1.
Charlie appeared in the spin cycle again, soaked and limp like a doll, tumbling in cadence with Kai’s favorite sweatshirt.
While it no longer struck her with the fierceness of a fresh corpse, Kai still found herself queasy looking at it in motion. The way she was lifted and dropped like wet clay in time with the rotations. Legs whirling and slapping her soaked jeans, forehead squeaking against the glass, torso mangling the linens. There was an unnerving heaviness to it, and Kai could never get over the sensation of watching Charlie’s flesh press into her own hand-me-downs. Kai had decided six months ago that she wouldn’t peek at her sister anymore at the laundromat, and she had managed to keep that promise—until tonight.
That evening, Kai’s usual machine, greased with old oil and on uneven foundations, was rocking off its base to the cadence of Charlie’s corpse flying inside of it.The coin-op could be a spartan place at times, a dingy tetanus breeding ground to the uninitiated. The only other customer that used the washers was an enigmatic man in a green flannel that sat in the corner by the wall fan, ogling a vending machine that sold soap. When they ran loads of laundry at the same time, the rusty components came together into an impromptu gear-and-pully thrash metal gig. Although she would never admit it, this was Kai’s favorite thing about the laundromat. Everything was noise—the machines, the fan, the coin return, the radio in the back office, the lights. Somehow even the lights were fly-buzz noisy. It was vile and strange and unwelcoming, but grief, Kai had long since learned, was nothing if not a spiral of quiet.
She came to that realization piecemeal steeped in a three-year plague of placating white noise—mediocre harpsichord at her counselor’s office, adagio country-pop sewage that played overnight at the party store, the deafening nothing that waited for her at the house at first light. Kai wished she could bottle the violence of laundry and leak it into those motionless, terrible moments. She still remembered the somber piano piece they put on during Charlie’s visitation, mostly because it was the same tune they’d played at her mother’s wake five years ago, as if it were the only sound approved for mourning. All light-handed and flowery and elegiac, her sister mannequin-pale in her box.
She remembered that music more clearly than she remembered the sound of Charlie’s voice, which was a haunt of its own.
To pass the time while Charlie was slowly scrubbed away, Kai would loiter around the CRT they installed above a broken dryer. Its audio had never worked, and the box was eternally stuck on a channel that played soap operas, but it was colorful and fast and at least a smidge entertaining. Every scene a simple kindling for dopamine—reruns spilling out of order like metallic jacks. Kai fixated on piecing the stories together from their mangled fragments. The characters always seemed to be in a moment of crisis, their lips agape, continuously begging for something. Especially the men. The rest was nothing but second chances and melodramatic speculation. Charlie used to love those kinds of shows, which Kai both despised and understood. After all, crisis had been an old coat worn by both sisters, and each had missed their fair share of second chances.
It must be exhausting, Kai thought. Always needing someone else.
As this thought crested in Kai’s mind, a crash unlike anything she’d ever heard struck from the other aisle. Vibrations made the lights stutter like they too had felt the fear. Kai peered back and saw her usual machine beached onto its side, leaking suds and water and collected sediment in tributary rivers up the grooves of white tile.
Kai rushed over and threw herself to her knees. She peered into the cracked porthole for a glimpse of her sister in the compact space. Charlie was still inside, neck craned so far back that her Adam’s apple poked out of her throat. She seemed grey, worn down, and decayed, and patches of her golden hair were stuck somewhere within the spinning mechanisms of the washer. Kai put a hand to the glass. It had been three years, and the body had never looked any different.
“I’m sorry,” Kai said. “I didn’t mean that.”
She went to open the door, hoping to find a way to untangle Charlie from the gears and rods and wires, but as always, when she cracked the plastic latch, her sister was nowhere to be found.
2.
When Charlie was alive, she worked at a pub, and if she came home, it would be at around 6 a.m. She’d step through the door smelling like malt, lugging a greasy brown bag of whatever the back of house was going to throw out at close. Most of the time it was onion rings or cannibalized sliders of unknown meat or fries. So many fries, all experiencing the reverse rigor mortis of growing soggy in their own fat. Kai would make it home from the party store about an hour earlier than her, and together they would pick apart the bar scraps like scraggly vultures.
