The Never Never Sisters

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The Never Never Sisters Page 20

by L. Alison Heller


  “Right.” When I had broached it with him, Dave had not had a problem with the Hamptons trip. Of course he wished he could go, he’d said. He didn’t feel abandoned, he’d said, unless I was planning to stay there forever. Was I? Ha, ha, ha, ha. It was a couple of days; he was pretty sure he could handle it.

  I had lost my ability to take anything at face value. Was Dave really okay with the plan or putting on a brave face? Had I cleared the coast so he could have secret meetings with members of the criminal underworld in our living room? The biggest question, though, the hardest to answer, was whether I was tagging along on someone else’s vacation because I wanted a beach getaway or just to avoid being home with Dave.

  It was crazy to start second-guessing a summer trip to the Hamptons. I was slowly, smoothly, surely going mad, picking at the corners of the yellow wallpaper of my life and peeling it all away.

  “And we’re going to be driving up with someone.”

  “Okay.”

  “Giovanni’s childhood friend.”

  “All right.” I hadn’t wanted to say his name, and Dave didn’t ask it.

  “I’ve met him before—he’s nice and kind of young, I guess, but he didn’t have a place to stay, so I offered him one of the bedrooms at our house.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “You don’t care.”

  “I mean, is he an axe murderer?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So reassuring.” He laughed. “Guess we’ll find out!”

  Driving downtown to Percy’s building took about forty minutes. In the garage, I had insisted that Sloane sit up front next to me. She’d mumbled, “Whatever,” and looked longingly at Giovanni, but I held firm. We would not be coupling off, with Percy riding shotgun while she and Giovanni drooled all over each other in the backseat. We would not.

  Because it took us forty minutes to reach him, Percy was waiting for us outside, leaning against his building, a knapsack slung over one shoulder. Giovanni got out and held open the door rather than sliding behind me in the driver’s seat—god forbid he and Sloane couldn’t hold hands through the seat gaps, which they had been doing since the garage.

  While Percy loaded his bags and settled in, I texted Lucy that I might be coming out that weekend. I had visions of her meeting Sloane and Giovanni, even Percy, but I thought I’d leave things deliberately vague until I knew everyone’s plans. When I looked up from my phone, they were all buckled in, watching me.

  “Let’s go!” Percy was right behind me, which was probably worse than shotgun; I was hyperaware of him, and every time I glanced in the rearview mirror, his piercing blue eyes met mine.

  I put the music on shuffle, and when a song from Graceland came on—the guitar strumming out the melody of “Under African Skies”—Sloane sat up straight in her seat. “I love this,” she breathed.

  “You remember it?” I said. “From growing up?”

  “Same as you. The backseat of Franklin’s Toyota Camry.” She started singing along with Linda Ronstadt’s harmony. On the second verse, I joined in too.

  This is the story of how we begin to remember,

  This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein

  The harmonizing had such sheer beauty that accompanying it was enough to make us feel like we could sing. Still, we had more feeling than tone, warbling and wavering loudly on the high notes. When the song ended, I waited for a smartass comment from someone, but none came.

  “This,” said Giovanni, “is a great album.”

  “Every song is a masterpiece,” Sloane agreed. “Except ‘Homeless.’”

  “But every album needs a ‘Homeless,’” said Percy. “A decent B-side song to let shine the genius of the ‘Myth of Fingerprints.’”

  “Do you have the whole thing on here?” Sloane scrolled through my music. “Yesss!” She pressed the screen and leaned back in her seat.

  Three songs in, we were all four shouting the whoops of “I Know What I Know” when Sloane stopped abruptly. “Can I smoke in here?”

  “No,” I said. “Do you need to because of the music?” It might bother her, I realized, given that I remembered it as the sound track of our childhood.

  “Paul Simon?” she said. “No, it just seems like from someone else’s life.”

