Natural Love

by S. Celi

  “I guess I’ll have Henry drive me to the parking garage,” I said. “Can’t have the car stay there forever, can I?”

  “No.” Avery’s eyes never broke my gaze. “And I’ll drive you.”

  WE DIDN’T SAY much on the drive to the parking garage. Instead, the radio ate up the silence and all I heard were the sounds of a random boy band as Avery drove her Honda Accord down I-71 and into the city. She got this car when she turned sixteen, but she wouldn’t have it much longer. Dad and Linda planned to give her a new Lexus on her twenty-second birthday in a few weeks, the same night of their annual Fourth of July party. They mentioned this in a recent email, too, and begged me to keep it a secret. In order to gain points with Dad, I did. I kept the gorgeous designer car a secret from the one person I never kept secrets from.

  Avery might have thought she disappointed them, but I knew better. They loved her more than they loved me. They always had, starting during my childhood, and I didn’t fault them for it. Avery fit inside their world like one of those Russian nesting dolls, as if she had always been a part of the family even though she never had the Chadwick last name. She made herself so easy to love. Just one smile from her, and people never wanted to be without her. They wanted to center their lives on her.

  After all that she had been through, all that I had witnessed, she still had this beautiful, brilliant sheen, and that mystified me. People who went through pain like in her past usually lost stuff like that.

  “I’m glad you didn’t drive last night,” she said after she pulled the Accord into a parking spot next to my Volvo. “That could have been bad.”

  “I told you I learned that lesson.” I paused. “Won’t ever be driving drunk again. Ever.”

  “You better not.”

  “I won’t.”

  “For some reason, I don’t believe you.”

  “Look. I was younger. Stupid. It was a mistake.”

  “You could have gotten yourself killed.”

  I shut my eyes and my head fell back against the seat. “Avery, let’s not talk about this right now, okay? I still have a headache from all the martinis I had.”

  “Okay,” she said, but I knew just by the way she said it that she’d bring it up again soon. “I’ll drop it. For now.”

  The music wailed for a few more seconds, and then she flipped off the radio. Now, instead of the annoying sounds of a boy band, a strange, awkward silence filled the car. I opened my eyes and turned my head to her. “You okay?”

  “Yes.” She sucked in a deep breath. “No. I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “I’ve been thinking about how to say this.” She bit her bottom lip and shook her head a few times as if deep in thought. “I heard you last night, Spencer.”

  “What? You heard me come in the house?”

  “No.” Her hands held the bottom part of the car’s steering wheel, and I saw them tighten around it. “That’s not what I’m talking about.” She paused. “I mean I heard you.”

  Avery didn’t have to elaborate. At all. Her tone of voice did that just fine.

  “What? We were that loud?” I tried to think about Anna without thinking about her, to rack my brain and figure out what had been so loud—me or her—and I still couldn’t remember anything. That morning, I’d been grateful for a blank memory. Now, I would have given anything for a photographic one. “No way.”

  “Yep.” She smacked her lips together. “You were that loud. And when I say loud, I mean loud with a capital L.”

  “Your room’s down the hall.” I raised myself up in the seat. “There’s no way we were that loud.”

  “You were.”

  I tried to sound like I didn’t care. “What can I say? I’m a guy. We’re adults. It happens.”

  Women liked me. I liked them. We liked each other better during sex. Losing that touch wasn’t on my agenda, no matter how weird it felt to think about Avery knowing every new chapter of my sex life.

  “I still heard you,” she said. “In case you wanted to know.”

  “Were you listening at the door or something?”

  She twisted around in the seat. “Listening at the door? Really?” Then she paused. “And what if I was?”

  “No way. You wouldn’t do that. I know you well enough, and the Avery I know doesn’t do stuff like that.”

  “Okay.” She grinned. “It was a little bit more complicated than that. I went downstairs to get some water, and I heard you then. She sounded . . . She sounded . . . satisfied.”

