The Sister Season (4 page)

“Anyway, he refuses to stay home alone with the kids,” Maya continued as they headed back toward the house. “Says he ‘didn’t go to graduate school to be a goddamn babysitter.’” She made air quotes with her fingers while she talked, her voice going low and taking on a buffoonish quality. “As if they aren’t even his kids. I keep telling him it’s not babysitting if they’re your own children, but he doesn’t listen. He’s too self-absorbed to listen to anyone but himself. So he wouldn’t stay with them, and I’ve been . . . under the weather, I guess . . . so I didn’t want to travel all the way here with them by myself.”

“You’ve been sick?”

“It’s nothing. I’m taking care of it.” Maya flicked her hand, then tucked it into her armpit. To Elise, she looked as if she were hugging herself, protecting herself, her dismissal flat and not believable. But before Elise could follow up, Maya continued. “And . . . so . . . Bradley is here. With . . .”

“With his family, where he belongs. It is Christmas.”

“No, I was going to say ‘with Claire.’”

Elise stopped walking. Of course she’d known this was going to come up, sooner rather than later. “Have you talked to her?”

Maya shook her head, her iron-straightened hair whipping around her face like filament. Elise noticed that despite the long day her daughter still had makeup in place.
My God, how exhausting that must be,
she thought. “She was still in her room. Though . . . you never know. Maybe he’s seen her. Maybe he’s in there with her right now.”

“Oh, Maya,” Elise said softly. “You don’t still think . . .”

“Of course I do. I’ve never had any reason not to.”

Elise grabbed her daughter’s hand and began walking toward the house again. “She said it never happened. She swore to you. She’s your sister. That’s a reason not to, don’t you think?”

“But he never denied it. And Claire has sworn a lot of lies over the years.”

Elise nodded patiently. “Always little lies. Nothing this big. Besides, even if she did, it’s been so many years.” She stepped over a large limb that had fallen off the plum tree during the last snow. It would make good firewood, but that had always been Robert’s job. Elise wasn’t even sure she’d be able to lift it by herself. But fortunately that was not something she needed to worry about right now. “You forgave Bradley.”

This time Maya stopped abruptly, her hand leaving Elise’s. Her cheeks were pink, whether with fury or cold Elise couldn’t be sure. “Mom, I will never forgive her. You don’t sleep with your sister’s husband and just . . . expect forgiveness.” She raised a manicured nail, pointed it at the house as if she were pointing to her sister. “Now, I will make nice for the next few days until we get Dad buried, but then she’s back to not even existing in my world. Please don’t ask me to accept her. Please. Queenie understands and you need to, too. Claire is not my sister. She lost that right eight years ago. She will never get it back.”

“Maya, it’s Christmas,” Elise said, standing there, clutching the empty bucket in front of her.

“I know. I’m sorry. But it’s not like we’ve ever had a happy little family Christmas anyway,” Maya answered. “I need to check on the kids.” She turned on her heel and strutted off toward the house in those ridiculous boots, both arms crossed over her chest, her cocoa-colored hair fluttering beautifully against her jacket. Such perfection. Such torment. Elise could not see how you could separate the two when it came to that woman.

Elise considered calling after her, but decided against it. What would she say? Just as Maya had no proof that Claire had been lying, neither did Elise have any that Claire had been telling the truth. Would she like to say she absolutely disbelieved that her younger daughter would do anything so terrible to her older sister? Yes, of course. But eight years ago was such a tumultuous time for Claire. Especially that particular day eight years ago. That day was the worst. The last day Claire ever spoke to her father or her sisters, as far as Elise knew.

The day Maya found . . . Oh, poor Maya.

Elise had thought she would never live through the weeping and the screaming and the threats and the beseeching to take a side, any side, but she found that if she simply stuck with her usual silent poise, eventually everything would calm down. She was hardly a pillar of strength at the time herself. She knew nothing about healthy marriages. And she felt like an utter failure over raising a daughter who would steal another daughter’s new husband. It just didn’t even seem possible. Surely there was a lesson she hadn’t imparted, a moral she hadn’t spoken.

