Above Lizzie's desk there is a photo taped to the wall of the three sisters as children. Jane is smiling wide at the camera, hair in braided pigtails. Her arm is linked with one of Lizzie's, who is standing slightly to the right, grinning up at Jane in adoration. Lizzie's other arm is reaching out behind her, hand inches away from her baby sister's chubby toddler's fingers. Lydia has her head thrown back, laughing with wild abandon.
She'd always loved that picture because it felt true: her and Jane, linked together, reaching behind to guide and protect Lydia.
Now she wonders if a another, more honest, interpretation is this: that her and Jane had grown a bond so tight it had become impenetrable; leaving Lydia alone, running to catch up to the sisters she was afraid would leave her behind.
It was strange how often she had thought of Lydia when they weren't speaking. A song on the radio; a shirt in a storefront; the glint of red off the sunset; the verbal inflections of another one of the interns.
Reading a book one wet afternoon, she barks out a laugh at a piece of description -
...if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.
The line is in no way about sisters but it suits her and Lydia so well that she puts down the book for a moment. She almost texts Lydia before she remembers that they aren't speaking (and if that pang in her heart feels a little too much like guilt, she reminds herself that she was only trying to help, after all).
Lizzie sat in her too-quiet home even though every part of her wanted to run out the door. Every angle, every frame, reminded her of all the ways she'd been wrong (about sisters, about love, about being right and being honest). She sighed and wandered aimlessly into the living room, skimming the shelves lazily. She stopped at a photo album, only half-shelved and pulled it out, staring at the very first picture stuck between the glossy pages. There was Jane staring at the camera, an 8 year old cute enough to sell Fisher Price toys on television (which more than one passerby had suggested to their mother. She had wanted it but Jane had embodied every aspect of the phrase 'painfully shy,' so they'd had to give up on that dream - the first of many), eyes soft with kindness and affection. Lydia was the chubby baby on her lap, a year old and already a defiant look to her; her right hand reaching out towards the camera as though to bring it closer. Lizzie had her arm around Jane's shoulder but her other hand had been wrapped tightly by Lydia's left one. Photo Lizzie was looking down at her baby sister with an expression of fierce pride and adoration.
It was, Lizzie thought, guilt coiling in her stomach, an expression that had slowly slipped away from her as she had gotten older. It had been replaced by exasperation and irritation. She had spent so much of her life worrying about protecting Jane because Lydia had grown up so fearless (reckless, she might have once said with a roll of her eyes; half-baked, she would have once spit out contemptuously) and Jane seemed so easily breakable. And yet it had been Jane who had grown a steel plated spine and Lydia who had revealed a fragile, damaged heart.
One night, she rewatches all her old videos that feature Lydia, cringing and hot with shame. She had had to come to terms with the fact that she had been wrong about Darcy, but now she sees that her wrong impressions of him are nothing compared to viewpoint she had of her own sister. At least she can comfort herself with the thought that she had known Darcy less than a year. What defense can she possibly have with Lydia?
The moment she sees herself refer to her sister as boy-crazy, completely irresponsible, substance abuser, sees Lydia's face drop and her brightness dim, she's flooded by a wave of self-hatred so high she feels like she's drowning in it. Wishes she could drown in it. Not because she wasn't being truthful, but because she wasn't being fair. This isn't costume theater, this isn't hoping the butt of the joke never finds out; this is cold and blinding, a black and white paintbrush washing out the honest colors of an entire relationship.
Half remembered lines from a college poetry class float through her mind, taunting her memory, cutting through her like waves of broken glass.
- the things we say are true;
it is our crooked aim,
our choices turn them criminal.
The night she finally watches Lydia's videos, she almost closes her laptop a half a dozen times. She wishes she could say that the Lydia on those videos is someone she doesn't recognize; but the jarring truth is not that she cannot recognize who Lydia is in those videos, but that she has never bothered to see who Lydia was at all.
She forces herself to get to the last video before she puts her head in her hands, willing herself not to cry out in despair, in rage, in growing helplessness and awful self-loathing. It feels melodramatic, she knows it's melodramatic but she also can't help it. She feels her insides twisting, as though she were trying to wring out every bit of her guilt and shame. It wasn't that she was to blame for him, it, the entire goddamn mess. She can at least now see that doing so is some strange brand of narcissism, a perverse way of alleviating ownership. But she does have a responsibility - to herself, to Lydia, to the practice of being better - and in that she has come up desperately short. She sees now that her ability to categorize people so easily was just a way to impose her own limitations on everyone else around her; that the descriptions we assign have a funny way of becoming the only truths that we allow ourselves to see.
