Notes on an Execution, page 17
Hazel didn’t hear her phone, buzzing from the kitchen counter.
Alma had just come home from the bus stop, and she was singing softly to herself as she untied her shoes, the tune drowned out by the tantrum Mattie was throwing from his high chair. Hazel crouched on the floor, wiping a splat of applesauce with a paper towel.
“Mattie, honey,” she begged. “Please just eat your snack.”
But Mattie only shrieked, scattering a handful of saliva-damp Cheerios onto the floor, pudgy fists banging against the plastic tray. Alma plucked a wet Cheerio from the hardwood and popped it into her mouth, grinning as she sang the tune intended to help her adapt to the first grade. The song was so catchy, Hazel had caught Luis humming it that morning as he swiped shaving cream across his jaw. We love to learn, we love to play, that’s how we do it at Parkwood Day!
“Mama,” Alma whined. “Your phone is ringing.”
Hazel strained against Mattie’s hollering, listening for the vibration. When she finally found her phone, facedown next to the stove in a puddle of water, it was still buzzing. jenny, it blinked.
“Hey.” Hazel clamped the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she lifted Mattie by the armpits out of his high chair. Content on the floor, Mattie picked up Alma’s discarded shoe and lifted the dirty sole to his slobbering mouth.
“The job,” Jenny was saying.
“What? I can’t hear—”
“I got the job,” Jenny said. “I did it, Hazel. I left him. But it was bad, really bad. I didn’t have time to do any of the things we talked about. Ansel read my email, he woke me up late last night. I left, I checked into the hotel, but I don’t have any of my things. Can you come?”
Jenny was crying, choked through the speaker, a siren wailing vaguely in the background. Hazel looked down at Alma, always far too perceptive for her age, an expression of concern painted across her little fox face. Hazel wrapped her fingers in Alma’s silky hair and gazed out at the flat expanse of the neighborhood. It was placid as ever, the sky a blank autumn blue. The calm seemed unfair, nearly taunting.
She remembered only after she made the plan, hung up the phone. Late last night. The squeeze in her chest, that phantom fist. At thirty-nine years old, Hazel had experienced her first Summoning.
* * *
No one could tell Hazel, now, that she had nothing.
She had Barbie dolls and board books. Baby formula, playdates, macaroni art. She had rice pudding smeared into the carpet and sticky hands early in the morning. A tantrum in the shampoo aisle at Target, a tantrum at the Italian restaurant downtown, a tantrum at her parents’ anniversary party. In the rare moment she found time to reflect, Hazel tried to revel in the chaos and motion, the fierce existence of the world she had so deliberately created.
So when Jenny called with the news, Hazel hunched over the kitchen table, shaking with the calibration. A younger self came flooding in, an annihilating rush: she was eighteen years old again, and Jenny was the whitest sun, the sharpest sound. The refrain from those withering teenage years echoed suddenly back. Be happy for her. In the cave of Hazel’s head, the phrase took on an old wounded tone, the words limp and defeated.
Alma reached out, her face like a worried little psychiatrist—she stroked Hazel’s hair, tender, her palm covered in half-peeled Winnie the Pooh stickers.
* * *
The change had happened slowly, almost imperceptibly. Hazel could trace the start of it back to Jenny’s wedding day.
Their parents had rented a tent on a golf course, with a partially obscured view of Lake Champlain. There were only thirty guests, mostly aunts, cousins, and Jenny’s high school friends. Hazel had only been dating Luis a few months by then, and it was the sort of new and giggling love that could be fractured by the politics of an event like this. She had not invited him. Standing behind Jenny as she pinned up loose tendrils of hair, Hazel ached for Luis’s presence—Luis was the kind of man who could not handle sad movies, or scary ones either. He cooked his mother’s tamale recipe on Sunday nights, kneading the dough with his knuckles.
Luis was the only person Hazel had told about Jenny’s secret.
