Phoenix

The chair beneath Sarah Marino squeaked with age as she lowered herself onto it. In front of her, on the warm wooded second-hand table they had bought at Goodwill, were three plates filled with the warm food she had made.

Being lazy and seventeen, she had only learned how to make a few dishes (omelets, spaghetti, stir fry), and so the pile of eggs and broccoli on the plates had already worn her taste buds of any flavor they could possibly have had. She was waiting for her father and little brother to come out of their rooms, though she didn't particularly care if her father never came out.

Bret Marino was a good father, he had raised his two kids as best he could on his own, and he had tried to love them with the love of a mother. But he was quiet and scared, and they were growing into adults that he felt would one day surpass him.

When Mark Marino trudged out of his dim room, he saw Sarah sitting alone at the table, the three plates in front of her slowly losing their warmth. He was tired, but not too tired to bypass teasing his sister.

"Eggs, again, Sare? Are we sure this level of egg consumption isn't lethal in some way?" She turned to look at him, she was tired, too, but she was smiling. He slid into the seat next to her.

"Maybe if you hadn't made eggs for breakfast, this wouldn't be a concern." She teased back, and they both picked up their forks, happily ignoring their father's absence.

"Eggs are a normal breakfast meal. Dinner is meant for pasta or pizza or some form of bread."

They saw their father out of the corner of their eye and both fell silent, smiles slipping from their faces.

"Don't berate your sister's lovely meal. You should be grateful she took time out of her day to make you this." He was a big man, with a raspy, low voice. He was quiet, but he still demanded attention when he spoke. His voice had an unidentifiable tone to it this evening, as if he was holding something in.

"Right." Mark said, that twang of teenage sarcasm edged in his voice. He sent Sarah a knowing glance. Bret was unable to discern between sibling bonding and sibling bickering. He would shut down any form of teasing, no exceptions.

He thumped into the chair at the head of the table, a wall of a man, an unavoidable obstruction to the siblings' conversation. Sarah lightly got off her chair and glided to the radio next to the sink.

"I'll just turn this on." She said carefully. Usually, she would have turned it on while she was making dinner, and the soft ballad-like songs she was partial to would lift and sway tediously around the three family members, careful to fill in all the silences that opened up between them. But for once she was willing to cook among the sounds of frying eggs and scraping spatulas, sharp knife puttering against soft wood, and now the decision had given her a brief, but duly appreciated, escape. She slipped back into her chair, Mark's preset eighties music following her with an air of duty.

The family ate carefully, cutting and slicing into the egg with almost surgical precision, making the effort for the sole purpose of avoiding any attention from the other.

Under the table, Mark tapped Sarah's shin with his socked foot. "Gross." Sarah said, as it was her immediate reaction whenever Mark's feet penetrated her field of awareness.

Everyone at the table was now alert, Sarah looking at Mark, slightly irritated, Bret looking at Sarah, slightly concerned and Mark's eyes flicked pointedly from Sarah to the vague direction of the garage.

Earlier he had begged her to ask to borrow Bret's work car, something he usually only gave access to on Sundays - his day off - and even then it was a hard 'maybe.'

Sarah cleared her throat, not fully sure why she was doing Mark this favor, and said, "Are you using your car tomorrow night?" There was no point in sweet-talking, Bret hated chatter. He raised one bushy eyebrow, leaning back in his chair.

"Who's asking?" He looked towards Mark, who was purposefully not looking up, and aggressively piercing a soggy piece of broccoli with his fork. He was the one who was usually asking t borrow the car. He was always immediately turned down.

"I am." Sarah said forcefully. He turned to look at her, his one eyebrow still arched, as if asking 'really?' "I am." She said again, more defensively and in her whining tone. Bret was silent. "Mark and I were just looking to go for a drive."

"Where." Sarah looked to Mark.

"Um, we were thinking..." He looked down at his plate. "Phoenix?" It was a ridiculous ask. They only went to Phoenix on New Year's to look at the annual Zoo Lights. It was three hours away. Sarah closed her eyes in regret. If she had known where he planned to go, she wouldn't have even bothered.

"Phoenix?" He sounded less angry than she expected. He sounded almost... sad. "Why on earth would you want to go to Phoenix?"

"Well, Wilson's throwing a summer pool party at his Grandpa's place, and I was hoping I could go." Wilson was a charming kid Mark had met at the beginning of summer, and Sarah sincerely doubted the pool party would be anything close to a rager. "And since it's Friday, you won't need the truck in the morning, so I can just sleepover."

"And where does Sarah fit into all this?" His voice was taking a tone Sarah didn't recognize. It made her shrink back into her seat.

"...She doesn't?"

"So why was she asking, then?" Mark also seemed to slip down into his chair.

