by Roz Nay
Chase is in marketing for our local ski hill, Powderkeg. More often than not, he’s the face of all the promotional advertising—the billboards, the website, the commercials—but I can never keep up with which west coast ski resort he’s filming in, or when. Most of his work is November through April, but there’s always the odd shoot in the summer months to preempt the new season. It’s nice to have him around more at this time of year, though. He helps a lot with meal planning.
“We just did some promo shots for next year.” He inspects the wine bottle vaguely. “Inside-outside stuff in Breckenridge. They turned out great. They took a lot of head-and-shoulders shots of me, and the director was really happy.”
“Of course he was. Are you going away again over the summer?”
“No, that should be it now.” Chase cracks the wine and pours a generous portion, sliding the glass across to me. “Downtime.”
“Good,” I say. “I miss you when you’re gone.”
He reaches across the countertop to hold my hand, but I withdraw it—I haven’t had a chance to wash properly yet. If I told him what I’d touched today, he’d be horrified.
His smile falters. “Are you hungry?”
I shake my head. “I have to take a shower first. I have to get this day off my skin.”
“Oh,” he says. There’s a second where I imagine him taking the expensive wineglass back. “I’ve made a new turkey and quinoa dish. It’s paleo. Full of good proteins. But we can hold off. We can eat in, say, twenty or so.” He picks up his knife and begins dicing again, the knife easily severing the tomato’s skin.
“That’d be great.” I take a sip of the crisp wine, then slide off the stool. In the bathroom, I peel off my clothes. Social work makes me want to scrub my entire body with a wire brush every day. I wonder for a moment if Sully feels that way about his job, too. After a quick shower, I head back out, toweling my hair as I enter the kitchen. Through the open bay windows, a chickadee is singing its binary song in the street. That’s when I hear a knock at the door. Chase, tea towel over one shoulder, pauses his chopping.
“Are you expecting someone?”
“No, definitely not.”
I wrap the towel around my neck, then head to the front door and pull it open. I see a face more than anything, the paleness of it stark against dark hair. Long hair, familiar. Blue damaged eyes. Immediately I feel my knees might give out, like I might fall to the ground. I cover my mouth with both hands and stare.
It’s her. It’s Ruth Van Ness. My sister.
RUTH
We all live more than one lifetime in a life. I’ve always thought that. But when Alex opens the door to her fancy loft apartment, her face is still an eight-year-old’s, changed only a little to fit an adult body. She hasn’t lost the freckles or that startled look, as if she’s just been told it’s her week for show-and-tell and she’s forgotten to bring in a toy. She’s willowy and beautiful, though, dark auburn hair, long arms like a ballet dancer’s, and yet there’s a scruffiness to her, a kind of scrappy soul she’s hung on to from childhood. I haven’t seen her for ten years.
“Hello,” I say, clearing my throat. “I thought it was time.”
She doesn’t do anything except gape. It’s possible I’m not a sight for sore eyes; I might not even be welcome. I made a choice a long time ago, and as soon as I made it, I sealed my fate. But none of that matters now.
“Can I help you?” A man who is so physically flawless he must be a model moves in behind her. “Alex, who’s this?”
“My sister,” she says. The words come out as a scrape.
“Seriously?” Model Material swings the door wider, and I see him take in the ragged hem of my sweater. He’s a Gap ad, all pastels and hope. “Well, hi. Wow. Alex always said that—”
“I said you’re not really one to visit, Ruth.” My sister gives him a pointed look. “That’s what I said.”
“I guess it’s been a while,” I say.
“It has.” She pauses and then steps aside, and I move past them both, the smell of the man overpowering, like the cologne counter in a department store. The loft has vaulted ceilings, and everything’s white. I feel I’ve just entered an art gallery and I mustn’t leave a smudge.
“Nice place,” I say, lowering my bag to the floor gently so the contents don’t make a sound.
“Thanks a lot, yeah.” The man glances at Alex, not quite knowing what to do. Then he picks up my bag and hangs it on a coat hook to the side of the door. “I got a great deal on this place. Friends in the right circles. Come in, sit down. Take a load off.”
