The Never Never Sisters

by L. Alison Heller

  “You know we have a lot of room here. We’d love it if—”

  “I can see,” said Sloane, turning around and taking in the vaulted ceilings, “but it’s very comfortable where I am. This place is insane, though.”

  “It was just luck.” My dad cleared his throat. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “That’s not true, Frankie,” said my mom. “If you hadn’t done such a good job at the bank to begin with, Brent never would’ve poached you from them to work at Moonstone. If you hadn’t done such a good job working at Moonstone, it wouldn’t have been ripe for the offering.”

  She always said it like this, as though my father had caused the boondoggle, his one sure step leading to the next—this is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat, that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

  It was sweet that she saw him as a superhero, but in reality, my dad’s life as in-house counsel at a bank had been identical to his life as in-house counsel at Moonstone, down to the allotted weeks of vacation and pay grade. He hadn’t gone there to strike oil; it was just what had happened.

  Sloane swiveled her head as though at an open house, and my parents watched her like nervous sellers.

  “What do you want to do when you’re here, Sloane?” My voice must have been too sharp again, because one, two, three, their faces whipped toward me.

  “I have some plans.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Um, some tourist stuff.”

  “Like . . . what?”

  “I really want to check out some of the SummerEyes sculptures. Have you gone yet?”

  “No, not yet.” I tried to catch my mom’s eye. Coming to New York for that particular art installation was kind of like going to Hawaii for the films. New York’s latest public art project, the Eyes, was the misbegotten plan of some artiste wunderkind who’d spent taxpayer dollars commissioning one hundred sculptures of eyeballs in parks all over the city. He’d been pilloried when his pièce de résistance—an overbudget giant unblinking bloodshot papier-mâché pupil just north of the zoo��was blamed for causing its fourth panic attack. “I don’t know if I’ll ever make it. They’re supposed to be terrifying, actually.”

  “I don’t know.” Sloane shrugged. “Some of them sound worth checking out.”

  My mom leaned forward tentatively, hoping to bond over the artistic merit of the Eyes, and I felt a surge of protectiveness toward her and a stab of anger directed at Sloane. It was difficult to tell which was stronger.

  Sloane offered to walk out with me, but I managed to duck the invitation by agreeing that of course we should all have another breakfast on Monday, but I had to leave for a session. I darted out as they continued to discuss their calendars, which were surprisingly complicated given that my mom didn’t have a job and Sloane was here on vacation.

  I was in the elevator, praying for the doors to just close already, when a hand waved through them. They receded and Sloane pushed her way in, muttering something under her breath about never getting out of there. Then, a little more clearly, she asked which way I was headed.

  “Up to Sixty-eighth Street.”

  “Good,” she said, checking her watch. “You can come with me to meet Giovanni.”

  She was sufficiently declarative to render me defenseless, so I followed her out of the building. As soon as we were on the street, she pulled a single cigarette and a lighter from the pocket of her shorts. I smelled the smoke, dry and corrosive, and fanned the air in front of my face, but Sloane was undeterred by my discomfort. Halfway up the block, her cigarette burning from her lips, she pointed. “There.”

  Two men stood, waiting, the heat outlining them in hazy waves so they looked like something out of a mirage. When we got a little closer, about twenty feet away, one still appeared as if from a mirage. He was built like an Adonis in perfectly broken-in jeans—broad shoulders, brush of blond hair, a T-shirt that both clung and draped. Jeans. In ninety-five-degree heat. Obviously, he wore them because knew he looked good in them. Which meant he was an ass.

  “And Giovanni is?”

  Sloane dropped her cigarette and stomped on it, speaking softer and sounding shyer than I could ever have thought possible from her. “My fiancé.” I stopped right there on the sidewalk, incredulous, as Sloane leapt forward and ran smack into the arms of the guy next to the Adonis, the one at whom I hadn’t even bothered to glance.

