The Weird Sisters (37 page)

And then they drove to a festival in a park miles from anywhere she knew, another of a million attempts to re-create Woodstock with a cast too self-conscious to stage an effective revival. Cordy was sitting in a tent with Max and some of his friends, and trying hard to remember what it was she had hated enough about Barnwell to have forced her here. She should be at her shift at the Beanery right now, she thought, and the idea of that place made her ache with longing—the smell of the coffee, the clatter of silverware, the way the sound rose and fell during the day from sleepy early risers to the bubble of the lunch crowd to the purr of afternoon lingerers. Had she really fallen madly in love . . . with a coffee shop?

Cordy sighed and leaned back against a pile of backpacks in the corner, resting her hand on her belly, stroking it slowly. No matter how much she loved the Beanery, it wasn’t hers anymore. She’d blown that by taking off. She looked over at Max, who was staring at her stomach intently.

“You’re pregnant,” Max observed.

This brilliant thought had taken him over a day to assemble.

“It happens,” Cordy said.

“Not to me,” Max said vaguely. Cordy wondered whether he meant that literally, that he was somehow surprised that he had never been pregnant, or just that he had never had the pleasure of knocking someone up.

“So are you on the kick again?” he asked. A boy—he was a boy, really, lanky and red-eyed, with patchy stubble on his cheeks—stumbled into the tent and collapsed on one of the sleeping bags in the back, promptly falling asleep with his leg draped unceremoniously over Cordelia’s thighs like a disobedient lapdog.

She hadn’t heard that phrase in a while. People had all sorts of names for that world, where you rolled from town to town like tumbleweeds, following bands, following dreams, following lovers, following stars. But Max had always called it being “on the kick,” given his penchant for getting kicked out of places for minor issues like refusing to pay his hotel bill.

“I don’t know,” Cordy said. Suddenly the tent felt close and hot, the sunshine through the red nylon making Max’s hollow cheeks glow in an eerie trace of veins and blood. “I need . . .” She pushed the boy’s leg roughly off her own, stood up and opened the tent flap to emerge into the air.

The stage was far away, beyond a small copse of trees that hid the campsite’s restrooms and showers, and the music was only a dull blur of thumps and shouting. A group of people played hacky sack by a cluster of tents and camp chairs. A young woman near a battered RV was rinsing laundry under a spigot. Her blond dreadlocked hair tangled down her back, looking thick and dirty in the fading afternoon light. Behind her, a toddler wobbled unsteadily around a broken camp chair. Cordy’s fist opened and closed.

The woman looked up at Cordy, her face wearing the mask of a woman twenty years older. Cordy’s hand went to her own throat, stroking the bones gently. She could do it. She could raise a child on the kick, bring it up on the open road and bands and starlight campfires in the desert. It would grow up open-minded and free, a leaf on the wind.

And she would look like that woman, untethered and exhausted. And the baby would never know the map of a bedroom ceiling the way she knew hers. And her milk would dry up on the thin and inconsistent food of the road. And Cordy would not feel Dan’s warm and grounding arms around her, and we would not know our niece or nephew, and our father would not murmur sonnets to his grandchild, and the baby would never know what it meant to hate Barnwell so deeply that she couldn’t help but return to it.

The band finished a song, the crowd cheered. The hacky sack players gave up and wandered back toward the stage and Cordy drifted after them, pulled in their wake. The field was massive, hemmed in on each side by tidy municipal fencing, and inside its boundaries a teeming rush of people, so many bodies in motion.
Witness this army of such mass and charge.

In that field was her past, a blur of sight and sound, a flood of experiences all designed to keep out the world, not to embrace it. Inside her body was her future, her family, all that would hold her in. Her stomach twisted slightly in guilt as she thought of us back home, wondering where she was, assuming the worst, assuming the truth.

But if she went back right now—if she could find someone to drive her all night—maybe we’d forgive. Maybe we’d forget. Maybe we’d understand.

