For a brief moment, he wondered if his mom had ever walked through these trees. Surely she had, growing up on the farm. But she never talked about it. She never seemed to want to relive her childhood like so many of his friends’ lame parents did.
But if this week had been any indication, was it any wonder why she wouldn’t want to talk about her childhood? This place sucked. This family . . . it was the worst.
On some level, he felt sorry for his mom. She may have been a crappy mom who never seemed to really care about his life until she thought he might end it, but maybe she was that way for a reason. Maybe she was a crappy mom because she was raised by a crappy mom. Maybe all the fighting and the grudges had gotten to her, like . . . deep. Maybe she never had a chance.
He could see the pond ahead, through the trees. The ice was dull and covered with massive drifts of snow. But the center still looked wet, kind of slushy. It wasn’t thick ice. He knew that. One good jump, or two, would probably do the trick.
He walked across the bank, toward the near end of the pond, where the biggest snowdrift was. He climbed to the top of it, remembering being a little kid and playing King of the Mountain with his stepsiblings. It had been fun. Addictive. They never even felt the cold. He wished life hadn’t veered from that. He wished he could still be king of something.
He looked out across the ice, noting that the footsteps of his aunt and uncle that he’d been following stopped at the pond’s edge and didn’t seem to venture out onto the ice. Another good sign. They probably thought the ice too thin to stand on. Or lie on. Whichever they were doing.
He closed his eyes against the sun and held his arms out. This is it, he thought. This is my last moment on earth. He was happy to find that he felt somewhat peaceful, if not a little ramped up. Images flooded his mind, all of them bad. Unjust. Name-calling. Punches. Ignored pleas for attention. Hurt feelings. Embarrassment. Humiliation. Teachers who didn’t give a shit. Evil bus drivers. He felt a tear slide down one cheek, leaving a warm line in its wake. He didn’t care anymore about those people, about those things. This was his revenge. This was his justice. This was his peace.
Without opening his eyes, he took a step forward, down the drift and toward the ice. Then another and another until he was standing on the ice. Holding his arms straight out to his sides for balance, he walked, slowly, assuredly, toward the middle of the pond. The closer he got to the middle, the more he could hear the ice strain and creak under his weight. He liked the sound. His breathing began to quicken, and he wasn’t sure, but he thought he might be hyperventilating a little. That was okay—all it would take was one or two breaths under water and it would be over.
“Hey!” he heard, and then a peal of laughter.
His eyes snapped open and he whipped around. He was almost to the middle of the pond, but back at the bank, climbing up the drift he’d just climbed off of, were his little cousins. They were giggling and pulling at each other, just as he’d done when playing King of the Mountain all those years ago. The ice creaked again under his feet, and he had a sudden realization that he couldn’t do this right here, right now. Not with his little cousins watching. They would never get over the image of seeing their older cousin drown on Christmas Day. He couldn’t do that to them.
“Hey!” he yelled, almost like an echo. But he was holding his palms out toward them, stop sign style. “Get off of there!”
But they weren’t listening. They were too busy playing. Too busy being kids with nothing at all wrong in their world.
“Hey!” he yelled again, a little louder this time. “You guys, it’s not safe!”
“Look out below!” Will called, bending low at the knees and then springing from the top of the drift to the ice below. Even from where he was standing, he could hear the dull crack of the ice under the little boy’s feet.
“Will! Molly!” he cried, in a near panic this time, but they still weren’t paying attention. Will had raced around to the back side of the drift to climb up again while Molly bent at the knees, readying her own jump. He began running toward them, no longer caring about shivering or hyperventilating or breathing under the ice. He could see the small cracks that spiderwebbed out from under his feet with every footfall, but still he kept running, full tilt, his hands out in front of him, his voice scratching out warnings. “The ice isn’t thick enough! You could fall through! Will! Molly!”
Finally, he got their attention, and Molly froze, her knees still bent in jump preparation. She stopped and straightened as he reached the drift.
“What are you two doing out here?” he panted, pulling them off the mound of snow and onto the frozen bank. “The ice isn’t safe.”
“You were on it,” Molly countered.
He took a few ragged, deep breaths, his hands shaking from adrenaline and fear. He started walking toward the tree line, ushering them with him. “I shouldn’t have been,” he answered. He looked over his shoulder at the ice, which from a distance looked pretty much exactly as it had looked when he’d arrived.
“I shouldn’t have been,” he repeated, and led the kids back to the house.
December
26
“Enough is too much.”
Fifteen
Claire couldn’t wait to get home. Even if it meant sitting on that long flight from Kansas City to L.A. between a set of colicky twin babies, she would welcome it.
She’d never heard of such a thing, burying a man nearly a week after his death. She couldn’t help but get grossed out by the idea. The only images she could conjure all involved extensive skin decay and smells that made her sick to her stomach without even actually smelling them.
Dead people weren’t like canned chili; they had a pretty short shelf life.
