by Ruthie Knox
“You’re going to have to say something eventually. You know that, right?” Allie asked.
May looked at her at last. Her face was gray, her eyes wet and angry.
“If you—” May shook her head. Looked down again.
“May, please.”
One of Ben’s terrified servers came to their table with the water pitcher, and Allie wanted to murder him. She felt a tiny spark of sister solidarity when both of them whipped their heads at him and barked, “No, thank you.”
May cleared her throat. “If you wanted me to say something about what you just told me—if you wanted my opinion on finding out you’re my half sister, or what happened between Mom and Dad when I was a baby and Mom ran away—then you could’ve said something. Years and years and years ago.”
“I know, I—”
“No. You don’t know. I really don’t think you do. Allie, I never, never felt like I—belonged. I was big and tall and I was always wrong.” May looked down again, furiously scrubbing at her face, and Allie wanted to fix it but didn’t know what to say because May was right, she hadn’t known. It was news to her that May hadn’t felt like she belonged. May had always belonged the most. May was the oldest, the most like their parents, the best behaved, the prettiest. May had been everything she wanted to be and could never figure out how.
“Mom picked at me for being too fat,” May said, “and Dad tried to make it up by leaving candy on my dresser, and—”
“Please. I know, I know. I hated how Mom was with you when we were teenagers and stuff. I just wanted to be like you, I just—”
“And you had all this—style or something. Got away with all kinds of things. You had some eighty-year-old man for a best friend and started a business in high school. I wanted something like that, that permission you always seemed to have to do whatever, be whoever you wanted, while I had to follow the rules and do what Mom said—”
May took a breath. Her hand came up to her throat, which had gone a mottled pink and looked raw and reminded Allie of when they were kids, how May always turned pink when they fought, how she would bait May because she wanted to break her composure enough to see her sister turn a different color.
She’d never been a good enough sister. She’d never been a good enough friend, or listened hard enough. This was what she was learning, from talking to her sister. How much better she had to do. Would do. For all of her family.
Because she loved May, had always loved May, felt her heart swollen and her body jumpy with the anxious need to turn her love into some kind of action that would prove it.
“You remember that time in college we were at the funeral,” May said, “and I found out that Mom’s friend Cynthia from high school who she always told us she was going to visit had actually moved down to Florida? I overheard it, and I went looking for you right away—right away, Allie—because it didn’t make sense, why would Mom say that when she wasn’t doing it, that’s what I was thinking. But when I found you, and told you, you said I was wrong. You said Mom hadn’t told us she was going to see Cynthia in a long time. You said you already knew Cynthia had moved, that we all knew, and probably I just forgot.” The pink had spread up May’s neck. “You lied to me. You knew then about Dad, about where Mom was going, who she was probably with, and you didn’t want me to find out.”
They’d spent an entire day inside a stuffy, hot funeral parlor in a suburb outside Milwaukee. She and May had driven down together, and Allie had smoked a blunt with the windows down, so happy to have a chance to get away from campus and spend some time with her sister, who’d been busy studying and having a life separate from hers, so that even though they lived in the same house off-campus, Allie felt like she never saw her.
They’d hovered around the veggie trays, eating broccoli and dip, talking to cousins and holding babies, and Allie had felt like she and May were grown-up, fully part of their family.
And then May had left to pee, and come back with this thing about Cynthia, and the whole day was ruined.
Mom had never been hanging out with Cynthia. Allie knew that, because she’d found out about Justin and stopped trusting her mother. She’d snooped on her computer and rifled through her purse and learned things she never truly wanted to know—and she hadn’t wanted May to know them, either. She hadn’t wanted May’s relationship with their mom to break even worse than it was already broken, or for it to be her fault.
She’d wanted to preserve May’s family for her, her home, even as her own felt irrevocably broken.
“I was trying to protect you.”
“No. No. I didn’t want protected, I wanted a fucking sister, Allie.”
