The Sister Season

by Scott, Jennifer

  Claire’s head was tilted down, but Julia could feel her sister’s eyes pointed her direction. She was half afraid to meet them, though. Half afraid that she would see in them what might have been said in the restroom after she’d left. She just wanted some peace for a few moments.

  “...were only planning to be here until today,” Bradley was saying, and the waitress nodded as if she’d never heard anything so riveting. Julia rolled her eyes. No wonder Maya was so insecure. The man didn’t even attempt to hide his flirtatiousness. She tried to block him out, but his voice broke through again. “...only brought clothes for two days. Hopefully nothing tragic happens or I’ll be out of underwear.”

  Just as the waitress threw her head back to laugh at his incredibly indecent “joke,” Bradley sitting there smugly, that arrogant grin on his face, his eyes roving over to Claire and back to the waitress again, Julia saw it happen.

  It was just the tiniest flinch, really. Could have been mistaken for an involuntary spasm. But it was there.

  Eli’s elbow flicked sideways about three inches, knocking into the full soda the waitress had just set down on the edge of the table between him and Bradley. The cup teetered, swerved, and then tipped, soda and ice sloshing across the table and down the front of Bradley, landing with a liquid thwack in his lap. The glass shattered on the floor.

  The whole room seemed to suck in its breath as Bradley jumped up, brushing at the front of his clothes frantically. Eli’s face immediately turned shocked, contrite, as he said, “Sorry, Uncle Bradley. I didn’t see it there.” And as Bradley dabbed at his crotch with a handful of paper napkins, his face furious, Julia heard her son add in a low voice, “Wow, how ironic, huh?”

  At that moment Julia and Claire locked eyes across the table. And they both grinned.

  Attempts—II

  What he liked best about the farm was the way the frozen grass crunched under his feet. Not that this was something special about the country—the grass in Kansas City crunched when it was frozen too. What was different about it on the farm was how loud it sounded, especially in the middle of the night, when it seemed like the whole world was asleep.

  The last car had turned down the gravel road hours ago. The cousins, who were both all right, he supposed, but were kind of annoying in that I’m-a-little-kid-so-everyone-must-entertain-me-all-the-time sort of way, had been in bed for a long time. Grandmother Elise had finished washing dishes and shut up the house and turned off the lights. The creaking in her bedroom, just above the one he was sharing with his mom, had stopped and, unlike the night before, he had counted to one-thousand-Mississippi after he was sure everyone was asleep before he moved a muscle.

  He’d crept through the house on ghost’s feet, practically floating above the warped wood floors, and had, just like the night before, gone to the front room and sat in his grandfather Robert’s recliner. The one he died in.

  He had heard that people shit and piss themselves when they died, and he wondered, as he sank into the worn nubby fabric of the chair, if Grandfather Robert had done that. It didn’t smell like he had. And he doubted that Grandmother Elise, who was kind of nutty, but not nutty enough to be gross, would have kept the chair in the house if he had. But it might have been a little bit cool if he had. If he’d been all shit and piss and bulging eyes and purple tongue and veins in his neck. That was the way he wanted to go—repulsive and shocking. Something people would talk about for a long time.

  Just as he’d done the night before, he sank into the chair. But tonight he had more time. He’d left his pocketknife under his cot mattress. So he pulled up the footrest, positioned himself in what he guessed was the same pose his grandfather had been sitting in, and held his breath. Held it until his vision was grainy and his lungs burned. Held it until he felt so miserable he might have been having a heart attack and dying. Held it until he could feel his pulse in his stomach, imagined it getting slower and fainter. He stayed motionless. Still as a corpse. Not even an eyeball twitching. Soon his eyes were burning too, and one of them let a tear loose down his cheek. He wondered if Grandfather Robert had cried a little when he died. He’d never heard anything about people crying while they died, but it made sense that they might.

  He held it, held it, held it.

  And then let the air out in a rush that sank his belly and made the chair bounce a little and squeak on its hinges.

  He was alive.

  Damn it.

  He sat there for a few more minutes, trying to soak up death in his grandfather’s death chair, and then quietly eased the footrest down and slipped outside into the crystalline air.

  It was freezing. His stocking feet made the frozen grass crunch. A dog barked off in a field somewhere. But otherwise there was nothing. Still as a morgue.

  He wanted to walk farther tonight than he had during the day.

  Earlier, he’d taken a walk, but had only gotten halfway through the old soy field before the cold seeped into the bones of his feet and made him hobble back home in defeat, shivering under his jacket violently. Tonight he wanted to get all the way through the soy field and to the pond on the other side of the tree line.

  It wasn’t fit for skating. His mom had said so herself. You could fall through the ice and get trapped beneath it. You’d freeze to death before the sheets on your cot had even lost all your body heat. You’d be a frozen brick on the bottom of the pond before anyone even noticed you were missing.

  Quickly, so as not to lose himself halfway through the soy field again, he followed the old rows toward the tree line. Once inside, he could hear the wind shake the limbs of the trees, which sounded dry and brittle like bones. A perfect setting for a suicide.

