The Sister Season (8 page)

As if on cue, her earlier conversation with Dusty pressed in on her, ringing in the back of her mind, his voice overtaking the voice of Robert Yancey.

It’s not all about you all the time, Julia. You never seemed to get that. You have a kid to take care of. Our kid. My kid. You’re supposed to be taking care of him. This is not taking care of him. But I bet your students are totally taken care of. It’s always been like that. It’s always been all about what Julia wants. All about your career. Never about your family. Never about me, never about Eli. Why do you think I left? And, look, now Eli wants to leave you too. How long till that Chinaman of yours takes off? Not that you would care. Because it’s always about you.

Maybe they were right. She was a selfish, selfish woman. But she’d never meant to be. Surely that counted for something. Surely intent had some amount of importance.

She ripped a paper towel out of the dispenser and ran it over her face, taking a few deep breaths to clear her mind. She couldn’t do this now. Not while they were in public. She had to pull it together.

The door opened and Julia caught a familiar mess of wiry blond hair coming up behind her in the mirror.

“You okay?” Claire asked.

Julia nodded, wiped her face, gulping in a cleansing breath, all business. “Eli come back to the table?”

Claire smiled. “Yeah. He’s got Bradley boning that fish for him. Looks a little tedious at this point.”

“Well, at least he’s eating.” Julia turned the water back on, washed her hands to busy herself. Claire hung around awkwardly, looking as if she wanted to say something but didn’t know what exactly it should be. Julia dried her hands and turned, leaned against the sink. “So did you and Bradley, um . . . talk? Earlier?”

Claire’s face flushed, and once again Julia noticed how red her sister’s eyes appeared to be. If she didn’t know better, she’d almost think Claire had been crying recently. No. Not Claire. Claire didn’t do that. Claire didn’t show weakness. “Not really,” she mumbled.

Julia let out an anguished sigh. “Sometimes I envy you, Claire. I used to think your life had to be lonely—no husband, no kids, no . . . ties. But now . . . I don’t know. I love them, of course, but . . . it’s just that sometimes family life is so hard, you know? Sometimes I think back to when I was young and free and I wish I’d appreciated it more.”

And, oh, how she did. How she looked back on the freedom and ease of her life before Dusty had walked into it with that lazy, bowlegged stride of his and wanted it back with such an intensity it almost made her limbs ache. How she watched her students, arriving late, hungover, already making plans for the next night’s party, and wanted to leave the classroom with them. Leave the stacks of paper and the battered laptop case and the . . . suicide worries . . . behind and dive into a bucket of Mexican beers, her only concern whether or not her bra matched her panties, just in case she might get laid. What happened to that life? Where did it go?

Claire disappeared into a stall, a cutting chuckle echoing off the tile walls, leaving Julia at the sink alone once again. “Well,” Claire said from inside the stall, “I’m maybe not as free and easy as you like to think, Queenie. I may have a little drama left behind in my own life.” Her voice was tinged with sharp edges. “And it isn’t easy, anyhow.”

“What do you mean?”

But before Claire could answer, the restroom door whooshed open again, and Elise entered. “Oh, there you are,” she said to Julia. “You left the table so quickly we thought something was wrong.”

Julia wadded up the paper towel she was holding and tossed it in the trash bin. “I just needed some space,” she said. “I’m going back now.”

“Oh. Well, the others have gone. It’s just us now. Well, and Bradley. Maya took the kids home. Maya doesn’t seem like herself.” She touched Julia on the elbow. “Do you think there’s something else going on there?” she asked. “Between Maya and Bradley? I know Claire makes Maya tense, but—”

“I’m in here, Mom,” Claire said over the stall door, and Julia could have sworn her mom blushed.

“Oh, okay,” Elise called out, then continued in a loud whisper. “It just seems like there’s more going on between those two than . . . you know . . . the old thing with Claire.”

The toilet flushed, and Claire stepped out, pulling the bottom of her sweatshirt over the top of her shorts. “You mean the
lie
about Claire.”

“That’s not what I meant. You know that.”

Claire edged Julia out of the way at the sink and turned on the water. “Of course I know that, Mom, but nobody seems to say it but me. And to answer your question, even though I know you weren’t asking me, I’d say yes, it’s a fair bet there’s something else going on between Maya and Bradley. It’s a fair bet something else is going on between Bradley and someone with a boob job and a spray tan, if you know what I mean.”

Julia stepped back to avoid water droplets slinging through the air as Claire flicked her hands over the sink. “Did he say something about it out on the sunporch this afternoo—?” she said, but Claire shot her a look, causing the words to dry up in her throat. Clearly, her sister didn’t want anyone to know that she’d been with Bradley on the sunporch earlier, and while Julia believed that was because Claire didn’t want any more suspicion cast over her, a part of her—the same part that remained unconvinced about Claire’s innocence years ago, the same part that saw too many unanswered questions, too many shifty behaviors to ignore—wondered if Claire was once again covering. She shifted gears. “Maya did say something about not feeling well earlier. I thought it was an excuse to leave the room, but maybe she’s sick. Maybe that’s what we’re all picking up on and everything with Bradley is fine.”

