Through Her Eyes

By Red L. Jameson

Max and Luke Joyce, sisters whose mother gave them traditionally male names, survived being orphaned only to end up worlds apart as adults. Each sister dealt with the tragedy of losing their parents and a middle sister in completely different ways: Max has perfection. She’s an up-and-coming physician with a handsome husband, 2.5 kids (a bassoon is the .5), complete with a white picket-fenced pristine house. Luke has dealt with debilitating depression and feels like a burdensome mess with her going-nowhere poetry, cheap apartment, and dead-end job. But when Max’s perfect life is torn apart by her husband having a full-blown midlife crisis, she asks Luke for help to pick up the pieces.

As the sisters readjust to each other’s company, sibling rivalry and birth-order roles never far from the surface, Max’s life takes a downward spiral with her husband acting like one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys—complete with running away to the Outback, while Luke’s life navigates toward the better—meeting a dreamy, swoon-worthy man who can’t get enough of her, even after she’s told him of her clinical depression. Bickering, yelling, silent treatments, making up, and trying like hell to allow each other to grow, the sisters have so much to overcome. But all the progress could be stopped short by the dark secret both of them have kept: the accident that killed their parents and sister wasn’t an accident at all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red L. Jameson
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005887049

Red L. Jameson

Red L. Jameson lives in the wilds of Montana with her family. While working on a military history master’s degree, she doodled a story that became her bestselling, award-winning romance, Enemy of Mine, part of the Glimpse Time Travel Series. After earning her gigantic master’s—the diploma is just huge, she couldn’t stop doodling stories, more Glimpse stories—because she couldn’t get enough of hunky Highlanders and buttoned-down Brits—and other stories, a paranormal romance series and a contemporary series, which grew into the pen name R. L. Jameson, under which she writes cerebral and spicy erotic romance. While working on yet another master’s degree—nowhere near as giant as the first, she wrote her first women’s fiction novels. But no matter which genre she writes, her novels always end with a happily ever after.She loves her readers, so please feel free to contact her at http://www.redljameson.com

Book preview

one

Max

---

One of my first memories is holding my baby sister, Luke, mere minutes after she was born. She smelled so good. Newborn babies have this saccharine, earthy smell that’s unlike anything else. I can’t help but wonder if this is why I became a gynecologist/obstetrician, getting addicted to that scent so early in my life. Some scientists point to the placenta being the culprit for the fragrance, that life-giving goo filled with nutrients. But the smell lingers for long months, bath after bath. No, babies are born sweet. And there’s not much on earth that’s truly sweet.

I held Luke—my mother in the name of feminism gave us all traditionally masculine names—her blurry blue eyes blinking, Mom in the background telling me how to hold her head. My other younger sister, Sam, was holding Luke’s swaddled feet, and everything in my world made sense. Luke found my eyes and focused, and that was the first time I felt such an intense feeling of love. It whirled inside me, that love, so strong, so powerful, yet as fragile as a newborn’s skull with the zigzag fissures not yet fused together with bone-hard cartilage. Actually, I know I became an OB/GYN because of this moment in my life, feeling love so big there’s no explaining it. Even now I find that huge love, that complete love, that fierce love, that little-girl sister love ineffable.

Look at them, Robert, my mother said to our father who was trying not to drowse in a hospital recliner set up close to Mom’s inclined bed. Dad sniffed and perked up, glancing at his three girls, smiling proudly.

You’re a great big sister, Max, Dad said. He smiled at Sam. Both of you are super big sisters.

Sam smiled, but I couldn’t. I was so overwhelmed with the feeling that this was what life was supposed to be. The three of us—Sam, me, and Luke. Luke had finally arrived and we were complete, and there was something about the three of us that was perfect, like a…like a triangle, which thanks to Big Bird I knew everything about. It was supposed to be, the three of us, forever. In my four-year-old mind, none of that could be explained, but I felt it. Felt it down deep, whooshing through my blood. It ached.