One night Charlie had snagged a slab of chicken parmesan and a cup of red sauce, which, all things considered, looked pretty gourmet. It sat atop the dinette with a certain elegance, the semi-flush light concentrating on the crust just enough to remind Kai that it was made in a commercial kitchen. Almost appetizing—but Kai would never say that out loud. It would only drive a harder bargain.
“I thought they stopped letting you take entrées,” Kai had said, prodding.
“They did. I had a heart-to-heart with Bill about it.”
“Just heart to heart?” Kai asked.
“Strictly professional. I offered to start taking Sundays, and he folded.” Charlie said, kicking off her shoes and throwing them into the middle of the hallway.
“Good. The thought of seeing him around the house gives me the creeps.”
“I do have standards, Kai.” Charlie smiled. “So, are you in or what?”
Kai looked down at the chicken, fixating on a crispy wedge of breading. She knew Charlie had been dating Bill for weeks now, yet the information had never bothered her until that very moment. Charlie hadn’t told her a lot of things—that her hours at the pub got cut, that she’d dropped out of cosmetology school in the final three months. Kai didn’t need to be told, she could piece things together on her own, but something about the Bill situation was different.
Bill was a thirty-five-year-old creep who flirted with teenage waitresses. Charlie used to say he greased the grill with his ponytail oil. In essence, he was a block of human white mold, yet now Charlie only pretended to hate him. She lied to Kai’s face with a nonchalant smile, and Kai, more than anything, wanted to know why. The obvious, flirty notes on the bottom of every bag were the only line connecting Kai to that truth, and the concept of truth only grew more opaque by the day. It was unnerving, how good a liar Charlie had become since their mother passed.
“I might be,” Kai said. “A pack of Black Labels or a half of merlot. Dealer’s choice.”
“Half a merlot for half of the parm,” Charlie countered.
Kai tilted her head. They were both very aware of how tricky it was for Kai to steal merlot from dry storage. How risky it was to tuck product beneath her shirt mid-shift.
“I’m still a growing girl, you know,” Kai said.
“You’re five-feet tall and twenty-two years old,” Charlie said.
“And I haven’t given up on myself yet.”
Charlie mussed the tinfoil further open, revealing a handful of mozzarella sticks in nearly pristine condition. It took Kai a few moments to realize that her stomach was making noise.
“We have a deal?” Charlie pushed. “I’ll do the dishes tonight.”
“Like you’ve ever done the dishes,” Kai joked.
“Once in a lifetime offer here, babe. Going once.”
“You can be really pushy sometimes,” Kai said.
“Going twice.”
“You’ll really do the dishes?” Kai asked.
“I promise. Swear on my mother’s grave,” Charlie said, hand on heart. Her expression should have been playful when she said that. It wasn’t.
Kai laughed nervously, then quietly, then naturally.
It was only then that Charlie joined her.
They split the patty down the middle and carved it further on their own plates. The meat was dry but serviceable. The sauce was a bit chunky. The next day the dishes were still in the sink, hardening with scraps of tomato juice and meat pulp. Kai started rinsing them off, never having expected anything else to happen.
3.
Kai sat on a bench outside the laundromat, the humid Michigan winter pressure-freezing her fingers to the filter paper of her menthol. She’d picked up the habit from Charlie shortly before she went—another passed torch that Kai was hesitant to snub out. Charlie used to smoke Black Labels so strong the vapor trail dispersed flocks of geese that passed overhead. It was all wood rot and grass clippings and forthcoming chemotherapy. Kai had grown desensitized to the smell of cigarette casings working at the party store, but trace fragrances of Charlie’s tar burners were still soaked into the fabric of her old jeans and jackets. It never came out entirely in the wash.
The laundromat owners hadn’t repaired Kai’s machine over the past three months, so she’d been using one of the three that sat along the back wall. Each one was tethered into the ground by long screws, so the usual clamor of the wash had changed into more of a fleshy shuffle. Kai had elected to spend most of her time out by the curb, too nervous to see Charlie wrapped in cycling fins a second time.
