As Close as Sisters (11 page)

12

Aurora

I
’m surprised I heard my cell ring at all. I probably wouldn’t have, except that I had plugged it in on the nightstand to charge before I went to sleep/passed out. It was dead: It had been dead two days apparently. When I plugged it in, the screen came up to tell me I’d missed eleven calls. I didn’t bother to see who had called: my agent, my manager, my publicist probably. Maybe Fortunato. Time to change my number again.

So anyway. The phone. It rang in the middle of the night. Not that unusual. If I’d realized it was on, I would have shut it off. But the gin had gotten the better of me. What was unusual about the event was that I answered the phone. I wouldn’t have picked up if I’d been awake and sober.

“Yeah?” I sat up on the edge of the bed. I was wearing a T-shirt and bikini top. Not sure where the bottoms had gotten to.

“Aunt Aurora?”

I squeezed my eyes shut. Opened them. I felt as if I were on a merry-go-round. Only two people called me that. “Mia or Maura?” I muttered. I could never tell them apart on the phone.

“Mia. Aunt Aurora, we need your help.”

The tone of her voice revived me more than what she was saying.

“Okay.”

“We need you to come get us. The police are here. I think they’re going to arrest Maura.”

Shit,
I thought. Maybe I said it out loud. I fumbled for the light switch on the lamp beside my bed. Knocked over a half-filled bottle of water. I heard it splash on the floor. No lid.

“Aunt Aurora?”

I flipped on the light on the third try. “Yup. I’m here.” The brightness of the seventy-five-watt bulb made me wince.

“Can you come? Maura says if you come now, maybe they’ll let her go. You know, because of Aunt Janine. Maybe she should come, too. Maybe Aunt Janine can make them not arrest her. Cops do that, right? For each other? Get friends off for minor stuff? She didn’t murder anybody or anything.”

Mia was talking so fast that it was hard for me to follow. “Slow down, slow down.”
And talk a little quieter.
“Where are you?”

“On the beach.”

“Where on the beach?” I said, annoyed. “Give me a city. A state.”

“Um . . . I don’t know. We’re in Delaware. Delaware. North of Lewes. You take Route 16 from 1. After you go over that bridge thing. I think they’re going to take her to the police troop. The one next to Wawa.”

I was having a hard time following. Maura got arrested, and the cops were going to take her to get a slushy? “State police?” I asked, spotting my white bikini bottom on the floor.

“Yeah.” Her voice was trembling. I could tell she was trying hard not to cry. “She was smoking, too, I think. Weed. Can they tell if she’s been smoking with the Breathalyzer thing?”

I stood up, and the phone got yanked out of my hand and hit the nightstand. It was still attached to the wall. I picked it up, unplugging the charging wire. “Mia, you still there?”

“Maura said you’d come.” She was crying now. “She said you’d know what to do. You and Aunt Janine. Maura can’t go to jail, Aunt Aurora. Mom can’t handle that right now. She shouldn’t have to.”

Mia’s words were all running together again.

I picked up the bikini bottom, thinking I had to get dressed. Then I realized the bikini bottom didn’t count as clothing, and I let it fall to the floor again. “I’m coming.”

“You are?”

The room spun, and I wobbled on my bare feet. “Yup. Of course.”

“Okay, but you won’t tell Mom, right? Maybe she doesn’t have to know. Maybe she’ll die before Maura gets sent to jail and she’ll never have to know. It’s not like she’ll be able to see from heaven, right?” She sniffled.

Mia’s sweet, naive words made me smile . . . and sober up a little. I grabbed a pair of jeans off the back of a chair draped with my clothing. “I won’t wake your mom. If she has to be told, it doesn’t have to be tonight.”

“She doesn’t,” Mia said, panicky again. “Maura says she never has to know. It’ll kill her, Aunt Aurora. That’s what Maura said to tell you.”

I stepped into the jeans, one foot, then the other, steadying myself with the chair, keeping the phone trapped between my chin and my shoulder. My mouth tasted like I had thrown up a little in it. I eyed the water bottle lying on the floor. It looked like there might be a sip left in it. “Exactly where are you?” I asked. When she didn’t answer, I asked again, “Mia, where are
you?
The police and Maura won’t be hard to find. The flashing lights and all, but I need to be able to find
you
.”

“I’m at my car. Parked along the road. I think it’s called Bayview or something like that. It runs along the beach. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. Maura said—”

“Just stay put, okay?”

