He knew that Aunt Claire and Uncle Bradley would be gone for a while. He was safe to try again. He pushed himself back against the chair, pulled open the pocketknife and held the blade dramatically against his throat, and then closed his eyes, gulping in a huge breath of air—maybe even bigger than before—and settling into his practice death once again.
But no sooner had he taken the breath than he heard a door open again and more footsteps pad down the hall. He let out the breath, feeling exasperated, and flicked the knife shut. It was like nobody ever slept in this godforsaken place.
But this time the padding had other sounds to it. A wet whimpering. Someone was crying.
The sound moved into the kitchen and seemed to stall for a long time at where he imagined the back door to be. But the back door never opened.
Probably he should leave. Sneak back to his cot. Slip in, go to sleep, try to get some rest before his cousins woke up screaming about Santa. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He was still hoping for that breath. That fix. He wanted to pass out in his grandfather’s death chair. If he couldn’t smash through the ice and slip into a numb death, he could at least do that much, couldn’t he?
So he stayed. And he listened. He listened as the crying got harder, as the whimpering turned into muffled little sobs. He listened as the paper towel holder rattled and then a nose was blown. As a chair scooted out and the sobs took on an echoey sound, as if the crier were facedown at the kitchen table. He listened and he let the sound of someone else’s pain lull him, and he almost fell asleep to it, his head feeling too heavy for his neck, the buzzy feeling back in his mind. He pulled one leg up into the chair with him, and then the other.
He got so comfortable, in fact, he was still curled up in that position when the sobbing came into the room with him.
He sat up, startled, dropping his pocketknife down the front of his pajama bottoms, his heart racing.
Aunt Maya was looking right at him, a balled-up paper towel in midair in front of her face.
“Eli?” she asked, her voice husky and nasal. She peered at him through the darkness. “What are you doing in here?”
He wanted nothing more than for the chair to grow those teeth and swallow him up now. Now, of all times! Before it’s too late! Just eat me in half, blood, guts, popping tendons, and breaking bones! Just do it!
But the chair remained a chair, and his aunt remained as still as furniture in front of him, her face shadowy and unrecognizable in the dark, and he said the only thing that came into his mind.
“Waiting for Santa Claus,” he said. And he was glad for the dark so she couldn’t see his burning cheeks. His embarrassment must have shown on his face. It almost hurt, it was so real.
She continued to stare at him, that paper towel ball still in front of her, for what seemed like forever. And then, just as it felt like she might never move again, just as he began to unfurl his legs and put weight on them to steal back to his room, she said, “Me too, buddy. But just between you and me . . . I don’t think he’s gonna come.”
December
25
Christmas Day
“The same ugly tension, wrapped up in bright paper and tied with a bow.”
Eleven
Elise had always been good at making the house feel Christmassy. Even when Robert was horrible. Even when they’d been up all night fighting the night before, Robert drunkenly slurring names at her back, Elise scurrying to put the girls’ gifts under the tree and hoping Robert didn’t notice that she’d bought them more than he’d agreed to.
Elise believed in Christmas. She believed in the magic of the season, even if she never really saw it for herself. She believed in George Bailey and that little girl Virginia and all that sappy black-and-white hopeful movie stuff. She believed that if she gave her girls a special enough Christmas, maybe they could come away feeling sappy and hopeful, too. Maybe they could forget how they were raised the other three hundred sixty-four days of the year.
But if every year Elise was hoping for a good Christmas, this year she was practically bursting with glad tidings. Even if the house had been overdone just a tad, what with the yards of tinsel and forest of poinsettias. Even if the girls had arrived surly and distracted and still—still!—at one another’s throat after all these years.
Even if her husband was dead.
Even if her guilty memory of the night he died ate away at her gut like drain declogger.
In the soft gray morning hours, while the snow and wind turned over to sleet ticking against the sides of the house, the Yancey Farm was calm.
• • •
Claire had come in hours before, shimmying out of her boots and carefully stowing them on the old towel her mom had placed by the back door earlier in the day to keep the kitchen floor from becoming a soppy mess. She’d brushed her hands through her hair, flinging bits of ice around the kitchen, where they would quickly evaporate. And then she’d slipped off to the bathroom to study her red, swollen face in the mirror once again, pondering how everyone in the house thought she was the cavalier one. How none of them could know how her heart was breaking over what had happened back in California just before she left and how confused and lonely she was and how guilty she felt because she knew her sister Maya would want—no, need—to know what had been going on all week. But Maya had shut her out so completely, how could she ever broach any subject with her?
In the end she had simply blown her nose and snuck down the hall into her bedroom, then fallen face-first onto her bed, still wearing the yoga pants she’d bought earlier in the day. She hadn’t worn pants in years, and they felt oddly constricting against her legs, like casts. She couldn’t help but think how appropriate that constriction felt in this, the house that had constricted her for the first eighteen years of her life.
• • •
The still night air pressed in on Bradley as he trundled through the back door, making few attempts at being quiet. He knocked his hiking boots against the bottom of the doorjamb two or three times each, and then squished his way back to his own bedroom, his boots leaving wet, snowy imprints behind on the hardwood floor. These, too, would evaporate before morning, and would be visible only when the light caught them just right, like the footsteps of a phantom. Bradley never worried about leaving a trail. He’d gotten away with so much over the years, what was the purpose of getting all paranoid now? He’d gotten cocky.
