by Megan Crane
There was absolutely no sign of my brother Christian’s trademark grin when he swung the door open sometime after 3 a.m. He squinted at me, and then scowled when he took in his fiancée’s condition.
“This is your idea of keeping an eye on Jeannie?”
We both swiveled to look at her.
Jeannie was more or less unconscious, emphasis on more. She had one arm slung across my shoulders and most of her body propped up against mine. She kept mumbling vowel sounds. Her hair was matted, and though I had had the presence of mind to remove the T-shirt with the risqué inscriptions, it was putting it mildly to say she looked the worse for wear. At least she was upright.
Well.
Mostly upright, anyway.
“She’s not facedown in a gutter,” I pointed out in the sweetest voice I could muster at that hour, and staggered a little bit when Jeannie flopped hard to the left for absolutely no reason.
What I didn’t point out was that we were all equally lucky that I was not in a similar condition. After all, I’d had several margaritas. And the better part of a bottle of champagne. It was just that when the other girls had opted for wacky drinks involving colored liquors and naughty titles to drown the pain of the karaoke, I’d opted for water and diet Coke.
Hence my ability to speak in complete sentences.
Christian held out his arms—despite the dubious look on his face—and we transferred Jeannie’s body from me to him with only minimal fuss. He moved inside the apartment and deposited Jeannie in a heap on the couch. She moaned slightly and muttered a few words toward the sofa cushions before lapsing into silence.
Or a coma, call it what you will.
“She’ll be up and puking within the hour,” Christian said, frowning at his wife-to-be—probably because he’d finally gotten a whiff of her brewery breath. Although, I reflected, it could also be the prospect of the night he had ahead of him. That would be enough to make anyone frown.
“Anything I should know about?” He gazed at me expectantly, and then his eyes crinkled up in the corners. “This isn’t Vegas. What happens here needs to be shared.”
I gazed back. “There’s nothing to share.”
Because of the Girl Code and because, let’s face it, he didn’t really want to know. He should count himself lucky he hadn’t had those Alpha Beta Whatever girls screeching in his ear all night. I might be permanently deafened.
In any event, there had been no sex, no kissing, and no stripping. That pretty much covered the bases. Why fill in the blanks? What fiancé wanted to know about the dancing, or the body shots, or the lewd commentary?
“I’m trusting you on this, Meredith,” Christian said, laughter in his voice. “I don’t want to turn into an urban legend, with some bozo passing out photographs on my wedding day.”
“Everyone was on their best behavior,” I assured him.
Given the assortment of people present, this was undoubtedly true.
“I’m trusting you,” he said again. Significantly, as if he really did trust me, which I doubted. “And don’t slam the door behind you. I’m hoping she’ll just sleep it off.”
“Yeah, right,” I muttered, but I still didn’t slam the door when I left.
When I tiptoed into my parents’ house later on that night, reenacting whole years of my adolescence in ways I was too tired to analyze, I stopped in amazement when I heard the sound of the television from the family room. Peeking inside, I saw my younger sister Hope crashed out across the couch. She had just graduated from college and had nothing to do with her life, as far as I knew. Yet she had been “too busy” to attend our soon-to-be sister-in-law’s bachelorette party.
I goggled at her supine form. She didn’t look particularly busy. In fact, if the junk food littered around her was any indication, she’d been in that same position all night.
“Oh hey,” she said when she saw me. “Check it out, there’s a teen movie festival on.”
“I thought you had other things to do tonight,” I said, and I could hear a little too much Snotty Big Sister in my voice.
Hope sighed. “How bad was it?”
“It was fine,” I told her. “It would have been better if you were there.”
“I really doubt it.” Hope looked at me. “You want to watch the rest of this movie with me?”
“I have to get to bed,” I responded. Hope was like an alien to me. I didn’t understand the things she did or said, and it always seemed to require way too much energy on my part to make the effort to bridge the six years between us.
I left the room without looking back.
But upstairs in my narrow twin bed, the one I’d slept in throughout my youth, I was suddenly wide-awake. I felt tired, but more than that, the strange kind of loneliness that seemed to go hand in hand with being awake when the world was sleeping all around me. Maybe I missed my boyfriend, Travis. Maybe it was just late. Or maybe it was a perfectly normal reaction to spending a whole evening in my past.
Once upon a time, Jeannie and I were best friends, and Christian really was like my twin. The three of us did everything together. Whatever boyfriends Jeannie or I had, or whatever girlfriends Christian had, what mattered was the three of us. We’d been that way since Christian and I had met Jeannie when all of us were toddlers. And we’d continued that way until the summer after my freshman year of college, when Jeannie’s and my friendship fell apart. I’d never expected to talk to her again until she’d started dating Christian the summer after we all graduated from college.
Fast-forward almost eight years and they were getting married, I was a stranger to them, and we all pretended things were exactly the same as they’d been in high school. I smiled and kept my thoughts to myself, Christian grinned and looked adorable, and Jeannie made us all laugh. We did the same dance every holiday I came home, and we would do it this weekend too.