“Well, I hope it’s not serious,” Elise said, and pushed into the stall Claire had just come out of. “I’d hoped that the two of them had gotten over everything and moved on. The children really need a happy home.”

Julia and Claire glanced at each other, and Julia guessed that both of them had the same thought on their minds: Where had their mom’s concern about children needing happy homes been when their father was still alive?

There was a beat of uncomfortable silence, during which Julia tried not to look at Claire, tried not to catch her reflection in the mirror, tried not to listen to Elise’s noises in the stall, tried not to think about her family. Tried to pretend that everything was normal—that they were gathered together to mourn the loss of her father and that nothing stood in the way of that. But it was impossible. She knew, as she always had known, that when it came to her family, there would always be more questions than answers, more discomfort than joy, more queasy silences than laughter.

Maybe that was why she’d emotionally bugged out on Eli so long ago. In her world, emotion was a complicated and fruitless monster.

She cleared her throat and edged around Claire as the toilet once again whooshed into life behind the metal stall door. She mumbled something about needing to get back to Eli and plunged out of the stuffy restroom and back into the garish colors and sounds of Sharp’s.

At the table, Eli had eaten a good portion of his catfish and was sitting in his usual pose—arms crossed over his chest, chin pointed downward, tucked into himself, silent and brooding. Bradley was scooted sideways in his chair, one arm slung over the back of it, talking up the waitress, who was nodding and giggling like a crushy teenager. Julia could almost swear that Eli shook his head, ever so slightly, disgustedly, every time Bradley opened his mouth to speak.

Julia poked around on her plate a few times, hoping to find her appetite, but there was nothing to be had. Her chicken still looked pale and fleshy. She tossed her napkin over it and pushed the plate away, just as Claire and Elise came back to the table and scooted in.

Claire’s head was tilted down, but Julia could feel her sister’s eyes pointed her direction. She was half afraid to meet them, though. Half afraid that she would see in them what might have been said in the restroom after she’d left. She just wanted some peace for a few moments.

“...were only planning to be here until today,” Bradley was saying, and the waitress nodded as if she’d never heard anything so riveting. Julia rolled her eyes. No wonder Maya was so insecure. The man didn’t even attempt to hide his flirtatiousness. She tried to block him out, but his voice broke through again. “...only brought clothes for two days. Hopefully nothing tragic happens or I’ll be out of underwear.”

Just as the waitress threw her head back to laugh at his incredibly indecent “joke,” Bradley sitting there smugly, that arrogant grin on his face, his eyes roving over to Claire and back to the waitress again, Julia saw it happen.

It was just the tiniest flinch, really. Could have been mistaken for an involuntary spasm. But it was there.

Eli’s elbow flicked sideways about three inches, knocking into the full soda the waitress had just set down on the edge of the table between him and Bradley. The cup teetered, swerved, and then tipped, soda and ice sloshing across the table and down the front of Bradley, landing with a liquid
thwack
in his lap. The glass shattered on the floor.

The whole room seemed to suck in its breath as Bradley jumped up, brushing at the front of his clothes frantically. Eli’s face immediately turned shocked, contrite, as he said, “Sorry, Uncle Bradley. I didn’t see it there.” And as Bradley dabbed at his crotch with a handful of paper napkins, his face furious, Julia heard her son add in a low voice, “Wow, how ironic, huh?”

At that moment Julia and Claire locked eyes across the table. And they both grinned.

W
hat he liked best about the farm was the way the frozen grass crunched under his feet. Not that this was something special about the country—the grass in Kansas City crunched when it was frozen too. What was different about it on the farm was how loud it sounded, especially in the middle of the night, when it seemed like the whole world was asleep.

The last car had turned down the gravel road hours ago. The cousins, who were both all right, he supposed, but were kind of annoying in that I’m-a-little-kid-so-everyone-must-entertain-me-all-the-time sort of way, had been in bed for a long time. Grandmother Elise had finished washing dishes and shut up the house and turned off the lights. The creaking in her bedroom, just above the one he was sharing with his mom, had stopped and, unlike the night before, he had counted to one-thousand-Mississippi after he was sure everyone was asleep before he moved a muscle.

He’d crept through the house on ghost’s feet, practically floating above the warped wood floors, and had, just like the night before, gone to the front room and sat in his grandfather Robert’s recliner. The one he died in.

