Edgewater (23 page)

Something flew across the room—holy shit! A bat! I ducked and covered my head with my hands. My heart was racing, but I knew I had a job to do and just about a half hour left before the attic fell into complete darkness and all the night creatures came out. Then not being able to see would be the least of my problems. I wanted to stay close to the door—to a means of escape—but I needed the light from the windows. I took a deep breath inside my shirt and moved forward. I sat on a box by a window and pulled a stack of papers onto my lap to read by the diminishing rays of sunlight.

If we were all dead
, I thought to myself, and I started a pile of things to dump: yellowed magazines and crumbling newspapers, bills for credit cards long closed, scripts for plays Gigi was never in, recipes for meals she never made, and notes scribbled in handwriting I didn't recognize. A breeze swept through the cracks in the windowpanes and sent the papers scattering
across the floor again. For a split second I actually welcomed the fresh air, clearing out the smell of decomposing animals. But then
SLAM!
went the attic door, and my heart pounded like Orion's hooves.

Yim, yim, yim, yim, yim, yim
, I repeated to myself, as quick as the heartbeats in my chest. But my mantra did nothing to calm me. As I moved across the room to the door, I couldn't get rid of the feeling that I was in another horror movie: Girl goes up into the attic, where no human has set foot in years. While rifling through items long discarded and forgotten, she gets locked in, and then she—

Oh, thank God. The knob turned, and the door opened. I wedged one of the heavier boxes against it so that even a gale-force gust wouldn't close it again. Now, back to work.

I needed to find the more recent piles. I spotted one of Susannah's coloring books on the top of a box, her name spelled out in messy capital letters, and I pulled the whole thing toward the window for optimum light. I flipped through old report cards, moldy stuffed animals, and pages ripped out of the phone book, scanning for clues of . . . what, I wasn't sure. Everything went into the toss pile.

I went faster and faster, so fast that I almost missed the drawings stuck in the middle of it all—my horse drawings. I'd been so little back then. I didn't know anything. I traced the lines with my fingers, remembering how hard I'd tried to get them just right. But this was no time to be sentimental. I crumpled them into a ball and tossed them toward the throwaway pile and turned back to the box. Nothing seemed remarkable until I found the red leather notebook. It was one of those fancy date
books you can get from a bank. I opened it to the first page and recognized Mom's handwriting.

I just want to have a place to document the things I'm thinking and feeling, because there's no one who is safe to tell.

Oh my God. A diary.

She'd kept a diary. To write about whatever secrets she felt she couldn't tell anyone else. Maybe to write about how she didn't love her kids enough. Maybe to write about her plans to leave us.

My palms started to sweat, and my heartbeat, which had barely returned to a regular resting rate, started pounding as fast as hoofbeats once again. I felt like I was invading Mom's privacy, reading her diary. Not that she deserved any privacy. She'd left Susannah and me and never looked back.

And so I kept going.

I didn't mean for this to happen. I suppose that's how it always starts. No one says they want to be a bank robber or a drug dealer when they grow up. And no one says they want to have an affair.

Questions rushed into my brain faster than I could read the answers. Mom had had an affair before Dad left? With whom? And how did she meet him? How long did it last?

I wanted to have a normal life, and on paper I have one—a husband, a child.

A husband. Okay, it
was
when Dad was still around.

So my sister is a little messed up. At least she has character.

Oh, sure, Gigi had a lot of “character.” I wondered if that was what Mom told herself when she left Susannah and me in her care.

I should be perfectly happy. I was mostly happy. Except for the times I'd wake up in the middle of the night with an inexplicable sense of loss, and I'd resent Keith next to me, sleeping the sleep of the dead. He'd worked hard to get where he was, from the rockiness of his childhood, to the rebellion and addiction of his young adulthood, to this normal life, and he never seemed to want any more than we had. The mornings after those sleepless nights, I'd come back to understanding his contentment. It seemed crazy—that I'd been so upset, and that I'd resented him for nothing I could even explain. I'd put on the coffee, and he'd shuffle papers into his briefcase, and we'd kiss the baby good-bye, and it all seemed to be the way it was supposed to be. And I was happy.

But things happen. A particular set of circumstances lead you to a particular place. A restaurant on the corner of Forty-ninth and Third. Your friend's late for dinner. A man sits alone at the next table. And suddenly your life is split in two. One life is your apartment and your husband and your kid. And the other life is just this man and nothing else. Everything else falls away. You tell yourself it doesn't mean anything. But then you keep going back—even though you know
you shouldn't. It feels so good. So you go back again. And again and again.

I decided I wasn't surprised that my mom had betrayed her family for something that felt good for a moment. That kind of impulse was the same kind as the one that got her to leave her children for good. I flipped the page, but it was stuck to a clump of others. My fingers fumbled to pull them apart. “Shit,” I said as I tore them instead of separating them. I pushed past the ruined pages to the next section.

I said I had a business trip, and then I got on a plane to meet him. Of course I called home to check in. Lorrie got on the phone to tell me about her day. Then she told me I had to say hi to each of her stuffed animals.

I thought back to the deepest recesses of my brain, to remember a phone call with my mom and a line of stuffed animals I'd made her greet. But I couldn't remember any of it. I couldn't even remember caring about my stuffed animals like that. That was Susannah's kind of thing.

Junior came into the room as I was greeting the hippo and the pig and the donkey.

Junior? What kind of a name was Junior?

