Is during the next family tragedy. She picks me up from the airport. Brings me a bottle of cold water, cucumber-infused facial wipes, an orange, and a jumbo box of Cheez-Its, which she knows I won’t eat. I’m always trying—for once and finally—to be skinny.
I slide, sweaty and exhausted and chubby, into her passenger seat.
“Where to this time?” she asks. “Bali?” She opens the water bottle because she knows I’m no good at that.
“I was thinking Cambodia,” I say. “I hear the noodles are good.”
“Cambodia then!” My sister peels off the curb and whizzes her Honda through traffic.
I dig into the Cheez-Its, grab a handful, and pass the box to the baby. There’s always a baby strapped into my sister’s backseat looking at me like I’m a stranger. A stranger without an appropriate coat or their mother’s cornfield accent. I show up only when everyone is crying. To my sister’s babies, I am a harbinger of doom. Sometimes the baby accepts the Cheez-Its box from me. Sometimes the baby does not.
On the interstate, we roll down the windows so we can scream instead of talk.
“SHE’S NOT RESPONDING TO CHEMO,” my sister screams.
“IF THE POLICE TAKE AWAY HIS GUNS, WE COULD REASON WITH HIM? WILL THEY TAKE AWAY HIS GUNS?”
“THEY PUMPED HER STOMACH TWICE. AND THEN GAVE HER MORE OXY?”
“YOU KNOW HOW THEY FEEL ABOUT CREMATION—IT WAS A SHIT SHOW.”
“I WAS THINKING ITALIAN FOR DINNER?”
My sister zips her Honda to the hospital or the police station. She zips her Honda to the ashes of our childhood home, to the funeral parlor our family keeps in business, to Target to buy more Cheez-Its.
My sister and I and the baby are in another white waiting room. We would prefer the zipping whizzing screaming freedom of the interstate. We play an old game, which starts with her saying, “Cheddar.”
“GOUDA.”
“Shhh.” My sister covers the baby’s ear. “She’s sleeping. Pepper Jack.”
“Monterey.”
“Mozzarella.”
“Parmesan.”
“Colby Jack.”
We are amazing at the cheese game. World class.
At night, we share a bed: in a hotel, or her house, or our childhood home before they burned it down. It gives us more time together even if we are sleeping. My sister’s babies, exhausted from daycare and school and all our weeping, snore softly in the bed around us. My sister whispers in the warm dark, “I want to be the one who totals the Jeep and drinks tequila in the wreck.”
“No one would come but me,” I say. “What’s the point? Havarti.”
“Brie.”
“Feta.”
“Muenster.”
“Smoked gouda.”
“You can’t just throw ‘smoked’ on everything,” she says.
“You did last time.”
“You should say: Pecorino Romano.”
“I can’t take your cheese.”
“Gjetost,” she says, playing her trump card. “Norwegian sweet cheese.”
I have to google to make sure it’s real.
It is. She’s been studying.
The next day, we return to the white waiting room, or the rehab center, or the prison. We blow through boxes of tissues. We bribe nurses with bagels, or flush pills down toilets, or wash graveyard mud from all the babies’ shoes. Always, we wear black. Even the babies. We feel good in black. It suits us.
“THAT WAS AMAZING,” my sister screams as she zips the Honda back to the airport. “I’M SO GLAD WE FINALLY WENT TO CAMBODIA.”
The baby passes up the Cheez-Its, looking at me like I’ve been around forever. I have been around forever. My cornfield accent has returned. We are ancient. “SHOULD WE GO TO NORWAY NEXT? TRY THE GJETOST?”
“OR ICELAND?”
“OH ICELAND! THEY HAVE WILD HORSES.”
At the airport, my sister and I hug. I want to hug her so tight, we become one person. One person who might go to Iceland. She smells like cucumber-infused facial wipes. I smell like Cheez-Its, which don’t count in the cheese game. Unless it’s been a particularly bad family tragedy.
My sister peels her Honda off the curb.
“CHEEZ-ITS!” I always scream.
The baby waves and hopes I never come back.
Amy Lynne Mckenzie holds an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review. She lives with her partner and two feisty pets on an island in the Puget Sound, where she’s always on the hunt for a good ghost story.