Edgewater (22 page)

The man shrugged. “I couldn't tell you.”

“Maybe he sold them to someone else, then, and replaced the sold pieces with fakes. It wouldn't be the first time he pulled something like that. But he had no right—”

I cut myself off. Why was I telling the pawnshop guy? He didn't care. He probably heard a ton of stories just like this—a wedding ring with initials engraved, a grandmother's Limoges box, baseball cards. It didn't matter to him how I or anyone else had acquired anything or why we'd ended up at his store. For him, this was simply business. Give me your treasures, and I'll give you some cash. And we'll both move on.

He exhaled a line of smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “I'll give you twenty-five hundred if you want to throw in the Rolex,” he said.

I looked at my left wrist. I'd worn that watch for over a decade. It had been my grandfather's, and Mom had worn it ever since he'd died. The night she left, when I was crying on the stairs, asking her to please stay home, she'd taken it off her wrist and put it on mine. “You can stay up a half hour later,” she'd said. It was meant to be a way for me to keep track of my bedtime, but maybe she'd also meant it as a tangible reminder that she was with me even when she was gone.

What a crock of shit.

It was an inanimate object, not a mom stand-in. Besides which, I was never sentimental about her; no reason to start being so now.

“Take it or leave it,” the man said. “Makes no difference to me.”

But it made a difference to me, of course. That's why I was there. My eyes itched from the smoke, and I blinked a thousand times as I undid the clasp. A watch was just a single-function device anyway, as the senator had said. Immediately following this transaction, I'd pay our cell-phone bill, and the phone would tell the time. I'd pay our electric bill, and we'd get the house clocks back. I'd have absolutely no use for the watch, and I wouldn't miss it.

“You have a deal,” I told him, handing it over.

He counted out the money in hundred-dollar bills, and I stuffed them deep into my front pocket.

Outside, I ran across the street back to my car. Double-parked at the end of the block was the same black sedan. My heart was pumping hard. The windows of the sedan were too darkened for me to see who was behind the wheel. But I couldn't help thinking it was someone watching me. I fumbled with my keys and got into the car, locking the doors again quickly.

I turned the ignition and sped in the opposite direction. On the drive home, the wad of money seemed to be buzzing from inside my pocket. I kept glancing into the rearview mirror, but as far as I could tell, no one was behind me. Twenty minutes later I pulled into the driveway at Edgewater and stopped with a screech. My goal was to pay the bills and get my phone in
working order so I could give Charlie my number when I got to Lennox's, and then have electricity to see my way to my room when I got home. I banged my way into the house and ran upstairs for my phone—this time I'd press one to be connected to AT&T. But when I tried to power it on, it was dead, and of course without electricity, I had no way to charge it.

New plan. “Brian!” I called. “Are you here? Susannah! Brian! I need your phone!”

Susannah's bedroom door was closed. I was this close to barging in. On principle, I didn't give a shit what they were doing on the other side. But truly, there were some things I didn't want to see. So I knocked first, three hard, loud raps. I waited a few seconds for an answer, and then I pushed open the door.

Two kittens, one white and one black, immediately ran out. The room smelled musty and sour, and the sheets on the bed were twisted in the aftermath of I didn't even want to know what. Four more cats were sprawled out on top of them. But there was no Susannah, no Brian. And no phone.

“Goddamn it,” I said as another cat slunk past me.

“Lorrie?” Susannah called.

I turned back to the hallway, in the direction of her voice. She was coming up the stairs with two large buckets. Her arms were extended from their weight, and she was walking carefully, but still water sloshed around and dripped onto the faded orange Oriental carpet runner.

“What's up?” she asked.

“I need Brian's phone.”

“He went out,” she said.

“Where?”

She stopped in front of me and put the buckets down with a thump, which sent more water splashing onto the floor. Not that a little bit of water would matter; the carpets were already saturated with cat piss. I made it a point never to go barefoot outside my bedroom. “I'm sure he'll be back soon.”

I shook my head. On second thought, I didn't even need Brian's phone yet. After all, I only had cash on me, and it wasn't as if I could send hundred-dollar bills through a cell phone. I needed to deposit the money and then write checks.