Ansel hadn’t graduated from college. He didn’t show up for any of his finals, that last semester—Jenny mentioned a fellowship he didn’t get, a professor who had written a bad recommendation. He’s too smart for them, she told Hazel, Ansel’s voice layered beneath the words. Jenny lied at the graduation ceremony, told their parents the philosophy program did something separate, while Ansel sulked in his dorm room. Ansel had worked at a furniture store ever since, where he polished handmade chairs and artisan tables and delivered them to wealthy families across Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. He was writing a book, Jenny said proudly. That part was true. Hazel had seen the pages, stacked on a makeshift desk in the garage when she’d gone to visit. She found it difficult to picture him sitting there, committing his thoughts to paper—it seemed more like a show than a genuine endeavor, a way for Ansel to remind himself of his own middling intellectualism. And there were other things she’d noticed, in that small rental house. The recycling bin, filled with empty wine bottles, a cheap chardonnay Ansel would never touch.
In the bridal tent before the wedding, Hazel tried to talk to Jenny. But she had waited too long. Jenny’s breath was sour with champagne, her eyes glassy as Hazel handed over a tube of lipstick.
Hey, Hazel had said. Are you sure this is what you want?
Don’t be stupid, Jenny had answered. She cupped a condescending hand to Hazel’s cheek, that purple ring glinting from her finger. I know what I’m doing.
At the reception, Ansel was perfectly charming. He complimented her aunt’s jewelry, joked with her dad as they cut the cake. But Hazel caught him so many times that night, looking dead-eyed over Jenny’s shoulder. His smile melted instantaneously off his face the second he did not need it—he held Jenny with a rigid back and a shallow happiness, impermanent as wet paint. After the ceremony, Hazel escaped to the bathroom, where she stared herself down in the mirror. She remembered that night on her twin bed, the question she had posed to Jenny. If he doesn’t feel anything at all, then how do you know he loves you? In her ugly silk bridesmaid dress, Hazel pressed a finger to the mole beneath her eye. With a jolt of surprise, she felt thankful for it. One day, she would wear a white dress, too. She would stand across from a very different man, a good man who felt everything in vivid color—and she would know exactly how he loved her. For the first time, Hazel felt bigger than her sister. The feeling was so sick, so addictive, she knew she could never let it go.
* * *
Hazel parked behind the studio, in the spot reserved by the dumpsters. Luis had come home early to take the kids—he’d been working the Arts and Entertainment desk the last few weeks, and the news was slower, his schedule easier. Hazel had left a box of mac and cheese on the counter, which Luis would let them eat with ketchup squirted over it.
Through the sheer studio curtains, the Level 4s marked a jump sequence across the floor, a wave of forest green leotards. Hazel kept her head down as she pushed through the horde of parents in the lobby, chattering and sewing ribbons as they waited. At the reception desk, Sara bent over a pile of paperwork. When the students didn’t pass their quarterly assessments, when the costume fees came in and the cast lists were posted, Sara took the shiny-haired complaints, the weightless threats. I swear we will pull her from this studio, a glossy mother would say, and Sara would serve her easy, blameless smile. As if to say: Go right ahead.
“I need a favor,” Hazel said. “It’s an emergency.”
“Your sister?” Sara squinted up. “Did she finally leave the psychopath?”
A wince, at the word. It felt suddenly like something private. Jenny’s darkest heart, not a thing to be gossiped about.
“She got the nursing job in Texas. She has a flight on Wednesday,” Hazel said. “Can you hold down the fort until then? Log your overtime, of course.”
Always, the studio was busy. But at a certain point—once classes were scheduled, tuition bills paid, directors hired for the seasonal showcases—the studio moved like choreography. Hazel’s anxiety was something more. She’d miss her Tuesday night. Tuesdays, Luis did baths and bedtime. Tuesdays, Hazel sent Sara home early and locked the front door. Alone, she queued up her favorite Bach CD, reveling in the high studio ceilings as she led herself through a barre warm-up. She let her body say the rest. She stretched, she leapt. She hurled herself against the floor. For that hour every Tuesday, Hazel did not have children, or medical bills, or debt from the business degree she probably didn’t need, no tummy-aches or broccoli on the floor or screaming for dessert. She only had her joints, rapt and unbetraying. Her muscles, exalted.
When Hazel first purchased the studio, using a loan from her parents and the majority of Luis’s inheritance, the building was decrepit. She and Luis had done most of the work themselves—hung the drywall, covered the concrete with soft marley, bulldozed and paved a parking lot. Hazel was not yet pregnant with Alma, and she spent her evenings with Luis on the unfinished floor, drinking beer with their tools scattered around.