  They hugged and murmured at each other—probably more about my parents: Did you survive? Yes, I managed even though they hung me by my thumbs—and I caught Adonis’s eye. He smiled, and I blushed and looked down.

  A hand touched my shoulder. It was the fiancé, who had made up the distance between us, his other hand holding Sloane’s. “Paige?”

  Sloane moved closer to him until their whole bodies were entwined. “Giovanni?” I said. He was not what I’d have dreamed of for a life partner for my sister; instead of a skanky ratlike creature, Giovanni was like a gangly, friendly version of the little prince: curly hair, huge Bambi eyes, about half an inch shorter than Sloane and I were.

  “Hi!” he said, and, hand still on my arm, leaned forward to give me a squeeze. “So great to meet you.”

  “You too,” I said, my eyes falling back to the nameless Adonis as if felled by gravity. He had that same smile on his face. Beautiful but simple, I decided. It was always the way.

  “We brought something,” Giovanni said. He fished into the beige tote bag slung over his shoulder and brought out a box, a brown ribbon quartering it into four uneven sections. “For you.”

  “Me?” I wondered how he had known that I was going to be appearing at this block at this time for the presentation when I myself had had no clue. “Thank you.”

  “Open it.”

  “Yeah, open it,” said Adonis.

  “Um. Okay.” I tugged off the ribbon and lifted the box. Four fat truffles sat in paper. They were beautiful, sure, but as it was a little after eight thirty and already sweltering, they seemed inappropriate. I could tell Giovanni was about to urge me to taste the chocolate, so I made some happy exclamation about how I couldn’t wait to have some after lunch, and shut the box quickly.

  “It’s from her store.” Giovanni removed his hand from around Sloane’s waist, only to clamp it down on her shoulder. They needed to get a room.

  “You have a store?”

  She nodded. “I manage it.”

  “She runs it!” Giovanni was almost crowing, and Sloane and Adonis started to laugh and shake their heads as though Giovanni’s exaggerations were a familiar comedy to those in the know. “It’s the best chocolate.”

  “It is pretty good,” Adonis said.

  They watched me expectantly, and I saw no way out of opening the box and nibbling one—something toffee with dots of nuts all over its square top. I pretended to be in heaven, but really I was preoccupied taking it all in: the candy box, the open smile on everyone’s faces, Sloane’s hand in Giovanni’s back pocket, the friendly street corner Greek God endorsing the chocolate. None of it was what I expected.

  When my eyes clicked with the Adonis’s for a third time, I wiped my hand on my skirt before sticking out my hand. “I’m Paige.”

  “I know,” he said. “For days all anyone’s been talking about is meeting you.”

  I assumed he was making fun of me. “Yes,” I said drily. “My exploits are the stuff of legends.”

  I sensed something from Sloane and Giovanni—worry? Giovanni said, in an apologetic tone, “Percy’s one of my oldest friends, so I call him first whenever I’m coming to New York.” Had they feared they’d offended me? It was so far from the truth, I felt like I’d been flipped into upside-down world.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Nice to meet you all.”

  “We’re going to breakfast, if you want to come,”
Giovanni said. “Please come.”

  “Yeah,” Sloane echoed with sufficiently less enthusiasm.

  I checked my watch deliberately. “I’ve got clients coming, so I should run.”

  “Clients?” Percy said.

  “I’m a marriage counselor.” I braced myself for the questions. People loved talking about my job—they were fascinated by others’ marriages, but Percy just laughed, his mouth opening far enough that I could see the luminous white tops of his back teeth.

  “Honestly?” said Giovanni. “That’s pretty funny.”

  “It’s a real job,” I said defensively. Now that I really was offended, no one seemed to care.

  “Of course it is,” said Percy. “It’s just that I’m a private investigator. I should give you my card so you can send the suspicious ones to me when it doesn’t work out. We can work like an assembly line.”

