How We Started (7 page)

Scorching heat filled the city like milk in a bowl—it rose up from the sidewalks, the pavement, and the park's walkways, benches, dry grass, and lumpy boulders of New York gneiss and Manhattan schist.

“Crime Spree” came on, and we liked the song's cockiness, the attitude: two sisters against the hard world, behaving badly in ways we would only sing about. They'd lost each other somehow, an idea unthinkable to us.

She kissed the lawyers on Folly Beach

I scammed on Azalea Square

Northern good girls on a southern crime spree

On the road with nothing to wear.

Sometimes the world is a crazy place,

It gives and it takes right away,

If I could trade everything just for a space

In her life, well I'd do that today.

We had to leave home but we didn't know why

We each had a stone in our shoe

We spoke the same language no one else could hear

Big sister, you know I miss you.

Kids came around with black garbage bags full of ice and Heinekens, and Anne bought six beers for us.

We were underage, but she was my older sister, and no one cared anyway. We both liked to get numb. We lay on our stomachs, bikini tops untied to drive a group of Frisbee-playing Trinity School boys crazy, and she told me the tallest was named Park, and she kind of liked him.

Sitting in jail, I wished for “Crime Spree” to be a sign. I felt the spirits of our young selves fly down from the heaven where wisps of brave, radiant teenage girls go once their dull, inducted middle-aged replacements take over.

I had to believe that the ghosts of the young, wild Burke sisters had taken over the guards' favorite radio station just long enough to blast twelve seconds of that song to give me strength and remind me of my sister: not the Anne now, but the Anne then. To remind me of why I'd done this for her.

I want the song and memory to drive away the knowledge that I'd completed Frederik's job for him, convinced Anne to cut me from her and the children's lives for good. The spider silk of today's reconnection would break. We would become reestranged, only in a much worse way. The song is in my head, but so is a map of the future.

I tried to kill her husband. My lawyer will say I was defending my sister, but Frederik will convince Anne at least to pretend to see it his way. He will get her to deny my story and show the court my letters and e-mails, proof of my feelings about him. I will serve time in jail, no matter how good Mary McLaughlin—a friend of Sarah's—might be. Anne will never visit or write to me. Her kids will grow up and I'll never know them.

A man who fears and despises me will write my future.

Also by Luanne Rice

How We Started

Little Night

The Silver Boat

Deep Blue Sea for Beginners

The Geometry of Sisters

Last Kiss

What Matters Most

The Edge of Winter

Sandcastles

Summer of Roses

Summer's Child

Silver Bells

Beach Girls

Dance with Me

The Perfect Summer

The Secret Hour

True Blue

Safe Harbor

Summer Light

Firefly Beach

Dream Country

Follow the Stars Home

Cloud Nine

Home Fires

Blue Moon

Secrets of Paris

Stone Heart

Crazy in Love

Angels All Over Town