After thirty-two years of being the successful sibling, I'd grown used to it. I should have been happy for my brother. He'd worked hard his entire life. He deserved a win. But winning was my thing and, after growing accustomed to the spotlight, his shadow falling over me left me uncomfortably cold and dark. I swallowed my resentment. I told myself to stop acting like a child. I forced myself to play the role of a grown woman, overcome by happiness.

Focusing a critical eye on my own image in the corner of the computer screen, I honed in on every detail. I pulled my cheeks upward into a wide grin that showcased nearly ten thousand dollars' worth of dental work. I let my eyes scrunch up, allowing the fine lines to appear at the outer corners of my eyes (violet today, thanks to the new four-hundred-dollar corrective lenses I'd recently purchased), but fine lines showed the difference between true joy and fake smiles. I raked my manicured nails through my jet-black hair so it fell back down on either side of my face in glossy cascades that reminded me of fluttering raven's wings.

"Jake, that's amazing! A Oscar nomination? That's," I shrugged and held one hand up as if waiting for the right word to fall from heaven and land in my upturned palm. "That's absolutely amazing."

Beneath the untidy bush of his mouse-brown whiskers, a blush appeared. "I was a little nervous to tell you."

"Nervous? Why?"

"I don't know." His dull eyes darted down and to the left.

"You earned this. You've turned into a workaholic. Your family's barely seen you for over two years."

He grinned at me. "Takes one to know one."

"Yeah, well, I haven't been nominated for an Oscar, yet so you'll have to let me in on the secret." I watched my performance in the video window. Very believable, if I may say so, myself.

With his large, calloused hand, he waved my words away. "Anyway, are you coming for Dad's birthday?"

I ran my fingers through my hair again, not acting this time. Buying myself a moment to organize my thoughts. In nine days, my father would turn seventy-years-old. He looked and acted like a man approaching his hundredth birthday. He'd been cruel my whole life. Each year made him meaner, but I'd made a promise.

"I'll be there. I'll bring the whiskey."

"I'll bring the smokes." Jake's smile looked sad and tired and utterly joyless.

We had a duty to fulfill. Neither of us wanted to face the old man, but we would get through it together.

Aiden didn't understand. "There is no law that says you are required to give space to toxic people. Cut him out." He pretended to slice the tip of my nose off with his fingers.

I turned in his arms, so my left hand lay on his bare hip. "That kind of thing sounds great in theory, but he's my father."

"If your father was Hitler, would you go to his birthday dinner?"

"Maybe." Laying naked in Aiden's arms, still covered in a sheen of sweat from making love, talking about my father felt dirty and shameful. I pushed away and scooted to my own cold, unused side of the enormous mattress where I found a soft blanket that we had kicked away. I covered my body. "It's very easy to judge people and speak in theoretics and hypotheticals, but he's my dad. Maybe Hitler's kids hated him, but they never stopped being his kids. No matter what, on some level, they loved him, too. No matter what. Family is like that. It's not a choice we get to make."

The swirled lines in the creamy ceiling paint reminded me of a van Gogh. Maybe I could jump on the mattress like a little girl and leap into that starry sky and fly away into the sweet, white oblivion.

Aiden's warm hand found me, pressed against my stomach, anchored me to the bed. "Do you want me to come with you?"

"No."

"I'll be a buffer, run interference." His hand climbed the rungs of my rib cage, inching toward my right breast. "I'll comfort you in moments of distress."

When I turned my head, my hair against the soft pillow made a sound like sand ground underfoot. Our eyes met, and I saw his love for me. He wore his feelings on his face in a way that was so natural and obvious it frightened me. How could anyone live life with their emotions so raw and exposed, out there for all the world to see?

"My father would eat you alive and spit out your bones just to make me suffer."

"Do you think I'm not strong enough to handle him?"

"No one is strong enough to handle him. He's the strongest man who's ever lived."

Aiden scoffed. "Do you really believe that?"

I returned my attention to the sweeping circles that hovered above us. Oh, yes. I believed it. My father was a force that could never be escaped, a black hole in the center of my own personal universe. I couldn't expect Aiden to understand. I couldn't expect anyone to understand, except maybe Jake. Jake was the oldest. He'd been under my father's rule longer than me. Jake was the only person in the universe who knew what I'd gone through.

