Julia shrugged, picked up the remote, thumbed the TV off. “I don’t know, really,” she said. “It’s just . . . he seems . . . lighter all of a sudden. You know, like hanging out with the cousins. He would’ve never done that before. But today he suggested it. And . . . we talked a little.”
“About the suicide?”
“No, just about stuff. About opening gifts when we get home. He wants to go to Dusty’s. He said he hopes he got a skateboard. That kind of thing. He’s talking about things that are going to happen. In the future. That’s got to be a good sign, right?”
“Did he?”
“Did he what?”
“Get a skateboard?”
Julia grinned. “No, but I called Tai and told him to go pick one up before we get home.”
Claire snickered. “Spoiled brat.”
Julia giggled too. “Not usually. And I kind of think that’s part of the problem. He needed to be special more often.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m probably just being hopeful. I’m still going to get him into therapy when we get back. We should’ve gotten therapy when we were kids, don’t you think?”
Claire nodded at her thumb once again. She’d had therapy, not as a kid, but as an adult. Oh, how she’d had it. Session after session after session of it. She’d needed it. And she’d often wondered how she would have turned out had she gotten it when she was young. “There’s no way Dad would’ve let that happen.”
“If for no other reason than that people would’ve seen the bruises,” Julia added. “It’s kind of weird to think about. They’d have probably taken us away. Split us up. We wouldn’t be here right now.” She thought it over, then added, “Though one of us probably would think that’s a good thing.”
She was probably right. Maya would most likely think her life much improved if she’d never known she had a little sister named Claire.
“So what would you say if I told you I had a boyfriend?” Claire asked suddenly, wanting to connect with someone, wanting to share her secret. She cleared her throat. “Um, I guess sort of a fiancé. Kind of. Never mind.”
Julia’s eyes grew wide. “What? No, not never mind. You haven’t said a single word all week. You’re getting married?”
Claire squeezed her eyes shut tight and shook her head. As much as she wanted to share her secret with someone else, she suddenly wished she hadn’t said anything. Life felt so much safer when she was the only one in her family who knew anything about her business. “No. Or maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been so confused.”
“What’s confusing about it?”
Everything, Claire thought. For starters, I have no idea what a good marriage looks like. I’m twenty-eight and have never had a successful relationship. With marriage comes kids and I don’t know if I could even think of being a mom. Not to mention this is the first time I’ve ever been in love. But she said none of those things out loud. “I just . . . I don’t know if I’m cut out for marriage. I broke up with him.”
Julia looked perplexed now. “So you’re not getting married.”
“I don’t know,” Claire answered miserably. “Just, see, okay, his name is Michael and he’s an ER doc . . .”
There was the thump of a door slamming shut, somewhere off in the garage, it sounded like, and both Claire and Julia looked toward the door leading downstairs. Julia sat straighter, the recliner back squeaking upright with her movement.
“What the—?” she said, as they heard muffled voices rising from the basement. Heated voices. Footsteps on the stairs.
“That’s Maya,” Claire said, and she started to get up, as if she might leave the room, but the basement door burst open and she sat back down on the piano bench.
“Maya, please, just tell me what I did wrong,” Bradley was pleading, as Maya stormed into the front room, her face stony, her body so rigid and erect she looked as if she was about to take flight.
Claire and Julia exchanged glances as Maya stopped midway through the room and wheeled on him. It was as if neither of them could see the sisters sitting in the room with them because they were both so consumed with their argument.
“Fine,” Maya said. “You want to know? I’ll tell you. You fucked Molly’s dance teacher. Is that enough for you? Because it’s enough for me.”
Julia gasped, brought her hand to her mouth. Claire closed her eyes regretfully.
“What are you talking about?” he countered, but all three women could hear the guilt in his voice. He sounded like someone who knew he’d been caught.
“I’m talking about Amberlee, your little fuck buddy. Or should I say your sister? Mrs. Winsloop told me all about how sweet and helpful your sister is. How surprised I was to learn that you had a sister, Bradley. God, how embarrassing!”
He took two steps toward her, closing the gap between them, and reached for her tiny wrists, grabbed them. “Maya, please, you have to understand,” he said.
She wrenched her wrists away from his grip angrily. “I don’t understand, Bradley! I will never understand. I don’t understand how you could do such a thing. I don’t understand how you could do this to me. To your kids! She’s Molly’s teacher, for God’s sake! Didn’t you even stop to think how that might affect Molly? Or were you just so worried about getting into her pants that you didn’t care?”
“It wasn’t like that. I’ve been so scared.”
Maya laughed, a sardonic bark. “So have you been scared, then, for ten years? Because I know Amberlee isn’t the first, Bradley. I’ve just been too stupid or blind or, or, or whatever to face it.”
In love, Claire thought. You’ve been too in love.
And, no, Amberlee wasn’t the first. Claire knew it because Bradley had told her. Had broken down and spilled everything, in their old spot next to the pond, his breath puffing out in front of him like smoke against the moonlit sky. That’s what he’d been doing all week. Purging. Maybe because he felt like he needed to, and like only Claire could understand what a tangle of emotions Maya could be. There had been others. Waitresses, colleagues met at conferences, even a months-long affair with a twenty-year-old intern that threatened to turn ugly. The girl wanted marriage. In Claire’s estimation, that girl was lucky he was the one who got away.
