Kith and Kin

by Kris Ripper

  Mother would take death as a challenge. She had apparently taken joining a cult as one.

  Lisa bit off an entirely inappropriate explosion of laughter—a cult! I joined a cult! (was it really laughter if it was torn from your body like a scream?)—and excused herself to her room.

  The kitchen door opened at the same time, and Jake, carrying Miles, as usual, almost bumped into her.

  “Oh, hey, Lisa. Listen, we’re going to my brother’s for dinner. Okay?” He glanced over her shoulder, toward the living room, almost as if he understood that she might not be okay.

  Then he looked back at her face and added, seriously, too seriously, “Come with us. You’ve never seen Carey’s place before, and Alice is a painter. And I wouldn’t mind the company, either.”

  “Isn’t Singer—”

  “Yeah. Yeah, of course. And Emery will be there.” He smiled.

  “I can’t do this more tonight,” she whispered to Singer’s boyfriend (and kid), standing in the hallway of what had once been her home. “I can’t tell who’s crazier, her or me.”

  “We’re supposed to be there at six. I’ll text you when we get close to ready.”

  She nodded and unlocked her door. She’d make some excuse, maybe about her dislike for sushi, which could definitely be played up, and she’d escape with them for a little while. Any plan was better than no plan.

  *

  Alice and Carey had clearly received warning that Singer’s crazy sister was coming to dinner. They were all smiles and welcome.

  Carey actually shook her hand. Which was funny. “You want the penny tour?”

  “Sure.” Weird, watching Carey, this Carey, when the Carey she’d known in school had never smiled, except with the Derries. Never laughed out loud ever. He’d been moody and—dark, Lisa settled on, though it hadn’t been a show, like with some kids. No trench coats, no eyeliner, no boots. She almost thought there was some kind of scandal when they were younger, one of those creepy priest stories, but who knew if what she remembered was real or rumor.

  “So our bedroom’s at the end of the hall”—to her relief, no offer was made to enter—“and this is my office, here.”

  Carey’s office reminded her of her scrapbooking room. Prepared for use, without actually being inhabited.

  “And this is Alice’s studio.”

  She could tell by his voice that it was meant to be a declaration. That in another context, she would be expected to give up at least an “ahh” if not an “ooh.”

  Then she saw Alice’s studio.

  “Oh my god.”

  The smile, the entirely smug smile Carey was wearing, should have annoyed her. But instead Lisa’s feet propelled her into the room without any interference from propriety or politeness.

  Paintings leaned up against all the walls, some four or five deep. There was a stack of three canvasses on the nearest table, beside a higher stack. The top of the first stack showed an incredible painting of hands twisted around each other, anchored in space by ropes, knotted at the wrist and extending beyond the edges of the canvas. God, god, Lisa thought, wanting to touch it, to verify what her brain was telling her must be true: there are no hands there. But something about it, far more than a photograph, seemed three-dimensional.

  “I don’t come in here at night, when the lights are off.” Carey had stayed behind her, to the side of the door. “She’s been working on hands almost since we moved in. One of the cousins has a friend who models for her, and Emery takes the photographs so she can paint from them later.”

  More hands, a few of ankles, though these were not nearly as well defined, the ropes blurred from far away and almost indistinguishable up close. (Snakes? Not snakes.) In the back corner of the room a second table was set up, and this one held notebooks and notebooks. Some, open, were sketches of a young man, bound with rope, in pencil, mostly. A few in charcoal. And then, larger, another sketch. Emery, unmistakable, looking down on a boy, one hand out, hovering just over his bent head, camera in his other hand.

  “I mostly stay away from the nudes in this sequence, but that one is … compelling.”

  The boy was naked, though the rope coiling around his arms and chest almost disguised it.

