Edgewater (4 page)

3

HOME SWEET HOME

GIGI WASN'T IN THE KITCHEN, BUT SUSANNAH WAS,
bent over a cardboard box on the table. I didn't need to peer inside to know that something frail and sickly was contained within. Instead, I observed my sister, who remained oblivious to me, to the smell—possibly even worse in the kitchen—and to the harsh static of the radio on the counter. Her thick strawberry-blond hair was in its customary braid down her back, her checked dress, while “new” to my eyes, was likely some discard she'd found at a tag sale. Her feet were, as usual, bare and caked with dirt. When we were young, Gigi had called Susannah the “child of light” because of her hair, not to mention her sunny personality. Which I supposed made me the child of darkness.

I cleared my throat, loudly.

“Lorrie!” Susannah said, pivoting to face me, blocking the
box with her body. “What are you doing here? I thought you'd be gone all summer.”

“That
was
the plan,” I said.

“What happened?”

“They kicked me out,” I said.

“You're kidding.”

“I'm not,” I told her. “Apparently there's a policy against staying at Woodscape for free. Where's Gigi?”

Susannah lowered her eyes. “BP,” she said quietly.

That was code we'd come up with when we were kids, for Gigi's Blue Periods.

Some days, Gigi would wake early, push the curtains in our bedrooms aside, and shout out a greeting to the morning sun. She'd coax the deer on the lawn close to the porch with table scraps and get them to eat off the palm of her hand. She held dance parties in the middle of the night when we couldn't sleep.

But then came the BP, seemingly without warning. It generally lasted a day or two, maybe three. The longest one went on for nine days. I was in sixth grade, Susannah was in fourth, and we'd had to stay home from school the whole time while Gigi lay in her room, blackout curtains drawn, sometimes sleeping, sometimes weeping. If Susannah or I went in to ask her for anything—food for us, milk for the cats—she'd groan and cover her ears, as if the sound of our voices pained her. By the time she'd snapped out of it, we were down to the crumbs in a box of Wheat Thins and a quarter of a block of cheese.

There'd be no confrontation until Gigi was out of BP, no matter how riled up and ready I was.

“How convenient for her,” I said. “How long so far?”

“I think this is the third day,” Susannah said. “Third or fourth. She'll come out of it soon, like she always does. Don't worry.”

“I wasn't,” I said. “So, what's your excuse?”

“My excuse?”

“Yeah, I only sent you about two dozen text messages in the last few hours to clue you in to the Woodscape stuff, and I've sent you even more going back the last couple weeks.”

“Sorry,” Susannah said lightly. “My cell phone's been acting wonky. I stuck it in a bowl of rice, because Brian says that cures phones, but it's still not working. He'll fix it soon, I'm sure.”

“He really is a jack-of-no-trades, isn't he? Has that guy ever done one thing he promised?”

“Be nice,” Susannah said. “That's my boyfriend you're talking about. He'll probably be your brother-in-law someday. The father of your nieces and nephews.”

I couldn't think of anything more revolting. “Where is this prince right now?” Not that I wanted to see him. More so I could avoid him.

“At a poker game or something.”

“Is that why the Money Drawer is empty?” I asked.

“No!” she said a little too quickly. “Brian would never do that.”

“Never steal?” I'd seen him come home with random little gifts for Susannah—nothing she'd asked for or even wanted, but things that were easy enough to swipe off a store shelf and shove into a backpack: lipsticks in various unattractive shades, a tiny stuffed dog, fuzzy socks, a pack of highlighters. “Yeah, right.”

Susannah shook her head. “He wouldn't,” she insisted. “Besides, he doesn't know about the drawer.”

“Really?”

“Really. I swear. I told you I wouldn't tell, and I didn't, but you . . . you don't know as much about him as you think you do, Lorrie. He's not a bad person, and he's important to me.”

“I know he is.” That was what made it even worse. “You deserve so much more, Susie. Someone who is smart and ambitious, and who isn't using you for the benefit of having a boardinghouse to crash at.”

Susannah ignored the last bit. “I guess Aunt Gigi just hasn't had time to go to the bank these last few days to make the transfer,” she said. “That's all. I'm sure it's no big thing. She'll go when it passes.”

The BP, she meant.

“God,” I said. “I can barely hear myself think with all this noise.”

“What noise?”

“You're kidding me, right?” I stepped up to the counter and snapped off the radio. Then, for emphasis, I pulled the plug from the wall. “Now, that oughta do it.”

But it didn't do it. The stack of dishes in the sink overflowed onto the counter, competing for space with at least two weeks' worth of
New York Post
s. We were surrounded by so much stuff that was old and broken and just waiting to be thrown away. I felt the burning need to deal with it all
right that minute
. I grabbed one of the paper bags on the windowsill and moved toward the refrigerator, a coffin of mildew and decay.

