“If I meant that much to you, maybe you should’ve thought about what you were doing,” I snapped, “instead of just doing whatever your id demanded.”
But Lanie was beyond listening to me, her face crumpled in anger and indignant tears streaming down her cheeks. “You didn’t even tell me where you were going. You told Ellen. Ellen. She’s not your sister. I am.”
“Ellen isn’t the one who slept with my boyfriend!”
Lanie snatched a pillow off the bed and pressed her face into it, screaming. When she tossed it aside, her cheeks were mottled red and stained with mascara, but her temper seemed calm. “I needed you,” she said. “Dammit, Josie, I really needed you.”
“I needed you,” I argued. “I didn’t want to go through all that stuff with Mom and Dad alone. But you wouldn’t have anything to do with me. You were too busy getting high with Ryder and God knows what else.”
“I was a mess,” she said quietly. “But you were supposed to understand. You, my sister. But then you left, and I was an even bigger mess, and the only person around to help me pick up the pieces was Adam. He was the only one who understood.”
“What do you mean Adam understood?”
“You left him, too. You were the most important person in both of our lives. And, yeah, maybe we fucked everything up, but if you loved us half as much as we loved you, you would have forgiven us. Or at least stuck around to listen to the apology. But you were just gone, and neither of us knew what to do. We missed you, and no one else understood how gutted we felt to have lost you. No one understood us except each other.”
“And . . . what? Missing me was foreplay?”
Lanie shook her head in disgust. “Don’t make a joke about this. I know it’s hard to understand, but we fell in love. Not at first, you know. At first it was . . .” She trailed off and waved her hand, a dismissive gesture that turned my stomach. “But I got pregnant. It was an accident. I was going to have an abortion; I had the appointment scheduled and everything. But then I started thinking about you, and about what you would do if you were in my situation. You wouldn’t have the abortion. You’d keep the baby and dedicate yourself to being a good mother. So I called Adam and told him I was pregnant. And . . . And Adam said that he would, you know, do the right thing and marry me.” Lanie paused to purse her lips wryly. “He also offered to support us financially, without any other commitment. I think he nearly had a heart attack when I said I accepted his proposal of marriage.”
“And now? Are you . . . happy?”
“That’s a simple question with a complicated answer,” she said, her face twisted in an unreadable expression. She left the bed, dropping to her knees on the ground in front of me. “I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness.”
Embarrassed, I looked away. “Lanie, get up.”
“I know I don’t deserve it,” she repeated, grabbing my hands earnestly. “But I’m asking for it anyway.”
My instinct, honed after ten long years during which I was furious with her, was to snap that she had always taken things she didn’t deserve, that maybe if she hadn’t always been so goddamn entitled we wouldn’t be in this mess. But one look at her wet eyes stopped me. It wasn’t true, after all; Lanie hadn’t always been like that. Once she had been my favorite person in the world, the one I trusted more than anyone else. She had changed once before; it was possible she had changed again. I might not be ready to forgive and forget, but maybe I was finally ready to talk.
“You really hurt me,” I said.
One fat tear dripped cinematically down her cheek. “I know.”
“You were supposed to be the one person who never betrayed me.”
“I know. Jesus, Josie, I know. I’ve spent the last ten years telling myself that. I made a huge mistake, a huge mess of everything. There’s nothing that I can do that will make it better.”
She rocked back on her heels, more tears quivering in her eyes. I wished I could say something. I wished I could forgive her, or tell her that I would forgive her someday. But I couldn’t make myself say the words, not yet.
“I know I can never take back what I did, but do you think we’ll ever be okay again?”
I shrugged. “You’re my sister.”
It wasn’t really an answer, but Lanie smiled anyway.
chapter 14
Later that night, long after Aunt A’s friends and colleagues had gone home, after Aunt A had sent herself to bed, and after Ellen and her family had helped me clean up and then left for the hotel, I found myself alone in the living room with Caleb. I sat on the couch, staring at him while he hovered in the doorway, the few yards between us feeling ten times their size. We hadn’t been alone since he’d driven me home from the funeral, and we hadn’t had a conversation of more than twenty words since the previous night.