He had heard that people shit and piss themselves when they died, and he wondered, as he sank into the worn nubby fabric of the chair, if Grandfather Robert had done that. It didn’t smell like he had. And he doubted that Grandmother Elise, who was kind of nutty, but not nutty enough to be gross, would have kept the chair in the house if he had. But it might have been a little bit cool if he had. If he’d been all shit and piss and bulging eyes and purple tongue and veins in his neck. That was the way he wanted to go—repulsive and shocking. Something people would talk about for a long time.

Just as he’d done the night before, he sank into the chair. But tonight he had more time. He’d left his pocketknife under his cot mattress. So he pulled up the footrest, positioned himself in what he guessed was the same pose his grandfather had been sitting in, and held his breath. Held it until his vision was grainy and his lungs burned. Held it until he felt so miserable he might have been having a heart attack and dying. Held it until he could feel his pulse in his stomach, imagined it getting slower and fainter. He stayed motionless. Still as a corpse. Not even an eyeball twitching. Soon his eyes were burning too, and one of them let a tear loose down his cheek. He wondered if Grandfather Robert had cried a little when he died. He’d never heard anything about people crying while they died, but it made sense that they might.

He held it, held it, held it.

And then let the air out in a rush that sank his belly and made the chair bounce a little and squeak on its hinges.

He was alive.

Damn it.

He sat there for a few more minutes, trying to soak up death in his grandfather’s death chair, and then quietly eased the footrest down and slipped outside into the crystalline air.

It was freezing. His stocking feet made the frozen grass crunch. A dog barked off in a field somewhere. But otherwise there was nothing. Still as a morgue.

He wanted to walk farther tonight than he had during the day.

Earlier, he’d taken a walk, but had only gotten halfway through the old soy field before the cold seeped into the bones of his feet and made him hobble back home in defeat, shivering under his jacket violently. Tonight he wanted to get all the way through the soy field and to the pond on the other side of the tree line.

It wasn’t fit for skating. His mom had said so herself. You could fall through the ice and get trapped beneath it. You’d freeze to death before the sheets on your cot had even lost all your body heat. You’d be a frozen brick on the bottom of the pond before anyone even noticed you were missing.

Quickly, so as not to lose himself halfway through the soy field again, he followed the old rows toward the tree line. Once inside, he could hear the wind shake the limbs of the trees, which sounded dry and brittle like bones. A perfect setting for a suicide.

Much better than the men’s room at school, where he’d planned to take the pills his mom had confiscated, the one lousy day of his life that she decided to take an interest in what he was doing. And better, though maybe not as dramatic, as some of the other scenarios he’d imagined: A gun in the backseat of his stepfather’s SUV. Stepping onto the tracks just as the Amtrak rumbled through. Hanging himself from the rod in his closet, although that one was getting a little overdone. Seemed like every time you got online these days, somebody was hanging themselves in their closets. Throwing himself out of the car on the highway. Plunging a knife under his ear in the locker room showers during a basketball game.

Drowning under ice could almost be made out to be an accident. Definitely not the same effect. But he’d be dead; what would he care, anyway?

Popping out on the other side of the trees, he stood staring at the pond. He’d made it. It was way bigger than he’d imagined. They wouldn’t find him easily.

He didn’t think about what he was doing. He didn’t need to. He’d thought it through so many times already. His life sucked. It wasn’t going to get any better. Mitch Munde wasn’t going to stop calling him “faggot” and giving him titty twisters in the hallways and he wasn’t going to get any better in phys ed and no girl was ever going to be interested in him. He wasn’t going to suddenly wake up with no zits and his parents would never get back together and he would never stop feeling like such a little bitch for wishing they would. He was never going to come home to cookies and the smell of laundry day. His stepdad was never going to take him to an amusement park or a baseball game. And his mom was never going to put him before her all-important students.

And he was never going to get happy. He’d tried. Ever since sixth grade he’d tried. It wasn’t happening. He just wanted to die and get it over with.

He paused only briefly to wonder if you shit and pissed yourself if you died underwater. He doubted it. Weird.

The wind ripped through him and he half hobbled down the short bank and stepped once, twice onto the creaking ice at the edge of the pond.

Don’t think about it,
he told himself.
Just do it. Walk fast to the middle and jump hard up and down. And when you hear the ice splinter . . . breathe.

But just as he lifted his foot to take a second step, he heard a noise drifting in on the breeze from the edge of the tree line. He froze, listening.

It wasn’t an animal. It wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t the cracking of the ice.

It was talking. He heard it plain as day, the lilting, the rising and falling of a woman’s voice. The low rumble of a man’s.

Slowly, he stepped back up onto the rocks at the edge of the pond and turned around, dropping his hands to the ground to give himself cover as he scanned the tree line with his eyes. His hands started to shake against the ground. His teeth chattered.

He peered into the trees, trying to make out shapes, straining to hear the voices again.

And then he saw them.

Sitting on the ground, wrapped in their coats, talking to each other in low, urgent voices.

Uncle Bradley.

And Aunt Claire.