The cupcake was suddenly gone. We were done here.
“Yeah,” I said, like, Duh, like it was past the whole world’s bedtime. “Get your bed ready and let’s hit the sack.”
I watched her unfold the recliner and make it up with a sheet from the cabinet. She’d brought a pillow and blanket of her own—both plaid, which added a camp-out vibe. As I watched her work, her movements and her silhouette so familiar, my eyes kept trying to close on their own. I remember thinking I was so tired I’d never wake up. I remember wondering if she was going to sleep with that crazy nose ring in.
*
I WOKE A couple of hours later to Kitty at my bedside, whispering, “Hey. Hey! Wake up!”
I opened my eyes in the pale darkness. Kitty was leaning over me in a sleep shirt with R2D2 on it. I was out of breath.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“You were having a nightmare.”
She wasn’t wrong. “I was drowning,” I said. “I was trapped in the plane—underwater.”
“I figured it was something bad.”
I squeezed my eyes closed and took a second to catch my breath.
My hair—what remained of it—was damp with sweat, and I was shaking. Kitty got a nubby white washcloth from the bathroom and pressed it to my forehead. Then, without a word, she crawled into my bed beside me—careful not to touch my neck. She was slender enough to fit. She curled on her side and stroked my hair. “Your hair’s a mess,” she whispered.
“The fire burned it off,” I said.
“Well, that’s kind of lucky,” she said, “because guess what I’ve been doing since the last time you saw me?”
“Tell me.”
“Cutting hair.”
I frowned. “You’re a barber?”
“A hairstylist. I’m famous. I have forty-six thousand followers on Instagram.”
“You’re famous?”
She nodded. “I also do tattoos. I have a place called the Beauty Parlor in Brooklyn. And we do piercings.”
“You do the tattoos yourself?”
“Yep. Tattoos and haircuts. I’m amphibious. Guess what else? I’m sleeping with the manager. Or maybe he’s sleeping with me … Either way, it’s one-stop shopping.”
The manager’s name was Ethan, but he had a handlebar moustache that he waxed at the tips, so everybody just called him the Moustache. Even Kitty.
She told me all about him in soothing tones while I waited for my body to settle down and stop shaking—his motorcycle, and his cooking skills, and his favorite books.
At last, after letting her talk and talk, I asked, “Do you always use the article? Like, do you say, ‘Hey, the Moustache! Come here!’ Or, ‘What’s for dinner, the Moustache?’”
She thought about it. “Actually, to his face, we call him ’Stache, like it’s a name. But when we’re talking about him, we call him the Moustache, like it’s his title.”
“What does he call you?”
“I can’t repeat it,” she said. “It’s X rated.”
The last time I’d seen her, she’d been temping as a receptionist. She’d been wearing pumps and an ill-fitting gray suit that she’d refused to have altered. “You’ve really changed a lot,” I said.
“For the better.”
“Maybe. Except for that nose ring.”
“You don’t like it?”
“You look like Elsie the cow.”
“But sexy.”
My sister, the nose-ringed hairstylist. “Can you fix my hair?” I asked.
“Of course. I’ll give you an adorable little pixie. It’ll be cuter than what you had before.”
It wouldn’t, of course. But I was too tired to argue.
“Remember that time,” Kitty said, “I cut that girl’s hair at summer camp and made her cry?”
“That was actually a really cute little bob.”
“I took like ten inches off, though.”
I remembered. “She called her parents to come and take her home.”
“I should send her a gift certificate. Now, I can make anybody look good.” She nudged me. “Even you.”
I knew she meant it as a joke. But I closed my eyes.
“I was kidding,” she said, when I got quiet.
I said, “Mom can’t even look at me.”
“That’s not about you. That’s about her.”
“My face is burned.”
Kitty made a pshaw sound. “It’s a sunburn. It looks exactly like a sunburn. Except for the blisters. Not a big deal. I’ll show you tomorrow.”
It was strange to listen to our conversation. It was like I was eavesdropping on it somehow. In one way, we sounded very much like we always did—the back-and-forth, the teasing. We’d only ever had one way of talking to each other, and it was playful and jokey. That way of talking didn’t fit the situation now, but it was all we knew how to do. So we did it. But it was in a minor key, just a muffled, gray version of itself.
Of course, that’s how everything I said or did or thought felt now. Flat, and colorless, and altered.
“Kitty?” I asked, after a bit.
“What?”
“Stay here tonight, okay? I don’t want to be alone.”
“I am staying here.”
“No, I mean right here. In the bed.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t want to have any more nightmares,” I said.
“I’ll keep an eye on you.”
“Thanks.”
We let ourselves get quiet and start to settle, but then I had to say one last thing. “You can’t be drinking here, by the way. I’m making that rule.”
“Drinking?” she asked.
“’Cause you get crazy when you drink, and I just can’t take any more drama—”
“I haven’t had a drink in three years,” Kit said. “Dad sent me to rehab.”
This should have been thrilling news, but my heart was too numb to feel it. “That’s great,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, he thought he should keep that under his hat.”
“That’s why you went away?”
“That’s part of it.”
“And you stayed away because—what?—you were too fragile?”
“That’s part of it, too. I’ll give you the whole story sometime. But not tonight. Then you really will have nightmares.”
Fair enough. “So … you quit drinking entirely?”
“Entirely. It was brutal, but I did it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. We all have our struggles. I’m better for it, actually.”
“Does Mom know?”
“I have no idea.”
“You should tell her.”
“Nah.”
“It might help the two of you make up.”
“Well, that’s the thing, right there,” Kit said. “I’m not sure if I want to make up.”
She was offering up some answers to questions I’d carried around a long time, but somehow they were raising more questions than they were settling. What had happened that night she pushed our mom into the pool? What had they fought about? Who was mad at who, exactly? What on earth could have made Kit—who always longed so much for attention—shut us out for so long? I wanted to know, but I also didn’t. It had to be something big, and I wasn’t sure at this point I could even handle something small.
Wondering about Kit did offer a small distraction, and in the face of the wasteland my own life had become, there was something about a distraction that felt like relief.
Until Kit turned it all back to me.
“Can I tell you something comforting about your situation?” she asked, after a minute.
“No.”
It hadn’t been a real question, of course. It was just an intro. “Really? You don’t want to be comforted?”
“Nope.”
She wasn’t buying it. “Everybody wants to be comforted.”
How to explain to her that there was absolutely nothing she could say that would comfort me? Even the attempt would make things worse. There was no upside. There was no silver lining. There was no comfort.
But there was no way she could understand that. “Don’t comfort me. Don’t say a word. Just go to sleep before I kick you out again.”
“Okay,” Kit said.
So that’s how we stayed, two in the bed, all night long: Kit patiently comforting me while I rejected the very notion of the concept.
As long as she was just breathing in and out beside me in that snoozy, wavy, sleepy-Kitty rhythm of hers—it was fine. I didn’t believe in comfort anymore, and I knew for a fact that I would never, ever feel better. But having her with me like that? Not being alone? Well, it didn’t make me feel worse. That counted for something.