He picked up his suit jacket from the back of a nearby armchair and looked at me. “Jo—”
“How did you know?” I asked abruptly. I hated myself immediately for the question. I needed to mend my relationship with Caleb, soothe the hurt my lies had caused, not drag my sister into things.
He tilted his head at me, confusion flickering in his gray eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Yesterday, when Lanie pretended to be me. How did you know that she wasn’t?”
“Dunno.” He shrugged. “I just did.”
“But you didn’t even know she existed.”
“Yeah, but I know you.” He caught himself and looked away. “I thought I did, at least.”
His words stole my breath, painfully reminding me of how much I had hurt the man I loved.
“Caleb—” I started, but my throat felt suddenly parched and I grasped at a half-empty glass of water on the coffee table, chugging the contents.
Caleb frowned slightly. “I think that was left over from the reception.”
Grimacing, I set down the glass and crossed the room to stand before him. I had to tell him the whole, messy truth while I still had the courage. I knew how easy it would be for me to omit my history with Adam, to slip back into familiar patterns of lying, but I also knew how much our relationship now depended on honesty. If I wanted to make things right with Caleb—and I did, oh, I did—I needed to start being more truthful.
I took a deep breath and said, “Caleb, I have to tell you something.”
His face hardened, and he backed away slightly.
“It’s not . . .” I started before trailing off lamely. Better to just get it over with. “Before Adam was Lanie’s husband, he was my boyfriend.”
Caleb lifted his dark brows in surprise, and I wished I knew what he was thinking. I doubted that was the revelation he had been expecting.
“Adam and I had been dating for three years when Lanie slept with him,” I continued. “Or he slept with her. Or they slept with each other. I don’t know anymore. One of them was drunk, one of them was high, I don’t know who was more culpable. I don’t know that it matters. But Adam’s defense has always been that he thought Lanie was me.”
“Bullshit.”
I cracked a smile. “That’s the most succinct description of the situation I’ve heard yet.”
Caleb reached out and gently tucked my short hair behind my ear. “Adam’s clearly a bloody idiot.”
“He is,” I agreed quietly, holding myself very still in case Caleb wanted to lean in and kiss me.
He didn’t. Instead, he pulled his hand away from my hair and replaced it at his side, falling silent. I felt on the verge of tears, but I hadn’t earned the right to cry over the circumstances—they were, after all, of my own making.
“That’s why I never told you about Lanie. She hurt me so much that I couldn’t even stand to think about her. I just wanted to forget she existed. I didn’t know how to explain any of that to you.”
Caleb sighed heavily. “I wish you’d tried.”
Swallowing back tears, I nodded.
Caleb looked down at the jacket in his hands and glanced toward the door.
“Well,
” I said, my heart feeling like lead. “I guess you’re heading back to the hotel.”
Then he lunged forward and kissed me, an abrupt, forceful kiss, the kind that left a person winded. When he pulled away, my lips felt bruised.
Reaching behind Caleb, I locked the front door, and he took my hand to lead me up the staircase. In the velvet darkness of my old bedroom, he lowered me down onto the twin bed and arranged his body over mine. I closed my eyes to blot out the subtle glow of the plastic stars; I wanted to focus on nothing other than Caleb, on the familiar scratch of his stubble against my face and the heaviness of his warm, callused hands on my rib cage.
“Are we okay?” I whispered.
Caleb’s hand paused, and he pulled back slightly. “Let’s not ask the big questions tonight. I don’t know where we go from here. I just know that I’ve missed you, and I think you’ve missed me. It’s been a hard twenty-four hours, and I just want you in my arms. Is that okay?”
I nodded fiercely and wrapped my arms around his neck, pulling him closer. As his mouth, lips soft and tasting of coffee, closed over mine, I willingly shuttered my mind and surrendered my body.
