She shrugged, trying to ignore the flipping and turning sensation in her stomach. It was almost as if she could feel his . . . vibe . . . coming through the air toward her. She remembered being attracted to him in the hospital, but she’d also been drunk. To have the same—no, stronger—feelings with him nearby when she was stone-cold sober was surprising. “It’s not bad. Sucks that it’s on the bottom of my foot, though. Hard to do much of anything.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Mind if I take a look?”
At first she wasn’t sure what he meant, and her face burned with the thought, Please do. Look all you want. Then she realized he wanted to check the wound. “Oh, sure, okay,” she said and backed up to the futon and sat down, propping her foot up on the coffee table so that the bottom of it was facing him. He turned and closed the door, then loped over to the table, still never taking his eyes off of her foot, and knelt down.
“The wrapping help?” he asked, all business.
“I guess. It’s kind of a pain to put a shoe on. And I miss the beach.”
He grinned. “You love the beach, huh?”
“When you grow up your whole life in a dry, hot, muggy bowl of land, you love anything to do with water. The beach is like paradise to me.”
He wound the bandage around and around until her foot was bare. She wiggled her toes in relief. Only then did he look up at her, just briefly, and she thought maybe she saw the same crushy fluster in his face as she guessed she probably had in hers. “You grow up in the Midwest?” he asked.
She nodded. “Missouri. You?”
“Omaha. I thought I recognized a Missouri accent.”
“I don’t have an accent!” she protested, giggling. “Missourians don’t have accents.”
“Oh, yes, they do,” he said, poking and prodding around on her foot. For a moment she let herself imagine that he was giving her a foot massage, but the prick of pain she felt every so often when he hit a certain spot chased that image away.
“So you make house calls? How very nineteen-fifties of you.”
He chuckled. “Only for special cases,” he said. He glanced up at her and the glance, combined with his hands on her feet, practically melted her.
“Oh, well, what makes me so special?” she said, hoping that witty banter would make her sound much more confident than she felt.
But he didn’t answer. Kept his head down and began winding the bandage around her foot, rewrapping it. Claire noticed that the tops of his ears were flaming red. “Looks good,” he said, as if she’d never spoken. “Whoever gave you those stitches knew what he was doing.”
Their eyes met again, his mouth set in that reserved little grin. When he finished, he stood up.
“Well,” he said, “I guess I’ll let you get back to . . . whatever you were doing.”
She blushed, reminded of how dumpy she looked. “Cleaning,” she said. “And, gee, thanks.”
She walked him to the door, wanting nothing more than for him to stay.
“Actually,” she said, touching his arm. “Really, thanks. It was nice of you to come check on me.”
“And probably illegal or against at least a dozen privacy regulations. You’re not going to turn me in, are you?”
His grin was contagious, as was his awkwardness. Claire felt silly, like a smitten thirteen-year-old, but she couldn’t help herself. “Nope,” she said. “I’m actually thinking of getting injured again because the service is so great.”
He paused and her hand fell away from his arm as he reached for the doorknob. “Instead, you could just go to dinner with me,” he said. “Look on the bright side—you might choke. If your goal is to get back into the ER, that is. I do know the Heimlich.”
Claire laughed out loud. “Okay,” she said, feeling pleasure well up in her chest. “Deal.”
That had been almost a year ago, and they’d been practically inseparable ever since. Michael was romantic and beautiful, and Claire loved to drape herself across him, wondering what the world must look like through those long eyelashes, wondering what the world must feel like on the other side of those soft, precise fingers. He made love to her the way he stitched her foot—like nothing else in his world mattered at that moment, like he wanted to memorize her, like he was afraid of breaking her.
She fell for him. Despite her efforts not to, she fell. He was everything she wanted to be, everything she wanted to have.
And the thought of that scared the shit out of her.
She began pulling away from him about a month before her father died. She’d hoped it would make things easier. That he would stray, find someone better, someone who knew a thing or two about how to treat him, how to act in a relationship. Her heart hated it, but she hoped he would fade away.
Instead, he proposed.
He’d taken her to dinner at a little Thai place they frequented, where Claire adored the tofu pad thai and he drank sweaty bottles of Singha and their table was so small their knees touched.
Claire had been brooding, so confused and frightened about the fact that even though she’d been pulling away he’d only seemed to grow more concerned about her, had only given her more space, and had done it lovingly rather than resentfully. She didn’t know how to handle this, and feared that she would eventually have to break up with him, which she knew would break her own heart in the process. But better to break it now, she thought, than to wait for him to disappoint her later. To wait for him to beat her, call her names.
“So I’ve been thinking,” he said after his second beer. Claire had dunked a spring roll into peanut sauce, but was caught holding it midway to her mouth as her stomach dropped. He’d sounded so serious. Maybe this was it. Maybe he was going to finally dump her. The thought both relieved her and brought tears to the corners of her eyes. She set the roll on her plate and looked down at the table.
“I don’t blame you,” she murmured, and wondered if it was too late to stop him from doing this. If maybe she’d made a mistake by pulling away from him. She reached for his hand, swiped it with her finger, not yet ready to let it go.
