The call in November came from Aunt Delphine, not my mother, asking me to come home for Thanksgiving, telling me my mother had lost weight, wasn’t sleeping, that Camille had moved out to Los Angeles three weeks earlier, done being the golden child. I asked my aunt whether she’d believed my mother’s lie because it made sense or because my mother said it. Because your mother said it, she admitted. I explained that in our family, my failure had always been easier to imagine than my success, that my successes had to be enormous before anyone accepted them while my failures could be invented from nothing and everyone nodded along. I cannot come to Thanksgiving, I told her. Not because I am angry. Because I am healing.
The article ran November fourth, and I hadn’t sent it to anyone. My family found out on their own, and my mother, for the first time in her life, could not control the story. Everyone knows now, Aunt Delphine told me. That is why she is in such a bad place.
Camille called me the next morning, from London of all places, having flown there on the cheapest flight she could find after seeing my work profile and needing to leave the country for a while. I met her at my hotel, got her a room, ordered food, and listened as she told me everything. That she’d been miserable for years, never worked a real job, never paid rent, never made a decision that mattered, that our mother had spent years telling her not to be like me, not to intimidate men with intelligence. That when the graduation happened, she’d been too wrapped up in her own party to notice, and when the house happened, she’d been angry without knowing the full truth. And then the article came out, and she finally saw me, really saw me, and realized our whole family had been telling a story about me that had nothing to do with who I actually was.
I told her we’d both been victims of the same story, just given different roles, hers pretty, mine useful, neither of them who we actually were. I do not hate you, Camille, I said. But I have been so tired of you. I let her stay in the hotel for the rest of my trip, bought her a ticket home, gave her two thousand dollars as a landing pad, not an allowance, and told her she couldn’t use me to hurt Mom, couldn’t come running to me after every fight. If you want a real relationship with me, build it directly with me, I said.
She hugged me at the airport. Thank you, Marlo, she said. I watched her walk toward her gate and felt, for the first time in my life, hopeful, because my sister and I were finally standing in the same reality.