  “And that bothered you?”

  Who was I kidding? I wanted it to bother her. I wanted it to bother her a lot. And if I was really honest with myself, I wanted Anna to be her.

  She twisted toward me some more in the seat and propped her elbow on the console. Now, with her face only inches away from mine, she looked at me. “Do you think that’s weird?”

  “Depends on what you heard. I mean, if you heard—”

  “Stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “You know,” she said. “Stop doing what you’re doing.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” I said, trying to sound innocent. “I’m just wondering exactly what you heard.”

  She shrugged and tried to hide a knowing smile, but it didn’t work. Not even close. “She sounded like she liked it. She really did.”

  “At least I have that going for me.”

  “It went on for a while.” She let out a long breath.

  “It did? A long time? How long were you out there?”

  “Remember that girl you brought home for Thanksgiving your freshman year at Penn?”

  “Wharton,” I corrected her. “I didn’t just go to Penn. I went to Wharton.”

  “Penn. Wharton. Same thing.” She swallowed. “Either way, you spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania hating life and trying to live up to our family’s impossible standards.”

  “And failing,” I said, and I couldn’t focus anymore. The damn scent of Avery’s perfume distracted me again. What was it? Chanel? Victoria’s Secret? Lancôme? Whatever it was, it was heaven. Heaven in a bottle. Heaven on my stepsister. Heaven I needed to smell every day.

  Every. Damn. Day.

  I was so screwed.

  “The girl from last night reminded me of that girl from Thanksgiving. Same type, right to the hair.”

  “You remember the girl from Thanksgiving that well?”

  “Yeah, I do. I remember all the girls you bring home.”

  “That’s funny.” I pointed to my chest. “I don’t remember her that well.”

  “Like I said, you have a type, Spencer. You don’t make it very hard.”

  She didn’t say what I knew about these women, though—that they all resembled her. All of them. No deviation whatsoever. Not in the eye color, the body type, or anything. But they wouldn’t satisfy me anymore. I didn’t want a fake or a replacement. I wanted—and needed—the real thing.

  Avery. Just Avery.

  What the hell was happening to me?

  “So.” Avery still stared at me. “Are you going to see her again?”

  “I don’t know.” I closed my eyes again, this time partly to shut out the sight of her. The last part of my headache needed to leave, too, and soon. “No.”

  “Good,” she said after a moment.

  My eyes flew open. “Good?”

  Avery wrinkled her nose, disgusted. “You can do better than someone like that. Much better.”

  “I wish.”

  “You can.” She straightened and turned on the car. “You just have to believe you can, Brother.”

  “Stepbrother.”

  “Right. Stepbrother.”

  “And what is this? Advice by Avery Jackson, Chapter One?”

  She grinned. “Yes. Advice by Avery Jackson, Chapter One. Part One. And if you’re smart, you’ll take it.”

  “As long as I have you to remind me that I should.” I pulled my car keys from my pocket and nodded at the
Volvo. “At least we know where the car is.” My hand grabbed the car door and I opened it. I needed to exit this car, exit this life. “I’ll see you back at the house, right?”

  “No. I have to work.”

  “Work?”

  “Yeah, they put me back on the schedule at the boutique.” She rolled her eyes. “So I’m just going to the gym and then there. My stuff is in the trunk.”

  “Good,” I said, but it didn’t hide the disappointment in my voice. “Responsible. Just what Dad and Linda want from us.”

  “It’s money.” She sighed. “Money I can spend on shoes at Nordstrom, I guess.”

  “Well.” I smiled at her, and then I couldn’t help myself. My hand cupped her chin, and I guided her forward until her forehead touched mine. “You have plenty of shoes, AJ. But maybe I’ll email them and say how great you are at following Dad’s rules.”

  “Rules were made to be broken, dear Brother.”

  “Not today,” I said.