She supposed she understood why her mom was waiting so long to bury the old son of a bitch. When you had a personality like Robert Yancey’s, and you found someone who actually wanted to befriend your mean ass, you waited around for that friend to be there when you died. Joe Dale was probably the only person who would show up to Robert’s funeral for any reason other than to silently bid good riddance to bad rubbish.
But still. She didn’t want to be here anymore. This place was toxic.
Not that she expected a reunion with her sisters to be something out of a Disney movie or anything. But . . . shit.
To be fair, it wasn’t going spectacularly bad with Julia. Julia seemed to have left what happened ten years ago behind. Like maybe she wasn’t wholeheartedly believing Maya’s bullshit anymore. Like maybe she might be willing to give Claire the benefit of the doubt. Or like maybe she had her own shit to worry about. She had bigger problems taking up her attention, which was fine as far as Claire was concerned. She didn’t need someone getting all up in her business.
Claire wasn’t heartless. She was really worried about Julia’s problems, actually. She wished Maya would get her head out of her ass long enough to see that Julia’s problems were big too. She had a suicidal kid.
God, a suicidal kid. Claire had a hard time even wrapping her head around what that must feel like. Queenie, struggling. She never would have thought it possible.
Claire wondered what would happen if the kid really did it. What would happen to Julia and to their family? She shuddered just thinking about it. She knew loss. Nobody else in the family would believe it, but Claire knew loss well. Her belly ached with loss every single stinking day.
As if on cue, she sat back on her bed and reached into the front pocket of her backpack again. For about the billionth time since she got here, she rummaged around until her hands landed on a small navy blue box, velvety and cool.
She pulled the box out and stared at it, afraid to open it. Afraid not to.
Afraid that no matter what she did, she would never make the hurt go away. Never.
She didn’t open it. She didn’t need to. She’d opened it enough times. She’d b
een gutted by what was inside over and over again.
She grunted and stuffed it into her backpack again, zipped it closed with ferocity. She couldn’t do this. Not now. Not today. Not after that scene with Maya storming out of the den and then their mom getting that strange gift from their father. Not after her mom’s breakdown in the kitchen that nearly burned down the house. Not after the silent, awkward makeshift breakfast—cold cereal and some fruit Claire had cut up on the fly after throwing away the burnt mess on the kitchen stove. Nobody had seemed into it anymore. If they ever had been. Why couldn’t they just heave the old man into a landfill and call it done so they could all get out of here?
She slipped into her yoga pants with their weird clinginess. The bottoms were still wet from the night before when she’d walked to the pond.
Her pond, really. Had it ever been anyone’s but hers?
She couldn’t resist that pond. She’d been a swimmer her whole life, had always loved the way the water felt against her, like it was a part of her skin. An extension of herself. She’d lifeguarded at the lake, had been on the high school swim team, and had lived like an otter in the Yancey Farm pond since she was old enough to doggy-paddle. It was her sanctuary.
She’d met Bradley at the lake, in fact, when she was lifeguarding all those years ago. He’d hounded her, always sitting at the bottom of her chair, always asking her questions, flirting with her. When his friends were around, he’d make crude jokes and sometimes she’d laugh. He was cute in the same way a puppy is cute. She’d played it up sometimes, puffed out her chest when she stood to stretch, spread her thighs luxuriously when she uncrossed her legs. She’d thought he noticed, but then he began dating her sister instead.
At first she was crushed, and remained aloof to him. Anyone who was into her uptight sister would never be a good match for her anyway. But then she noticed that he would follow her to the pond when Maya wasn’t around. She would pull up onto the bank after a swim and see his shadow skittering in the woods.
“You can come out, you know,” she’d called one day, lying on her back in the dirt, still breathing heavy from her backstroke, letting the sun soak into her bones.
He’d come slinking from the trees like a guilty child.
“Does my sister know you come down here to watch me swim?”
He shook his head. “She’s on a run.”
“Then why are you here?” She opened one eye, squinting against the sun, and turned her head so she could see him.
He swallowed, looking truly miserable, and then gazed at her with a look so intense it made her want to curl up and shield herself. “You’re so beautiful,” he answered.
“Don’t be gross. You’re dating Maya,” she said matter-of-factly. “So you can forget it if you think you’re going to get anywhere.” And she meant it.
But he’d kept coming around anyway. Sometimes back into the trees with Maya, where they didn’t think Claire could see what they were doing. Maya may not have known it, but Claire understood that he was watching her swim lazily back and forth the whole time. Sometimes he hung back in the trees on his own, just watching, always watching. And sometimes he would sit on the bank and ask her questions.
“Why do you come down here every day?”
“To get away. To swim. Why do you?”
“To watch you swim.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“I can’t help it. I’m in love with you.”
“I should tell my sister.” But she never would, because she knew that it would break Maya’s heart. And she knew that nothing would ever come of his following her around. What harm was there in letting him watch? Plus, she sometimes enjoyed the company. He was her friend.
“What are you trying to get away from?” he would ask her.
