The Wrong Sister

by Caroline Leavitt

  “Well,” Danny said. He stood up. Beautiful and naked, so easy in his own skin, Sadie couldn’t help but admire him.

  She listened to the water in the shower. One of them had to stand as lookout, otherwise she would have just gone in there with him. Sadie tapped her fingers on the glass. She bent and picked up Danny’s denim shirt and held it to her face. It felt as if a whirlpool had formed within her, spinning deeper inside. She put the shirt down, dazed. She picked up his pants and his wallet flew out. She knew she shouldn’t. What kind of a girl was she? Didn’t she trust him? She opened the wallet. A stick of gum. A driver’s license with his blurry face. And a piece of paper. Evelyn, it said, 666-4577. Sadie felt sick. She went over to the phone and called. A girl answered. “Hello?” she said, and Sadie hung up. When Danny came out, his hair slick like a seal, his face sunburnt, Sadie was crying.

  “Did I miss something?” Danny said, puzzled.

  “Evelyn.”

  “Who’s Evelyn?”

  “She’s no one.”

  He looked around. “Why would you even say that name?”

  “You had her name on a piece of paper. It—it fell out of your wallet when I was picking your things up.”

  He sighed. “Sadie, I want you to come home.”

  He cupped her chin in his hands. He kissed her. “I’ll call you tonight,” he said, and then Sadie made a decision. “I’m coming home,” she said.

  She was sprawled on the couch reading when her parents came back in. “You missed a wonderful day,” Louise said.

  “I’m going home,” Sadie blurted. She stood up. “I’m going to take the train. I hate the beach. I hate the sun. No one else my age has to take vacations with their family.” She looked at Louise. “You said if I stayed the week, I could go home. We agreed.”

  “You’re staying here,” Bill said.

  Sadie shook her head. She looked at Louise. “You said if I had a bad time—”

  “Sadie—” Louise said, wearily. “Can’t you just stay?”

  “You are staying. I’m your father and I say you’re staying.”

  Sadie turned around, grabbing her purse, and headed for the door. “My father!” she cried angrily.“I’m going.”

  And then Louise was suddenly crying, suddenly grabbing for Sadie’s arm. “Don’t leave me here with him,” her mother whispered, and Sadie walked out the door.

  Sadie wasn’t sure where she was going. She had $10 in her pocket, and she jabbed her thumb out to hitch, but the only people who picked her up were a woman who scolded her for hitching and a guy who wanted to know if Sadie knew what fellatio meant. He smiled at her, clean scrubbed, friendly. “It means I call the cops,” Sadie told him, and he peeled to a stop. He leaned across her, making her stiffen,but all he did was pull up the button and jerk open the door. “Get out,” he said, still smiling.

  There was no place to go but the beach. She’d think what to do. Maybe she’d hitch.

  Maybe she’d get to the Greyhound Station and have enough to get somewhere. The beach was cold and dark and deserted. Kind of spooky, she thought. And then she heard a car slowing behind her.Great. The fellatio guy coming back to show her what he meant. Some other pervert. Some maniac. Well,she was in no mood to take anything from anybody. Sadie jammed up her third finger. She kept walking along the road and then she heard someone speak.

  “Sadie.” Her name pulled like a hook deep in her throat. “Sadie.” Sadie turned and there was her father in the car, and he was crying, his face crumpling. It was the first time she had ever seen him weep. It pinned her in place. “Please,” he said. “Please get in, Sadie. Oh God, please.”

  He started to put his head on the wheel and then looked back at her. His face was streaked with tears. Sadie got into the car. He turned the motor off. He swiped one hand across his eyes. “I thought you had gone.” His voice sounded different to her. “I didn’t know what to do.” His shoulders shook. His eyes were so swollen they were pin dots. He touched her and Sadie jolted back. “You’re all I have.”

  “You have Mom.”

  He shook his head. “I never had your mom.” He swiped at his eyes. “Your mother has no use for me. She never did. You think I don’t know that?”

  Sadie looked at him, shocked. Her side of the door was unlocked. She could jump out again. All she had to do was put her hand on the door and turn it. All she had to do was move one leg after the other.