Now, thirty-four years later, I’m waiting for Luke to be discharged from a thirty-six-hour psychiatric observation. I don’t know why I’m thinking of Luke’s birth. It only hurts to think of, feels like shattered glass and gnarled metal from a car accident. I haven’t felt something like that kind of love in so long. What I feel for my daughters is an even bigger kind of love, so irrational and animalistic that I hardly allow myself to feel it. And I adore my husband, Pete. Peter, my man. Marriage takes many different journeys, but we’re still here for each other, cheering each other on, even if it feels like we’re cheering each other from different islands. And my best friend in the world, Sue, is—I wouldn’t be who I am without her. Because of her, I’m a better person. But that perfect triangle love I felt when Luke was born and for ten years while my parents and Sam were alive was so complete, so perfect, but now is…ineffable again, but in a completely different way.

What I do feel is somewhere between numb and such pure anger that I can’t sit still in Dr. Martin’s, Luke’s psychiatrist for this thirty-six-hour stay, office. I keep fidgeting or standing and investigating the posters on the walls about schizophrenia, bipolar manic depression, borderline personality disorder, and addiction. Cute cartoon people with anime-large eyes discuss how to get help when feeling suicidal in bright primary colors.

I know Dr. Martin. Professionally, of course. I don’t know her well. But we work at the same hospital and have for more than a decade now. She’s older, petite with a slight rounded belly, and always wears clothing that flows. Flowy pale blue skirts, flowy lavender blouses, flowy white scarves. I’ve never paid much attention to her because although OB/GYN will need a psychiatrist referral every once in a while, it’s rare.

Dr. Martin also has a wall of shelves with books and diagrams of the human brain above a non-intrusive desk with the outdated computers we all share at our hospital. The monitor can easily swivel so patients can see X-rays or test results. There’s a small yet boxy printer to one side of the wooden desk. I stare at the printer that keeps blinking that it’s low on ink. Standing, I want nothing more than to pound the printer with my fists, to keep hitting it until my knuckles bleed, to try to break the stupid thing, feel the plastic fracture under my force.

There’s a soothing, feminine voice outside the office, and I sit in time for Dr. Martin to open the door. She’s smiling, her face wrinkled yet her skin is such an even texture—maybe a lot of time under a laser—that the wrinkles blur. Her smile only grows as she opens the door wider, spotting me.

Dr. Joyce—I kept my maiden name for my profession, some of my mom’s feminism seeping through—how nice to see you, Dr. Martin says, like I’m dropping by for a personal visit. She opens the door even wider, and there’s my sister, there’s Luke.

She looks just like you, Maxie, Mom said all those years ago when I was holding baby Luke. Don’t you think?

Luke’s coloring is similar to Sam’s, like our father’s. She has pale skin with such dark, dark hair that when Luke was a teenager, people would loudly remark how she resembled Snow White. I take after our mother—blonde, my skin always looking tanned even though I rarely go outside. Luke, when she’d been in her Snow-White age, had said I was golden like a wedding ring. It was the single-best compliment of my life and I’d nearly choked up when she’d said it, especially because I’d always felt like the outsider when compared to Sam and Luke. I wonder if Sam, had she lived, would have grown tall like Luke, would have grown so much taller than me.

The punching-my-way-through-the-printer anger returns as I look at Luke, thinking of Sam. I stand but am unsure of my fierce rage, so I sit again, folding my hands together, like our mother taught us when we were little, when we’d go to church and all us girls couldn’t sit still with the bursting energy to run and run and run. Mom would whisper, Sit your fingers in their pew, honeycakes. I’d oblige, the only one to do so, being the responsible oldest sister, showing my baby sisters how I’d lace my fingers together and hold all my wayward energy in my locked-tight hands.

Hello, Dr. Martin, I say, my voice wobbly and weird.

Luke, who knows me better than I know myself, shies from me, like a colt who knows she’s about to be broken. They still tie a horse’s leg to a tree, making it stand on three legs for hours, humiliating the animal, to break it. Luke is acting like she knows I’m going to tie one of her legs to a post.