  She gestured to the man above the boy. “It’s Emery, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. He and Alice have known each other for almost their entire lives, and I have to believe that does something for the art. I think all of her work is miraculous, but this series contains some of my favorites.” Carey moved to stand beside her at the table. “I don’t know where all her Emerys went—there are entire notebooks—and in some of them you can see this look on his face, serious and humorous at once. But that one is a particularly good perspective on—I don’t know—the way he watches. Like a heron, very still.”

  Lisa glanced over.

  “Are you impressed? Alice tells me I live vicariously through her. But I can’t help but feel weirdly proud, standing here looking at her work.”

  “Yeah. I think that’s appropriate. Wow.”

  Carey grinned. And that expression was new to him, as an adult. Teenage Carey could never have opened his face like that, shared that kind of smile. “That’s the whole tour. Which I basically offered to give you only for this room.”

  “I can’t imagine being able to do this.”

  “Me neither. The places Alice goes in her head astound me. In a good way.” He paused. “Well, never in a bad way, at least. I hope you like pizza. We’re having a pizza buffet.”

  “Stop hiding!” Alice shouted from somewhere else in the house.

  Oh god, was she hiding again? She couldn’t seem to stop hiding. Lisa turned to the door and froze at the sight of a noose hanging from the ceiling. Her chest seized, throat closing, and she couldn’t breathe or swallow and her heartbeat took over her entire awareness—

  Carey froze, not quite reaching out. “She meant me. I’m the one who’s hiding.” Pause. “That’s a lasso. A gift from a friend of Alice’s before she moved to the wild West.”

  The words fell around her, out of order, and all she could think was, I’m dying, I’m dying, the snake is a noose and this is death and I am dead and that noose is proof—

  “Hold your breath. I know it sounds weird, but it works for me. Hold your breath and focus on something until you think you can inhale again. Something real, something tangible, with texture, and scent. Lisa, hold your breath and focus.”

  Her toes curled inside her shoes, and both of her hands came up to her chest, clenched and crossing, like she was a mummy, dead and buried.

  “Lisa. You’re here with us, having pizza, and also listening to Alice’s crazy ideas about family expansion, which is fitting, since you are an expansion of our family. Focus on something and breathe.”

  Tears blurred everything, but she could still see the drawing of Emery, looking down, careful and intense and holding his camera, the strap loose around his wrist, and she could feel the weight of a camera strap if she tried, she could feel the swing of it as if the drawing weren’t just a moment trapped on paper.

  “Breathe,” Carey said. “Not too fast.”

  She looked at the sketch and for a second imagined that she was the one on her knees, that she was the one Emery was looking at like in his gaze even Lisa could be whole.

  “You guys ready for pizza?” Alice asked from the doorway.

  “We’ll be out in a sec.” Then, lower, “You good?”

  She didn’t know how long it took before she could get herself back from the speedy panic in her lungs. But when she did, she nodded, and Carey nodded in reply. No fanfare. No discussion.

  One fuckup to another: You good?

  Lisa wanted to curl up in a ball and cry, but she followed him out to the main room and sat beside Emery, who, whether he knew it or not, had grounded her enough to stop dying.

  He sm
iled at her, and some deep fault line in her shifted, the broken pieces knitting back together.

  28

  Emery

  54 days since meeting Lisa

  Emery liked a good pizza buffet as much as the next man, but it was Lisa’s surprise arrival with Jake’s family that made the drive out worthwhile.

  And she’d sat down beside him. Spontaneously. He could feel her energy in the air even when neither one of them was participating in the conversation around them.

  Singer shook his head, absently wiping tomato sauce off Miles’s chin. “So, short of matricide, I don’t know what we’ll do with her.”

  “Have we ruled out matricide?” Lisa asked.

  He shot her a look. Then it softened. “Well. Not completely.”

  Carey stood up and brushed crumbs from his hands back over his plate. “We can’t help you with that, I don’t think. But we did talk about something else.” He glanced at Alice, who smiled up at him. “Hell, Al. I have no idea how to discuss this.”