The way he’s talking, it’s like he knows I’ve been through hell, like he can see it on me. Alex, for her part, looks like she’s been drained of all bodily fluid. The guy urges me to the designer couch, where I perch at the farthest edge of the cushion, frightened to make a dent. Alex lives here? It doesn’t seem like her at all, not like the girl I once knew. None of us talk; we sit. We simply stare. A minute goes by.
“What happened to you?” Alex says finally. Her arms are crossed over her stomach as if my presence makes her physically sick.
I could ask her the same thing—Where have you been for a decade? But I don’t.
She studies me suspiciously with her sea-gray eyes. But it’s a two-way mirror: she’s different—familiar and yet a silhouette of herself—the years she’s spent away from me like a shroud. Maybe I shouldn’t have come here, but what choice did I have? I bought the bus ticket. I got on. I ran away hoping never to look back. And yet now, the past is right in front me.
“You own this place?” I ask, rather than answer her question. “How’s that?”
“I’m sorry.” Model Guy leans out. “I’m Chase Kennedy, Alex’s boyfriend, and this is my apartment. I mean, we live here together. Your … sister and me.” He stretches past Alex with his hand, which I shake limply. I don’t really like his fingers. “And you’re Ruth? Am I getting that right?”
Another glance passes between him and her, one that makes me feel I’m a ghost that’s suddenly begun to haunt. What did she tell him about me?
“Yes. I’m Ruth. I’m Alex’s sister. I always have been.”
“I’m sorry,” Alex cuts in. “But you’ve shown up here rather unexpectedly. This is all kind of a … shock.”
The way she stares at me, it’s pretty clear she doesn’t think it’s the good kind.
Chase tries again. “Are you in town for a while, Ruth? You’re welcome to stay.”
Alex’s back goes ramrod straight. “She probably isn’t. She might not want to.”
Chase looks from her to me and back again, like we’re a tennis game.
“I’ll get out of your hair for a minute and take a shower while you two … chat.” He stands, touching Alex briefly on the arm, searching her face for some kind of explanation.
She ignores him, though. I can see this makes him simmer.
His neck tenses. “Take your coat off, Ruth—at least stay for dinner?”
That gets Alex’s attention, but she doesn’t utter a word.
“Thank you,” I say.
He pauses with his hands on his hips, then disappears to the far end of the loft, behind a sliding Japanese door that’s almost see-through but not quite. Alex sits stiffly.
“So why are you here? And where have you been for, you know, ages? You didn’t say.” Her hands are fists in her lap.
I bypass the sarcasm. “I’ve been out east. Here and there. You look good.”
“So you’ve been with him. With Hal?” She can’t hide the effort in having to say his name out loud.
Hal Nightingale, the lanky-legged drifter I dated, who she and Dad loathed when he worked that one summer on our farm. His car was a Plymouth Duster with a stereo so distorted the rock music blared out as fuzz. I bet she thinks I married him. She never knew why I hung out with him, except she did know. She knew all the disappointment that pushed me there, all the towering blame.
“I left him a long time ago,” I
say. “You do realize that was ten years ago?”
Her eyes widen for just a second. “Right. Good for you.” Liar, she’s thinking.
“Are you okay, Alex? Is there something you want to say?”
“Isn’t it a little bit late for that?” she says.
My plan isn’t working. “Look at this place,” I say, forcing my voice lighter. But I can’t help adding, “It’s nothing like you.”
“What does that mean?” She takes a long strand of her hair and sucks it, just like she did when she was little and someone was cornering her. We sit in silence for a minute, a stilted agony more than a family reunion. Eventually I point to the giant canvas photograph by the door, the only artwork in the whole loft.
“Who’s that?” I ask.
“It’s Chase. He’s a ski racer. Or he was. Now he works for Powderkeg, the local mountain.”
I stare at it. Who hangs a fuck-off-massive picture of himself on his own wall? Right on cue, Chase emerges from what must have been a thirty-second shower. Was he afraid to leave us alone for longer?