There’re only two chairs in Dr. Martin’s office, besides the swivel chair behind the desk for Dr. Martin of course. Tall, thin Luke glances at the chair next to me, her dark blue eyes sharp, but her puckered brows show her wariness.

I pat at the seat. I won’t bite. I try to laugh. It hurts a little to do.

Dr. Martin laughs, though, as she scoots her small frame into her chair behind the desk. Today, she’s gracing a lot of flowy lavender. It looks good on her even complexion. Her laugh is melodic, the lavender calming, but I’d like to tear through anything and everything at this moment.

Luke doesn’t laugh and sits on the chair next to me with more than half of it exposed. She’s sitting on the very edge, perched like a sparrow next to a hawk.

I try so hard to calm my instantaneous and much-too-loud rage at my sister for putting me in this position, for being her in-case-of-emergency person, for being my troubled sister. I know she doesn’t need my anger. Hell, I don’t need my anger either. And I can compartmentalize so many other things. But my anger is the dark cloud over us all.

Dr. Martin observes the way Luke is sitting next to me then scrutinizes my face for a second or two, but it feels like a lifetime as I make every effort to conceal my…everything. She clears her throat, probably making some mental note. Hopefully nothing in that note is about me.

Well, Dr. Martin folds her small, delicate hands, hands that have liver spots that show her age, with the first knuckle of both her index fingers slightly swollen. Arthritis. Not bad, though. After thirty-six-hours of observation, she says, I find Luke to be emotionally stable.

I blink, my thoughts shooting past me so fast I can’t grab one and hang onto it. Glancing at my sister, I wonder how manipulative she’s grown in the last few years to have Dr. Martin think that, to give her professional assessment that’s so…that’s so fucking wrong.

Luke scoots even further away from me.

I finally ask, You think the overdose was an accident?

Dr. Martin nods and smiles at Luke. That’s what Luke has said and, yes, I believe her.

You think the Ambien overdose was an accident. I say it this time more like a statement, and I can almost feel Luke’s cringe inside my own skin, all sharp, like a pencil stabbing a palm.

Dr. Martin nods again. She’s agreed to no longer take any sleeping aids, too. Dr. Martin is studying me more than Luke, and my anger is intense, throbbing, as she says, I believe Luke forgot that she’d already taken a dose, just like she’s telling us.

"She forgot she’d taken three doses when she took the fourth, the nearly deadly dose," I correct Dr. Martin. It was fatal for my thin sister who had just been prescribed the Ambien for the insomnia she’s had since she was a kid. She had no threshold for the drug, no tolerance to build on. She’d slept through her morning alarm, her heart rate slowing, her breathing slowing, the oxygen to her limbs sluggishly moving, rerouting to her organs.

When her neighbor knocked on her door about her alarm clock being too loud, when he’d, for whatever reason, tried the unlocked door—why the hell doesn’t Luke lock her fucking door?—and went inside to find my sister, she was already cold, barely breathing. It was only because of some annoyed neighbor that my sister is alive right now, sitting as far from me as possible, silent, yet her hurt at my dubiousness is as loud as my anger. I see it in the slant of her dark arched brows, the turn of her eyelids, the way she’s biting at the inside of her mouth, like she did the first time she pulled this suicidal stunt when she was thirteen years old.

Dr. Martin nods. As I’m sure you know, if you prescribe Ambien, there are many patients who cite difficulty remembering, especially when the drug is in effect. I believe your sister. I believe Luke. She doesn’t want to die, Dr. Joyce. It was an accident and she’s not currently having suicidal ideations. She’s also let me know that she doesn’t think she’s been depressed for more than a year.

I glance at Luke again, wondering what game she’s playing. The one thing I can usually say with certainty is how honest my sister has been, so heartbreakingly honest, about her depression. We’ve done family therapy for years, where she’s openly expressed what she thinks about death. My poetic sister has said that she imagines death like a pimp in a ‘70s model Cadillac, how it’s always searching for her, wanting to use her body, use her spirit, and how for so long she’s been attracted to giving it what it wants. She said that when she was fifteen, and Grandma Joyce nearly fell to the floor in shock and outrage that a granddaughter of hers knew what a pimp was.

