The Orphan Sister (26 page)

“What are you doing here?” I asked, turning to Eli, those unmistakable laugh lines, the long, strong fingers.

“What do you think?” he asked, kissing me like a starving man.

“I have no idea.” Then I looked around—anyone could be here, my sister, my mother, my wayward father. Was I making a huge mistake kissing my best friend? It felt blissful, better than anything. Better than horseback riding, chocolate, better than kissing Cameron, even if my memory of kissing Cameron was the mark against which I measured all kisses, so impossibly good nothing could match it, or I didn’t want anything to match it. Who remembered kisses all that well? Who knew what it felt like when you were no longer doing it? Like a kid, kissing a pillow, imagining the give of another mouth.

“Um,” I said, retreating, sitting with my arms crossed as if I wanted distance between us. I was inexplicably nervous. This was
what my body wanted—this was what I wanted. But could I trust him with this the way I could trust him with friendship?

“They hired someone else for the shelter job,” I said. “I can’t believe it. Of course, he can type, and I can’t, not really. I guess it’s Starbucks for me this summer. Which is fine, really, I—”

“You got in, didn’t you,” he said, looking concerned.

“Yes. Which means I’m not staying here. Not that I ever planned to stay here—”

“Congratulations, Clem.” He leaned over my folded arms and kissed me.

“Thanks.”

“Why so miserable?”

“Ah, the lovebirds,” said my father. That man, for whom we’d searched morgues and hospitals, who’d made us phone his lawyer to inform him of rapidly impending grandfatherhood—not his first time, it turned out—was now ubiquitous. Like a mosquito in August. I wanted him to stop popping up everywhere, commenting. I wanted him just to go away again so I could decide how I felt about him, whether I even liked the man.

“Dr. Lord!” Eli shook my father’s hand as if he hadn’t just seen him this morning in my little house. “So. Adam. He’s gorgeous, the little guy.”

“I hope
you’re
not planning anything,” said my father, still gripping Eli’s hand. “I’ve had enough additions to the family for a while.”

“Dad!” I said, pulling Eli away from him, an unnecessary rescue.

“I’ve paid for enough weddings for a while,” he continued.
Cameron’s face came to me, Dad telling us not to get married. I wondered if he even remembered.

“Hm,” said Eli. “I hear that fourth daughter was a surprise to some of the other people in your family.”

My father’s face turned pink. Blotched, the way mine does. He hated being challenged in any way, even now. I noticed how deep the circles were beneath his eyes, how his hair was so thin you could see the freckles on his scalp. His big hands had age spots.

“Touché,” said my father. “Actually, she was the first daughter. But I meant what I said.” He stalked off, smiling his Big Important Doctor smile, slightly wry. He couldn’t fool me—things actually bothered the man. I was glad. I didn’t want him to have a heart attack. I didn’t want him to drive into the guardrail of the Garden State, but I did want him to be bothered, to think about what he’d done to us. Of course, I had to decide what that really was.

“So did I,” said Eli, to my father’s turned back. He kissed me and said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear him, “I love you. I am in love with you.”

Then he stretched, readying himself for a race. “I have a meeting with my adviser in an hour. Can I take you to lunch afterward? Or for a swim? Or anywhere?” That grin. I knew he meant back to bed. I didn’t know about him, but I felt as though I’d been starving for years and had just now discovered the fruits and vegetables of my appetite.

“Sure,” I said, wondering whether I should have said I love you, too, and what that meant. I was going to vet school. Would we shack up for the summer, only to part in the fall? Would he continue to flirt with waitresses, baristas, the buxom woman who checked our IDs at the pool?

I went back to Odette. She was propped up in her bed with a lunch tray. Adam was nestled in her lap, and she tried to fork salad in her mouth while holding him.

“He’s going to get an early taste of dressing,” she said. “I’m famished. Can’t wait. Can you hold him?”

Carefully circumnavigating my sister’s IV line, I took my nephew for the second time. The weight and warmth of him felt important. His face was screwed up in sleep. He yawned, a perfect
O
of mouth, and let loose a loud fart. Then his sleeping face relaxed.

“Did you hear that?” I asked my sister, but Odette was shoveling white cake into her mouth, starving. We were all starving for something.

“Mmm,” she said. Adam fussed and I settled him back on her blankets.

“So, I got into vet school. Three of them. Still waiting on others. And I was rejected by the shelter for the administrative job of my dreams. Or nightmares. I just hoped I could work with animals for the summer. Instead of waitressing. Maybe one of those posh restaurants would—”

“I could use some help,” interrupted Odette, trying to lift her arms with Adam in them.

“Oh, okay.” I took him from her again. We were Marx Brothers, physical comedy, pass the baby. She started swigging the apple juice that came with her lunch in a little plastic cup. She spilled a thin river down her neck.

“No,” she said, swallowing, then smiling at me. “I mean, I’m
going back to work sooner than humanly possible. I could use some help—you know, a sort of nanny. But aunt-nanny, which would be better. I’d pay well.” She grinned. Cheshire grin.

I couldn’t tell who felt luckier. I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend my days—getting to know this impossible creature, my nephew. Hanging out by Odette’s pool feeding him rice cereal. Not that I knew when he’d start rice cereal. Maybe it would just be bottles. So now I could spend the summer falling completely in love with two guys I’d have to leave. I wondered about Cornell—not so far. I imagined driving down the Hudson, arms hungry. I wondered whether Eli had heard about any of the fellowship programs where he’d applied. I wondered whether I remembered, from my babysitting days, how to change diapers.

“Of course,” I said. “My summer job. I’m going to tell Olivia,” I said, picking up the hospital phone.

“I’m busy, Clementine,” said Olivia. “Do you need something?”

