After we’d shared sherbet on the couch the other day, she’d finally asked me to show her my tattoos. Turns out she wanted to see every one of them. Touch them. Kiss them. And the strength ittook for me not to want to take her right there as she admired me so sweetly was Herculean. So I knew she wasn’t askingwhatthey were. Been there, done that.
“What do they mean to me?” I clarified.
“Mhmm,” she said. “Why do you get them?”
“Some of them are things that have meaning to me. A lot of them are art I admire. Some are memories I want to hold onto.” I said, not finding the question hard.
Her next question was much harder, in my opinion. “How did you get into it?”
I swallowed. “I went through a really tough time a while ago. Some things happened with my family. Hard things. And in the aftermath, I latched onto a part of me that was different from the things that reminded me of the pain. I latched onto the good.”
It was readying, the beat of silence that passed. I knew what would come next. “What happened?”
And even though I knew, it didn’t stop the pain that lanced through my chest when I thought about the answer. It wasn’t a complicated one. There weren’t a lot of parts or even a lot to say. It was simple and sometimes simplicity hurt. It left behind unanswered questions and unshut doors in its wake.
But I didn’t want to hide things from her or hide from my past, either. It was hard, but it happened. It was painful enough facing the fact, running from it on top of everything would just be exhausting. “My sister left.”
If the silence before was readying, this one was deafening. I’m not even sure she was breathing over there. The whir of the heating system was the only sound in the shop.
“Left?” she asked softly.
“Yep,” I said. “There one minute, gone the next. Never to be seen or heard from again.”
“Harper, that’s?—”
“It’s not as horrible as you think. She was eighteen, and she tooksome money we had set aside for her. She’s a smart girl and I know she wouldn’t do anything stupid with it. Chances are she’s alright. She just…left is all. She couldn’t take being a part of our family anymore and just decided she wasn’t going to.”
“How long ago?”
“Ten years.”
“How long have you been an artist?”
“Ten years.” I smiled. “Though I haven’t been agoodone that whole time.”
“Did she like art?” she asked. And for some reason the question brought a prickle to my eye. So many people asked me about Mar when they found out my sister was gone. They asked me if I thought she was alive, they asked what happened, they asked all these questions that I didn’t have or want the answer to. But this girl, she asked questions that were actuallyabouther. Like she was trying to understand me through understanding her.
It was just like Alta to dig deeper and shoot straight for my core.
“Me and her always had similar interests. We worked in similar fields. But when it came to what we loved, we were very different,” I said. “I’m the one who liked art. She liked language, so to speak. But we always encouraged each other. So when it came down to leaving the field of work that reminded me of her in a bad way, I wanted something that would remind me of the good.”
“Which one of your tattoos is the memory of her?” she asked.
“All the loose water that weaves throughout the different images is her. I didn’t want to get anything specific that would remind me of her since it would be too hard, but…” I huffed, holding my arm up to look at the smooth ink that covered my skin. “It all just reminds me of her anyway. Of dreams we didn’t get to see or promises I didn’t have time to fulfill.”
“It hit you hard when she left?” she asked.
She knew the answer, so I suppose she wanted more than just the simple nod I wanted to give her. I shook my head, the memoryof those first days, months, years of confusion and not knowing coming back to me all at once.
“It was so fast,” I said. “One minute I had a sister, hadsomeonethere with me through good and bad, easy and hard. Through all of it. And the next, I had no one. And I still don’t know why. Whatever it was, I think we could have worked it out, I could have helped her through it. But we never got the chance. It’s like losing a whole piece of yourself and not knowing how to grow it back without fucking it up again, cause you don’t know what you did to fuck it up in the first place.”
“You didn’t mess anything up, Harper,” she said, “I’m starting to believe you don’t know how. You’re honest and you’re encouraging and have such a gentle heart. So I don’t believe for a second that you messed anything up. Sometimes life just happens and things get all jumbled. And I admire you for being so true to your promises that you could get them inked on your skin forever.”
She was standing beside me now. Cradling the drawing pad to her chest as she drowned me with her eyes. Her words pierced my chest, but I couldn’t go further than this. Not yet. So I cleared my throat, trying to sound casual or at the very least less devastatingly grateful for her words. “Enough of that buttering me up. If you want something just ask.”
“I want you,” she said simply. Directly. She was getting so good at that. And before I asked her to clarify, her soft lips were on mine. “Thank you for telling me about her.”
“Thank you for listening.”