  It didn’t to me. I could visualize it: sitting in the backseat of my dad’s sedan, right in the spot where Percy was now, Paul Simon singing about poor boys and pilgrims going to Graceland, my head leaned as far back as it could go so I could stare straight up and out the rear window. Above me would be the thicket of bare tree branches reaching across the yellowing evening sky. To my right would be Sloane, zipped into a brown-and-orange puffy coat, her knees pressing through holes in her jeans, her Keds inked with graffiti and pressed flat against the back of my mom’s seat.

  A whoosh of air drowned out “Gumboots.” Next to me, Sloane had opened the window on the highway, forcing her lit cigarette out into the gusts.

  “Sloane!”

  “I need to because I’m addicted. Don’t mess with addiction, Paige. Seriously.” But after three drags, she let the cigarette slip out of her fingers. It flew away and upward as if yanked by a string. Sloane rolled up the window, sealing us back in. Then she turned to me and sang, “Don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.” Still to the melody, she pointed to the dashboard and sang, “Mr. Bonedigger, bonedigger—you’re almost out of gas, you are.”

  When we pulled up to the gas station, Giovanni announced he had to pee.

  “Traveling with you is like traveling with a toddler,” said Percy.

  Giovanni didn’t argue. Instead, he rubbed his stomach in a circular motion and announced, “It needs food.”

  “Fat Charlie, the Archangel, files for divorce,” Giovanni mused while we sat at our table in McDonald’s, yellow wrappers crumbled in front of us.

  “You’re still on the Paul Simon?” I said.

  “It sticks in your head. Who is this Fat Charlie, the archangel? Paul Simon always makes me want to ask, What do the words mean? What does it mean? What does it mean?” He pointed at me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Obviously not. If Fat Charlie, the archangel, had had as good a marriage counselor as our own Paige Reinhardt, he wouldn’t be filing for divorce, right?”

  “Obviously.”

  “We didn’t listen to this Paul Simon in high school,” Giovanni said. “We listened to Slayer, right, Perce?”

  Percy, expressionless, lifted his hand in the death-metal devil horns gesture, index and pinky finger up.

  Giovanni devil-horned him back. “We just sat in the basement blaring loud music, smoking pot, talking about how we were going to get out of Ohio, and look at us, we did it.”

  “Please,” Sloane said. “You were all Four-H club and yearbook and stuff.”

  “He was,” said Percy, “all of those things, although there was a brief period with heavy metal music and a rattail.”

  “That wasn’t a rattail,” said Giovanni. “That was a Mohawk.”

  “Whatever,” said Percy. “It was an embarrassment.”

  “What about his girlfriends?” Sloane asked.

  “I didn’t have any girlfriends,” Giovanni said. “I never met a woman until I met you.”

  Percy smirked. “There was the crush on Mrs. Stetler. Remember, Giovanni? She was the Four-H adviser and she smelled, as Giovanni said, like lilacs in bloom.”

  “She was a goddess,” Giovanni said, “and her husband did not appreciate her. At all.”

  “Then there was Miriam. He used to watch her at cheerleading practice.”

  “A lovely person,” said Giovanni. “Although she really, as it turns out, was only interested in what I could do for her as the yearbook editor.” We looked at him curiou
sly. “She wanted the immortality only I could promise. Pictures in the yearbook. A lot of them.”

  “And then Valerie, your prom date.”

  “Right. Valerie. Enough said.” They exchanged a loaded look, and Sloane and I glanced at each other wide-eyed.

  “You’re like brothers.”

  “We are.”

  I tried to soak it up, the bond between them, and respect it, rather than allow it to be a referendum on Sloane and me. Maybe we could build up to this; I was starting to think it was possible.

  Giovanni pointed to me. “Paige. Share one of yours.”

  “My what?”

  “Childhood stories.”

  I intercepted Giovanni’s glance at Percy because Percy was staring down at his soda lid. “Well,” I said, pointing my chin at Sloane, “apparently this one used to dress me up like Nana the sheepdog.”