  I wanted to say something smart and snappy to put him down, but I couldn’t come up with anything aside from assembly lines being why Detroit was in financial ruin. I wasn’t sure that was accurate, or even logical, so I noted to myself that he wasn’t quite as good-looking as I’d originally thought. Then I smiled my phoniest smile and told Sloane I’d see her Monday before walking away as quickly as I could.

  Slouched in my office desk chair, I listened to Helene’s cancellation voice mail message. No explanation, just an apology and a halfhearted request to reschedule to July 8. I could call this one from a mile away: the Jacobys were never coming in for another session.

  I pushed against the desk with my bare feet—sorry, Dr. Max—and returned a phone call to my friend Lucy who was out in the Hamptons.

  “When are you coming out?” She had started every phone call this way since leaving the city six weeks before.

  “I don’t know, Luce.”

  “What’s that? Tomorrow? Tomorrow’s great!”

  “I can’t. Sloane’s here.”

  “Bring him along, whoever he is.”

  I had to laugh. “Sloane’s my sister.”

  “What?! The crazy one?”

  “She’s not crazy. She has substance abuse issues.”

  “So how’s the visit going?”

  “It just is. Not much to report from here. How are things at the beach?”

  Her voice got muffled. “I’m on the phone. Yes, but I’m on the phone.” Then louder. “Paige, can I call you back? We’re trying to leave in time for the farmers’ market so we can barbecue later.”

  “Of course.” I had to admit it sounded nice, but there was nothing stopping me from doing the same thing in the city. I could go to the Union Square farmers’ market, buy some fixings and plan my very own barbecue. Then I could invite over my distracted mother and Sloane, intense and sulky. And surely Dave would be delighted to cohost—he was in top form this week, a hint of color having just returned to at least one of his cheeks. Stove-top corncobs and mildly depressed mindless chatter on the seventeenth floor. Fun, fun, fun.

  I opened the box of Giovanni’s chocolates and stuck an entire round truffle in my mouth. What I should do was go home to my husband.

  I bit down and caramel oozed out over my tongue.

  Not bad. I stuck in another one and tasted the tang of passion fruit sharp behind the smoothness of the chocolate. Not bad at all.

  I knocked on the door to Dave’s home office. “I’m baaack,” I sang, opening it a crack.

  He was better today, still in the same gym shorts and T-shirt, but he appeared happy to see me as he turned around in his chair. “How was the big reunion?”

  The Jacobys’ absence was still fresh on my mind, so it took me a while to realize he meant the get-together with Sloane. “Fine, I guess.”

  “Do you think she’s using?”

  I shook my head. “She seemed very with it. Not entirely pleasant, but with it. And she has a fiancé.”

  “Really?”

  “His name is Giovanni.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He gave me chocolate.”

  “So he essentially bought your soul?”

  “Ha.” Something was still bugging me about the Sloane visit—like a little divot in a manicured green lawn. “Don’t you think the timing of the visit is odd?”

  “Summer?”

  “After Moonstone’s public offering. All of a sudden, my parents have gone from worrying about the mortgage to being loaded.”

  “That happened three years ago.”

  “Right, but still . . .”

  “So, what are you saying? She waits three years to contact them, meets Giovanni of the boxed chocolate and then all of sudden becomes a grifter?” I shrugged. “There’s this song, by Styx, I don’t know if you know it, but it’s called—”

  “Please stop.” The first time Dave had done this, we’d been in a cab after our fourth date, heading to my apartment. I still hadn’t decided what was going to happen when the car stopped there, whether he’d be coming in with me or not. At dinner, as on the three dates prior, he’d done everything perfectly: made the right reservations, ordered the right appetizers, whipped out his credit card before I even had a chance to reach for my purse, lifted his arm to conjure cabs from thin air. He’d asked me questions about myself, he’d made witty jokes, spoke about current events in a way that made them feel accessible and like I wasn’t a moron for not getting each reference.

  Something was stopping me, though, from falling all over him in the cab, as cute as he was. Did I like him or just his collection of attributes and achievements? He was practically my mother’s wish list for me in human form.