“I am your sister. I was just so afraid when I found out that you wouldn’t think I was anymore, I—”
“You’re…you’re the worst. You’re the worst. The worst.” May choked. “I would never care about that. I would have helped you. I would’ve been on your side. But you never trusted me. You, you shoved me aside and decided I wasn’t your sister. Don’t tell me that you wanted to be my fucking sister. Sisters tell each other things. They—they’re for each other. Who were you for? Just yourself and your mean fear and your stupid business and no one.”
Allie felt the room, the noise, the heat of the small dining room spinning around her. She didn’t know where to look, or how to hold her body, or what to do. She looked at her plate, the oozing eggs and weird greens and oily pink meat, and felt sick.
“Everybody has known except for me. It’s so…typical I could scream.” But May didn’t scream, and she said this so softly, Allie could barely hear her. “You told some one-night stand before you told me.”
Then Ben came banging out of the kitchen, wearing a scrupulously white chef uniform and a scary expression that he shot right at Allie so hard that she jerked as though he had thrown a ladle at her. He didn’t look at her for more than that second, though, before he turned his attention to May, all of his attention, and came over.
“What’s going on?” He didn’t yell, but it felt like he was yelling.
“I’m going home, Ben. I’ll talk to you later, but I need a little time.” May grabbed her bag and stood up. Ben took her elbow and led her into the kitchen. They were a wall of us. Allie was them.
Allie was the worst.
Chapter 14
His brother had come to New York, the fruit of four years of thawing ice and awkward transatlantic phone calls, to sit in his living room in Manhattan, physically present, terribly familiar, and eat pizza.
“I’ve been thinking of moving back to London,” Winston said.
Nev grunted, then folded a slice of pizza and shoved half of it in his mouth like he’d been eating New York style his entire life instead of French cassoulet and salads with vegetable rosettes.
On the patio, Cath and Bea were laughing over Internet videos.
Winston was at sea.
He cleared his throat. “Beatrice seems to have everything under control here, and not to need my…help. So. It seems like the sensible thing to do.”
“You don’t think you’re a good father, is what you’re telling me?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, precisely.”
“No, but that’s what you’re saying. You’re thinking of going back to London because you think you’re crap at being a father, but Bea thinks you’re a good father, except when you do things directly because you think you’re a bad father, which, actually, at least in the moment, makes you a bad father.”
Winston closed his eyes. He loved Neville desperately. But when he was like this, like an overeager retriever with a wet duck, he very much wanted to snipe at him. Particularly at the ever-so-thinning hairline he was trying to hide with that ridiculous barber cut and “hipster” beard.
“Come again?”
“Bea is just like you.”
Winston recalled Allie saying something similar, and his similar reaction of instant rejection. Hearing Nev say it, too, made him very much want to know what Nev thought,
and also worry about Allie, who had only texted him once today, to tell him it hadn’t gone well with her sister and she’d be back soon.
“You can’t see it because you’re you,” his brother said. “But it’s terribly obvious. When you were her age, at university, I was marking off the days until you’d come home on holiday in a datebook I hid inside a pigeonhole of my desk. You’d drive up in that ridiculous Vauxhall you had, and you’d whisk me off for a day of curry chips and racing forms, or take me to Stonehenge or over on the Chunnel for some two-hundred-pound French meal complete with cognac. You talked like she does, and you made the same faces and waved your hands around like she does, and you felt like her to be around. Like you were absolutely mad to take up every experience you could get your hands on.”
Winston nearly felt as though his brother had told him someone they had known as boys, or young men, had died.
He remembered all that, he did. That mad existence as a young man, his hopes.
Nev clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t look so glum. The way I see it—the way Cath sees it, actually, since she’s the one always telling me this—is you’re going to die.”
“That’s a comfort.”
“Don’t be an ass. The point is that you’re not dead yet. That’s why I’m here, because you’re my brother. The same brother who took me to France, the same brother who tried to bollocks up my life a few years back, the same brother who bought me this pizza. I don’t want to die with everything fucked up between us, and neither do you.”
