The Space Between Sisters

by Mary McNear

  “They do that.”

  “Eventually, though, they went to sleep,” she said. “And that was our night. Until, just now, I started to pick up the toys and you came home.”

  They stood there for a moment, smiling at each other, and Sam realized that neither one of them wanted her to leave.

  “Would you like something to drink?” he asked.

  “I’d love something,” she said. “What have you got?”

  “Coffee, tea, soda, beer, wine.”

  “I’d love a glass of wine,” she said. “Just one. But only if you’re having one, too.”

  “Sure,” he said, heading into the kitchen, and wondering, vaguely, if he was breaking some unwritten rule of parenting. Something like, Don’t drink with your children’s babysitter. But he was pretty sure he’d already broken the rule that came before that: Don’t lust after your children’s babysitter.

  Sam took a bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator, opened it, and filled two wineglasses, while Poppy sat down at the scuffed pine table, which, in this cabin, served as the unofficial center of family life. “Sorry about this,” he said, setting the wineglasses on the table and trying to clear away some of the clutter that had accumulated there over the course of the day—a pile of half-finished drawings, several dog-eared children’s books, and the cereal boxes that no one had bothered to put back in the cupboard after breakfast that morning.

  “Oh, no, don’t do that,” Poppy objected, as Sam tried to shuffle the drawings into a neat stack. “Leave everything where it is. It’s nice. I like a little chaos. My sister, on the other hand . . .” She shrugged, picked up her wineglass, and took a sip. “Wow, this is really good,” she said.

  He drank some, too.

  “Do you know a lot about wine?” she asked.

  He nodded, a little distractedly. “When we lived in Minneapolis, I was a partner in a wine distributorship.” He wasn’t thinking about that, though. He was thinking about her eyes. They were so blue. Cornflower blue, Sam thought.

  “Is that why you carry so many different kinds of wine at Birch Tree Bait?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh. The expensive ones don’t always sell that well, but every once in a while someone comes in who really appreciates a good bottle, so I keep ordering them.”

  They were quiet for a moment, and Sam, looking at Poppy, was glad they were sitting at the kitchen table. It seemed less intimate, somehow, than the couch, more . . . appropriate. So why, then, did he suddenly imagine himself tugging on one of her earlobes with his teeth? He rubbed his eyes, and drank some more wine, and said, apropos of nothing, “I had a long night tonight.”

  “Did you?”

  “It was a first date.”

  “Oh, well, that explains it. Some of the longest nights of my life have been first dates.”

  “Have they?”

  She nodded. “Honestly, I’ve had first dates that were so excruciating the only thing that saved me was knowing that if I could get back to my apartment by 10:55, I could be in my pajamas, watching a Seinfeld rerun by 11:00.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “That bad. I mean, have you ever been on a really amazing first date?”

  “Yes,” he said, honestly. “I have. My first date with my ex-wife was amazing. I knew, by the end of it, that I was in love with her.”

  “You did? Wow. That must have been one hell of a date.” She sipped her wine.

  “Actually, on paper, it was a disaster,” Sam said. “My car was in the shop so we had to take the bus. We were just kids—both of us were still in college—but even then we knew it was not an auspicious beginning for a date. Then, while we’re on the bus, it starts to rain. No, I don’t mean rain. I mean pour. So we got off the bus and ran to this Chinese restaurant, which was just a couple of blocks away, but by the time we got there we were soaked. And there was a long wait for a table, and we had to just stand there, dripping, until they seated us, like, an hour later. And then, when the waiter came over, Alicia asked him if we could order the fried rice without the shrimp. And she explained to him that she was allergic to shellfish and that if she had even the smallest amount of it, she’d go into anaphylactic shock. And he said ‘no problem,’ but I think there may have been a language barrier there, or something, because when he came back with our order, there they were, right on top of the fried rice, five huge shrimp, staring straight up at us. And the two of us started laughing, laughing so hard that we just had to leave some money on the table and get out of there.

  “And when we got outside, it was still raining, so we got soaked all over again, only now, in addition to being wet, we absolutely reeked of Chinese food. It could have been a nightmare. But instead, while we’re standing there on the street corner, all I could think of was that Alicia looked beautiful. The raindrops on her hair looked like little glass beads, and her complexion was so perfect, it made her look like she belonged in a soap commercial or something. Then she smiled at me. She just . . . smiled. And I remember it so well, because I could feel it happening. It was like everything in my life just . . . clicked into place. And I thought, ‘This is it. She’s the one.’”

  Poppy toyed with her wineglass, a little pensively. “That’s a nice story,” she said, finally. “But . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “It doesn’t have a happy ending.”

  “You mean . . . because we got divorced?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, that was still years away. Before that, there was a lot of happiness. There still is. I mean, we have three beautiful children together whom we love, I think about as much as it’s possible to love anyone. So, in that sense, there are no regrets.”

  “No, of course not,” Poppy said quickly. “I didn’t mean that. I meant . . . what happened between the time you stood on that street corner and the time you got divorced? How do you fall out of love with someone? Or is that too personal?” she added.

  “No, it’s not too personal. It’s hard to explain, though, without resorting to an old cliché. We drifted apart.”