Dr. Martin keeps nodding. I believe your sister, Dr. Joyce. I believe Luke. I think she’s been very accommodating to be here.

Accommodating? I say, my voice grinding, sounding like metal on metal.

Dr. Martin leans forward, planting her folded hands even more firmly on the desk. Yes. While I understand your impulse to ask for this observation, while I understand the history of Luke’s depression, I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Unfortunately, there are many who accidentally overdose with sleeping medications. Most would be sent home if they were discovered as Luke was. We’re lucky Luke was found when she was. She truly doesn’t want to die. She likes her job; she loves her nieces; she likes her life. She knows if suicide ideation surfaces again how to get help and how to ask for it.

This ain’t my first rodeo. My sister’s voice is deeper than usual, gritty. She might be sitting as far away from me as possible, but she cuts me a look I’ve never seen from her, and it blasts through me, chilling me, making me nearly shudder as I see in her blue, blue eyes my own anger reflected.

It’s loud and vibrant and matches my own.

Well, hate me if she must, but there is no way I’m letting her walk away from yet another overdose, yet another stomach full of charcoal after being pumped of its contents. I’m not going to stand idly by after she has pulled this shit so many times before. Was this her sixth time in the ER after she’d tried to take her life? Or seventh?

I talked the ER attending into the psych eval. I forced the issue. I’d taken my sister’s rights from her, something she’d yelled at me as three nurses were threatening to sedate her if she didn’t come quietly.

Luke, now, inhales and slowly exhales, looking at Dr. Martin. Her skin is so pale when usually there’s a cherry hue in her cheeks. She truly does look like Snow White most of the time, even if she hacked her dark hair short, into a mangled mess that keeps floating down over her eyes. She’s gritting her teeth, obvious by the striations along her jawline. She’s too thin, too pale, and she is now lying about her depression, something she’s never done before.

And I’m exhausted playing this detective role, this emotional detective. I have worried for two decades when my sister will kill herself, when will I get the call that the rest of my family of origin is dead. I have often put that worry above anything else, like when my oldest daughter Meg was a colicky six-month-old baby, but I’d forced Pete to take care of her when my sister called and confessed she was in a dark place.

That had been the last time Luke had called about her depression, I realize; Meg is twelve now. All the same, I don’t believe Dr. Martin, even if she keeps using my professional name out of respect, almost begging me to see what she sees. I know my sister. At thirteen she tried to cut herself with Grandpa’s whittling pocketknife, at fourteen a Tylenol and Aspirin overdose, at fifteen more cutting and then a cough syrup overdose, at sixteen drinking antifreeze which hospitalized her for months, seventeen anorexia, and eighteen an alcohol overdose mixed with continuing disordered eating.

I know my sister. When I was happy with the new love of my own child and the new love for Pete, Luke had called crying, hysterical, sniffing and saying how death was riding through the streets for her.

That might have been twelve years ago, that call, but she keeps breaking. Luke keeps breaking, and I’m so angry she can just break and depend on me to pick up her pieces and put her back together again. Fragile Luke. Like the fissures in her skull never fused and my hands are the only thing keeping her together. I’m so fucking resentful of this role.

Still, even though I’m exhausted, there’s no way I believe any of this was an accident. Nor will I ever give up on my sister, the one family member I have left.

I’ll get a second opinion. Yes. I’ve heard great things about a new psychiatrist that moved here about a year ago. What was his name? Dr. Daniels, maybe. Something like that. I’ll look him up and have him check out Luke. I’ll just force Luke to comply. It’s for her own good because I cannot get that phone call in the middle of the night. I cannot endure more grief. I know if the cops called and told me that my sister has finally completed what she’s been wanting to do for nearly twenty years, I’ll just…I’ll just break like her. And I can’t do that, shatter into billions of pieces of broken glass, so broken the fragments resemble pieces of sand rather than glass, going back to their original form.