  “From Peter Pan?” Percy asked.

  “Yep,” I said. “Word on the street is that young Sloane had her own fringe festival.”

  “We did. Together.” Sloane looked at me. “You don’t remember that either?”

  “Wasn’t I, like, three?”

  “That’s the whole point of Peter Pan anyway, right?” Percy said. “The Lost Boys and the haze of forgotten childhood.”

  “I like that.” Sloane brightened as she slurped her soda. “Paige, you’d make a perfect Lost Boy, given your lack of recall.”

  “Are you kidding me?” My voice had come out heated, so I lowered it. “First of all, the Lost Boys fell out of their prams and went missing from their families. If anyone’s a Lost Boy, you, Sloane, are the Lost Boy. I’m the perfect Nana, when you think about it, stuck at home with Mr. and Mrs. Darling, barking to herself.”

  “I don’t remember the falling-out-of-their-prams part,” Percy said.

  “It’s in the book. But they all grew up eventually. One became a judge.”

  “Oh,” Percy said. “I didn’t read the book. My analysis was based on the movie Hook, and I got the distinct impression that there was some forgotten, hazy childhood stuff going on with Peter Pan and the woman from Downton Abbey. You know, like she remembered him, but she didn’t.”

  “Right,” I said. “You’re absolutely right. We should be looking to Hook for themes and deeper meaning rather than the book.”

  “I didn’t know you did that.” Giovanni smiled at Sloane. “Were you Peter Pan?”

  “I wasn’t really anyone, but I tended to tell stories in defense of Captain Hook.”

  “Of course you did,” I said.

  Sloane pulled her straw in and out of the plastic top and then sipped. “I can tell how much this means to you, Paige, so I’m promising you right here and now—when we do the fringe festival this year, you can be Nana.”

  “Well, thank god.” I laughed. I hadn’t even known she could be funny like that.

  “It must be pointed out, Paige,” Giovanni said, “that if you don’t remember the Peter Pan plays, that doesn’t technically count as a story from your childhood. You still have to tell us one.”

  “Okay.” I pointed at him. “Special for you, a real unknown story from my childhood: our grandfather.”

  “What about him?” Sloane said.

  “Mom’s dad. He’s like He Who Must Not Be Named.”

  “That’s technically not a story,” Sloane said. “You really do need to work on your narrative form.”

  “Okay, fine. Once upon a time when I was growing up, my parents never mentioned or divulged the name of my maternal grandfather. It remains a mystery to this day. The end.”

  “Maybe,” Giovanni said, lowering his voice, and we all ducked our heads in, “you’re direct descendants of Voldemort.”

  “I would almost believe it at this point.”

  “Russell Cohen.” Sloane chewed the end of her straw as she spoke.

  “I guess that’s as likely as anything else.”

  “No, that was his name. Russell Cohen.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Basic research. It wasn’t that hard.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  She held up her hand, palm up, fingers spread like she couldn’t believe I was asking. “Obviously you’ve never really tried to find out.”

  “I have. I’ve asked several times. I kept getting stonewalled.”

  “Relying on someone else to hand you the information is the same as giving up.” She stared me down so intensely that Giovanni and Percy swiveled their heads away from us in reaction, each in the opposite direction. “That’s not the way to learn anything. You always have to get it yourself.”

  When we got back into the car, the summer sun was low and burning, its light so strong as to appear almost solid across the road and treetops. In the front seat, Sloane put “Crazy Love, Vol. II” on repeat, and Giovanni made up silly words about poor Fat Charlie coming to counsel with me, and opting against filing for divorce.

  We listened to Graceland the whole way up, on a loop, the sun setting golden all around us, the energy infused with nostalgia and excitement. It doesn’t happen a lot—an anticipated memory playing out just as beautifully as you’ve visualized it, but when it does, you just have to soak it up.

  chapter thirty-five

  WE PULLED UP to the house at dusk. Above the sound of the tires crunching over the gravel driveway, Giovanni read loudly from his phone, in the Italian accent that I was realizing he did whenever he felt like a tourist. “Quogue is one of the westernmost beach towns in the Hamptons, known for being family oriented and on the sleepy side of things.” He looked up and, still in accent, asked, “Where is the disco mirror, Paige? Where are the T-shirt guns? I was promised T-shirt guns!”

