I don’t know anyone who identifies with those head-in-the-sand characters. Everybody is so sure they’d see the writing on the wall, that they’d go into that room, aware and fighting just like the heroine. No matter how much I wanted to be that person—sentient and wise—I had to admit to myself that for a while now I’d been utterly clueless, bumbling in the dark.
chapter forty
DAVE HAD LEFT an apology note on the floor outside the closed bedroom door. I was sure he’d never done that before—left an apology note after a fight—but it felt like the fiftieth time. Like we had this dynamic down pat.
I’m so sorry, it said. I wanted things to be different. Fire drill at work but home by dinner. I was pretty sure that by “things” he meant “last night,” but perhaps he’d meant more. It could easily mean between us—we were fighting, we were apologizing, we were veering off track.
Bandito was probably the only living creature I hadn’t alienated. Maybe my dad too, which was more a sign of apathy than anything else.
My phone buzzed for the sixth time that morning. My mom had apparently found her voice. As soon as I picked up, she launched in, her tone rat-a-tat and accusatory: “We need to talk about yesterday.”
“Listen,” I said.
She kept going. I held the receiver away from my head. A bit louder, I said, “Listen.”
She stopped.
“I’m sorry I exploded at you and Binnie and for—” She waited. “I read your journals. From twenty years ago—”
“I know which ones.” Her voice was neutral.
“It was a violation and I’m sorry. But I don’t want to—I can’t—talk now. After I cool down, okay?” Silence. “Okay?”
I heard her suck in her breath. “Okay,” she responded. And I turned off my phone and went to the office.
Selena Richards might have been the tallest person I’d ever seen, except for her girlfriend, Bianca, who was even taller. I welcomed their kneecaps and pointed them to their seats, feeling like the lollipop guild greeters for Dorothy. I tried not to be intimidated as they folded themselves into chairs.
“Candy?” I pushed the jar closer to them.
“No, thanks,” Bianca said in a crisp British accent, and Selena shook her white-blond hair and laughed that tinkly giggle she’d used on the phone. Of course they didn’t eat candy. They were shiny gazelle creatures who subsisted on wheatgrass and egg whites. Their hands cradled, Bianca’s café au lait skin entwined with Selena’s peach, draped together like some expensive fabric.
This was when I should ask what they wanted.
They would be amenable. They had the ideal body language for clients—focused and open, both encouraged and encouraging.
“How did you guys meet?” I popped a Hershey’s Kiss in my mouth. It was a punt of a question, small talk.
Selena looked surprised and relieved. “At a friend’s party. About two years ago.” They smiled with the memory and narrated it together, interrupting each other and telling their own versions in a way I knew they’d done before. I could picture it: two sequoias seeing clear to each other above a bumpy terrain of indistinguishable scrub brush. Your hair was spun from fairy dust and the finest Chinese silk! Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, mine too!
I half listened, but I had skipped forward in my head to that question, my cornerstone: What do you want?
It was a bid for an impossible conclusion. If someone had asked me the same question in that moment, I would have stalled for a bit and tried to come up with something more graceful than the truth:
I wanted to eat that entire jar of candy and not get a cavity. I wanted the summer to be over and for Lucy to come back to Manhattan. I sort of wanted a dog like Bandito, for goddamn scientists to find a cure for addiction—what was taking them so long if it was all just an issue of chemistry?—and the ability to communicate with my mother as badly as I wanted a fifty-year break from her. I wanted Bianca and Selena to be happy, and I wanted to want to gaze at Dave the way they did at each other. I wanted to be an only child again. I wanted back my childhood with Sloane.
It wasn’t simple, what I wanted. My answer wouldn’t have been anything as concrete as what I demanded from the couples in my office.
About twenty minutes after Selena and Bianca glided out the door, my buzzer sounded. I assumed they’d forgotten something and didn’t even look at the monitor before pressing the button to let them back in. Giovanni opened the door instead.
“I tried to call.” He was slightly out of breath. “But you didn’t pick up.”
“My phone’s off. Why aren’t you flying home?”
“Nice office.” He glanced around. “Hey! You made a rainbow out of your bookcase. Love it.”
“Thanks.”
“I told Sloane that I was going out to get Ziploc bags for the flight—which was an excuse—but I really do need some. Is there a place around here I can get them?” He exhaled and said in a rush, “I’m so glad I caught you.”
“She doesn’t know you’re here?”
“I know. I feel awful. She’s so sad, though. And you are too, right? I had to do something.”
“Sad? The vibe I got was mad.”
“No. Sad.” He collapsed on the couple’s couch, fanning himself. “Sorry. Hot. I assume she never told you the real reason why she came to New York this summer?”
“No.” I sat down right next to him, across from my usual space.
“From the beginning, I asked her about you guys—her family. She always said the same thing, that there wasn’t a relationship, there would never be one. She claimed to have a very strict belief that people should be able to choose their family, the same way they could their friends.”