  “You said I don’t know anything about you,” her father said. “But do you know anything about me? Did you know I wanted to be a doctor? That my father said fine, pay for it yourself. Did you know that? I tried to. I went to work, I saved, but I couldn’t make enough to do more than go to community college and be a salesman. Did you know I suffered, too?” He looked at her. “Don’t you love me? I know I’m not your mother’s dream. I’m not the doctor I wanted to be. If you say I’m not your father, then what am I?”

  He pulled her against him. She felt herself stiffen.

  “Your mother said if I couldn’t find you she would divorce me. She said I couldn’t expect her to be in the cottage if you weren’t with me.” He kissed Sadie’s face, her chin, the tips of her fingers.

  “She wouldn’t leave.”

  “She got the suitcase out.” He held Sadie’s hand in his right hand, and with his left, he snapped on the radio. A peppy tune chirped on. “You like this song?” he said hopefully. His grip tightened.

  She had never heard it before. It sounded like an advertising jingle to her. “Sure. Sure I

  like it.”

  “See? Now I know something about you. I know you like this song. And you know something about me. That I like it, too. Now we know something about each other. It’s something to build on, isn’t it?”

  He was staring at her, pinning her in place. Sadie nodded.

  “Do you want to talk more? Is there anything else you’d like to know?”

  “No.” All the questions she had ever had about him folded back like a row of dominos. “Well,then, let’s head back.” He smiled at her. He stroked her face.

  On the drive home, he had one hand on the steering wheel, the other clasping her hand, tightly, as if he’d never let go. She sat as closely to him as she did with Danny. He parked in front of the cottage and ran around to her side to open the door, and as soon as she stepped out, he put his arm about her shoulders. His grip was tight. He was standing so close she could hear him breathe. He guided her back into the cottage, matching his steps to hers.

  Inside, Louise’s suitcase was open in the middle of the room. It was almost packed, blouses and swimsuits crammed in, shoes, and when Louise strode into the room, Bill pulled Sadie closer to him. “Everything is just fine now,” he said boisterously. Sadie couldn’t have moved even if she had wanted to. Sadie saw the look on Louise’s face, an expression that struck her like a slap. Trapped. Louise was trapped. Sadie had given her a way out by leaving. And Sadie had betrayed her by coming back.

  That evening, they went to dinner at Thompson’s Clam Bar, the place Louise had been trying to convince Bill to go to all week. Bill ordered wine and they all clinked glasses and no one talked about anything. When Bill got up to go to the bathroom, Sadie leaned toward her mother. “Are you mad I came back?” she said.

  Louise looked at her.

  “I didn’t know what else to do—” Sadie said.

  “Why would I be mad? I was worried sick about you.” Louise looked away, down at her plate, at the left-over lobster.

  Sadie pushed her plate away from her. The lobster looked suddenly glutinous. “You could still leave.” She made her voice low, as if she were telling a secret she didn’t dare have anyone else know.

  Louise laughed. “You think it’s so easy?” she said, and then there was Bill, sitting down, and Louise seemed focused on something else now: her lobster, the napkin, the waiter. “Who wants dessert?” Bill said. He looped one arm about the back of Sadie’s chair, one arm around the back of Louise’s. “Let’s all get some
.”

  They drove back to the cottage, the radio on, Bill and Louise talking about the beach, the weather, the things they might do the next day. Sadie pretended to doze. As soon as they got to the cottage, she yawned loudly. “I have to go to sleep,” she said. She kissed Louise. She kissed Bill and then she sat in her room, listening, trying to hear what they were talking about, and then after a while, the cottage was silent.

  She couldn’t sleep. She quietly got up and went outside, walking to the payphone by the beach. She squinted at her watch. It was 2:00 a.m., but she had to call Danny.

  “Yes?” A woman’s voice, soft with sleep.

  Danny’s mother, Sadie thought, and it suddenly struck her that in all the time she and Danny had been going together, she had never met her.

  “No. No, this is Sadie.”

  “Sadie?”

  “Sadie London. His girlfriend.”

  Danny’s mother was quiet for a minute. “What’s the matter, Sadie?”

  “Please.” Sadie couldn’t help it. She started to cry. She sluiced at her tears with her

  fingers.

  Danny’s mother sighed. “Don’t make this a habit,” she said, and then there was the clunk of the phone and silence and then Danny got on, his voice slow and heavy.

  “Hello?” he said, and Sadie burst into fresh tears. Please, she wanted to say. She wanted to tell him about her parents, to tell him how lonely she was, but instead her mouth just opened; it had a life all its own. It said what it wanted.

  “Who was Evelyn?”

  “Sadie, do we have to do this now? Can’t this wait?”

  “Look, I love you.” Her own words shocked her. “If you can’t handle it, tell me now. We can just forget everything.”

  He was silent. She could hear his breath moving through the wires. What have I done?

  She thought.

  “Say it!” She screamed. “Just be honest!”

  There was silence again. She heard something clicking through the wires. She’d hang up the phone, she’d walk right into the sea and hope for sharks. Or maybe she’d just hitch to New York.

  “OK,” he said.

  “What, OK,” she said wearily.

  “I love you.” His voice was quiet. “OK, I love you.”

  “What?”

  “I love you.”

  “And you’ll stop seeing Evelyn?”

  “Evelyn who?” he said.

  Sadie hung up the phone. Her heart was racing. She couldn’t catch her breath. She turned and kept walking, to the beach. No one was there. The sand felt gritty. The water looked black. She thought of the movie Jaws, the first time she had seen it. There was a whole media blitz about it in Boston. Some theaters said right in their ads that they were going to hire ambulances to wait outside for customers who might faint, the same way they had for the opening of The Exorcist. She had gone to the movie alone. Before it even started, someone had run out screaming and the woman next to her had laughed and said, “That’s a good sign.” Sadie had watched Jaws with her feet up on her seat. She hadn’t gone to the beach all the rest of that summer. She had been so terrified Louise had called up a marine biologist friend of hers and put him on the phone with Sadie. “Sharks don’t act like that. That’s the movies,” he assured her.“Oh.” Sadie pretended to believe him.

  She walked to the water, let it lap at her toes. A shark would be a huge white flash under all that water. You could disappear in ways no one could even imagine. She kept walking. She sat down, close to the waves. She thought about all the ways a family could configure, how you could spend your whole life just wanting to get out from under.

  And then, she remembered this one time. She was six, her buttery curls flying about her head, untamed, playing a game with Louise. They ran around and around the house, racing out the front door and back again through the back door, zooming through the messy kitchen, the dining room where the breakfast dishes still sat, the living room with Louise’s fashion magazines scattered across the floor.Nothing cleaned up. “Run!” Louise called, her voice a challenge. Sadie ran, tumbling and bolting up, scampering, the two of them laughing harder and harder. Stamping their feet, making a mess. “Run!” Sadie screamed. And then Louise zoomed out the door, and Sadie banged into the front door, smashing it into a million pieces. Everything went still. Glass sparkled across the front steps, through the front lawn. Sadie kept her head down. She clapped her hands over her ears, waiting.

  And then Louise laughed, a bright bell. “Don’t touch anything,” she said, and she crouched down. She cleaned up the glass herself. She called a glass man to come and fix the door, and by the time Bill came home, he hadn’t even noticed that anything was different, not even that the glass looked cleaner.Sadie waited, but Louise didn’t say a word. Instead, when Bill was plunking down in the big brown chair by the window, leaning over to untie the shoes he hated, Louise winked broadly at Sadie. It was funny, but every time after that, every time Sadie passed the glass door, she remembered the chasing game. She remembered Louise’s wink. The bright chiming bell in her laugh.

  Sadie stood up. In a few hours, this beach would be mobbed again. Families. Lovers. Kids. Louise and Bill. And Sadie. She shucked off her shirt, her shorts, everything but her panties and bra, and then she ran into the water. She swam. Sharks or no sharks. Danny was coming again. They’d make love. He’d say sweet things, and maybe, if she was lucky, she’d believe them.