To make matters worse, she wasn’t alone. The green flannel man had been creeping in later and later each week, never bringing any clothes but washing something just the same. Kai would occasionally peek back through the storefront window to observe his inhuman focus on the vending machine. The pallid blue light from inside the dispenser would cast a pale gradient over his skin, making him seem almost frostbitten. Like aliens from old movies, or zombies from new ones, the flannel man seemed to stand somewhere between life and death, reality and unreality. That is to say, she was happy to sit by the curb if it meant keeping a wall between the two of them.
Kai didn’t even realize that he’d stepped outside until his weight depressed the other end of the bench. The welcome bell sang its sad chime moments later as the door swung shut next to them. A sour mildew bled from him in the way all old things eventually bleed. He sighed hard and leaned back onto the spindles, sore from the process of sitting down. Kai shuffled herself to the corner of the bench with a few quick movements, hyperventilating through the menthol as she gauged the distance between herself, him, and the door.
“You don’t look like a smoker,” he said, gruff. “Smokers take their time.”
Kai paused mid-pull. She soundlessly removed the receding stub and snubbed it on the armrest.
“I’m not the type to sit around and enjoy things,” she said.
“Yeah. Suppose I’m not either,” he said, pulling a blister pack of gum from his pocket. He horse-chewed it, tried to blow a small bubble. It foamed like simmering paste on his lips.
“So, can I help you?” Kai asked, cursing her customer service tone.
“Nah. Just saw you lookin’ at me out here all the time. Figured you thought I was trying to steal something of yours, so I came out, too.”
“Oh, no. It’s nothing like that,” Kai said, feeling a fresh guilt. “It’s just—”
“The vending machine?”
“Yeah. The vending machine.”
“I know it’s strange of me. But I can’t figure out which detergent I need to use,” he said.
“So you’ve just been deciding this whole time?” Kai asked. “That’s what you’ve been doing all these months?”
“Yeah, that’s it. If you can believe it,” he said.
They sat quietly, letting the wind blow snow from the sidewalks onto the tops of their shoes. Kai fought back a fit of laughter and relief, but some of the air escaped her throat and went rocketing out of her nose as a snort. She could feel her face go beet red.
“Not very polite of you to laugh at a stranger,” he said, stoic.
“I know. I know. I’m sorry. Sometimes I just create a problem out of nothing.”
“I think everybody does that,” he said. “Find a nice shadow to chase.”
Kai settled herself and relit the smushed end of her menthol. She drew from it for a long while, letting the feeling coat her throat entirely before bellowing it all out. The feeling was sharp but nice. It came with a compounding calm—Kai could almost understand why Charlie used to love it so much.
“So,” The flannel man began. “Who do you got in there?”
“What?” Kai replied, not sure she heard him correctly.
“I asked who you’re washing right now.”
Kai scanned his face for any hints of sarcasm or cruelty—between the wrinkles and the mole on his cheek, his five o’clock shadow and the shaving scar under his nose. The flannel man’s eyes kept fixed on the street below like his question could have been meant for anybody but found its way to Kai first.
“My sister,” Kai said. “Just my sister.”
“Oh? And what detergent do you use for her?” he asked.
“Detergent?” Kai parroted.
“Powder? Neutral? Nontoxic? Those little pods they sell in bins?”
“Um…Tide, I think.” Kai said, newly concerned.
“And does it work?” he said, gravely.
“Work?”
“That’s what I said. Does it work?”
Kai could feel her heart beating faster. She wanted another menthol or to get lost in something noisy or to see her sister’s body anywhere but in a washtub.
“No,” Kai said. “It’s never worked. Not even a little bit.”
“I see,” the flannel man said, pity-nodding to himself.
He picked himself up from the bench and stumbled inside. Back to the vending machine and its cold, pastel glow. Kai closed her eyes for a while, unsure if she should scream or run or get up and ask him who he had in the wash. In the end she did none of those things, and when the timer shrieked from the far wall, she entered quietly and collected her things, still smelling bits of Charlie in the linens.
4.
Kai had spent her twenty-third birthday on a ladder re-installing the siding of her mother’s house. Silver storms had cracked and stripped the vinyl like dry skin over dozens of winters. Other planks had broken off entirely, collecting in detritus herds across the lawn. Stuffings of insulation stuck out of the gaps above the stoop. The house was wilting, and new petals dropped every hour. Kai ran a barbeque spatula along the loose grooves, and when it bumped a locking socket, she heaved and snapped the siding back into place. Her fingers grew raw beneath her gloves. Charlie sat on the bottom rung, looking out towards the street. She was hungover and had no interest in keeping the rails in place.