Rarely, during this time, did Hazel think of Jenny. She remembered that period tenderly—a stretch of months during which she did not feel Jenny and Jenny did not feel her, when they spoke intermittently on the phone, grazing only the surface details.
They were the best months of Hazel’s life.
When can we see it? Hazel’s mother had pestered. Soon, Hazel had promised. Just wait until it’s ready. When her parents finally came over in the minivan they’d driven since Hazel was in high school, she paced the wide, empty space, satisfied. Her parents stood at the entrance to the gleaming studio, looking small and frumpy in the spacious wall of mirrors. They examined the mahogany reception desk and the hanging light fixtures, the shiny stereo and the ample dressing room. Her mother’s face was awed, ecstatic. Unraveled proud. It was exactly the way she used to look at Jenny.
* * *
Hazel left in the pink blush of sunset. She cracked the car window open, let the autumn air rush in as she pulled onto the highway.
I don’t know what to do at night, Jenny had said over the phone just last week. I’ve been drinking so much tea. She’d said it spitefully, like the cups of chamomile were to blame for the nervous tremble, her racing thoughts. What does Tricia think? Hazel had asked. Jenny’s sponsor had been sober nearly twenty years. Hazel had never met Tricia, but Tricia met Jenny every morning at the café across the street from the hospital. It was Tricia who urged Jenny to call Hazel in the first place, to start these nightly confessions. Tricia, whose voice Hazel heard in the background as Jenny cried into the speaker. I always wanted kids, Jenny said during one long sniffling call. But I never thought I could go nine months without it. Ansel claimed ambivalence about fatherhood, though he seemed distinctly put off by the rowdiness of Hazel’s children—she could never picture him as a father, and Jenny had always shrugged off the question. Only now did Hazel understand the extent of her sister’s disentangling.
Hazel did not have advice. She couldn’t tell Jenny about the fairy tales whispered in the glow of Alma’s night-light or how it felt to stand over Mattie’s crib at naptime, his lashes fluttering delicate. Jenny adored Alma and Mattie, but Hazel knew the longing she saw in Jenny’s eyes. It was envy. She was mortified by how good it felt, to hand that feeling finally over to her sister.
She passed wide fields, outlet malls. The evening dimmed to a lilting, satin blue.
* * *
Jenny stood over the pastries. The café was closing, the chairs already stacked on their heads as a barista skirted the corners with a mop. The light from the pastry case glowed Jenny’s scrubs gold—her face was bloated and puffy, ponytail mussed from a busy shift. Aside from their hair, which had always been a similarly wavy chestnut length, Hazel realized: she and Jenny looked nothing alike. Jenny had gained weight the past few years, and Hazel felt guilty for noticing. Her sister was wide around the middle, veering viscerally toward middle age. For the first time in her life, Hazel looked at Jenny and did not see herself at all. A stranger would never stop to ask: Are you twins? The fact struck Hazel with an acidic devastation, her mouth already unbearably sour from the highway.
Jenny turned.
“You’re here.”
Hazel gathered her sister up, held her shoulders close. It was still there, beneath the scent of croissants and coffee grounds. That Jenny smell: fruity hair, cigarettes, generic laundry detergent.
* * *
“Maybe we should come back later,” Jenny said from the passenger’s seat.
Hazel’s car idled on the curb—the squat, single-story rental looked definitively menacing. It was Jenny’s last day at the hospital, and Ansel was supposed to be at work. But when they pulled up on Jenny’s lunch break, Rihanna crooning from the car radio, Hazel’s gut dropped: Ansel’s white pickup truck was parked around the side. Looming, waiting.
“We have our list,” Hazel said, unconvincing.
They’d been talking it over for months. They’d made the plan carefully: load the car while Ansel was at work, drop everything at the hotel, come back to tell him right before the flight. The plan had not included a midnight screaming match or Jenny’s email pulled up on the computer in the corner of the living room, now cracked across the dusty screen.
“Come on,” Hazel said. “We’ll be quick.”
Hazel stepped from the car, hands clammy. She tried to tamp down the terror, to stand a little taller as Jenny followed her to the door. The scent of Jenny’s house hit her right away, remembered instinctually from visits years ago. Unwashed sheets, garbage sitting too long in the bag. Musty carpet, thrift-store furniture.
