“No. I don’t want to see you.” She goes off on a whispered tirade at this point that is impossible for me to understand, but it ends with two words weighted with the heaviness of the earth as it depresses and curves space-time around it: “A divorce?”

There is a long pause after that.

“No, of course not,” she says at last. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” And then, “Of course I do.”

I can almost feel her words crackling in the air.

Elizabeth and Donovan have always had a tumultuous relationship. Perhaps all of her relationships are like that. When they first started dating, they passed smoldering looks to each other; they couldn’t get enough, ravenous for the other, but they bickered, too. When I stayed with them, they could go from a terse conversation out the sides of their mouths while watching TV on separate couches to a full-blown screaming match to a half-weeping, half-laughing reconciliation in an hour or less, whereupon they might snuggle back together on the couch to finish watching whatever was on TV. It was strange for me to behold that riot of emotions; I could not imagine behaving in such a way with another person. The more riled up I get, the quieter I become, and the more insistently someone asks me what is the matter, the more cagey my response. But Elizabeth is a tidal wave, a whirlwind that pulls up pieces of the house around her until whatever has had the misfortune of her focused wrath has no choice but to explode in equal measure.

Curiously, when they were not together, Donovan seemed remarkably more at ease. There were days when Elizabeth would don her fashionable pencil skirt and heels to go into the office while Don, a coder, elected to work from home in his sweat pants, and if it was an off day for me, then I would stealthily observe how quiet and calm the house became, how it settled into its foundation with ease, like a sigh as one slips into a warm bath, how readily Donovan might toss me a casual joke. I thought that if love was such an unpredictable thing, then perhaps I didn’t want any of it after all.

But I did love Elizabeth, even if the love of sisters, too, could be wild and tumultuous.

When we were children, I made Elizabeth a necklace of arrowheads I had dug out of the mire, which I presented to her on her fourteenth birthday as if it were gold and diamonds and not a jagged mouth of sharp rock strung together on twine. She could have tossed it back at me like the junk it was, or thrown it away, or even simply draped it over the snarl of necklaces that adorned the top of her dresser and left it there to tangle, but instead she put it around her neck and wore it almost every day that year. It was one of those kind things she had a habit of doing that made me love her again.