He pushed open the door to the bedroom and paused in the doorway. He hated that they were all sleeping in the same room. Will snored, and Molly often got up in the middle of the night and stood by the bed, sleepily staring at her mother. It was creepy. Like something you’d see in one of those B horror movies made with camcorders.
Bradley had never been much of a kid person. For one thing, they wrecked a good woman’s body. And not just with stretch marks—those could be ignored if you just turned the lights out. They ruined certain feelings of elasticity down there, in Bradley’s opinion, and he hated how every young mom (including, but definitely not restricted to, his wife) that he’d ever slept with had turned into some sort of Puritan after the baby was born. What the heck did having a kid do to keep a woman from going down on a guy? That he could never figure out.
But more than that, Bradley just never really understood kids. Maybe not even when he was a kid himself. They always seemed to be thinking things he couldn’t pick up on. They stared at him as if they were privy to private information. And they talked. A lot.
No, if Bradley had to do it all over again, he definitely wouldn’t have had kids. He wasn’t even sure he’d have married Maya, if truth be told. She was needy. And suspicious. And she tried too hard to be perfect all the time. All that perfection was annoying. He wanted her to be real. Genuine.
More like her sister.
He knew he looked like a real schmuck, the way he had been carrying on with Claire the past week. But he couldn
’t help it. Honest to God, and what Maya never knew, he was in love with Claire long before he was in love with Maya. He’d only asked Maya out on that first date all those years ago because he’d found out she was the sister of the sexy, adorable lifeguard that he’d been ogling all summer at the lake. He’d hoped things wouldn’t work out with the short brunette who had those intense eyes and that rigid way of standing, and that his consolation prize would be to get with the blonde. God, when she uncrossed and then crossed her legs again up on that lifeguard stand, her swimsuit stretched so impossibly close to her skin . . . it still gave him a hard-on to think about it.
He’d tried to woo Claire while at the same time making Maya think he was trying to woo her. He chased after Claire like a damned puppy, looking for every possible in, every possible second alone together. Every chance to touch her delicate wrist or wipe something from her tiny, upturned nose.
But Claire never seemed to even realize that he was there. Not really. Not as anything more than just a friend. Someone to talk to. Bah. He wasn’t interested in talk. He wanted her. And her indifference to him only made him pursue her all the harder.
And then something happened. Maya started putting out. First, secretive hand jobs in the barn loft, her fingers cold and tense around his cock, such that it was almost painful. Then blow jobs in the woods by the pond, where he would sometimes peer through the trees over Maya’s head to see if he could catch a glimpse of Claire swimming, imagining her wet body until he exploded in her sister’s mouth, feeling guilty and ashamed and dirty.
Maya was good at reeling him in. She always had been. She’d give him a little to get what she wanted. She was always willing to do things that other girls wouldn’t do: go to drag races or see action movies with those terrible actors or drive him from bar to bar, sipping water while he downed shot after shot and not even complain when he puked in her car. She was stiff and precise in a way that he found altogether unsexy, but she made him feel good about himself.
So when she’d promised him sex—the real thing, not the skin-ripping hand jobs she was famous for—he’d gone ahead and done it, knowing that what he was doing was unfair to her, yet being unable to help himself.
After a hurried fuck in the backseat of his car in a nightclub parking lot, he watched Maya’s face, and the sadness in her eyes, the way she looked as if she knew she’d given up something precious to someone who didn’t appreciate it, brought to his chest such a constriction that he realized that somewhere along the line he’d begun to love her too.
Not fall in love with her. Love her. There was a difference.
It wasn’t the same gut-clenching, mind-bending adoration that he had for Claire, but it was real. He wanted to be around her. He wanted to impress her.
He proposed to Maya the following weekend, and he was happy, but he knew on the inside that if Claire should ever give so much as the slightest hint, he would not be able to hold on to that love he had for Maya. It just wasn’t strong enough.
In the dark bedroom on Christmas Eve years later, he shimmied out of his boots and jeans and adjusted his boxers, then crept over to the bed, where Maya was already wrapped into a tight little cocoon in the bedsheets. He lay down next to her, feeling nowhere near the warmth that he’d felt from Claire just fifteen minutes before. All these years later . . . all that had happened over the past ten years . . . and he still couldn’t be near Claire without wanting her.
Even though he’d promised Maya. Oh, God, he’d promised her so many things. Had he ever lived up to one of them? He wasn’t sure.
And now she had cancer. Cancer, for fuck’s sake. The thought of it made him feel numb. What if Maya were to die? He couldn’t lose her. Even if he might not have married her over again, he didn’t want her to die. He loved her. She was the mother of his children. And she was a damn good mother. She was a damn good wife. He hated that she was suffering. And he hated even more what he was doing to her while she was suffering. He’d been doing it for years, of course—a different woman, a different pair of legs or round butt or enormous breasts every so often, hiding from his wife as if she were the police. He thought maybe she suspected, but she had never said anything. She was that desperate to keep him, and he knew it.
