MY SISTER, AMY, IS NEARLY ten years my junior, a surprise pregnancy for my parents on the week my mom registered my brother, Brian, for kindergarten in Denver, Colorado. When Amy was four months old, we moved to Eagle-Vail, so that my dad could open a new Hyatt property in Beaver Creek, a swanky ski resort just west of Vail. She began as a colicky baby and grew into a towheaded spitfire of a toddler who would hold me as a cuddling hostage, wrapping her skinny arm tightly around my neck so she could play with my hair.
The hotel business is one of transfers and moves, and my dad’s job took my parents to Hilton Head, South Carolina, just before my senior year of high school. I lived with another family to finish out my final year—an act of love on my parents’ part that I’m only now starting to fully grasp, as my own sons approach that seminal year, that momentous collection of last times.
In Hilton Head, my family lived in an apartment on the ninth floor of the hotel. Amy was a real-life Eloise, doted on by the staff and making mischief wherever possible. Everyone loved her.
Despite the age difference, we’ve managed to grow up together, sharing the peculiar mix of genetics, memory, history, and idiosyncrasy that binds us as family. Amy knows me. She knows, for example, that going to Disneyland turns me into a maximizing lunatic who feels compelled to determine the best plan for the day, hit all the best rides, and efficiently collect the appropriate FastPasses. If I mow down a few toddlers in pursuit of these goals, then so be it.
“Maximum fun!” shouts Disneyland Julie, in a voice a shade away from unhinged, exhorting her family to hurry up. We were once abandoned by friends in the park when they realized that our Disney pace is just short of an all-out sprint.
Amy knows who Disneyland Julie is.
And so she was fully aware, as we power-walked to the Cars ride in California Adventure, the FastPasses in her hand as I managed the stroller (with the child that was too big for the stroller because Disneyland Julie can’t wait for these kids to just walk), that she’d be pushing me over the edge when she turned to me and said, at 11:14 a.m., “Julie, these passes were from ten to eleven, not eleven to twelve.”
I stopped dead in the middle of the wide walkway, just in front of the Radiator Springs sign. “What.” I stared at her in horror.
Amy’s face broke into a satisfied, triumphant grin. “Just kidding,” she managed to say, before laughing uncontrollably.
And that’s why, on that cool January day at Disneyland, as she wiped tears of laughter from behind her glasses, I turned to Amy—my soul sister, who happens to be my real sister—and I called her a fucker.
I didn’t need to dodge or hide with Amy. I tapped her name to dial her number as I folded laundry after school, while the boys were busy with homework.
“I’m feeling weird,” I said. “Like I can’t turn off or something.”
“That sounds like anxiety,”Amy replied carefully, drawing from her own experience.
“Well, it’s horrible.”
“Have you talked to Mando?”
“Not yet. He has two more nights in Dallas.” I couldn’t stay on the phone for long. I had to check homework and make dinner and finish the laundry, because Nolan had only one pair of baseball pants, and there were often games on consecutive nights.
And really, what more was there to say? Was this anxiety? I couldn’t yet find words that would adequately capture what I was experiencing. Nothing sounded quite right because nothing felt quite right.
“Okay, well, call me if you need me,” she instructed. “Hang in there, sissy.”
On that day, Amy gave me a name for my new worst friend: anxiety. And beginning with this phone call from the laundry room, my little sister became my primary touchstone. Over the coming months, she would answer every call, every text. She knew how much I needed her. Amy was the one to tether me through this time. She took the string of my balloon out of my shaking fingers and said, over and over, “I’ll hold this for you.”