“I’m scared, Aunt Aurora. She wasn’t even very drunk, only this guy we don’t even know got into a fight with some other guy, and they said he pulled a knife and . . . I don’t know who called the cops. Maura thought we should run, but then they put the spotlights on us and—”

“Probably just as well you didn’t run,” I interrupted. Her jabbering was making me nauseated. I slipped my feet into flip-flops and slapped to the door, then, realizing I’d left the light on, I went back to turn it off. “Both of you would be locked up and then who would have called me? Stay where you are, Mia. Stay in your car. No booze and no pot. At least until I get there.” I raised my finger threateningly.

“I wasn’t drinking,” Mia wailed. “I was the DD. I’m always the DD.”

I sort of laughed. Except that clearly this wasn’t funny. If Maura got arrested for drinking underage and possession, McKenzie would come unglued. “Be there as quick as I can.”

I hung up and checked the screen of my cell. It was two eleven. I stepped out into the dark hallway and debated whether or not to pee first or wake Janine first. If I startled her and she pulled a gun or a Bowie knife on me, or some shit like that, I was liable to piss my pants. On the other hand, time was of the essence here, and she needed at least a couple of minutes to get dressed and get her cop face on.

I walked past Lilly’s quiet room. At Janine’s door, I tapped lightly. I didn’t want anyone else in the house to hear me, but I wasn’t dumb enough to open the door and get eaten by a dog, either.

“Yeah?” Janine’s voice came. It didn’t sound like she’d even been asleep.

I opened the door a crack, thinking if Fritz came at me, I could slam it on his snout or something. I’ve never even seen him behave aggressively, but tonight wasn’t the night I wanted to test him.

“I need you to take a little ride with me,” I said softly.

“Okay.” I heard her get out of bed. “Bring Fritz or leave him?”

“Better leave him.” I closed the door. Janine didn’t ask where we were going or why.

13

Janine

“T
hanks, Aunt Janine. Thanks so much.” Mia gave me an awkward side-hug as we walked toward my car, parked along Bayshore Drive. Not Bayview, as she had told Aurora. Luckily, I knew exactly where to go. We arrested kids here all the time.

“Yeah, thanks, Aunt Janine. This whole thing was bogus,” Maura said, sounding all righteous and tough.

We had gotten lucky. No one had administered a Breathalyzer test to Maura yet when we arrived. Clearly, she’d been drinking. And smoking marijuana from the smell of her hair.

The troopers had so many underage drinkers rounded up that they were still waiting for backup when Aurora and I arrived. I knew one of the troopers on the scene well. He let me take Maura without much more than the warning to her that if her aunt wasn’t such a good cop, if he didn’t respect me so much, Maura would be on her way to the troop with the rest of her friends. It wasn’t even a big favor really. One less teen to process tonight.

“Should . . . should we just go back to Dad’s?” Mia asked as we crossed the road.

I leaned toward her, sniffing. “How much did
you
have to drink?”

“Nothing!”

It was dark. I could hardly see her face, but I didn’t need to. “Pants on fire.”

“Like one beer,” Mia insisted defensively.

I glanced at Maura, walking on the other side of me. She was a little drunk, but I knew she’d only blow a .07 or so. Wouldn’t have mattered. She was underage. If the girls hadn’t had the good sense to call Aurora right away, Maura would have been looking at an underage drinking charge. And possible possession when they frisked her. I didn’t want to know what was in her pockets.

“My sister was the DD,” Maura insisted. “If she says she only had
a
beer, she only had
a
beer.”

“I could use a beer about now,” Aurora muttered, just loud enough for us to hear. She was walking behind us, smoking a cigarette she’d bummed from one of the teens huddled in a group, waiting to be carted off in a paddy wagon.

We didn’t have paddy wagons, of course. Well, we did have vans for transporting multiple suspects at a time, but my guess was that they wouldn’t even call them to the troop. Too much work. It would take too much time away from real police duties. Their parents would be called, their information would be taken down, and they’d be notified of their court dates. I’d worked this same scenario enough times that I could have worked it drunk. I snickered at my own joke.

“You’re not driving home,” I told Mia.

“What about my car?”

I pulled my keys out of my pocket and unlocked the doors of my Jeep with the remote. “We’re leaving it here.”

“How am I going to get it in the morning?” Her voice was getting high-pitched again. “Dad’ll want to know where the car is. What am I going to tell him?”

“You’ll think of something. My guess is that this won’t be the first time you lied to him.” I climbed in the driver’s side. They all got in: Aurora beside me, the two girls in the back.

Aurora buckled in, then leaned on the seat to talk to the girls as I pulled back onto the road. “Here’s what you do. You tell your dad you had a beer and—”

“I can’t tell my dad I
had a beer!
” Mia wailed, too loudly, from the backseat.

“No, no, listen to me,” Aurora soothed. “You tell him you had a beer, just one, but you knew it wasn’t safe to drive home, so—”

“Don’t you have a curfew?” I asked. A cruiser, blue lights flashing, passed us going the other way. “Where does your dad think you are right now?”