“You have arms,” Kai said, jiggling a ridge that wouldn’t fit. “You could use them.”
“Work smarter, not harder,” Charlie said.
“There’s nothing smart about sitting on a ladder.”
“It’s completely scientific. Like inertia.”
“You don’t make a very convincing scientist,” Kai said.
“Is my genius not apparent to you?”
“You want me to answer that?”
“Not really,” Charlie said. “I can pay for the surgery if you fall.”
“You talk like we don’t know how expensive hospitals are.”
Charlie burned through a Black Label in three seemingly impossible pulls. Kai stopped prying at the vinyl and waited as the smell wafted her way. She saw that look on Charlie again, that pasty sheen of nonchalance. Maybe she was mulling images of Kai through her mind in a patient bed, pale and delirious with medication or sepsis. Always close to sleep but never quite there. Or maybe she was thinking about something else entirely. Kai was quickly losing her read on Charlie, and every day brought about a new contortion of that nodding thing the two called truth. Kai scraped her wrist on a stud beneath the siding, and it just barely broke skin.
“I’m going in for an extra shift today. That should cover it,” Charlie finally joked. “Either that or we make splints out of the pieces of the house that are falling off.”
“Comforting,” Kai said.
“It should be. You’re my little sister after all, so you have no choice but to rely on me.”
“Then we really are fucked.”
To Kai’s surprise, Charlie did not laugh at that. She didn’t grow angry or shake the ladder or craft a standard, witty response. She said nothing at all and did nothing at all.
“Anyways,” Kai stumbled. “If you keep smoking those things the way you do, an accident is gonna happen in your lungs before anything happens to me on a ladder.”
“Say whatever you want, but it’s fun. And it makes you look mysterious. Life’s way too short not to have fun and look mysterious,” Charlie said.
“You and I have different ideas about fun.”
“You’ll be into it when you’re old like me,” Charlie said with snark. “Then we can look mysterious together.”
Just then a busted-up sedan pulled onto their street, rolling slowly like it was waiting for permission to come to a complete stop. Kai knew it was Bill. Not because she knew Bill owned a sedan but because Bill had no confidence. She had listened to his engine crawl around the block at odd hours of the night to pick up Charlie for six months now. The sound of his pistons had plagued her deepest dreams. This was the first time Kai had seen him in broad daylight, and she was decidedly unimpressed.
“Right on cue. There’s my ride,” Charlie said.
“Bill is giving you rides to work now?”
“Yeah. Turns out he’s a pretty great boss after all.”
“You aren’t even in uniform,” Kai said, more accusatory than she meant.
“I have a spare at the pub.”
“Charlie, wait,” Kai said. “Don’t you have something to tell me?”
Charlie seemed puzzled by the question. Her brows slid lower over her eyes to simulate deep thought.
“The ladder will be fine without me, I promise,” Charlie said.
“Wrong answer,” Kai said.
“I’m just kidding,” Charlie said, giggling. “Happy Birthday, Kai. I mean it.”
“Wrong answer,” Kai said.
For the first time in months, Kai identified a real emotion on her sister’s face, and it took the shape of shock. She slowly raised herself from her rung and inched down the grassy incline of their lawn. For a moment it looked like she might cry, but then that feeling was swallowed by something far larger than it.
“Then I guess I really don’t have anything to tell you,” Charlie said.
With Charlie inside, Bill sped away. Kai spent the rest of the day alone piecing together the flayed bits of their home. Strangely enough, the ladder never shook or toppled, slid or skidded. Charlie had dug little holes beneath the rails and, mercifully, it kept everything in place.
When she finally made it back inside, Kai found a box on her spot at the dinette. It was wrapped in some of the takeout menus their mother had collected and stuffed into the junk drawer over the years. The corner was signed with a little bundle of balloons, right above the name of a greasy spoon that went out of business a decade ago. Opening it, Kai found a box of menthol cigarettes and a note that said nothing but I love you.
5.
