The Orphan Sister (7 page)

“It’s one of
those
birth plans,” said Olivia, her voice the even, bright sound of her doctor-self.

“Well, her best friend is a militant midwife,” said Odette, smiling at me as the phone clicked. “Not like mine—she’s doc-friendly.”

“Hello?” said Olivia. “Who are you talking to—O? You there?”

“Yep,” said Odette, nodding as I listened in.

“
But under no circumstances shall the mother be anesthetized
makes it complicated . . . hello? That’s Clementine?”

“Party Trick,” I said, feeling a little mean, and a little nervous that she wouldn’t do it. We always did it.

“Argh,” said Olivia.

“We,” Odette said.

“Need,” I said.

“A,” moaned Olivia.

“Family.”

“Meeting.”

“All right, already,” said Olivia. “I’m not trying to protect the bastard; I just didn’t want to waste all of our time.”

“Tomorrow,” said Odette.

“Fine,” said Olivia. “Now about Mrs. Hindenberg.”

Odette laughed. “Hillsmith.”

“Good-bye, Clem,” said Olivia. “You know, patient privacy and all that.”

Where was Dad? What was he doing to the three of us?

We needed to
, Odette wrote on a Post-it before she waved and left.

But as I watched her go, I was afraid that even though
we needed to
, Olivia still might shut us out, that our triple-hold would weaken for twin grappling, and if anything was worse than a constant harmonic, it was two notes, empty without their third.

O
n the third day of Dad’s absence, we held an afternoon family meeting in my diminutive living room. Mom refused to come at first, so we started without her, but as Odette predicted, she couldn’t stay away and appeared bearing a tray of limeade garnished with mint leaves she’d grown in her conservatory. She had dipped the glass rims in sugar before she filled them.

“So,” said Odette, continuing what we’d started without Mom. “There’s this other lawyer, whoever she—or he—is. If you won’t give, O, I say we make a list of possibilities. And split up the contact list on his cell phone. If we can unlock it. Mom, surely you know the code?”

Our mother hummed and distributed limeade, acting mysteriously deaf, as if, if she pretended she couldn’t hear, other people would forget she was listening. If I cover my eyes, you can’t see me.

“Mom?” said Odette.

“O, this is ridiculous.” Olivia had been sitting in the big chair, an enormous plum with sticks for legs in her graceful mauve maternity dress. She’d told us already, six or seven alternative ways, that Dad was safe and he’d contact us soon. That she didn’t want to talk about it. She looked like Mom, lips thin, containing confidences. All I could read from her was a fat, fuzzy thought
caterpillar, with occasional shock-shots of food. A fudge-filled shortbread cookie, a single slice of pink ham. That must be how pregnancy felt—at least one where you were keeping your father’s secrets.

“No, you’re ridiculous,” said Odette, sweating a little. She had been pacing my living room. I felt Odette, her anxiety in my own stomach, an acid lining. She was guessing numbers for Dad’s code—7/7, our birthday; 11/20, Mom’s . . . I was awash in her worry. But Olivia only emanated the blur and the food, no thoughts, no distinct feeling. It was as if she wore a lead apron against the two of us, using her triplet superpower to reveal or veil.

Odette kicked off her clogs because her ankles were swollen. Her maternity dress was much like Olivia’s, only black. Every now and then I thought I saw an elbow or a knee make its way across the surface of her belly.

“You know better than to keep this from us.” Odette addressed Olivia with a teary look.

“Girls,” said my mother, her voice high and childish. “It’s so nice to have you here all together.”

“Jesus,” said Odette. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous,
ridicularum, ridiculas
. . . ,” Olivia started, as if we were holding Latin class.

“O,” said Odette, her eyes mildly desperate.

“You all right?” I asked her, because my sister never panicked. She succumbed to anger, sure, but she had a lawyer’s steadfast intent. She never looked like this. As if she might cry. I might cry. I still imagined him dead. I walked over to Olivia and put my
hand on her shoulder, trying to divine the source of her hermetically sealed information vault.

“Why does he have some extra lawyer?” I whispered. “Is he divorcing Mom?”

“It’s not that,” Olivia said. “It’s not about Mom, not really.” Olivia closed her eyes. “I don’t like this,” she continued, pausing to catch her breath, though she sat still, almost motionless except for her worried mouth. “Any more than you do. If he hadn’t asked me to keep this to myself—anyway—he’s being a jerk, but that doesn’t mean I can’t respect his wishes.”

