V. H. King's Ink

The sun is hot, the music is loud, and air is sharp with algae.  The day is humid enough to taste, but Fiona refused to keep the windows up.  Tressa could hear the party a mile before they got to the huddle of cabins, or maybe that was just her dreading the disaster this could turn out to be.  She puts the car in park and blows out a breath. 

“Do you want to be here?” Fiona asks.

“Yeah, but—”

“Do you want me to be here?”

“Of course, I just—”

“I want to be here, and you want to be here, and you want me here.  So that’s that, okay?”

There’s really no use trying to hedge or make excuses.  Tressa takes a deep breath and nods.  Fiona gets out the car, fixing a ridiculously floppy straw hat atop a tangle of messy red curls.  Tressa smiles to herself and went to get their bags from the trunk. 

“Tristan?  Nice to meet you!”

“Thanks.  I’m the third one in my family.”

“Tristan the third?”

“No, the third stan.”

“So your real name is Stan?”

“No, that’s my grandfather.”

“Should I ask what your dad’s name is?”

“Distan, but everyone calls him Sony.”

“Sonny?”

“No, like—”

“Tri-star!”

The yell is barely a warning before a blur of green and a tangle of arms and legs launches at Tristan.  He laughs, staggering back with the force of the hug.

“Columbia!  God it’s been ages!”

“It wouldn’t be if you weren’t such a workaholic.  When are you coming to visit?  I shouldn’t have to wait until summer to see you. You missed Christmas, for crying out loud.  Who misses Christmas?”

“Who could cry louder about it than you?” Tressa said, coming back from the cabin with her shades in place. 

“I should have been there,” Tristan said, shaking his head.  “Next time I will make sure the snow-storm doesn’t happen until after I have arrived for the holidays.”

“Good!  But now you have a whole year’s worth of presents to catch up on, so you better not let me down.”

“Welcome to summer camp,” Tressa says, shaking her head as she sat by Fiona and motioned for her to turn around. 

Smoothing sunscreen into her fiancée’s freckled skin helped calm her down.  Tressa reminded herself that she needed to stay calm and not turn into a righteous bitch.  Except Carolyn had that magic talent of knowing just how to aggravate her out of the galaxy and back. 

“Isn’t everyone’s family a little weird?”

Tressa shrugged.  She wanted to be here—and she wanted Fiona to be here.  There was just a lot of things that she wasn’t sure how to explain, or if she should explain, or if Fiona even cared for an explanation. 

“Do you want me to clue you in, or do you want to just…enjoy the batshit craziness that this will be?”

“Well, so far I’ve learned that there are at least three stans in your family, but only one person is actually named Stan.”

“Should I also tell you that I have an aunt named Distance?”  Tressa asked.  “And she named her kid Miles?”

“Okay, note to self, we have to have some great names for our kids.”

Tressa tried to cover her mouth first, but it was too late and she was already snorting with laughter.  Fiona turned and wrapped her arms around her, their combined weight making the picnic bench squeak.  It still made her tingle, when Fiona said our anything.  Our with a capital O, like the title of the next chapter in their story. 

“We—we don’t have to stick with the family tradition of ridiculous names,” Tressa said when she had caught her breath.

“Are you kidding me?  Who wouldn’t love a baby named Pixar?”

“Oh my God, please no.”

“Fine, Paramount?  Legendary?  Bad Robot?  What’s the one all the Christopher Nolan films are on—Syncopy, is it?”

“Damn, I knew there was a reason I asked you to marry me, but I didn’t think you were weird enough to fit in so well.”

“Too late, now,” Fiona said, grinning.  “Let’s just go with it, okay?  I want to see how well I can do.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes.  This week is going to be great.”

---

It’s more than a week.  Once she and Tristan had their licenses, the three of them always found a way to get to the cabin before anyone else.  Tristan and Carolyn because they were eager for fun, and Tressa because, well, someone had to make sure they all didn’t die or burn half the forest down.  It’s ten days of accumulating noise and nonsense, until it’s just the three of them again for the last night or two and they split ways until next summer.

