The Sister Season

by Scott, Jennifer

  Talking to Dusty always put Julia on edge, especially when his belligerent second wife, Shurn, listened in on the other line (okay, her name was technically Sharon, but the way she said it, with that masculine bravado, as if she was always talking around a mouthful of chaw, made Julia and Tai take to calling her “Shurn” behind her back instead). Why, in the name of God, had Dusty chosen such an uneducated, unrefined woman? Even after all these years, Julia still felt insulted that he would go from her, with her degree from Brown, a college professor, for God’s sake, to . . . to that . . . Shurn.

  But tonight’s phone call had Julia particularly jumpy. This was no Who’s Going to Take Eli to Practice sort of phone call. This was Important Stuff. This was capital-letters Co-Parenting. This was a cry for help to the one man who knew Eli as well as she did. And the one man who cared enough to respond.

  Oh, not that Tai didn’t care. Of course he did. But Eli was Tai’s stepson, not his real son. He couldn’t claim Eli’s brown eyes or the way he walked on the outer edges of his feet or his natural propensity for algebra. He couldn’t remember the day Eli was born. Plus, Tai never was all that into children. Always said he had enough children as it was, referring to his chemistry students. And Julia had been all right with that. She didn’t need someone who was going to vie for Eli’s affections, who would make things even more difficult between her and Dusty. Dusty had been a horrible husband. But he was a good father, and part of her reason for marrying Tai was that she knew he would never try to take that title away from Dusty.

  But right now . . . Eli really could use as many fathers as he could get, and a part of Julia wished Tai could see that.

  Another gust of wind razed her face, and she turned toward the garage just as she finally wrapped her fingers around the cigarette pack she’d been hunting. She pulled it out and plucked a cigarette from it, tucking it into her mouth and digging back into her pocket for a light.

  “That shit’ll kill you.” She turned, her heart leaping, to find Claire coming down the steps toward her. Claire sidled up next to her sister, her hands pressed deep into her coat pockets—a coat she’d borrowed from Elise—her face shadowed by the hood, which was ringed with woolly black fur. “I’m talking about standing out in the cold, not the smokes. I forgot how fucking freezing it was here.”

  Julia lit her cigarette and took a drag, closing her eyes and letting the nicotine give her limbs a relaxed buzz. She turned and leaned back against the garage door. “Want one?”

  “Of course.”

  Julia held out the crumpled pack and shook it until a cigarette wiggled halfway out of the torn opening. Claire reached over and took it, then let Julia light it. She dragged, the cherry burning bright, and leaned against the door next to Julia.

  “Why are you wearing shorts?” Julia asked, glancing at her sister.

  “The question is, why aren’t you?” Claire shot back. She blew out smoke and then added, “I haven’t owned a pair of pants in three years.”

  Julia chuckled. “You have always been a strange nut, Claire.” She flicked the dead ash off the end of her cigarette and rubbed it into the concrete with her boot. “You’ve seriously never had a need for a pair of pants in three years? Not one event?”

  “Seriously no. And any event that would require them would not require me.”

  Julia tipped her face up to the sky. “Bet you own plenty of wet suits, though,” she said.

  “Only one, actually. For Casual Friday.”

  “I thought you were a waitress.”

  “Hey, I wear a uniform,” Claire answered, feigning defensiveness.

  “And I bet your surfboard matches your wet suit,” Julia teased.

  Claire cocked an eyebrow. “What makes you think I own a surfboard?”

  Julia shrugged. “You’re a Californian. You all own surfboards.”

  “Oh, that. And we all Rollerblade in bikinis and march in gay rights parades on the weekends too,” Claire said, deadpan. “And we all vote Democrat.”

  “Exactly.”

  They glanced at each other and snickered. “Okay,” Claire said. “One surfboard. For the weekends. But it doesn’t match my wet suit. Not on purpose, anyway. I’m a terrible surfer.”

  “I knew it.” Julia grinned.

  “So why are you hiding out here in the cold?” Claire asked. “Dad is dead. It’s not like he’s going to bitch about the cigarettes anymore.”