Sometimes I forgot that everything was different, and just relaxed in the familiarity of it all. And then sometimes I wondered what would happen if we were forced to deal with each other for longer than the odd weekend here and there. Would everything explode? Or would we decide it wasn’t worth dredging up the past?
Happily, I wasn’t ever likely to find out.
Chapter 2
In the basement, my father had created an aquarium to rival the one we’d visited in Baltimore as kids.
I was only slightly exaggerating.
Fish tanks of varying size and containing different numbers of fish covered the many tables he’d erected across the concrete floor. They all gurgled and hummed, and inside them the fish swam back and forth, back and forth, without end. I stared at the nearest tank, which contained tiny little ones, barely the size of my fingertip.
“Babies,” Dad told me, following my gaze. “I had to take them away from their mother. She was trying to eat them all.”
“That’s horrible!” I said, looking around for the cannibal fish, but they all looked the same to me.
“That’s nature,” Dad replied. “Next time you come home, you should spend some more time down here. I’m doing some interesting things with fins.” He smiled at me, the kind of smile he’d been using since he retired from Wall Street. He kind of aimed it in your direction but there wasn’t much to it. “I know you used to get a kick out of science.”
Actually, that was Hope. She was the kind of irritating person who would roll her eyes into the back of her head, pronounce all homework “dumb” and “boring,” and then effortlessly ace her tests. She’d slouched and shrugged her way through school, never appearing to pay attention or crack a book, and had somehow ended up with a 4.0. Christian had once theorized that it was an elaborate ploy, and that in reality, Hope hid out under her covers at night, feverishly cramming.
In any case, I didn’t bother to correct my father. No need to correct people when what they thought was true was more favorable than what was actually true.
I walked closer to the nearest tank and peered into it. There were ferns waving sluggish
ly in the water, a bright pink rock, and a few plump fish.
Unlike Hope, I’d always hated science. And I’d never understood the fascination with fish. Who wanted to spend all that time and energy with tiny, slimy creatures who couldn’t love you and forgot you existed by the time they turned around at the edge of their tank? Finding Nemo was cute and all, but a real pet, I’d always thought, had to be a mammal of one sort or another.
Nonetheless, the fact that my father loved fish was practically the only thing I could say about him now with any certainty. It had been easier before he’d retired: Goldman Sachs, Ivy League schools, an addiction to the Wall Street Journal. Now there were just the fish tanks, scattered around the basement like clues.
“It looks like you have more fish tanks down here than you did at Christmas,” I said, trying to take an interest.
“Oh, a few.”
“Wow.”
So much for that.
I snuck a look at him as he puttered around a table. He looked the way I half imagined Christian would look eventually, and he liked to engage in political debates over Sunday dinner, but only if they could be wrapped up in time for 60 Minutes. Was I supposed to know him better? Were grown children supposed to want to know their parents better? It was different with my mother—she was a constant voice in the back of my head, and, when I wasn’t screening my calls, she was directly in my ear. In comparison to all that, my father was just a quiet background noise. Kind of like wallpaper.
He looked up then, as if he’d heard me, and smiled slightly. “I think your mother wants to talk to you,” he said. “Before I take her to the airport.”
At least it was comforting to learn that some things were genetic, I thought, staring around my parents’ familiar bedroom. My mother’s suitcase was open on the bed and just about every garment I’d ever seen her wear was piled around it. Packing light was not in the McKay family genes.
Mom looked up from a consideration of what appeared to be two identical black Talbots sweaters, and her brow wrinkled slightly.
“Aren’t you up late today,” she murmured, in that amazed tone of hers. The one that suggested she was astounded by my laziness.
It occurred to me every now and again that she didn’t actually mean things the way they sounded, that my internalized Mom Voice was already cranked up to high and I responded as if she was deliberately trying to be evil when really, she was just commenting.
I took a few deep breaths, and tried to let this occur to me more forcefully.
“The bachelorette thing took all night,” I said, hating that I felt defensive. Not that hating it either (a) stopped me feeling that way or (b) stopped me sounding that way.
“I hope Jeannie had a good time,” Mom said, totally unperturbed by my tone. “She pretends to be so relaxed about these things, but I’m not sure she is.”
“She seemed pretty relaxed,” I said. Or, you know, wasted drunk, but I kept that to myself.
“It was so nice of you to come up for the party.” Mom beamed at me. “I know that meant the world to Jeannie.”
Apparently we were pretending that she hadn’t expended some serious energy during our weekly chats making sure I would come.
“Your trip is going to be so amazing,” I said, changing the subject and fingering the edge of her suitcase. “You and Aunt Beth are going to have a fantastic time.”
Back when they were girls, my mother and her sister had dreamed of taking the Grand Tour like the heroines in the novels they read. They’d talked endlessly about touring the great capitals of Europe, but life had intervened and they’d never quite gotten around to it. This summer, however, things had changed. Aunt Beth had finally divorced Uncle Richard and had declared that come hell or high water, she was taking that trip at long last. Shortly thereafter, Mom had announced that she saw no reason why she shouldn’t accompany her little sister on the trip they’d always meant to take, particularly at such a time. They were taking off for some six weeks of a Grand Tour this evening.
