Through the Heart (6 page)

I couldn’t tell if he said it with disgust or admiration. But the truth was, I didn’t care about that either.

He went on, and what he said next sounded like a kind of curse. He said, “God help you if you ever do start to care. You won’t be used to it, and you’ll suffer.”

I just took another bite. That didn’t even deserve an answer.

Edward took the hint, and we ate our pizza in silence.

Even with two slices, I was done before him. I stood up. “Got to go, Eddie.”

He hated when I called him that.

“You’re a bastard,” he said.

I smiled. That was another reason why I liked Edward. He told the truth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
was still in my nightgown when my sister arrived. I had just gotten up and was making coffee when I heard the front door. I thought it might be Tammy, except it would have taken a crisis to get her up before noon on a weekend.

When I went out into the living room, I discovered Deirdre coming in with a diaper bag over one shoulder and one of the twins asleep on the other. She looked tired, as if it were the middle of the night, after a hard day, instead of first thing in the morning.

“Is there any coffee left?” was the first thing she said to me.

“I’m only just making it now,” I told her.

She looked at me and took in the nightgown. “You’re not even dressed yet,” she said accusingly.

“It’s only seven thirty,” I said.

That Deirdre was here so early meant she must have been up well before six, since she lived a good hour and a half away. And she would have had to pack the car with all the things the twins needed. It’s always amazed me, not just how much work kids are, but also how much stuff you seem to need to take care of them.

“And I didn’t know you were coming,” I added.

It was the mildest way I could think to say it, but my sister still jumped all over it.

“What do you mean, you didn’t know I was coming? I spoke to Mom this week.”

“Well, she didn’t tell me,” I said.

“I guess maybe she doesn’t tell you everything then. You think you’re so
close
now, but you’re not.”

It usually ended up like this, but it was a bad sign that it was starting out this way. Deirdre and I had been close when we were growing up. We formed a united front against my mother and provided some protection for each other. But then she left for college, and she met Boyd (her husband), and I met Dan, and we just didn’t see each other much. For a long while it seemed like it was just distance and time that came between us. But it turned into something else when I moved home. For some reason, my sister hated the fact that I was taking care of our mother during her illness. I figured it was probably guilt.

I said, “Mom might not be up for a bit. She had her fifth chemo session yesterday, you know.”

“Oh really?” Deirdre acted as if she were completely uninterested. Most of the time I thought it was an act, but sometimes I wondered.

As usual, she changed the subject and said, “I’ve got to go get May from the car. Here, take Frankie.”

When I took him, Frankie was as heavy and unwieldy as a sack of potatoes. You would never guess that when awake he turned into a whirling dervish of energy.

Deirdre returned a minute later with May. While she waited for the coffee to brew, she settled the two sleeping twins into a portable crib she had brought. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee in a travel mug, and before I knew it, was gone, mentioning something about meeting a friend in town for breakfast.

It was nine hours before my sister returned.

My mother came downstairs when the twins were just waking up. But when Frankie hit May and May started to scream, she said, “I don’t feel up to this right now. I think I’ll go lie back down for a bit,” and she disappeared upstairs and didn’t come down again. I was relieved. The one thing my sister and I agreed on was that our mother was not good with children, even her own. We knew—we had firsthand experience.

I was exhausted after two hours with the twins. I had no idea how my sister managed. After eight hours I thought I’d figured it out—at a certain point autopilot takes over, and you do it because you have to, because there’s no one else.

When Deirdre finally walked in the door, I was in the living room, the twins sprawled out asleep on the sofa. I was sitting on the floor, my back against the sofa, still in my nightgown, trying to find the energy to get up and get some food. I hadn’t properly eaten all day.

Deirdre came back looking like a different person. She took after our mother, small boned and birdlike, with dark brown hair that she wore in a bob. This morning her hair had been pushed back in a headband—and it looked like she hadn’t even brushed it beforehand. Now it was glossy and perfectly cut and dried. She had arrived wearing gray sweatpants and a T-shirt, and now she had on a red scoop-necked top and jeans. Her nails were polished dark red to match her top. So I knew at least three places she’d been in the last nine hours: the beauty parlor, the nail salon, and the mall.

I was about to say something to her about her disappearing act, but Deirdre looked at the sleeping kids on the couch, held her finger to her lips, and pointed at the kitchen.

I nodded and got up from the floor carefully, so as not to wake them, and followed her.

“So you can’t wait to go to sleep, is that it?” my sister said when we reached the kitchen and closed the door safely behind us. She was looking at my nightgown.

“No, I never changed from this morning,” I said.

Deirdre laughed. “That’s why I wear sweatpants and a T-shirt to bed, so if it’s one of those days, no one can tell,” my sister told me, giving me a view into her life that I had suspected but hadn’t known for sure. I decided not to say anything about her disappearing. Deirdre didn’t have an easy time of it. My life wasn’t a walk in the park either, but if you compared it to twins and an alcoholic husband, my sister won.