“Hello?” Hazel called.
Ansel sat on the flaking leather couch. He had his cell phone in his hand, like he’d been waiting for a call, or maybe just for this. Hazel had not seen him in nearly two years, and she was surprised by what time had done to him. Ansel had always been handsome, a prize Jenny could drag to work functions, flushing while the other nurses whispered jealous. But he was getting older. Gravity had begun its work. Ansel’s stomach folded over his jeans in the faint shape of a beer belly, and his skin looked sallow, tinged a sunless yellow. His glasses were smudged with greasy fingerprints, and his face had rounded out, sagging beneath the chin. For the first time, Hazel could picture exactly how he’d look as an old man. Gruff, gnarled. Devoid of any surface-level charm.
A sneer curled across his stubbled mouth—Hazel stepped back instinctively, surprised by her own current of fear.
“Oh,” Ansel said, his face rearranging itself instantaneously back into a veneer of calm. It seemed he had mistaken her shadow for Jenny’s. “Hazel. I didn’t expect you.”
He stood. For a terrifying second, Hazel thought he might lean in for a hug. She tensed, bracing, the fear mixed with something else now: a dripping, metallic guilt. In that single glance, she saw a sliver of the complexity Jenny had been living. The sharp corners, the chilling subtleties. Hazel knew only the outline of her sister’s reality, and it was shocking to stand now in the depths of it.
Ansel brushed past her to find Jenny, who lingered paralyzed on the front porch, the door hanging open like a jaw.
“You fucking serious?” he called.
“We’re just here to get her things,” Hazel said. “Jenny, show me where the suitcase is?”
While Hazel fished the suitcase from the closet, Ansel hovered—he looked almost amused, hands shoved casually into his paint-spattered pockets. They tore down the list hastily, throwing everything sloppily into the bag: Jenny’s bras, her shirts, her shoes. A box of high school mementos, a tin of earrings that had once belonged to their grandmother. Jenny would leave her cast-iron pots and pans, she would leave the sheets she’d picked out years ago to match the shag carpet, she would leave her hair products in the bathroom cabinet. Hazel dumped a wad of dresses into the suitcase, still on their hangers, as she listened to Ansel’s breath. A whistle, loitering too close.
“You’re proving it, Jenny,” he kept saying, a repetition that grew louder. “You’re proving me right.”
The bedroom was alive with electricity, intimate and ugly. Jenny dumped an armful of T-shirts into the bag, shaking with a restrained sob.
“It’s just like my Theory,” Ansel said. Hazel pried the suitcase from Jenny’s tight white grip and lugged it back across the hall, beckoning her forward. “Like Sartre said. The very nature of love’s suffering makes the concept impossible. No one thing can be wholly good, can it?”
“I’m sorry,” Jenny croaked, a half whisper.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” he said, almost laughing. “Love cannot exist as something pure—the spectrum will always infiltrate. The badness will always sneak in.”
“Come on,” Hazel urged, so close to the car now. She tried to tune out Ansel’s rambling, so faux-philosophical it sounded psychotic.
“I’m sorry,” Jenny said from the stoop, snot running shiny from her nose as she stumbled down the front steps. “I’m sorry.”
Finally, they were outside, and Ansel was just a following mass. Toxic shadow. Hazel’s steps were heavy, panicked, and when she was certain she heard Jenny behind her, she broke into an involuntary run.
Ansel stood on the porch, so tense he looked like he might burst. Hazel hefted the suitcase down the sidewalk—when they finally slammed the car doors shut, Jenny burst into a frantic sob.
“Don’t look,” Hazel said. “Just don’t look.” While Jenny buried her face in her hands, Hazel took one last hesitant glance: framed in the door, utterly still, Ansel stood straight and tall, his face twisted into the purest expression of rage Hazel had ever seen. He was a wolf, gnashing teeth. Inhuman. She pulled away from the curb in stuttered spurts, her legs shaking so hard the car jerked, her gaze transfixed on the rearview mirror. Hazel knew she would forever think of him like this, a menacing form in reflection, the shape of a furious man on a porch, getting smaller and smaller until he was nothing at all. A pinprick, a thing of the past. As Hazel’s hands trembled on the steering wheel, she had the naive, comforting thought: she would never have to see Ansel Packer again.
