The Sadness. Benjamin Rybeck

“if you, uh, deposited the cash and everything, like we talked about.” “Mom,” Kelly said, locked in the darkness of her bedroom, sitting on the floor in the corner, “I need to know when you’re coming home.” “Listen,” Mom said, her voice even stranger than before, like she was an actor playing Mom, “listen, I’ll be honest with you: Remember my friend Melanie? Well, Melanie’s having some trouble, so I’m here trying to help. I just need—” “Melanie came to the house,” Kelly said, “and she’s worried too. She doesn’t know where you are.” There was a pause. “If I give you an address,” Mom said, “can you mail me that money overnight?” “If you don’t come home,” Kelly said, “I’m calling the police.” “Okay, I’ll, um, I’ll come home tomorrow.” Mom cleared her throat. “But, uh, can you put Max on the phone real quick?” “No, I can’t. I won’t put Max on the phone.” “Kelly Jennifer Enright, put Max on the phone right now.” “No,” Kelly repeated. “Now,” Mom said. But Kelly stayed strong: “You want me to let Max talk to you when you sound like this? No, I won’t do it. And I’ll take his phone away too so you can’t call him.” Kelly was trying not to cry; Mom was silent. “You need to come home,” Kelly said. “Please. Max won’t go to school. Not for the last week. He won’t go.” “He doesn’t need to go.” “Yes, he needs to go.” “He’s smarter than that.” “Yeah? You want him to be a fuckup like you?”

      The silence on the other end of the phone made it clear to Kelly that she shouldn’t have said this. But she felt unable to control herself anymore. And Kelly, in that moment, didn’t care. She knew she should apologize, but she didn’t apologize. Maybe, compared with all the other things ever said by teenagers to their parents, this wasn’t too bad—no different, really, from I hate you, Mom, followed by the slamming of a bedroom door. “Kelly…” Mom said finally, her voice weak. Kelly snapped her phone shut and threw it across the room. Now, she wishes that Mom were the one who hung up in anger. But it wasn’t like that; it was Kelly who couldn’t take another second, so she threw her mother across the room—snapped her mother’s head off against the wall.

      Kelly never called the police; instead, a week later, they called her. There had been an accident. It was April by then. When Max found out that Kelly had lied to him about the circumstances surrounding Mom’s death—that there was no job interview, that Kelly had spent time on the phone with her, that all Mom wanted was money—he took it surprisingly well, nodding and shuffling to his bedroom, whose door he didn’t even bother to slam. Kelly had felt too stunned to cry or get angry about the death, and perhaps Max felt the same way. Or maybe the funeral and the reality of being orphaned adults who happened to still linger in high school fused the siblings together. Maybe Max accepted Kelly’s dishonesty simply because he had nobody else.

      In May, Max asked her to be in his movie, The Glazen Shelves. A few days passed, and she heard nothing further about the movie or her part. She asked him when she was going to become a movie star and flipped her hair back, affecting a glamorous pose—the sort of silliness that usually would have amused him, but all humor had drained from her brother. Soon, Kelly discovered what the part was; she’d been playing it for a week. She woke in the middle of the night and saw Max at the end of her bed, a video camera glued to his hand. Kelly told him to get the fuck out of her room, then locked the door. She slept with the covers over her head and the blinds drawn. It wasn’t anger, really. It was fear. He terrified her, and she avoided him, instead spending her time with all the willing kids around town, drinking and doing drugs and other stupid things teenagers do, but doing them with the desperation of somebody who understood genuine pain. She gained a reputation as the person who never wanted to stop, begging people not to leave her, to stay up with her all night. Maybe Kelly could have helped Max, but she was scared, drained; she had nothing to say to him, no way left to look after him. And now, some nights as sleep washes up around her body, Kelly hates herself for hiding and running from Max, instead of trying to help. So, should she have stayed here in Portland? Should she have tried to look after her brother, the way that Mom asked? Then again, who the hell ever tried to help her?

      The answers to these questions, and to all her other questions, lurk somewhere in the darkness. Sometimes she brushes her fingertips against an answer as she reaches out, but she never grabs it, because sleep always comes and pulls her into blackness, and then the morning sun blares, evaporating what came before.

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