  Things were about to get interesting. This was the pretense on which he’d been lured out to the great beyond, the big capital-T Talk with Jake and Singer.

  When Alice opened her mouth to respond Miles let out the kind of belch that Emery associated with drunk frat boys who showed up at the tattoo parlor and tried to goad each other into ink.

  The comically bewildered expression on Miles’s face made all of them laugh.

  “That’s gas, from your stomach,” Alice said, leaning down.

  “Ah?”

  “Did he just say ‘gas’?” Singer said.

  “Or, wait, are we doing that thing parents do, where they think their kid’s doing long division and it’s just squiggles?”

  “I’m writing it down in his baby book as his first word,” Alice told them. “This is actually better than we’d hoped, Care. Lisa’s here, and Miles is talking about bodily functions.”

  Carey, still looking uncomfortable, began, “And yet—”

  “We are willing to surrogate a baby, if you two would like to conceive but find yourselves unable to because of biology.” Alice smirked. “There. Not that hard, Care, if you simply say what you mean.”

  Ha. She was such an insufferable smartass. Emery caught Lisa’s eye, and they shared a look he interpreted as Glad I’m not involved in this.

  Singer, though, was possibly even more uncomfortable than Carey. His whole body went rigid, but he didn’t speak.

  Carey shifted on his feet, ran a hand through his hair, and shook his head. “Right, so, I’m making coffee.”

  “Coward!” Alice called after him. “You would never know it was his idea. Mostly.”

  “Ah … um…” Jake looked at Singer, who was still sitting there like he’d suffered an electrical shock. “Uh…”

  “Listen, this is just something for you to think about. I know how it works from the assisted reproduction standpoint, and Carey’s pretty sure he can iron out—as well as possible—the legal side. We don’t say any of this lightly, and you two will need some serious time to discuss it. No pressure, of any kind, but we wanted you to know that this is an option.”

  “Ah,” Miles said, to Jake, who smiled weakly.

  “Gas, huh? Alice—”

  Alice held up her hands. “That’s it. Think about it. Or don’t.”

  “Um. Okay. Thank you.”

  “We have coffee.” Carey stuck his head into the room. “Who wants coffee? We also have chocolates with stuff in them. For dessert.”

  It was probably wrong to find Carey’s awkwardness vaguely satisfying, but the man made a habit of seeming unperturbed, and Emery wasn’t so noble that he didn’t get off on seeing confident people unsettled.

  This time Lisa caught his eye and … smiled. It was almost a smile. Really close.

  “Coffee?” he asked.

  “No. But chocolate would be welcome.”

  Carey took orders and returned a few times with cups of coffee and two boxes of truffles (which Alice had clearly already picked over for the caramels and cremes). Conversation broke up a little, so Emery was free to turn to Lisa and ask her how she was. A totally normal question. Casual, even.

  “Oh. Fine.” She selected another chocolate, turning it in her fingers, trying to figure out what was inside through careful study.

  “Fine? Is that true, or are you just saying it?”

  Lisa’s eyebrows rose. “Were you—serious? I figure ‘fine’ is the standard answer to ‘how are you?’”

  “I was serious. Like you can give a real answer, if you want.”

  “Okay. You answer first. So I know what you mean.”

  He sipped his coffee, reflecting that the universe had exacted quick revenge for how amusing he’d found it when Carey was unsettled. “How am I? I guess I’m … fine.”

  That earned him a genuine smile. “See? It’s not an easy question.”

  “I’m going to try to answer it. Hang on.” He pretended to ponder his life and found that honesty wasn’t as difficult as it had seemed. “Actually, I’m good. I like California, and I’m doing work I enjoy, even if it’s not the shop I want to work at forever. Considering I only moved out here a few months ago, I feel pretty grounded.”

  “Grounded,” she repeated. Not like she was critical of the idea, more like she was rolling the word over, studying it from different angles.