Maya and Claire were at war. They vowed never to speak to each other again—Maya out of betrayal and Claire out of disbelief that her sister would distrust her so—and poor Julia, not sure whose side to take, vowed silence as well, just to stay out of it. She had marriage problems of her own to deal with, and a six-year-old little boy caught between two fighting parents like a pasture fence trembling with the effort to stay dug in during a tornado.

As far as Elise knew, that silence had mostly stuck. Claire packed a garbage bag full of clothes and slipped off to California. Bradley took a job in Chicago, where, cut off from family and everything familiar, Maya had no choice but to forgive him. And Julia lived her own separate hell up in Kansas City, leaving Elise to contend with Robert and all that achingly empty space in the house by herself.

And now they were all back. They were under the same roof. They would be here for days.

And most important . . . their silence would be forced to be broken.

T
he clock in his bedroom had the loudest tick he’d ever heard. Even if he’d wanted to sleep, there was no way he ever could. It was so quiet in the country—every little bump and noise and creak sounded like a bomb dropping.

Not that he really wanted to sleep here at all. He didn’t even want to be here. He didn’t have any great Christmas plans or anything, but just sitting at home watching old reruns of that Charlie Brown Christmas show alone would be better than this. This house was hot. And crowded. And he didn’t know anyone, and they were all crammed around the kitchen table all the time and were all mad at each other. Stupid. Seriously, everyone tried to tell you that when you grew up, things got better, but as far as he could see, adults were no less likely to get dumb in an argument than kids were.

He turned over, his cot squeaking loudly against the silent midnight, and stared out the window, the moon spotted by the filmy polka-dot curtain. He was pretty sure everyone else was asleep by now, but his eyes felt pried open by an unseen force. His mind felt electric, like it would never turn off. He could hear his mom’s soft breathing over in her bed. She was turned away from him. The dotted moonlight fell across her like a second blanket.

After a while, he turned over again, and then again. And then, with a sigh, sat up and slipped out of his cot and padded down the hallway in his socks.

The hallway spilled into the front room, the room where his grandfather had died. Right there in the recliner. He reached out and slid his hand along the arm of the chair, touching the rough upholstery with his fingers. A death chair. The very thought excited him.

Slowly, carefully, without making any sound, he slid into the chair, easing back into it luxuriously. Every nerve in his body felt every bump of the fabric. It was like being on a drug—a death drug. It was the best thing he’d felt in a long time. Maybe for as long as he could remember.

He started to consider all the things he could do in this chair. All the things he could do, period. All the ways he could accomplish exactly what he wanted to accomplish. He pulled a pocketknife he’d found in the top drawer of the bedroom bureau, small but sharp, out of the waistband of his pajamas and unfolded it, taking in the gleam of the blade in the moonlit room.

But no sooner had he held the knife up than he heard a noise. He stiffened, every muscle tensing, ears straining to hear if it was just another pop of the house settling, or something more.

Creak, creak, creak.

Footsteps. It was definitely footsteps. Treading carefully down the hallway. Quickly, he closed the knife and stashed it back in his waistband. His heart pounded as he listened for more, sitting straight as a spike in the chair, hands clamped on the arms as if they would protect him.

Creak, creak, creak.

The steps moved closer and then turned toward the kitchen. He let out a shaky breath, as slowly as possible, and listened as the steps turned to the rustling of a coat and the whine of the back door opening onto the sunporch. And then a light click as it shut.

Gulping, trembling, he bolted out of the chair and, taking as much care as he could, raced back toward his room, plunging the knife under the cot mattress where he’d hidden it earlier in the afternoon.

His mom stirred and rolled over when he dove back onto his cot, but he simply flung the blanket over himself and closed his eyes, feigning sleep, feeling certain that his heartbeat could be heard across the room.

But the clock kept ticking. The night settled back around him. He calmed and even began to doze a little, the adrenaline rush subsiding and soothing his system. He began wondering who he’d heard. Who was wandering around outside this late at night? And why?

He tumbled into sleep. He didn’t hear the second set of footsteps pass his bedroom and slip out the back door.

“You can’t take every little threat seriously.”