I am a glop of sand, nodding at Dr. Martin, saying the right things to get out of her office, already having an exit strategy, having several. Generals in the military aren’t as prepared as me because I’ve been saving my sister’s life for what feels like a thousand years. I’ve already taken all the precautionary steps. My sister might complain about losing her rights, but she will not die on my watch. No matter how tired I am, how the exhaustion is like a hairshirt, clingy and tortuously itchy, and I want the thing off, but—I look at Luke, challenging her anger with my own—she will not die on me.

two

Luke

---

As Max insists on driving me home—no Uber for a quick getaway from her eternal wrath—I lean my head against the window on the passenger side of her Land Rover. The SUV looks pretentious, fitting an up-and-coming physician like my sister. But I’m probably the only one who could guess how she spent months if not years studying which SUV would stand up the best after crashing headfirst into a concrete wall. The Rover is a tank that gives my sister a feeling of imperviousness to our shared, shattered-glass-and-burnt-rubber past.

Max’s anger is another passenger in the Rover, pointy red-hot energy floating between us, even though I have a right to be angry since I’m the one who just spent thirty-six hours in the vicinity of a man who peed himself every four hours and had, within that span of a little more than a day and a half, pulled out all the hair of his left eyebrow with his thumb and index finger. I might complain, but Paul, the eyebrow plucker, is my people. If anyone dared complain about his incontinence, I’d fiercely defend him. But sometimes it’s hard to be around my people, like Marge, the schizophrenic patient who thought I was her long-dead daughter haunting her. Her meds hadn’t taken effect yet when I’d first come on the floor. God, poor Marge’s screams still bare into my skull, the sonorous sound reverberating from one wall of bone to the other, my jelly brain vibrating with her unbearable pain.

So yeah. I just spent the weekend locked up with mentally disordered people all because my sister doesn’t believe me. My sister thinks I’m lying about accidentally taking too many pills. I thought we had finally gotten to the point where we were both adults, where she knew she didn’t have to watch over me like I was a terminally ill criminal. We had gotten there once, but since she met Pete, now some thirteen years ago, she’s somehow forgotten the years of peace, the truce, the time of just allowing me to be me.

I take a breath, focusing on the feel of life at this moment, centering myself. The cold from the window feels good against my forehead. I’m too hot, utterly frustrated that after all this time, my sister still treats me like a criminal rather than loves me. No. Not frustrated. This is a level of hurt that is as hard and knobby as grief.

Not going to talk to me? My sister’s voice is jagged and thick, thick like the red apparition between us.

I straighten, realizing through her eyes I probably look like a sulking teenager. But I like the cold glass; it grounds me, so I lean my elbow against it, hoping for a breezy air of confidence I don’t feel.

What would you like to talk about? I’m trying so goddamned hard to be patient. I submitted to the thirty-six-hour evaluation because I thought I could prove to Max how changed I am, but the white spreading through her knuckles gripping the steering wheel indicates my mission is futile.

Oh, I don’t know. Max waves a hand at the empty street in front of us. Maybe what the hell you’re doing trying to kill yourself again.

And this is the way you’d talk to a suicidal person? I can’t help myself. She’s picking at an old wound. No, a scab. Picking, picking, picking. Until I’m bleeding, bleeding, bleeding.

But I take a breath, trying like hell to avoid bleeding in front of her. I have to have more self-control. I change tactics. I’m not suicidal.

Mmm, you have a funny way of showing that with overdosing on sleeping pills. And by the way, who the hell are you seeing who would prescribe Ambien for you? I’m going to gut him, take his license away, go to the board—

I’m not suicidal, and people who are not suicidal get prescribed sleeping pills all the time.

The white around her knuckles spreads, making the entirety of her fingers, except for the very tips, turn a bleak white. The tips are the color of her wrath.

I change tactics yet again. How’s Meg and Jo? You didn’t tell them I’m suicidal, did you? I know talking about Max’s daughters will change the mood. It’s a risky tactic because she could get even more defensive and angry. But I adore my nieces and don’t want my sister’s age-old misconceptions about me interfering too much with our relationship.

Max blinks a few times and swallows. I didn’t tell them anything.