But then there was the problem of our checking account being overdrawn. I was guessing that meant we owed the bank money and that they'd take their share out of whatever I deposited. Suddenly everything seemed so difficult, all over again.

A black cat jumped up onto the side of the bucket and started lapping up water. “You thirsty, Pickles? Not too much. That's for Lorrie.” She turned to me. “I figured you'd need some, too.”

“What for?”

“To flush your toilet,” she said.

“Oh God, Susannah,” I said. “Do you see what it's come to? We can't even flush the toilets.”

“I know. I was upset this morning.”

I nodded. “Finally.”

“But now we have a solution,” she said. “I washed my clothes this morning, too.”

“And what are you going to do when you want to shower? Bathe in the stream?”

“Go to Brian's house,” she said.

“I didn't know Brian had a house.”

“Oh, stop. I'm sure he'd let you come, too.”

“I'd rather stick needles into my eyes.”

“Do you have to be so down on him all the time? He's the one who figured out we could use stream water to flush the toilets.”

Another cat joined Pickles at the bucket. When she jumped up, the whole thing tipped over. Water everywhere. The cats skittered off.

“I can't take it,” I said. And then I shouted: “I can't take it!”

Susannah bent to turn the bucket upright again. “Jesus, Lorrie, it's no big deal,” she said. “There's plenty of water in the stream. We'll just get more.”

When she stood back up, I gripped her shoulder. “Listen to yourself,” I said. “Do you hear what you're saying? Or have you lost the ability to think straight?”

Susannah shook me off. “I'm not crazy. Things just don't bother me the way they bother you.”

When we were really young, Susannah used to come into my room in the mornings to see what I was wearing. Only then would she get dressed herself—in the closest approximation to my outfit that she could manage. “She's copying me again,” I'd whine to Gigi. I'd race back upstairs to change my clothes so I didn't show up at school dressed like my little sister.

If I'd known then what I knew now, I would've let her keep copying me. I would have dressed her in a matching outfit each day myself. Because having my sister end up as someone who was so
not
like me was the real frustration, the real loss.

Susannah had turned away from me and was headed to her room. I followed behind. “All day I've been blaming Gigi for
what's happening right now,” I told her, speaking to her back. “But the more I think about it, the more I think it's actually Mom's fault. She knew Gigi was a mess. She was always on her about being hopelessly, recklessly disorganized. They fought about it all the time.”

We were in Susannah's bathroom, where pebbles from the litter boxes peppered the floor. On the windowsill, higher than the cats could jump, was a cage that housed a couple of mice she'd rescued from her cats' jaws. One was missing an ear, the other a tail. “Hey, Farley, hey, Whiskers,” she said, tapping the wire mesh of the cage. The mice jumped toward her fingers, as if high-fiving her.

“Susannah, are you even listening to me?”

She turned back to me. “I am,” she said. “And I don't remember them fighting.”

She grabbed a crumpled towel off the rack and headed back out to the hall.

“Of course you don't,” I said, following her. “You were so little, and now, well, now you've just acclimated to the crazy. We learned about this in Developmental Psych at Hillyer—how the first six years of your life are the most formative. You spent half of those years in this house, with Gigi as your primary role model. You don't even realize how crazy things are, because as far back as you can remember, they've never been any other way.”

I'd always wondered why Susannah and I were so different, and it was making sense now: Those two years between us made all the difference. I had memories that predated this crazy life, and Susannah did not.

Susannah was on her knees, blotting at the carpet where the water had spilled. As if we needed to worry about spilled water. “But my point is, Mom
did
know better,” I told her. “What was she doing, giving Gigi that kind of responsibility? She should've known that Gigi couldn't handle it. It's a wonder it all didn't go to shit earlier. Did Mom care about that? No, she did not. She just wanted to run off with her boyfriend. But we didn't choose to be born. She chose to have us. And that means she chose to make our lives her priority. And, I'm sorry, but you can't just change your mind about that.” I paused, shaking my head in disgust. “I'm sure it seemed like a good idea to her at the time. She had a new boyfriend, and she didn't want to be saddled with two kids, so she basically paid someone to take them off her hands. It was practically a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Susannah stood and threw the towel over her shoulder. “She gave us a trust fund,” she told me. “That's not free.”

“So you're totally okay with her putting a price tag on her kids,” I said. “And that she left us in Aunt Gigi's incompetent hands. Look at us, Susannah! We're living in the dark. Things are only getting worse.”

“We have flashlights,” she said.

I stamped my foot on the floor, like a child. I couldn't help it. “The batteries don't work.” I knew I could buy new ones now, but that only seemed like adding insult to injury. “If we had a mother at home, she'd remember to buy new batteries. She'd remember to pay the electric bill.”

“It hasn't been all bad,” Susannah said softly. “Like you said, Mom chose to have kids. She chose to have
us
. So maybe we're just supposed to be grateful to her that we get to be here.”

Out of habit, I glanced down at my wrist, but of course I didn't have a watch anymore. “It's gotta be late in London,” I said. “Mom could be taking a midnight stroll with Nigel. Meanwhile we're here in the dark. That doesn't piss you off?”

“Mom's not with Nigel anymore,” Susannah said.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“They broke up.”

“She broke up with Nigel, and she's still not here?” Susannah nodded, tentatively. “How do you know?”

“There was a letter from Nigel's dad at some point. He said Nigel wasn't back in London, and he was trying to track him down here.”

“That doesn't mean anything,” I said. “Maybe they had some sort of deal—I'll abandon my family if you abandon yours.”

Susannah shrugged, seemingly uninterested. “I guess it's possible.”

“When did you see the letter?”

“I don't know,” Susannah said, more forcefully this time. “It was a while ago. In a pile of stuff.”

“I brought everything that had to do with Mom up to the attic a few years ago,” I said. “All the cards and letters she ever sent us. Letters come in envelopes, and envelopes have postage stamps, even if they don't have return addresses. I'm going to find them.”

“Why?”

“So we can find
her
.”

“I thought you never wanted to see Mom again.”

“I don't want to see her,” I said. “I want to sue her. She's like
our father. A deadbeat parent. Even worse than that, actually.”

“Why are you angrier at her, when he was the one who left first?”

“You're angrier at him?”

“I'm not angry at anyone.”

“Well, you should be. Especially her. Dad was a drunk who admitted he didn't want kids, but Mom—she made us love her first, and then she disappeared. Maybe you don't remember, but I do. When we were little, she'd sing us songs and tell us stories and go around saying we were the Three Musketeers. You just—” I broke off, and Susannah reached out, but I shook her off. “You just can't go around doing that and then leave your kids behind. Actions have consequences.”

I left my sister standing in the hallway and headed to the small staircase at the end of the house that accessed the attic. It had been God-only-knew how many years since anyone had walked these particular halls, and they smelled old and musty. Eau de Decay, Number Eight: Abandoned Rooms.

The couch and love seat in the sitting room at the base of the stairs had layers of dust on them as thick as blankets. Cobwebs stretched between them. I spotted a spider, big as a baby's fist. My heart started to pound, but I wouldn't let myself acknowledge that I was scared as I put a hand on the banister. The dust on it was like a film. I crept up the stairs to the attic door and turned the knob. The door was stuck from being closed for so long. I pushed my whole body against it to make it open.

The stench on the other side was like nothing I'd ever
smelled before, and I pulled the collar of my T-shirt up over my nose. Things must have died up here for it to smell like this. In my head I cursed my mother one last time before I stepped in. The attic was one enormous room, as big as the footprint of the entire house, with a low ceiling and small dormer windows like the lookout windows on a ship. I squinted in the darkness and panned the room. Boxes were everywhere, with corners chewed off and things spilling out onto the floor—old bills, photographs, sheets, clothes. And there was the tent we'd used once, when I was seven and wanted to camp in the backyard. (We lasted for about a half hour before coming inside to sleep in our beds.) And there was Susannah's old dollhouse. And my first saddle. And stacks and stacks and stacks of books.