What was worse was he wasn’t even in love this time, unlike some of the times in the past. He’d always hated when he fell in love with one of the women he was screwing. It complicated things. It made him nauseous and worried and the breakup was always so messy that he would slink around his house for weeks waiting for the jilted woman to pop in and make a real mess out of his life.
So it was good that he wasn’t in love this time, though a tad shocking. He’d thought he might be able to get there. Amberlee looked so much like Claire. But it wasn’t the same. Amberlee had some of Maya’s rigidity about her. And she was stupid. But he kept going back for more because the resemblance was uncanny. He’d noticed her right away, the very first time he’d had to pick up Molly from dance class and he’d walked into Move ’N Shake and his heart had caught in his chest thinking he’d just seen Claire. More than any of the others, if he just got Amberlee to shut up while they were in bed together, he could stare at her and imagine those uncrossing and crossing legs and it would almost seem real.
Maya would never understand that the affairs were his only way of being able to stay married to her. She would never understand that he needed them. That his heart needed them. She would think he was a bastard, for sure, because she’d given herself to him completely, and not once, not since that first fuck in the nightclub parking lot, had he ever appreciated it.
All he had in his defense was helplessness. Complete and utter helplessness.
He was a weak man. He knew it. And he hated himself for it. But he knew he’d never change. If he could give his wife one gift for Christmas, it would be to change. But he could only flip to his side, his back touching hers, and drift off to sleep, feeling every bit like he was damned no matter what he did.
• • •
Maya lay next to Bradley with her eyes open, her form so still she imagined she looked for all the world like she was asleep, or maybe dead. Her husband’s back was still cold from the outside air and she wanted so badly to recoil from it. It felt like he’d brought his deception into bed with them, the cold just as horrible as the scent of another woman, the scent of her sister. But she feared that if she flinched or moved, he would discover that she was awake and then they’d have to talk.
She’d hardly been able to talk to him for weeks. Ever since she found out about him and Amberlee. She’d barely been able to look him in the face. The only reason she’d brought him here was because she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him at home to sleep with Amberlee in her house, worry-free. To screw her on the kitchen counter or in the bathtub where the children bathed. To let her try on Maya’s lingerie, her stilettos. To wash Bradley’s semen off of her legs in Maya’s shower, using Maya’s loofah, Maya’s body wash. No way.
She would not let him abuse her that way.
But he’d only just continued the abuse, the deception, right here in her parents’ house. On Christmas. When her father was lying dead in a coroner’s refrigerator somewhere, waiting to be buried. With their children right there in the house with them. And with her sister, for God’s sake.
Oh, how she hated him. Hated touching his back with hers. Hated sitting at the same kitchen table with him. Hated sitting across the aisle from him on the airplane.
And she hated the very thought of dying and leaving him to care for her children, whom she loved so much. He didn’t care about his children. He didn’t care about his family. He didn’t deserve them. Any of them.
After she’d left the gifts under the tree and filled the stockings, Maya had gone to bed, only to feel Bradley get up and dress himself a few moments later. She’d suspected he’d been sneaking out, but she had no proof since she was usually asleep. Maybe he’
d forgotten about it being Christmas Eve. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed that the lump next to him on the mattress was still tossing and turning, definitely not asleep at all. God, was she that insignificant to him? Maybe he thought she’d figure he was in the bathroom and would drift off without a care.
She’d slid out of bed and snuck through the house and, sure enough, not only was he missing but so were the boots that Claire had been using all week. It hardly took a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on.
And that was when it all rushed in on her. Everything that she’d been fearing and feeling and thinking and surmising and dreading over the past ten years—hell, maybe over her whole life!—had tumbled right into her lap. She had forced a man to love her, she had forced herself to be blind to what was really there, and now she might be dying and it had become painfully obvious that he was only going through the motions. She was going to lose everything. And she was finally admitting to herself that there was nothing she could do about it.
She’d bawled until she was sick to her stomach, and then she’d begun to fear that Bradley and Claire would come back and she would still be sitting at the kitchen table, blubbering and weak. Giving them the upper hand.
No way.
Bradley would never have the upper hand again.
She’d scooted away from the table and had stood in the doorway to the den for a few moments, sickly admiring the way the lights on the blue spruce were twinkling off of the tinsel, making shimmery reflections on the walls.
It would get better, right? It had to. She had two children who wanted good lives, and damn it, they deserved good lives. Not a life where their mom was forever sobbing over their father’s affairs. Not a life where their mom mattered that little. She had to live so that she could get them out of there. They didn’t know it, but their lives were counting on it.
Sniffling, she’d left the den and made her way toward the bedroom, but was surprised when movement from her father’s recliner had caught her peripheral vision. Her heart leapt a little, the irrational side of her sure that the spirit of her father had come back to add insult to injury just like some damned Dickens novel. Maybe to tell her that her husband was unfaithful because she was ugly. Because her hair was greasy and her face pimply and she was too short. Because she had a fat little stomach and spindly little legs. All the things he used to say to her growing up.
The Sister Season Page 14