Alma had just come home from the bus stop, and she was singing softly to herself as she untied her shoes, the tune drowned out by the tantrum Mattie was throwing from his high chair. Hazel crouched on the floor, wiping a splat of applesauce with a paper towel.
“Mattie, honey,” she begged. “Please just eat your snack.”
But Mattie only shrieked, scattering a handful of saliva-damp Cheerios onto the floor, pudgy fists banging against the plastic tray. Alma plucked a wet Cheerio from the hardwood and popped it into her mouth, grinning as she sang the tune intended to help her adapt to the first grade. The song was so catchy, Hazel had caught Luis humming it that morning as he swiped shaving cream across his jaw. We love to learn, we love to play, that’s how we do it at Parkwood Day!
“Mama,” Alma whined. “Your phone is ringing.”
Hazel strained against Mattie’s hollering, listening for the vibration. When she finally found her phone, facedown next to the stove in a puddle of water, it was still buzzing. jenny, it blinked.
“Hey.” Hazel clamped the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she lifted Mattie by the armpits out of his high chair. Content on the floor, Mattie picked up Alma’s discarded shoe and lifted the dirty sole to his slobbering mouth.
“The job,” Jenny was saying.
“What? I can’t hear—”
“I got the job,” Jenny said. “I did it, Hazel. I left him. But it was bad, really bad. I didn’t have time to do any of the things we talked about. Ansel read my email, he woke me up late last night. I left, I checked into the hotel, but I don’t have any of my things. Can you come?”
Jenny was crying, choked through the speaker, a siren wailing vaguely in the background. Hazel looked down at Alma, always far too perceptive for her age, an expression of concern painted across her little fox face. Hazel wrapped her fingers in Alma’s silky hair and gazed out at the flat expanse of the neighborhood. It was placid as ever, the sky a blank autumn blue. The calm seemed unfair, nearly taunting.
She remembered only after she made the plan, hung up the phone. Late last night. The squeeze in her chest, that phantom fist. At thirty-nine years old, Hazel had experienced her first Summoning.
* * *
No one could tell Hazel, now, that she had nothing.
She had Barbie dolls and board books. Baby formula, playdates, macaroni art. She had rice pudding smeared into the carpet and sticky hands early in the morning. A tantrum in the shampoo aisle at Target, a tantrum at the Italian restaurant downtown, a tantrum at her parents’ anniversary party. In the rare moment she found time to reflect, Hazel tried to revel in the chaos and motion, the fierce existence of the world she had so deliberately created.
So when Jenny called with the news, Hazel hunched over the kitchen table, shaking with the calibration. A younger self came flooding in, an annihilating rush: she was eighteen years old again, and Jenny was the whitest sun, the sharpest sound. The refrain from those withering teenage years echoed suddenly back. Be happy for her. In the cave of Hazel’s head, the phrase took on an old wounded tone, the words limp and defeated.
Alma reached out, her face like a worried little psychiatrist—she stroked Hazel’s hair, tender, her palm covered in half-peeled Winnie the Pooh stickers.
* * *
The change had happened slowly, almost imperceptibly. Hazel could trace the start of it back to Jenny’s wedding day.
Their parents had rented a tent on a golf course, with a partially obscured view of Lake Champlain. There were only thirty guests, mostly aunts, cousins, and Jenny’s high school friends. Hazel had only been dating Luis a few months by then, and it was the sort of new and giggling love that could be fractured by the politics of an event like this. She had not invited him. Standing behind Jenny as she pinned up loose tendrils of hair, Hazel ached for Luis’s presence—Luis was the kind of man who could not handle sad movies, or scary ones either. He cooked his mother’s tamale recipe on Sunday nights, kneading the dough with his knuckles.
Luis was the only person Hazel had told about Jenny’s secret.
