I Don't Forgive You

by Aggie Blum Thompson

  A creak of a floorboard grabs my attention. I look past Mark to see my sister-in-law standing half-hidden in the shadows of the foyer. I didn’t hear her open the screen door, and I have no idea how long she has been standing there.

  9

  I notice that Mark’s car, which we had left at Daisy’s last night, is now parked behind Caitlin’s.

  “When did you get that?” I ask, craning my neck.

  “This morning.”

  “This morning? When? I got up just after five, and you were still sleeping.”

  “I woke up around three, hungover, you know the drill. Couldn’t sleep.”

  I nod, trying to work it out in my head. “So you went over to Daisy’s and got the car?”

  “Yeah, then I went back to bed.”

  “I can’t believe I slept through all that.” But Mark is not listening. He’s shepherding Cole into the back seat of Caitlin’s enormous Ford Explorer. I’ve noticed an inverse correlation between the size of the woman and her SUV in D.C., and birdlike Caitlin is no exception.

  I get into my own car and watch them drive away, a fluttering panic in my rib cage. Everything feels off, and my anxiety is spiking. I miss Cole already, and the thought that Caitlin is taking Mark and my son away from me for good hits me. Irrational. I turn on the engine. The news of Rob Avery’s death has thrown me for a loop, that’s all. And I’m never in a good mood after seeing Caitlin. I try to see her through Mark’s eyes. He knows she’s difficult, but he loves her loyalty and intelligence. He’s told me all these stories about her taking on school bullies on his behalf and of how she stood up to their overbearing father, who thought it was a waste of time for a pretty girl to go to law school. According to Mark, Caitlin also struggled to get pregnant, and her husband refused to do IVF or to adopt. I almost wish I didn’t know these intimate details about her, because then I feel like a jerk.

  But then I remember the things she’s said over the years. During my first visit to D.C. with Mark for Thanksgiving, when I was seven months pregnant, I overheard Caitlin asking her mother in the kitchen, How do we know it’s even Mark’s?

  A rap on the car window startles me, and I look up to see Heather, my next-door neighbor, cranking her hand in the universal roll-down-your-window gesture.

  “Hey, neighbor!” she says, pushing an errant honey-blond strand back into her high ponytail. “Did you hear about what happened over on Arleigh?”

  “Yes, it’s really crazy.” My words are measured, my tone even.

  “Did you know him?” Heather asks.

  The question startles me. Does she know something? “No,” I offer tentatively, trying to remember if I saw Heather at the party last night. She had to have been there. She has two kids at Eastbrook—Sam and Isabella—and from the emails I get, it looks like she is on almost every committee the school offers. Maybe she saw Rob and me talking in the kitchen.

  “Me, neither,” Heather says. “I mean, I knew him to say hi. I’d seen him around, at like the Backyard Pub Crawl and school things, but I didn’t know him know him. So sad. He has a daughter, you know, Tenley, who’s in the fourth grade with Isabella. That poor kid.”

  “Terrible.” Guilt washes over me. I hadn’t even thought of his daughter when I heard the news. But of course, some little girl just lost her dad.

  “Of course, from what I hear, the poor thing basically lives at her mom’s apartment in D.C., and the dad stayed in the Bethesda house so she could go to school in this district.”

  I nod, amazed at the intel Heather has on a man she claims not to know. What does Heather do? I rack my brain and then remember. She handles communications for a senator from Rhode Island. She can sure sniff out a scandal.

  “I wonder what happened,” she muses. “You know, my boss’s brother had a heart attack at forty-five. And he was a marathon runner, super-fit guy.”

  “I have no idea. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Just goes to show you. I mean, we’re at that age, aren’t we? Well, you’ve got a few years to go, but once you hit your forties, it’s nuts. Cancer, heart attacks, strokes. It’s really scary.” Heather winces as her little dog yanks at the leash. “Cut it out, Thurston.” She refocuses her attention on me. “So what are you up to this lovely fall day?”

