Page 5 of 32 Days in May

Neither of us laughs.

“Jimmy Timmon’s been committed.”

This is how my sister responds to Hello?

I set my knife down on the kitchen counter.

I’ve been cutting up apples for a pie I promised Allie for her birthday; she turned thirty nearly two weeks ago, so timing-wise, I’m actually doing very well. I only answered my older sister’s phone call because I was feeling too good about myself. “Olivia. I don’t think you can say that anymore.”

Liv is completely unfazed by my reaction. “His mom’s heartbroken. She came in to pick up two pounds of braciole and she could barely hold it, her hands were shaking so badly. Terrible.”

Before my diagnosis, Liv only ever called me when she was absolutely desperate for some entertainment. If her fiancé, Mike, was out of town and our mom unreachable, I was her last resort. Now, we talk on the phone so frequently I can picture exactly what she’s doing as she yammers. I can picture her car keys jangling and swinging from her wrist and the ice in her latte clanking as she crosses the four-way intersection from our parents’ butcher shop to the opposite corner where she parks her car illegally, every day. I can almost smell the sunshine on the black-topped Philly street, can almost imagine how the cherry blossoms cushion each of her steps, their last petals shed and having given way to wide, shining leaves.

“No fucking shit!” I pick up my knife again, going back to hacking up a particularly large Pink Lady. “That’s her kid!”

Jimmy grew up around the corner from us, on a side street that always smelled like sulfur and dryer sheets. He’d been a scrawny, irritating kid with knobby knees and crooked teeth, cruising around on his bike or on the back of someone else’s, standing on their back pegs like a captain at his hull. Most of us grew up, moved away, moved on. But Jimmy hung around, still cruising on his bicycle. A living ghost.

A shiver runs down my spine.

“Sad stuff.” Liv sighs, but this feels like the beginning of a longer sentence she’s still working her way up to. Silence settles over the phone line until I can’t even hear the wind anymore.

“Thanks for letting me know,” I say to fill the space, dragging out the oh in know so it sounds like a question.

“Yeah, well, I wanted to tell you, just in case you had any ideas . . . about . . . you know . . .”

“Oh my God. Are you serious right now? How many times do I have to tell you—”

“Hey,” she cuts me off sharply. “Don’t sass me, sister. I’m the eldest daughter. I’m the parentified one here. Mom and Dad are worried sick, and that means I have to—”

“What, threaten me with a grippy sock vacation?” I let out a biting, incredulous laugh. “Is this Jimmy news really your best attempt at talking to me about mental health?”

“Yeah, and it scared you, didn’t it? Shocked you?”

Kinda. “You’re sick, bitch,” I say.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!” she cries in response. She sounds so much like Mom, I actually have to stifle a laugh. “They’re on my ass, Nadia. They have no idea how to deal with this whole lupus thing—”

“It’s not a thing that needs to be dealt with. It’s just my life now.”

“It’s a serious disease.”

I press the back of my hand—warm and clammy from the effort of chopping—into the space between my eyes. “Believe me, I’ve noticed.”

“You lost your job.” The way she says this makes me want to barf. We’ve been having this exact conversation for six months, and each time it makes me hate who I used to be a little more. Cinderella lost her shoe; Virginia Woolf lost her mind; Nadia lost her job.

“Maybe it was a job I wanted to lose! Maybe I’m better off!”

Quietly, my sister grumbles, “You don’t believe that.”

“What difference does it make? This is my life, whether or not you and Mom and Dad think it’s pathetic or weird. This is what I’m doing.”

“But you’re not doing any—”

“I’m fine.” I cut her off before she can finish the word, before she can fully and totally accuse me of stasis. “I promise you, I’m not in crisis anymore. I’m just . . .” I search for the word. I’ve been searching for it for months, actually. One single word to describe what it is I’m doing. “I’m cloistering.” This . . . is the best I can do.

“Cloistering?” Liv repeats carefully.

“Yeah, like a nun. I’m turning inward, searching for meaning in the meaningless. I’m finding power in stillness—”