  Poppy frowned. “But here’s the thing about ‘drifting apart’ that I’ve never understood. Can’t you feel yourselves drifting apart? Don’t you know it’s happening while it’s happening? And isn’t there anything you can do about it?”

  He thought about that for a moment. “It seems like it should be that way, doesn’t it? But for us, no, it wasn’t like that. Later, looking back on it, I could see it happening. But at the time . . .” He shook his head. “Think about it. Between the two of us, we had, eventually, two jobs, one house, three kids, two cars, and, as I remember it, several goldfish with incredibly short life spans. We were so caught up in the day-to-day of our lives that we couldn’t see the big picture anymore. For all of that, though, our marriage might have survived. If I hadn’t been . . . unfaithful.”

  Sam saw it again in her expression: disappointment. And this time, she didn’t try to hide it. “You cheated on her?” she asked, and Sam felt her lean, almost imperceptibly, away from him.

  “In a sense, I did. But not in the way you’re thinking. There wasn’t anyone else. It turns out there are other ways you can be disloyal in a marriage, and, in my case, it wasn’t with a person. It was with a place.”

  She looked at him, puzzled.

  “I was married to her,” he explained, “and I was raising our children with her in suburban Minneapolis, but in my mind, I never left this place. There was always a part of me that was here. Maybe the biggest part of me.”

  “By ‘here’ you mean Butternut?”

  He nodded. “I grew up here. About three miles away from where we’re sitting right now, actually. And I loved it. When you’re a kid, of course, you’re not necessarily aware of something like that. You don’t wake up every morning and say, ‘God, I love this place. To me, it was just home. All of it: the cabin we lived in, the lake, the woods. I don’t think I ever thought I would leave it. Not really. Not permanently. My parents, though, had other ideas.”<
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  He stopped, drank some more of his wine. “They loved it up here, too,” he continued. “But it’s hard to make a living this far north, and, like a lot of people who live up here year-round, they learned how to do a little bit of everything to make ends meet. They wanted more for my brothers and me, though. There was no question we were going to go to college, and no question, either, that if we came back here, it was only going to be to visit, not to live.”

  “You had other plans, though,” Poppy remarked.

  “I did, but I didn’t know it until Alicia and I had children of our own. That’s when I realized how much I missed it up here. And how much I wanted them to grow up in a place like this. Already, I could see how it was going to be, raising them in the suburbs. I knew they’d be like a lot of kids today. The outdoors would be a destination for them; a place you make little forays into, preferably armed with things like insect repellant, and bottled water, and UV protective clothing. I wanted them to just . . . grow up outside, the way I did, so that it wasn’t a separate place, it was just where you were. How you lived. And I wanted to teach them all the things my parents taught me, how to hunt and fish and canoe.”

  “You couldn’t just have come up here on the weekends?” Poppy asked, gently.

  “I tried that. When Alicia first started working for the DA’s office, she was drowning in work. She still is, actually, but then she was so worried about doing a good job that she started not just staying late at the office but bringing work home on weekends, too. And I thought, to help her out, and to give her some peace and quiet around the house, I’d bring the kids up here, and we’d stay with my parents at their cabin—this was before they’d retired and moved to South Carolina. At first, it was just a few weekends here and there, but then it was every other weekend, and then it was every weekend. I told myself it was just temporary, just until Alicia got settled in at work, but the truth was, every time I packed up the car to make the drive back to Minneapolis, I dreaded it. And then one day, I remember—it had been several weeks since we’d been able to get up here—and I drove the kids up on this beautiful fall day, and we went for a walk down by the lake, and I thought, ‘For the first time in weeks I feel alive, really alive.’ At home, I realized, I was just phoning it in.”

  “Was that the turning point?”

  “No, that came a few months later. It was a winter morning, and things were quiet at work, and I found myself going online to the twenty-four hour webcam at the White Pines Resort and just watching this shot of snow falling on the frozen lake for about fifteen minutes. That’s when I knew things had to change.”

  “Did your wife ever consider moving up here with you?”

  “No, it turns out I married someone who really loves being near a city. And who really loves her job, too. Living up here would have been a dead end for her career. There is one prosecutor in this whole county, an elected official who’s called the county attorney. And while I’m sure it’s a great job, if you can get it, it was never going to satisfy Alicia’s ambition.”

  “So, that was it?” Poppy asked.

  “No, not quite. We tried counseling. But in the end, this is what we came up with. We sold our house, and I found a cabin, and a business, both for sale up here, and she found a smaller house outside Minneapolis and we’ve been making it up as we go along ever since. It’s not perfect. Alicia misses the kids. And they miss her. Sometimes the weekends aren’t enough. The guilt, I know, can eat her up. But this makes the most sense. I have more time and more flexibility than she does, especially during the off-season, when business is slow. And even when it is busy, I can bring the kids into work if I need to, or, if they’re sick, it’s easy for me to stay home with them and get someone to cover for me there.” He shrugged. “I make it work. Most of the time.”

  “I can see that,” she said, drinking the last of her wine. “I can see it in your kids. They seem happy. They really do.”