  Another beat passed before I got out of the Accord and shut the door. She waited for me to slide in the driver’s seat before she threw her car in reverse and pulled out of the parking lot.

  WHEN DAD AND Linda had shipped me off to the Peace Corps, my dad said the experience would turn me into a man. He said it over and over whenever he could for the month before I left, a season of madness just after graduation from Wharton. I drove my college life back to a house that didn’t want me, and a father who had decided that my Bachelor in Business from his Ivy League alma mater didn’t do enough to prepare me for real life.

  And Dad took every opportunity to remind me that I should feel grateful for the “experiences” South Africa would bring someone as reckless as me.

  “You need this, son,” he said, over what remained of a designer cigar I knew had come from the cabinet behind his desk in the home office. “Focus. Responsibility. That’s what the Peace Corps will teach you. They make people leaders.”

  Another favorite was one morning a few months earlier, when I’d sat at breakfast but didn’t contribute much to the conversation. Avery had spent the night with a girlfriend, so that left me alone in the house with two people who’d taken to talking about me behind my back and shutting up whenever I walked into the room. Since the DUI and the car accident, the three of us had played a game of chess on the weekends when I came home from Wharton. I moved into one room; they left it for another. I caught them whispering about my problems in the garden; they shot me disgusted looks over plates of peas and teriyaki pot roast. I made plans; they made other ones.

  “There’s a lot riding on this, Spence.” Dad spooned some Metamucil into his glass of orange juice. For the last two years, he’d eaten the stuff every morning because he had convinced himself it would keep him young. “It’s an honor to be a part of the Peace Corps at all. Don’t want you to forget it.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “This is the next step for you. The right next step.”

  “You would know.” I could have basted my words with sarcasm.

  “Of course I know, Son,” Dad said, ignoring my tone of voice in favor of another spoonful of fiber.

  “I’m only going because you had the connections and you want to punish me,” I said, and caught Linda shooting a sharp look at my dad. She knew better than to argue with Dad about business or decisions regarding me, though, so that’s all she did. “You’re the one who made the phone call. You got me in.”

  “Maybe I did,” Dad said. “But it’s up to you to make the most of it. Man up.”

  “Man up.” I didn’t try to hide my derision; I just let it stay in the room as a silent guest, a ghost that had all the answers to the problems of the Chadwicks. God, if only Dad and Linda knew how bad the problems really were . . .

  “Yes, Son. You heard me. Man up.” Dad swallowed a long gulp of the juice and when he pulled the glass from his lips the orange stain it left behind reminded me of a cartoon. “I expect you to make the most of this opportunity. You’re going, and that’s final.”

  “Richard,” Linda said. “Do you think that’s really fair?”

  Dad raised his hand. “Oh, it’s fair, honey.” He narrowed his eyes.

  “Dad, come on,” I said. “It was one night. It’s not like I screw up all the time.”

  “You chose a pretty big way to screw up.”

  “One mistake! I made one mistake!”

  He glared at me.

  “It was a car accident. I drove drunk. I made a huge, stupid mistake,” I muttered. “People make plenty of those.”

  “Chadwicks don’t,” he said. Another sip of the juice. “And the Peace Corps is going to shake bad judgment like that out of you. Make sure you don’t do something stupid like that again.”

  “I already told you I wouldn’t.”

  “Don’t you know what this family risks every time we make mistakes?”

  I sighed. “Why don’t you remind me,”—I looked at my stepmother— “and Linda one more time? Since you haven’t said it yet today.”

  “Leave Linda out of this.”

  “Dad . . .”

  “I hope you know how many people I had to talk to in order to make this happen.” Dad narrowed his eyes. “It cost me many favors. Favors don’t come cheap, Son.”

  “Well, our family’s always been great at hoarding favors.” I added a fake smile.

  Linda coughed, as if she got some of her drink lodged in her throat. “He’s not wrong about that, Richard.”

  Dad nodded in her direction. “I’ve spent years making the connections this family needs to succeed. Do you hear me? Years. It would be nice to know the people closest to me appreciate that.”