“I’ll just get dressed,” he says, “and then we can have some dinner. Take your time, no rush. You two must have a lot to catch up on.” He smiles broadly and heads into what looks like a walk-in closet.
When I shift my leg to move one knee over the other, the pointy glass corner of the coffee table stabs me at shin level. I wince. Chase is only half-right. Alex and I do have a lot to catch up on, except that we don’t. There’s so much to be said that we can’t say anything. I might not have seen my sister since she was fifteen, but I can already tell what her adult life has been, already sense the ease of it—while mine has been the opposite—and the lies behind it all, our whole family, including me, willfully forgotten. We were forged in the same fire, though. In the end, it will all come out.
“He’s upbeat, isn’t he, your husband? He seems to have a very sunny disposition.”
Heat blotches at her throat. “He’s not my husband.” She looks down, notices the tattoo on the inside of my left wrist. My arrow, the end of it sharp and hard, but she doesn’t comment on it. “He already told you he’s my boyfriend. We’re living together, but we’re not married.”
“Is that allowed?” I venture a smile, but it’s not reciprocated. “Dad would lose his mind.”
She starts a sentence and stops it again. Tries several more times.
“Do you know about Dad?” she finally asks. “About what happened to him?”
“That he’s dead, you mean?” I say.
There’s a beat, a twist of hurt. “So you heard.” She sniffs. “It was four years ago, and I left Horizon as soon as he passed.”
“I don’t blame you. It was a shithole, let’s be honest.”
“And Mom? You know about her, too?”
“Listen, Alex, I didn’t come here to—”
“How could you get my messages and not get in touch with me? Why didn’t you come home?” She has bigger questions than that, though. She must have.
“You know why,” I say.
Alex sits rigidly next to me on the unforgiving couch. I can feel her low animal steadiness, the precision of her breathing. “So why are you here?”
I put both hands on my stomach and rest them there, around the well-disguised curve of me. She looks down at my fingers, up at my eyes, until recognition dawns on her.
“No,” she says finally. “No.”
“Yes, sister,” I say. “I’m pregnant.”
ALEX
We sit crowded around one end of the kitchen island to eat Chase’s paleo meal, our bowls almost touching. On one side of me, Ruth shovels the food in as though she hasn’t eaten in weeks. She still holds her spoon like it’s a bike handle. It brings me back: Dad must have told her a hundred times.
“So you’re just traveling through? Or…?” Chase lets the real question hang in the air.
“I don’t necessarily have a plan,” Ruth says. Her mouth is full, and a fleck of quinoa spits onto the marble countertop.
“She’s pregnant,” I say, pushing my food away. I’ve taken only a couple of bites. The quinoa coats my tongue like sand.
“Really?” Chase spills a little water on his chin. “Okay. Well, wow. Congratulations, then.” He checks my face to see if he’s responding the right way, but I’m fresh out of signals.
“Having a baby is like being reborn.” Ruth puts down her spoon. “Isn’t it, Alex?”
I say nothing, concentrate only on breathing quietly in and out.
“It’s all about getting it right. I have to build a nursery. I have to build it while the baby is still on the inside.”
“A crib, you mean?” Chase fills my wineglass, watching me.
“She’s being metaphorical.” My voice is as steady as I can make it. “She means she’s planning to be a good mother.” Has she wiped everything that happened before from her memory? If she believes she’s capable of being a mom, she’s blocked it all out. My hand trembles as I lift my wineglass.
Chase fills in the silence. “A nursery sounds like a great thing. And … where will this nursery be?”
I know he’s trying to help, but he’s so entirely literal. It’s as if he’s wandered into a movie halfway through and is trying to guess the plot.
“Your food’s delicious,” Ruth says. Typical, age-old avoidance.
“Thank you. It’s all organic, locally sourced.” Chase glances to the bay window as if the weather threatens, but it doesn’t. “Alex, it’s getting pretty late. Is your sister staying? Or is there somewhere we can take you, Ruth? Do you have a place to—”
I grip the wineglass. “She can stay here,” I say. “Just for tonight. Then she needs a better plan.”