  “Just visiting my mother.” It comes out more clipped than I’d like, and I immediately regret that. Heather is in my book club, a potential friend, and she’s been nothing but kind to me. A few weeks ago, I came home to see her leaving through my front door. I wondered if I had found some dark side to Heather, but it turns out she was just bringing in some Amazon packages that were getting rained on, using the spare key I had given her for emergencies.

  “So I’ll see you at book club Tuesday?” she asks.

  “See you at book club!”

  She steps back and waves as I pull away. No way, I think. No way am I going to book club. After all, I’ll never finish Disheveled in time, and I’m not sure I’m ready to face a room full of neighborhood women buzzing about Rob Avery’s death. But as I pull onto Western Avenue, I realize I am being silly. No one knows what happened to me last night. And now that Rob Avery is dead, no one ever will. It would be weird not to go to book club. If I am going to make new friends, I need to step up.

  On Connecticut Avenue, I make sure to stay below thirty miles an hour to avoid being caught on one of the many speed cameras. My mother’s assisted living facility is a good thirty-minute drive away. Squinting, I focus on which Beltway entrance to take, since the signs don’t offer clear instruction—one says Baltimore, the other Richmond, which always confuses me. The Beltway is a loop, so you’d arrive at both places eventually if you stayed on it long enough. Which I have. When I first moved here, I found myself doing loops around D.C. after a photo shoot in Alexandria, wondering where the heck to exit.

  The traffic is reasonable, something I am grateful for, since at any moment of any day, the Beltway can come to a standstill.

  I dial Krystle’s number, and soon my sister’s scratchy voice is booming through the speaker in the car. Her voice is sodden in the way it gets when she’s hungover.

  “Late night?” I ask. My mother was only twenty-two when I was born, and she was a huge Dynasty fan. I was named for the raven-haired villainess. Two years later, her second daughter was named after the platinum-blond power wife on the show. This was apparently a source of contention with my father and his family, who, being good Catholics, felt children should be named after saints, not soap opera characters.

  “It’s not even ten o’clock, Allie,” she grumbles. “What the fuck? Oh, shit, sorry. Is Cole in the car?”

  “He’s not. He’s at church with Caitlin and Mark.”

  “Barf.”

  “Be nice, Krys. I’m heading up to see Sharon.”

  “Yes, Madame. I’ll be nice. Hey, did you bring her Dots?” I hear a sharp inhale of breath on the other line, and I can picture my sister inhaling from that little tube she carries everywhere. She and her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Ron, traded in cigarettes for vaping a few months ago.

  “Yes.”

  “And US magazine. Sharon likes US, not People.”

  I glance at the basket next to me. “People, US, Star, In Style. I’ve got them all.”

  “You should have left her where she was. She doesn’t like this new place. We should move her back,” Krystle says without pausing for breath. “Sharon doesn’t need to live in some fancy-schmancy place.”

  I bristle. Every time I think we’ve settled this argument, she brings it up with renewed vigor. Sharon was not the type to scrupulously save for retirement, but she lucked into an inheritance my senior year of high school. A long-forgotten relative left her an old house on the water in Westport, Connecticut, and by renting that out over the years, she’s been able to pay for assisted living.

  It’s the one smart financial move she ever made.

  Only now it looks like selling the place might be the best option.
>
  We haven’t had tenants in four months, and the house requires major repairs. The septic tank needs replacing to the tune of twenty-five thousand dollars, and the roof will need to be replaced in the next year—probably another fifteen grand. We’d have to pull money out of the house to pay for that. Frankly, the whole thing seems like a nightmare, and I’d rather just sell and invest the money. But Krystle freaks out whenever I mention selling.

  “Morningside House is not fancy. It’s what assisted living costs around here.” Krystle never got behind the plan to move our mother down here, but she also never visited Sharon when Sharon was living in Connecticut, even though it was only about an hour from New York City. “Come down and see for yourself.”

  “I mean, I want to come down, but my shifts at the restaurant have changed, and now I don’t have two days off in a row. Did I tell you I got a callback for The Young and the Restless? I’m this close, Allie.”