Maybe we’d believe that this time the change was for real.

Cordy rushed back to the tent to get her things.

She couldn’t have known that at that moment we were hardly thinking of her at all.

TWENTY

W
hen Bean got home after work, our father was standing at the front door like a dog begging to be let out. He and our mother had long ago begun a tradition of pre-prandial walks, the most our mother could ever be expected to adhere to a schedule. He might come home from the office late in the afternoon and she would leave her dinner preparations (and us, once we were old enough), and the two of them would wander the sidewalks of the town. And despite the fact that our mother could no longer participate, he persisted in this tradition.

“Your mother’s resting,” he said, by way of greeting, and walked out of the door into the cooling evening.

But when Bean walked upstairs to change, she heard a strange gasping sound coming from our parents’ room. Her heels spun gunshots as she ran to their door and opened it. Our mother was definitely not resting. She was bent strangely, as though she had been interrupted while getting off the bed, her back arched, one leg stretched out, hovering above the floor. She lay on one bent arm that was shaking with the effort, and her eyes were wild as her other hand reached for Bean.

“Mom!” Bean shouted, rushing toward her. “What the hell is going on?” She was looking for blood, for vomit, for anything, but all she could hear was the dangerous rasp of our mother’s breathing, and all she could see was the jerking, flailing motions of her limbs. Bean pushed her back against the pillows, tugging the bent arm out from under her. Our mother gasped for breath and tried to sit up again.

“Jesus,” Bean said. “Rose!” she screamed. Her voice echoed in the empty house. She opened her mouth to call for Rose again, and then realized her error. Rose wasn’t here. Rose wasn’t going to rescue her. Not this time.

She grabbed the phone off the table and dialed. Our mother’s breathing had slowed, but was still rough and wheezing, her eyes wide, the circles beneath them dark against her shockingly white skin.

“I need an ambulance!” Bean shouted into the phone when someone answered. She ran to the window and shoved it open. “Daddy!” she shouted. He couldn’t have walked that far. And then she shouted again, half into the phone and half into the night, as our mother shook behind her, “I need an ambulance!”

B
ean was completely furious.

How was it possible that Rose was not here right now? This was absolutely 100 percent Rose’s kind of emergency. This was completely the place where Rose would shine. Where she could climb right up on her martyr’s cross and talk about how she’d saved our mother’s life and wasn’t it so lucky that she had been there?

And where the hell had Cordy gone? No one had seen her since a few nights before, when our father had run into a slovenly refugee helping himself to leftover chicken, which he was eating directly from a plate in the refrigerator. Had she finally decided that we were right, that she had no business raising a child, and taken off on the winds that had blown her here?

Here is a measure of how upset Bean was: she didn’t even notice how handsome the doctor sitting beside her on the waiting room chair was. She didn’t even glance at his perfectly tousled hair, didn’t even purse her lips temptingly at the gleam of his white teeth, didn’t even watch his broad hands smoothing his white coat as he sat down.

Or maybe this was a measure of how much she had changed, after all, somehow, and finally.

There had been a clot, in our mother’s arm, or maybe her leg, and worsened by the enforced disuse of her bed rest, by the chemotherapy, by the radiation, it had broken off and traveled into her lungs. Perhaps the doctors had told our parents that it was something to guard against, but between our father’s mind being eternally on the book in his hand and our mother’s mind being perpetually . . . well, elsewhere . . . they hadn’t told us. And while they swore it was nearly impossible to predict, shouldn’t we have known?

But we wouldn’t have heard it anyway, would we? With all of us wrapped up in our own private traumas, we weren’t any good to anyone. Not even our mother.

So it had crept through her veins and into her lungs, which is what had left her wheezing so desperately. And she was going to be okay, she was going to be okay, the handsome doctor said this many times, and Bean nodded agreeably each time he said this, but they were going to keep her for a little while. And we could go home and come back for visiting hours tomorrow.