“Planning a funeral, Olivia?” I asked, because I saw a crack and wanted to pull it apart with my fingers. “
Respect his wishes?”

“He’s fine.” Olivia’s eyes opened: sudden blue. “Really.” She took my hand in hers briefly, then dropped it. “I don’t think he called me on purpose. That is, I just answered. I thought it was about this case he was helping me review—”

“Since when—,” Odette interjected. “I didn’t—”

“Shh!” I said.

“Fine. I’m not talking to you,” asserted Odette childishly.

“Dad gave me his lawyer’s number in case I go into labor,” Olivia said. “Or—”

“Why would a lawyer care?” Mom looked sharp, but softened, a wave reaching knife edge, then receding, liquid.

“What about me?” Odette pouted.

“You aren’t talking to me,” said Olivia. “But I was about to say in case you go into labor, too.”

“It’s inevitable,” I said, unable to help myself in the face of their fecundity.

“He had some old family business—but I know about it because I read his papers, not because he confided in me,” said Olivia.

I thought of the child’s photograph I’d found among our report cards. Obviously I wasn’t the only snoop—and maybe I’d been too late to get any real evidence—of what I still didn’t know.

“You know, it’s the first time he ever did anything that was just
me
, not me and O—O and O and O and O and O . . . ,” Olivia continued. “Clem, you may not have grown out of wanting negative attention, but I still—”

“Hey!” I interjected, but stopped myself. I wanted to hear everything she was willing to say. Or at least I hoped I wanted to hear it.

“Still,” her voice was mellowing; a decrescendo. “It was something
just me
. And now I realize this was only because I was convenient that he told me, not because I was special.” She pouted—a recalcitrant, stylishly plump mama-to-be. I thought she got more than her fair share of attention.

“What old family business? What old family? Mom, what the hell?”

“Don’t swear, Clementine,” said Mom. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know.”

“There were just some people from his, um, childhood,” said Olivia. “I think he realized he’s mortal. And he has some old friend who’s dying or something.”

My mother looked wounded. “Some old friend I don’t know?” she pondered. “Your father and his opacity.”

“He’s mortal?” Odette said.

“I hope so,” grumbled Olivia.

“What old friends?” I asked. My mother put her hand over my hand like a punctuation mark. A musical
fin
. End.

“He’s fine,” said my mother, picking up my glass and placing a coaster under it, though the table was glass.

“If that’s all, girls . . . ,” said my mother. “Anyone hungry?”

My mother, brilliant with a conservatory of flowers, a multitasking Library Friends volunteer and country-club member, was sometimes like a toddler. Sometimes, when I saw her stamping her foot as she argued with my father about something—his last-minute weekends away, his insistence that I could only move in if I didn’t bring my ferret (Mom won, and I kept my entire menagerie)—she looked like a three-year-old having a tantrum. Her face contorted, she was threatening to cry. But as I watched her now, since I’d been living at home, as I’d watched her with my sisters, with the gardeners, with the woman who delivered organic produce twice weekly in reusable baskets, I realized this was just her way, that it had little to do with marriage.

“We’re hiring a private investigator,” said Odette, walking over to the window and looking out at the lawn.

“You don’t need to,” said Olivia, almost conciliatory.

“Yes, I do,” said Odette. “We do,” she said, looking at me, and my sister. “And if you’re not going to tell us what you know, it’s going to cost more.”

“This isn’t necessary,” said my mother softly.

“I have work,” said Olivia, heaving herself out of the chair.

“Fine,” I said. Ella began to bark; she wanted out. Alphabet joined in with his houndlike howl. I picked up the leashes and nodded to the women of my family. “Thank you, Odette. Gotta go.” If no one would tell me anything else, I wanted them all to
leave. I wanted to strategize with Odette over the phone. I wanted Olivia to crack. But it wasn’t going to happen like this. I looked up at the house as I came out of mine, hoping the Mercedes might suddenly appear. He may have been opinionated, sometimes even small-minded, but I didn’t want my father dead. And it was hard to imagine why he would need another lawyer. What kind of fight was he waging? Was it for money, or love, or his family we never knew? It was hard to imagine Dad needing to fight for something, perpetual king of the castle. We played that—he was the castle and we climbed atop his shoulders at the lake in Greensboro, wrestling to be the girl he’d dunk into the water. He was rarely there, rarely with us, but when he was there, he was there in body, playful, when we were young enough for that sort of play. What would make Olivia both tight-lipped for him and furious at him?