“I need to take some coffee so I don’t conk out while I’m driving home,” she said as she crossed to the coffee maker. She put in a filter, then opened the jar where we used to keep the coffee.

“It’s in the freezer,” I told her.

“You’re not supposed to put coffee in the freezer.” My sister shook her head at me, as if I should have known better. “You’re supposed to keep it in the fridge. The freezer destroys the oils or something. You work in a coffee store, and you don’t know that?”

In fact, I knew more than that. I knew that everyone agreed on what was bad for the coffee (air, moisture, heat, and light), but no one seemed to be able to agree on whether the freezer or the fridge was better. But I didn’t say that. I tended not to say what I thought to my sister. Things went more smoothly that way.

“This is regular coffee, right? If it isn’t, it will be your fault if I fall asleep at the wheel and we all die,” Deirdre said as she dumped three, then four, then five scoops into the filter.

Not for the first time, I thought that Deirdre and my mother had more in common than just their appearance.

“So why don’t you stay here tonight?” I suggested. “You didn’t even get to see Mom.”

Deirdre shot me a look over her shoulder as she carried the glass carafe to the sink to fill it with water. “You’re saying that like it’s a bad thing?”

My sister had a point; whenever they spent more than an hour together they always ended up getting in a screaming match. It made a kind of sense—they were too much the same. Even while screaming they both had a vein right in the center of their foreheads that branched above the eyes like a wishbone and stood out and throbbed.

“You didn’t even ask how she was,” I said.

“No, I didn’t,” Deirdre said, and ran the water full blast so that I couldn’t easily talk over it. When she shut it off, she said, “I don’t want to talk about it, okay? We always fight when we talk about it. And I don’t want to fight.”

“Okay. We don’t have to talk about it.”

Deirdre didn’t say anything else right away. She fiddled with the coffee scoop. The fine grains of coffee that clung to it drifted down to the counter like a mini brown snow flurry. She pushed them together with the side of her palm, and then left them there in a little pile.

“Do you want some food?” I asked, wondering what made her so quiet. “There are some leftovers in the fridge.”

“No, thanks. I ate dinner.”

Another thing she’d done while she was out. I have to admit, it hurt a little. I knew Deirdre was probably just avoiding our mother, but it felt like she was avoiding me too.

“But you can do something else for me,” Deirdre went on.

“What’s that?”

As I watched, she pushed her finger into the pile of grounds she’d made. She swirled her finger as if making a pattern. Then, almost abruptly, she said, “I need to borrow some money.”

“How much?”

“Not a fortune or anything. Just enough to cover me for a few months. Rent and groceries and diapers.”

This wasn’t going to go well, I thought.

“Well?” Deirdre demanded, when I didn’t answer right away. “Don’t tell me you’re going to give me a hard time about this. It’s not like you’ve got a whole lot of expenses. Seems to me like you’ve got it pretty easy living rent free. Bet Mom pays for the food too, right? What do you even need any money for?”

We had never talked about the details of my staying here.

“Actually, Mom doesn’t pay for anything,” I told her.

She looked at me as if I had started speaking in a foreign language. “What do you mean, Mom doesn’t pay for anything?”

“I mean I pay for the food and the mortgage and the bills. I pay for everything.”

“Bullshit.”

I shrugged.

“Bullshit,” Deirdre said again with even more feeling. “How long has this been going on?”

“For three years. Since right after I moved home. You know when she got sick she had to leave her job at the bank. And she told me she didn’t have the money, so I paid.”

“That’s such crap,” Deirdre said. “She’s got to have something. I mean, I know she was just a secretary, but she was there for years. She must have gotten some retirement or something. Some savings . . . something.”

“I don’t know anything about it except what she told me. Why don’t you ask her, if you want to know.” I suddenly felt exhausted. I sat down in one of the kitchen chairs.

“I really need the money, Nor. Seriously.”

I wondered if using my childhood nickname was unconscious or some sort of strategy, an attempt to call on the old times, old loyalties, old affection. Whatever it was, I matched her nickname for nickname.

“I don’t have it, D. I’m sorry. But I just don’t have it.”

“You want us to be out on the street?” my sister said, almost desperately. If it was an act, it was a good one.

“You’re not going to be out on the street. Boyd wouldn’t let that happen.”

“Boyd’s gone,” Deirdre said quietly.

I looked up at my sister. Deirdre was standing there, looking lost. I’d never seen my sister look quite like that before.

“He’s left before, and he’s always come back,” I said.

Boyd was a binge drinker. He sometimes went months without drinking, he went to meetings, he did everything he was supposed to do. Then he’d disappear for a week, sometimes two. Once I think he disappeared for a month, and my sister was convinced he was dead somewhere. When he showed up, he was always full of apologies. He would promise it would never happen again. But it always did.