It feels like forever before Afton and Abby arrive at the Lagoon Grill. By that time I’ve calmed myself. I even feel embarrassed at how dramatically I reacted. All the running. The hyperventilating. The huge emotions and hopeless thoughts. The flashback to a freaking car accident, for freak’s sake. I’ve pulled it together now. Still, seeing my sisters coming toward me holding hands, their faces both so innocent of the things I know, I feel my eyes burn. But I somehow manage to smile. “Hey! How was hula?” I ask Abby.
“Fun!” She beams up at me. “And Josie and her mom and brothers were there too! And we learned a new song.” She proceeds to sing an off-key ditty about the ocean and the silvery moon, but stops midway through to inform us that she’s hungry now, and we should probably feed her.
“How are you?” Afton asks, squinting at my face.
I nod. “Fine. Let’s get her something to eat.”
We find a table that overlooks the dolphin tank. It turns out that most of the things on the menu are sandwiches.
“I don’t like sandwiches,” says Abby.
“I know.” I scan the menu. “How about a burger?”
“I don’t like burgers.”
“How about a nice green salad?”
“Salad is rabbit food,” she says with a sniff.
“But you’re a little rabbit, aren’t you?” Afton says, and wiggles her nose.
Abby giggles. “No. I’m a girl, silly.”
“How about a salad . . . with pineapple in it?” I offer.
Sold.
I order a Hawaiian bacon BBQ burger for myself, which is an epically bad idea. My head feels full, but my body feels empty, and it seems in the moment like maybe if I eat something familiar, like a burger, things in my world will return to normal.
But instead the burger instantly gives me a horrible stomachache.
Abby picks at her salad and after about four bites announces that she’s done. I don’t try to argue. On average we can only get my little sister to eat about one full meal a day, and she did that at breakfast. I tell her that she can go over and look at the dolphins, and away she goes, half skipping, half running to the edge of the dolphin tank.
Afton and I stay at the table. Afton uses her debit card to pay for the meal.
“Are you okay?” she asks me. “You look . . . weirder than normal.”
I don’t say anything right away. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything I can say.
And then Afton says, “I’m sorry, okay?”
I blink at her. “What?”
“I’m sorry I’ve been kind of mean to you. I know you’re going through a thing. It just hurt my feelings when you called me a—”
“I didn’t call you a slut!” I exclaim. “I was going to say that you’re perfect, and no, I didn’t exactly mean that as a compliment, but I did not say slut, because I would never say that and I don’t think you are.”
“Oh,” she says. “Okay. Well, I’m not perfect.”
“Oh, I know,” I say.
She smiles. “Right. Anyway. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” I say, but this topic feels like a lifetime ago. We’re on to more serious catastrophes now; she just doesn’t know it yet. I take a shuddering breath. I have to tell her. She’s my sister, and this is about her, too. She should know.
But it feels like I’m about to tell her that someone—or something, I guess—has died, and the dead thing is this fanciful notion we’ve been holding on to for so long of our family as this secure little unit. Mom and Pop and Afton and Abby and me. Our family. And that idea was basically stabbed through the heart the moment I peeked through the adjoining door of our hotel room.
But I’m being dramatic. Again. Because of course, she and I both knew deep down that something like this might be coming.
“I need to tell you something,” Afton says, which short-circuits my brain for a minute, because what could she possibly have to tell me? “Logan and I broke up.”
I blink at her. “What? No.”
“It was a mutual thing,” she explains. “Amicable. Friendly. He was thinking about going to Stanford, but then he decided he wanted to go with Dartmouth instead.”
Wow. Dartmouth. Logan always struck me as a smart guy. He’d have to be, for Afton to be interested in him. “Where’s Dartmouth, again?”
“New Hampshire,” she says with a sigh. “We agreed that the long-distance thing was probably not going to work, and we should just call it good, you know, quit while we’re ahead, make a clean break of it, et cetera, clichés.”
“When did this happen? I mean, when did you break up?”
She looks simultaneously guilty and sad. “Friday.”
I feel like she punched me, which makes my stomach hurt even worse than the terrible hamburger. “Friday. As in two days ago.”
“Yeah. I thought I was fine with it, that it was a mature decision and all that, but I haven’t exactly been fine. I’ve been . . .” She searches for the word. “Struggling.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
Her eyes meet mine. “You had your own thing going on.”
The way she’s been acting makes a lot more sense now. Also: I am a crappy sister. “I’m sorry. You should have told me. I mean, we broke up with our boyfriends on the same weekend.”
“Yes, we did,” she says with a hint of a smile. “But we’re both going to be okay now. Trust me on this. We’re going to be great. You’ll see.”
In this moment I know this as an absolute fact: I can’t tell her about Mom and the affair.
If I tell Afton, not only will I ruin Hawaii for her and all the optimism she’s feeling about how fricking great we’re going to be, but she’ll feel like we have to do something. I know her. She’ll want to confront Mom. And if we confront Mom, the only thing that will happen is that Mom will feel like she has to do something. And the only something that she can really do is, like, confess. And then she’ll probably split up from Pop. They’ll get divorced.
I can’t imagine life without Pop. Or Abby. Because Abby goes with Pop.
I’m a terrible liar. My face is an open book, Pop always says. My voice does the catch thing. But this time I manage to pull it off. “You’re right,” I say steadily. “We’re going to be great.”
Abby comes running up to us, grinning and chattering, cheeks flushed with excitement, eyes bright with her simple five-year-old delight in the fact that dolphins are a thing that exist. “Oh my dog, I want to swim with the dolphins! Can I, Ada? Can I swim with the dolphins like those people are doing?”
Afton stands up. “Let’s go see, Abby-cakes.” She holds out her hand to our little sister, who grabs it. “I’ll babysit,” Afton says, another generous gift to me. “We’ll talk more later.”
Or we won’t talk more later, which is what I’d currently prefer. Not until I figure out how I’m going to deal with this. Alone. All by myself.
But I can do this, I think. I can act like I don’t know anything. Like I didn’t see anything. Like it didn’t even happen. I have to.
“Let’s go pretend we’re mermaids,” Afton’s saying as she pulls Abby toward the dolphin tanks. “Under the sea.”