Names My Sisters Call Me

by Unknown

My heart kicked at me in my chest. There could be nothing good about Lucas brooding. By nature, Lucas was about laughter and discussion. Never brooding. That was the province of the Matt Cheneys of the world. Lucas had better things to do than brood.

  “Hi,” I said. Carefully. “I think I’m hung over,” I informed him, which was incredibly hard to do with a tongue that felt simultaneously swollen and dry, and that didn’t even take into account the percussion section in my temples.

  “I know you are,” he told me.

  I couldn’t say I particularly enjoyed his tone.

  “I guess I was pretty drunk last night,” I continued when he fell silent, hoping that would spur him into speech.

  “You could say that.”

  More silence.

  Dread pooled in my belly and then spread out along my limbs. I tried to think back over the night, but it was so blurry. I remembered the look on his face when I’d come in. I also remembered talking.

  God. I remembered talking a lot.

  “I don’t actually think you’re controlling,” I said then, cringing at the memory of my own drunk voice from last night. “I think that had more to do with my sisters.”

  Lucas continued to look at me for a long moment.

  More brooding. I felt like squirming, except that would require moving, which I was afraid to do in my current state.

  “And what about kissing Matt Cheney?” he asked. His voice was so calm. Pleasant. It took a moment for the words to sink in.

  When they did, I actually felt the blood drain from my face.

  “What?” I whispered. Pathetic.

  “Funny,” Lucas said. “That’s what I said. And then you started rambling out a whole load of drunken nonsense—my controlling you figured prominently—and then you passed out. Then you took a nap on the bathroom floor.”

  Every word sent a new wave of shame crashing over me. But there was something else wrapped up with it, if I was honest: relief. There was no need to worry about this conversation any longer. It was happening. All the horror and upset of the past month or so was about to be over. No doubt for good. I felt awful, but at least it couldn’t get any worse. This was, literally, the worst thing I could imagine happening. And it was happening right now.

  “I’m so sorry,” I managed to say.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Lucas said. He was holding himself still against the wall, but his eyes burned as he looked at me. “Tell me what happened.”

  So I did.

  I told him about my secret hope that Matt Cheney would be with Raine in San Francisco, and my refusal to plan for it. I told him how confused I’d been when I’d seen Matt, and how worried I was that the confusion meant that things were bad between Lucas and me. I told him about Matt’s appearance outside the hotel, and I told him what Matt had said. I left nothing out. I told him how I’d held on to that, and how, standing outside in Chestnut Hill later on, I’d deliberately decided to allow that secret space between us to grow. I’d encouraged it by not telling him what was going on.

  I told him about heading out to see Raine, and how, in retrospect, I thought maybe I’d been hoping to force another confrontation with Matt. I told him about the near miss kiss in the kitchen doorway. I spared no detail. How close it had been. How far I’d gone and how I’d stopped it. I told him how terrible I’d felt when he’d gotten so angry with Raine on my behalf, and how I’d been incapable of admitting to him how little I deserved his consideration. I confessed that I’d lied to him about Verena’s stand-up show. I told him I’d gone to see Matt, and I told him what I’d finally discovered. I told him every last detail of the conversation Matt and I had had in my mother’s hallway, and then I told him all about Mom’s confession, the fight with my sisters, and my subsequent need to drink myself silly.

  “And the worst part is that I know I did this to myself,” I said when I was finished. My throat was dry, and I’d twisted the sheets in my hands while talking. “I know I deserve whatever you’re going to do. I just want you to know how sorry I am. For everything.”

  And then I bowed my head and waited.

  I didn’t know how people went about leaving one another openly, I reflected in those tense moments as I waited for his response. My father had taken off before I was born. Matt had done it in the dead of night. I didn’t know how Lucas would do it. In the light of day? Would I be required to help?

  It was a good thing I was so hung over. It allowed me to feel numb.

  “Let me make sure I’m following this,” Lucas said finally, in that same calm, almost pleasant voice. “You’re expecting me to . . . what? Break up with you? Pack up and leave?”

  I tried to swallow.

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “If that’s what I want,” he repeated. He looked down at the ground and laughed to himself, and then he pushed himself away from the wall and took a step forward, and he was furious. “What I want is to marry you and live happily ever after, Courtney. Do you know how you can tell? Because I asked you to marry me and live happily ever after. What part of that involves breaking up?”

  “There are extenuating circumstances,” I whispered. He was already using The Name. It was bad. “There are things I did.” I couldn’t say it again, not to his face. I couldn’t bear it.

  “Because you got thrown by your ex-boyfriend?” Temper moved across his face. “Did you think I somehow missed that at the time, Courtney? I hate to break it to you, but you’re a terrible liar.”

  “Yeah, but I almost—”

  “Did you kiss him?” Lucas demanded, cutting me off. “Don’t tell me about how close your mouths were again, ever. Seriously. Just tell me if you actually kissed that guy.”

  I looked up. His eyes were narrow.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t kiss him.”

  Lucas held out his hands, palms up.

