Treasure Island!!!

I do about HORN-BLOWING ?”
    “Would you put the knife down now?” my mother asked me anxiously. “You’re mangling that pie.”
    “Let her mangle it, Mom,” Adrianna mocked. The intervention appeared to have robbed her of whatever stability she still possessed, for she repeated the statement hotly: “Let her mangle it! I’m getting sad for you now, I really am,” she told me, a lowering shadow over her face. “You get inspired by stories about sailing the high seas, but you’re like a dead goldfish, floating belly-up in the tank. It’s pathetic! Ever since you read the damn book, you’ve been gearing up to
do
something, right? Well,
do something
, sister! Take a risk! Go somewhere! Get a job! Try loving somebody—for real, I mean, not just house-playing! There are all kinds of ways to have a life, but you’re the only person I know who thinks she’s risking something when she gets out of bed and thinks, do I have toast or cereal? Cereal somebody else paid for! You know what?” She was raving now, wheeling about the room like a crazy person. “I could
forgive
your passivity, if you were a gentle, deluded, slacker kind of person. But I can’t forgive a deluded, slacker person who fucks with my relationship and kills an innocent bird!”
    I jumped up only to speak, but seeing me lunge, Adrianna panicked. In a deplorable display of cowardice, she scuttled away from me and pressed her back to the wall. I could tell by the workings of her face, and the girlish octave of her screams, that she thought I was going to stab her. The thought amazed me—and in my newfound confidence, stab her I did, pinning her hand against the wall, causing her to bleed copiously all over the Thomas Kinkade print we’d gotten my mother for her fiftieth birthday (“a cottage radiant with the light of love seems to bathe all of nature in an atmosphere of breathless serenity”).
    Adrianna, did I do something at last?
    I think I did. It was some time before I could remove the knife, partly out of squeamishness, and partly out of a sincere wish not to damage any nerve endings.
     

CHAPTER 25
     
    H ours have passed since the intervention. Who intervened with whom, you might well ask. Who indeed. Yes, who. But now I am a little deflated and the pen is heavy in my hands. Regrettably I no longer feel like stabbing anyone.
    I think I can skip over the particulars of the clean-up—predictable as they are. Adrianna bled against the Kinkade for a good five minutes, during which time Rena dry-heaved into a napkin and Lars called 9-1-1. At last, my parents wrapped the hand in a bath towel and hustled Adrianna off to the Emergency Room. The others fled, Nancy taking care to haul off the remainder of the pie. Alone in the house, I dropped into the chair where Lars had recently sat, and fancied I could smell his personal scent—something I’d always registered as a cross between Pears soap and tree resin. My hand, where I had gripped the knife, throbbed. The intervention had stirred feelings in me that I had been working hard not to feel these past few months. I was like a giant soup pot that had been left a long time to simmer on the stove, and now someone had come along and pried, with a wooden spoon, the burnt bits of onion and garlic, maybe even glutinous pasta, off the bottom. Those little crusty bits of food now floated to the top of the soup and they were, I believed, my feelings about Lars. Did I love him?
    I called his cell and, after the preliminary greetings (hi, how are you, is your sister able to move her hand), I asked him if he’d meant what he’d said.
    “Um, which time?” he asked.
    “About how you missed me and want to make me a key to the apartment.”
    There was a pause. “Well, after seeing you go after Adrianna with that boning knife, I think maybe I underestimated the depth of our problems.” Another pause, during which there rose, as if out of a deep trench, a stone wall that could not easily be breached. I had a flash of what I’d looked like with the knife in my hand—mentally speaking, an impressive piece of masonry.
    “But when I
said
it, I meant it,” Lars clarified. “I mean, I wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble if I hadn’t thought—but then, you know—you picked up the knife. And, well. It’s probably my fault for being over-hasty in my fantasies about reconciliation. Because, um . . . things change.”
    “Do they?” I said ironically, although at that point I wasn’t in full