• • •
I woke up alone. I felt a crushing desolation, certain of the inevitability that Caleb had come to his senses and left me. Our ending had been in view since the moment we met. I had prepared myself for the end a hundred times before, but as the years wore on, I had gotten comfortable, fallen more in love, hadn’t been able to believe that he would actually, truly leave me. I thought of all the things I should have done to be a better girlfriend, a better human being. I would call him, I would find him, I would make him love me again. Feeling resolved, I swung my feet over the edge of the bed and drew back in surprise.
Caleb’s shoes were by the nightstand.
Gravity suddenly had nothing on me; I was weightless, buoyed by sheer relief. He hadn’t left me; he hadn’t even left the house.
Opening the bedroom door, I heard strains of Pearl Jam and could smell coffee and the rich, golden scent of buttery pancakes, all of which served as further confirmation that Caleb was still there and hinted optimistically at his mood.
As I descended the front stairs, the doorbell rang. I tightened my robe and opened the door, expecting to find a contrite neighbor apologizing for skipping the funeral in the universal mourning language of casseroles. Instead, there sat a large cardboard box, taped up tightly and dented at the corners, and, beyond it, the retreating figure of a delivery person.
“Who was it?” Aunt A asked, coming down the stairs as I tugged the box, which wasn’t so much heavy as it was large and awkward, into the living room.
“UPS. They left this.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure. It’s addressed to you, and the return address is some post office box in California.” I froze as I said the word California. I glanced quickly at Aunt A, who looked stricken as well. “You don’t know anyone in California, do you?”
“Open the box,” she said dully. “Let me get you some scissors.”
I ripped the tape from the box with my bare hands and flung open the lid. Together, Aunt A and I peered into the box, which was crowded with a jumble of incense-scented, light-colored cloth; strings of beads; and assorted knickknacks. Her voice trembled when she spoke. “They’ve sent us your mother’s things.”
I reached into the box and delicately fingered a strand of beads, as though they might shatter at my touch, barely resisting the urge to wind the long ropes of color around me, to wrap myself in my mother’s essence and try to breathe her in one last time. Did these things help her find peace? Did they fill her with love and purpose, like we once had?
Why did you go, Mom? And why didn’t you say goodbye?
• • •
Aunt A and I got no further than the beads before Caleb announced breakfast was on the table, and we agreed it would be a shame to allow such delicious-smelling pancakes to get cold. Aunt A went upstairs to fetch Ellen (who I was fairly certain hadn’t eaten a pancake since the early 2000s), and I folded the box’s flaps closed. There was a certain sense of relief at being forced to abandon the project, albeit temporarily. It had been a brutal and emotionally devastating week, and I wasn’t certain I could withstand the added trauma of confronting my late mother’s personal effects.
But after breakfast had been consumed and the kitchen had been cleaned, Aunt A returned to the box and I felt compelled to follow her. I had to imagine that Aunt A was feeling some of the same dread at the thought of opening it, and I couldn’t allow her to suffer alone.
“I wish this hadn’t come today,” she said, staring down at it.
“Me too,” I agreed, my voice catching. “After everything . . . You know, we don’t have to open it right now.”
“It’s not going to get any easier.”
“No.” I sighed. “It’s not.”
“Come on,” she said, kneeling beside the box and patting the ground beside her. “Let’s do this together.”
I nodded and sank to a seat. She was right: sorting through my mother’s belongings would never be anything less than heartbreaking, and I knew that we could each use the moral support. As Aunt A pulled open the box, I took a deep breath, futilely hoping to catch a whiff of my mother’s unique scent, vanilla and lilac and something green. But all I smelled was cardboard, and the musty scent of stale objects. My heart nearly cracked open.
Aunt A extracted a long, beaded necklace and dangled it before her, the glass beads twirling and catching the light. “This would’ve looked pretty on her,” she said quietly.
