Delia could see that even though Juniper was baking, she was preparing to go out. Or rather, she could smell it. Once her scones and cupcakes were on the cooling rack, she could leave, unlike Delia, who had to babysit the bread dough.
Her sister had showered, shampooed, and used her new, expensive conditioner with its faux mint scent, and had anointed her body with Burt’s Bees honey and vanilla because Juniper now believed smelling slightly like a cookie or a crème brûlée would have an intoxicating effect on men. In this one way, she had followed Delia’s advice. “Men generally have an inferior sense of smell, but they do respond unconsciously to something more foodlike. I mean, you don’t want to smell like a rare New York strip or garlic-embedded shrimp scampi. Go for sweet or chocolate.”
Her sister had taken her advice.
“Where are you going? And with who?” Whoever it was, he was going to be swept away by the honey and vanilla scent of J Bird.
“Just some people from work. One of the new guys has a boat. It’s just a skiff, or bigger than a skiff, I haven’t seen it yet. But the plan is to take it out, bring a bottle of wine, and watch the moon come up over Casco Bay,” said Juniper.
Collier had been the best guy her sister had ever dated, and Delia had struggled with feeling left out. How mortifying to be the big sister and feel left out. Now that J Bird was single again, she vibrated to an urgent search mode. Or at least that was what had always happened before. This time, Juniper swore she was too busy for the shenanigans of a relationship. “After we open the café,” she had said. But the void in Delia’s love life was Grand Canyon wide, just as deep and long-lasting. J Bird was her dating coach, and so far all of her expertise with men felt wasted.
If Delia was lucky, they’d talk about the upcoming boating excursion, the now and future; she didn’t want to get sucked into the past. But a sister was a magnet for the past. Sisters knew you when you blew fart bubbles in the bathtub or threw up on the kitchen floor. All of Delia’s past lived in J Bird, or at least the part of her past since the arrival of her little sister.
“Was I just imagining things or was your old boyfriend trying to reconnect with you? I saw him looking at you with The Look,” said Juniper.
Delia opened up a new sack of King Arthur bread flour. “What look? I didn’t see a special look,” said Delia.
“That’s because you don’t know the look. You can smell a gumdrop a mile away like a freaking bloodhound, but you’re blind to the way men look at you.”
Maybe her sister was right. Maybe she had been so busy taking care of J Bird and working that she had ignored the very basic cues of romance. Juniper understood the solace of romance, every nuance of flirtation, lust. It was how she sustained herself after their parents died.
“How was the trip to West Hartford?” Juniper asked, expertly avoiding comparisons of social lives. Delia was both appreciative and resentful that Juniper had dodged an obvious topic.
“It’s the new truly awful case. It’s not the kid who’s awful; it’s the whole gut-wrenching, I-can-never-fix-it scenario. We can’t find any family to claim this girl. But Ira and I found some threads that might lead us to her family. And that’s all I can say about it.”
Delia balanced client confidentiality constantly, hoping that the kids in foster care could keep a few shreds of privacy once their families were blown apart. She sat down and put her head into her hands, elbows on knees, pressing her fingertips into her forehead.
Juniper pulled a large green bowl out of the dish cabinet. “Here. I started some bread dough for you. I was worried that you’d get back too late and not have time to get it started. I figured you might need it after working on this case. I don’t have the finesse that you do with bread, but once the café is open, we need to be the backup for each other. Suppose you’re sick one day and I have to make the bread?”
Delia wanted a backup. She was exhausted by feeling out in front. The last time the sisters went cross-country skiing after a heavy snowfall, Delia had immediately taken the trailbreaking job, slogging through the snow so that J Bird would have an easier time. After a water break, J Bird launched off first, not hesitating. The reversal felt uncomfortable, wrong in every fiber, until J Bird collapsed into a snow bank, laughing. “So this is what life is like in your world. We’ll have to do this more often.” That’s what the J Bird Café was all about: working together, letting J Bird take the lead.
