Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (31 page)

“Fuck,” Des whispered.

“Yeah. Fuck. So I yelled, ‘Daddy! Go get Mom I need her! Just tell her to come down here.’ ”

Des and Sarah sat in silence for a minute. Then Des remembered something, a fully formed memory from that time that usually was just a frustrating wash of sad grown-ups’ faces. “You weren’t at the wake. They had a table for us kids to eat dinner at together, and it was just me and the boys.”

“I just kept saying it, over and over, ‘Go get Mom, Daddy! I need her!’ and he never said anything back, and every time I said it I kind of remembered more and more. And then, by the time Mrs. Lynch knocked on the door, I had remembered that she was dead and that she couldn’t help me, not ever. That she wouldn’t even know I got my first period. Mrs. Lynch had her coat, and she put it around me and took me to her house. Gave me all the stuff. Then we sat on her sofa and watched
Days of Our Lives
while everyone else was at the church.”

Des grabbed a tissue from the tiny box they put in the hospital rooms and threw the box at Sarah. They spent a while blowing their noses and scrubbing their faces. “That’s a fucked-up story, Sarah.”

“No shit. Not the kind of menarche magic story I could’ve sent into
Sassy
magazine or some bullshit. ‘Hey girls! Getting my period freaked me out so much I forgot my mom was dead! Mazel tov!’ ”

“You and Lacey helped me with mine.”

“Oh my God. You were so weird about it, totally refusing to use a pad and making us talk you through a tampon for your first period. Jesus.”

“I wanted to be like you guys.”

Sarah looked over at her and smiled, and it was the first time in a while that it seemed liked Sarah was really smiling at her, was completely there, in the room with her. It gave her goose bumps and she rubbed her arms.

“It took like an
hour
. We had to figure out, like, ten thousand different definitions of the word
vagina
in the hope you’d figure out what part of your body we were talking about. Then you finally, finally got it in and swaggered out of the bathroom all sweaty, saying ‘I’m a woman now!’ ”

Des laughed. “I remember. I felt like a woman. You totally made me feel like a woman!”

And then Des and Sarah totally lost their shit. It was the best she’d felt with one of her siblings in forever.

Sarah wiped her eyes and blew her nose again. “What do you want now, Desbaby?”

“What do you mean?”

“That guy?”

“Hefin?”

“Yeah. Hefin. He’s into you. Like, game-changing into you.”

“Who?”

Des looked up and PJ was in the doorway, his hand over his eyes like he always did coming into Sarah’s hospital room after he walked in on a dressing change where he saw more of Sarah than he’d bargained for.

“I’m decent, PJ. Jesus.”

He put his hand down slowly, like he didn’t believe her. “Totally covered?”

“Yes. Don’t be such a prude.” Sarah yanked her blanket up higher.

“I’m not a prude. I’m categorically in favor of topless women, but my sister is not in that category.”

“Of women? Of toplessness?”

“Yes. All of those things.” He pulled open the dividing curtain and sprawled on the empty bed where Sarah’s roommate would be if she had one.

“Who’s into Des?”

“That guy.”

“The English guy? Evan?”

“Hefin,” Sarah and Des said together.

“And he’s from Wales,” Des said.

“And, like, really into Des. Really, really. He makes her stuff and I think he even promised to make me something, but I don’t totally remember because that was right before I almost died.”

“Sarah!” Des and PJ yelled together.

“What kind of stuff does he make you?”

“Taking notes, PJ?”

PJ glared at Sarah. “Just because you almost died doesn’t mean I have to haul ass over here after rehearsal with Peanut Butter M&M’S.”

“You have Peanut Butter M&M’S?” Sarah reached her hand out.

PJ reached into his jacket pocket. “You know these aren’t vegan, right?”

“I’m supposed to be getting more protein.”

He handed her the candy and tossed a Twix into Des’s lap. “Who’s your favorite brother?”

Des grinned. “I don’t have favorites.”

“It doesn’t bother me when you say that since I know it’s me. So what kinds of things does he make you?”

“He made me a dome.” Des carefully unwrapped her candy bar so she could fold the wrapper into an origami frog. As was her way.

“Huh.”