  “Is that still on the air?” Krystle’s been this close to her big break for about ten years now. I’d hoped that once she turned thirty, she might realize she was not going to become a famous actress. I thought at least she’d get a day job with real earning potential and benefits.

  “Don’t be a bitch. This is a big deal for me.” Even over the phone, I can see that sour look on her face—eyes narrowed, lips pressed together. “Look, it’s not like I don’t want to come,” she wheedles, “but it’s just harder for me.”

  I don’t argue. My sister’s narrative is that things have always been easier for me. In her mind, my scholarship to Overton Prep school is exhibit A in this fundamental unfairness. My hard work versus her hard partying do not play a role in her version of our life. My marrying a lawyer only cemented this belief. I change subjects. I’m not in the mood for an argument that I can’t win. Instead, we chat for the rest of the ride. If she’s in the right mood, Krystle can talk unabated about her life in New York City with the ease and comic timing of a cabaret star. She’s always made me laugh. In fact, that’s pretty much the only thing I can depend on her for.

  Even though Krystle is two years younger than I am, as children, we were often mistaken for twins. I was short for my age, and she was tall. We shared everything: our clothes, our bed, our long, brown hair. But somewhere in high school, our responses to the same circumstances put us on divergent paths.

  We have the same genetics and the same upbringing, but the chaos of our childhood made me cling to stability, while it made Krystle allergic to it.

  I’ll never forget the day—I was in fourth grade—that Krystle and I came home to my mother announcing with great cheer that she was no longer going to work as a receptionist to a local podiatrist, and that we were moving to a small apartment building where she would be the manager. I cried, while Krystle jumped on the sofa with glee that she would get to miss a day of school.

  The apartment-managing stint lasted all of six months. We left that place in a hurry, the building’s owner threatening to sue my mother for some damages that had taken place on her watch. When we packed in the middle of the night, Krystle and my mother giggled like they were Thelma and Louise, outwitting the law. I got a stomachache that lasted a year. Our next stop was a basement apartment near a CPA where my mother worked during the rush of tax season only to be laid off come spring. Krystle loved that Sharon was working late and we were unsupervised, whereas I was visited by nightmares of my mother being abducted on cold, dark March evenings as she walked home from work.

  Rinse and repeat.

  Finally, there is a pause in the conversation, and I fill her in on what happened at the party last night.

  “Wait, so you’re on Tinder now?” she asks.

  “No. That’s not what I said, Krys. The guy said that.” The fact that she has missed this salient point irritates me.

  “I don’t get it, Allie. Why did he think that?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why it’s so crazy.” Her doubting tone irritates me. “But that’s not the point.”

  I hear the gurgle of the coffee machine, and I can picture her in the kitchen of that tiny studio apartment on East Eleventh Street that she moved into ten years ago, with the miniature fridge and sink small enough for an airplane bathroom. “There’s no shame in looking for a little excitement, Allie. I don’t blame you. If I had to live with Mark in the suburbs, I would’ve turned to Tinder a long time ago.”

  “A, that’s not funny. And B, I didn’t turn to Tinder.” I brake and honk at a Volvo that has drifted into my lane at forty miles an hour. “That’s not even the weirdest part. This guy, the one who did this? He died.”

  “Died? What do you mean, died?”

  “I mean stopped breathing. I don’t know how. Could be he fell down the basement stairs, could be a heart attack. I only know that it happened late last night or early this morning.”

  “How do you know?”

  I laugh. “Believe me, in my neighborhood everyone knows everything.”

  “That’s so creepy, Allie. It’s like karma or something. It’s like the universe saw what he did and then, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about this guy. I don’t know why he came onto me like that, and I don’t know what he meant when he told me to stay off Tinder. Do you think he had me confused with someone else?”

  “You know, there are a lot of fake Tinder profiles,” she says. “People set them up to try to get money from suckers.”