  “Then maybe you should tell me what’s really going on around here.”

  “I just told you.” I stared at him. “At great length.”

  “You told me a lot of things, yes,” Lucas agreed, irritably. “But what I can’t help wondering is when you decided that your decision to keep things from me became my decision to break up with you.”

  “It seemed like the natural progression.” I felt defensive, which I thought was strange, since this conversation wasn’t going at all the way I’d feared it would.

  “The natural progression of what? The way you beat yourself up?”

  “Why would you want me?” The words felt pulled out of me. They hurt. “After what I did?”

  He ran his hands through his hair, then met my gaze again.

  “Do you want to marry me?” he asked.

  “Yes. Of course, yes.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked, his voice much quieter. “Because that’s not what it looks like. From over here, it looks like you’d rather undergo elective dental surgery than anything even resembling wedding planning. We’ve been engaged for half a year and we haven’t even started talking about picking a date. And it looks like you bent over backwards to invent a reason that I’d have to break up with you. To the casual observer, this might look a lot like someone who doesn’t want to get married. Am I right?”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “You don’t have to answer right away,” he said, cutting me off. “I want you to be crystal clear about who I am, Courtney.”

  “I know who you are.” I rubbed at my temples. “I know exactly who you are.”

  “I don’t think you do.” Lucas took a step closer to the bed, and though he held himself still, I could see that he was the most furious I’d ever seen him. “I’m not your father. And I’m not your jackass ex, either. I’m not going to leave you, and it pisses me off that you don’t know this after all this time and that ring on your finger.”

  “Sometimes people leave,” I told him, when I could finally find the words. “Sometimes they even have good reasons.”

  “Not me,” he said. Flat and final. The phone in
his office began to ring. “Why don’t you think about that, for a change, instead of Matt Fucking Cheney.”

  He looked at me for another tense moment, and then he walked out of the room, presumably to go and answer his phone.

  I realized that my symptoms had extended into nausea, and curled myself into the fetal position as I waited to see if it would tip over into something worse.

  Welcome to your hangover, I told myself bitterly. The only thing in the entire world worse than your problems.

  It took me a long time to drag myself out of bed, and I did so only to take up residence on the couch, where I cowered under the fleece throw, drank as much water as I could hold, and watched repeat episodes of Law & Order: SVU I’d recorded to our TiVo. Lucas had gone out to some business lunch or client meeting—I wasn’t sure which, as his terse note did not elaborate beyond gone out.

  The longer I lay there, the better I felt. Physically, that was. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to turn off my brain. I couldn’t get Lucas’s words out of my head. And then they seemed to intertwine with everything that had been said at my mother’s house the day before. Like a bow pulling out a note from something hushed into something that filled music halls, everything that had been said swelled inside my head until it blocked the rest out.

  I thought about the realization I’d had while talking to Matt, that all my issues began and ended with my father. I had such complicated feelings about the idea of him. He was an imaginary construct for the most part, but one I’d grown used to over the years. All the myths of my father seemed to blend together in my head. He was a hero. He was a pig. He was a saint. He was the worst of sinners. He abandoned us. He loved us and missed us horribly. He never looked back.

  What I felt more than anything was a sense of blurriness. There was no narrowing in on this man I’d never met. There was no understanding who he really was. He was gone, and the only things that remained were stories, and how those of us left behind fashioned ourselves based on these stories.

  Norah was still so mad at him that all her stories cast him in a negative light. Raine was so desperately in love with the idea of him that she’d, in effect, modeled her life after his. Right up to the dramatic exit toward the West Coast. She needed everyone else to validate her vision of him. And me? I felt guilty.

  Guilty for being born. For making him leave.

  It was stunning, really, to sit there in my living room and see it all so clearly in front of me. I’d been self-effacing my whole life, and nature abhorred a vacuum. It was easier to concentrate on the in-your-face nature of Raine’s dramas and exploits. Or Norah’s academic achievements. Or my mother’s absence, which I could see now in a different light, but had felt like an abandonment when I was small. Everyone else came first, and I’d helped make sure of it.

  I thought about the way I’d accepted the role I’d been assigned—or the one I’d volunteered for—and assumed I deserved no better. It had taken Lucas’s keen insight to make me see that. It had taken him to force me to look at how little I’d always thought of myself.

  Something caught in my throat then.

  It was horrifying, when I really considered it, that Lucas had to point out the depth, breadth, and fullness of my self-loathing. In defiance of what I’d achieved. In defiance of what, intellectually, I knew to be true about myself. None of that mattered when it came to my deep, emotional conviction that I was somehow responsible for making my father leave—that he had left, in fact, because of my inadequacies, and that this all led to the inexorable conclusion that I was unworthy somehow. Or so flawed that his leaving was the only rational response. I had accepted, long ago and without comment, that there was something heinously wrong with me.

  How shocking that Lucas had seen all of this, pointed it out, and still I’d refused to look at it. He had seen how I let others treat me and, worse, how I treated myself.

  And he loved me anyway.

  That was the part that made my breath hitch.

