She sent a photo of her own hands. Just that — her hands on a kitchen table, and underneath it: I haven’t been able to go back since that day. One afternoon in September 2023, forty-one pictures, and then she got in her car and never made it through the doors again. She’d tried eleven times. She’d sit in the parking lot for an hour and drive home. Our mother didn’t know her that day — called her by our aunt’s name for two hours straight — and something in my sister broke that she has never been able to describe to me, and she’d been sending me one photo a week for eighteen months so I wouldn’t find out that neither of her daughters was visiting her.
I flew home in April. I’d been telling myself for two years that Denver was fine because my sister was ten minutes away, and I’d built my whole life on a photograph. I went alone the first time and it was exactly as bad as she’d said. Mom asked me three times where the car was. She was wearing a green cardigan. The blue one has been in a drawer since 2023, which is how the whole thing would have come apart eventually anyway.
We go together now, second Saturday of the month, and I fly in every other one. My sister still can’t do it alone and I’ve stopped asking her to try. What she said to me in the car the first time was that she’d rather I hated her for lying than knew that she couldn’t walk through a door, and I told her that’s the single stupidest thing anyone in this family has ever said out loud, and then we both cried in a parking lot for twenty minutes like a couple of idiots. Mom knew me in June for about four minutes. I have a photo from that day. I sent it to my sister on a Friday.