But our father, of course, set up shop in an uncomfortable chair in our mother’s room, so Bean went home alone.

Where Cordy was waiting.

“Holy crap, Bean, what’s going on?” she asked, when Bean came in, slamming the door behind her. “Where is everyone?”

“Where the hell were you?” Bean asked. She stalked to the refrigerator and flung open the door. Cordy had been curled up on the sofa, but she padded after Bean into the kitchen.

Cordy hesitated. “I just went . . . out. With some friends.”

“Going out lasts for a few hours, Cordy. Not days. What’d you do, hit the road and then chicken out?”

Cordy’s back stiffened. “I didn’t . . .” she said, but she couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Well, you picked a hell of a time to disappear. Mom’s in the hospital.” Bean fluttered her fingers impotently at the food in front of her and then closed the door.

“What’s wrong?” Cordy asked, and her voice cracked a little. This was the time she had chosen to leave. Excellent work, as usual.

“A blood clot ended up in her lungs. Crack nursing staff that we are, we somehow completely failed to notice this until she nearly asphyxiated tonight. So good on us, right? How was your trip?” Bean picked a pitcher of iced tea off the windowsill and poured herself a glass.

“Is she going to be okay?”

“No, I left her at the morgue. She’s going to be fine, you moron. Dad’s staying with her, and I’ll go back to visit her tomorrow.”

“I’ll come, too,” Cordy said.

“Don’t put yourself out,” Bean said, slamming the glass down, the tea leaping dangerously close to the edges and then receding like a tide.

“I’m glad you were here.”

“Oh, me too. Thrilled. Lucky me.” Bean turned toward the cabinets for a moment and took a drink and then turned back to Cordy so quickly the liquid splashed on the bodice of her dress, leaving a dark stain across a bright red poppy. “Cordy, where the hell have you been? You can’t just take off like that and not tell anyone. What if I hadn’t been home?”

“Someone would have been there,” Cordy said, pulling the sleeves of her sweatshirt down over her hands.

“Who? Dad was out for his walk, Rose is in England! We can’t just keep covering for you, Cordy. There’s not going to be someone to pick up after you for the rest of your life!”

Cordy, who was pulling into the fabric that covered her like a turtle, shot back sharply, “You’re giving me advice, Bean? If you hadn’t been home, where would you have been? In bed with your married lover? Like I’m supposed to give you a medal that you weren’t fucking him right at the time that Mom needed help?”

“I broke it off with him,” Bean spat, steely.

“Then it just would have been someone else,” Cordy said quietly, and they froze for a moment, Bean because it was so true, and Cordy because she had never said anything quite so cruel before.

“You’re in no condition to go casting moral aspersions on anyone,” Bean said, and placed her glass in the sink. “Now I have the infinite pleasure of calling Rose and telling her the news. Unless you’d like to do the honors.”

Cordy worried the sleeves of her sweatshirt against her fingers. “If you want me to.”

“Don’t be an idiot. You weren’t even here,” Bean said, and flounced off to phone Rose.

W
hen the phone rang in that strange, double-toned way Rose was sure she would never get used to, she sprang into wakefulness with a gasp. Jonathan rolled over sleepily and answered it. “Hello?” he asked, and Rose could hear the mumbled pitch of Bean’s voice. “No, it’s okay. Is everything okay?” A pause. “She’s right here. Hang on.”

“What’s wrong?” Rose asked, clutching the phone in her hand.

“Charming to speak to you, too,” Bean said dryly. Her voice echoed tinnily in Rose’s ear. “I see England hasn’t improved your manners any.”

“Shut up, Bean. It’s five in the morning here—you wouldn’t be calling if there weren’t something wrong. What’s going on? Is it Mom?” Rose was already standing, fumbling for her clothes, which she had uncharacteristically left scattered on the floor. The phone cord scraped across Jonathan’s nose and he pulled on it, forcing Rose back onto the bed.