Okay, so Max is back to resorting to keeping secrets. Good to know; although it’s painful she didn’t tell my nieces that I had been hospitalized. Granted, I don’t want my sister to tell them I was suicidal, but that’s simply because I’m not suicidal. Still, it would have been nice—nice isn’t the right word; nice is never the right word when concerning Max—if she had told my nieces I wasn’t available. But even as I’m thinking that, I’m realizing I’m not sure what I want my nieces to know. That I was hospitalized to prove a point? It now sounds desperately pathetic. Maybe I am.

My sister read and reread Little Women to me after the accident that killed our parents and our middle sister, Sam. I’m not too sure if Max even liked the story, but she read that to me like it was the Bible and she had converted to a fanatical church. At fourteen, she was thrust to the head of our family of just us, her and me. Our dad’s parents took us in, and our mom’s sister took me in when Max ran off for college. But she kept insisting we read the book and watch the movies, all the different versions throughout the ages, for many years after the accident. I wondered if it was her way of summoning Sam. Sam, the peaceable glue that held us together. Sam, the negotiator. If she had survived, she probably would have become the world’s best diplomat, and we would be facing global peace.

But she didn’t survive.

And my alive sister keeps reading a story she doesn’t enjoy, even naming her children, whether consciously or not, after the characters.

We are not characters in a book, especially not her daughters who need me so they can stretch their wings and just be themselves without their controlling mother around to dictate who she thinks they should be.

I clear my throat because I don’t want to sound hurt that my sister wouldn’t tell her daughters about me, even if I’m not sure what I’d want her to say to them. Okay.

Are you hungry? Can I get you something to eat?

This is nice. Her voice changed, sounding melodic, like our mother’s when she was happy. Mom could make everything sound like a song. I smile but not for long because my love for my mother, like the car accident that took half my family away and gave me scars down my abdomen and a leg and gave Max a silver scar on her forehead that runs to her temple, is jagged and filled with a kind of grief that feels as cold as outer space.

I turn to her, trying to smile again. McDonald’s fries? Even the coldest of hearts can’t resist those fries. I’d buy, but I don’t seem to have my purse with me. I thought I was making a joke, since I was ambulanced to the hospital, which I’ll never be able to pay off. But my sister’s smile, burgeoning and fragile at the mention of McDonald’s fries, breaks at the joke.

Still, we go to the drive-through.

We’re both quiet. I’m kicking myself for making the joke. Max is…ever angry. She orders us both Quarter Pounders with cheese combos, complete with soda pops and milkshakes. I’m not hungry enough to eat it all, but I will because I always cow to her, which my therapist, Beth, (my sister would love her for her name alone) is working with me on. Beth visited me often during the last thirty-six hours, working with Dr. Martin.

I can’t even describe how angry I am at myself for taking too many pills. For not remembering if I’d taken any. For not remembering anything. Dr. Martin had gently pointed out that that’s one of the side effects of the drug, short-term memory is kaput for some. She also said that since we know I have that side effect, maybe it’s best not to take any sleeping aids from here on out. I resisted rolling my eyes, but I did tell her I knew as much. Even the best of psychiatrists can treat we mentally disordered like we’re children in need of the most basic of instructions. So, yes, Dr. Martin, duh, I know. I’ll just have to fight this more-than-twenty-year-long insomnia some other way.

People, and by people I mean the Average Joe to psychiatrists who have been working the field for more than forty years, vacillate in treatment of people like me from acting like I’m a six-year-old to acting like I’m a criminal. There doesn’t seem to be any in between. Well, my sister seems to be the one exception who thinks I’m a constant criminal. There is no vacillation to treating me like I’m a kid who can’t tie my own shoes. She’s thinks she’s my probation officer, and I’m some moron who can’t help but keep pickpocketing everyone I meet.

That’s why it’s so important to find a therapist like Beth, bipolar and openly admits it. She’s done the work and is a damned good therapist, empathizing when needed, challenging when it’s time. She’s the first person who has ever treated me like I’m a fellow human being, which is changing my life.