Bradley didn’t argue. Just stood in front of Maya, his eyes cast to the floor, one hand on his hip, the other stroking his upper lip contemplatively. Maya seemed to gather strength from his silence.
“I’ve known about them all along,” she said. “Ever since Claire. Ever since the first one.”
“I wasn’t—,” Claire began, but clamped her mouth shut. Now was not the time to insinuate herself into their fight. No matter how wrong her sister was.
“I could smell them on you, for God’s sake. But I pretended I knew nothing. How stupid you must have thought I was.”
“I never thought you were stupid,” Bradley said. He looked up at her at last, his eyes watery. “I felt sorry for you. I pitied you for what I was doing to you.”
This was the wrong thing to say. Claire knew it before the blood had fully gathered in Maya’s face. Maya was not one to be pitied. Maya would never be okay with giving up that strength. Maya would see it as a loss of control, and if there was one thing Claire knew about her sister, it was that control had been the only way she’d made it through those bleak, dark years of childhood. What she could control, their father couldn’t.
“Don’t you dare pity me, you bastard,” Maya said, her voice going dangerously low and ominous.
Bradley’s eyebrows cinched together; he had the balls to look annoyed. “Stop with the name-calling, Maya, okay? We’re both adults here. Let’s discuss this like adults. I’ve apologized and I’ve broken it off and—”
“Don’t tell me what not to do!” Maya shrieked. Julia jumped, pulling both legs up into the chair with her. She looked embarrassed to even be witnessing this scene. “Do not
fucking tell me what to do!”
“Lower your voice. You’re making a fool of yourself. Claire and Julia are sitting right here.” He gestured helplessly toward the sisters.
“You!” Maya screeched, jabbing her French-tipped finger in his face. “You made a fool of me! You are not an adult. You’re a cancer! You’re a fucking cancer and you will kill me if I don’t cut you out!”
Claire’s heart sank. This, Claire thought, was the reason why she couldn’t put that ring on her finger. This was the reason she couldn’t say yes.
Thank God the children were outside and weren’t hearing this. Her sister seemed like she was on the edge, screaming about cancer, raving about Bradley’s “fuck buddy.” Claire wished she could take it all back, turn back time to when she and Maya were friends. To a time before Bradley, when Claire could stand up and wrap her arms around her sister and tell her everything would be okay. That it didn’t seem like it now, but a year from now she would look back on today and think, Thank God I made it past that horrible time.
“Stop it!” Bradley was yelling back, and for a second Claire and Julia simply looked at each other, eyes wide, as if they’d stumbled into something they wished they could get out of, but without any idea of how to exit the situation gracefully.
They began shouting over each other.
“...can’t believe I let you do this to me . . .”
“If you’d just stop yelling for a minute . . .”
“...tried so hard to be perfect for you and you never gave a shit . . .”
“I didn’t want a perfect wife!”
“I should never have married you! I wasted my life . . .”
“...the kids will hear you if you don’t stop screaming.”
And then Maya, who’d been so steely as if to appear almost as a statue throughout this, finally broke down. Her voice came out in ragged chokes, tears raging from her eyes.
“Leave! Just leave!” she began screeching, pointing toward the door. Bradley was struck silent, his face red, his eyes bulging. He shifted his weight from hip to hip, breathing hard, but when he didn’t move to her instruction, Maya stomped around him and up the stairs to their bedroom. A few moments later she reappeared at the top of the steps with a suitcase. She heaved it with a grunt and it sailed through the air and hit Bradley in the back of the legs with a mighty thump. “Get! The! Fuck! Out!” she screamed from the top of the stairs. “Go home, get your shit out of my house, and don’t come back. Ever!”
She ended the last bit on such a scream that everyone in the front room—Julia, Claire, and Bradley, his back still to the stairs—flinched. Then she retreated to their room and slammed the door.
For a few minutes there was nothing. No noise. No movement.
Claire didn’t know what to do. Say something? What? What did you say after witnessing something like that? Go to her sister? As if her sister would have anything to do with her. Go to Bradley? He would be receptive—maybe too receptive—and the last thing she needed was to “side” with him. Pretty much nobody in the house would understand. Maybe not even her.
Finally, Bradley bent, turned and picked up the suitcase. Without a word, he walked toward the front door, pulled his jacket off the coat tree, and left the house. A few minutes later Claire heard a car door shut and the sound of an engine gunning and then gravel stirring under tires.
“What was . . . ,” she began, but Julia shook her head at her sister perfunctorily, her eyes looking meaningfully to the door between the kitchen and the front room. Claire followed Julia’s gaze and saw all three children—Eli, Molly, and Will—watching the scene.
“How long?” Claire whispered.
“Enough,” Julia answered, looking down into her lap balefully.
Enough, Claire thought, is too much.
Seventeen
His name was Michael and he was an ER doc.
