The Bitter End

1

Erin is running away tonight. She’s been soaking in the cold, soapy water of her tub for what feels like hours. Her chin rests atop her knees, arms hugging her legs. The tiles on the wall are a shade of blue so deep that it seems almost purple. It creates an effect that makes the room feel impossibly large and yet deeply constrictive. But maybe she’s just looking for excuses as to why she feels so nauseated. The weird paint job seems as likely to be the offender as anything else.

Erin finally pulls the drain and grabs her towel, resting her face in it for two long, deep breaths. She wonders if anybody’s ever died from anxiety before, or will she be the first?

The mirror is partially fogged up, but Erin can still catch her reflection when she approaches. Her hair is plastered to the sides of her face. Ordinarily, it hangs just above her shoulders, a near-white level of blond. Bluish-green eyes. Her mouth curves downward naturally, which makes it look like she’s always fighting a pout. She definitely is now. A fraught expression keeps forming despite her best attempts to look normal.

The family photos that hang in the hall paint a strange portrait. Erin takes note of them as she treads past. There used to be more, before Erin complicated the adolescent boyhood depicted and her mother packed almost everything into storage boxes. What remains of Erin is a mix of genderless baby pictures and glossy senior pictures. It’s rather funny. As if she were born at eighteen, fully conceived.

She knocks gently on her sister’s half-open door before she steps inside. Hayley, already covered in summer freckles, lights up at the sight of her. She casts her book to the floor and pulls her covers up to her chin with a toothy, eager grin. Erin smiles and sits at her feet. Despite the decade between them, they get along just as well as if they were twins.

“Did you already brush your teeth?” Erin looks her sister up and down, reaching over and tucking a few wild strands of hair behind her ear.

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh. Let’s see ’em.”

They bare their teeth at each other. Hayley’s teeth are tiny and perfect.

“Okay. You’re good.” Erin sighs and looks around the room. “I don’t know, are you enjoying summer break?”

Hayley nods. “Are you?”

That depends entirely on how this next week will play out. Erin still pretends to think about it. “Well, it’s not summer break for me anymore, it’s just summer. Adults have to work.”

“You’re not gonna be--”

Erin shushes her. Downstairs, she can hear the sound of the front door closing: Mom is home. Hayley’s blue eyes get big, and she nods knowingly.

“You remember what we talked about?” Erin whispers, as quiet as she can get. “You’re gonna have to be the woman of the house. Can you handle that?”

Hayley nods with deadly seriousness. “Swear to God.”

“Do you know what the woman of the house has to look out for?”

Hayley shakes her head.

Erin puts her feet on the ground and leans in. “Ghouls. Ghosts. And tickle monsters.”

Hayley’s eyes go wide again, but she’s not fast enough to stop Erin’s hands from rushing to her sides. She shrieks, and Erin takes a wild kick to the ribs, but they’re both laughing so hard that they’re out of breath within seconds. Tickle monsters don’t often manage lasting attacks around this house.

The light above them turns off, then on again. Erin and Hayley look up to find their mother watching them. She’s still in her scrubs, and most of her hair is poking out of its bun.

“Get some sleep, you two.” She takes her hand off the switch.

“Good night, Mom!” Hayley grins, flopping back against her pillow, audibly out of breath.

Their mom lingers. Her eyes shift to Erin.

Erin smiles bashfully. “You might’ve just missed a tickle monster breach,” she admits.

As quickly as it comes, her concern melts away. “I thought we agreed, no more tickle monsters at bedtime.”

“That’s why I said breach.”

“Uh-huh. Hayley, if you can’t sleep, I want you to bug your sister, not me. Got it?”

Hayley shoots her a thumbs-up.

Both girls listen as the footsteps grow softer and softer, until they’re no longer able to be heard at all. Erin realizes that might’ve been the last thing she’ll say to her mother for the foreseeable future. Her stomach rolls with too many emotions to neatly sort out.

“Are you ready?” Hayley’s hands are cupped around her mouth.

Erin returns to the present moment and nods.

