"What? You want to tell me more of your bedtime stories? Tell me how I'm special and perfect and will do something important with the world?"
Gabriel rushes to the mantle.
"And prom? These pictures?" He shoves the pictures in Virginia's face. "These are fake, mom. She doesn't even like me. She only did it because her mom was making her!"
"That can't be true," Virginia says.
"It is true!" Gabriel says. "None of this is real. None of it! I'm nothing, I'm nobody. Your son is a fucking failure."
Sarah sits in her room and curls up into herself. She can hear her stepmother screaming, her father shouting.
"You're obsessed!" Kim says. "You don't give a shit about me, you just want your dead wife back!"
She hears broken glass shattering on the floor, things being turned over. Sarah winces. She hears the voices rise, then fall, then rise again. Then she hears her father's footsteps, hears the door slam. She hears her stepmother chasing after him.
"I hate you!" Gabriel says. "Nothing I do is good enough, you have to make me into something I'm not!"
"That's not true!" Virginia says.
"What if I don't even want to go to college? What would you do then?"
"I just want the best for my son!" Virginia says.
"Well what if it's not what I want?" Gabriel asks. "What if what I want is just to be a watchmaker? What are you going to do? What are you going to do then?"
"Frank! Jesus Christ, come back!" Kim says.
"Get away from me," Frank says.
"Frank! Frank!"
"I said get away!" Frank shoves Kim against the house.
The picture frame shatters on the ground.
Tires squeal on pavement.
Virginia starts to cry.
Hours pass. Neither Gabriel nor Sarah moves.
It should be raining, but it's not. So far everything that has happened in Sarah's life has happened in the rain; her mother's suicide attempt, her mother's death. The coming of her stepmother, and her half-hearted attempts at bonding. But tonight it doesn't rain, the sky is perfectly clear. Sarah looks out the window and sees nothing but endless dark, the cloud-cover hiding the stars.
Sarah stands by her bedroom window, where she can see Kim standing on the dirt path, dark and terrible and silhouetted by moonlight. It's times like these that Sarah loses all sense of herself, when her twilit shadow seems to fade with the coming night and the whole of her body seems to be nothing more than a reflection on a pane of glass.
Her stepmother opens the bedroom door. "He left," she says. Her eyes are red and her lips are twisted. "He left because ofyou."
Her stepmother's hair falls in stringy pieces; gobs of mascara run down her face. Sarah stares at her, dumbstruck. They stare at each other for a long time before her stepmother turns away and closes the door.
In Queens, Gabriel stands over the bathroom sink, scrubbing his hands with hot water. There's violence in the act of scrubbing, his hands raw and wet and dirty and trembling. He sits heavily on the edge of the bathtub, clasping his head with soapy hands. He made his mother cry. He hates himself. He clutches his father's razor and holds it like a crucifix, imagining himself dragging it across his arm. But he doesn't, he sets it down on the floor instead. Above him, a picture of the Virgin Mary smiles serenely, illuminated and darkening again by the lightening outside.
In Utah, Sarah curls up on her side and cries, hugging herself tightly. In Queens, Gabriel stares at the ceiling and tries to forget. If they weren't so far away, if they knew each other right now, Sarah would climb through Gabriel's window and cry against his chest, and both would take comfort in feeling not so alone.