Nev picked up another slice of pizza, folded it and lifted it to his mouth. Grease dripped onto the rug beneath the coffee table.
“Christ. Sorry.”
“It’s all rented.”
“In that case, buy some furniture.” He pointed the pizza at Winston, his mouth stern. “And stop worrying about your daughter. You’re not dead yet. She’s here in your place, showing up to see her uncle, being your daughter. She doesn’t hate you, so you must be doing something right. You’ve got time to figure this shit out.”
The front door opened and Allie came in, a blur of red and gold sparkles, and he felt the lift in him, just looking at her in her costume, her wild beauty and her small, worried face.
The anxious weight of her expression told him things had gone considerably worse than not well with her sister.
It was familiar, this combination of lift and weight. Excitement and fear. He knew it well, because he felt it every time his daughter walked into a room.
With Beatrice, he called it love.
“Allie,” he said. “You’ve made it back.”
He looked for the lift in her face, in her eyes, but she put her phone in front of her and grimaced. “Jean drove me. I’m sorry I’m so late for this, I’ve got to—I can’t wear these clothes anymore. Sorry. I’m going to get changed real quick.”
She speed-walked past him, turning into the bedroom and closing the door.
“You might want to check on her,” Nev said.
Winston wasn’t sure he’d be welcome, but he rose anyway and knocked softly. Water was already running in the guest bath.
He tried the knob, but she’d locked him out.
By the time she reemerged with her hair down, wearing the same loose top and yoga pants she’d had on the night they met, Cath and Bea had come in from the patio and gathered around the table.
Allie clutched her phone in one hand. It was buzzing, even as she offered a low wave. “Hey ho.”
He extended his arm as she approached, hoping she’d tuck herself against him, gratified when she did. “Allie. I’d like to introduce my brother, Neville, and his partner, Cath. And of course you know Bea already.”
“It’s good to meet you guys.”
“We’ve already heard so much about you,” Nev offered.
Allie had drifted away from his side. She thumbed the screen of her phone.
Cath swept her long dark bangs away from her forehead. “Can we get you a slice?”
“Hm? Oh, no, thanks. I’m good. Sorry.” Allie bit her lip, then put her phone down on the table. It vibrated vigorously, the screen flashing with green message icons. “So how was your flight over?”
“It was fine,” Cath said. “Although I feel like the planes are shrinking. Is that part of getting old? Or are they actually smaller?”
“They’re loads smaller,” Bea said. Her accent was stronger, he noticed, in her uncle’s company. “I read about it. There’s something like thirteen inches less room for your arms now than there used to be?”
“Not thirteen, surely,” he said.
The conversation found its legs from there, but Allie said little, and her absorption in her phone was borderline impolite.
“Is everything all right?” he asked in a low tone at one point.
“I’m fine, don’t worry about me,” she replied, her smile false.
He told himself he had neither right nor reason to be hurt when she didn’t join in the wide-ranging conversation Bea, Cath, and Nev had about everything from contemporary documentary filmmaking to the Benin bronzes to crowd-funding to body diversity in modern dance, but he didn’t seem to be able to prevent himself from feeling hurt regardless—and when Cath tried to draw Allie out in a discussion of her own work with vintage clothing and antiques without success, Winston became…irritated.
Irritated, because she was absorbed in her phone, unwilling to share anything, and because the conversation was exactly the sort he felt confident she enjoyed.
Irritated because he cared, perhaps cared too much, and it was making him impose expectations on their short acquaintance that had no place.
And irritated, finally, when her phone rang and she let it go to voicemail, then checked the message while the conversation faltered around her.
Cath looked at Nev and yawned. He checked his watch, and the party broke up.
Ten minutes later Winston closed the front door on his daughter, turned around, and Allie had gone.
—
Allie couldn’t remember exactly how she’d come to be on the roof once she got there.
It helped, though, and she needed help.
She needed great, gulping deep breaths of the cool night air, and the glow of the city all around her, and landscaping—did they call it “landscaping” when it was a roof?—that incorporated a mixed profusion of wildflowers.