  In the end, Sadie was right. It was the last vacation. The week before Danny was to leave for MIT, a girl named Betsy called her up and told her she was Danny’s new main squeeze and had been for months. Why couldn’t Sadie leave him alone? Why couldn’t Sadie see how desperately

  Danny wanted to be free?

  “Why couldn’t you just tell me?” Sadie asked Danny, and he shrugged, embarrassed, and that was that. He went off to MIT and she went off to high school. She left early and came home late, and at night, she always said she had studying. Weekends, she had papers. Nothing changed in her family. The only change was that every time she looked at her parents, she knew what was keeping them in place, and it was too big a responsibility.

  When Sadie went to college, she went to Stanford, as far away as she could get, and she found reasons not to come home. Summer school. An internship. New boyfriends, none of which ever worked out. She came home every Christmas, every May, just for a week, and every time she did, Louise had a million things planned, and Bill said hello and then went into his garden.

  Sadie sat in the kitchen, watching Louise peeling the skin from a chicken before she cooked it. “Fat,” Louise said, tossing out the skin. “Your father’s blood pressure has hit the roof. We eat like Spartans these days. The days of Cape Cod lobster dinners are over.”

  Sadie told Louise about a woman her mother’s age who was taking classes, going for a new degree. She told Louise how a friend of hers had seen Louise’s photo and exclaimed about her beauty.“Isn’t that nice,” Louise said.

  “You could do that,” Sadie said and Louise rolled her eyes. “Don’t start with me, please,” Louise said.

  “Are things better? Are you happy?”

  Louise laughed again. “Oh, to be young again,” she said, “and believe in everything being possible.”

  Sadie spent all her time at home crazy to get away, but as soon as it came time to leave, she felt herself coming undone. It hurt her the way Louise looked so tired. It hurt her the way her father, even on his special diet, seemed to be putting on weight. She hadn’t even left and already she missed them, but it maybe it wasn’t them she missed, maybe it was just the idea of them, the idea of family. She got back to her dorm room and flopped on the bed, depressed. She thought about her father, thought about the divorce/car wreck game she used to play, and then panic set in. What if there really was a car wreck? What if something really happened? She bolted up from her bed. She didn’t have a boyfriend. She didn’t have a best friend at school. She couldn’t make the right connections, not the ones that stuc
k. She was alone in the world. She thought of her father saying, “if I don’t have you, what do I have?”

  She got up and grabbed a sheet of paper. She drew little hedgehogs on it, a summer garden sprouting from the margins. “Hi Daddy,” she wrote. “I just wanted to tell you I love you and miss you!” And then before she could change her mind, she mailed it.

  A week later, she called home and Bill answered. “Did you get my letter?” she asked. “Oh yes,” he said. “Very nice.” There was a silence. “Oh, here’s your mother,” he said.

  “She wants to speak to you.”

  That night, she got out her watercolor paper, $2 a page, and painted a garden of Eden. She put in Adam and Eve and the serpent, too. She gave him blue eyes and a bright red tongue. She wrote a one-page letter to her father. “We should have dinner together when I get home, just the two of us. We could talk.” She mailed it to Bill. She put on a return address so it wouldn’t

  get lost. “Did you get my card?” she asked when she called, and he said yes, as if it were the most usual thing in the world.

  She began sending him more and more cards, each one more elaborate than the last. She bought special watercolors from France, she bought sable brushes and a rapidograph and handmade paper with blue threads running through it. She felt guilty and made some for Louise, who gushed and carried on and called the moment the cards arrived. Finally, Sadie asked Louise,

  “Does Daddy look at my cards?”

  “Of course he does, honey,” Louise said. “Does he say anything?”

  “Oh. You know your father,” Louise said. “What does he say about anything?”

  Sadie was a senior in college when the call came. Stroke. In the garden, releasing a mail- order praying mantis Bill had special ordered, just as Louise was calling him in for the special nonfat healthy meal she had prepared for them, the no-fat dessert. Sadie flew home for the funeral.