Ansel hadn’t graduated from college. He didn’t show up for any of his finals, that last semester—Jenny mentioned a fellowship he didn’t get, a professor who had written a bad recommendation. He’s too smart for them, she told Hazel, Ansel’s voice layered beneath the words. Jenny lied at the graduation ceremony, told their parents the philosophy program did something separate, while Ansel sulked in his dorm room. Ansel had worked at a furniture store ever since, where he polished handmade chairs and artisan tables and delivered them to wealthy families across Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. He was writing a book, Jenny said proudly. That part was true. Hazel had seen the pages, stacked on a makeshift desk in the garage when she’d gone to visit. She found it difficult to picture him sitting there, committing his thoughts to paper—it seemed more like a show than a genuine endeavor, a way for Ansel to remind himself of his own middling intellectualism. And there were other things she’d noticed, in that small rental house. The recycling bin, filled with empty wine bottles, a cheap chardonnay Ansel would never touch.
In the bridal tent before the wedding, Hazel tried to talk to Jenny. But she had waited too long. Jenny’s breath was sour with champagne, her eyes glassy as Hazel handed over a tube of lipstick.
Hey, Hazel had said. Are you sure this is what you want?
Don’t be stupid, Jenny had answered. She cupped a condescending hand to Hazel’s cheek, that purple ring glinting from her finger. I know what I’m doing.
At the reception, Ansel was perfectly charming. He complimented her aunt’s jewelry, joked with her dad as they cut the cake. But Hazel caught him so many times that night, looking dead-eyed over Jenny’s shoulder. His smile melted instantaneously off his face the second he did not need it—he held Jenny with a rigid back and a shallow happiness, impermanent as wet paint. After the ceremony, Hazel escaped to the bathroom, where she stared herself down in the mirror. She remembered that night on her twin bed, the question she had posed to Jenny. If he doesn’t feel anything at all, then how do you know he loves you? In her ugly silk bridesmaid dress, Hazel pressed a finger to the mole beneath her eye. With a jolt of surprise, she felt thankful for it. One day, she would wear a white dress, too. She would stand across from a very different man, a good man who felt everything in vivid color—and she would know exactly how he loved her. For the first time, Hazel felt bigger than her sister. The feeling was so sick, so addictive, she knew she could never let it go.
* * *
Hazel parked behind the studio, in the spot reserved by the dumpsters. Luis had come home early to take the kids—he’d been working the Arts and Entertainment desk the last few weeks, and the news was slower, his schedule easier. Hazel had left a box of mac and cheese on the counter, which Luis would let them eat with ketchup squirted over it.
Through the sheer studio curtains, the Level 4s marked a jump sequence across the floor, a wave of forest green leotards. Hazel kept her head down as she pushed through the horde of parents in the lobby, chattering and sewing ribbons as they waited. At the reception desk, Sara bent over a pile of paperwork. When the students didn’t pass their quarterly assessments, when the costume fees came in and the cast lists were posted, Sara took the shiny-haired complaints, the weightless threats. I swear we will pull her from this studio, a glossy mother would say, and Sara would serve her easy, blameless smile. As if to say: Go right ahead.
“I need a favor,” Hazel said. “It’s an emergency.”
“Your sister?” Sara squinted up. “Did she finally leave the psychopath?”
A wince, at the word. It felt suddenly like something private. Jenny’s darkest heart, not a thing to be gossiped about.
“She got the nursing job in Texas. She has a flight on Wednesday,” Hazel said. “Can you hold down the fort until then? Log your overtime, of course.”
Always, the studio was busy. But at a certain point—once classes were scheduled, tuition bills paid, directors hired for the seasonal showcases—the studio moved like choreography. Hazel’s anxiety was something more. She’d miss her Tuesday night. Tuesdays, Luis did baths and bedtime. Tuesdays, Hazel sent Sara home early and locked the front door. Alone, she queued up her favorite Bach CD, reveling in the high studio ceilings as she led herself through a barre warm-up. She let her body say the rest. She stretched, she leapt. She hurled herself against the floor. For that hour every Tuesday, Hazel did not have children, or medical bills, or debt from the business degree she probably didn’t need, no tummy-aches or broccoli on the floor or screaming for dessert. She only had her joints, rapt and unbetraying. Her muscles, exalted.
When Hazel first purchased the studio, using a loan from her parents and the majority of Luis’s inheritance, the building was decrepit. She and Luis had done most of the work themselves—hung the drywall, covered the concrete with soft marley, bulldozed and paved a parking lot. Hazel was not yet pregnant with Alma, and she spent her evenings with Luis on the unfinished floor, drinking beer with their tools scattered around.