She stuck her nose in a coneflower while her phone buzzed out its second notification of a text from Matt.
She was the worst. She’d ruined Winston’s reunion with his brother, and she knew it meant a lot to him, having Nev and Cath visit.
She’d ruined things with her sister. Like, ruined-ruined them, maybe-could-never-fix-them ruined them, only she couldn’t think like that, couldn’t think, period, and had spent most of the day on the top of a double-decker tourist bus, filling the spaces in her head with the blank patter of the tour guide.
The roof door opened and closed, and Winston joined her. Walked behind her, around the raised brick bed in the center of the roof that contained the wildflowers, and stopped opposite where she stood.
He removed his cuff links. Placed them in his shirt pocket.
Bzz-bzzzzt.
Bzz-bzzzzzzzt.
And then a chime to indicate a different sort of message, an email or Facebook or Instagram, she wasn’t even sure.
“Who—” Winston said, “—the fuck—” and he turned up one shirt cuff, “—is trying to reach you, and why the fuck—” he turned up the other cuff, “—don’t you pick up the blighted phone?”
“It’s Matt.”
He put his hands on his hips. “What does Matt want?”
Allie sighed, sinking onto the brick ledge of the flower bed. “So far today, he wants to know if I want him to renew the art museum membership as a couple or if I want to buy my own as a single, even though it costs more. He sent me pictures of the dogs, which used to be our dogs but now they’re just his. He called and left a message to let me know that he�
��s worried that I haven’t been responding to his texts, though he can see they’re delivered and read, and maybe we should talk, or even set up a regular weekly time to connect.”
She thumbed on her phone and scrolled down through the messages. “Oh, also, do I want to buy chocolate from his niece, who’s selling it for her school.”
“You gave me to understand that you and Matt were no longer together.”
“We’re not.”
He gestured to her phone, which had once again begun to buzz.
Four more texts from Matt.
Did you know the guy at the grill is putting in a new bathroom?
I stopped by there and the place is a disaster.
I’m not sure he’s doing it to code—the demo crew was his brother and some of his guys. If the electrician’s not licensed, you’re going to have a real problem when it gets inspected again.
Have you seen this?
And then a link to an online article, no doubt about the importance of using union labor or why it was a bad idea to upgrade restaurant bathrooms, and what the fuck, what the fuck, “What the fucking fuck, Matt, what the fuck?”
She shook her phone, tempted to send it sailing off the roof, but she couldn’t even bring herself to toss it into the daisies.
Her mom might need to reach her.
Allie looked at Winston. “He does this all the time. Texts me. Calls me. Drops by my parents’ house, so I’m over for dinner and, ‘Oh, hey, look, Matt’s here! Good thing you guys are such friends.’ The one time I thought maybe I’d pick up a guy for a one-night stand, Matt was at the bar, fucking cock-blocking me with his pictures of the dogs and throwing his arm over my shoulder and telling the one hot guy in the place, ‘This is Allie, we used to be engaged, isn’t she great? She’s the best.’ ”
“You might try telling him to sod off.”
Allie shook her head. “Elvira told me today that if he comes by her office one more time to ask her questions about shit that’s none of his business, she’s going to call the police.”
“I like the sound of this Elvira.”
“She’s awesome. You’d get along. Anyway—” She held up her phone, screen out, as though Winston could see it. “—now he’s stopping by my tenant’s restaurant, probably hassling them, plus I found out he was texting my sister to ask where I’m at. I don’t know what to do about him. I mean sure, tell him to sod off, but…I don’t know. I can’t think about Matt. I try to think, and my mind goes completely blank, like there’s nothing. There’s nothing. I left him, Winston. I dated him for four years even though I didn’t love him, even though I was never even particularly attracted to him, and then I dumped him right before we were supposed to get married, so that means I have to deal with him forever, and give him what he wants so he won’t hate me, but I’ve got too much other shit, I’ve just got—”