“I’m just pleased that your father can spare me,” Mom said, choosing one of the identical sweaters and placing it in her suitcase. She walked over and put the other one back in her bureau.
I couldn’t tell what the difference was between them, but knew better than to ask. I’d made that mistake once before, with nightgowns. The woman had a system. End of story.
“Dad said you wanted to talk to me,” I said, settling on the edge of the bed. “I was looking at his fish.”
“He loves those fish,” Mom said. She turned back toward me then. “I’ve left the makings for dinner in the fridge,” she said, suddenly brisk. “Your father will drop me off at the airport and then come straight home, and you should all have a nice dinner before your brother takes you to catch your flight later tonight.”
“You shouldn’t have gone to any trouble,” I said. Much less intricately plotted everyone else’s every move while she was going to be at cruising altitude above the Atlantic Ocean. The woman was detail-oriented on a pathological level. “I could have made dinner.”
“It wasn’t any trouble at all,” Mom countered. “I’ll like thinking of my family gathered around the table together as I head off on my adventure.”
“You should have been concentrating on your trip, not on us.” I smiled at her. “You do too much, Mom.”
“It was easy enough to pull together,” Mom demurred, but I thought she looked pleased.
“She’s been puking her guts out since last night,” Christian muttered around a yawn.
He was slumped over the kitchen table, unshaven, with bloodshot eyes. Jeannie had made a brief appearance in the kitchen, ascertained that no parents were about to perform for, and headed directly upstairs to lie down in Christian’s old room. Perhaps she derived comfort from the remains of NHL stickers (Go Rangers!) that still clung to the windowpanes, or from Christian’s extensive collection of Douglas Adams novels.
“I told her I didn’t think it was fair that I had to deal with the consequences of her ridiculous bachelorette behavior, and she just got sicker.” Christian rubbed his jaw and cracked a smile. “And also told me to go to hell, of course.”
“Your relationship is so tender and sweet,” I teased him, and his smile widened.
“Yeah it is,” he said. “I held her hair back. For hours.”
“Are you going to give us a chunk-by-chunk breakdown here or what?” Hope demanded from her seat. “Because I already have too much information, thanks.”
“I don’t even want to talk to you.” Christian eyed her. “How could you bail on Jeannie’s party? What kind of sister-in-law are you?”
“The kind that was busy and doesn’t want to hear anything else about vomiting,” Hope retorted.
“There must be traffic,” I mused, ignoring both of them and staring at the clock. Mom’s plane was at three-thirty. It was nearing five.
“There’s always traffic,” Christian said, but he was still frowning at Hope.
“Maybe Dad stopped along the way to buy himself a snazzy new fish,” I suggested. “Maybe one with extra-special fins.”
I wasn’t sure if fish were the sort of thing one just impulse-bought, like clothes, or if they required planning and thought, like furniture. Or possibly even an emotional commitment, like puppies. Fish were obviously part of a whole world I knew nothing about.
“What time is your plane?” Christian asked me, obviously giving up on Hope. She just smiled to herself and returned her attention to her glossy magazine. Neither one of them addressed the fish question. Deliberately, I was pretty sure.
“Nine-thirty,” I said.
And at about nine-twenty-five, I figured, the cheery goodwill that we all put on for show would dissipate like a fairy godmother’s spell, and there we’d all be, rolling around in the lumpy pumpkin patch of our actual relationships.
I intended to be deep in the bowels of Newark Airport well before that could happen.
An hour later, Jeannie was up and in th
e kitchen and even Hope was moved enough out of her disinterest to register that it was unlike our father to be late for anything, much less this late, and to a meal.
When the phone began to ring, we all stared at each other. And especially at Christian, who held the receiver in his hand.
Ring.
“That’s probably him now,” Jeannie said. Her voice was scratchy, but her eyes were fixed on Christian. “Right? That’ll be him.”
“Answer the phone,” Hope told Christian.
Ring. Ring.
“I’ll get it,” I said, but I didn’t move.
And so we all watched while Christian picked up the receiver and bit out a greeting.
And then we watched as the color drained out of his face.
The last time I had been to the local hospital was back in the eighth grade, when I’d had my tonsils removed. I had been anxious about the surgery, but excited about Christian’s tales of endless ice cream to soothe my aching throat. I had been outraged to discover that ice cream was out because of the way dairy produced phlegm, and I was expected to make do with ice chips. Ice chips! Looking around the hospital lobby, I realized I was still holding on to that outrage.
Is this really what you’re thinking about? I asked myself in astonishment.
But it was better than the alternative.
We knew only the basic facts: there had been an accident, and Dad had been taken from the scene of the accident to the hospital. Beyond that, we knew nothing. And so we gathered in a little group, with scared eyes and tight mouths, and waited for more information because there was nothing to do but wait.
Time stretched out and trapped us in that same aquamarine waiting room. It was just one night, but it felt like years. In the morning, Dad was groggy but okay, with just a badly broken leg to show for it.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he barked when I suggested letting Mom know. “I hope none of you tried to talk her into coming home?”