“Thank you,” Ruth mutters. She keeps her head low and continues to eat.
Later, we set her up with clean sheets on the couch and Chase gives her a towel. She doesn’t shower. The bag she brought with her hangs by the front door. If there’s a toothbrush inside it, she doesn’t go looking for it. Once we’ve established that the couch is hers for the night, Chase and I can’t watch television, relax, or go anywhere in the loft except to the far end, where our own bedroom is. I pack a few things in the kitchen for work tomorrow, while Ruth sits with her back to me. Our good nights are lackluster and clipped.
“She’s different from anything I expected,” Chase whispers once we hear Ruth pad her way into the bathroom. We can both see the light on in there through the gap in our bedroom door. I undress hurriedly, as if being timed.
“You told me you thought she was probably dead,” he says.
I don’t take the bait. I’ve got nothing to say. The last thing I’m doing is explaining myself.
He gets into bed and sits cross-legged, a child with a big man-chest. “I kind of had this idea in my head that if she was alive, she was living out of dumpsters or shouting at pigeons. But she seems … normal. Why do you think she showed up now?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Is it? You told me she was a drug addict.”
“She is. She was. She was when I last saw her.” I toss my T-shirt to the ground. “Look, she abandoned my entire family. Just up and ran away from us all, never to be seen again. I didn’t know what became of her. She was a mess. I just assumed the worst.”
He glares at me as if I’m not apologizing enough.
“When it comes to the details of my life, Chase, you’re hardly a master code cracker. You barely show interest.”
“Hey, don’t turn this around. Whenever I ask about your past, I get one-word answers and shrugs. And besides, I’m not mad that she’s here. She’s your sister, after all. She’s family.” His jaw clenches. “I just want to know who I’m welcoming into my house.”
“Excuse me?”
“Our house.” He sighs. “You’ve always said your sister was serious trouble. So is she or isn’t she?”
“Why don’t you decide? You’re the one who invited her in for dinner.” I stamp my pants
to the ground and leave them there.
“I was trying to be nice! I didn’t know what to do. You weren’t offering many cues as to how I should act.” He lets out a deep breath, turns back the duvet for me, and I slip under it. When he speaks again, his voice is gentle. “Look, I know this is all a shock. Let’s just try to calm down and talk about this sensibly, okay? What I really want to know is why she’s here. Why would she search you out now, when she’s pregnant?”
Chase doesn’t know that he’s playing with fire. How could he?
“We should be careful,” I say, hugging my knees.
Chase rubs my back roughly, a bear pushing at a tree. “Why?”
“She’s done a lot of things that were kind of wild. She put my parents through hell. She put me through hell, too.” The past swells in my throat, and I swallow hard to keep it down. “She claims to build things while she actually destroys them. She’s hurt me, Chase. I don’t want her to do that again—not to you, not to me.”
He gives up on his version of a massage. “I don’t really know what that means, Alex. What exactly did she do?”
“She’s that kid who borrows a toy and gives it back broken.”
“Yeah, but you’re both grown up now. My brother used to take my ski gloves and rip them up on a tree run. But that was when we were ten.”
I squeeze my eyes closed for a second, my throat tightening again, as I picture Chase’s perfect family, his banker father and yoga-loving mother and Brad, his brother, who sails yachts. They live in Nantucket now, all of them, but Chase stayed on the west coast for his career. He grew up without a care in the world. It’s one of the things I love about him—his limitless innocence. My own childhood was quite different.
“Ruth made a mistake years ago that changed everything for my family. And then she made a hundred more. She left because my dad disowned her. He had to.”
Chase doesn’t say anything.
See? I think. You don’t want to know. If you did, you’d ask why.
He thumps his pillow a few times before settling back against it. “All I know is you do a lot for other people’s families. She’s your sister. And she’s clearly doing better than when you last saw her. Maybe things are different now. Maybe you should try a bit, see if there’s a way to help her out.”