“Makes sense.” It did, right about now, although I couldn’t think of any friends close enough to be my family either, not even Lucy. The fact was, I’d confided in Sloane more than almost anyone.
“It’s a bullshit theory.”
“Oh.”
“I said I understood, but come on, if she really believed it, would she be here? I humored her at the time, because I liked her. A lot. I mean how could I not?”
I nodded as though anyone in his right mind would be defenseless in the face of Sloane’s overwhelming charisma.
“But I secretly thought she was exaggerating and eventually I’d meet you guys and you wouldn’t be as . . . alien as she made you all sound. Which, as it turns out, you aren’t.”
“Thanks.”
“When I hadn’t met anyone from her family after we’d been together for a year, I started to believe her. My family’s very embracing, a little too much, actually. She’s had no choice but to get trapped in its fold, and I assumed my family would be our family and that would be enough. But then, when we got engaged, I threw her a surprise party after, with some of her close friends and my family waiting for us at our apartment, and everyone was so happy. And it was a perfect night. The most beautiful night until—”
“Until what?”
“When I woke up in the middle of the night and found her crying in the living room because she didn’t have anyone to call about the engagement. I mean, she did—she has friends, and some of the folks from her recovery support have been in her life forever, but not having any family to call apparently meant something to her. I was so surprised. I realized you weren’t out of her life; you were worse than that. You were one big pile of unresolved. All the time she was pretending not to care, she was feeling awful about it. And she kept talking about you. You were the one she wanted to see. You were the one she’d thrown away.”
“Her whole life, she’s basically acted like I don’t exist. Why did she vanish?”
“She was sixteen, Paige. Sixteen and messed up. I don’t think she ever meant to vanish from your life. She says she tried to reach out to you a few times, right after she
left. When she was at that Gentle Breezes place and then, later, after she moved to California. And you know Sloane—she’s too shy to keep trying if she feels rejected. I’m not saying it’s a strength of hers, but . . .”
“She’s not shy. She’s mortar-tough.”
“Tough and shy aren’t opposites.”
Had there been something? I felt a fuzzy recollection of her reaching out—a postcard maybe, or voice mail, hardly a deluge—and ignoring it, chalking it up to a therapy assignment. It was possible; I’d certainly clung to my narrative of Sloane as a dark, shadowy figure whom we were all better off without. I’d given myself permission to clear her from my memory.
And you know Sloane. My immediate reaction had been to shake my head. I did not know Sloane. All I knew was that she ruined whatever she touched, and she was the one who’d been pushing me forward down this horrible path with Dave.
But . . .
I played the last two weeks in my mind like a fast-forwarded tape—her stringy appearance at the first breakfast; her general availability; taking me to the restaurants she wanted to try; generally having my back; right up to my harsh words on the boat.
I had gotten to know her this summer: she was rough around the edges and vulnerable and messed up, but she wasn’t intent on destruction. She was trying to be involved in my life. If I had opened up to her about an interest in skeet shooting, rather than my suspicions about Dave, perhaps we’d be happily pummeling shots into clay pigeons right now.
“I’m not trying to force things with you two,” Giovanni continued, “but our flight is later on today, and I was wondering if you had any interest in just saying . . . good-bye. Leaving on a better note.”
I had already grabbed my bag. “Where is she?”
“Crapola,” he said as our cab pulled up to the Lincoln, which looked run-down even in the early evening’s golden light. “After all that, I forgot the Ziploc bags.” He checked his watch. “You go in. She should be in the lobby with the bags.”
As soon as I recovered from the lobby’s overwhelming smell of stale hot dogs, I saw Sloane gesturing to someone behind a double-glass booth. Eventually the concierge nodded and slid something through the partition. Sloane took it and shoved it in the back pocket of her jeans. Her relief was evident when she turned around and saw me, and then she gave me a look that asked, How?
“Giovanni,” I said. “He’s out getting the right size Ziplocs.”
She sighed. “The man is obsessed with those.” She swept her arm toward the other side of the room where two men in plaid shirts sat on a row of mismatched chairs. Their heads were frozen in an upward tilt, watching NY1 News. “I invite you into our sitting area. Lovely, right?”
We both perched on the edge of our chairs. “This place,” I said. “I feel so bad you came here.”
“It was fine.”
“Where’s Bandito?”
She put her hand to her lips, but it was too late. At the sound of his name, one of the bags—the black one on top with mesh sides—moved. “No dogs allowed,” Sloane mouthed.
“Sorry,” I mouthed back. “You don’t have to go back, you know.”
“It’s time,” she said. “But it’s not good-bye. I’ll come and visit you if you want.”
“Or I could visit you.”
“That’d be great. We’d love to have you guys.”
“Both of us?”
“I really wasn’t trying to break you up or anything.”
“I know.”
“I thought I was being helpful. I was maybe a little too enthusiastic, trying to force things. Sorry. It’s awkward.”
“You really have nothing to apologize for. You’ve been great. You’re great.”
