'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Amy decided as she fixed herself some cereal. All the girls at school came from happy families and she'd be damned if she could never tell them apart. But Amy knew that she was different. Too quiet, too shy, too... something. Something always separated Amy from everyone else. Amy knew that it was nothing short of a wall of sadness.
But not all unhappy families were sad. Some were just angry or hurting. Anger burns out and hurts heal, so sadness should fade too, right?
Amy never acknowledges the part of herself that says no, sadness does not fade.
She headed back upstairs after eating and dealing with her dishes. On her way to the bathroom, she passed a closed door. Glancing at it briefly, she wondered what happened to the room's assigned occupant. While Adam was only younger the Amy by forty-three seconds, she never had a clue what ran through his mind. 'So much for twin telepathy.'
Carrying on to the bathroom, Amy figured that Adam had probably been shacking up with girls for the last two days. She's pretty sure that's what he usually does in the spans of time that he does not come home.
After finishing her normal morning routine, Amy took a cursory glance back at the house before leaving. Mom would wake up in an hour, take a painkiller or two for her unending headache and go back to bed. Her father was asleep, either at his desk, beer still in hand, or in bed fully clothed. Amy sighed and turned to leave.
Upon return, Amy noticed a white envelope on the door mat. She stared at it for a second, trying to recall what bill they were late in paying. Coming up empty, she figured it to be from a motel that Adam snuck out of, avoiding payment. She picked it up and her eyes widened.
In record timing, she was in the kitchen, envelope cut open, still folded letter sitting in front of her. Her hands were shaking so hard that she had to sit on them for a minute. It's the most prestigious art school in the province, what if they rejected her? Finally working up the nerve to open the damn thing, Amy felt the urge to jump around in pure, unbridled joy. Accepted.
The front door slammed open.
Quickly realizing that Mom was upstairs and Dad was at work, Amy hid her letter behind a stack of unwashed dishes. Rushing out to the front hall, Amy pasted a smile on her face.
"What the fuck are you so happy about?"
Adam was home. Amy muttered something about seeing her brother safe and got him into the kitchen. Adam only ever came home for money or food, occasionally a place to crash. Amy puttered around the kitchen, making a tuna salad sandwich, Adam's favourite, while listening to him curse at her for various reasons. She just had to feed him, he would probably leave on his own. The happier he was the less damage he would do.
Why was he suddenly so quiet?
Amy turned from her post at the counter, mid-sandwich-prep, to see Adam picking up a piece of paper. A piece of paper from behind a pile of dirty dishes. Oh shit.
As Adam read the acceptance letter, his scowl became more and more pronounced. When he turned to her, he looked ready to kill something. "So this is why you were so cheerful, huh?"
Amy turned back to the sandwich. 'Keep to game plan. He comes, he eats, he leaves. Game plan.'
"Think you're so special, do you? Stupid bitch."
'Don't say a word. It will only antagonize him. It will only make it worse.'
“I bet you had to go down on your knees a couple times before they let you in. Bet you liked it too. Cunt."
'He doesn't know anything. It doesn't mean anything. Stay calm.'
"So what? You were just gonna run off and live the life of your dreams? Get real. You can neither escape nor fix this fucked up family any easier than I can. Deal with- oh!"
Amy had whipped around and sunk her fist in Adam's gut, knocking him to the floor. Everything she had ever wanted to say to him came pouring out of her mouth.
"At least I'm trying! At least I give a shit! Mom and Dad would have died in their own filth without me, and where were you? Out getting drunk and laid and into fights! I swear, sometimes I can't stand to look at you! You have no right to talk about this family to me!" Adam stared up at her dumbly. He did not understand why she had hit him, had yelled at him, when she was normally so passive. She had long since given up on scolding him, because it clearly never worked. He did not allow himself to entertain the thought that he had pushed Amy too far. He stood back up.
"Who do you think you’re kidding? Huh? You hate this place. You'd be sick in the head if you didn't. You hate it just as much as I do!"
"Yes I hate it!" Amy threw up her hands. "I hate it so badly that I wake up every morning and wonder what am I still doing here? I wonder why I have to deal with a mother who's clinically depressed, with a father who's alcoholic? Then I remember that I am the only thing keeping this house from collapsing in on itself! But do you know the worst part? Do you?" Amy took a couple steps toward Adam, getting right up in his face.
"I'm all alone in this. No outside help, whatsoever. No one to turn to, no where to run, no easy way out. That's why I deserve to go to that school. And nobody, least of all you, is going to stop me." Amy snatched back the acceptance letter from him, and ran upstairs.
Adam watched his sister's retreating form until he could no longer hear her footsteps on the stairs. He turned to the sandwich on the counter. Unbidden, memories of all the times that he had come home appeared in his head. It was always Amy who fed him and picked up after him. Before that, she had been the one to scold and discipline him, or try to at least. Before that, it was her who would get him ready for school in the morning and then help him with homework at night. Even before that, it was always Amy's bed that he crawled into whenever he had a nightmare. It had always been Amy.
