The Sullivan Sisters

by Kathryn Ormsbee

  “You’re fourteen,” Eileen said flatly. “Get the hell over it.”

  “But cheese. Cheese that’s fried.”

  Eileen couldn’t tell if Murphy was genuinely whining or trying to be funny. Probably both. She was always putting on a show.

  As Murphy lathered her hands with soap, Eileen glanced in the mirror. Black liner was smudged at the edges of her eyes, and she made quick work of wiping away the excess. That didn’t help her face much. It remained gaunt, cheekbones sharp as a metal frame. Her gaze was dark, shoulders slouched.

  Did she know this version of herself? The one who threw back whiskey before driving her sisters up I-5?

  Was this the face of a goddamn alcoholic?

  Eileen snapped her gaze from the mirror to the sticky tile floor. No. That wasn’t the word for it. Claire’s charge had been bogus. Eileen had been buzzed, maybe, but she hadn’t been driving drunk. And she wasn’t a drunk. Even now, as the need for booze turned her throat to a gaping vortex of liquor-lust, she wasn’t going to call it that.

  But then … why had she pulled off the interstate? Why had she let Claire take the wheel?

  Because she was tired. She hadn’t been up for a fight.

  It wasn’t because she was drunk.

  She was fucking tired. Wouldn’t anyone be at four in the morning?

  Murphy shut off the sink faucet with the back of her wrist, then searched around the bathroom, presumably for a paper towel dispenser. Eileen tapped the dryer she was leaning beside—a white, rusted clunker. In response Murphy wiped her hands on her jeans.

  “What’s the point of those things?” she sighed.

  Then she stopped in front of the bathroom door, looking expectantly at Eileen.

  “What?” Eileen asked.

  Murphy said primly, “My hands are clean.”

  Eileen rolled her eyes and jerked open the door. Murphy could be a real princess—a trait she shared with Claire. Eileen followed Murphy down a convenience store aisle stacked with jerky out to the Caravan. In their absence an attendant had filled the tank using Claire’s dirty bribery money.

  Once everyone was in the van, doors slammed shut, Claire turned to Murphy and asked, “How much do you know?”

  Murphy told them how much, which was basically everything: Uncle Patrick, their inheritance, and the deal Claire had struck with Eileen. Snooping—another thing Eileen’s sisters had in common.

  Claire was pink in the face by the end of it. “You’re staying in this van the rest of the trip,” she commanded.

  Murphy scoffed. “What, do you think bandits are going to drag me off or something?”

  “Maybe I do,” Claire snapped. “We’re going to a town no one’s heard of to see a dead man’s house. We don’t know what to expect, and what we especially don’t need is a little sister to worry about.”

  “I’m fourteen,” said Murphy. “I’m three years younger than you. You always act like it’s a decade.”

  “Maybe because you act like you’re four.”

  “Okay,” Eileen said, dispassionately. “Can we not? Murph, you do whatever the hell you want. Claire, chill out. This is my car, and you’re both here thanks to my mercy, or whatever.”

  “I’m here thanks to my money,” Claire sniffed. “Murphy is deadweight.”

  “Oh my God,” groaned Eileen. “This isn’t the zombie apocalypse. We’re not fording raging rivers, we’re checking out a house. That’s it, okay? And Murph’s right, it kind of sucked that we were going to leave her alone overnight.”

  It did suck. Eileen was realizing that. She’d been so set on going to Rockport, she hadn’t considered the fact that leaving Murphy behind was exactly what Mom had done to the three of them with her cruise. Big surprise: Eileen sucked as a sister. She hadn’t planned on receiving the Best Older Sibling award anytime soon.

  “Yeah,” Murphy piped up. “What’s with that?”

  “You chill out too.” Eileen pointed to Murphy in the rearview mirror. “You got what you wanted: You’re in the goddamn car.”

  Murphy had no reply for that. She sniffed and shrugged.

  “Keys,” Claire said from the driver’s seat. She extended a hand to Eileen, who’d grabbed the keys when they’d parked.

  “I’m fine to drive,” Eileen muttered, not putting her heart into it.

  She was too tired to argue. And that’s what had impaired her driving: tiredness. That had been it.

