Joshua Mohr - All This Life

Sara puts the nail clippers down and decides to use her phone as a diversion, catch up on her celebrity gossip, but everyone’s still talking about the brass band from earlier in the day — the image on MSN’s homepage is the Golden Gate Bridge with a saxophone superimposed on top of it. Caption reading, MURDER MUSIC.

So much for distraction.

She sends another note to Nat: Didn’t you like me?

She paces, worrying about Rodney, wondering why Nat won’t text her back. Paces and almost cries and there’s no way to escape this new life — the one she never asked for — her life with a conjoined twin.

She realizes she’ll never be able to separate herself from digital Sara, nude and pixilated. Perfectly preserved. Frozen for all time. Sex tape as fossil. Her twin will never age and will always be there. Her twin feels to her like a wholesale tragedy, and from here on out, Sara will never be alone again, always dragging this twin through their life.

And the mere presence of that thought in her head, the fact that it shuttles around within her, makes Sara hyperventilate, rest her head on the kitchen table, the Formica a bit sticky from one of Hank’s pancake stacks. It’s all a bit sticky. The whole room, the whole house. They should have moved after their parents died. They should have redecorated. They should’ve tried to make it less their parents’ place, but neither of them really wanted to do that. It’s a way of preserving the extravagances of memory, living in the house long after their parents have gone.

Take this kitchen. Take the linoleum floor that’s white, yellow, and green, pocked by the jagged bottoms of the chairs, little potholes. Take the sun-bleached curtain over the sink. It used to be lavender, then gray, and now it’s stark white, the wan light growing in intensity every day. Take the fridge, the wheezing fridge, its compressor barely holding on, emitting rumbles and snorts. Take the stove with three burners broken. The countertop with its stains and mildewed edges. The leaky faucet making its own muted thwunk with every drip.

These are things that should be fixed or changed. A lot of them easily remedied. Buy another curtain; they’re cheap and easy. But nothing is cheap and easy about transcending grief, especially when it hasn’t been given its proper due. Sara realizes that the grieving process in this house has been incomplete, was never really begun.

Sara could never clean up their house, after their deaths. It was the leftovers in the fridge that paralyzed her. After the funeral, Sara saw a quarter pan of lasagna, the last home-cooked meal that her mom prepared. Sara doesn’t count Hank heating up turkey chili, or Sara reheating whatever the restaurant served for staff meal. No, that lasagna was the end of a family sitting down together.

After the funeral, Sara ate all that lasagna in one sitting; it was enough to serve four or five people, but Sara’s grief was famished. Her mom had once told her that some brides kept their leftover wedding cake in the freezer and ate a piece to cheer themselves up over the years during trying times. Sara couldn’t pace herself, though, her fork ferociously stabbing at the cold, congealed mess, choking on the dried noodles and cheese and over-baked sauce. Sara didn’t taste anything, finishing it all up and holding the glass dish, letting it fall from her hands to shatter on the floor. Took her two days to inflate the gumption to sweep up the shards.

There was no way to get her stampeding feelings under control, and she feels the same now with this latest betrayal. All Sara can do is rest her head in a sticky spot next to a pile of fingernails.

No text back from Nat.

No way to lasso a sex tape and bring it down.

Tires screech outside. Hank’s home. Hank’s dog, Bernard, barks from the porch. She hears her brother say back to the bark, “Your master’s still got it, boy! Let’s drink a beer.”

Hank enters the kitchen, the dog trotting behind. Her brother’s not wearing a shirt and goes to the fridge for a cold one, drinks most of it in a sip, slams the empty on the stained counter. He has another beer in the same motivated way, then belches. The other finished bottle crashes down, too. Hank stares out the gauzy curtain into the backyard, the only item out there besides brush and bugs is an aboveground pool that hasn’t had any water in it since the death of their parents.

All of this done without looking at or saying one word to Sara.

She watches him surveying the arid yard, wondering what her brother is thinking. Does he have moments of personal reflection? And would he ever open up to her? These are important questions for Sara, given the circumstances.

Because she’s going to have to tell him. Sooner rather than later. She’s going to have to come clean about the sex tape. She has no choice. If she lets him find out about it from anyone else, Hank will lose his shit. He’s going to be so pissed, so disappointed. Hank has never turned his temper at Sara, not really. There’s been yelling, but never any violence. He’s gentle with her. Or he was. Until he finds out about this.

“Is Rodney all right?” Sara says, flexing her hands, in and out. Her heart rate stays too high and her armpits stink.

“He’ll live,” he says.

“Will you sit down?” she asks.

Hank grabs another beer from the fridge and moves a chair back from the table, fixing it into a few potholes. “Well, that was fun.”

“What was?”

“Stomping those fools.”

“What did you do to Rodney?”

“I gained some respect for him today,” says Hank. “He didn’t have to square up with me. I’d already whupped the other dumb asses. But he wanted to take a go. It was impressive.”

“Does he need a doctor?”

“He’s needed a doctor ever since the balloon.”

“You know what I’m asking.”

“He’s fine, Baby Sis. He’ll have a headache, but these things happen.”

Sara swells with conflicting sensations, a different kind of conjoined twins. On one hand, she’s happy that Felix got hooked, glad that the buffoon learned that there are consequences for being nasty. But she has guilt now, too. Some shame that it’s her fault that Rodney got hurt. She’ll apologize. It’s easy to be honest with him because she once loved him, probably still does deep down, in some unhelpful ways. They’d still be dating if he’d never mounted that balloon, and because of that he deserves the truth.

And so does her brother, her protector. She loves the fact that he went down there for her. She loves that there’s no thinking with Hank, no weighing the pros and cons, no looking at problems from all sides and selecting the prudent course.

No, Hank only leaps.

He loves her and he leaps.

He loves her and he leaps and she is protected.

It’s going to be a hard conversation, but Sara has to be strong. He’s been strong for her, and Sara has to meet his brawn with some of her own.

“There’s something I need to tell you, Hank,” says Sara. “I’m sorry this happened, but you should hear it from me.”

Her brother’s face, its mass of freckles and moles and some acne from the steroids, has a tenderness to it that Sara hadn’t expected to see. Normally, he wears his rage like war paint, but now he looks gentle and concerned.

“Everyone already knows,” he says, shrugging his shoulders.

“You know?”

“I’ll beat Nat’s ass for you,” says Hank. “Wanna beer?”

“Sure.”

He gets two more out of the fridge, and they sit at the sticky kitchen table. “You okay?” he asks.

“I ruined my life.”

The dog rests his head on Hank’s huge thigh. “Don’t say that.”

“What’s left for me?”

Hank rubs Bernard’s head. “Why are you asking that, Baby Sis?”