"Because you always say yes when you think it’s ‘sibling bonding’." Mark's voice was pitiful.

Bret stood up suddenly, the water cups on the table sloshing dangerously at the movement.

"You know what?" His face was hard, his eyes set on his two children. "You both can go to Phoenix. Visit your mother, like I know you've always wanted to." Mark and Sarah were frozen, barely able to comprehend the words being thrown at them. "As a matter a fact, you can leave in the morning. I'll take a day off, all for your special trip." When he was done, it was quiet. The eighties music played timidly in the background.

"Dad?" Mark asked quietly, as if afraid of his own voice. Bret had never risen his voice like this before. "What's going on?" Sarah stood up.

"You know where Mom lives? She asked it with urgency, staring her father directly in the eyes, not daring to look away. Her heart was racing.

Bret looked down, suddenly ashamed of himself. "I'll send you the address tonight."

Mark scrambled up out of his chair, looking frantically between his father and sister. "Wait, you're serious? We're actually going on this trip?" Bret turned away, meaning to head to his room. He probably wouldn't be seen again for the rest of the night. "Wait!" Mark called out. He sounded desperate. "I don't even want to go to Mom's." Sarah glared sharply at him. "I've never met her, you don't even tell stories about her. I was honestly under the impression that she died, or something. And now, out of the blue, we're going for a friendly visit to her house in Phoenix?! That's only two hours away from here! What the fuck?" Bret was a silhouette against the yellow lights in the hallway, his figure had always been big and sturdy, but tonight he was crumbling. It was as if big pieces of himself had fallen away from him. Everything that made Bret Sarah's father had disappeared. She collapsed into her chair.

If he had been withholding this from her - if he had been keeping her away from her mom, keeping her motherless, all these years - Sarah didn't know if she could ever forgive him. She felt as if her insides had been turned to ice, as if he had taken his big, strong hands and shattered her glass intestines.

"It's true." His voice was finally back to what was familiar. Soft, quiet, gentle. Scared. "You'll go tomorrow. Stay there for a week." He turned, his face seemed drooping with grief, and he looked at Mark with watering eyes. "Please, stay there for a week, at least." He turned away again, this time disappearing into his dark room. He closed the door before he turned on the lights, letting himself soak in the darkness for a moment.

Mark was frozen, he had no idea what he was supposed to be saying right now, let alone think. Sarah pushed her chair in aggressively.

“I can’t believe this,” she hissed under her breath. She stormed out of the room, hair flickering behind her.

Sarah and Mark were in their father’s work truck, white and beige paint crusting the carpet in the back and a layer of dirt covering the ground of the passenger and driver seat. Mark was driving, Sarah was leaning her head against the window, watching the commuter traffic trudge by in the other lane. Mark glanced at her nervously.

“Can you believe we have a mom in Phoenix?” He was cautiously hopeful.

“What I can’t believe is that our father has been lying about her all this time. We could’ve had weekend trips, and Christmas visits, and…” Her eyes were beginning to tear up. “And I just don’t understand why he would do something like this to us.”

Mark fidgeted at the wheel. “Everything will be okay, Sare. We’re going to meet our mom! What else could you possibly ask for.”

Sarah smiled, watching the landscape blur together in a beautiful watercolor painting of dead trees and thick dust. “A lot of things, Mark.” She said, half-sarcastically.

The two siblings were now driving up through the wide city of Phoenix. They had never been in this part of the city before. It was gray and dirty, and elicited a feeling of uneasiness; so many people and street corners that were alien to them.

The directions their father sent them led them to a parking garage underneath a tall building filled with businesses, apartments and penthouses. It was suffocating underneath it, the warm air filled with an unfamiliar and sour musty smell. It felt wrong leaving the work truck there, giving them the sensation that they were leaving it alone and unguarded in this foreign and oppressive environment. They held their bags close to themselves, feeling naked and exposed without the comfort of the truck.

They found themselves walking through a lobby on the third floor with shining tiles laid before them on the ground and men in suits and women in pencil skirts lining up behind desks and computers or guarding the doors. Sarah looked down at her and Mark’s beaten converse, feeling like they might get in trouble for treading on such beautiful tile without the polished shoes to match. A desk clerk with a serious and cold smile called a room far above them, their mother, and directed them to a smaller elevator with less buttons. They pressed button thirty-two, the third tallest floor.

When the doors slid open, a smooth hallway extended in front of them, with only three doors on each side, spread far apart from each other. They knocked on the door they were supposed to knock on - their mother’s door - and waited for it to open.

A beautiful woman, a woman undoubtedly related to Mark and Sarah with thick, curly black hair like Mark and bright, round eyes like Sarah. She was wearing grey, fitted dress pants and a flowing black blouse. Her feet were bare against the cold wood floor that stretched behind her until it met a window that encompassed the entire back wall. The city was nestled beneath them.

