The Violet Hour: A Novel (27 page)

Cassandra took off several days that week to slink around town with her sister. The first day, they walked over the Golden Gate Bridge and back, then climbed down to the base, then looked back at it from a point farther down the coastal trail. Up close it was a machine goliath, far away a braided piece of string. On the trail, Mary looked pale, like a photograph of herself on a trip. The next day, feet and thighs aching, they went to a sunny diner and spent a fulsome hour bent over a newspaper crossword another patron had left behind. Cassandra thought about the way, as a child, Mary used to let her dress her in silly handmade costumes, holding her breath as Cassandra tightened a glittery vest over her shoulder, her eyes full and serious, as though afraid to disturb her in her work. She thought it was fitting that Mary should be the first member of her old family to visit her new one here.

That evening, Abe came home bearing bags of fruit and vegetables from the farmers market. Mary held a pitted half of an avocado as though it were made of gold. She looked at her sister with a wondrous envy Cassandra immediately wanted to erase. “Jeez, Mary, it’s just an avocado,” she said.

Diane came over, Diane who Cassandra often sketched and was more like Mary than Cassandra had previously realized, both of them patient enough to sit for her while she played her creative games.

“Isn’t Cassandra’s hair just indecent?” Abe roared. They were
sitting around, the four of them and Abe’s friend John, stoned. Cassandra had given in to Mary, and the moment she did, she realized her sister smoked grass all the time. She required no instruction on how to inhale, lighting the packed pipe herself without hesitation.

“Indecent how?” Diane asked.

“It’s all on display,” Abe said, crawling along the couch to reach his arms around Cassandra’s waist. “Something that powerful ought to be contained.”

“Abe!” Cassandra said in fake protest as his head fell into her lap. John got up to change the record. He was a sweet-tempered, unobnoxious person who had plans to be a surgeon. He was from Iowa. He liked glam rock. She was privately hoping he’d marry Diane.

“You’re saying she ought to cover it up?” Diane was saying now. “Like some kind of Orthodox Jew?” Cassandra winced. Abe’s father had been Jewish and Diane often said things that weren’t really racist, but could sound racist if you were only half-listening.

Abe spoke into her thigh. “No, I’m saying I love it. My natural beauty. You know she doesn’t wear makeup.” He rolled over to look up at her, fingering the ends of her hair.

“Shh,” Cassandra said, embarrassed.

“It was a good thing when we were growing up,” Mary was saying. “I was blond, so no one ever assumed we were sisters.”

“Yeah, who would ever want to be related to her?” Diane said.

“I didn’t,” Mary said. They laughed.

They were kidding, weren’t they? She looked down at Abe, who was like a child in her lap. He pouted at her and continued to touch her hair. Across the room, her friend and sister were far away, flopping their heads on their necks. Mary was clutching a blanket around her shoulders. “It’s way colder here than everybody says.”

“Hello, Cassandra,” Abe said. His voice was an imaginary line, hooking her back in among her people, a line that wasn’t really there, but in which it was better to believe if she could.

T
HE NEXT NIGHT
, the sisters were at a concert, a screeching affair in a checker-tiled room so soaked with beer and urine that its scuffed black walls seemed to radiate a pale yellow glow. They sucked lurid drinks through cocktail stirrers and spoke directly in each other’s ear.

“I’ll never meet anyone in College Park!” Mary shouted, after surveying the room.

“I felt the exact same way.”

“You always met people,” Mary insisted. “You just didn’t like them as much as they liked you.”

“Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”

Mary cleared her throat in exasperation. “I feel like I’m in the wrong club,” she said. “The jock guys who keep asking me out. They aren’t
my
guys, you know?” She tossed her hair out of her eye, flirtatiously. Don’t waste it on me, Cassandra wanted to say, but didn’t. The truth was it couldn’t be wasted. Mary was nineteen and on vacation. Her allure was in limitless supply.