  “I hope they’re happy,” he said, and he smiled at her. God, this is so easy, he thought. Sitting here with her. Talking to her. Why couldn’t his date have been this easy? He and Margot would still be there now, still sitting at their little table at the Corner Bar, still talking, if it had been this easy. Hell, they would have closed the place down tonight. Marty, the longtime bartender, would have had to kick them out of there.

  “I’d offer you another glass of wine,” he said, gesturing to her empty glass, “but you’re driving.”

  “I am,” she said, standing up. “And you’re working, first thing tomorrow.”

  “So are you,” he reminded her.

  “That’s true,” she said, putting her wineglass on the counter. He re-corked the wine bottle, and she wandered over to the refrigerator and studied the things he’d stuck up on its door—emergency phone numbers, the children’s school pictures, and day camp activity schedules.

  “I always wished our refrigerator door looked like this when I was a kid,” she said, moving aside as he opened it and put the wine bottle back in. “But my parents were too disorganized. And then there was our family life. It wasn’t very . . . wholesome. If they’d put things up on the refrigerator, they probably would have been things like eviction notices, or summonses to appear in court.”

  He looked at her carefully, to see if she was joking, but she wasn’t. He wondered what her childhood had been like, and he was about to ask her, but she leaned back against the closed refrigerator door now, and she smiled at him, and tipped her chin up, fractionally. Okay, he thought. Either she wants me to kiss her, or she is doing a very good imitation of someone who wants me to kiss her. The first one, he decided, but just to be sure, he reached out a finger and ran it gently down the side of her face, from her temple to her jaw. She kept smiling. Her skin is so soft, and she smells so good, he thought, leaning closer. He bent, slowly, to kiss her, and she kissed him back, her lips smooth and pliant beneath his. But he pulled back, before the kiss really got started. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do this. I want to, very much. But it feels wrong to start the night with one woman, and end it with another.”

  “I . . . I see what you mean. I should go,” she said, and he could see that she felt awkward.

  He walked her out to her car and said good night. Then he watched until her taillights reached the main road, and eventually disappeared out of sight.

  He went back inside and closed the door, stepping on a Lego that had escaped the cleanup. You’re an idiot, he thought. If it’s not enough that she was the babysitter tonight, she’s also your employee. But truthfully, he’d been an idiot long before tonight. Ever since she’d first walked into Birch Tree Bait, and bought that cheap bottle of wine, he’d been attracted to her. And then he’d hired her, less for her qualifications than because he thought he’d like having her around all day. And he had liked it; he’d liked it a lot, especially when the attraction seemed to be reciprocated. But he would have to stop this tomorrow. Because if he was going to be the kind of boss who got involved with an employee . . . well, then he had no business owning a business.

  He went to check on his kids. He got to Tim and Hunter’s room first. They were both sprawled out on their beds, Tim’s head where his feet should have been, and Hunter’s right arm dangling over the side of the mattress. Sam knew better than to try to rearrange either of them into something resembling an orderly night’s sleep. He just tousled their heads, in turn, and went to Cassie’s room. She was tucked neatly into her bed, the covers barely disturbed, her left cheek resting on the pillow. And her hair, he saw, was braided into a perfect French braid.

  A couple of hours later, Poppy was lying in bed, on the verge of sleep, when she saw an image of Sam from that night in his kitchen. And what was startling about it was the clarity with which it came to her. It was less an image than a sense memory, an exact re-creation of the moment before he kissed her. (And damn it, she had wanted him to kiss her.) Now, she could see, hear, smell, and feel every detail of it. The way the blue check in Sam’s
shirt brought out the blue in his eyes, the way the trees outside, tossed in a blustery wind, tapped and creaked against the kitchen windows, the way the cabin had a pleasant wood smoke smell to it, as if there had been a fire in the fireplace recently, the way her face felt warm, as if she’d come into a heated house on a cold day. And thinking about that moment now, she could actually feel things clicking into place, just as Sam had said they had for him on his first date with Alicia . . .

  She sat up in bed, abruptly. She was awake now. She was five cups of coffee awake. She leaned over and snapped on the bedside table lamp, and Sasquatch, who was curled up at the end of the bed, lifted his head and blinked at her sardonically, as if to say, Some of us, at least, are trying to sleep here.

  Oh, my God, am I falling in love with him? she wondered. That’s crazy. She got out of bed, and went to sit on the window seat, using the old-fashioned crank handle to open the window, and resting her forehead against the screen. And then she looked out into the night, as if there she might find the answer to her question: Was she falling in love with Sam? And, if she was, why him? And why now?

  The now was especially perplexing. Here she was, almost thirty, a refugee from the city who’d dated countless men, none of whom had ever inspired anything even close to love in her before, and what had she done this summer? She’d fallen, hard, for the first man she’d met up here.

  And it wasn’t that there was anything wrong with Sam, she thought, as she wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees. There was, in fact, plenty right with him. But what about all the other guys she’d met over the years? Some of them had been jerks, of course, but just as many of them had been nice guys who’d seemed intent on connecting with her. In the end, though, she hadn’t wanted to get close to any of them, a fact that she suspected, in some cases, had more to do with an unwillingness on her part than with a deficiency on theirs.