They had dropped their bags in a guest room that held nothing more than a queen-sized bed, two bedside tables, and a lavish rug. They were ushered to the kitchen table, and sat uncomfortably in stiff plastic chairs that Sarah suspected were better served as decoration rather than as actual chairs. For some reason, she felt disgusted with it all, and she looked at her mother she wasn’t filled with the warmth she thought she would be. Sarah felt more like she was meeting with a stranger, rather than a mother - her mother. She avoided looking into the woman’s eyes.

“I’m so excited to finally see you guys again.” She said happily, with an accent Sarah couldn’t place. Mark shot Sarah a look, and when the woman turned back toward the stove he mouthed ‘again’ in question. Sarah shook her head, silently pleading with Mark not to ask, to just shut up and eat, and then they both could get back into their father’s work truck and leave this strange palace.

“What do you mean by ‘again?’” He asked, eyes ferociously curious. The woman turned, looking at them with wide eyes and a parted mouth.

“Well, I don’t mean to upset you stray kittens,” Sarah bristled, tugging at the sleeves of her worn sweater consciously, “but I did give birth to you both. Raised you up until you could walk.”

“And then you left.” Mark said guardedly, his voice flat and blunt. The woman seemed unbothered, tying her thick hair into a low ponytail while watching the eggs with scrutiny.

“I did.”

“Why?” Mark asked, and Sarah didn’t dare look at his face, afraid of the emotion that lay there.

She pulled the eggs off the stove, spilling them onto a platter dish, haphazardly throwing on salt and pepper. She set it on the table and sat across from them. When neither of them moved to fill her plates, she looked embarrassed.

“Oops,” she said sheepishly, “I forgot to ask if you guys had any allergies.”

“We don’t.” Sarah said flatly. Mark and Sarah continued to sit still, watching the woman, with identical expressions. The woman sighed and leaned back. She held a manicured hand up to her face and had the expanse of her house behind her. Despite the circumstance, she seemed strangely bonafide and beautiful.

“I can’t stop you from letting the eggs get cold, I assume.” The siblings didn’t respond. “I will tell you why.” She said finally, looking seriously at Mark. “But I did not invite you into my home to be judged, so I expect you to be courteous.” Sarah wanted to scream until she deflated. This place should be their home too. It shouldn’t be a place that they needed an invitation to enter. It should be like a second home - their mother’s home.

“I left because your father did not consider my needs. Bret was a kind mind, but he was not ambitious. I could not live in that small home with dust on the shelves and dishes in the sink. I needed a bedroom thirty-floors up, the city at my feet.” She gestured proudly at the home she had won. Sarah was uncomfortable with this woman referring to her father by the first name; it was disrespectful. 

“Why didn’t Dad let us visit? Why didn’t he let us know you’re alive?” Sarah asks against her better judgment. She expected a cool answer, a deflection of responsibility, but she still wanted to hear it from the source.

“I asked him not to talk about me.” She said, and Sarah must’ve drained white.

“Why?” Mark asked again, desperate and shaking.

“Because then you would’ve wanted to visit. And a home like this is not earned through distractions.”

“Distractions?” Mark asked, voice cracking, he was looking at the woman through blurred vision. Sarah was looking at nothing, the conversation reached her through a haze. When the woman offered no comforting words, Mark slammed his hands against the table, springing to his feet. Sarah was startled to attention. His cheeks were wet. Her baby brother’s cheeks were wet with tears. Anger simmered on her skin.

“You… I can’t believe you…” He struggled out through clenched teeth. Sarah sent the woman a devastating glare, and tenderly closed her fingers around Mark’s wrist, silently tugging them to the guest bedroom, but making sure to slam the door closed. Mark sat down hard on the bed, the mattress sinking around him. He buried his face in his hands.

“Text Wilson that you can’t go to his party.” Mark looked up with red eyes and quivering lips.”

“No shit, Sarah.”

“Grab your bag, we’re going home.” He didn’t ask any questions, moving numbly. They left the house without a goodbye, descended down through the building, finally arriving in front of the work truck. Sarah got into the driver's seat this time, Mark quietly accepting the passenger seat. Not a word was exchanged the whole way back and Sarah could’ve fainted from the relief upon finally hearing their garage door squeak open. 

Sarah raced into the kitchen, leaving Mark and their bags in the garage, scanning wildly about the room. Her father appeared in the doorway, confused and tired in his pajamas still.

Sarah fell into his arms, his hug infinitely familiar and comfortable. He hugged her back without question. Tears sprang into her eyes, and wet her father’s gray pajama shirt.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped, unsure of what to say and how to say it. Words tumbled from her mouth, “thank you, I love you, I’m sorry.” He only squeezed her tighter.