Another drink in, Mary lost her footing and Cassandra had to catch her by the soft, nubile arm. She loved the ugliness of the place, the way it made everyone inside it look beautiful, her little sister most of all. Then the screeching stopped and the main act—the act that John had sent them to hear—came on and filled the room with a thundering heartache of guitar, drums, and bass. The lead singer was a scrawny man who looked like a woman and held his high notes forever. Cassandra and Mary bumped against each other in excitement, and strangers bumped against them, too. A sweaty, older man with long hair bumped Mary a few too many times, finally abandoning the ruse and directly pressing himself into her, his stomach smushing where it made contact with her back. Even in the dark, Cassandra could see her shoulders stiffen at the unseen presence behind her, then stiffen more after she managed to glimpse his toothy face. She looped her arm around Mary’s waist and spun her until she was in front of her, then pressed her own body against Mary’s in defense. They remained that way for a moment, bucking to the music like one sister instead of two, closer than they’d been even on the nights
they’d shared a bed as girls. The man moved on, miming a hat-tip and making them laugh, and before they knew it, they were separate again and dancing, and another man, this one much younger and much handsomer, in an angled, almost military way, was advancing on Mary from the side.

The floor was humming in Cassandra’s knees, the music banging pinball-like from her chest to her neck to her knuckles, and she didn’t know what Mary would want her to do this time. She watched her sister bob her head. Her hair, blond even in the dark, fell like a glare across her face as the man bent down from his great male height and spoke into her ear. Her sister’s spine arched as she looked up to respond; her face turned away from Cassandra’s. It looked very much like a situation in which Cassandra was not supposed to intervene. She stood there a moment on the scummy checkered tile, and then, finding she still had liquid in her cup, downed her last swallow of beer.

She reached for her sister, whose shapely body still swiveled just inches from her own. She pulled her toward her, away from the tall soldier and back into her frame of vision. She closed her eyes and kept her there, nodding to the crescendo that had since given way to a piercing, palpitating guitar. When she opened her eyes again Mary was there, smiling at her, swooping toward her for an embrace.

Cassandra held her sister and told her she was glad she’d guessed right. But Mary just shook her head and smiled, then shouted something explosive in Cassandra’s ear.

“What?” Cassandra screamed back. “I can’t hear you!”

“I can’t hear you!” Mary mouthed in response.

A
S THEY CAME
back into the apartment, Cassandra’s ears were ringing so violently she thought she heard the phone ringing, too. It wasn’t until Abe, who’d been sitting with a book in his armchair, stood up that she realized it really was the phone.

Mary had already rushed on to the bathroom, so Cassandra stood for a moment in the entryway absorbing the glow of Abe’s reading
lamp, which softened the darkened room, drew it inward, and made it hers. When he came back from the kitchen, she didn’t immediately recognize the expression on his face. She tilted her head at him, cutely, inviting him to tackle her. But instead he stood in the dining alcove and waited. In the next moment, she understood everything. Still she didn’t move. She wanted to hold the moment one beat longer, the final moment before his tragedy became their tragedy, before everything could still be postponed because it hadn’t yet been spoken.

It was his grandmother Helen, of course. A heart attack in her kitchen. One minute squeezing her can opener, the next minute gone. Sudden, like Abe’s parents before her. “She was just using a can opener,” he repeated, always one to focus on details. Cassandra led him to the couch as though introducing the act of sitting, and let him slump with his hand in hers, his head on her shoulder, not even at a comfortable angle, though he didn’t seem to care.

It occurred to her then that Abe had never really described to her how he’d felt when his parents died. Of course, she knew he had to have been a wreck, that it had changed his life forever and continued to affect him even today. But how, precisely? Had he temporarily lost his appetite, his ability to sleep? Did he obsess over the event privately or did he put it out of mind, so that it seemed like something that had happened to someone else, something he’d heard about, maybe, on the news? These suddenly seemed like important things to know about the person she’d committed to for life, and she felt embarrassed and even foolish not to have tracked down the answers before.

Perhaps he had been waiting for her to ask him again, and in her happiness, she had forgotten. Perhaps he had tried to bring it up, but she had clumsily and inadvertently rebuffed him when he did. It was impossible to say. She looked at his forehead where it rested on her shoulder, so furrowed and porous, lightly perspiring with emotion. She couldn’t ask him now, or even anytime soon. She’d just have to make a mental note, and remember.