By the time I came back from letting Ella and Alphabet sniff all around the pool, dig around the mossy base of dogwood at the back of the property, and finally pee in the hostas (a little uric acid wouldn’t kill them—hopefully), I saw Eli’s little frying-grease-rigged Corolla parked on my little gravel driveway. He was sitting on the stoop, and my sisters and mother were gone.

My friend Eli came over to the carriage house twice a week for dinner. I bought ingredients and he cooked; that had been our arrangement since college, when I was in a dining cooperative and he was scraping by to afford his fifth year—he was getting double degrees in piano performance and biology and was one of the smartest men I’d ever met—and I’d pilfer the stores at the
co-op, bringing home a block of cheese, two avocados, six slices of bread, whatever seemed extra enough to take.

Eli is a brilliant cook. His mother was a chef, and she became a TV personality, a celebrity chef, just as the concept took off. Food TV. She was half-Indian and wore wrap dresses and exotic hairstyles that made her every bit as gorgeous as her food. Eli grew up in Manhattan, sometimes attending school, sometimes substituting with a tutor on the set. She was glamorous and he was a geek. She died in a small-plane crash in the Alps two years before college; Eli went to live with a father he’d hardly known in Cleveland, and then on to Oberlin, which is where we met.

“I couldn’t get portabella mushrooms,” I said. “They only had these little thingies.” I pulled out a bag of the tiny soldiers they’d had at Whole Foods. Gorgeous objects with fat, smooth heads and a gorgeous, woody scent. And at $18.99 a pound, I could only afford a thimble-size bouquet, but I didn’t point this out to Eli. Eli’s mother had had a lot of money, but it was tied up in probate court; he had to live on very little as he finished his Ph.D. in biology at Princeton, teaching his way through grad school, living in a nasty apartment in East Brunswick I refused to visit because I was afraid to walk the six blocks from the bus to his door. He was studying food science—he specialized in the health benefits of food diversity, but it came down to hours and hours of lab work.

“Oh, goodie, criminis!” said Eli, carefully extracting them from the bag. “They’re baby portabellas, Clem, even better—these are delectable. I’m not going to make the frittata then. These deserve more of a showcase. Spring rolls, I think. Do you have the carrots?”

I handed him a bag of baby carrots. “Organic.”

“Oh, I would’ve preferred real, live long carrots with the tops on.” He looked up at me. I was scowling. “But of course. Just what I wanted, these.” He kissed my nose.

“So,” said Eli, chopping scallions, his elegant hands dangerously close to the blade of his knife—which he brought with him everywhere the way someone else might bring a cell phone. Eli rarely remembered his cell phone, and it usually needed a battery charge. “What’s the word on your dad?”

Of course I’d told him everything. Well, almost everything. I hadn’t told him that in my secret heart it gave me pleasure that Dad was gone, gave me a tiny sense of peace I hadn’t known I was missing. There was a lot in my life I was missing, but until now, I hadn’t known I was furious enough with the man to wish him gone.

“Maybe he’s dying, or maybe he has Alzheimer’s,” I said, thinking aloud. “God, I hope he’s not dying.” I was unable to avoid it—what had happened to Cameron made me go there, to unexpected endings.

I looked over at the framed family portrait from my sisters’ wedding on the desk and noticed how my father’s head was bigger than everyone else’s, how there was something almost vulnerable in the way he curved around my mother, trying to conform to the shorter stature of everyone else in the picture. My brothers-in-law stood square and proud; my father slouched. I couldn’t bear his face because it made me think about his mortality, all the possibilities, so I put the photo facedown on the desk, but gently.

“Clem?” Eli put down his scallion work and touched my cheek. Just friends, but he still made me blush. Eli dried his hands
and sat on the floor with Ella, tugging gently at her ears in play, the way Dad did. “Who’s a beautiful girl?” he whispered to her.

“I really resent this drama. You know I love the man, no matter how difficult he might be. He may have been frequently late and emotionally absent, but, Eli, he knows me, and he eventually arrives, and I think he wants me to be whatever it is I am—only better, of course. He wants,” I stopped to pat Ella, who was nudging my hand and woofing gently, having lost Eli to another hand washing and his kitchen prep.