“Remember that movie with the artist who made things from sticks and rocks and leaves and stuff? You watched it with me.”

PJ moved to shift onto his side. “I had the most awesome dreams sleeping through that movie.”

“Shut up.”

“So he made you a dome?”

“A twig dome.”

Sarah poured another huge handful of M&M’S into her palm and shoved them in her mouth. “In her backyard. Also, he draws pictures of her. Like, compulsively.”

“You’re making him sound weird,” Des said.

“He
is
weird, Des. He makes domes and draws and barely talks and his name is
Hefin
.” Sarah shoved in another handful of M&M’S. “Oh! And he calls her
Des-tiny.
”

Sarah said her name like it was a little bit of a taunt and not, well, her
name
.

“He’s kind of old, right?” PJ asked.

“Jesus,
no
.”

“I don’t know. He seems kinda old.”

“Says the twenty-two-year-old in love with a much older woman who won’t give him the time of day.”

PJ threw his sunglasses at Sarah and she caught them, put them on, and just grinned.

Des closed her eyes to see if there was any patience inside her brain. Except, she realized she was actually kind of happy. She was actually kind of hanging out with her brother and sister and they were having fun. True, one of them was hospitalized and not allowed to sit up past a thirty-degree angle and had some kind of machine attached to her hip sucking blood and pus out of it, but she’d take it.

She’d take the candy and the jokes and the laughing and the tears, too. Just to have them back. Have them all here.

It wasn’t sitting around their dad’s kitchen table, but maybe it was the start of some kind of new kitchen table. Maybe they could do this. Maybe that was the silver lining of Sarah’s getting sick, that they would have to stick together and be there for each other and really do this. Figure out what their new kitchen table would be.

“He sent me those, you know.” Sarah pointed at the wide windowsill where there was a very arty arrangement of spring green and white hydrangeas.

“Those aren’t from Marnie?”

“Nope, your boy Hefin. Look at the card.”

Des reached back and slid the square kraft-paper card toward her. It was obviously handmade.

The flowers and this drawing will have to do until I can manage a thermos of proper tea for you. And chocolate biscuits, of course. Speedy recovery.
Hefin (Destiny’s friend)

There was a beautiful drawing of interlocking, many-toothed gears, with a bicycle chain worked through them.

Des watched the card go blurry.

“He’s a classy guy, Desbaby.”

“Yeah, he is.” She traced her finger over his note. He wrote with those precise typewritten letters that architects use.

“I will totally admit that the card and flowers made me want to do him. Just a little.”

“I appreciate your honesty. With that hip, I’m not worried about it.”

Sarah and PJ guffawed together, and Des smiled to herself. He made her a dome. He sent her sister flowers and a drawing.

She’d kept him updated over email the last week, she’d even seen the back of him from the corner of her eye at the library, but she was avoiding him. Had been avoiding him for a week.

Or, more like, avoiding how she pushed her keys into his hand and ignored how that wrinkle dove between his eyebrows and how he tried to touch her hand as she gave him the keys.

She’d been thinking of her mom a lot, lately. Wondering why her family hadn’t visited hers more, why she didn’t know her mom’s side of the family better. Someday, she wanted to ask PJ about them, because he had gotten to know them much better over the last two years with his professional trips to their city. Maybe she could go to Pittsburgh and watch her brother play, sometime. See her aunt and grandmother. Her three cousins. Two of them had kids of their own.

She’d realized, since she’d talked to Betty, that those were her mother’s people. She’d spent the last eighteen years wondering what her mom was like, and all this time there was a woman right next door who had coffee with her every morning, and two hours away an entire family who had known her mom their whole lives.

She could have known. Maybe she could have even understood more about herself if what Betty said was true, and she was like her mom. She’d just never imagined
that, looking at her mother’s pictures—dark-haired and pretty like her sister.

It was the classic Dorothy revelation—the shoes you were already wearing were the magic that would take you home. Except, instead of ruby slippers, Des had a cranky landlady ex-babysitter.

Her mom gave up her family for love, and Betty said she’d never regretted it.

Hefin gave up his family for love, and it stalled out almost ten years of his life.