No matter how fond of Aiden I might be, he could never know me the way Jake knew me, and he could never help me.

Jake and I couldn't be helped. We could only find a way to survive until the black hole collapsed in on itself.

~*~

Anyone in their right mind would have taken a plane to cross the country for a birthday dinner. I drove. Aiden accused me of insanity. Maybe he was right.

"I like the idea of having my car with me."

"You could rent one at the Detroit airport. People do that, you know."

"But it's not my car."

"What's so special about your car?"

"It's mine." I worked for the money. I chose the make, model, and color. I picked out floor mats and seat covers with purple iridescent butterflies and sparkling green frogs worked into the charcoal backgrounds. The scent of clove incense, purchased from my favorite purveyor of all things New Age and Witchy, permeated the surfaces.

Tuesday morning, well before sunrise, Aiden got up to "make breakfast." He served me a cup of fruit with a few tablespoons of plain yogurt and a sprinkling of granola. It was what I had for breakfast every day. Next to my bowl, he plopped down a trucker-size insulated cup. "Sugary coffee. I know how you feel about sugar, but it'll keep you going. Humor me, this once."

When he kissed me, he tasted of mint toothpaste and he smelled like last night's aftershave and clean sweat. He smelled like home.

The coffee carried me for seventeen hours. After navigating the last sixty miles into Denver through a snowstorm in the dark, I gave in and turned my Audi into the parking lot of a brightly lit, freshly painted hotel that looked like every other brightly lit, freshly painted hotel at every other exit on the highway. A disinterested night clerk swiped my credit card, failed to ask for ID, and gave me a key to a room on the second floor. I stripped to a tee-shirt and underwear, crawled between sheets that stunk of disinfectant and lay flat on my back. With the lights off and blackout curtains hiding the glare of streetlamps outside, the hotel ceiling held no swirling mysteries. As I drew closer to my father, there hovered above me nothing but an endless darkness.

Wednesday I got all the way to Chicago. From my hotel window, I watched the storm-driven waves of lake Michigan race toward land, only to be sucked out to sea again. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn't escape the fact that they were part of something bigger than themselves.

I strained my eyes toward the eastern shore, the Michigan coastline. Michigan, where only three hundred forty two miles separate Hell from Paradise. My father's house was much closer to Hell.

Once a sunny yellow color, years of unchecked wind, rain, and snow had stripped the house's paint, leaving a battered gray two-story structure squatting in the middle of winter-barren acres of land. Snow drifted against an orange plastic barrier that ran alongside the driveway—the only spot of color on a landscape even more bleak than I remembered. In summer, corn and beans and tomatoes would sprout up on every side. The trees along the distant riverbank would burst into bright green life. Wildflowers filled the ditches and, at night, fireflies lent their magic to the perfumed sky, but winter stripped away all signs of life. In winter, those who lacked a firm hold on hope killed themselves slowly with unhealthy foods and drink or, not rarely, by more expedient means.

My father's 1987 Ford pickup sat in a pool of half-frozen sludge. A brand new Chevy half-ton was parked next to it. Jake got here first. I pulled in next to him and killed the engine. Checking my reflection in the visor mirror, I doubted everything. Why had I come? Why had I driven? Why had I left Aiden behind? Maybe I shouldn't have put on full makeup that morning. In this place, the colors shone too bright, gaudy as a circus clown. My crimson lipstick looked like a bloody gash across my lower face. I searched for a napkin in the glove box, blotted my lips against the pulpy brown paper. It was high-quality stuff that barely left a mark. This is who you are now, I told the starlet gazing at me from the mirror with wide unnaturally colored eyes. Own it.

On the freezing trek from the car to the side door—no one uses front doors in the country, least of all family—rock salt crunched under my feet. In summer, the sounds of birdsong and frogs, rustling leaves and rushing water would blend in symphonic glory. In winter, only the frigid wind and humans too stupid to go somewhere else dared make themselves known.

With my gloved hand, I rapped twice on the century-old door and let myself into my father's house.