“What do you think it accomplishes, not talking to him?” I could hear Odette in my question to Olivia.
Accomplishes
. I’d meant to tell her I was going to take care of Adam this summer. That I had been admitted to vet school, but she was so closed, I felt the need to pry at the seam, like wresting open an oyster for the good meat.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I have my family, and I can’t talk to him. No one should treat a wife like that. No one should be so foul and deceptive and—” I could hear her pager beeping. “The point is, I don’t need the anger in my life, and we can’t pass it on to the babies in the breast milk.”

“You really think that’s possible?”

“Sure, when you’re angry, you produce certain stress hormones—fight-or-flight . . .” Olivia continued her mild lecture, and I looked across the room at Odette, who was pretending not to watch me.

“Okay, O,” I said.

“Odette should know it doesn’t mean I’m not talking to her,” she divined.

“She knows, I know.”

“She should know I don’t think she should talk to him, but if she does—”

“Christ, O,” I said. I carried the phone over to Odette and Adam. “Talk to her yourself,” I said to the air.

“Olivia?” Odette said, sounding so strangely cautious I held my breath. “She already hung up,” she said, sorrow like a joke around the corners of her mouth. “But it’s really okay, Clem, you don’t have to broker peace. I’m not mad. She’s mad.”

“I’m mad,” I said. “We’re all mad as hatters!” I took Adam tenderly from her arms and started dancing him around the room.

E
li was invited to my sisters’ wedding, and he brought a date, a flutist, about three inches taller than him—six inches in her heels—who sported a rim of blue eyeliner around her big brown eyes. She wore her hair cropped short, and it fell in smooth lines like an artist’s pencil sketch around her face. I was busy that day, holding up trains and buttoning a thousand buttons at Odette’s back. The dresses didn’t match, and the vows were all individual, but everything about the twinned rest of it irritated me, scraped at my skin like a rough wood floor under bare feet.

My father was late for the ceremony. I was with my sisters in the Room of Preparations, or the Brides’ Room, as indicated by my mother’s girlish, round handwriting on a cream-colored card on the door. I should have seen it then; he wasn’t busy, he was hiding something. He had another family—who else did that? I didn’t know that then, I just knew that Olivia started chewing on her nails, which she had stopped in second grade by painting them with a bitter polish. She’d had me lick it just to see how disgusting it was, and I’d thrown up my after-school snack of about thirty Ritz crackers spread with great wads of Deaf Smith healthy peanut butter.

“Don’t,” Odette said to Olivia, putting her hand over her sister’s. “They’re so beautiful, we don’t want to chew them.”

“Why do weddings have to look perfect, anyway?” asked Olivia, holding one hand in the other as if to keep it from straying toward her mouth. “I think we should skip the portraits and pomp and let Aunt Lydia sit near Dr. Horace, even if he’s clearly afraid of her because she might be a lesbian. I think we should forget about the place cards and just let people sit wherever they want. Where is he?”

“You’re babbling,” I said to Olivia. “Calm down, he’ll be here.” Of course, my own heart hurt for worrying about when he’d arrive. My familiar, potent, liquid wash of fear for my father—it wasn’t rational, and I wouldn’t admit to it, but it returned like a cold sore at times of stress. He had been at the rehearsal dinner the previous night, which was held aboard a borrowed yacht in the Hudson. When we’d all tripped off the gangplank at midnight, tipsy and alive with nerves and the pleasure of having completed an important ritual, Dad had waved good-bye and crossed over to a heliport on the other side of the West Side Highway. I’d watched his shadowy form waiting at the stoplight, his hunched shoulders. I’d wondered how often he took helicopters; I’d never been in a helicopter. Mom had already left with the parents of the grooms, who were staying the night at a hotel in Princeton. She was settling them in, she said, which really just meant she wanted company in the limo on the way back.

“He said it was just a quick appearance at a conference,” said Odette. “He’ll be here soon—if he can take a helicopter to—where did he say he was going?” She adjusted her hair, taking out one of
the four hundred thousand bobby pins the stylist had used to give her pin curls a boost.

“Boston,” I said.

“Maryland,” said Olivia, at the same time.

Someone knocked at the door.

“May I come in?” said my mother, her voice almost shy.

“Mom, is he here yet?” Odette asked, opening the door at once.

My mother’s face flashed something strange, a dark expression, but not anger, something more like grief. Then she gave us her composed smile. “He called from the limo; he’s almost here. Are you girls ready?”

“Yes,” said my sisters in unison. I wasn’t. I wasn’t ready to give them up.

Of course all was forgiven once he arrived. We were too busy with the details, all the details—the boutonnieres, the wrist corsages for all the mothers. The last-minute realization that the Octavia roses had been left out of the centerpieces, but no one minded, least of all Mom. After all, she may have seemed to care about the roses, but what she cared about most was seeing us off to more open lives than her own. What had she done to deserve this? I didn’t notice then. Instead, I noticed how Eli’s date threw her head back when she danced, how her neck was long, and white, almost swanlike, and strange, holding her head back. I didn’t like her, but not because she wasn’t nice—she was plenty nice. She hugged me when she said good-bye, and Eli just punched my shoulder, as if we were sports buddies.

Eli was in Princeton when I came home to visit from San Francisco, which is why I decided to use the ticket Dad had sent. For two days I woke up late, still on California time, and sat by the pool wearing jeans despite the heat, dangling my feet in the water and reading some of the novels I’d bought at the used-book shop on Twenty-Fourth Street. I had a few fantasy books in my to-be-read pile—dragons and magic—stuff I’d never been all that interested in before, but which looked soothing when I was shopping, along with a field guide to butterflies and an ancient copy of
What Color Is Your Parachute?