Because of the work I’ve done with Beth, I know my anger at myself for what I’ve done—the overdose—isn’t serving me. I’m so relieved and embarrassed that my new neighbor, someone I haven’t even met yet, got so angry that he broke into my apartment to turn off the alarm and found me blue. Do you send a batch of muffins to someone who saved your life but are too embarrassed to actually face? Maybe my first-born child?

As soon as the French fries hit my tastebuds, dopamine kicks in, and I genuinely smile at Max. She genuinely smiles back. When I turned twenty-one and she was twenty-five, we briefly lived together while she was going to medical school. We’d scrape together enough money for a McDonald’s run about once a week and just sit and eat and talk about her studying and I was attempting an English degree.

When we eat this greasy, salty, cunningly sweet food, we’re back to our twenties, to the brief time when we were sisters and friends, to when we shared everything with each other. Well, I remember those times. With all the compartmentalizing Max does, I doubt she recalls.

Why is this so good? I ask; although, once I do, I worry she might think about what I’d been served the last couple days. I had a lot of instant mashed potatoes. My body doesn’t need the added sodium, but the fries are too good to resist.

I don’t know. Max tears into her Quarter Pounder. I don’t even know if I’d care if Soylent Green was the secret ingredient.

I laugh. We’re sitting in her Rover in the McDonald’s parking lot, gray concrete streets and a nearby drab tire shop with loud drills and men shouting, and this little bit of heaven for food. Her anger dissipates. I feel it dissolve. It’s a palpable being, ebbing away like the tide as she eats.

Do you remember when Sam used to put her fries up her nose to make you stop crying? Max asks, looking at her half-eaten sandwich. She always acts like I was too young to remember Sam, our parents. But I was ten when they died. Contrary to her memory, I wasn’t a baby.

I nod, realize she might not have seen me, and say around the fries in my mouth, Yep.

Then she’d eat them.

I truly laugh at that, my heart warming at the memory of Sam with her dark, wavy hair that always had a few staticky strands, how she’d put her snotty fries in her mouth and chew. Weird girl.

Max chuckles but eats more, her smile vanishing from her pretty face.

Max is one of the most striking women alive. I know, I’m her sister; I might have a bias. But she is. She got our mother’s petite genes, complete with blonde bombshell looks. Sam and I were tall and thin, like our father. But Max was voluptuous and curvy, even at fourteen, while I’m still a stick insect. She’s the epitome of femininity and stronger, both physically and mentally, than anyone I know. She’s this short, angry Viking goddess. A Valkyrie. And I so adored and still adore her.

I want to keep her laughing, so I’m wracking my brain trying to think of something, anything, that could put a smile on her face. Remember all the songs she’d make up?

Max smiles through a bite of fries and burger. She had no meters—

None.

She very rarely rhymed—

There were the songs that only featured rhymes.

True. And those songs would go on and on forever.

We both laugh and eat. The car quiets with only the noise of air-impact wrenches tightening bolts, the smell of junk-food grease clinging to both of us.

I was supposed to be named Gabriel. My mother wanted me to be similar to my sisters, Maxwell and Samuel, both ending with the -el sound. But Sam took one look at me when I was born, and although only two, insisted I was Luke. Not Lucas. Just Luke. She was so insistent that my parents complied with the toddler. I don’t know why Sam was so insistent—watched too many Star Wars movies? And I don’t understand why my parents allowed it, but I always felt that Sam was watching out for me, had a wing protectively around me from Max’s intensity and our parents and their revolving-door soap operas.

When I lost Sam, I lost my protector. I’ve felt utterly alone since.

I feel utterly alone with Max. I always have. Okay, not always. I want to be close, like we briefly were when I was in college and she was in medical school. Like we were right after the accident. But I’m trying too hard to appease and appeal to her. It breaks me to talk about Sam, to remember her songs and her soft brown hair with the gold strands, her pale hazel eyes—gray mixed with starbursts of more gold.

I know Max blames me for Sam’s death. I blame me too. So part of me feels that trying so desperately hard to