I am territory. I am a thing to put flags in. They want to claim me as their own. It’s a whole new thing. I am used to being the thing abandoned. A left-behind spare sock or a toy you outgrow but sort of vaguely remember as symbolic of some time in your life. I am Montana who watches Tess move out or Montana who gets one card a year from her mother or Montana whose dad wishes she had a different shape or Montana whose sister has a better time without her.
“One of the last times Montana saw her mother was at the park,” Natasha says, because even if Karissa knows me in the wildest ways, Natasha knows me deepest. She’s read the lists, she knows everything that’s ever made me happy or grateful or nostalgic. She knows I sat and watched cupcakes float in the fountain and that I’m grateful that I remember the moment so clearly.
I have never seen Natasha petty like this until I realize of course I have. When Natasha was with my father, she’d make sure we knew that she knew him best. “That’s not his favorite tie,” she said to me once when I brought him what I thought was his favorite tie—a purple one I’d given him for Christmas. “Your father prefers red.”
It’s not like I’ve forgotten the things I used to hate about Natasha or the way she made me feel when she lived in our apartment and tried to change us. But I let those memories fade a little, and now there’s the outline of the person she used to be, and she never did get her implants taken out, and she’s grasping onto me and some life we had together, and I guess maybe people change but they also don’t.
“Montana and I don’t live in the past,” Karissa says. She puts an arm around my shoulder. She smells sweet and alcoholy. “We have adventures in the here and now.”
I shrink away from her. I don’t want to be a thing they both own. I don’t even want to be a thing Bernardo owns, a piece of a whole. Even though I miss it so desperately, I’m not even sure I want to be part of a set of sisters, at the end of the day. I want to be whole, all on my own.
Natasha narrows her gaze. She sniffs the air, maybe seeing if I’m drunk too. Sussing out what these adventures might be. She stands in front of the stroller instead of behind it, blocking the girls from Karissa or, maybe, from me.
Another flash of memory: Natasha sniffing at my father’s collar, wondering if he’d been with another woman. The kind of sick that made me feel.
“You’re a drop in the bucket,” she whispers to Karissa. “Don’t you forget it,” she says to me. I am the rope in a game of tug-of-war. They both want me, but neither of them really wants me. They just want to win.
“So were you,” Karissa says.
We’re close to home, and Karissa’s smoking what I assume must be the world’s last cigarette by the way she’s hoarding it.
“Hey, me too,” I say, and reach for it.
“I thought you were all good now,” she says. She doesn’t give me a drag. She scarfs the rest down, quick, unpleasant inhales and exhales, and pounds it with her heel into the pavement. “What the hell have you been up to? What was that?”