I nodded in agreement, not daring myself to speak, feeling the lump of tears working its way up my throat. I plunged a hand inside and extracted a sky-blue scarf. I rubbed the gauzy fabric between my thumbs and against my face, hoping to feel some kind of connection. I felt nothing. Nothing about that piece of cloth reminded me of my mother. For all I knew, it wasn’t even hers. We could have been mailed items belonging to someone else’s dead mother. How would we ever know?
Unsettled, I reached into the box once more. There had to be something that would stir me, something that felt unequivocally hers. My fingers hit something papery but soft, something that felt like a well-worn piece of stock paper, and I carefully pulled it free. I caught my breath when I recognized it as the cover to our mother’s treasured copy of Anna Karenina. The book had been one of her favorites, one that Lanie and I had tried—and failed—to read on many occasions. One cold winter, stuck in Berlin while I raised money to keep traveling, I found a copy in the hostel’s library and finally made my way through the tome. None of it stuck with me so much as its famous opening line: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
As Aunt A and I sifted through the modest, sad artifacts of my mother’s existence, fruitlessly searching for the rest of the book, I realized that this was the uniqueness of this unhappy family: a mother who had left behind nothing but broken incense burners and threadbare scarves that reeked of patchouli.
My fingers hit something else that felt book-like, and I pulled it out, hoping for more of Anna Karenina, or perhaps one of her journals. Our mother had been an inveterate journal-keeper, and, for as long as I could remember, she had chronicled her life in a series of notebooks. She guarded both their contents and location with extreme secrecy; I would only spot a journal in the wild when she had it in her hands, curled up in a chair by the window, lounging on the front porch swing, or, sometimes, holed up in the playhouse behind our house. Lanie would sometimes uncover them, but she never told me where. In the dark months after she had left for California, I had torn apart her bedroom looking for them, hoping they might contain some explanation of why she left or where she had gone. I never found them.
Instead, I extracted a thick pamphlet, its bright yellow cover torn and stained, its pages dog-eared. This book, whatever it was, had been well-loved. My stomach soured as I read the title: The Official Handbook of t
he Life Force Collective: Ideals and Practices for All Members. I almost threw the book down, but curiosity overtook me. This might be the best chance I had to learn more about the cult that had consumed my mother, to understand why she had left us for them and never once looked back.
Gritting my teeth, I opened the book. After the title page, the first full page was dominated by a glamour shot of LFC founder Rhetta Quinn. From the gloss on her hair and the smoky eye makeup, I suspected it was one of her former headshots. I resisted the urge to curse at her image and turned the page.
What We Believe, it said in bold-faced letters at the top of the page.
We believe in the restorative power of the sun. We believe in the energy it instills in us, and we believe that we are vessels of that energy. We believe that it is our duty as human beings to cultivate the energy bestowed upon us by the sun, the giver of energy and thus the giver of life.
I didn’t have the patience to read any more of the hippy-dippy manifesto, not when I had lost my mother to its inane worship, and I flipped the page. A Brief Biography of Our Founder, Rhetta Quinn, accompanied by another glamour shot. This time, I couldn’t help but spit some choice words.
“Josie?” Aunt A asked, looking up from some photographs. “What do you have there?”
“This,” I said, handing it to her. “The Official Handbook of the Life Force Collective. Check out the two huge pictures of Rhetta Quinn before you’re even five pages deep. What an egomaniac.”
Aunt A frowned as she began flipping through the book. A few pages in she stopped, spots of angry color rising in her cheeks.
“I can’t do this,” she announced, dropping the handbook as though it had burned her. “I’m sorry. I know I said . . . but I need a break. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” I said, feeling guilty for handing her the book that had so upset her. “Are you okay?”
She nodded brusquely and headed for the stairs. Her abrupt departure was so unlike my normally calm aunt that I wondered what it was that she had found so objectionable. Was she as frustrated with Rhetta Quinn as I was, angry that this woman was tearing apart families for what seemed like an ego trip?
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