Des felt like her brothers and sister might have started to gather together after the scatter this winter since their dad died and Sarah got hurt. But it was so new and tentative. It felt like every laugh they had together was a little tender.

She’d kept to short emails to Hefin, she’d
kept away
because she wasn’t used to not knowing what she wanted.

Or wanting two different things.

She wanted Hefin. She wanted back in his bed. She wanted to curl up in her dome with him. She wanted his tea. She wanted to crisscross their legs together and talk about their day. She wanted how he looked as he came, his brow wrinkled and his eyes closed and those eyelashes tangled in the corners of his eyes and his top lip swollen and wet.

It was also possible she wanted something from the world. Seeing how unlikely her dome looked in her little backyard had made her yearn, just a little, for other unlikely things.

Hearing his voice, that singsongy little burr made her yearn in the same way.

Sitting in this hospital room, eating candy with her family, made her yearn too, but for a different world. The one she’d thought she lost. The one that seemed like it had swirled away in a tornado and she would never get back to again.

“If he likes you, what’s the problem, Desbaby?” This from PJ, who had now helped himself to the bed’s pillows and adjustment controls. He looked like a curly-headed sheik draped over the luxurious comforts of a silken tent. All he needed were a few dancing girls feeding him dates.

“He’s going back to Wales,” Sarah said.

PJ exchanged a look with Sarah. “So go to Wales. It’s nice, actually. I mean, the people were. Most of what I saw was from the windows of our tour bus. We played St. David’s concert hall in Cardiff. That’s the capital.”

“He’s from Aberaeron, that’s on the coast too, but north.” She had spent an embarrassing amount of time studying the map of Wales.

“Okay. So go there.”

“I’ve known him barely a month, not even.”

“I knew I wanted to marry Lacey Radcliffe the first time she walked through our back door.”

“You were five years old. You don’t even remember the first time she walked through our back door.”

“She was wearing a green dress with ties on the shoulders and it was all wet because she had noticed that our outdoor water spigot on the house had broken and was spraying water everywhere instead of feeding it through the sprinkler. She had tried to turn it off, herself, and when she couldn’t she knocked on the back door. Mom got her a towel, and she sat down next to me at the kitchen table. I gave her my cookie. I’ll always give her my cookie.”

“Holy shit, PJ,” Sarah said.

PJ looked at Des. “Barely a month is plenty of time. If you know, you know.”

“Lacey lives in our neighborhood. Hefin lives in
Wales
. You can know and not be able to do anything about geography.”

“If Lacey moved to Wales, I’d figure out how to play cello in Wales. Fuck that, if she moved to the goddamned moon, I’d sit on a rocket and follow her. Play in the Martian orchestra.”

“The Martian orchestra would be on Mars,” Sarah said.

“Whatever.”

“I think you mean Lunar orchestra.”

“I said, Sarah, what. Ev. Er. Doesn’t matter. That’s where I’d go.”

“You’d go to the moon so she could continue
not
giving you the time of day on the moon?” Sarah asked.

“That’s right. Actually, I’d be kind of stoked if she moved to the moon because my odds might be better there.”

“Mmm. No.” Sarah shook her head.

“Astronauts,” Sarah and Des said almost together, and laughed. The kind of
synchrony she’d walk away from if she left home.

“Fucking astronauts.”

“Yeah, exactly,” said Sarah.

Des suddenly realized that PJ was here, with them, playing in the Lakefield Symphony, not because he was born and raised here and had family here but because
Lacey
was here.

He’d been the only one of them to go away to school, to the Boston Conservatory on a full-tuition scholarship, he’d graduated from high school two years early and made it in. There had been a story in the paper about him and everything.

When he had scrambled so much after he finished to be accepted into Lakefield Symphony’s program, she had really thought it was about his family.

She knew he’d had other offers, but didn’t even know where.

Her brother was completely fucking nuts.

Des handed Hefin’s card back to Sarah. “Well, for now, Wales might as well be the moon.”

“Okay,” Sarah said. “But don’t you have this hot Welshman at your disposal for the next month or so? Why the hell are you here? My bed bath is not going to be that exciting.”

“You’ll warn me before that happens, right?” PJ asked.

“I want to be here with you guys.”

“It’s boring here, and he gives you his cookies.”