  Claire clicked her seat belt in place and repeated, “Keys.”

  Rolling her eyes, Eileen produced the keys from her pocket. Rather than hand them over, though, she jammed the car key into the ignition herself. Then, crossing her fingers out of sight, she turned the key just so.

  The car started on the first go, with a full tank of gas.

  One hour till they reached Rockport.

  * * *

  “So, our first sister road trip, huh? Go-see-our-new-house-we-didn’t-know-existed road trip. And after we see the house, we can get cheese curds for breakfast. Claire, you like cheese curds, right?”

  “Those have gluten.”

  “Well, what about Blizzards?”

  “They clog your arteries.”

  “Yeah, that’s why they’re good.”

  “We don’t have time for Dairy Queen.”

  “It’s a road trip. We gotta eat sometime.”

  “It’s not a road trip. It’s … reconnaissance.”

  “What’s the Renaissance got to do with anything?”

  Eileen turned up the radio, chewing viciously on two new pieces of Dubble Bubble. She and Claire fought, sure, but at least they knew how to stay quiet. Murphy? The kid didn’t have a filter. And Claire? She always rose to the occasion.

  “Murph,” Eileen shouted over the music. “You were better as a stowaway.”

  The rearview mirror reflected Murphy’s grin—crooked teeth, no orthodontic intervention. Like Claire’s. Eileen’s were perfectly straight. A waste, since out of the three of them, she smiled the least.

  Eileen glanced at the GPS on Claire’s phone and muttered, “You don’t need that. I know the way.”

  Claire looked at her funny. “What, you have a photographic memory?”

  “Yeah, Claire, maybe I fucking do.”

  “Don’t say ‘fuck’ in front of Murphy.”

  Murphy laughed. The kid had a weird sense of humor.

  “Anyway,” Claire went on, “the phone is more reliable. I’m not risking taking wrong turns in a small town. We could end up someplace bad. It could be like Hawkins, Indiana, for all we know.”

  “Hawkins?” Eileen asked.

  “Indiana. From Stranger Things.”

  “Stranger Things?”

  “Oh my God, Leenie.”

  “What?”

  “You know what Stranger Things is.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, you know what Hawkins is.”

  “Sheesh, Claire, who doesn’t know what Hawkins is?”

  Claire slammed a hand on the wheel, releasing a sharp honk. “You ass!”

  “Hey,” Murphy said. “Don’t say ‘ass’ in front of me.”

  Eileen snorted. Maybe Murphy’s sense of humor was okay.

  Claire appeared to be taking deep breaths. Steadying herself. Calming down. Probably a technique that god-awful YouTube girl had taught her. Eileen didn’t press her. As always, it wasn’t worth the effort.

  * * *

  “It’s raining,” Murphy said a half hour later.

  It was. Featherlight rain was misting the windshield, accumulating enough to warrant the lowest wiper setting. The moon shone on the highway, spilling silver light outward, toward a field of evergreens on the right—a whole forest of Christmas trees.

  “It’s beautiful,” Murphy murmured, dreamily.

  Eileen wondered what it was like to be that person: an Oregonian still in love with the rain. After all the muddy, sunless winters. After so many too-damp springs. To be a person who could say, “It’s beautiful.” Murphy�
�s age was probably to blame. Give her five winters more and maybe, like Eileen, she’d be sick to death of it. Claire was sick of it too, Eileen knew—desperate to get to Yale. They were both over this place.

  It hadn’t always been that way, though. Once, Eileen had been as excited about a new pastel set as Murphy was about her magic tricks. Eileen couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t liked to make art. There were even memories, lodged deep in her mind, of finger painting with Dad. He’d squirted greens and blues on a Styrofoam plate in the kitchen, and together they’d dipped their hands and drawn a school of fish on a flattened Amazon box.

  For her birthdays Eileen had asked only for paints and pencils, cardstock and crayons. Mom had hardly ever bought the right kind. The crayons were waxy, and faint on paper. The paint was cheap, filled with gloopy chunks. The pencils had bad erasers that left behind pink streaks, or worse, tore through paper. Still, they’d been supplies, and Eileen has used them all up. She’d traced animals from old magazines, and she’d filled in every free space of her Dollar Tree watercolor books. She’d mastered the art of outlining and checkering in crayon drawings.