  “Mmm. I promised Tai and Eli that I’d quit smoking.”

  “Ah. Hiding from the kid.”

  “Eli.”

  “What?”

  “He’s got a name. Not kid. Eli.”

  “Eli. Sheesh. Touchy about his name, Queenie.”

  Julia thought about it; Claire was right. She hadn’t meant anything bad by calling him “kid.” She knew no more about parenting, or children, than she did about the physics that Julia taught at the university every day. Just like Julia didn’t know beans about surfing or rafting or whatever it was her sister did out there on the coast. “You’re right,” she said. “Sorry.”

  The two women dragged on their cigarettes again. “No problem,” Claire finally said. “It’s not like you accused me of sleeping with your husband or anything.”

  Over the whistling of the wind, Julia heard Claire chuckle from within the depths of her hood. And something about it made her chuckle too. Nervousness. There was still all this nervousness. First, Dad dying. Then having to be in this house with Mom and the sisters, and then, of all things, Bradley had to show up. And then the phone call to Dusty. She was lucky she wasn’t cackling like a lunatic.

  “So have you talked to Maya yet?” Julia asked.

  “You mean has she given me a chance to talk to her? Nope. You saw how she was at breakfast. I’m like a ghost. She won’t make eye contact.”

  Julia had seen it, actually. Had seen how Maya wouldn’t even look in Claire’s direction. How she’d suddenly found things to fiddle with on her kids—cutting their food into pieces, straightening their collars, folding napkins into their laps, topping off their milk—every time Claire had spoken. How she’d inched around her sister at the sink, the stove, the table. And how she’d kept her eyes solidly glued to Bradley the entire time, as if his every move were being recorded in her brain. God help him if his gaze should accidentally land near Claire. Julia hated to think what would happen then.

  “You think she’ll ever come around?” Julia asked. She took a long last drag on her cigarette and tamped it out on the heel of her boot, stowing the butt in her coat pocket and then scuffing her boot along the driveway a few times.

  “Hell, no. I think she can’t wait to get back to Chicago, away from me.” Claire finished her cigarette too, but in Claire style, she flicked the butt end over glowing end onto the driveway, where it landed with a starburst of ashes in the gravel. She wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s too damn cold out here even for a good smoke.”

  Julia looked down. “Of course you’re cold. You’re in cutoffs.” She chuckled. “But your legs look fabulous.”

  Claire laughed, pointing the toe of one boot and swiveling her leg to show off her calf. “You think? I do run, you know. On the beach.” Her voice was lavish, with a tinge of a purr to it.

  “Well, la-ti-da,” Julia teased, relishing the light moment with her sister. She vaguely remembered such moments from long ago. Too long ago. Moments when, to her delighted surprise, she and Claire connected. Julia admired her littlest sister. Claire had something that she and Maya didn’t. A certain playfulness. A laid-back attitude that Julia envied. Hell, she had the ability to move eighteen hundred miles away, alone, and never look back. She had the guts to do what she’d done at the Chuck Wagon eight years ago. The woman had balls. “Some of us don’t have beaches to run on, Miss Hollywood.”

  “You have plenty of cow shit to dodge, though. Could improve your agility.”


  “I live in the suburbs now, thank you very much. We dodge minivans.”

  The two sisters stood by the garage door and laughed. Julia’s fingers absently rubbed her coat pocket, feeling the bump of the cigarette pack inside, feeling an urgency that didn’t really register anywhere else. Distantly she recalled the phone conversation with Dusty, and felt a pang in her gut that stripped away her smile.

  Another squall of wind shrieked past them, almost through them, and they both tucked their chins down into the collars of their coats, squinting against the assault. Claire cussed and pushed away from the garage door and headed back up the steps toward the house, and Julia silently cursed the wind that had ruined whatever it was she and Claire had been experiencing just then. Eight years with no communication—surely there was something that would keep them talking. Hell, she’d talked to Dusty (and, in the background, Shurn) for thirty full minutes. Surely she could communicate with her sister for longer than the amount of time it took to burn one cigarette.