“Promise you’ll be safe?” Hayley asks.

“Yeah. I’ll send you guys a postcard.”

“Promise?”

Erin sighs and puts her hand out, pinkie up. Hayley does the same and intertwines their fingers. She gives Erin a good, firm shake with her whole arm.

Then Hayley pulls herself out from under the covers and wraps her arms around Erin’s neck. Erin’s face twists up as she hugs her back, holding Hayley’s tiny body against her own.

“I’m gonna miss you,” Erin breathes.

“I’ll have an extra good summer, just for you,” Hayley whispers, “so when you come home, I can tell you and Max all about it.”

Guilt knots up in Erin’s throat. She forces a laugh.

Yes, Erin told Hayley that she’s leaving. Hayley is good at keeping secrets. Even still, Erin omitted a few crucial details. Like where she’s headed, and the fact that she’s not coming back.

Erin hates the way lying weighs on her shoulders, pressing down on her until it feels like she can’t breathe. She carefully takes Hayley’s arms from around her neck and lays her back down. She tucks the covers snugly underneath her chin.

Eventually. Erin will tell her everything eventually. Now is just too fragile of a moment. Too many things could still go wrong. Erin only hopes that, unlike their father, she’ll get the chance to explain herself to Hayley one day.

“Tell Max I said hi?” Hayley smiles with all of her teeth.

Erin tries to smile back, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

Downstairs is so quiet that it makes the whole house feel brittle. Erin tiptoes across the hardwood, as if the slightest noise will bring it all crashing down on top of her. This is a familiar routine. Like she does every night, she checks that the back door and all the windows are locked. The fire alarms are set. It’s a nice neighborhood, and they’re a careful family, and neither fact is related to why she does this. It’s about feeling the control that comes with her fingers sliding against the dead bolt. The knowledge that she is responsible for this house. She needs that feeling of control on a normal day. It is especially vital tonight.

The front door comes last. On the wall beside the door are two things: a mounted rack, which holds a variety of lanyards, coats, and bags. And then there’s the family photo.

Erin’s always thought it was strange. Her parents divorced when she was twelve. The family that greets her at the door hasn’t existed in six years. And yet it hangs there anyway, at her mother’s insistence. It’s supposed to be a reminder of what they’ve come from. Erin struggles to see it as anything more than a marker of what they’ve lost.

In the photo, Hayley is two, nothing but a head full of blond hair and their dad’s smile crowded onto the left side of her face. Erin is twelve, wearing this horrible plaid shirt that makes it even worse that this is the only nongirl photo still hanging in the house. Mom is holding Hayley on her lap; Dad has his arm around Erin’s shoulder. He looks like Franco Nero, face dominated by a thick mustache and a laid-back swagger that hangs in the air even now.

Her parents divorced only a few months after the photo was taken. Last fall, her dad died.

Erin stares at the photo for a long time before she jiggles the doorknob and turns away.

It’s a contradictory thought, but as she looks, she can find all the spots where life was once lived so much. The corner of the couch where her dad used to fall asleep on Saturday afternoons, halfway through one of his Westerns. The patch of carpet that’s still indented from Hayley’s baby stroller. The half window in the front door; Erin can remember the sight of Max’s hair through it, his eyes peering inside before his thumb jammed against the doorbell.

There’s so much that isn’t here anymore. Within a matter of hours, Erin won’t be, either.

Back in her room, Erin gets dressed for real: a pair of jeans, a hoodie that goes over her tank top, and her most comfortable sneakers. Two half-packed suitcases take up her bed. Once she’s sure that the rest of the house is asleep, she goes about filling the bags with whatever fits.

Inevitably, Erin finds herself at her desk. She put it together with her mom, one of those early efforts at bonding as mother and daughter. It’s white and bubblegum pink, with a vanity mirror as its centerpiece, where several photos are taped around its rim. Her and Miranda, the day after graduation. Hayley’s kindergarten portrait. In the corner, there’s a photo of Max.