He dipped his head to try to look into her eyes. “Blame me?”
“For breaking up with me,” she said. “I’ve been asking for it.”
He laughed, leaned to one side, and rooted around with his fingers in his front pocket. “I’m not breaking up with you,” he said. He pulled out a box and set it on the table between them. Claire looked at the box, her heart thunked once, hard, and then she looked up at him. “I’m proposing,” he said quietly, calmly, as if this was the most expected thing in the world.
He scooted his chair backward, palming the box and getting a very serious look on his face.
Claire jumped up out of her seat, the flimsy wooden chair flopping back onto the concrete floor behind her with a smack. Heads turned all around the restaurant and she felt even more panicked. This wasn’t how she wanted to do this. Not with everyone watching. Not with him clutching a ring box and looking like a lovesick little boy. Not with her heart ripping into shreds inside her chest. Not with her wanting to lie down and die.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
He stopped, looked confused. “What do you mean? It’s not five-star here, but I thought . . .”
“I’ve been so distant,” she said, almost to herself, as if trying to convince herself that this proposal was not her fault. “I’ve been pulling away from you.”
“You’ve been stressed. I haven’t been taking it personally. I love you.”
“Is that how it is, then? You just let someone treat you like shit because you love them? You just let them take and take and you let them abuse you and you let them betray you, and nobody is ever happy, because they’re all in love? Doesn’t that sound ridiculous to anyone but me? Isn’t it wrong?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean. You haven’t treated me like shi
t. We’re great together, Claire. I’ll make you so happy.”
“Don’t,” she said, her voice full of tears. She held out one hand toward him in a stop gesture. “I can’t . . .” She took a deep breath. “Please don’t ask me to marry you.”
“Why not?”
She bit her lip. “Because the answer will be no. It’s over, Michael,” she said, and she had to rely on her ears to hear herself say it because her lips were too numb to fit around the words correctly and she couldn’t feel them leave her mouth. It seemed surreal to her, this scene—gold lamé and the clinking of silverware against china and a Thai waiter rushing between the tables with pitchers of iced tea and Michael, the first man she’d ever allowed herself to love, holding a blue velvet box in one hand, his face a big question mark. She was not doing this. She was not breaking up with him.
Except she was.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and picked up her purse and rushed out of the restaurant, bolted down the sidewalk before he could follow her, ducked through an alley to the next street over, and hailed a cab, which took her home.
And then flung herself facedown on her bed and sobbed for what seemed like a lifetime. She turned off her cell phone. Refused to check e-mail. Set the chain lock on her door. Slept.
She slept for what must have been three days, off and on. She would get up only to force a few crackers in her mouth, down a glass of milk or a bottle of vitamin water. She didn’t shower, she didn’t turn on the TV, she called in sick to work.
Her heart was broken, and she’d broken it herself. She loved him. God, how much she loved him. And it was for that reason that she couldn’t marry him. If she had to choose one of them to hurt, she chose herself. That’s how much she loved him.
On the fourth day, she got up and showered, put her hair into a ponytail and went to work, waiting tables at a pizza restaurant a couple of blocks away. Her mind wasn’t on her job and she was continually getting ripped by Billy, the manager with the pornstache who she hated more than life itself. Her tips sucked, but she didn’t care. All she cared about was that she wanted to hear Michael’s voice, wanted to feel his soft fingers brush her legs, wanted to look into his eyes, kiss him, love him, make love to him. But she couldn’t. She’d blown it. She’d blown it on purpose. She would have to live with the pain.
When her shift was over, she went straight back to her apartment, her eyes already drooping for want of sleep again. She knew it wasn’t healthy to be doing this—that she should be going to the beach and swimming away the sadness—but she didn’t care. Really, what in life was there to care about anymore? If there was something, she didn’t know it.
She opened her apartment door and right off she could smell him. She lifted her nose like a dog, catching the scent of Michael’s cologne on the air. The scent made her gut squeeze and cramp with loneliness. But also with curiosity. He’d been in the apartment.
“Hello?” she called out. “Michael?”
But there was no answer. She shut the door and moved into the room slowly, warily, looking for evidence of him.
She found it on the kitchen table. A vase with a single red rose in it, next to it a note, next to that the blue velvet box he’d been holding at the Thai restaurant four days earlier.
With shaking hands, she opened the note. It said: Please at least look at it.
She did. She looked at it and looked at it, touching the diamond, holding it under the light. Imagining it on her finger as Mrs. Michael Bowman. Or was it Mrs. Dr. Michael Bowman? She’d heard of some women doing that.
She never pulled it out of the box. She never tried it on. She only stared at it, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Hours later, the phone rang. It was her mom. Her father had died. She needed to come home right away for the funeral. Was she free?
Tearfully, she admitted that yes, she was free. Unfortunately, she was free as a fucking bird. Free to do whatever the hell she wanted. Not even a goddamn dog to board or cat to find a sitter for. She was nothing if not free.
And free felt like shit.
