'What We Lost in the Tide' by Emily Roth

“We’ll keep her comfortable,” the nurse says.

I grip my sister’s limp hand, the diagnosis looping through my mind. Cirrhosis. Toxins in her bloodstream. Brain damage.  

As I study her face, slack and yellow-tinged, the decades blur together, indistinguishable.

When we were five and six, a hurricane ravaged our town, churning our house into a pile of bloated wood. Sometimes I dream I’m the house, frozen in place as the waves beat into me, aware that I’m doomed to crumble.  

We first tasted alcohol at a party by the pier, sipping from the same Solo cup. Later, when we struggled to crawl back through our bedroom window, she giggled and I shushed her, but my stomach hurt from laughing.  

We couldn’t feel the tide swirling around us yet. We wouldn’t until it had long dragged us both away from ourselves. Only I found my way back.  

I look at my sister and see every time we’ve splashed in the ocean together. I see a little girl hugging a waterlogged doll in the wreckage of our house. I see her in the front row the night I earned my twenty-year chip, her eyes shining.  

I hold her hand like I used to when Mom sang to us at bedtime, before we knew the smell on Mom’s breath was whiskey, until, side by side, we floated off to sleep.  

Outside the hospital window, I hear the drumbeat of palmetto leaves and, distantly, the humming of the sea. I think of my dream. The pain of the waves, the knowledge that the end is coming.