ABOUT MAXINE

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It's like the passing of day into night, night into dawn, dawn into day. Seasons cycle out, and to their rhythm does time march on. Yesterday was as yesterdays had always been: eventfully uneventful in a way that only a seven-year-old can understand; school as usual, taking the bus to a friend's house, Kali can't go because she's coughing and sneezing her way through a terrible chest cold. Today and tomorrow should have gone as todays and tomorrows had always gone: routinely exciting in a way that only a seven-year-old can appreciate; home in the morning, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, hogging the swings with her sister at the park and kicking up sand at any who would try to reclaim them. Commonplace, but not repetitive. The way things had always been; the way they always should have been.[break][break]

'Today' begins with police officers at the door. Soft-eyes, bulking frame. You think first, Someone's gonna get arrested. You think second, I hope it's not me.[break][break]

“Maxine Sullivan?” Booming voices, familiar words strewn together in unfamiliar phrases. “Your sister is in the hospital right now.”[break][break]

Your stomach growls, and you think more of the breakfast you haven't had than Kali on a stretcher. It's probably just her cold. She was always such a baby when it came to those things. What catches your attention more isn't the news of her whereabouts, then, so much as the mystery regarding that of another. “Where's mom and dad?”[break][break]

For most, genesis is birth: the first breaths taken in an unfamiliar world, and the years it takes to carve out the way you will walk, the words you will speak, the things you will do. You'd thought, in that off-handed way that a child does not actively think of most things, that yours had been much the same. But you were wrong. Your genesis is here: standing in the foyer of someone else's home, clothed in penguin pajamas, staring blankly at intimidating men and their painful silence. This is where your life begins. Or rather, its downfall.[break][break]

They don't have to say anything. Seven years old, and you understand.[break][break]

if you've gotta go, i won't stop you

'Up in flames' people say so carelessly, like they've never choked on the smoke of their hopes and their dreams and everything they've ever built their lives off of. You don't see the fire, feel the ash, smell the stench of burning flesh, but you see your sobbing sister wrapped up loosely in aqua scrubs and bandages and think that you can just almost picture what mighty beast of flame plucked your parents from their beds and swallowed them down whole.[break][break]

You don't cry with her, though. It seems selfish, when she was there and you were not; when she lays in that hospital bed, and you do not; when she is the younger sister, and you are the only older family she has left. And the nurses, oh, how they praise you. You're so strong, Max, and, It must be comforting for Kali to have such a calm sister around.[break][break]

(Except you don't really understand. It's as if any moment, you'll blink, and you'll be back in your sleeping bag at Emily's house, sister unburned, parents outside of a morgue. One by one, you bite the heads off of gummy bears, and think less of the uncertain road before you and more of the routine that will most certainly persist. ... Won't it?)[break][break]

Positive reinforcement sculpts you into a person you never meant to become. When Kali cries, you're expected to stay silent. When Kali lashes out, you're expected to stay calm. When Kali cracks the rare smile, it is only then that you are expected to act – but how, exactly, are you meant to? What is “right” in their eyes? What would a “good older sister” do? Whoever you were and whoever you wanted to be are lost in translation. Your childhood, or lack thereof, becomes discarding “Maxine” for the role of an unshakable moral compass and point of comfort that your burned little sister so desperately needs. At first, you are all too happy to give yourself away. She's your sister; you would do anything for her, especially when she hurts as much as she does now.[break][break]

It isn't until you've passed through the threshold fully that you begin to wonder if all of this was worth it at the expense of you and your own happiness. When you think to only look back, the door has already been locked shut behind you.[break][break]

you'll hear me singing to you:[break]
“glory, glory, hallelujah”

She picks fights, you teach yourself to cook.[break][break]

She nurses bleeding knees, you're elected student council president.[break][break]

She shoots your aunt glares when she's not looking, and you help clear away the dishes at dinnertime.[break][break]