Kai started making her own detergents in the service sink in the basement. Her sleeves grew stained with baking soda and borax, her hands coated in sea salt and scented oils. A whirring bastard aroma of herbs and water-dissolved preservatives leaked from the narrow, dark space, turning the house’s foundations into potpourri. Kai found the experience to be strangely enlightening. No two combinations of ingredients interacted in the same way. Lavender perfume and bleach left a hazy grey liquid that only grew intense if scrubbed into something. Washing soda and lemon made her dizzy the way nicotine did. Open jars collected on the windowsills and storage shelves, by the stairs, and on the floor beneath the sink. Kai imagined herself as a mad scientist, stacking bergamot and mild alkali in bottles next to her monster’s head.
The next six months were nothing but trial and error. A new wash, a new ingredient, a new outcome. Kai peeked through the porthole from time to time, watching her hopes bubble up and smear across Charlie’s skin as she spun. Her golden hair had lost its sheen over the years, now looking something like straw through the dirty glass. Her skin had grown so terribly grey that the veins were easily visible beneath it. She looked older and deader than she had ever been.
Every once in a while, the flannel man would show up and run an empty machine. They never spoke to each other again, but it appeared to Kai that he had given up on detergents. When he fixated on the vending machine in the corner, he didn’t seem to be searching anymore, but instead dreaming deeply—like he was imagining another life behind the blue light, and he wanted nothing more than to step into it.
After her twenty-sixth failed trial, Kai sat in a crawlspace by the sink and lit up a menthol. The lack of progress was disheartening, and the hobby was expensive. Kai wondered how long she could continue experimenting on her sister, if she should have ever done it to begin with. Laurel, lime, nutmeg, fir, violet, hemp, hemlock—a thousand little pieces of the world had been ground up and dispensed over her drenched body like incense to a prayer. Kai wasn’t sure if she wanted Charlie to thank or forgive her for it, or if both of those things could be possible in the same breath.
Kai tapped the excess off the end of her cigarette with a few light flicks, watching the smoldering red and grey bits float down into the empty mason jars by her hip. The embers would go out slowly, still looking for something, anything, to catch on. Quite a bit of ash had piled in that jar over the past half year without Kai even noticing. She began to chuckle to herself, unsure how many hours she’d balled up in that exact spot under the sink. Then, in a moment of clarity, Kai felt something warm and wet run down her face. She wiped it away with her filthy sleeve, but then came another. Her vision grew blurry, and something unidentifiable caught in her throat.
For the first time since Charlie had died, she was crying over her.
6.
Two months before her death, Charlie stopped seeing Bill. Kai hadn’t been told about it, but the pub bags stopped coming, and the cricketing of his shitbox sedan no longer stalked the neighborhood in the murmurs before dawn. Charlie seemed downcast but not heartbroken. The two spent a lot of time in the little family room where their mother used to listen to the radio and can the vegetables she grew on the porch. Charlie would lounge on the couch and read Modern Salon or abandon any pretenses and stare at the ceiling for hours at a time. Kai had stopped asking Charlie questions about the job she no longer had or the classes she no longer took or the boy she no longer friended. There were more important things to handle, like learning the robust vocabulary required to read a dead woman’s mortgage agreement. Their mother’s life insurance was running thin, after all. Yet the house continued to take.
One morning, Kai came home from the party store to find that Charlie had picked clean the house of anything that belonged to their mother. She’d spent the whole night hauling everything downstairs—stuffing items onto storage shelves, into cinder block corners, atop the broken washing machine. A lifetime’s worth of pots, pans, lamps, paintings, heels, home phones, romance novels, toolboxes, and gardening gear sat in a single, amorphous mass. The impossible mountain of things leaned at odd angles, and an assortment of boxes had already crashed onto the floor. Shards of the mason jars their mother used for canning had splayed across the cement, and among them, Kai found a few drops of blood.
Charlie sat among the mess, curled up in a cubby beneath the service sink, applying pressure to her forehead with a pillowcase as if she’d been waiting there for Kai all night.
Kai guided Charlie to the upstairs bathroom. She dabbed at the wound with one of their mother’s old washcloths while Charlie squeezed a dry bar of soap like a stress ball. Kai reached for the rubbing alcohol and cotton swabs in the cabinet, which finally drew a nervous hiccup out of Charlie.