  Desperate, without even thinking, she blurted, “Eli tried to commit suicide.”

  Claire stopped abruptly and turned. She flipped down the hood of her coat and Julia could see the shocked expression on her face. She suddenly felt embarrassed, exposed. She was the together sister. The brain. The professor. Admitting Eli’s suicide attempt was like admitting failure. Up to this point, she’d barely admitted it to herself.

  “Well, he didn’t actually try try. But he was going to. I found . . . I found pills. He’d apparently been stealing and stockpiling from . . . God knows where.”

  “Oh, my God, Julia. Does Mom know this?”

  Julia shook her head, simultaneously letting her now shaking hand snake back into her pocket and fish out the cigarettes again. She tapped one out and popped it into her mouth, then offered another one to Claire, who took it. “I haven’t told anyone yet. Not even Tai. Just today I called Dusty. That’s why I’m out here smoking these damn things. I needed . . . I don’t know. To think. To relax.”

  “What did Dusty say?”

  Julia shrugged. “He said a lot.” Mainly that Julia was a horrible mother who was more worried about her career than her one and only son and how did she possibly think that the kid was going to grow up with no emotional problems the way she practically stole him from his father and tried to make the kid think that some . . . in his oh-so-eloquent Dusty-words . . . some slant-eye science nerd was his real daddy when he knew it wasn’t the truth. Also that she was probably . . . how did he put it? . . . one of them high-society rich suburban drug addicts who thinks prescription pills make them sexy and in style and that was where Eli got the idea. Oh, and when she’d told him this had happened two months ago (it truly had taken her that long to get over the shock and the grief and work up the nerve to call him) and she hadn’t taken Eli to a psychologist (Yet! Yet. She was going to. She was.), he’d really lit into her. She took a drag off her cigarette and blew the smoke out in a breathy burst. “He said he’ll see me in court. He wants custody.”

  Claire’s blue eyes swam over Julia’s face. “No fucking way,” she said, letting her cigarette burn down to the filter without bothering to drag on it at all. “Well, he can’t. Surely he can’t. I mean, the kid . . . Eli . . . is, like, fourteen. Dusty can’t just rip him away from his mom after all these years.”

  Julia shrugged again, feeling shaky all over. The truth was, she wasn’t sure Dusty didn’t have a point about her. She wasn’t sure she hadn’t screwed Eli up. She wasn’t sure Dusty wouldn’t be successful in ripping Eli away. And she wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be best for her son if he did.

  The numbing buzz of the nicotine combined with the horror of having revealed Eli’s secret—to Claire, of all people! Not to her mom, her best friend, not even her husband, but to the sister who’d single-handedly wrecked her family eight years ago—was setting in.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s right. I’m a bad mom, I don’t even know my son, and he’s suicidal and I suspected nothing. You know how I found the pills?”

  Claire shook her head.

  “I was looking for my car keys. I was yelling at him because I was late for my eight o’clock class and I couldn’t find my damn car keys and was blaming him for it. I shook out his backpack and there they were.” She took a deep breath, partly for effect, but also partly to steel herself for admitting the horrifying truth. “He told me later that he had been planning to do it in the school bathroom that day.”

  Julia flashed back to the scene, of turning the whole house upside down looking for those keys. Screaming at Eli, pontificating about how she doesn’t “just misplace things” and how he is always, always getting into her belongings without permission. God, she could lecture almost better than her father could. And the poor kid, still in his boxers with sleep-funk hair, his body peach-fuzzy and immature, stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her. Listened to her. Took the lecture. Just took it. Never argued. Never defended himself. Why don’t you fight back? she’d felt like yelling at him, but she supposed she knew the answer. She’d been lecturing him for fourteen years; he’d probably learned that arguing only led to more lecturing.

  And then she’d dumped out the backpack and found the plastic bag full of pills. And the whole world had seemed to stop. She’d even heard the kitchen clock ticking in the background. She wasn’t sure if she’d breathed. She was afraid to look up, to let her eyes meet her son’s eyes. Acknowledging what she’d just found would mean she would have to accept what it meant for her family.