“I think you’re great.” She said this quietly. “I wish I’d tried harder to reach out. Before now.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I guess I thought you’d reach out too. I didn’t realize what a number they were doing on you back here, that if you brought up my name, you’d get reprogrammed.” She moved her arms like a robot. When I made a noise of objection, she moved her robot arms in surrender. “Let’s agree to disagree. I’m just glad for this summer.”
“Me too. On the whole,” I said, “it’s amazing how not awkward it’s been. With us. If not with Mom and Dad.” She was silent, studied. “But maybe that will just take more time.”
She made a face. “I’d much rather keep this about us. I’m sure you don’t want me to go there.”
“Go where?”
“I saw them only because I figured that was the easiest path to you. I don’t understand how you’re all so much in each other’s business. But”—she held her hands up—“to each his own. I don’t particularly need to pretend to be close to them and their motley band of shopping buddies.”
“What is the deal with you guys?”
“I can’t stand the hypocrisy.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t really hate them. I mean, Franklin is harmless, if a complete nonentity, but what I can’t stand is everyone’s sheepdog devotion to her. You know how growing up, she was all—family this and family that. Family’s the most important thing?”
“Yeah.”
“She talks such a big game about loyalty, but then she goes and does whatever she wants.”
“Like?”
“Like enrolling me in that school.”
“I don’t think she really wanted to. And isn’t that how you got sober?”
“Yes, I lucked out. But it was halfway across the country.”
“I read her journals. I think the decision killed her. But she thought it was best for you.”
She shrugged.
“Is that really it? You’re mad she sent you away? You were self-destructing, from what I understand.”
She set her jaw. “I really didn’t want to tell you this. You’re so blindly obedient when it comes to her. No offense.”
“Tell me.”
“So when you were reading her journals, you never came across anything about another guy?”
“I did. Nothing tawdry. She talks a lot about one friend. Someone called G.”
“Maybe. I don’t know his name.”
“What about him?”
“One night, this was just before I left, I was out late. I was with a group of friends, and we were walking by the Friendly’s on Sycamore. And I saw her car. It was about ten o’clock at night, so I walked closer and knocked on the window. She was in there with a guy. A much younger guy. And I know she saw me because she got all shocked, her eyes were like”—Sloane stopped and arranged her features in a catatonic look—“and she pulled away from him, but he didn’t get the memo, so he kept trying to continue whatever disgusting things they were doing—the windows were all fogged—and she kept pulling back and finally I just left.
“The next morning, she’s sitting at the breakfast table with Dad. He’s reading his paper, clueless as ever, and she looks me square in the eye, asks me where I was last night and how was it and that was it. She’s a total fraud.”
I imagined my teenaged self upon seeing that car just as Sloane had. I would’ve crumbled.
“You’re disgusted too.” Sloane sounded triumphant.
“Not really.”
“You’re not?”
“I’m sure I would have been disturbed to see it, but . . . a fraud? Isn’t that harsh?” G. had offered Vanessa something to get her through that year, and she’d grabbed onto it. I couldn’t have understood that at sixteen, but now I could imagine: G. with Percy’s face, in jeans.
“The definition of a fraud is someone who pretends to be what she’s not. I’d say it fits perfectly.”
“It’s not that black and white.”
“She lied. To my face. Not just
about how important family is, but about what she was doing that night. You thought I asked good questions about you and Dave?”
“All your therapy-inspired questions? Yeah.”
“Trust me. I’ve spent a lot of time on this exact issue, going over and over it with various experts. What I can’t get over is how she expected to know everything about me—where I was going, what I was doing, the mileage on my car—and the whole time she was lying.”
It was funny; I’d thought the very same thing a few weeks ago when I first saw the journals. “Not lying. Just not telling you about one part of her life.”
She snorted. “What’s the difference?”
“This is what I’ve learned this summer: There are going to be hidden facts, right? You can’t know everything about a person, so you base the relationship on what you do know.”
“So what do I know?”
“She was trying to act in your best interest. She was having a confusing, horrible year. How about me? It’s a fact that I was awful to you on the boat, but you know that I care about you and you’re able to get over it.”
“That’s, like, the worst example ever. You weren’t lying to me. You were being honest, if a little cranky. Look at the Dave stuff. It’s not like you felt good about the possibility of his lying to you.”
“But he’s my husband.”
“And she’s my mother. We’re very different in what we expect of people.”
“How?”
“You’re willing to twist things around. You accept whatever anyone tells you is true—Dave, Mom, Dad, to the extent he says anything. You just kind of go into your little box and stay. Your own little doghouse.”
“Doghouse?”
“That wasn’t the best image. I just meant—you’re obedient. You stay in a little sectioned-off portion on the edge of someone else’s property. I haven’t even been back that long, but already I can tell that your whole life is Vanessa-sanctioned. She practically picked your husband and your apartment and that horrible decorator.”
The Never Never Sisters Page 25