“I need to go,” I whisper. “I can’t…”
“I know it’s hard to hear, Wren, but you need to be tougher if you want to survive in this world. She’s not going to be your harshest critic. There will be people a lot stricter than her. If you want something, if you want to skate, regardless of your reasons for doing so, you need to learn how to hold your head up.” Her words sound like daggers straight to the heart, no matter how gently she attempts to say them.
“I want to be able to do things that make me happy without feeling the need to please her. I’m sick of doing it for her and not myself,” I admit.
“You’ll find out the reason you’re doing it soon. If you weren’t doing this for yourself, you wouldn’t be in this deep. There is a part of you that wants to do this foryou. And that’s the part that you need to hold on to. You’re her last chance at hope. Her last chance at a legacy.”
Her words weigh on my brain as if I’ve been watching too much TV. I’ve known that. Of course, I have. It’s all she would talk about when we were kids. Some part of me hoped that if Austin succeeded – which I thought she would – then I wouldn’t have to try as hard. I could be good enough for myself and that would be enough.
I made bets with myself. If Austin won her competition, I could come second in mine. If Austin didn't succeed in school, I could be fine too. If Austin could balance her relationship with her work, I could too.
“Why do we have to do this, Austin?”
“Because. She’s our mom. She’s hard on us but she’s given us everything. Even if they’re not what we wanted, it’s what we have.” Austin looks at me with kind eyes, understanding and sympathy laced within them.
“You should have just become a chef,” I whisper under my breath. She laughs and the noise almost shocks me hearing her laugh for the first time in years. Her smile reaches her blushed cheeks as she shakes her head lightly.
“Well, since I’ll be staying at home when the baby comes, who knows what could happen,” she says, rubbing her stomach as she looks down at it. "They say anything happens when you're pregnant."
“You seem calmer than you did on the phone,” I murmur.
“I’ve come to peace with it. I’m happy. Excited, even,” she responds.
“Do you know what you’re having yet?”
“A boy,” she says, turning to me with a grin. My heart doubles in size. “Thank God for that, right?”
“I’m so happy for you, seriously. Dad is going to be over the moon. And I’m going to have a nephew!”
“Yep,” she says. “We’re thinking of moving back here too. Well, maybe not Salt Lake but closer.”
“Really?” I don’t bother to hide the excitement in my voice. As much as she can be hard to deal with, I’ve missed having my sister around. She’s the only close family I have here other than my parents even if she’s only visiting.
“Yeah. I’ve missed you, Emmy. I know we weren’t the kindest to each other growing up, but this baby has really made me rethink it all. I want to be closer to you.”
“I would really like that.”
After a much needed catch up with my sister, she stays on the patio when I walk back into the house. For a second, I feel like I’m floating. Hearing what she said about our mom was hard, but it had to be said. There had always been some unspoken rule between us that we could never admit what we were doing our sports for. We pretended to ignore the rants that mom would go on as to how her life was ruined when she first fell in love with dad and got pregnant with Austin.
As kids, it wasn’t something we could laugh about. It was a cautionary tale. Something for us to learn from. It wasn’t anything we could just joke about because it really was our whole lives. We trained, we preformed and that was it. There was no reason to sit and look into it. By the time I realised what was underneath it all, Austin had already gone to college, and it felt like it was too late. As if bringing it up would start either and argument or a revolution.
When I get to the kitchen to walk out the front door, I’m stopped by my mom.
“I’m disappointed in you Wren,” is the only thing I can hear her say. My eyes adjust to the kitchen counter, and I can just about make out my mom's figure. She’s sitting with a glass of wine, staring out into the front yard through a sliver in the blind. Yeah, this is how all my nightmares start.
“Oh, really?” I retort sarcastically. She scoffs before taking a large sip of her drink. There is nothing I love more than my mom when she’s drunk. Kidding, of course. She is theworstwhen she’s drunk.
“Since you’ve been hanging out with that boy something has changed in you. You would never talk to me like this.”
After the day I’ve had, I don’t bother to hold back on my candour. I don’t usually like to air out my shit like this, but it needs to happen. There’s no use for us to hide this anymore. There’s no reason for me to be up her ass 24/7 and let her control every aspect of my life like she has been for the past nineteen years.
“That’s because I was afraid of you for so long. I was so scared that you’d stop loving me if I did something wrong. Like you did with dad. But he didn’t even have to do anything. You just stopped. No explanation. That was it and you never told us why. I have spent my whole life trying so hard for that not to happen. I thought that if I did my best, if I made you happy in some way, you wouldn't stop loving me.”
I take a deep breath. I don’t know when I got so close to her; when I could start to smell the wine on her tongue, but I did. She looks at me for a moment, as if contemplating which direction to take. She avoids my eyes when she speaks next.
“You’re starting to sound bratty and selfish, Amelia. You seem to be forgetting who paid for all your skating outfits and who pays for half of your rent. Yet you and that boy were so quick to take that vacation, knowing you were lying to me.”
“Does that even matter anymore? Austin is happy. Can’t that be enough?” I huff. “Listen, we’re grateful for the trip but we didn’t ask you to do that. You’re the one who got us that hotel so you could try to make me forget about how much you hated my performance. Like you do every time. The same thing with the flowers. In some pathetic way for you to apologise and make yourself feel better.”