  We smiled at each other in the backseat. I didn’t want the lightness of his brown eyes to lure me, so I stared out the window on my side of the cab. About two blocks up, a runner made his way up Madison Avenue in the dark. His body bobbed with each step, his gray sweats flapped loose around him, his ears were covered by headphones so large they looked like Princess Leia’s buns. The guy was booking it, sprinting full on in a way that made me want to cheer for him, and next to me, in perfect unison with the runner’s steps I heard a soft voice: “Bum. Bum ba bum. Bum ba bum. Bum, bum, bum.”

  “The Eye of the Tiger.” After we stopped laughing, Dave kissed me, right there, and with that spontaneity, I knew any hesitation on my part was ridiculous. Why question that we locked together like a jigsaw puzzle? My supportive family jutted out where his was just a curved indent, and his ambition was rock solid where mine tended to wilt. This was it: game over, as though every other guy I’d dated had been a rehearsal.

  His repertoire for sound-track humming was usually eighties pop: “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” to stave off a fight, for example, or, as cringe-inducing as it should have been but wasn’t, “I Want Candy” before fooling around. In the past year, he’d aired out this Styx one before—“Too Much Time on My Hands.”

  “Not funny,” I said. But it was. It always was.

  I would never have admitted to any happiness that Dave was suspended, but there was something cozily indulgent about the two of us being home together in the middle of a workday. I realized how much I’d missed just having him close by, sharing the same space, and instead of going back to my office, I decided to stay in and unpack those boxes from the closet.

  I started on the easier box, Dave’s, piling the photos into two groups, Dave before me and Dave after me, with the thought that maybe I could organize them or even put together one of those bound books for his birthday.

  I hadn’t seen one of the pictures before—Dave hiking, probably about age seventeen, based on how beanpole-skinny his legs were—but the rest were familiar: him at twenty-eight, smiling in front of the keg on the porch of the beach house he’d rented; the shot of earnest, save-the-world Penelope, his girlfriend from college, standing awkwardly in the middle of the quad, her hair
pulled back severely. I’d first seen it years before, clipped inside a greeting card of a cartoon hand holding a fist of posies. I’d opened the card to read the inscription: Thank you for loving me like that.

  “Excuse me.” I’d pushed the card at Dave from my cross-legged position on the floor, surprised that such a buttoned-up-looking girl wrote that message. “How exactly did you love her to inspire this card?”

  “Like this.” Dave had stuck out his hand formally.

  “Yeah, right,” I’d said.

  He’d replied, “Really. I swear,” before putting his arms around my waist and lifting me onto the couch. End of discussion about bland Penelope.

  The box also contained several photos of Gemma, Dave’s drop-dead gorgeous girlfriend from law school, who was obviously a romantic counterreaction to poor Penelope. That one didn’t seem to hate posing: pursing her bee-stung lips, hair strands across her face, stretching her hand up (midriff exposed) in the one where she tried to touch the WELCOME TO TEXAS sign.

  I had always pretended to be slightly suspicious of her—how does a man get over someone that beautiful?—but Dave had never made me feel insecure about an ex, and I’d long before subscribed to the nauseating theory that all of his ex-girlfriends had turned him into the man I met.

  Also floating in the box was our wedding announcement from the Times. There’d been a massive snowstorm the week before our wedding with airport and subway closures. All of the details we’d sweated over evaporated like steam. Our band: canceled. Our guest count: halved. Our flowers: botched and sparse.

  Some style section reporter had called us up afterward for an article about the storm’s impact on area weddings. I’d been quoted: “It ended up being a perfect day. And the good news is that if we can get through the stress of that week, we can handle anything that marriage brings up.”

  I put the clipping aside to show Dave. Then, stall tactics over, I regarded the second box. Do it quickly, I thought, like ripping off a Band-Aid: just open the lid, pull out the journal, flip to the first page and read: