by Kris Radish
At Emma’s garage, Debra grabs Emma’s house keys from her and lurches for the back door, saying, “I need a frigging glass of wine.”
Big shock there, Emma whispers as she hears Debra shout into her cell phone to Kevin, “No! We haven’t found her yet but we are getting warm. Do not let the girls go out! I’ll be home when I get there.”
God, she’s sweet. What in the world happened to her? When did this sister and the other one who lives way too close to me get to be bitter, overbearing, curt, only occasionally kind women? Kevin, Emma imagines, must have had his little penis yanked off about ten years ago. It’s a wonder he’s not the drinker in the family, but it’s also a wonder he hasn’t smothered Debra in her sleep. Except he seems to genuinely love her. Go figure, Emma laments. No wonder I’m not in a successful relationship. I clearly know nothing about having one.
There is no note on the counter from Marty and lest she fall any further into the mysteries of her increasingly nasty sister’s life, Emma decides to check her own cell phone for messages while Debra uncorks the only bottle of wine in the house.
There is a parade of messages from work, one sweet voicemail from Stephie telling her that when Emma gets old and can’t take care of herself she can count on Stephie as long as she takes her to some more cool places and can forgive her.
Zip from Grandma.
Zero from the Higgins sex slave.
Not a thing from the Gilford Family Matriarch.
Then there is a panicked lunge for the old phone machine when Debra reaches for it because Emma suddenly comes out of her lost-mother coma and remembers what is on the machine. Amazingly, Debra does not spill one drop of wine as she reaches the machine first, pushes the New Messages button and stands back with one hand on her hip. Emma pours herself a glass of wine that she realizes she is going to need because of what is coming next.
There are three telemarketer calls, which piss off Emma who has tried without success to understand how you can be on the Do Not Call list and still get calls for everything from life insurance to refinance offers.
You would think that the call from Marty would be the most important one the two sisters discover. The call that sort of explains everything. The call that goes like this:
“Honey. Hi. It’s Mom. The most wonderful thing has happened—I’m on my way to an island in the Caribbean. I’m with one of my special friends and he’s paying for the whole thing and I had just one hour to get ready and go and well, I just didn’t have time to call your sisters. I’ll be home in a week or so, if I come home at all, just kidding. Please don’t worry, Emma. I’m safe and happy and I will try and call but don’t count on it. Love you. Love to all.”
But this was not the biggest news. The biggest bombshell on Emma’s answering machine was not the message that their mother had taken off suddenly to an island in the middle of the ocean with some guy that they either didn’t know or did know and who had not revealed his true intentions.
The biggest bombshells were the other two phone messages. The ones Emma has not been able to bring herself to erase.
Samuel’s two messages.
Both Emma and Debra listen to them without moving. Their wineglasses are glued to their lips. Emma for sure is not breathing. Debra is trying to remember how to breathe. They are both staring at the phone machine as if there is a chance it may spontaneously burst into flames.
When the two messages end, Debra looks up first and into Emma’s eyes. Emma cannot bring herself to look away. She cannot lie. When the questions come she knows she will tell the truth. The truth has been a long time coming.
“Was that my Samuel?” Debra asks, her jaw wedged so tightly that Emma fears that it will shatter against her wineglass.
“It was a long time ago. You were gone. You were already dating Kevin. It just happened, Debra. It was a mistake.”
“A mistake,” Debra repeats.
“You heard me,” Emma says, trying to sound brave.
Debra turns slowly, like they do in the movies just before something terribly important happens. Then, very deliberately, she throws what is left of her wine into Emma’s face and says, “Fuck you, Emma Gilford. Just fuck you,” and runs out the back door.
11
THE ELEVENTH QUESTION:
What in the hell is going on around here?
THERE ARE STILL WINE SPLATTERS on Emma’s kitchen floor when the back door flings open and sister Joy, who has not bothered to knock or shout a warning about her forthcoming appearance, barges in and asks in a voice that is decibels above loud, “What in the hell is going on around here?”
Emma does not look up when Joy storms into the kitchen like a terribly severe late spring rainstorm, slamming the back door behind her and making a sound like a fat dog that has just dropped to the floor and prays it will never have to get up again. Her hands move without hesitation, slowly pouring what Joy assumes is some evil liquid, slowly and so precisely into a mysterious container. Joy has to say, quite firmly, “I asked you a question.”
Emma does not answer.
“Are those drugs or something? For crying out loud, Emma, what in the hell is going on around here?”
The procedure is almost finished when Emma sets down one container, taps the tall cylinder that she filled with her fingertips, holds it up to the light, and makes small circling motions with it as if there is an invisible hula hoop around the top that she needs to balance. Only then does she finally look into Joy’s eyes.
What would Joy think if Emma really did tell her what was going on? What if she just told her about Samuel, and how she has totally screwed up the reunion, and how her relationships with all three of her sisters are in freefall, and what if she said she was terrified because their mother has changed so much? What if she said that her heart was filled with uncertainty and that what she really would like is for Joy to sit down and just talk to her like a real girlfriend, like a real sister?
But Joy’s eyes are bloodshot and she looks as if she has not slept in ten years and she now appears even thinner than she did at brunch, so Emma cannot bring herself to confess any of these things. They have both agreed to stop talking about Stephie’s serious lapse in judgment that resulted in the drunken party. This only after Emma has listened to her sister chastise her as if she were a baby for falling prey to Stephie’s lie. Because of this she can especially not now tell her about Stephie’s life dreams or that Erika has finally contacted her only to say, “Emma, do not do a thing. I’m working on straightening out this mess you’ve made of the reunion. Do nothing,” and then hung up.
Emma would so love to know what in the hell is going on around here herself and until she looked into her sister’s sad eyes she was going to try having a normal conversation with her. But that apparently will not work out either.
“Emma, are those drugs or something? What are you doing? Debra tells me you have flipped your lid and I don’t even want to know what kind of trouble you got into with Stephie. What is wrong with you?” Joy whines.
What is wrong with me? Emma wonders for a few seconds what Joy would do if she asked her to sit down so she could properly address that question. For starters, she’d say, I let you walk right in here as if you owned the place. Polite people knock, you big dip. My mother has run off with a stranger and for some insane reason everyone blames me. I wasn’t even there and the evidence in her bedroom suggests she took off with some local Casanova, whom no one has met, but who wears a thong that would fit King Kong. Our sister Debra, who I now dislike almost as much as I dislike you, has finally found out that I had an affair with her ex-boyfriend, who is—from the look of the wine stains—someone she still carries a torch for after all these years. We are all going to be in deep shit soon because I am woefully behind in the GFR planning, which Mother probably assumes we—and we almost always means just me—are handling while she has vanished with the thongman. Since Stephie went back to you all I want to do is hide in my garden. It’s like someone cast a spell on me and I am
powerless to fight it. I called in sick yesterday. I get up in the middle of the night and pick dead buds off the new flowers and I sketch gardens that belong on estates somewhere that is not anywhere near Higgins. And now here you stand shouting at me as if I am in control of the world and what I’d love to do is just sit here quietly in my garden and think about what I can plant in midsummer.
But she says none of these things. What she does say is about as normal as a conversation gets with anyone even halfway related to a Gilford.
“First of all, Joy, stop yelling, for God’s sake. I’m standing right here. These are plant nutrients and in order for them to work I have to balance them perfectly.”
Joy looks from Emma back to the bottles and jars clustered on the table and then back to Emma.
“You work in human resources,” Joy reminds her. “For crying out loud, this house, your yard, it looks like a garden shop half the time.”
“I like gardening,” Emma explains, her voice quivering with emotion.
Joy is totally distracted now. She trails Emma outside without saying another word.
Then there are at least five minutes of blessed silence when Emma kneels down as if she is in front of an altar, gently caresses a group of flowers with wilting, deformed, brown buds that might be weeping if they could actually do that, and not so much pours as anoints the stems with the magic potion she has just concocted in her kitchen.
Joy is spellbound. She watches Emma like a medical school student might watch a great surgeon remove a heart and replace it with a new one. Emma’s fingers dip the brown, seemingly half-dead buds into her potion again and again. She is precise, patient, extraordinarily focused, and Joy, thank heavens, has the good sense not to say another word until Emma sits back on her heels, rotates her neck from side to side to release the tension, and places the container on the ground.
“There,” Emma declares. “If this works I may want to get some kind of patent on this because it will blow Miracle-Gro off the shelves.”
“What is it?”
“If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m serious.”
“Really?”
“Totally. I’ve been working on this for a long time.”
“Gee, Emma, I never knew all of this. I thought you were just, like, futzing around back here because … Well.”
Emma imagines what Joy wants to say and almost, just almost, does not want to hear it because she is beginning to realize that her entire life has been running on the leaking fumes of assumptions.
“Don’t be mad, Emma, but I thought you focused on your plants because you’re not married, and you rarely date, you know? I guess, well, sometimes I think we don’t know very much about each other anymore.”
Joy gets up. She walks carefully between the rows of flowers and she sits down close to Emma’s bent knees, right where Emma’s feet might be if she stretched them out from under her body. Emma prepares herself for some kind of physical or verbal assault.
Emma can count on one hand the number of intimate and emotional moments she has shared with her seemingly switched-at-birth oldest sister during the past twenty-five years.
Sisters should be more than just passing acquaintances at family gatherings, even if there is a thirteen-year age difference between them. Sisters should be open, and not demanding, and stop and listen to each other, and be kind and caring. They shouldn’t drink so much and yell at each other. There should be give-and-take and not what seems to be a distance the size of fifty Grand Canyons between them.
Emma now is certain that either her or Joy’s Moment of Possible Salvation has passed and she is about to get blasted for exposing her niece to the underbelly of life during the past week.
“Well?” Emma asks impatiently, wanting her penance to begin. “You asked me what in the hell is going on around here. Why did you storm my fort?”