  As she’d grown Eileen had advanced to freestyle. She’d started with little things in the house like tape dispensers and tumblers of orange juice, and then, eventually, moved on to people, like Claire. She’d found tutorials on YouTube, she’d made As in Ms. Kletter’s sixth-grade art class. She’d gotten good at technique.

  Then she’d grown up more, and it was no longer about technique, but expression. Mr. Lee had taught her that freshman year: A piece of art was about more than technical perfection; it was about how it made a person feel. So Eileen had nurtured an obsession with color wheels and spectrums, with the impressionists and modernists, and the umph you felt, like a kick in the throat, when certain colors and shapes grabbed your eye.

  She’d been a true artist—curious since birth, devoted since she could hold a brush. Back then the world had been colored in rainbow hues, the saturation ticked up to the max with optimism. The future had seemed clear: an arts program—maybe even the Myrtle Waugh Fellowship in Eugene—and after that, teaching, and as a side gig, an art shop. And maybe she’d get lucky, and someone important would notice her work, and she’d find herself lauded in galleries in New York.

  It was possible. Anything had been possible then, when she was fourteen. Back then, like Murphy, she’d been in love with the rain.

  The letters had changed that. The letters first, and then the junior art exhibit.

  Now rain was … rain.

  The wipers sliced through it, violently flinging every offending droplet aside.

  The clock on the dash read 4:53 a.m.

  Sleep in heavenly peace,

  Sleep in heavenly peace.

  Frank Sinatra crooned the carol as Claire took the exit for Rockport. The empty countryside turned to rows of weather-worn bungalows. A sign appeared, its letters caught in the Caravan’s headlights:

  WELCOME TO ROCKPORT

  POP. 4,572

  WE MAKE YOU KINDLY WELCOME

  Eileen grimaced as Claire slowed the van.

  “The hell,” she muttered.

  The carved wooden creatures on the sign were bad enough—a mermaid, gesturing toward the town name, a seahorse set among bubbles, a row of shells at the sign’s base. Each was carved with cartoonish proportions, and wind, rain, and salt had worn the paint away to a thin, chipped base. It was the slogan that got under Eileen’s skin: We make you kindly welcome.

  Maybe the greeting was meant to be nice, but to Eileen’s ears it was sinister. Like the townspeople who’d written it had left off the tail end: We make you kindly welcome, and you’ll never leave.

  A chill passed through Eileen.

  “What?” Claire said, glancing over.

  “Nothing.”

  She shook it off as they moved on, kindly welcomed into the town of Rockport. The coastline had become visible, peeking through a line of ocean-facing bungalows. The road sloped upward, forcing Claire to push harder on the gas. The houses grew farther apart, allowing wider views of the water, and then the rocky ground grew so steep the bungalows disappeared altogether. Still, Shoreline Road continued upward. Eileen realized they were making their way up a bluff. The rain was spitting against the van, and Claire notched up the wipers and turned on the Caravan’s brights. At last the incline flattened out, and in the gathering rain, Eileen squinted to make out the street sign ahead: LARAMIE COURT. She scratched through the last of her mental directions: Turn right on Laramie, and the destination will be on your left.

  The destination.

  2270 Laramie Court.

  Claire cut the Caravan’s engine, and the sisters stared ahead.

  The house was bigger than Eileen had imagined. Way bigger than any of the places on the coastline below. It was built in the Victorian style, complete with gables and a wraparound porch. Its two stories were fitted with rows of wide windows, set in splintering, baby blue wood. On the house’s far right side, a domed turret poked out. The house backed up to the coast, its rear windows overlooking the Pacific. The place was dark, deserted. No sign of life. There were no neighbors. This was the only home at the top of the bluff, built amid a small wilderness of rocks and evergreens.

  I had an uncle, Eileen thought.

  For the first time that thought seemed real. Because here she was, in front of a real house. Eileen had an uncle her mom had never told her about.

  Had Mom not told her for a good reason?