J
ulia’s hands shook as she fumbled in her coat pocket. She supposed she could blame the shakiness on the cold—it felt absolutely subarctic out here, especially when the wind zipped tiny pellets of ice around the garage corner and up against her face—but she knew her jitters had far more to do with the phone conversation she’d just had with her ex-husband.

Talking to Dusty always put Julia on edge, especially when his belligerent second wife, Shurn, listened in on the other line (okay, her name was technically Sharon, but the way she said it, with that masculine bravado, as if she was always talking around a mouthful of chaw, made Julia and Tai take to calling her “Shurn” behind her back instead). Why, in the name of God, had Dusty chosen such an uneducated, unrefined woman? Even after all these years, Julia still felt insulted that he would go from her, with her degree from Brown, a college professor, for God’s sake, to . . . to that . . .
Shurn
.

But tonight’s phone call had Julia particularly jumpy. This was no Who’s Going to Take Eli to Practice sort of phone call. This was Important Stuff. This was capital-letters Co-Parenting. This was a cry for help to the one man who knew Eli as well as she did. And the one man who cared enough to respond.

Oh, not that Tai didn’t care. Of course he did. But Eli was Tai’s stepson, not his real son. He couldn’t claim Eli’s brown eyes or the way he walked on the outer edges of his feet or his natural propensity for algebra. He couldn’t remember the day Eli was born. Plus, Tai never was all that into children. Always said he had enough children as it was, referring to his chemistry students. And Julia had been all right with that. She didn’t need someone who was going to vie for Eli’s affections, who would make things even more difficult between her and Dusty. Dusty had been a horrible husband. But he was a good father, and part of her reason for marrying Tai was that she knew he would never try to take that title away from Dusty.

But right now . . . Eli really could use as many fathers as he could get, and a part of Julia wished Tai could see that.

Another gust of wind razed her face, and she turned toward the garage just as she finally wrapped her fingers around the cigarette pack she’d been hunting. She pulled it out and plucked a cigarette from it, tucking it into her mouth and digging back into her pocket for a light.

“That shit’ll kill you.” She turned, her heart leaping, to find Claire coming down the steps toward her. Claire sidled up next to her sister, her hands pressed deep into her coat pockets—a coat she’d borrowed from Elise—her face shadowed by the hood, which was ringed with woolly black fur. “I’m talking about standing out in the cold, not the smokes. I forgot how fucking freezing it was here.”

Julia lit her cigarette and took a drag, closing her eyes and letting the nicotine give her limbs a relaxed buzz. She turned and leaned back against the garage door. “Want one?”

“Of course.”

Julia held out the crumpled pack and shook it until a cigarette wiggled halfway out of the torn opening. Claire reached over and took it, then let Julia light it. She dragged, the cherry burning bright, and leaned against the door next to Julia.

“Why are you wearing shorts?” Julia asked, glancing at her sister.

“The question is, why aren’t you?” Claire shot back. She blew out smoke and then added, “I haven’t owned a pair of pants in three years.”

Julia chuckled. “You have always been a strange nut, Claire.” She flicked the dead ash off the end of her cigarette and rubbed it into the concrete with her boot. “You’ve seriously never had a need for a pair of pants in three years? Not one event?”

“Seriously no. And any event that would require them would not require me.”

Julia tipped her face up to the sky. “Bet you own plenty of wet suits, though,” she said.

“Only one, actually. For Casual Friday.”

“I thought you were a waitress.”

“Hey, I wear a uniform,” Claire answered, feigning defensiveness.

“And I bet your surfboard matches your wet suit,” Julia teased.

Claire cocked an eyebrow. “What makes you think I own a surfboard?”

Julia shrugged. “You’re a Californian. You all own surfboards.”

“Oh, that. And we all Rollerblade in bikinis and march in gay rights parades on the weekends too,” Claire said, deadpan. “And we all vote Democrat.”

“Exactly.”

They glanced at each other and snickered. “Okay,” Claire said. “One surfboard. For the weekends. But it doesn’t match my wet suit. Not on purpose, anyway. I’m a terrible surfer.”

“I knew it.” Julia grinned.

“So why are you hiding out here in the cold?” Claire asked. “Dad is dead. It’s not like he’s going to bitch about the cigarettes anymore.”

“Mmm. I promised Tai and Eli that I’d quit smoking.”