And now she was leaving him behind. How could she do that? He needed her here.
Leaving the sandwich on the table, Adam headed upstairs to his room. He wasn’t hungry anymore.
Of course, he had totally forgotten that the wall separating his room from Amy's was about as thick as paper, and not quite as sound proof. She was crying. Adam could tell that she was trying to be quiet and was probably muffled by her pillow. He refused to feel guilty. This was not his fault. It was hers, she was leaving him. If she would just stay put, then she wouldn't be upset like this. She needed to realize that she couldn't just abandon him.
Adam wondered when it was that he had started denying that he had abandoned her first.
He reclined on his bed, annoyed with himself for thinking that way. But for all his annoyance and self-denial, Adam knew it was true. He wasn’t capable of handling the responsibility of keeping what was left of the family together as well as making sure no one went hungry or homeless, and that frightened him. So, instead trying to power through and make up for his shortcomings, he turned tail and fled.
His parents couldn’t love him, so he in turn stopped caring about them. His sister always gave a home to come back to, but he could never be truly grateful for it as it was the home he was running from. A home that was broken and cold. Adam briefly wondered if that could be counted as a home at all. He also considered the coldness as a possible reason for his habit of sleeping around. It was warmer with another body next to you.
Rolling over, Adam figured that it was his pride that had never allowed him to think like this before. That very same pride had been sucker punched by his sister back in the kitchen and was now crumbled to dust. His sister, who had knocked him to the floor, was crying in the next room.
That thought made something inside Adam twinge. He didn’t like it when she cried. Amy had always been too mature for tears. She didn’t so much as whimper when she broke her arm as a child. Adam figured that she wanted to be strong for her brother. He always was the emotional one of the two.
Adam couldn’t stand listening to her cry like this anymore, so, getting up, he headed to her room. He didn’t know what exactly he would do or say to her just yet, but he just had to get her to stop crying.
Raising his hand to knock on the closed door, Adam hesitated. After thinking about it for a moment, he figured Amy wouldn’t let him in if she had the opportunity to turn him away. As a result, he opened the door without warning.
Had he knocked, Amy would have had a moment to compose herself. As it was, she had been caught completely off guard. Therefore, when Adam opened the door, he was confronted with a shocked, vulnerable, wounded look on the face of a figure curled up in a ball on the bed. Adam wasn’t sure how he managed to reconcile the image with that of his enraged sister from the kitchen. He was right about the pillow.
“I’ve never seen you cry,” Adam found himself saying. “You’ve seen me cry all the time. Cry, scream, rage, flip tables, all of it. But you were always too calm for that.” The masculine teenager did not know why he was telling his sister all of this. From the look on her face, neither did Amy.
"I figured, somewhere along the way, that you were trying to protect me. From the world, from our family, even from myself. You always loved me, enough for to make up for our parents. But I never loved you back, did I? Not nearly enough, at least. I only depended on you. I was a parasite, a pointless burden that latched itself to you.”
“Of course you loved me enough.” Adam looked up at his sister, shocked that she could speak so calmly and firmly, despite the emotional turmoil she had just gone through. “The fact that you latched on to me and nobody else proves it. I know you much better than you know yourself, if you think otherwise.” Amy put the pillow aside and shifted so that she was sitting with her legs hanging off the edge of the bed.
“It always used to scare me that you would one day leave and I would be left all alone here. But you always came back so it was okay. Even now, when you’re gone for days at a time, it’s okay because I know you’ll always come back. I just wish that, when you do, you leave the rage at the door.” She looked up at him and smiled softly.
Even though her face was blotchy and still covered in tears, she looked beautiful when she smiled like that.
Adam wanted to promise that he would do better, be better. He wanted to tell her that she could go away to school and not worry, because he would fix things. Most of all he wanted to say that he loved her and was sorry for never saying it enough.
He couldn’t open his mouth to save his life. So he opened his arms instead.
The two embraced long and hard, the leftover tears from Amy’s face creating a dark patch on Adam’s shoulder. Adam caught himself thinking about when the last time he hugged his sister was.
Upon separation, the two began to plan. This had been just one of the many rifts in their family that had to be patched together. They knew it would not be easy; their family had been broken for a long time. But the time to try was long overdue and so they had to do some serious catching up.
They bounced ideas off one another all afternoon and well into the evening. The first thing they decided to do was dump out all the alcohol Dad had stored around the house. Adam volunteered to do that, after swearing on whatever was important to him that he would not drink it himself or use it to set the house on fire. Next they spent an hour debating the merits of Amy dragging Mom around the mall in the pyjamas she always wore versus showering and dressing the older woman up manually. Either way, she had to get out of the house on a regular basis, headaches be damned.
Around the time that the sound of the front door opening echoed throughout the house, rustling and shifting could be heard from up the hall. Mom and Dad were about to enter the picture. The twins grinned at each other and left the room. Amy headed up the hall to get Mom, while Adam went downstairs to corner Dad. The four of them were going to have their first family dinner in years.
After all, unhappy families are all different. Some are stronger than others.