* * *
Delia dusted the countertop with flour. She formed a fist and punched down the sourdough that had expanded like a hot air balloon. Deflated, the dough sagged in the middle, falling in on itself.
“I had a wild dream last night,” said Juniper. “Daddy explained the family secret to me.”
Delia stopped; a deathly hand clutched her heart.
What secret could the dead tell her sister? The age-old protectiveness rose up in Delia as it had when they were kids, when she needed to push the dresser against their bedroom door when their father wanted to rip the wiring out of their room, when Juniper had huddled in the corner farthest from the door while he pounded and shouted.
Juniper pulled a tray out of the oven, the miniature cupcakes that people devoured sans guilt.
“What was the secret?” asked Delia, pressing the heel of her hand into the smooth, elastic dough. The day had turned into that rare thing, a perfect ratio of warmth and humidity vs. crisp air and whatever else it was that made yeast flourish. An ocean breeze blew the heat and humidity inland. What would happen to the dough now that the darkness of their father had entered the kitchen?
Juniper set the tray of mini cupcakes on a wire rack. “He looked like he did when he was good. Even better than good, like pure Dad essence. He held up two vials of liquid, the kind from a chemistry lab. He set them in little hangers. They were both the same except one of them had a little black dot bobbing around in it.”
“That’s it?” said Delia. Her hands hovered over the dough. She wanted more than a black dot.
“That’s it. That was the big explanation, the black dot. But I wish you could have seen the kindness on his face. . . .” Juniper stopped, her voice catching on a ledge of longing.
They only had each other, there was no one else who understood what they had been through. Ben was as close as they could hope, and they both knew he would do anything for them. But there were times when just the two of them talked about their parents, and it lanced the infected wound. Not something you ever looked forward to, but the effect was cleansing.
It was a dream, a projection of Juniper’s desires, her struggle to understand their father, not a visitation; she couldn’t accept a visitation. Delia pounded the dough again with power from her arms, her shoulder blades, and the spot between her shoulder blades that held grief.
Juniper fed eggs, flour, sugar, milk, grated lemon peel, salt, and baking powder into the large stainless steel bowl for the next round of cupcakes. “I think the secret was that there was this one dot in him that was wrong, his chemistry, his chromosomes or something, and that it caused him to be schizo.” She switched on the fat blades that whirled around the bowl in a robotic dance.
Delia bristled at the label. Their father wasn’t schizophrenic, he was their father, who had schizophrenia in the same way people had diabetes or cerebral palsy. Except those diseases didn’t cross-shred a family into bits, or make a mother choose a father over the kids.
Juniper switched off the mixer. “I used to pray that Mom would leave him.” Her voice was rough, dragged through the rugged terrain of the past. “I used to pray that we could leave, just the three of us, and I wouldn’t be afraid all the time. And it hurt so much because I loved Dad, but he scared me witless.”
Delia kept one hand on the dough. “I know.” She gulped hard. “Right before the fire, I begged her to leave him.”
This was new territory, unexplored by the sisters, honeycombed with shame for wanting to leave their father. The words expanded the walls, bulging out.
“S
he should have protected us too, not just Daddy. Didn’t she love us?” Juniper slumped against the counter, her chest sinking.
“She did love us, but she loved him too. She knew him when he was brilliant, kind, and handsome, not all beat up by a major thought disorder. She was never going to leave him. We were all held hostage by his illness, not just Dad,” said Delia. Her last image of her father, bloated by medication and defeat, rose up and gripped her heart.
“Surviving the mental illness hostage takeover doesn’t feel so good. Like in some weird way, I wished for it, I wanted him gone. And now he is, they both are, we lost them both,” said Juniper.
Delia dipped her fingers into the bag of flour, forcing them to move. “Do you think he knew that we wanted Mom to leave him?” Delia whispered.
Juniper looked startled by the shift in her big sister, their usual roles reversed.
“Hey, you know what? If they could see you making this freaking awesome bread, they would be cheering for you. They’d be shocked, but happy,” said Juniper. Her voice sounded tender.