Tuesday night Tressa hears it before it happens.  There’s something to the wind, a whistling that she recognizes.  Thunder splinters itself apart, spreads its shrapnel across the sky.  She kisses Fiona’s cheek, eases out of bed, and into the hall.  For a moment, she’s not sure which way to go.  But then she hears something else, underneath the wind and the rain.  The rain which, for now, is still a merry patter. 

“Bibi?” she calls at the top of the basement stairs.

“You’re not allowed to all me that.” Carolyn stomps her way up the carpeted stairs, glaring at her.  “Only your girlfriend can.  You can’t just steal people’s nicknames and think it’s okay.”

Tressa drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly.  Carolyn pushed past her and to the kitchen, bowl in hand.  Tressa wonders why Carolyn doesn’t just keep her stash of cereal down there, but instead the wrong thing comes out of her mouth. 

“Why do you hate me?”

“Why do you look at me like you wish I was never born?”

“I don’t—”

“Yes you do!  You always have this scowl on your face, like I just puked on your dinner!”

“I’m—I’m sorry.”

Carolyn doesn’t say anything.  She slams the door to the fridge and stomps out to the screened in section of the back porch.  The other half of the deck, equipped with two grills and a smoker, is slippery and sleek with rain. 

Carolyn chomps through her cereal, and Tressa tries not to make any faces.  But does she have to be angry about everything?  All the time?  For no reason?  The rest of their family would have woken up—if not for the fact that anyone was just as likely to argue first thing in the morning as the middle of the night or just past high noon. 

“How’s Mr. Tibbits?” Tressa asks.

When in doubt—or in too deep—she opted for switching subjects.  Beyond the screen, the rain comes down in diagonals.  Left to right and then right to left.  Carolyn digs her toes into the mat underneath the patio furniture, toes curling. 

“Mom wouldn’t let me bring him.”

“But you brought him last year?”

“And you screeched your face off when he got in your room, so now I have to leave him suffocating and half-starved to death for ten days.”

Oh.  But waking up with a lizard in her hair had not been on her to do list for family summer camp.  Mist blows through the screen.  Tressa fights the urge to redo Carolyn’s braid, knowing her own hair was heavy and coiled with the dampness. 

“Do you have any pictures of him?”  Tressa asks.  “Has he gotten any bigger?”

Carolyn keeps munching on her cereal.  The closer she gets to the bottom of the bowl, the louder she eats.  Not even the storm can drown her out.  Tressa knows she’s trying to drown out the storm, and wishes she could offer better company. 

“She’s not your girlfriend, is she?”

“What?”

“Fiona.  She’s not your girlfriend.”

A frown freezes on Tressa’s face, her mouth hanging partly open.  Instead of re-doing that braid, she’s ready to yank it if Carolyn dares to say the wrong thing about Fiona.  She would burn the house and the forest down herself without a second thought—and drive away from here with Fiona at her side and not a single glance back. 

“What do you mean?”

“You married her.”

Tressa blinks, but she’s still angry because Carolyn always knows things. 

“Not—not yet, but—”

“Yeah you did.  You didn’t have a wedding, but you married her.”

Tressa’s sigh is lost in the wind.  Now that she was up, she almost wished she had gotten a snack too.  But she never knew what to eat in the middle of the night, so she ended up eating a little bit of everything and regretting it in the morning.  Late night feasts were worse than hangovers, and she tried not to make a habit of either. 

“Are you going to tell me she’s too good for me and I don’t deserve her?”

Instead of it coming off light-hearted, Tressa realizes she’s being defensive.  Why couldn’t she predict these things before they left her mouth, the same way she could hear rainclouds just before they let loose their generations of droplets or sense lightning just before it lit up the sky?

“Is it because you’re the oldest?” Carolyn asks.  “Is that why you think you have to be perfect?”

“What?”