“I don’t know. Probably in bed,” Maura said. “He doesn’t wait up. Peaches gets up a lot at night still. Dad sleeps like he’s dead when he can sleep.”

“Mia, you tell him you knew you shouldn’t drive, so you just got a ride home,” Aurora suggested. “He’ll be offering to give you a ride back to get your car.”

I frowned.

Aurora looked at me. “What? It’ll work. You know it will. Parents eat that shit up, thinking their kids made
good choices
.”

I thought about our conversation the night before. About Jude. Maybe Aurora really had made the right decision, letting his father take him. I couldn’t imagine Aurora being a mother to teenagers. She acted like one herself still.

“I’m telling you, he’ll totally believe you,” Aurora said.

She’d still been half wasted when she woke me up. Right now, I guessed that she and Maura would be blowing the same blood alcohol level. But Aurora knew how to handle her booze. And she was an adult. Free to screw up her life as she saw fit. Maura wasn’t old enough to be making those kinds of decisions. At least she wasn’t in my book.

“I don’t think beer should be in the explanation.” I glanced in the rearview mirror at the girls.

Annoyed that I wasn’t agreeing with her, Aurora harrumphed and settled back in her seat. “I’m just glad you called, Mia.” She glanced over the seat. “You know your sister saved your ass, Maura.”

We rode in silence out to Route 1. I made a U-turn and went south.

We were passing through the Five Points intersection when Maura asked, completely out of the blue, “Hey, Aunt Aurora, who’s Buddy McCollister? Or should we be asking you that, Aunt Janine?”

I swear to God, I wasn’t expecting that question. I mean . . . I was expecting it one day, but . . . not tonight. Not now. Not with their mom being so sick.

I looked at Aurora. She looked at me. We’d talked about this day. About what we would do when they asked. We had hoped that McKenzie would tell them before it ever got to us. She should have told them by now. Even Lilly agreed. But none of us were living in the real world right now. Certainly McKenzie wasn’t. We were in some kind of limbo, waiting for her to die. Waiting for our hearts and our lives to shatter.

“Who told you about Buddy?” Aurora threw over the seat. She’d been besties with the girls a minute ago, but now she sounded angry.

“Nobody. We read it on the Internet. Wikipedia,” Mia said.

I cut my eyes at Aurora. She stared straight ahead. Suddenly, she was looking completely sober.

“What did it say?” I asked, keeping my voice level. Wikipedia? Fucking
Wikipedia?

“That Aunt Aurora killed him when she was fourteen years old.” Maura. Slightly accusatory. My guess was that this was her way of defusing the situation. I was known to use the same coping mechanism myself, on occasion. “Then I Googled his name. I found the obituary. It said he’d died at home in Albany Beach.”

I could have told the girls we’d talk about it later.

I felt light-headed. I wasn’t ready for this. Not right now. Not with McKenzie being sick. Lilly with a bun in the oven. Me with . . . Chris and the lawsuit. I gripped the steering wheel until my fingers hurt.

“If we don’t tell them,” Aurora said, not even making an attempt to keep them from hearing her, “they’re just going to find more stuff on the Internet. Better they hear it from us.”

We drove past the outlets on the northbound side, then the southbound side.
Tax free shopping!
a sign declared. All shopping in Delaware was sales-tax free. I signaled left to turn onto Rehoboth Avenue. The light was green.

“You don’t have to tell us,” Mia piped up. “Not if you don’t want to, Aunt Aurora.”

“I think we have a right to know,” Maura said.

I scowled. But I got off on the circle before the exit to Jared’s house and continued on Rehoboth Avenue. It was quiet. Bars were closed. There were a few cars parked on the street. The lights were green, one after another.

“Where we going?” Mia asked. She sounded a little uneasy. Like she thought maybe we were going to kidnap her or something.

“We’ll sit on the beach for a few minutes,” I said. I checked the dashboard. It was three forty a.m. “Then I’ll take you home.” I made a U-turn and took First Street on the right.

“You don’t have to say a word,” Aurora told me softly. She slid her hand across the seat, touched my leg, and pulled it away before I had a chance to push her off.

I parked practically on the boardwalk on Olive. The street was empty except for a lime green VW Beetle. New. 2013. 2014. Maryland plates. Purple
Fractured Prune Bakery
bumper sticker. Crooked, on the right side of the rear bumper. Weird that I would notice those details.

I’m good with details. Especially when it comes to vehicles. Tool of the trade.

I got out of the Jeep. Everyone else got out. I locked it with the remote and led the way onto the deserted boardwalk, down the steps, and onto the sand. The last couple years, the landscape of the beach in the whole area had changed. Mother Nature kept pushing with hurricanes and nor’easters and the US Army Corp of Engineers kept pushing back with dredging operations and dune construction.