  He’d been trying to point that out to me this morning. That I was the one who didn’t trust him. That I was the one who’d gone a little bit crazy, when he was the man who loved me. Had always loved me. Who didn’t know the self-effacing, thirteen-year-old I became whenever the family stuff got intense.

  Lucas knew a different Courtney. The grown-up. The professional. The woman who loved him, not the little girl who was afraid to. Lucas knew me as his partner. His equal. Someone who would stand by him, as he would stand by me. He would never see me as Norah’s little sister, or Raine’s worshipful follower. He only saw the best me, the me that I was with him.

  I pulled myself off the couch, walked over to my music corner in the bright sunlight that fell through the bay window, pulled my cello from its case, tuned it quickly and efficiently, and then began to play.

  I played from memory. I played all of my memories, one after the other, bad and good alike. My bow against the strings, my hand against the neck of the cello—that was all there was, and everything outside of that was the music.

  I played loss and joy, discovery and anger. I played for the little girls who lost their father, and the adult women who lost him again and again, every time the story changed.

  I played for my sisters, and I played against them, then I played them off each other. Brisk staccato for Norah, and dreamy darkness for Raine. Something majestic and sad for my mother. Something mournful and lost for the mystery of my father. My family was a lush collection of sounds with a starkness woven into the spaces between. I played them all.

  I played dead white men and living women. I played songs I’d never heard before and could never duplicate. I played and I played.

  I played until my arms ached and my back protested and tears mingled with sweat along my jaw.

  And then I pulled my bow from the strings and looked around me, as if I’d never seen the place before.

  The apartment was still. The cats lay in an intricate ball on the couch, wound together on the throw. They eyed me without interest as I slowly got to my feet. One of them trilled a stray note at me.

  But it was the man who stood behind them who captured my attention. I wasn’t sure when he’d come in, I only knew I looked up at some point and he was there.

  I crossed the room, realizing as I did so that I was breathing heavily, and I was still holding my bow in my hand.

  Lucas watched me close the distance between us. His eyes were gray and far away, but I knew as he focused on me that he saw me with a clarity no one else ever had.

  “I push you away,” I announced. I hadn’t known it until this moment, but I knew it was true. “I keep you at arm’s length.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, his eyebrows arching up slightly.

  “I don’t entirely trust you. I keep waiting for you to leave me.”

  “That, too.” His mouth curved. “But not all the time, and I try not to take it personally.”

  I wanted to tell him, then, the things I hadn’t known until today. The things I hadn’t wanted to know, and had only ever accessed through my cello. The things I suspected he already knew.

  I could have played it all for him, but I didn’t know how to say it. I stood there with my heart pounding almost painfully against my ribs, and regretted, for the first time in my life, that I was more fluent in the language of music than I was in English.

  “I’m sorry.” It was the best I could do. “About everything.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, moving toward me.

  “It’s not,” I whispered. I held out my hands. “I want to marry you more than anything in the world. I love you,” I told him, and the inadequacy of the word frustrated me.

  “I love you, too,” he answered me, but quietly.

  I thought about all the years and emotions and dreams I’d poured into my cello. And into dreams of who Matt Cheney could have been, if only he could have been someone different. I thought about all the energy and time and commitment. I loved my cello, and I had loved Matt once, too. But
they were different kinds of love, and at the end of the day, far less rewarding.

  “I don’t think I’m any good at this,” I confessed, emotion in my voice that threatened to close my throat. “You might have to help me. I never learned how to love something that could love me back.”

  That lay there between us. I thought I could almost see it there—ugly and true and swelling up to take over the room.

  Lucas’s face softened. He reached over and took my cheeks between his hands.

  “We have a whole lifetime to figure that one out,” he said. “You just need to keep your mouth out of extracurricular kissing range.”

  “I don’t know what the hell I’ve been doing,” I told him, feeling the tears start to come. “I don’t know what that was all about. And you’ve been hiding away in your office, and I don’t know what you’ve been doing either.”

  “I think I’ve been freaking out, too,” Lucas said, smoothing a hand over my hair. He sounded a little bit dazed. “I bought you a ring and you said yes and now I wake up in the night with the compulsion to raise my income so we can do adult things like have savings. Buy a house. Talk about kids and act like a detergent ad. Like some 1950s head of the household, as if you don’t have your own career . . . ”

  “You’ve been freaking out?” I asked, feeling tenderness course through me.

  “Marriage is a big deal.” He shrugged. “Forever is supposed to be a little bit overwhelming, isn’t it? That’s why it’s forever.”

  I kissed him then, and Lucas kissed me back, and I sank into it. I wrapped my arms around him and he rested his forehead against mine, and we stood there together for a long, long time.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The next morning, I was so thrilled to wake up knowing that things were right between Lucas and me that I had to lie there for a while, savoring it.

  We’d spent the rest of the day talking, filling up that space I’d put between us. Making it so we overlapped again. So we were one, the way we were supposed to be. That took a lot of conversation, a lot of kissing, and the Chinese delivery place we kept on speed dial.