  And the secret—had Mom had a reason for keeping that, too?

  Eileen could stop right now. She could force herself into the driver’s seat and head south, away from the coast, back to Emmet. Murphy would whine and Claire would raise holy hell, but Eileen was eighteen and the only one who could inherit. In the end heading home affected her alone.

  Heading inside this house? That affected them all.

  What was waiting for them in there? What had Mr. Knutsen meant by documents? What if Claire or Murphy found something that clued them in to what Eileen had known for two years? The secret. Mom’s secret. A secret that had ruined everything.

  Head back, said a voice in her head. Eileen wasn’t sure if it belonged to fear or better judgment. Some days those two sounded exactly alike.

  Head back to what? said another, sturdier voice. Your drafty bedroom. Your boozy nights. Your empty drawing desk.

  The thumping began anew in Eileen’s chest, beating beneath her leather jacket:

  Ch-change, ch-change, ch-change.

  Eileen yanked the keys from the ignition. She pocketed them and opened the passenger door, resolved.

  She had an uncle named Patrick Enright, and she was about to break into his house.

  ELEVEN Claire

  Leenie. Leenie … Eileen!”

  Now that Claire was here, parked in front of her inheritance, her insides were turning graceless pirouettes. The sight of the house had cemented Claire to the seat, causing her jaw to unhinge like a Halloween skeleton’s.

  Claire wasn’t sure what she’d expected from 2270 Laramie Court. A weathered farmhouse, maybe, or a slipshod starter home. A double-wide with a chicken wire fence. What else could you expect from a house in small-town Oregon? Those were the everyday homes Claire saw in Emmet.

  Not here, though.

  Rockport wasn’t a mere small town, but a coastal one, bordered by vast ocean. And this house, while it wasn’t Downton Abbey, certainly wasn’t slipshod. It was two stories of imposing bulk, outfitted with a glimmering, domed turret. This house intimated history, money, and class.

  One might say it was an Exceller of homes.

  The overwhelming revelation of the place—that’s why Claire had first been insensible to the fact that Eileen had taken the keys and was out of the car, approaching the front door. Then clarity had struck Claire across the face.

  This house wasn’t theirs yet. Eileen would have to square away legal matters with Mr. Knutsen. There were papers to be signed, no
doubt, and important conversations to be had. Claire herself wouldn’t inherit until next September. So what on earth had she meant to do here?

  Claire always had a plan. Always. But tonight she’d acted on impulse, desperate for a scrap of hope: lemonade that would make sense of the lemons. Her golden moment. Now, what were they supposed to do next? They couldn’t just break into the house.

  Though that seemed to be exactly what Eileen had in mind.

  “Eileen, stop!” Claire yelled through the open passenger door.

  Claire knew Eileen heard her. She didn’t stop, though, and she didn’t turn around. She kept walking ahead. Is she in a trance? Claire thought irritably, ignoring the fact that she’d recently been in one herself.

  Then she heard a noise from the back of the van: another door opening, shoes hitting gravel. A moment later Murphy was passing in front of the windshield, a jogging blob of a purple puffer coat.

  “Murphy!” Claire shouted. “I told you to stay in the van!”

  Murphy waved without looking back. She might as well have been giving Claire the finger.

  “Unbelievable,” muttered Claire, throwing open her door and stepping into the night.

  Eileen had reached the front porch and was taking the steps slowly, studying her feet as she moved, as though inspecting the wood’s integrity.

  Could be rotting, Claire thought. Magnificent as it is, the entire house could come crashing down.

  Sudden panic burst in Claire’s chest, and she broke into a run, moving fast enough to catch up with Murphy and grab her by the arm.

  “Hey—ow!” Murphy yelped, tugging away.

  Claire held firm. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Uh, checking out the house. What are you doing?”

  Murphy’s intonation could only be classified as sassy. Claire ignored her, looking ahead.

  “Leenie,” she whisper-shouted.

  Eileen, still unresponsive, had moved her inspection of the porch to the front door. Claire stomped up the steps, hauling Murphy along. There, she got a good look at the situation. Eileen was turning the door handle left, then right. When it didn’t give, she shook it violently.