We sat in a row, in the damp sand, facing the ocean. Me, then Aurora, then Mia. Maura was on the end. The rain had passed hours ago, and I could tell from the barometric pressure that it was going to be a clear day.

“Me or you?” Aurora asked. She was drinking from a water bottle she’d found on the floor of my car. Considering how much gin she’d consumed the previous night, I was pretty impressed that she’d sobered up so quickly.

“You.” I drew my bare knees up, hugging them to me. “I can’t. Not tonight.”

We were all quiet for a minute; there were just the comforting sounds of the waves washing on the shore.

“So it’s true? You really killed someone, Aunt Aurora?” Maura asked. “He was your relative, right, Aunt Janine? Oh my God,” she murmured then. “He was your father, wasn’t he? The obituary said he was forty-one when he died.”

I lowered my forehead to my knees, drawing myself into a tight ball. Aurora didn’t dare touch me, but her voice was a caress.

“You’re okay,” she murmured in my ear. “You’re going to be fine.”

And I was fine. Surprisingly enough.

Aurora told the story. She kept it brief, but she didn’t sugarcoat it. What would have been the point of that? What, with Wikipedia out there?

“We were all staying at the beach house. Janine and her family lived there year-round. It was Janine and her mom and dad and us. Her little brother wasn’t there,” Aurora explained. “My room now—that was Todd’s. I was sleeping in his room that night because. . . I don’t know. I slept in there sometimes. It was a Friday night in September. Rainy.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to concentrate on the sound of the waves and not the sound of my father’s footsteps outside my bedroom door.

“I got up to go to the bathroom, and I heard your aunt Janine in her bedroom. She was crying.” Aurora’s voice broke.

The girls sat motionless in the dark. Neither made a sound.

“She was talking to someone. Begging him . . .” Aurora sat in the sand in her jeans, her legs stretched out in front of her. We’d all left our shoes in the Jeep. She had dark polish on her toenails. Blue.

Aurora glanced at the girls, then at the water again. “I opened the bedroom door to see what was wrong.”

I rocked very gently back and forth. The sand was wet under me. Cold. I vaguely wondered if I should go back to the Jeep for towels. Mia and Maura might be cold.

“I opened the door, and there he was. Buddy McCollister.” She spoke his name as if he were a plague upon the earth. Which, of course, he was. “He was in Janine’s bed.”

“Oh my God,” Mia breathed, starting to cry softly. “Aunt Janine, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“You mean, like,
in
her bed?” Maura asked, clearly trying to wrap her head around what Aurora was saying. “Like—”

“Yeah,” Aurora said. “Come to find out, the fucking bastard had been raping his own daughter for two years.”

I listened to the sound of the waves, trying to block out Aurora’s voice. People describe it as a crash, but it’s not really a crash. A crash is the sound of glass shattering, metal buckling. Like in an automobile accident. The waves are just white noise. There’s no violence in their sound.

I tightened my arms around my knees and wondered how it could be twenty-eight years later and Buddy could still bring me into a fetal position.

Aurora went on talking. “He was drunk. Crazy. When he saw me, he got out of her bed. He came after me. He knew I’d tell.”

“Where did you get the gun?” Maura breathed.

“He was a cop and a dick. There were guns all over the house. Loaded. He liked them. A lot. He was always talking about how he hoped someone would break in so he could blow their head off. I guess he had one with him when he went into Janine’s room. His way of keeping her quiet. Guys like him, they do that kind of shit,” Aurora told the girls.

She was sticking to the story she’d told the cops. Only the four of us knew that Aurora had gone downstairs and gotten the gun out of the kitchen cabinet where Buddy kept it. I sometimes wondered if my mom knew the truth. If she did, she had never voiced it. Not to the investigating officers. Not even to me.

“So how did you get his gun?”

“It was on this table near Janine’s bed. We were doing a big puzzle on it that afternoon after school. Because it was raining.” Aurora stopped for a minute.

I looked at her. She was staring out at the ocean. Dry-eyed. She was glad she killed Buddy. She’d always been glad. I’d never heard a breath of regret from her. She’d done what I hadn’t had the guts to do. She’d saved me.

“We both went for it, and I beat him. He knocked over the table. The puzzle pieces went flying.”

That part was true. About the puzzle. He did throw it over. As he went down. It was a
Goonies
puzzle. My brother’s. I remember the box. The color of the pieces.

“It all happened so fast,” Aurora told the girls. “I don’t exactly remember it. It’s like a movie in my head. Like I saw it, but not like I did it. He lunged for me. I aimed the gun. He said terrible, awful things. He kept coming. I pulled the trigger.”