Blue Sisters

by Coco Mellors

It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was all the time in between that was so hard.

love you too,” Avery said. “Without the too.” Lucky smiled. It was something Nicky used to say. No too. Just love.

She was back in New York. City of sirens, city of secrets, city of her sisters. She had dreaded returning, but it was surprisingly comforting to see the city lights wink in their bed of black below, each one a little life of its own.

She was home, the only one she knew, not because she’d always lived in it, but because it always lived in her.

Avery and Nicky had dark chestnut hair and Bonnie’s and Lucky’s was blond, but they were all unmistakably sisters.

“There’s nothing to say,” she replied, her voice returning to its quality of crisp control. “It happened and I have to live with it. End of story. No reason why, no hidden lesson, no attitude of gratitude.” She almost spat the words. “She died and I’m still alive. Life’s random and unfair and sometimes it’s random and more than fair. That’s it.”

But Nicky was different. Nicky was always the first person to ask a question in the Q&A section of a talk because she couldn’t bear for the person onstage to experience awkward silence after having made themselves vulnerable. She didn’t need to have a drink to dance

or make a speech at a wedding or go on a date like most people did. She threw herself into the center of things. Nicky took those drugs in order not to fall out of love with life. All she ever wanted was to stay. And now here was Lucky, alive when her sister was not, destroying herself. It struck her with sudden clarity that the best way to honor her sister would be to live life the way Nicky had wanted to, wide-awake and not numbing any part of it. But she didn’t know how, and feared she never would, so she pushed the thought away.

“You are not the only person in this house who is having a hard fucking time, Avery.” Avery made an anguished sound. “I know you miss her,” said Avery. “But she was my sister.” From the center of her exploded life, Chiti gave her a look of pure contempt.

“Not only Nicky,” Chiti said. “You. I lost you. For over a year now, I have been waiting for you to come back to me. I could feel it at the funeral when you wouldn’t let me put my arm around you.”

“You have been slipping away from me for months,” continued Chiti. “And now this! You think this is a surprise? You have been sabotaging our relationship in slow motion for a year.”

She remembered

an anecdote she’d heard about David Foster Wallace, who had considered television, not drugs, to be his primary addiction; during book tours, he apparently had the staff remove the TV from his hotel rooms before he entered, the same way, in early recovery,

“In my experience,” she whispered into the soft whorl of her ear, “the not doing is the hardest part.”

They all had dinner together every night and Avery felt the pleasure of being a sister among sisters again after so long. They were not four, and they never would be again, but they were starting to find the symmetry in three.

“I miss her and I miss her and I miss her,” she began. “And I wait for the feeling to end because every other feeling has ended, no matter how intense, no matter how hard—but this won’t. There’s just no end to the missing. There was life before and there’s life now.

And I can’t seem to accept it. I can’t accept that I’ll have to miss her forever. There will never be relief. There will never be a reunion.

All I have is this missing. And part of me is

glad it won’t end because it’s all I have to connect me to her now.”