  She told Claire how she’d remembered about her class, and that her job was the only thing that made sense to her at that moment, so she had simply palmed the bag, stuffed it in her pocket, and barked out a gruff “You’re late for school.” She hadn’t even talked to him about it until two days later over take-out Chinese, when he’d confessed to her what the pills were intended for, what he’d been planning.

  And the keys had been in her laptop bag the whole time.

  “Well, thank God you found them,” Claire said. “The pills, I mean, not the keys. Has he . . . ?”

  Julia shook her head again. “No, he hasn’t tried anything else. But now that I know about it, he . . . you know, I realize he says it a lot. And has been for a long time. ‘I hate my life. I’d be better off dead. I should be dead right now. Tomorrow I won’t be here anymore.’ That kind of thing.”

  “Jesus, why isn’t he in a hospital right now? I mean, he’s seeing a shrink, right? You’ve got him on antidepressants? You’ve got to take that shit seriously, Queenie.” Claire tossed her untouched cigarette out near the first one, where it smoldered in the wind until the tiny pellets of icy snow tamped it out.

  “I do take it seriously,” Julia snapped, taking one last, long, shaky drag off her cigarette and snuffing it out on the bottom of her shoe like the first. “But . . . how was I supposed to know what to do? I have my students, and Tai and . . . and then Dad died, and I . . . I don’t know, I thought this might be my chance to reach him. Get us alone, just the two of us. Talk a little. Show him what my life was like growing up. Get him away from the pressures of school and . . .” She rubbed her face with her palms. “God, I don’t know! It’s just not as easy as that. Kids aren’t as easy as that. You can’t just put a bandage on this and wait for it to go away.”

  Claire was silent for a minute, then put up her hood as if in thought. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “I think so. I hope so. I don’t know.”

  “You want me to talk to him?”

  Julia looked horror-stricken. “No. Absolutely not. I don’t need him thinking I’m telling the whole world about this. He doesn’t even know you.” She let out a breathy laugh toward the sky. “I don’t even know why I told you.”

  “Because I’m your sister?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe because I figured you might know something about suicide.”

  Cla
ire let out a dry, humorless laugh. “Can’t say I do, Queenie. I’m fucked up in a lot of ways. But I like life. I’m all about the breathing.”

  Julia couldn’t pinpoint why, but for some reason this surprised her. She’d always assumed Claire’s life was miserable. That Claire was lonely and barely hanging on. Maybe that was what she’d needed to believe. “And please don’t tell anyone else. I’m going to deal with this. I am.”

  Claire nodded slowly. “Okay. You got it. But if he starts eyeballing Dad’s shotgun cabinet or something, I can’t make any guarantees.”

  Julia’s eyes widened. “Oh, God,” she moaned. She leaned over and put her hands on her knees, hanging her head miserably.

  Tentatively, Claire reached out and rested a hand on her sister’s back. Distantly, Julia realized this was the first time her sister had touched her in . . . a decade, at least. After a second of thought, Claire started rubbing between Julia’s shoulder blades, nervously, almost apologetically, and Julia leaned into it, surprised by how comforting it felt. “Hey. Queenie. Julia. He’ll be okay.”

  The wind roared through again, and both of them stiffened against it, Claire squinching her eyes shut and Julia hunching her shoulders. Claire’s curly hair seemed to stick straight out to the side. Finally, Julia straightened up and swiped her coat sleeve across her eyes. She took a deep, snotty breath. “I hope you’re right, Claire.”

  “Can we go in now?” Claire asked, blinking against the sleet, which had begun to pelt them anew.

  Julia felt her coat pocket again, considered another cigarette, knowing that if smoking was bad for her, smoking outside in a blizzard probably somehow made it even worse.

  It was just . . . she didn’t feel ready to face everyone inside again. Didn’t want to wonder if anyone had overheard her conversation with Dusty. If anyone had picked up that something was off with Eli. Didn’t want to turn her guilty face to them, dare them to figure out that something was going on.