When Mary finally opened the bathroom door—how long had she been hiding in there, sensing something was wrong?—her face was
almost professional in its expression of concern. She hung back at just the right distance, so that her presence and support were felt but not broadcast. She was like an actress in a play in which Abe’s grandmother had died, so finely was she performing the etiquette of grief. Much more finely than Cassandra, who felt feckless and ill-equipped to even sit on her own stupid couch. Mary was only nineteen, and her shorts were far too short, but it was clear she’d paid attention to the things her family had to teach.

Cassandra caught her sister’s eye and motioned her over. Mary came around to join them, drawing her legs up beneath her like a pet. On her other side, Abe breathed in a rhythm that suggested nothing, and after a while, she stopped waiting for him to speak. She thought of Helen, who’d lived in a rural county all her life, but moved to Richmond when Abe fell to her care, to give him the best education. The framed picture of her late, darker-skinned husband she kept hidden in her bedside drawer. The eyebrows she drew in with pencil, the thick stockings she wore every day. The way she’d once admitted she was too fond of pigs to eat them, but bought and cooked bacon for Abe when he visited, because she hated to deny her boy his treats. Cassandra’s foot, bent at what was now a clearly unsustainable angle, began to tingle, but she refused to move it. For a little while longer, she’d be still. She’d be like Helen and overcome her own discomfort. She’d give him whatever he wanted.

M
ARY’S RETURN TICKET
couldn’t be changed, so she stayed on with Diane while Abe and Cassandra went to Richmond. In the departures hall, Abe wore a jacket that made him look like a pilot, and for a moment Cassandra worried someone might show up and ask him to fly a plane. Mary and Diane had come to see them off, but in her distraction Cassandra could hardly give them anything. She told Mary about a soap shop near Diane’s if she wanted to get a gift for Eunice, but it must have come out wrong, because Mary only pressed her lips
together and leaned in for a hug. Over her sister’s shoulder, Cassandra watched Abe intently as though he might wander away.

The funeral was the first she’d attended outside her parents’ house, but it was a funeral all the same: unfashionable fabrics in a range of grim hues, voices laboring to sing in unison, the nagging feeling that none of this was really helping anyone, least of all the stricken family in the front. At the lectern, a newly shaven Abe eulogized his grandmother’s tenacity as well as her slowness to appreciate jokes. He told a story about how he often liked to fake injuries as a child, just to see what she would do, and how she always came running, even after she ought to have known he was only messing with her. Cassandra looked at the congregation of old ladies, all of whom seemed to have heard the story before, and liked it. She’d never heard it. “And thank God for that,” Abe said, hamming for the ladies, who nodded their hats at the memory. “Because when I really did fall and break my ankle, she didn’t just leave me there on the ground!” Everyone laughed, including Cassandra, grateful to have the chance.

Back in Helen’s bungalow, scented with cinnamon candles and vacuum exhaust, Abe accepted condolences and advice. He nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am.” Cassandra took note of this, that in grief he was even more polite than he was in ordinary life.

In bed that night, he lay hard and almost unbreathing beside her, as though the mattress concealed a hundred knives, which the slightest movement would send plunging through his ribs. She drifted off easily, but when she awoke again in the middle of the night, she was troubled to find him gone, not in bed and not even in the room. With her eyes half-shut, she hauled herself out of bed and down the little staircase to Helen’s living room, where Abe sat in his boxer shorts and threadbare undershirt with a fat hardcover book on the couch.

“What’re you reading?” she asked, her voice raspy with sleep.

“Sherlock Holmes.”

She came to sit beside him. “Really?”

“It’s my old edition. A favorite.”

She lifted the back pages to catch a glimpse of text. “I don’t think I’ve ever read Sherlock Holmes,” she said through a yawn. “I was more into Nancy Drew.”

He closed the book over his finger and smiled at her, fuzzily, so that the parts of his face that had once seemed most vital were, for a moment, blurred out. She found herself missing his beard. “You can go back to bed,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re very sweet but you don’t have to worry about me. Get some sleep.” He looked her directly in the eye, and even in her groggy state, she could see that he wasn’t just being generous; he was telling her what to do.