  Much better than the men’s room at school, where he’d planned to take the pills his mom had confiscated, the one lousy day of his life that she decided to take an interest in what he was doing. And better, though maybe not as dramatic, as some of the other scenarios he’d imagined: A gun in the backseat of his stepfather’s SUV. Stepping onto the tracks just as the Amtrak rumbled through. Hanging himself from the rod in his closet, although that one was getting a little overdone. Seemed like every time you got online these days, somebody was hanging themselves in their closets. Throwing himself out of the car on the highway. Plunging a knife under his ear in the locker room showers during a basketball game.

  Drowning under ice could almost be made out to be an accident. Definitely not the same effect. But he’d be dead; what would he care, anyway?

  Popping out on the other side of the trees, he stood staring at the pond. He’d made it. It was way bigger than he’d imagined. They wouldn’t find him easily.

  He didn’t think about what he was doing. He didn’t need to. He’d thought it through so many times already. His life sucked. It wasn’t going to get any better. Mitch Munde wasn’t going to stop calling him “faggot” and giving him titty twisters in the hallways and he wasn’t going to get any better in phys ed and no girl was ever going to be interested in him. He wasn’t going to suddenly wake up with no zits and his parents would never get back together and he would never stop feeling like such a little bitch for wishing they would. He was never going to come home to cookies and the smell of laundry day. His stepdad was never going to take him to an amusement park or a baseball game. And his mom was never going to put him before her all-important students.

  And he was never going to get happy. He’d tried. Ever since sixth grade he’d tried. It wasn’t happening. He just wanted to die and get it over with.

  He paused only briefly to wonder if you shit and pissed yourself if you died underwater. He doubted it. Weird.

  The wind ripped through him and he half hobbled down the short bank and stepped once, twice onto the creaking ice at the edge of the pond.

  Don’t think about it, he told himself. Just do it. Walk fast to the middle and jump hard up and down. And when you hear the ice splinter . . . bre
athe.

  But just as he lifted his foot to take a second step, he heard a noise drifting in on the breeze from the edge of the tree line. He froze, listening.

  It wasn’t an animal. It wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t the cracking of the ice.

  It was talking. He heard it plain as day, the lilting, the rising and falling of a woman’s voice. The low rumble of a man’s.

  Slowly, he stepped back up onto the rocks at the edge of the pond and turned around, dropping his hands to the ground to give himself cover as he scanned the tree line with his eyes. His hands started to shake against the ground. His teeth chattered.

  He peered into the trees, trying to make out shapes, straining to hear the voices again.

  And then he saw them.

  Sitting on the ground, wrapped in their coats, talking to each other in low, urgent voices.

  Uncle Bradley.

  And Aunt Claire.

  December

  24

  “Soon you’ll only cry at night.”

  Eight

  Maya awoke to the sound of her son’s snore. The room was still dark, but she knew daybreak was coming, even if the sky never lightened up enough to actually look like day.

  She knew dawn was approaching because she knew her son. He slept so deeply during the night, scarcely moving a muscle, sweat brimming his bangs as if sleeping soundly was hard work, but come daybreak when he began to float to the top of his dreams, he snored. Always had, ever since he was a baby and slept in her arms.

  Molly was curled into a ball in the cot next to him, her thumb poked into her perfect pink O of a mouth. She still sucked it like a newborn, busily and greedily, and Maya had worried over children’s advice books on how to make her stop. She didn’t want the girl to grow up with crooked teeth. Girls with crooked teeth went through a lot of hellish teasing. Maya didn’t like to think about it, but she and her friends had doled out that hellish teasing to many an imperfect girl in their time.

  Maya lay on her side and stared at her children. She knew them. Everything about them. There was rarely a surprise when it came to her babies.

  Unlike the twitching, snoring form at her back. After nine years of marriage, she felt as if she scarcely knew him at all.

  He liked brunettes. She knew that. He preferred trim figures, which, God knew, was not an easy feat after having two eight-pound children and nearing forty to boot. He liked year-round tan skin under cream and eggshell and bone colors in clean-line fabrics and designer labels. He liked a well-spoken woman, but preferred she save that skill for things like PTA committee planning and homeowners’ association meetings. He had exacting standards on just what turned his head, and if she didn’t keep up . . . well, he never exactly said what would happen if she didn’t keep up, but she had her theories.

  Of course one of her theories involved wiry blond hair and frumpy U of C sweatshirts and a filthy, opinionated mouth that would embarrass even the most clichéd construction worker, so go figure.

  But Maya refused to think about Claire this morning. It was Christmas Eve, and she was sleeping in her satiny pajamas for the third night in a row, and everyone knew how satin could begin to smell after just a couple of days of sleep heat being trapped in it. She should have packed something more practical.

  She would have to go shopping today. She couldn’t sleep in those things another night. And she couldn’t have her children waking up on Christmas morning to no Santa Claus. She knew it wasn’t her mother’s fault that the funeral got moved to after Christmas, but . . .

  Well, Elise had seemed a little strange. Not that Maya could blame her. She supposed that when your husband died, you were going to have a few “off” days, no matter how much of a cruel shit he was when he was living. Maya had sympathy for her. She’d been off lately herself. Well, not so much “off” as scared for her life, but she was trying so hard not to dwell on that. Not over Christmas.