It hadn't always been this way with Lydia, had it? She looks around the room, desperately reaching for something that doesn't implicate her in the entire mess. Something real.
Real. The word sparks something in her memory.
She opens her door to a darkened hallway and pads quietly down the stairs to the living room. She gropes for the light and then heads right to one of the bookshelves, hoping that she hadn't thrown away the book she was looking for. After a moment, she sees it, tucked too tightly between other childhood books that had been long forgotten.
She pulls out The Velveteen Rabbit, taking care to open it carefully to protect the cracked binding and worn cover. Reading through it brings her comfort, then an empty sort of sadness: she can remember her voice reading it aloud to Lydia, who first sat on her lap; then on her leg; then just sat next to her, head on her shoulder. (She tries not to, can't help but remember the last time she held it in her hands - Lydia at 16, saying it was her all-time favorite book, and Lizzie rolling her eyes, saying that it was probably because it was the only book Lydia had ever actually read).
She reads through it slowly, surprised to find tears slowly pooling in her eyes. She stops and stares at a passage, eyes blurring the room into obscurity. She looks up and wipes her eyes, then lowers her head to read back over the section once more.
""Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. It doesn't happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.""
Tears splash down onto the page, wrinkling the page beneath her. The wet spots grow, darkening the page, morphing into childhood memories: Lydia, miserable at home, being told she's too young to go out with Lizzie and Jane; Lizzie's half a dozen, casually lobbed, insults all calling Lydia promiscuous, or whorey, or slutty, or all three during a fight over the bathroom; Lizzie's self-righteous angry lecture because Lydia had failed another test, or brought home a guy that would never be heard from again, or stopped going to school altogether; Lizzie failing to ask, to comfort, to wonder, to care, over and over and over again.
She makes it to one more line before she has to push the book away because each line seems like another accusation.
"..once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
She had never wanted to understand Lydia. Had magnified her sharp edges and trapped her in a box of assumptions; had turned her simply into a prop to roll her eyes at. She had spent her entire life content and secure in the feeling that Lydia was simply the problematic, indulged-in, youngest child.
The entire thing would be laughable, if it wasn't so utterly loathsome.
How could she ever have thought to have figured Lydia out when it's obvious she can't even navigate her own traitorous heart?
She thinks back to one of her last days in San Francisco. A song had come on that had landed close to her heart, even though it was obvious that it wasn't about sisters at all.
(A passing thought had been spared to think - seriously, why does no one write about sisters? They provided as much heartache and heartbreak as any other love affair.)
One line in particular had stuck out to her-
We're like a wishing well and a bolt of electricity.
We can still support each other,
all we gotta do's avoid each other.
At the time, she saw herself as the wishing well - calm, reflective, and filled with dreams of a better tomorrow. Lydia must be the bolt of electricity - overly bright and brash.
After - after the phone call and the horrifying reveal - she thought, maybe it's the other way around. She is the bolt of electricity - sharp, quick to spark, blazing suddenly to a fire. It is Lydia who is the wishing well - drowning in wishes, heaped full of everyone else's expectations. Yes, that seemed honest.
But now. Now she thinks that maybe it's time to stop viewing people as metaphors; because as long as people are metaphors, they can never be real.
Lydia is not simply a force of a nature or a delicate heart: she is reckless and loud; confident and lonely; fearless and abandoned.
Above all, she is Lizzie's sister and she deserves to be loved for every single part of who she is.
Early Monday morning and Lizzie can barely drag herself out of bed. She stares at the black screen of camera, trying to scrape up some semblance of strength to turn it on. She sits, vainly hoping that she could go back in time, take back all those things she said, remove the blinders from her eyes. She wishes that there was something, anything she could do to help. She's never before wished for superpowers or massive wealth (a contract killer might be nice, too) like she does in this moment.
But she doesn't have a time machine or superpowers; it's just her. She's armed with nothing more than the admission of how wrong she was and how much she loves her baby sister.
And maybe, right now, for this moment - it can be enough.
A/N: Other people's words who say things much better than I do:
The title is taken from the song "Shake it Out" by Florence and the Machine
The line about being a drizzle and a hurricane is taken from the book Looking for Alaska by John Green
The lines of poetry are taken from "We are hard on each other" by Margaret Atwood
The song lyrics are taken from "Werewolf" by Fiona Apple