Delia was grateful to her for the attempt at comfort. “It would be a surprise for them. And the café would just make them faint,” she said, forcing a brightness in her voice.
Delia glanced at the clock; it was five. J Bird had to deliver the breads, scones, and cupcakes by seven the next morning. The art department at the university was hosting a regional conference off campus and they had agreed to try J Bird’s new catering service. The sisters had plenty of time. Besides, this was where her little sister excelled, the timing of baking and the choreography that brought all the baking to a sumptuous conclusion at just the right time. Delia could relax and let Juniper hold the reins.
Juniper finished frosting the cupcakes, slid them into the fridge to safeguard them from Baxter, and ran out the door with a bottle of wine. Delia was left with four loaves of bread for their final rise.
But had a black dot of their father been deposited in either of them? Were they truly in the safe zone yet, barricaded by age? She wanted to believe so. And she wanted to believe that her mother truly had loved them.
CHAPTER 24
The next afternoon, they collected the serving trays from the grateful academics. The rave reviews from the organizer stayed with them as they drove to the café. A few hours of painting awaited them.
Juniper screwed a paint roller to the end of a broom-length pole and dipped it into a tray of fuchsia paint. Everything was going to take two coats.
“Delia, where was I when you ran into the house? It feels so weird and disconnected not being able to remember. I mean, I was almost fourteen.”
Delia never told her sister about what she heard, so long ago, when she ran into their house before the fire engines came screaming down the street, before Tyler dragged her from the building. Why did Juniper want to know now, thirteen years later? Couldn’t they keep that one bit sealed over?
The demon of the fire haunted Delia, but it had been her fire, never fully explained to Juniper. She owned it, chained it securely in a dank cave and visited it from time to time to be sure that its incarceration held firm.
It had been wise to keep details of the fire from Juniper when she was thirteen. The important details were clear enough. Their parents were dead, as inconceivable as it was to the sisters; their parents were gone. Now J Bird was twenty-six. She had survived a string of boyfriends unfit even for themselves. She had survived drinking too much in college and too much Ecstasy. But for the last few years, J Bird had left behind the remnants of her wild girl identity, the one who would do anything, and exchanged it for this new, more exciting version, the one who could run a bakery. Her future was bright and boundless.
J Bird’s true north was baking, and she drove the effort to open the café in seven weeks. Seeing her sister’s expertise, the way she knew just where to buy a good used baker’s oven, where to attach the cooling racks, how to order supplies, had lowered Delia’s vigilance monitor by a few degrees.
So why now? Why did her sister want to know the details now? Delia had held the demon chained up in the cave for so long. She wasn’t sure if she could talk about that night again. Except for the fact that Juniper had been pecking at her for hours.
“Can’t this wait? I have the worst case of my entire career weighing on me, Tyler has come back into town, and my online dating project was awful. Do we have to scratch off this scab now?”
The clatter of Baxter’s claws on the hardwood floors caused them both to turn their heads. He had a dayglow green tennis ball in his mouth. He looked at both of them, raised his eyebrows, and walked to the door. Tail up, three wags. He had to go out. Delia was suspicious. She was sure that Baxter was intervening in a discussion that probably sounded like arguing to him. Were they arguing? She suspected that hearing his two main people argue was the most complicated situation for him, far worse than keeping them safe from outside forces. How could he protect the sisters, whom he loved, from each other?
“Okay Mr. Peacekeeper, I’ll take you out. I’ve got to change out of these painting clothes before I do,” said Delia. She had on ancient yoga pants that were blotched with paint and had a hole in the crotch. She slipped off the pants and pulled on a stretchy skirt free of paint.
“Come on, we could both use a break. Let’s walk out to the marsh,” she said to Juniper. Baxter wiggled his entire body, offering them his trademark retriever smile, even with the ball in his mouth.
They wrapped their brushes and rollers in plastic bags and headed out. It was easier for Delia to talk if she was moving.