His face is obscured by windblown bangs, and he’s not smiling so much as baring his teeth to the camera. It’s been years since Erin has seen him look this happy.

Erin checks her phone. Max lives ten minutes away, and the on my way text illuminating her screen is already seven minutes old. So she tops off her suitcase with her bottle of estradiol, her Monday-through-Sunday premade pill case, and a disposable camera she bought for the hell of it, then zips both suitcases up and drags them across the room.

She opens the window and sticks her head out. There’s a stretch of flat roof underneath, which is directly above the front porch. The perfect launching pad. Erin takes a deep breath before she ducks back inside and pushes her bags through the window.

It occurs to her, briefly, that this might be the dumbest thing she’s ever done, though the night is still young. On her hands and knees, she crawls to the edge of the roof and looks out.

Her vision warbles with vertigo for a few scary seconds, and Erin shuts her eyes until the spinning feeling stops. When she can breathe again, she looks out, not down. The house across from hers is another two-story, with bushes along its porch. It’s dark in the windows except for the upstairs bedroom, where, judging from the time, Martha and Jakob are ready to settle in for the night. Erin remembers going through the neighborhood with her dad to clear out driveways in the winter, how Martha would always reward her with five dollars and a candy cane. That all stopped once her dad left, but the couple was still very nice. Very Polish. They never fussed about Erin’s whole thing.

Erin carefully drops each suitcase over the edge. They fall with firm, muted thuds. She turns and grips the edge of the roof and lowers herself as much as she can, until her fingers ache, but there’s still a good five or six feet between her shoes and the ground.

She means to do a countdown, from three to zero to letting go, but her grip fails at two. Which means she falls silently and lands on her back. It knocks the wind out of her, but it also probably spares her one or two broken ankles.

Still. Erin lies there for a minute. Her breath comes back to her in gasps, each one less shallow than the last. Somehow this is all still easier than sneaking through the inside of the house. Her mom wakes if a pin falls on the carpet. The stairs creak and the front door squeals. Nobody, in all her years of being alive, has been able to sneak out like a normal human being. Nobody’s really tried before, either, but that’s beside the point.

She sits up. Her back hurts, but nothing seems broken. For a moment, while she’s still getting her breath back, she looks around. It’s eerily silent. So much so that her own breathing seems heavy and awkward to her ears. She seems so loud. She almost expects people to start poking their heads out from behind their curtains: just look at that girl disturbing the peace of their neighborhood. Again.

Tires crunch on street gravel. She can hear it before she finally looks over her shoulder. At some point, the Impala may have been white. But now, in its age, its color has faded into a horrible-looking rust-tinted cream.

She takes a deep breath and, with a bag in each hand, pushes herself to her feet and walks up to the car. The passenger window is already down. Erin bends forward and looks inside.

Despite the fact that it’s June, he’s dressed in layers; a shirt over a shirt under a jacket. But Max might be the happiest he’s ever been. His hair, dark brown, has been freshly cut, uneven ends hanging just past his jawline. His face is marked by acne and lingering baby fat. If they didn’t know him, people might assume he was a tween boy. In reality, he turned eighteen last week. It’s hardly passing, but Erin knows it’s better than not passing at all.

Max beams up at her. “Hi! Are you ready?”

After a moment, Erin nods. “Uh-huh.”

One lone suitcase sits in the back. Erin stares at it for a moment, the knot in her stomach twisting again, before she hoists her own bags inside.

After she settles in the passenger seat, Max sits there for a moment. His fingers drum against the wheel. “Sure you didn’t forget anything?”

“Yeah, let’s go,” Erin answers tightly.

Despite the lingering awkward silence, a grin returns to Max’s face before they peel out of the neighborhood.

Four days, Erin reminds herself. That was the amount of time Max told her it would take to drive from Columbus to Berkeley. Four days with a boy who broke up with her almost two years ago. A boy who hasn’t really spoken to her since. Until now.

Although dread still clings to the back of her throat, Erin can’t deny that it is tinted with some bit of exhilaration.