“Ah. Hiding from the kid.”

“Eli.”

“What?”

“He’s got a name. Not
kid
. Eli.”

“Eli. Sheesh. Touchy about his name, Queenie.”

Julia thought about it; Claire was right. She hadn’t meant anything bad by calling him “kid.” She knew no more about parenting, or children, than she did about the physics that Julia taught at the university every day. Just like Julia didn’t know beans about surfing or rafting or whatever it was her sister did out there on the coast. “You’re right,” she said. “Sorry.”

The two women dragged on their cigarettes again. “No problem,” Claire finally said. “It’s not like you accused me of sleeping with your husband or anything.”

Over the whistling of the wind, Julia heard Claire chuckle from within the depths of her hood. And something about it made her chuckle too. Nervousness. There was still all this nervousness. First, Dad dying. Then having to be in this house with Mom and the sisters, and then, of all things, Bradley had to show up. And then the phone call to Dusty. She was lucky she wasn’t cackling like a lunatic.

“So have you talked to Maya yet?” Julia asked.

“You mean has she given me a chance to talk to her? Nope. You saw how she was at breakfast. I’m like a ghost. She won’t make eye contact.”

Julia had seen it, actually. Had seen how Maya wouldn’t even look in Claire’s direction. How she’d suddenly found things to fiddle with on her kids—cutting their food into pieces, straightening their collars, folding napkins into their laps, topping off their milk—every time Claire had spoken. How she’d inched around her sister at the sink, the stove, the table. And how she’d kept her eyes solidly glued to Bradley the entire time, as if his every move were being recorded in her brain. God help him if his gaze should accidentally land near Claire. Julia hated to think what would happen then.

“You think she’ll ever come around?” Julia asked. She took a long last drag on her cigarette and tamped it out on the heel of her boot, stowing the butt in her coat pocket and then scuffing her boot along the driveway a few times.

“Hell, no. I think she can’t wait to get back to Chicago, away from me.” Claire finished her cigarette too, but in Claire style, she flicked the butt end over glowing end onto the driveway, where it landed with a starburst of ashes in the gravel. She wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s too damn cold out here even for a good smoke.”

Julia looked down. “Of course you’re cold. You’re in cutoffs.” She chuckled. “But your legs look fabulous.”

Claire laughed, pointing the toe of one boot and swiveling her leg to show off her calf. “You think? I do run, you know. On the beach.” Her voice was lavish, with a tinge of a purr to it.

“Well, la-ti-da,” Julia teased, relishing the light moment with her sister. She vaguely remembered such moments from long ago. Too long ago. Moments when, to her delighted surprise, she and Claire connected. Julia admired her littlest sister. Claire had something that she and Maya didn’t. A certain playfulness. A laid-back attitude that Julia envied. Hell, she had the ability to move eighteen hundred miles away, alone, and never look back. She had the guts to do what she’d done at the Chuck Wagon eight years ago. The woman had balls. “Some of us don’t have beaches to run on, Miss Hollywood.”

“You have plenty of cow shit to dodge, though. Could improve your agility.”

“I live in the suburbs now, thank you very much. We dodge minivans.”

The two sisters stood by the garage door and laughed. Julia’s fingers absently rubbed her coat pocket, feeling the bump of the cigarette pack inside, feeling an urgency that didn’t really register anywhere else. Distantly she recalled the phone conversation with Dusty, and felt a pang in her gut that stripped away her smile.

Another squall of wind shrieked past them, almost through them, and they both tucked their chins down into the collars of their coats, squinting against the assault. Claire cussed and pushed away from the garage door and headed back up the steps toward the house, and Julia silently cursed the wind that had ruined whatever it was she and Claire had been experiencing just then. Eight years with no communication—surely there was something that would keep them talking. Hell, she’d talked to Dusty (and, in the background, Shurn) for thirty full minutes. Surely she could communicate with her sister for longer than the amount of time it took to burn one cigarette.

Desperate, without even thinking, she blurted, “Eli tried to commit suicide.”

Claire stopped abruptly and turned. She flipped down the hood of her coat and Julia could see the shocked expression on her face. She suddenly felt embarrassed, exposed. She was the together sister. The brain. The professor. Admitting Eli’s suicide attempt was like admitting failure. Up to this point, she’d barely admitted it to herself.

