A Town of Empty Rooms by Karen E. Bender

Author:Karen E. Bender
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2012-12-13T05:00:00+00:00

THE NEXT DAY AT 10:00 AM, Serena stood at the security gate waiting for Dawn and Sophie, her mother, to come off the red-eye to Waring. Her mother and sister headed down the stale white corridor, Dawn in sunglasses, limping but wearing high heels, and their mother beside her, her face pale with exhaustion but her wearing a sweater with French phrases — bonjour, merci, comment allez-vous — written across it in gold script. The sight of them made Serena feel buoyant. They were all related. They knew her; there was a primitive value in that. She loved them with immediacy and optimism; it was as though family was merely this, the place where your private strangeness could be understood.

Or where you hoped it could be understood.

Dawn and her mother wandered onto the steel blue carpet of the Waring airport. Serena ran toward them and hugged them.

Dawn had not spoken to her in weeks, but Serena clung to her for a moment, letting her sister’s body fall against hers, even though Dawn was much taller.

“I missed you,” said Dawn; Serena could not speak, understanding how much she had missed her sister as well. She pressed her cheek to Dawn’s long, dark hair, the same color as her own, listened to her laugh, the same sound as hers; she longed to see her sister, the face and hands and arms that were shaped in a way that was closest to her own. There was the hope that they would be more similar than they were, the stubborn optimism that, because they had just, by a matter of months, missed being each other, they would think and feel the same way. There was the bewilderment, the sense of loss, when each had a thought or feeling that the other could not comprehend.

Serena had imagined they would appear different now, somehow, with their father gone; she was aware of how she and Dawn looked similar with age, how the minute differences in their looks as teenagers were erased by the softness in their waists, the heaviness under their chins, the first gray in their hair.

“You look the same,” said Dawn, with relief. “A child. Twenty-five. We both do.”

She smiled, and she seemed to mean it. Dawn stood, her elbows jutting out as they had when she was a small girl; she had a determined need to see goodness. Their father had loved that about Dawn, the way she mythologized the family, the first-place essay in high school she wrote about her father, entitled “An International Hero,” in which she described a father so perfect Serena took it as an exercise in art, but which their father happily accepted as biography.

“What a flight,” said her mother. “The turbulence. I thought I would vomit. I snagged some of these on the way out — ” She reached into her purse and brought out several silver foil packets of peanuts.

They retrieved luggage and headed into the low, silvery autumn light. Her mother and sister walked beside her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.