I don't know why I was self-conscious. He's a parent, too. Up until now we've had an unspoken rule not to talk about
our families. The names of our spouses and our children are verboten. But suddenly he wanted to know about other things I did with Lorrie. I told him all of our little traditions, but I left out any mention of Keith. As if we were a family of two and not three.

I felt bad for the child version of myself, on the phone with Mom. Of course, I'd had no idea what Mom was really thinking at the time. I wondered if she'd rushed me off once her boyfriend walked into the room. I flipped the page again.

Junior and I had no fewer than a thousand conversations about it, and in the end he'd always come to the same conclusion: Telling the truth would be so messy.

But life is messy. That's what I kept telling him. You make messes, and you clean them up as best you can, and then you make more messes. And so it goes. I thought maybe if I made this particular mess first, we'd clean it up together. So I told Keith the baby wasn't his.

The baby? Did she mean Susannah? Was Susannah not my father's child? Oh God. My sister. My sister wasn't my sister. At least, not entirely.

It was the biggest revelation of my entire life, and I was learning about it alone in the barely lit attic surrounded by garbage. My heart was beating madly and erratically, my stomach was in knots, and a lone tear fell from all those welling in my eyes.
Plop
, onto the page. I smudged Mom's words as I wiped it away and kept on reading.

But afterward, it just didn't work out the way I thought it would. My plan was, I'd tell Keith and report back to Junior, and he'd finally be prompted to tell his wife. It would be a hard year of adjustments—getting divorces and becoming stepparents to each other's children. But other people have done it. We could do it, too. And in the end it would even be better than what we were living now. That's what I told him.

But he didn't leave his wife. He said he didn't want to. He said we were being selfish and this was something we shouldn't have started at all. And Keith. I can barely stand to think about what this did to him. He threw away years of sobriety in one night. He said he never wanted to see me again. I cried and begged, “What about Lorrie?” But he said she reminded him too much of me and all he'd lost. He said she'd be better off without him.

So now here I am—without my husband, without Junior. A single mom, with a new baby on the way.

Was I supposed to feel sorry for her—because her husband and her boyfriend left her? It was only because of her own selfish choices, like Junior said.

But my heart did break for Susannah. Memories from our childhood suddenly flashed into my mind. Like how she would ask to sleep in my bed almost every night. It's so weird, being the older sister. Sometimes you're not in the mood to be followed around or copied or needed. You don't want a little sister. You want to be an only child again. And those nights I'd tell Susannah to get back to her own room. But then, sometimes, there's no better feeling than having your younger sibling lying
right beside you. In the mornings Susannah would let me brush her hair. I had a book of different braids, and Susannah was the model I practiced on to learn a fishtail, a French braid, a Dutch braid. The last one was her favorite. “It's inside out!” she'd always squeal with delight.

I looked back down at the journal on my lap. The words were a blur on the page, but I read them anyway, as if this time they'd spell out a different truth. I didn't hear the footsteps behind me.

“Lorrie?” Susannah called, and I jumped in surprise. Startled, Susannah dropped the candle she was holding. Mom's diary fell to the floor, and I kicked it away so she wouldn't see it. Susannah cried out, and for a second the only thing that registered was that the room was suddenly brighter. Then I realized she was on fire. Whatever synthetic tag-sale skirt she was wearing had gone up in flames, which were spreading quickly, licking her skin.

“I'm burning!” she screamed.

Stop, drop, and roll.
That firefighting lesson from childhood popped into my head.

Once, in a Hillyer science seminar we'd been taught that small animals like flies and hummingbirds experience time in slow motion. That's what it was like for me as I tackled Susannah to the ground. She was wailing in pain, and the words I yelled out sounded distended and strange: “Help! Fire! Help!”

18

WE HAVE A PROBLEM

“LORRIE,” SOMEONE WHISPERED. “LORRIE, WAKE UP.”

A hand clamped down on my shoulder, and I screamed before I'd even opened my eyes.

“Shh,” the voice said.

It took me several seconds to focus on the man standing in front of me, dressed from head to toe in teddy-bear scrubs. I was in a hospital, I remembered. I'd come screaming into the emergency room, barely two hours earlier: “My sister! My sister! Someone help her, please!”

Now Susannah was lying in the bed next to me, and a machine beeped rhythmically, tracking her vital signs. I wondered what had happened to the car after we'd been checked in and treated. I'd pulled up right outside the ER door, and orderlies had come with a gurney to get Susannah from the backseat. One of them noticed my hand and brought me inside, too. No
one had asked me to move the Mercedes. I think the keys were even still in it.

“My car,” I whispered to Teddy-Bear Scrubs.

“It's all right,” he whispered back. “Someone parked it for you.”

“The keys?”

“They're in the bag with your sister's clothes,” he said. “Don't worry. Can you come with me now, please?”

I nodded, got up, and followed him into the hallway, where a woman was waiting. She was in a pantsuit that Lennox's moms would characterize as “smart,” and she had a clipboard under her arm. Around her neck was a tag that read:
C. HILLMAN.

She held out her hand to shake mine but then noticed my bandage and gave me a pat on the shoulder instead. “I'm Cheryl,” she said.

First-name basis. So, she wasn't a doctor. I was pretty sure she wasn't a nurse, either.

“And you're Lorrie Hollander.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Of the Hollanders on Break Run?”

My cheeks warmed. “Yes,” I said again.

“No kidding,” Teddy-Bear Scrubs said. “I've driven by that place a hundred times. I've always wondered about the people who lived there.”