  Lisa’s specific attention made him attempt more clarity. “I guess by the time I left the city I was totally sick of it. California’s so much … shinier. It’ll never be New York, and I miss the speed, the edge, the intensity. I miss feeling like I was standing at the epicenter of the world. But this is so much smoother, like maybe terrible things happen here, but they aren’t as ugly as they are there. Is that weird?”

  “I don’t think so. Or I think maybe the place you know best is always the place where you can see all the shadows.”

  “That’s a good way of putting it, yeah. Maybe I’m only seeing the surface here, but if I live here for thirty years I’ll see more of the edge.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So? How are you?”

  Lisa finally took a chance on her chocolate. When he leaned in closer, she held it out so he could see the inside.

  “Is that nougat?”

  “I guess so? It’s good, whatever it was. And not fruity.” She finished it off and sat back. “I think I’m sort of deeply aimless, if that makes sense.” Her tone shifted, rueful and almost apologetic. “Every day feels like this huge looming thing I have to fight my way through. Sorry, I’m trying not to sound crazy, but even the least of it is probably still pretty crazy.” Her eyes darted toward the rest of the house, away from the table. Emery couldn’t imagine what she was thinking.

  “I don’t think it’s crazy.”

  “It feels crazy to me. Like things used to make sense. And now they … don’t. When I was younger, I thought I basically had everything together. I knew what was supposed to happen next. Then I went to college it all sort of … faded. Until I had no idea who I was, or what I was supposed to be doing. And then I met my friend Abigail, and she was already thinking about moving to the farm. So we did it together.”

  “It must have been easier to have a friend with you. I wouldn’t be here without Alice, so I get that part. Having a person you can count on makes it easier to be brave.”

  “Yeah. It was like that. She was excited, thinking it could be home, more than her home. More than here. And I guess it kind of was.” She searched his face, and he hoped that she only saw acceptance. After another moment, she continued. “Everything was simple there. We did our routines, worked where we were supposed to work, ate and talked and slept. Now I get hung up on these stupid things, thinking I must look so completely nuts from the outside. Do you ever worry about that? That if people could see you when you were alone they’d t
hink you needed to be committed because you were actually crazy?”

  “I try not to think too hard about how people see me.” It wasn’t a lie. At least not entirely. He’d learned when he first started modeling how to divorce himself from the image of him that other people saw. When he took pictures he came at it from the other side, attempting to show something, to elicit a certain response, a certain connection.

  If he were photographing Lisa in this moment, he’d be trying to somehow encapsulate the ways she expressed uncertainty through the constant motion of her fingers, the way her eyebrows dropped inward as she contemplated what she wanted to say.

  “I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.” She took up another chocolate. “Oh, gross. Cherry.”

  “Here.” He popped the rest into his mouth. “I like the cherry ones.”

  “It always tastes like it’s bleeding or something.” Lisa shuddered.

  “Okay, that’s disturbing. I think you’ve ruined cherry-filled chocolates for me.”

  “Sorry. But they’re really sickening, Emery.”

  And damn. She’d said his name.

  He hid how pleased he was and reached for another chocolate. “I’m going to eat all the cherry ones I can find now, just to gross you out.”

  “That’s mature.”

  They smiled at each other, and Emery imagined an entire series of photos: Lisa, with truffles. He’d have to get a mixed box, like this one, so he could catch the exact expression on her face when she inadvertently bit into a cherry. And definitely a shot of her smile when he teased her, and she teased him back.

  29

  Singer

  59 days with Miles

  It started in the bedroom.

  Singer had given the kitchen a cursory once-over after they got home from Carey and Alice’s while Jake put Miles, already asleep, in his crib. They’d reconvened in the bedroom.

  It started with Jake saying, “Maybe we should think about surrogacy. I mean, I never considered it as an option, but I don’t know. Maybe it is.” Then he’d looked over, with that sweet, goofy smile on his face that made him look younger, and added, “Seriously, the thought of a kid with your genes is kind of amazing, you know?”