“You think it’s gonna hurt?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
“I can get you a tongue depressor to bite down on if you need it,” Kai said.
“Fantastic. You would’ve thrived during the Civil War.”
“And you definitely wouldn’t have,” Kai said, unscrewing the isopropyl cap.
Charlie sucked air through her teeth the entire time. It was the same when they were kids, and their mother had to coax Charlie into staying still as she cleaned the scrapes on her knees. Coaxing meant holding Charlie in place with an alligator grip and letting her kick her thighs, but their mother was nothing if not too stubborn to let go.
“Not bad?” Kai asked.
“A cakewalk,” Charlie said. “I’m really sorry for all this, Kai.”
Kai shuffled around the cabinets for a bandage that was roughly forehead-cut size. She could feel Charlie’s eyes on her, the air of melancholy suffocating. There were tiny bloody fingerprints on the vanity and stains on Kai’s work shirt. She would have to throw it out.
“You know we’re going to have to carry all that stuff back up, don’t you?” Kai asked.
“Do we? What’s wrong with keeping it down there?”
“You’re going to ask me that while I patch up your forehead?” Kai said, peeling at the bandage adhesive. “It’s dangerous. It’s stupid. Besides, we need a lot of it for the house.”
“We don’t need it. They’re just things.”
“Things we need, Charlie. You took the lamps out of the family room. I had to grope around in the dark to come find you.”
“Look, we can sell them. Or donate. Or something. I’ll buy the replacements myself.”
Charlie almost squirmed on her perch on the lip of the bathtub. Her usual neutral expression was fraying. Kai had bargained with Charlie over hundreds of things since they’d been alone in the house, yet it had never been more obvious—there was nothing left for her to bring to the table.
“With what?” Kai said.
“What?” Charlie replied.
“With. What. What are you going to do to buy those replacements? What are you going to use to get them? Is it coming from the oodles of cash you make at the pub? From all those juicy extra shifts? Is it coming from Bill? Is he going to pawn off that rusty bucket to help you?”
“Kai, I can handle it. I promise."
“That’s the last thing. The last thing I want from you right now is a promise.”
Charlie’s eyes glazed over, heavy with wet. Kai sighed and placed a patch over the cut. The gauze looked like a mounding anthill on the beach, a thousand grey specks marching in the maze beneath. Kai went to work cleaning the vanity, and Charlie stared at the dry blood on her palm.
“Charlie, I don’t understand you,” Kai said.
“I know you don’t,” Charlie said, almost at a whisper. “And I’m really sorry for that. But I never know what I’m supposed to do.”
She took a moment to compose herself.
“I just want it to get easier.”
Kai stuffed the first aid kit back under the sink. The new vulnerability in Charlie’s voice curled into her ears like bramble. It pricked at her brain. Easy lies and painful truths—everything its own kind of thorn. Kai found herself long-exhausted of learning from things that never get said. The cabinet door, loose on its hinges, squeaked loudly as it was shut.
“I’m sorry too,” Kai said. “But I don’t think it does.”
“Oh,” Charlie said.
“People just find their own way through it. The world’s full of givers and takers.”
“Givers and takers,” Charlie parroted. “And which do you see me as? A giver or a taker?”
Kai almost coughed. The air was hot tar in her throat.
“I think you’re both. But whatever you have to give was never meant for me.”
“You really think that?” Charlie asked.
“I really do,” Kai replied.
The house was as soundless as it ever had been and ever would be.
“Do you want anything from the party store tonight? I can get you a pack of the Black Labels if you want,” Kai finally said, eyes locked on a smudge of red on the faucet.
“Yeah,” Charlie said, a little choked up. “Sure. Two of them, if you can.”
They saw less and less of each other after that. Charlie began leaving the house for weeks at a time, and Kai did not ask her where she went. Kai started renting recipe books from the library to cook for herself, and every once in a while, when she sat down to read them in the family room, her mother’s photo album would be flipped open on the coffee table. Always on the same picture—a water-stained shot of Charlie as a toddler, sitting atop their mother’s shoulders in the driveway of the house. Both made faces that only looked like smiles in retrospect. It seemed like a happy memory. One separate from Kai.