“The same thing Maya is. Him.”
“That bad, huh?”
“You have no idea.”
“Tell me.”
“Doesn’t Maya?”
“Not really. I want to hear it from you.”
So she did. Day after day she told Bradley about her father, about his abuse. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she pulled her swimsuit strap up or down or to the side a few inches to show him a bruise. She told him about what Robert did to Maya. And somehow she felt like, by telling him, she made Bradley fall even more deeply in love with Maya, who experienced and felt and stowed away all the same injustices she did, but did so with a sturdy grace. While Claire whined and raged, Maya gutted it out and carved out a great life for herself.
In some ways Bradley was her best friend. The one she told everything. The one she trusted with her secrets. And in some ways the pond was their spot.
Even in the winter Claire loved the pond. She loved sliding across the thin layer of ice in her boots, tempting the ice to crack, wondering what it would be like to swim under that layer of protection, the ice between her and the air. And when the ice got thick, she loved putting on skates and twirling and jumping and daring herself to test gravity over and over again. She loved sitting on a blanket at its edge, just thinking. She loved imagining the fish underneath, staring up at her with their bug eyes, their mouths sucking, sucking, sucking.
When she’d come home for her father’s funeral, all she’d wanted was that sanctuary. That place to go to think, even if it wasn’t her father she was thinking about this time. It was truly the only reason she’d come back. Not to pay respects to him, nor to beat her head against the wall trying to connect with her sisters, not even for her mother. She’d come back for the space, the perspective.
The first night she’d gone out and sat on the bank, watching the moonlight shimmer over the ice, thinking about Michael, about the mess she’d left behind in California. She’d damn near frozen out there in her shorts, but she didn’t care. The creaks and pops of the trees around her, the smell of the dirt under her, the feel of the blanket around her . . . It was as if she’d been transported back in time to her childhood. It was as if she’d gone back to the only place she’d felt comfortable and at home.
That was, until the day Maya caught them there, ten years ago.
Bradley and Maya had only been married a short time. Maya was so full of herself and her marriage Claire could hardly stand to be around her. It was as if Maya had landed some great coup or something. As if she and Bradley had invented marriage.
“You should really stop fooling around with all those boys, Claire,” she’d say. “Pick one and get serious.”
“I don’t want to get serious. I’m having fun.”
Maya would hold her hand out, spread her fingers wide, admiring her ring. “Marriage is where the real fun is, though. Having a man like Bradley living to please you is just . . .” She would sigh deep and dreamily, as if about to break out in song. “Bliss.”
Meanwhile, Bradley was still showing up at the pond’s edge. Practically the second their honeymoon flight had touched down in Kansas City, there he was, standing in the trees, watching Claire do the backstroke, his jaw slack. Was this bliss?
“Oh, Claire, you really don’t know what you’re missing, to have an amazing man adore you and only you.”
The more Maya aggravated Claire, the more she played it up, pulling herself up out of the water sexily, arching her body as she floated on her back, drying herself off with her ass facing the woods, bending straight-legged and seductive until her fingers brushed her toes. She knew he was watching, and she knew he was loving it all. And she knew what she was doing was wrong on some level, but she couldn’t quite pinpoint why.
But then there was the argument about the car.
Claire had wanted to take it into town to pick up a new swimsuit. Hers had been looking a little threadbare. She’d asked her father, who promptly said no.
“I don’t need to be letting no teenager take a ten-thousand-dollar piece of machinery out on the road to do God knows what.”
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“Dad, I’m eighteen. I’m not a little kid. And I’ve had my license for two years now. I’ll be safe. And it’s not God-knows-what. I just need to go shopping.”
“I said no. I don’t expect to have to say it again, damn it!”
But Claire had been relentless. Something about his refusal to hear her out made her all the more adamant that she needed that car. He was unfair and pigheaded and stupid and she was sick and tired of backing down to him.
She followed him into the house, where he shucked off his work gloves and started straight for the freezer, where he kept his bourbon.
“You’re being unfair,” she lobbied.
His eyes hardened on her and, not for the first time, she felt real fear. This man was strong and lean-muscled. And mean. He could kill her if he wanted to, and she guessed he wanted to more often than she’d ever known. Still, she gathered herself tall and followed him as he walked toward the stairs, taking swigs of bourbon as he went.
“You’re being unfair,” she tried again, only louder. “You never listen to anything I say. You never listen to anything anyone says.”
“Girl, I said no, now shut the hell up,” he boomed, still walking, but Claire could see his shoulders tensing. She didn’t care. She’d come too far to care. She was nobody’s “girl” and she was fed up with cowering in the face of his abuse. She couldn’t take it anymore.
“You shut the hell up!” she shouted to his back. “You are nothing but a hardheaded jerk! And nobody in this house loves you. Not one of us can even stand you. How does that make you feel, huh? Knowing that the only reason people stay around you is that they’re afraid of you? Well, I’m not afraid of you. Not anymo—”
The Sister Season Page 17