My siblings and I were raised on more practical things than most children. We learned to play hooky, and speak to spirits, and avoid riptides. We learned the dangers of regrets, and how to not take crap from anyone. My father can tell when people are lying, but I also learned that I’ll believe anyone.
“Are you thinking, or wishing?” he asked me once.
“Right now, it’s both. They’re the same to me.”
My siblings are mostly the practical ones now. The ones who grew up too fast, whereas I stayed a kid too long.
Eventually I learned different lessons. That I hold things too closely, most of the time. I learned we could defy the odds in ways I never dared defying anything while growing up, for all that my mother tried to get me to rebel more. Perhaps I was saving it. I learned to have food fights with my littlest sister at midnight, and that I smell like chlorine for days after I leave my parents’ house.
I didn’t start calling my father Daddy until after my mom got sick. “We don’t know about these labs,” he tells me. “I want them to check for this, I want to know it isn’t that. There is another scan in two months.” That sort of thing I can handle. I’ve grown accustomed. There is always another scan in two months. It’s when my mother tells me to pack green apples for the plane, because she knows I like green apples, she got them just for me, that I cry about everything.
There are things I shouldn’t say that I believe in. Connections that probably shouldn’t be forged, or at least admitted to. That my period came two weeks early, on the day that Chloe went into labor and that’s how I knew she was having the baby. That people tell me things in dreams before they tell me things in real life, and so sometimes I wonder which dreams are the true ones, just how many of those dreamt-up conversations are real conversations that just weren’t spoken. That I look at people and can see when they’re sick, in the way that my father can see when they’re sick, except my people get better and his people don’t. I see things that are serious, he sees things that are terminal. And so I know we’re both watching Mom.
There is a part of me, every time, who wants to give everything up and just stay for a while. Because I’m always bad at leaving where I am - at leaving her, really - which is probably why I got stuck in Texas for ten years to start with. So instead I buy bracelets to match her bracelets. Dot the calendar with scan dates.
And I pack the green apples.
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