Eighteen
Julia had gone outside, saying something about wanting to get fresh air, but Claire could hear the crinkle of a cigarette pack working under Julia’s kneading hand in her coat pocket. She stifled a smile—Julia had always been the avoidant sister, the one to cut and run when the dirt got deep. Maya had always stuck around and wallowed in the pain; Claire had always fought back. But it was Julia who would find respite.
Bradley had left and Maya had been stomping around in the back of the house ever since. Claire sat in the living room alone, thinking about Michael, wanting him, while at the same time wanting to not want him. Maybe she would call him again later. Just to tell him she was okay. Just to apologize for hanging up so quickly earlier.
“Hello?” Elise came in from the sunroom, stomping slush from her boots. It had warmed up considerably outside. Pockets of slush were dotting the yard, snowmelt dripped in the gutter, and birds chirped along the top of the sheds and the barn. Elise had called out earlier that she was going outside to put out some more seed for the birds. She’d left humming “O Come All Ye Faithful,” and it had occurred to Claire that they’d played no Christmas music all week.
“In here,” Claire called from the piano bench. It was like she was riveted to that spot. It was an old relic of the McClure clan, that piano. One of her uncles or maybe great-uncles or God knew who used to play boogie-woogie like nobody’s business. And church hymns. But that uncle or great-uncle or God knew who had long since left the farm, and had left his piano behind. Nobody in the Yancey family had ever played, although there was a time when Claire sorely wanted to. Robert would have never tolerated the noise, would have never tolerated the redundancy of practice, would never have tolerated a teacher’s bill, so she never even asked. Still, the piano stayed, just like the ancient, dusty butter churn in the back of the pantry and the falling-down chicken coop and the rusted farm tools in the toolshed. They were as much a part of the family as Claire, Julia, and Maya were. Maybe, in some ways, more a part of the family, because those things had happy memories attached to them, and Claire wasn’t sure she and her sisters did.
Elise traipsed through the kitchen and out into the front room. She was still wearing her stocking cap, her cheeks two bright red patches from being out in the wind so long.
“Where is everyone?” she asked.
“The kids are outside somewhere. So is Julia. Maya’s upstairs. And Bradley left.”
“Oh.” Elise removed her gloves and dropped them into a box full of mismatched gloves by the front door. “Where’d Bradley go?”
Claire shrugged. To the airport, she supposed. Or maybe to a motel. Who knew? That was, oddly, something they didn’t talk about during their nights down by the pond. All the things he had to tell her about Maya, and leaving her was never one of them. Claire knew it would sound unlikely to just about anyone—especially to Maya—but she believed that Bradley really did love his wife. He didn’t mean to be hurting her. In his mind, he was able to separate his actions from his love for her. He was so genuinely frightened by the cancer.
God, the cancer. Her sister had cancer. No matter how many times she repeated that in her mind, Claire just couldn’t grasp it. They were all supposed to still be children, not adults battling for their marriages, their kids, their lives.
She doubted anyone else knew. Bradley had told her that Maya was funny about spreading the word. She didn’t want Molly and Will to know. She didn’t want the babysitters to know. It seemed like the only two people carrying the burden were Bradley and Maya. Well, and some friend Maya had made. One who had cancer herself.
What a sad secret to be carrying around.
Claire quickly studied her mom, still standing in the front room trying to shake off the cold, gazing expectantly at her for answers. She didn’t even know that one of her daughters could b
e dying. Shouldn’t she know that? Was Maya being unfair? Was cancer the kind of secret you were allowed to keep, or were you obligated to share the news with the people who loved you so they could prepare for the day when they would have to say good-bye to you?
Probably Maya figured Elise was saying good-bye enough this week. “Maya kicked him out. I don’t know where he went.”
Elise paused. “Kicked him out? For good?”
Claire shrugged again. “I guess. He’s been cheating on her. Since day one. I think she’s finally had enough.”
“Well,” Elise said, busying herself again, “who could blame her? Poor Maya. Those poor kids.”
Claire said nothing. She wondered if she could blame her. Claire had always had a soft spot for Bradley. Had always enjoyed their talks by the pond, before he kissed her. And though she knew it was only going to start trouble this week, she’d been enjoying their talks again. Bradley listened to her. Bradley didn’t judge her. And he was easy to talk to because Claire never expected anything from him. He couldn’t let her down.
At the same time, he could never do anything right for Maya. She began their marriage so sure the other shoe would drop any second, she damn near threw it down herself. She gazed at him with disappointment in her eyes every minute of every day. She waited for his admission that he’d been the failure she’d always known he would be. She was so sure he would betray her, it really didn’t make any difference if he did or didn’t do it in reality.
He slept with those other women, in part, because in Maya’s mind he had already done so.
Still. The woman had cancer. If nothing else, he lost points in human decency for that fact alone.
“Well, I suppose Maya knows what she’s doing,” Elise said. She perched on the edge of the recliner, where Julia had been just moments before, and tilted her head, gazing at her daughter. “I suppose I should have done it myself.”
“Done what?”
Elise bit her lip, chewed for a second. “Kicked your father out.” Claire noticed her mom’s hands were shaking.
The Sister Season Page 20