Claire met him when she stepped on a shard of glass on the beach, slicing the bottom of her foot open during her roommate’s birthday party. The pain wasn’t too bad, probably because she was half-drunk, but the cut wouldn’t stop bleeding and she was pretty sure she would need stitches.
“God, I’m sorry to ruin your birthday,” she’d lamented over and over to Judy, her roommate, as she’d lolled in the front seat of Judy’s car, blood leaking out onto a sponge that somebody rounded up from somewhere and rubber-banded to her foot. The sponge was filthy and it stank, and on a sober night Claire would have never put it on an open wound, but that night she was sloshy and carefree, trying to forget about her ugly breakup with Rob the Terminally Boring Investment Banker two nights before.
“Don’t worry about it,” Judy said, slurring her words a bit, and Claire had a distant alarm bell go off in her head about her friend’s ability to drive. “I was getting tired of volleyball anyway.”
“Yeah, but Ben was totally into you tonight.”
Judy laughed. “We were probably about half a minute away from a hard-core make-out session.”
Claire pushed her head back against the seat again and closed her eyes. “God, I’m sorry,” she repeated.
“No big. He’ll wait for me.”
When they rounded the corner into the hospital parking lot, Claire said, “Just pull up to ER. I’ll probably be here for hours. You can go back to the party and I’ll get a cab when I’m done.”
“You sure?” Judy had asked, and Claire had nodded, pulling herself out of the front seat, trying to steady herself while the sidewalk was lurching and she was trying not to walk on the ball of her foot.
But Claire hadn’t needed to get a cab that night. The adorable doctor with the dark hair and tan, gentle hands who stitched up her foot had offered to drive her home.
“Just don’t tell anybody,” he said. “I could get into big trouble.”
Right away Claire knew that Michael was different from all the other men she’d dated, and it scared her. She’d always prided herself on the way she’d so efficiently protected her heart, at first by necessity, an eighteen-year-old, fresh off the farm, in a new, big city all alone. The vastness of California had frightened her. The people. The possibilities. They all seemed so dangerous, even deadly. She felt like she was constantly scurrying—scurrying to get groceries, scurrying to work, scurrying to the beach, just hoping to go unnoticed. The men, they were everywhere! And constantly on the make. She dated more men her first six months in California than she had her whole life in Missouri.
But she always feared them. When would one of them hit her? When would he call her fat or ugly, tell her she wasn’t good enough? And would she have the guts to stand up to an abuser twice? Somehow she doubted it.
But as she grew more comfortable with her surroundings, she began to get more into a groove. She liked being unattached. She liked having that sheath of protection around her heart. She would be hurt by no one, because she would be damned before she’d let it happen.
She’d never fallen in love before, but even that first night, when he touched her foot so gently as he bandaged it, and when he helped her hobble into her apartment, Claire knew that Michael would be different. He had that soul—that one soul—that matched hers and that she would be unable to keep out.
He stopped by the following Monday.
She’d been cleaning, her hair mostly captured in a bandanna, her running shorts full of holes, when the buzzer rang.
“Who is it?” she shouted into the microphone, her voice still on louder-than-the-vacuum mode.
“Michael Bowman,” came the answer.
Her brow furrowed. She tried to remember if she knew a Michael Bowman. The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but the name totally did not. Maybe he was someone she’d met at one of Judy’s beach parties and she’d been too tipsy to remember having met him. She pressed the button on the buzzer to talk. “Do I know you?” she called down.
The voice respond
ed, “Um, it’s Dr. Bowman. From the emergency room?” He said the last as a question, as if he wasn’t quite sure if that was where he was really from or not.
Claire’s finger jerked away from the intercom button as if it were on fire. One hand involuntarily flying up to the bandanna on her head, she raced to her living room window, which stretched across the front of the building, allowing for a perfect view of the front stoop. She used one finger to split the Venetian blinds just slightly and peered down between them.
Oh, God, it was him. The hot doctor from the ER who’d brought her home Saturday night. The one she thought she’d felt a connection with. Standing there in scrubs and a gray T-shirt, his hair tousled and shiny in the sunlight. She watched as he leaned forward and rang the buzzer again.
Unsure what to do, Claire raced back to the intercom and pressed the button. “I’m here . . . um . . . just . . . can you give me a min . . . I’ll be right . . . come on up.”
She did something she’d never done before—pressed the button to unlock the front door to let a strange man walk right up to her apartment. Her heart raced with the danger of it all. And the excitement. There was definitely excitement. Something about him made her feel exhilarated and windswept, like she’d just gotten off of an amusement park ride.
Quickly, she glanced down at what she was wearing, and remembered that she hadn’t even had time to brush on a little mascara. She looked like death on a platter. But he was already knocking on her front door; there was nothing she could do about it now.
She walked to the door, waited just a beat before opening it, then swung it all the way open with a smile. “Dr. Bowman! Hi!” She stepped aside to welcome him in. He stepped over the threshold awkwardly, his eyes pointed toward her foot.
“I just thought I’d check to see how you were doing.”
“Great,” she answered, though she held her foot up just slightly off the ground like an injured animal, because for some reason that felt like the right thing to do.
“Good. How’s the pain?”
The Sister Season Page 19