  Maya sighed and pulled her trim body to a sitting position. She felt fat and bloated, eating the rich Missouri foods, drinking all that fattening Christmas wine and snacking on cookies, and with no morning Pilates workout. She really needed to stop napping and start hiking, but she still hadn’t gained back all her strength—the treatments, the stress just seemed to sap her energy—plus there was something about being in the same house with Claire again that brought back all those horrid old memories and, quite flatly, wore her out.

  The last time she’d seen her sister had been after she’d taken Bradley’s car in for detailing as a surprise. They were newlyweds and were living that fabulous phase of life where there was so much promise and so few worries. No kids to grab the attention in the family. Just the two of them, and Maya loved how romantic they were—it was such a departure from the family she’d grown up in, the family Claire had still been growing up in, the poor thing.

  They were living in an apartment just beyond the baseball diamond, maybe fifteen minutes from the farm. Saving money for their dream house. Making plans. Making love. Doing the things newlyweds do.

  But the surprise had been on Maya, when she’d opened the ashtray and found a used condom nestled on a couple of wadded-up gum wrappers. Disgusted, she’d picked it up between her thumb and forefinger, her whole body going numb with disbelief. There was no way it could have been Bradley’s. He loved her. He’d married her. He’d made promises to her.

  She tried to come up with alternative explanations. Maybe it was a friend’s. Maybe it had come with the car and they’d just never noticed. Maybe . . . But it was hopeless. Whose could it be if not Bradley’s?

  She’d cried. Right there in the parking lot of the U-Clean Car Wash, she’d sat on the curb next to the trash bins and bawled like a lost child. She felt everything slipping away from her, her whole life loosing itself from her grasp before she’d even had a good hold on it. She’d worked so hard to win Bradley. She was the most perfect she could possibly be, all for him. If he didn’t love her, she was nothing. If he didn’t want her, she might as well be dead.

  After a long while, spent from the sobbing, she felt the overwhelming grief give way to a sort of maniacal anger. Her fists clenched and her fingers nearly ached with the desire to be washed of the scum that had been on the outside of that condom. Scum that belonged inside another woman. How dare he!

  Nearly blind with rage, she dove back behind the steering wheel and tore out of the car wash parking lot and sped toward the baseball field and to the roundabout that took her down by the railroad tracks and would eventually lead her to the only place she could think to go.

  And that was where she’d found her husband, locked in an embrace with a woman. All Maya could see over his shoulder was the shock of curly blond hair, the tanned hands gripping the backs of his arms. But that was all she needed to see. She could recognize her sister from a mile away.

  They denied it. Of course they did. Well, Claire did. Bradley never really said one way or another. Just stuck with some bullshit story about how it wasn’t his condom and he had no idea how it’d gotten into his car’s ashtray. As if some random stranger just went around breaking into people’s cars to hide their used condoms. As if she would believe that.

  “Do you love her? Are you in love with her?” Maya had asked him time and time again.

  “This isn’t necessary,” he would always answer, or, “She told you it wasn’t hers. I told you it wasn’t mine. Why don’t you drop it?” or, simply, “Maya, I told you on the day I married you that I loved you.”

  It didn’t exactly take an expert to recognize that none of those answers was the “no” she’d been looking for.

  So whether or not Claire was innocent, as she maintained, in Maya’s eyes she was guilty. Because whatever had transpired between them—and make no mistake, something had!—it had made Bradley fall in love with Claire. And as far as Maya was concerned, Bradley having sex with Claire was hurtful and destructive, but
Bradley loving Claire was unforgivable.

  She’d made a vow that she would never forgive her sister for what had happened. Had pushed Bradley into taking a job in another city. And had been thrilled when he got one in Chicago. Far away from her sister, who was nothing and at the same time everything that Bradley wanted in a woman.

  And now she was back home at the farm where her marriage had taken such a dark and harrowing turn, a single floor’s distance from the woman who’d destroyed it. And how ironic was it that her life had recently taken an even darker and more harrowing turn, and no matter how far and how fast she tried to run, she could never get away from this new development.

  Will’s snores got louder, and Maya thought she heard, in the distance, the drone of a chain saw, which meant somewhere out there people were up and at ’em. She slid out of bed, careful not to wake Bradley and the kids, and padded to the bathroom for her shower. Her hair needed straightening, her eyes were in desperate want of some firming cream, and how she was going to live for three more days without her teeth whitener she had no idea.

  All she knew was it was Christmas Eve and she had to get up and moving. She had shopping to do.

  Maya showered, dressed, and was in the process of throwing together a sour cream coffee cake when Julia shuffled in, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.

  “You’re up early,” Julia said on a yawn.

  “Is it? I can’t find a working clock anywhere in this place.”

  Julia plunked into a chair at the table. “It’s about six now. Looks like you’ve been up for a while.”

  “Is that all? Feels later. I couldn’t sleep,” Maya said, spooning batter into a pan.

  “Too quiet? I forgot how quiet it is here.”

  “Too loud in my head,” Maya answered. She fussed with the oven control, turning it to the preheat setting.