  “I’m not on Tinder.” The exit for Damascus comes into view. I’m in rural Montgomery County now, just thirty miles outside D.C., where working farms outnumber office buildings.

  “Maybe you don’t think you are, but maybe there’s a fake profile on you.”

  “So you think there might be a fake Tinder profile of me? And that’s what this guy saw?”

  “Definitely. Happened to my friend Lola.” Confidence has always flowed from Krystle, justified or not. “They took some nude photos of her that she did when she was young and made a fake Tinder account.”

  “Who is they?” I turn onto Flamingo Lane, which curves through open pastures.

  “Umm, hello, the Russians? Do you, like, even read the news? You should check on Tinder and see. I bet it’s some photo they’ve grabbed off some website.”

  “I can’t check. You need to have a Facebook account to look at Tinder profiles, and I don’t want to link mine to it. Can you look into it for me?”

  Through the phone, I hear the scream of an ambulance, and it makes me miss living in the anonymous chaos of a big city. For a moment, I experience a pang of longing, not just for Krystle’s life—which seems so uncomplicated compared to mine—but for the way mine used to be. “Hello, you still there?”

  She takes a loud slurp of coffee. “You want me to search Tinder for your fake account?”

  “Please?”

  “You know there’s an app you can download; it’s for suspicious spouses. I saw it on The Today Show.”

  I swallow a hard sigh. Krystle has always been this way, clever yet resistant to any kind of work, doubly so if it is someone else’s idea.

  “Take a look, please. A fake Tinder account makes more sense than my other theory.” I pull into the Morningside House of Damascus parking lot and find a spot under a large oak tree that has yet to lose its leaves.

  “Why, what was your other theory?”

  “That this Rob guy knew me, from Connecticut.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Well, he called me Lexi.” From the corner of my eye, I see a woman and two children approach the building with a large bouquet of flowers. Flowers. Next time, I will bring Sharon some.

  “That’s weird. Why would he call you Lexi?”

  “I don’t know. I thought, maybe he went to Overton or something? But he’s older, so he wouldn’t have been at school the same time I was.”

  She laughs. “Well, don’t ask me. Older guys were your thing, Allie. Not mine.”

  When I don’t respond, she let
s out a gruff laugh. “Oh, come on, you’re so sensitive, Allie. Learn to take a joke.”

  “I’m here now. Bye, Kris.” I hang up and grab the basket. Everything’s a joke with her. But she’s right that everything that has happened in the last twelve hours has left me feeling sensitive.

  I wait at the front door for the concierge—the facility’s choice of word—to buzz me in. The large foyer is straight out of a new model home, with fancy couches flanking a gas fireplace. But the people on those couches are not fancy or new. Beside the sofas, some sit in wheelchairs or hunch over walkers. Many are still clad in pajamas, hair unkempt. I take a deep breath and push last night’s drama out of my head. I need all my mental energy to steel myself for whatever condition I might find Sharon in.

  On entering her room, the first thing I notice about my mother is that she has lost weight. She’s always been slender, but now her peacock-blue wrap dress, more appropriate for a nightclub circa 1984 than an assisted living facility, falls from her frame like it’s on a hanger, exposing deep clavicles.

  The second thing I notice is the yellowish bruise on her neck.

  10

  I try not to act alarmed as guilt washes over me. She’s been convinced that someone is after her, a concern I had dismissed as dementia. But last week, she had a scratch, and now this. This makes two injuries in two weeks.

  I put the bag of goodies on a table and walk over to the vanity, where she is teasing her thinning champagne-colored hair in front of the mirror.

  “Sharon, what’s going on with your neck?”

  “Oh, this thing? I hate it.” She looks up and catches my eye. Her long fingers flutter to the oval bruise on her slender neck. It’s the exact shape and size of a thumb, as if someone had been trying to take her pulse and pressed way too hard. “I woke up with it. I tried to cover it with makeup, but this concealer is crap. I need the stuff they use on movie sets. Can you get that for me, Alexis? They sell it at Dan’s Beauty Supply.”