  We got out of the car and stood on the front lawn for a moment, stretching our legs before grabbing the bags out of the trunk. It felt cooler out there in all the leafiness, and the house did appear, as I’d hoped, like a small fairy-tale cottage: sloped triangular roof, strong trees in the front and that hammock between them.

  Giovanni spun around in circles, his arm outstretched. “The beach is that way?” He pointed away from the house and sniffed the air.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s about a mile. There’s a small pool in back, though.”

  “Let’s go now,” he said. “We missed sunset, but we can walk in the water.”

  “Oooh.” Sloane sounded freakishly girlish. She walked up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist, pushing her face into his back. “Let’s.”

  “The walk will be really dark,” I said.

  “How much trouble can we get into?” Giovanni said. “It’s a sleepy family town.”

  The two of them set off with Bandito’s bag slung over their shoulders, amid Giovanni’s warnings that the surf made him “romantic” and we shouldn’t wait up.

  Percy and I looked at each other. “I know beggars can’t be choosers,” he said, “but I’m really, really hopeful that I can sleep in the room right next door to theirs.”

  “I might make them sleep outside next to a cold-water hose.”

  We walked up the flat stone path to enter the house and went about turning on the lights inside, checking it out. Percy’s voice came from the kitchen. “Uh-oh.”

  “What?” I poked my head in.

  He pointed to a straw gift basket on the kitchen counter. There was a paper card folded in front of it: Welcome from Bob and Michael McCan, owners of Blossom Cottage. Pressed into the gift straw were decayed bananas, now completely black, and an oozing pear. Stacked next to them were wrapped crackers that were probably fine, cheese wrapped in red wax that probably wasn’t and, in the middle, a bottle of wine.

  “When did Bob and Michael McCan leave this, you think?”

  “Memorial Day, probably.”

&nb
sp; We found a plastic bag under the sink and emptied everything except for the wine and crackers into it, after which we double-tied the handles. Percy volunteered to take it to the outside trash can while I searched the house for anything else that might have spoiled.

  The upstairs really should have been two rooms—a master and a spare—but the McCans had divided the spare into two mirror-image cubbies with just enough room for a full bed crammed against the wall and a dresser each. They had painted one room sea green and the other light blue. Across the hall were a tiny beige bathroom and the master suite.

  I went back downstairs to find Percy at the kitchen sink, pumping hand soap into his palm. “Slugs,” he said.

  “Thanks and sorry. I checked out the bedroom situation.”

  “Oh?”

  “A master for the lovebirds and then two identical rooms—one green and one blue. Which do you want?”

  “The better one.”

  “They’re identical.”

  “I don’t care. You assign them—it’s your house.”

  “I’m trying to be a good host. You choose.”

  “What shade of green?”

  “Like the first grass of spring.”

  He whistled. “Nice. What color blue?”

  “Palest wash of robin’s egg.”

  “You speak some real Pantone poetry.”

  “Why don’t you take green? It’s slightly closer to the bathroom.” I sat on one of the kitchen stools and regarded the bottle of wine standing forthright on the kitchen counter. I wanted to sit out on that hammock and drink wine until I was as mellow and relaxed as someone should be in a beach town in summer. I held up the bottle to Percy. “I should throw this out, shouldn’t I? Because of Sloane.”

  “I’m sure it’s okay. She works around wine.”

  “Yeah, but here, in New York, with all the reminders of her childhood . . . might be too much.”

  Percy smiled—I see where this is going. “We could hide it in the trunk of your car.”

  “Right.”

  “Or we could bury it in the yard. Pour it into the sink?”

 

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