“There was a fire, our parents were killed. It was arson, and most likely our father set the fire in the midst of his last raging psychotic episode,” said Delia. “You know all this. What else is there to know? Dead is dead.” Even as she said this, she knew it was too harsh, not what J Bird deserved.
The serenade of katydids looking for love filled the air along the quiet street that bordered a marsh. Juniper still wore her flip-flops, unwilling to give in to the approaching fall.
“After we talked yesterday, I remembered something. You made me go to the Clarks’ house. Then you ran into our house. I saw you from their living room window. So did Mrs. Clark. She screamed and held on to me; she wouldn’t let me follow you. I heard the sirens, but you ran in before the fire truck arrived. What did you see?”
Had they come to a time when the past could be untangled? Would talking about it help?
Muscles along Delia’s rib cage woke up and tightened. They relayed an alarm that marched outward, toward her arms and legs. “The smoke was already so thick, I couldn’t see much. I dropped to my hands and knees where the smoke wasn’t as thick.”
“Did you call to them? Could you hear them?”
Delia heard the demon in the cave jangling its chain, whipping it from side to side.
The gravel crunched under their feet. Baxter jumped into the first water access he could find in the freshwater marsh.
Delia’s voice constricted, the sides of her throat conspiring to silence her. “Yes, it was the first thing I did. I thought I heard them, I thought I heard Dad. But then my lungs filled with smoke, or at least that’s what it felt like. I couldn’t see and I couldn’t breathe.” She remembered the sound, the roar inside their house, the blast of hot air that hit her like a wall.
Baxter ran back to them and shook off, spraying his people with marsh water. J Bird picked up his tennis ball and hurled it into the water. Baxter dashed off, the tips of his ears bobbing, his powerful body stretched low and long, in full retrieving mode. There was nothing he wouldn’t do in his quest.
Delia scuffed her paint-splattered running shoes in the dirt. “Let’s go back, okay? Talking about this feels like I’m being dragged in the dirt behind a pickup truck. I forgot how it felt to picture that day. It doesn’t get easier. Please. But I did call to them. And I’m not sure that I heard Dad.”
Juniper jammed her hands into the pockets of her painting pants, jeans
with shredded knees. “I know you don’t like to talk about it, but I missed something that you were able to have. You got a little bit more of them that last time, in the fire. I want to see it all,” she said.
Baxter returned, dropped the ball at their feet, and shook off, fully prepared to do it all over again.
“Sorry, big guy, we’ve got work to do. No more,” said J Bird. The center of Baxter’s eyebrows rose, as though he were crushed by the terrible news.
They walked a two-mile loop in silence, punctuated with ball tosses, and returned to the café. Baxter claimed the spot by the front door, where his stainless steel water bowl awaited him.
* * *
Delia lined up planks of baseboard trim between two sawhorses and dipped her brush into high gloss white paint. She looked down at the boards, giving a sideways glance to her little sister. “What made you think of the fire today?” Delia said. She only wanted to know why now, but the question was sure to open the door to more questions.
Juniper rolled a twelve-inch-wide swath of fuchsia up the wall. “It’s just that you and I are starting this business together, and Dad would be so happy about all this great food and Mom would be proud of us. If ever I wanted them to be back, you know, alive again, it’s now. I feel like they’re here, watching us sometimes.”
Delia gripped the paintbrush. She didn’t want her dead parents in the new business. She wanted a clean break from the sadness that defined their lives. But if J Bird wanted to feel closer to their parents, if that was the reason tied up with starting the new bakery café, maybe she should share more. J Bird was all grown up.
Delia took a breath. “I was glad that our neighbors, the Clarks, kept you across the street while they called 911. Remember, we had just come home from the mall and saw the smoke coming from the upstairs bedrooms. It was getting dark.” A furnace of heat started deep in her stomach and rose unabated to the top of her skull.
“I sort of remember. I liked Mrs. Clark even though their house always smelled like hamburgers. I remember she had on a sweater, something itchy. Wow, I’d never remembered that before, even when you made me go to the therapist after Mom and Dad died.”
The Tiger in the House Page 10