Charlotte can’t muster the energy to conceal her relief when she opens the hotel door to find her older sister collapsed on the rotting armchair.
Lilah looks up with a scowl, eyes softening as she meets her gaze.
Charlotte pulls up a chair and sinks into it, waiting for Lilah to speak first. That’s the pattern they’ve fallen into – Lilah shows up without warning, without explanation, and Charlotte listens to whatever she needs help dealing with, because she knows her older sister doesn’t possess another person in this world who would be willing to grit their own teeth and do the same.
Lilah is quiet for a while, then – “D’you know, Mom stopped speaking to me a year ago? Said she’d had enough, not to come by again.”
Charlotte’s jaw works around silent, uncooperative syllables. She didn’t know, because Lilah had never told her. They had maintained contact these past years only through that desire born from an unshakeable sense of obligation, a nagging thing woven into the strands of their shared DNA, that neither seemed to be able to shake for long. They talked on the phone, brief conversations, rare and shadowed by a veil of ill-concealed emotional distance. Occasionally, Lilah would drop into Charlotte’s place without warning, if the shoddy lodgings Charlotte’s work dropped her in happened to be near to Lilah’s… assignment, or mission, or whatever secret operations it was that she considered important enough to hide from everyone who loved her.
Through the years, she’s learned to swallow down her bitterness at the whole ordeal – the constant heartache of knowing that each time she sees her sister; each time she hears her exhausted voice echoing through the phone from an unknown number – could be the last.
“What’s this really about? I know you didn’t come here to tell me that.” Because Lilah had never come to discuss something so trivial – or what passed as trivial, with a life like hers – in a long time. Not since she dropped out of college a year in, escaped to Europe, and came back a year later completely changed. Charlotte presumes she’d joined some organization there, one of those ones whispered about, the focus of conspiracy theories about hidden control and assassinations – there was no other explanation for her darkened eyes, the way she ducked her head and twitched at the slightest movement.
No, this couldn’t be the reason she came, because Lilah only showed up these days to use Charlotte as the outlet for her tragedies, which this was not. It was hardly even unexpected. Their mother has always been selfish, a silent woman who treated affection like currency and hugged them only when the neighbors were watching. Still – Charlotte thinks she loved them, her two girls, in her own way – and thinks just as surely that she must have cut Lilah off because she determined it the path to least pain for herself.
Lilah looks at her with a mirthless smirk, as though she knows what Charlotte is thinking. “My partner died. I – four years, and she’s just dead. And they don’t even seem to care.”
They. The mysterious ‘they,’ who controlled Lilah’s every move and cast a shadow over her every potential happiness.
“Oh, Lilah… I’m so sorry.” Charlotte thinks about hugging her and lets the idea splinter to ash as she recalls Lilah’s fearful recoil the first time she tried that – when her sister showed up at her door after disappearing for a year. She remembers that night well, the tear-stained pleas for an explanation, Lilah’s eyes not nearly as regretful as they should have been, vague answers, the scalding realization that the sister she’d known was really, really gone forever.
“I…” She’s at a loss; phantom hands squeezing her lungs. “Do you want to talk about it?” It’s a hollow offer, but all she can provide.
Lilah casts her an unreadable stare, and says nothing. Offers nothing, as always. Then – “I’m sorry, Charlotte.”
Charlotte looks on in shock, sure she’d heard her incorrectly. “For what?”
“I know you’ve always felt responsible for me. And I stay away so long because I can’t stand for you to feel tied to the mess of my life, and if I said how much I needed you… But I realize now that’s wrong. I’ll leave for good. I can only apologize for not doing it earlier.”
Charlotte can feel the tears starting to well, not even just in sadness but in cold resignation. Lilah’s mind has never changed once she’s made it up, not ever. Charlotte can feel it, the plunging weight in her chest as simple sorrow turns to grief. It’s the odd thing about siblings – they know you for your whole life, and they’re really the only ones who do, who understand you so truly and completely in every version of yourself that’s ever come and ever will. Charlotte just has one of those people, and she’s slipping through her fingers, and there’s nothing she can do about it.
“No,” Charlotte tells her as she stands up from the couch. “No, you can’t mean that.”
Lilah only stares at her sadly, walking towards the door. Charlotte throws herself up, starting to feel a burning anger roiling in her gut, because her sister is leaving again and worse, doesn’t even care enough to say anything.
Lilah opens the door.
“You –” Charlotte says, almost spits at her in a silent rage, “You know I’ll be waiting for you.” She always will be, waiting desperately for the girl she knew to return to her.
She thinks, for the first time, that maybe she never will.
Lilah turns her head one last time, and the gaze of her haunted eyes is almost painful, and then she’s gone.
Charlotte watches the door close behind her, inspects the splintering wood that conceals the movements of her sister, walking away again. Always walking away.
She stands there for a long time. Grieving.