Rarely, during this time, did Hazel think of Jenny. She remembered that period tenderly—a stretch of months during which she did not feel Jenny and Jenny did not feel her, when they spoke intermittently on the phone, grazing only the surface details.
They were the best months of Hazel’s life.
When can we see it? Hazel’s mother had pestered. Soon, Hazel had promised. Just wait until it’s ready. When her parents finally came over in the minivan they’d driven since Hazel was in high school, she paced the wide, empty space, satisfied. Her parents stood at the entrance to the gleaming studio, looking small and frumpy in the spacious wall of mirrors. They examined the mahogany reception desk and the hanging light fixtures, the shiny stereo and the ample dressing room. Her mother’s face was awed, ecstatic. Unraveled proud. It was exactly the way she used to look at Jenny.
* * *
Hazel left in the pink blush of sunset. She cracked the car window open, let the autumn air rush in as she pulled onto the highway.
I don’t know what to do at night, Jenny had said over the phone just last week. I’ve been drinking so much tea. She’d said it spitefully, like the cups of chamomile were to blame for the nervous tremble, her racing thoughts. What does Tricia think? Hazel had asked. Jenny’s sponsor had been sober nearly twenty years. Hazel had never met Tricia, but Tricia met Jenny every morning at the café across the street from the hospital. It was Tricia who urged Jenny to call Hazel in the first place, to start these nightly confessions. Tricia, whose voice Hazel heard in the background as Jenny cried into the speaker. I always wanted kids, Jenny said during one long sniffling call. But I never thought I could go nine months without it. Ansel claimed ambivalence about fatherhood, though he seemed distinctly put off by the rowdiness of Hazel’s children—she could never picture him as a father, and Jenny had always shrugged off the question. Only now did Hazel understand the extent of her sister’s disentangling.
Hazel did not have advice. She couldn’t tell Jenny about the fairy tales whispered in the glow of Alma’s night-light or how it felt to stand over Mattie’s crib at naptime, his lashes fluttering delicate. Jenny adored Alma and Mattie, but Hazel knew the longing she saw in Jenny’s eyes. It was envy. She was mortified by how good it felt, to hand that feeling finally over to her sister.
She passed wide fields, outlet malls. The evening dimmed to a lilting, satin blue.
* * *
Jenny stood over the pastries. The café was closing, the chairs already stacked on their heads as a barista skirted the corners with a mop. The light from the pastry case glowed Jenny’s scrubs gold—her face was bloated and puffy, ponytail mussed from a busy shift. Aside from their hair, which had always been a similarly wavy chestnut length, Hazel realized: she and Jenny looked nothing alike. Jenny had gained weight the past few years, and Hazel felt guilty for noticing. Her sister was wide around the middle, veering viscerally toward middle age. For the first time in her life, Hazel looked at Jenny and did not see herself at all. A stranger would never stop to ask: Are you twins? The fact struck Hazel with an acidic devastation, her mouth already unbearably sour from the highway.
Jenny turned.
“You’re here.”
Hazel gathered her sister up, held her shoulders close. It was still there, beneath the scent of croissants and coffee grounds. That Jenny smell: fruity hair, cigarettes, generic laundry detergent.
* * *
“Maybe we should come back later,” Jenny said from the passenger’s seat.
Hazel’s car idled on the curb—the squat, single-story rental looked definitively menacing. It was Jenny’s last day at the hospital, and Ansel was supposed to be at work. But when they pulled up on Jenny’s lunch break, Rihanna crooning from the car radio, Hazel’s gut dropped: Ansel’s white pickup truck was parked around the side. Looming, waiting.
“We have our list,” Hazel said, unconvincing.
They’d been talking it over for months. They’d made the plan carefully: load the car while Ansel was at work, drop everything at the hotel, come back to tell him right before the flight. The plan had not included a midnight screaming match or Jenny’s email pulled up on the computer in the corner of the living room, now cracked across the dusty screen.
“Come on,” Hazel said. “We’ll be quick.”
Hazel stepped from the car, hands clammy. She tried to tamp down the terror, to stand a little taller as Jenny followed her to the door. The scent of Jenny’s house hit her right away, remembered instinctually from visits years ago. Unwashed sheets, garbage sitting too long in the bag. Musty carpet, thrift-store furniture.