Joy is surely not used to quiet emotional encounters. Somehow she has turned into one of those extraordinarily obnoxious life coaches whose main job is to humiliate, scorn, frighten, and generally intimidate everyone she comes into contact with. Joy Gilford who once upon a time managed to win the heart of nice guy Rick, a handsome but extremely quiet lout, who has always deferred to his wife, who has rarely spoken up to defend his sisters-in-law, or his own children, and who has been disappearing physically and emotionally more and more as the years have passed. Emma cannot remember the last time she had a conversation with Rick.
Emma feels her heart pick up speed as Joy lifts her head and starts to talk.
“I was coming over here to talk to you about Stephie,” Joy begins, “because I know she told you I get jealous. I was also going to yell at you again for the party mess. Maybe it’s the plants or talking nice like this, but I think I want to talk about something else.”
Emma is too astounded to reply. What in the holy hell? Joy wants to have a real conversation? She wants to sit in the yard and talk with me? Maybe I should just confess, she thinks, and get it over with.
“Let me explain about the club and college and whatever else Stephie might have shared with you,” Emma begins.
Joy’s head shoots up as if someone has hit her in the center of her spine with an ax.
“What are you talking about?”
“Never mind,” Emma stutters, stunned.
Joy, surprisingly, lets it go.
“Whatever it is, it’s okay,” she says, to Emma’s astonishment. “I was out of line to yell at you and question the fact that you could take care of Stephie. For crying out loud, she should be your daughter. I have no idea what I am doing.”
Here is when Emma really wants to snort the few drops of what is left of her plant medicine. She wants to lie back on the small lush tract of grass she has planted in between this wide row, hold the funky cylinder to her lips and lick the minerals and vitamins and the secret concoction of herbs she ordered from Mexico so that she can levitate herself right out of her own backyard and into orbit.
“Joy, you know I love Stephie so much even when she’s a little shit,” Emma manages to say, wondering as she says it what in the world will come out of Joy’s mouth next.
Joy doesn’t pause. When she speaks it’s as if something inside of her is pushing the words out and she has no control over what she is saying. She speaks so fast and what she says is so astounding that Emma leans forward and almost touches her sister’s forehead with her own because she doesn’t believe what she is hearing.
“Emma, there’s no other way to say this but I think … not think … really I know … Rick is having an affair.”
For a moment so brief it might be impossible to measure it, Emma shuts her eyes, and behind her eyelids sees nothing but the aqua blue ocean she has dreamed about on some unknown tropical island over and over again for what now seems like years and decades. But when she opens her eyes she sees that Joy has started to cry.
“Oh, Joy, how do you know?” Emma asks as she sits forward to place her hand on Joy’s arm. She wonders why Joy is confiding in her and not with her soul sister Debra.
Rick, Joy tells her, has a non-traveling job, but he’s always going somewhere. He’s started working out and never has any gym clothes to wash and he’s gone a lot of the time.
Rick is absent.
She knows, Joy shares, because they have not had sex in almost two years.
She knows because before that he stopped parenting. He just let it all go and says, “Ask your mother,” and always leaves the room.
She knows because he stopped showing up for Bo’s athletic games and when he does show up he sits quietly or text messages—someone.
She knows because during spring break he said he had to work two extra days and he met them at the beach house late.
She knows because a wife knows.
She knows, finally, because for the past six weeks Private Detective Joanne Watson from Charleston has been tailing Rick and unless Jennifer, a nurse from the hospi
tal, is really an undercover agent trying to recruit Rick for counterintelligence operations, she’s been screwing his brains out at hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, and in several cars all over South Carolina and a few states south, east, west and north.
If you could pick six things that Emma Gilford thought she would never hear, and a person she thought she would never hear them from, this moment with Joy would bolt right to the top of that list. A random lightning strike, a message inside of a bottle rolling into Charleston Bay with her name on it, the cancellation of the family reunion, or a row of ducks speaking Greek in her backyard are more likely than this moment.
No wonder her sister looks like hell.
“Joy, I don’t know what to say.”
“You are the first person I’ve told. I came over here to tell you Stephie is my daughter and not yours and then I saw the way you were touching those plants and I realized that I don’t really know who you are.”
“You know me,” Emma says in a voice that has parked itself halfway down her throat so it sounds as if she can barely speak at all.
“No, I don’t, Emma. And you don’t know me. We pick on each other at all those goddamn family things we have to go to and we chitchat like neighbors over a fence, but we really don’t know each other. No. And do either one of us really know Mom? Apparently not.”
This, Emma realizes, is why, and when, people would stand up and cry “Holy shit” and then stand speechless while they wait for the Gift of Tongues.
If only she could move.
If only she could breathe or think or stand up or know what to do next.
If only she could take another bottle, mix something up inside of it, and pour it down her sad sister’s throat to make everything better.
The next few moments of silence are so exhausting it is a miracle that Emma can get up, put her hand out, say “Come with me,” and walk her shaking sister to the wicker swing on the back porch.
Emma orders Joy to sit until she comes back, and when she returns she has some stress tea, sweetened with honey and two fresh mint leaves that Emma plucked off her nest of herbs growing right next to her kitchen sink.