“Well, he didn’t actually
try
try. But he was going to. I found . . . I found pills. He’d apparently been stealing and stockpiling from . . . God knows where.”

“Oh, my God, Julia. Does Mom know this?”

Julia shook her head, simultaneously letting her now shaking hand snake back into her pocket and fish out the cigarettes again. She tapped one out and popped it into her mouth, then offered another one to Claire, who took it. “I haven’t told anyone yet. Not even Tai. Just today I called Dusty. That’s why I’m out here smoking these damn things. I needed . . . I don’t know. To think. To relax.”

“What did Dusty say?”

Julia shrugged. “He said a lot.” Mainly that Julia was a horrible mother who was more worried about her career than her one and only son and how did she possibly think that the kid was going to grow up with no emotional problems the way she practically stole him from his father and tried to make the kid think that some . . . in his oh-so-eloquent Dusty-words . . .
some slant-eye science nerd
was his real daddy when he knew it wasn’t the truth. Also that she was probably . . . how did he put it? . . .
one of them high-society rich suburban drug addicts who thinks prescription pills make them sexy and in style
and that was where Eli got the idea. Oh, and when she’d told him this had happened two months ago (it truly had taken her that long to get over the shock and the grief and work up the nerve to call him) and she hadn’t taken Eli to a psychologist (Yet! Yet. She was going to. She was.), he’d really lit into her. She took a drag off her cigarette and blew the smoke out in a breathy burst. “He said he’ll see me in court. He wants custody.”

Claire’s blue eyes swam over Julia’s face. “No fucking way,” she said, letting her cigarette burn down to the filter without bothering to drag on it at all. “Well, he can’t. Surely he can’t. I mean, the kid . . . Eli . . . is, like, fourteen. Dusty can’t just rip him away from his mom after all these years.”

Julia shrugged again, feeling shaky all over. The truth was, she wasn’t sure Dusty didn’t have a point about her. She wasn’t sure she hadn’t screwed Eli up. She wasn’t sure Dusty wouldn’t be successful in ripping Eli away. And she wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be best for her son if he did.

The numbing buzz of the nicotine combined with the horror of having revealed Eli’s secret—to Claire, of all people! Not to her mom, her best friend, not even her husband, but to the sister who’d single-handedly wrecked her family eight years ago—was setting in.

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s right. I’m a bad mom, I don’t even know my son, and he’s suicidal and I suspected nothing. You know how I found the pills?”

Claire shook her head.

“I was looking for my car keys. I was yelling at him because I was late for my eight o’clock class and I couldn’t find my damn car keys and was blaming him for it. I shook out his backpack and there they were.” She took a deep breath, partly for effect, but also partly to steel herself for admitting the horrifying truth. “He told me later that he had been planning to do it in the school bathroom
that day
.”

Julia flashed back to the scene, of turning the whole house upside down looking for those keys. Screaming at Eli, pontificating about how she doesn’t “just misplace things” and how he is always,
always
getting into her belongings without permission. God, she could lecture almost better than her father could. And the poor kid, still in his boxers with sleep-funk hair, his body peach-fuzzy and immature, stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her. Listened to her. Took the lecture. Just took it. Never argued. Never defended himself.
Why don’t you fight back?
she’d felt like yelling at him, but she supposed she knew the answer. She’d been lecturing him for fourteen years; he’d probably learned that arguing only led to more lecturing.

And then she’d dumped out the backpack and found the plastic bag full of pills. And the whole world had seemed to stop. She’d even heard the kitchen clock ticking in the background. She wasn’t sure if she’d breathed. She was afraid to look up, to let her eyes meet her son’s eyes. Acknowledging what she’d just found would mean she would have to accept what it meant for her family.

She told Claire how she’d remembered about her class, and that her job was the only thing that made sense to her at that moment, so she had simply palmed the bag, stuffed it in her pocket, and barked out a gruff “You’re late for school.” She hadn’t even talked to him about it until two days later over take-out Chinese, when he’d confessed to her what the pills were intended for, what he’d been planning.