Something that she could never understand by herself.
When Kai found Charlie in the bathtub two months later, the Black Labels she stole for her were littered on the tile, smoked past the filters. Kai was afraid to look over the rim, so she didn’t. Instead, she kneeled by the vanity, picking up the little yellow stubs one at a time, trying not to notice the dried puddles against the porcelain, the smell of iron in the air, or the saturation of stains on Charlie’s sweatshirt sleeve. Kai wanted to take the soiled fabric off her and wash the wounds again. To be the person she needed to be or at least wanted to be. Of course, she didn’t. An infinite distance separated the two, even in the same room. The faucet didn’t drip, the wind did not blow against the screen. Kai heard nothing and everything all at once.
There was no way she could do that for her now.
7.
Kai brought the jar of menthol ash to the laundromat, tucking it into the pocket of her hoodie. In the small hours of the morning, the incandescence from the ceiling was a pastel, misty orange, almost otherworldly within the grey surface of the city. Kai opened the front-loading door of a machine by the wall fan and gently settled her garments. Hand-me-downs from Charlie, her mother’s linens, Kai’s own jeans, all smelling of baking soda and mothballs—they stacked and folded together until no one piece was separate from the others. Then, with a shake, Kai shimmied the residue from the jar, layering a smoky blanket on top of it all.
Kai unplugged the CRT above the broken washer. Somebody in the soap opera had just returned from the dead as the screen cut to black, which Kai imagined might have killed them all over again. She toggled off the radio. She jammed dryer sheets in the coin returns. She found the switches for the wall fan and lights and palmed them down until the entire building accepted its dormancy and remained still. Then, with the twist of a knob and a gentle pull, Kai set her machine in motion, her arms wrapped around its hull to keep the contents from spilling out onto the floor.
Kai held her cheek to the top of the machine and felt its vibrations run down her neck and shoulders. It was too dark to see anything, so instead, she listened to the motion, the rumbling. Without airflow, the laundromat had become rainforest humid. It reminded Kai of the day after their mother’s funeral when she snagged a tub of ice cream from the party store freezer and snuck it out under her uniform. It melted during the walk home, the summer too dense and persistent for anything to remain un-liquified. Charlie was waiting on their front steps with a pair of spoons and a tired, yet thankful, smile. They situated the tub between their thighs and ate it like soup, the excess slush sometimes globbing between their fingers. Whenever it did, they would reach over and wipe it off on each other—their shirts, their shoes, their faces—until each was their own mess, and Charlie was laughing so hard that her face flushed velvet.
Even when Charlie was alive, this was one of Kai’s favorite memories.
When Kai opened her eyes again, the sky was cobalt blue, and spindled clouds could be counted like sticks. The drool on her chin confirmed that she’d fallen asleep. The red patches on her cheek confirmed that it had been for a long while. Her shoulders were stiff and her jaw hurt, yet, for the first time in months, Kai wouldn’t have called herself fatigued. It was as if the drumming tub had sung a lullaby that swallowed her up.
Kai took a knee on the tile, settling herself in front of the glass that separated her life as a sister and the life that lay beyond that. The ash had left a cakey layer of grey in the mounding dome—one more earthy façade covering Charlie’s body. Kai could feel her heart beating, but not quickly, just heavily. She knew what she might find inside or not find at all. Gripping the lip of the porthole with her fingers, long callused from vinyl siding and dirty dishes and jammed jar seals, Kai pried open the lid and faced the contents in the dim light of a new day.
There was sediment everywhere. In the filters, around the roof, on the towels, and in the pockets of the jeans. Things that were once yellow were grey, and what was already grey only greyed further. A damp, chimney stink stuck to everything it touched, Kai’s hand included, as she reached into the pile. Beneath a floral tablecloth, Kai caught hold of Charlie’s wrist. It was smooth, warm, thinner than she remembered. With a gentle pull, Kai revealed more and more of her. The buffalo-shaped birthmark on her shoulder, her narrow collarbones, the little scar on her forehead, and her hair, now so bright that it glimmered in the drain water.
Kai rested Charlie into her lap as she spilled out of the machine, feeling her weight finally settle in one place—every inch of her whole and glowing.