Carolyn rolls her eyes—something Tressa is certain her sister could do before she even left the womb.  But when Carolyn speaks next, her voice is quiet. 

“Maybe if we were triplets we wouldn’t hate each other.”

“You don’t hate Tristan.”

She’s being defensive again, but she wrinkles her face and crosses her arms.  Immature, but sometimes she gets tired of being the bigger person. 

“That’s because he’s not a bitch.”  Carolyn glares, voice hardening and her shoulders drawing together.  “He knows how to have fun.  All you do is complain and get us in trouble.”

Tressa grabs her sister’s bowl and goes back to the kitchen.  So what if she woke up sick in the morning?  She fills it with cereal, skips the milk, comes back out to the porch, scooping it out of the bowl with her hand.  Carolyn stares at her as if she’d grown a hand in the middle of her head.  For a moment, Tressa wishes she’d brought the box of cereal out here just so she could dump it on Carolyn’s head. 

Tressa munches, even though she usually didn’t eat cereal.  It was too loud, whether you were eating it or listening to someone else eat it.  But after a few minutes, she realizes that it blocked out everything—the storm, her thoughts.  Her feelings were still there, but not as sharp or painful as before. 

“Does your wife know you eat like an animal?”

“I’ll be sick in the morning, thanks to your germs.”

“Liar.”

Tressa grins, scooping more cereal into her mouth. Carolyn gets up and goes to the screen, watching the branches bend.  Tressa thinks some of the tension has gone out of her.  The wind has died down some, but Tressa doesn’t tell her that it’s not over.  You always talk to me like I’m an idiot.  I’m not stupid!  To that, Tressa had told Carolyn that she certainly acted like it—and of the many unkind things she’d said to her sister over the years, that was one of things she regretted the most.  

“I really am sorry,” she says a few minutes later.  “I’m not a nice person.”

“It’s not that.”  Carolyn shrugs.  “You can care.  You just always choose to care more about being right.”

“I—”  Tressa puts the bowl down, but can’t bring herself to get up.  “If something goes wrong—especially with you or Tristan—it’s my fault.”

Even though she’s curling in on herself, Carolyn’s words have a way of arrowing through her. 

“You’re not our parents.  And even if something happened, they can’t control everything either.  Life doesn’t promise happy endings.”

Stop, stop it, stop talking.  Tressa shakes her head because it shouldn’t hurt this much to know that her sister is this smart. She should be the one offering reassurance, not the other way around. 

“But I’m supposed to look out for you, I’m supposed to be responsible.” Tressa’s voice rises slightly, volume making up for what she couldn’t figure out how to say.  “That’s what older siblings do.”

“No, they’re supposed to set bad examples so that the rest of us can show you up and remind Mom and Dad that if at first you don’t succeed, try again and all that.”

Tressa laughs in spite of herself.  She didn’t know if Carolyn really believed that, but she would be wrong if she said she didn’t want Carolyn to be better than her.  Pulling herself up from where they’d sat with their backs against the sliding door, Tressa crosses the patio and stands beside her sister.  The wind is picking up again, cool relief brushing her forehead as her hair is swept out of the way. 

“I’m proud of you, you know.”

“Why?”  Carolyn’s voice is hard again, a sulk scrunching her shoulders.  “I haven’t done anything.  I’m not even out of high school yet.”

“You don’t have to do something for me to be proud of you.”  Tressa bumps her little sister’s bony hip with her own much wider one.  “You’re just you.”

“But you hate me.”

“I don’t understand why you’re always angry—”

“Ditto.”

“But I know you’re brave and passionate.  You love adventure and you don’t let people get away with lying.”

The deck shakes and the screens shudder, their conversation interrupted by the racket of thunder as it works itself through the atmosphere.  Maybe there wasn’t anything left to say.  The choppy liquid of the lake reflects silver-blue-white streaks that lance and arc across the sky.  They watch the storm, and when Tressa finally slips back into bed around four in the morning, she doesn’t think she’ll wake up feeling sick.