“Hello?” Hazel called.
Ansel sat on the flaking leather couch. He had his cell phone in his hand, like he’d been waiting for a call, or maybe just for this. Hazel had not seen him in nearly two years, and she was surprised by what time had done to him. Ansel had always been handsome, a prize Jenny could drag to work functions, flushing while the other nurses whispered jealous. But he was getting older. Gravity had begun its work. Ansel’s stomach folded over his jeans in the faint shape of a beer belly, and his skin looked sallow, tinged a sunless yellow. His glasses were smudged with greasy fingerprints, and his face had rounded out, sagging beneath the chin. For the first time, Hazel could picture exactly how he’d look as an old man. Gruff, gnarled. Devoid of any surface-level charm.
A sneer curled across his stubbled mouth—Hazel stepped back instinctively, surprised by her own current of fear.
“Oh,” Ansel said, his face rearranging itself instantaneously back into a veneer of calm. It seemed he had mistaken her shadow for Jenny’s. “Hazel. I didn’t expect you.”
He stood. For a terrifying second, Hazel thought he might lean in for a hug. She tensed, bracing, the fear mixed with something else now: a dripping, metallic guilt. In that single glance, she saw a sliver of the complexity Jenny had been living. The sharp corners, the chilling subtleties. Hazel knew only the outline of her sister’s reality, and it was shocking to stand now in the depths of it.
Ansel brushed past her to find Jenny, who lingered paralyzed on the front porch, the door hanging open like a jaw.
“You fucking serious?” he called.
“We’re just here to get her things,” Hazel said. “Jenny, show me where the suitcase is?”
While Hazel fished the suitcase from the closet, Ansel hovered—he looked almost amused, hands shoved casually into his paint-spattered pockets. They tore down the list hastily, throwing everything sloppily into the bag: Jenny’s bras, her shirts, her shoes. A box of high school mementos, a tin of earrings that had once belonged to their grandmother. Jenny would leave her cast-iron pots and pans, she would leave the sheets she’d picked out years ago to match the shag carpet, she would leave her hair products in the bathroom cabinet. Hazel dumped a wad of dresses into the suitcase, still on their hangers, as she listened to Ansel’s breath. A whistle, loitering too close.
“You’re proving it, Jenny,” he kept saying, a repetition that grew louder. “You’re proving me right.”
The bedroom was alive with electricity, intimate and ugly. Jenny dumped an armful of T-shirts into the bag, shaking with a restrained sob.
“It’s just like my Theory,” Ansel said. Hazel pried the suitcase from Jenny’s tight white grip and lugged it back across the hall, beckoning her forward. “Like Sartre said. The very nature of love’s suffering makes the concept impossible. No one thing can be wholly good, can it?”
“I’m sorry,” Jenny croaked, a half whisper.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” he said, almost laughing. “Love cannot exist as something pure—the spectrum will always infiltrate. The badness will always sneak in.”
“Come on,” Hazel urged, so close to the car now. She tried to tune out Ansel’s rambling, so faux-philosophical it sounded psychotic.
“I’m sorry,” Jenny said from the stoop, snot running shiny from her nose as she stumbled down the front steps. “I’m sorry.”
Finally, they were outside, and Ansel was just a following mass. Toxic shadow. Hazel’s steps were heavy, panicked, and when she was certain she heard Jenny behind her, she broke into an involuntary run.
Ansel stood on the porch, so tense he looked like he might burst. Hazel hefted the suitcase down the sidewalk—when they finally slammed the car doors shut, Jenny burst into a frantic sob.
“Don’t look,” Hazel said. “Just don’t look.” While Jenny buried her face in her hands, Hazel took one last hesitant glance: framed in the door, utterly still, Ansel stood straight and tall, his face twisted into the purest expression of rage Hazel had ever seen. He was a wolf, gnashing teeth. Inhuman. She pulled away from the curb in stuttered spurts, her legs shaking so hard the car jerked, her gaze transfixed on the rearview mirror. Hazel knew she would forever think of him like this, a menacing form in reflection, the shape of a furious man on a porch, getting smaller and smaller until he was nothing at all. A pinprick, a thing of the past. As Hazel’s hands trembled on the steering wheel, she had the naive, comforting thought: she would never have to see Ansel Packer again.