(No one ever asks you how you feel about your aunt. No one ever asks you to tell them how you think she's a squirrelly thing of a woman, lovable only as much as she is useful for feeding you and clothing you and keeping a roof over your heads. Perhaps it is just the suddenness in which two warped daughters are thrust upon her, but she is ill suited for raising and loving children. Or so you think – but no one ever asks.)[break][break]

School is a chore, but one you perfect with the efficiency that is expected of the elder Sullivan sister. Kali's hard edges are worn away by her love of the library and the books it harbors, and though she runs off with you to college across a state border, you know in your heart of hearts she'll go back eventually. She can be awfully predictable like that. You, then, sibling of no desire, sibling of no ambition, make it your desire and ambition to pursue what would make up for a life spent in the company of well-worn paper and minuscule paychecks. A cool head (one you never asked for) makes you excellent at debate, you convince yourself, and it's better to aim for a sleazy career in politics you'll excel in than the lottery gamble of corporation wealth.[break][break]

The easier of two paths or no, however, does not guarantee ease. Even with school out of the way, there are debts to be paid back, a home to provide for yourself, a name to get out into the shouting crowds of Seattle that will not be buried under the turmoil. Your parents meant nothing to the rest of the country – are dead, both in the political landscape and in the real, waking world. You have no step ladder with which to climb off of, no exceptional skill to put you above the others who have been here for so much longer.[break][break]

He's a godsend cut out in the shape of a man, then, when you first meet: gentle eyes, calming smile, and charming in a way that should earn his picture a spot in Webster's above all others. It takes only a drink to get you to ease up around him, regardless of the way he sits too close; by two, you don't mind the careful way he places his hand on your thigh; by three, you're prattling on about flames that made a meal of your childhood, a sister who you've sacrificed everything for, a career you can't afford to not make successful.[break][break]

“I can help,” he tells you, like it's so simple, so, so simple.[break][break]

Is it the disarming way in which he looks at you, picking your visage apart piece by piece to get at the meat of you lying inside? Is it the desperation of months worth of utter failure and the knowledge that, again, just like always, your sister needs you (even if she doesn't, even if she's fine, been fine, but what are you if not her foundation, and what use have you if you are not useful to her?)? Is it the alcohol in your veins that blurs him in and out of vision, makes the room spin like a top? The last of them, above all, but perhaps some toxic mix of the three.[break][break]

You don't notice the poison plaguing the apple. He presses (his lips) it to your mouth, and you (wrap your arms around his neck, tangle your fingers in his hair) eagerly devour it bite by killing bite.[break][break]

you've made it easy for the both of us

“I'm thinking this is the place, Kali. I wish you could see it, too – it's gorgeous.”[break][break]

Penthouse suite, recently remodeled, marble counter tops, view of the ocean and the lights that pepper the pier like shimmering diamonds in the night. It's the sort of place you would have never dreamed of living in just five years prior, suffering with your nose in a study book and fretting all the worse for your twin's grades than your own. In truth, even with recent developments, it isn't your own pocketbook that could afford such a marvel of a place. Your help has been so appreciated by your... partner, you'll say, that he's decided to reward you beyond what he already has by aiding you in your house hunt across the city. There isn't a place within city limits, you think, that he could not afford, but you'll dig as deep into his checkbook as you may, thinking all the while his lost funds are some form of penance for what he has done to you.[break][break]

(What you have let him do to you, you miserably think. Kali on the other end of the line: so long as she knows it is an act, then it is most certainly fine.)[break][break]

“You're always welcome, you know. It's a little far from the library, so commute might be a bitch, but...”[break][break]

But charity isn't Kali. You'd had to arm wrestle her into taking a single check, however meager the funds compared to what you could have given her, and then repeat the process all over again when you tried to make it a monthly affair.[break][break]

The room rings suddenly colder at your thoughts: the your help is not always wanted, not always needed. (Big sister, big sister, bend over backwards until you don't know how to stand up straight again.) When she hangs up, you are left with silence befitting of your solitude – just you in an empty room. No furniture. No aspirations. No parents.[break][break]

The fireplace crackles like snapping bone. When you sign the lease, you vow, it will be the first thing to go.

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