  “We do appreciate it, honey,” Linda said, her voice smoother than icing on a cake.

  “All of this,” Dad gestured to the ceiling, “is a house of cards. All of it. Meanwhile, Spencer, do you know how much your little incident cost me?” Sour annoyance coated Dad’s voice. “The court costs alone?”

  I just stared at him. He’d tell me line by line if I waited long enough.

  “Ten thousand in legal fees. Forty-five hundred bucks for damage to that car of yours. Five thousand in court costs and fines.” He paused. “Actually, I’m surprised it wasn’t more.”

  “Got lucky,” I said.

  He snorted. “Maybe with the judge. But then there was that ad package I bought over at the newspaper just to keep this out of the press.” Another pause. “Print and Internet ads. Didn’t come cheap. Not to mention the phone call I had to make to Hank at FOX to make sure his station didn’t run that video footage they got the night of the accident. And that cost me an afternoon on the golf course at Camargo.”

  “You like playing golf, though,” Linda said.

  Dad snorted. “The point is, I had to go above and beyond to keep this from becoming public. Remember what happened with the Oldhams, when Todd got arrested for public intoxication and that yelling match with his wife? All over the paper. And they lost their place on the board of the Reds.”

  “How many times do I have to say I’m sorry?”

  “Oh, we’re just getting started, son.” He pushed a box of Corn Flakes at me. “Going to South Africa with the Peace Corps is part of your apology. A big part.”

  Two years later, sitting in one of the library’s large leather chairs, that conversation played over and over in my head. As it repeated, I doodled in the margins of the binder, something I had always done to calm myself. I loved drawing. Everyone said I had talent, even the kids in the South African village where I’d worked. They’d wanted me to draw their portraits and create funny cartoons all day long. I’d never turned them down.

  Twenty-four months of my life. What a long ass time.

  Long enough to consider what I wanted to do with my life, and long enough to know that I wanted to eventually run Chadwick Properties and Construction. Dad might have contracts that made three million a quarter, and real estate that made a hundred thousand in rental income a month, but
he didn’t have me on board. And Dad needed me, regardless, even if he didn’t think he did. Contracts, money, martini lunches at Camargo Country Club and endless business meetings all needed me. At least, that’s what I told myself during those moments when a shred of doubt crept into my mind.

  “Two weeks,” I said aloud in the empty room. “Two weeks to figure it out.”

  “Two weeks to figure out what?”

  Avery’s voice came from somewhere behind me. I jumped a little because I’d forgotten that she was still in the house. Unusual for her at 9:30PM on a Saturday, and dangerous for me. Nothing threatened my future more than the weird feelings I had for Avery.

  “Oh, just stuff with Dad,” I said, turning to her and hoping to sound nonchalant.

  “Hmm.” She walked in the room and sat on the small leather love seat next to the couch I had claimed. She wore a tight pair of black yoga pants. A red V-neck tee. No socks. Red toenails.

  Jesus.

  “I can do this,” I said once she tucked her feet underneath her and I had her full attention. “I was born to do this.”

  “I know you can, Brother.”

  I pointed at the binder. “This stuff is too easy for me to remember. Most of it I know already. He thinks I never paid attention, but over the years, I did.”

  “Dad has a hard time seeing reality sometimes,” she said. “He doesn’t always want to know the truth.”

  “I’ll never understand him. He’s held one fuck up against me for years.”

  My thoughts flickered to three years earlier and the largest secret both of us carried, the one that drove to me to my “drinking problem” and left her begging me not to leave for the Peace Corps. The secret we hadn’t discussed since I left; the secret I felt in every room of the house.

  She shrugged. “Sometimes it’s just easier to pretend that certain things didn’t happen.”

  “Certain things?”

  “Focusing on the present is easier. So is focusing on the future.”

  “Is that what you do when it comes to—?”