“Here we go,” Susannah murmured.

I threw her a look and got on with it. Inside the fridge were the usual suspects: green-gold hunk of cheese, congealed carton
of yogurt, milk well past the sell-by date and gone chunky, leaden-gray bar of something in a baggie, rotting head of lettuce, an onion coated in fizzy white mold, countless opened cans of soda long gone flat. My hands were like robot arms, picking and tossing.

“Aunt Gigi will be upset you trashed her chopped liver.”

“Was that what that was? Tell her I'm saving her from E. coli.”

Susannah shrugged. “Tell her yourself.”

I went for the freezer, a fun house of mystery meats wrapped in foil, and I pulled back the wrapping on one, uncovering something fleshy, pink, and unidentifiable. “I bet you can't even tell me what this is,” I said.

“That's monkfish, from Brian's dad,” Susannah told me. “It's only a couple weeks old.”

I put it back, picked up another, and peeled the foil back. “Holy shit,” I said as the package slipped from my hands to the floor.

“Oh, my birdies!” Susannah put down what looked like an eyedropper and stepped away from the box at the table. “I found them on a nature walk.”

Gigi had started taking Susannah on nature walks years ago, and my sister found beauty in every bone, every carcass.

“Poor little red-breasted robins,” Susannah went on. She picked the foil package up from the floor and caressed the frozen feathers. “They were dead when I found them, but I couldn't just leave them there, and I couldn't put them in the ground to decompose just yet. Gigi said we could put them in the freezer, just for a little while.”

Of course that was what Gigi had said, and of course my sister had gone along with her. They shared a similar temperament. For years I'd been waiting for Susannah to change. Waiting for lightning to strike and—
poof!
—she'd be turned into the person I wanted her to be. One day, surely, she'd wake up and say, “Oh my God, Lorrie, I just realized that you've been completely right about this all along. This is insane. This is
unacceptable
.”

She wasn't ever going to, and I knew it, but still I desperately wanted her to. And every time she didn't, it made me unspeakably sad, as if I'd lost yet another essential person.

“Preserving them on ice isn't going to save them, you know,” I told my sister. “Once something is dead, it's dead. You and Gigi must be violating some safety code, having dead things in the freezer next to the food we're supposed to eat.”

“The monkfish is dead,” Susannah pointed out.

“I know you know the difference,” I told her.

Susannah resealed the package with the care of a new mother swaddling an infant, put it back in the freezer, and hugged me from behind. “You've been gone for three weeks,” she said. “I don't know why you have to be so pissy the minute you come through the door. I'm happy to see you, Lorrie-Lorrie-boborrie. Aren't you happy to see me?”

“Yeah, of course.” I twisted around and returned her hug. Susannah's hair was tawny and as thick as a mane. A picture of Orion flashed in my head. His registered name was Hunting Achievement. But his nickname came from the great hunter who, according to Greek mythology, Zeus had placed among the stars.

Was Orion being well cared for? I'd forgotten to tell anyone about the baggie of mints tucked at the back of the shelf just outside his stall. He ate them off my palm, a treat at the end of the day. As thanks, he'd lower his muzzle to the top of my head, exhaling into my hair.

“My big duffel's in the front hall,” I said, letting go and blinking back the sting in my eyes. “I have to bring it upstairs.”

“I'll help you, if you want.”

“Yeah, thanks. That'd be great.” I tipped my head toward the box on the table that Susannah had left unguarded. “So, what's the deal?”

“Five kittens. They're Pansy's, and the runt's a calico. We should keep her. It's bad luck to let go of a calico.” She moved toward the box again. “Look, isn't she cute?”

I peered in on the squirming mass of furry bodies rammed up against Pansy, and then I saw the one in a corner—a little smaller than all the others. Pansy stared at me through dazed yellow eyes.

“Poor little runt, she's not thriving,” Susannah went on, “and she hasn't attached to Pansy yet. But I think she'll come around.” She was speaking to me, but she was looking at the kitten and talking in her baby voice, a voice meant to soothe. Broken things were so easy for my sister to love.

“That's great, Susannah,” I said. “Now come give me a hand.”

We lugged my bag, as large as a man's body and nearly as heavy, up to my room. It had once been Mom's childhood room, but I'd long ago removed all traces of her. Hard enough to have a mother who'd left voluntarily; I didn't want to look
around and be reminded of that. So Mom's watercolors and Limoges figurines, her old schoolbooks and poetry collection, were all boxed up and stuffed in the attic. I liked my room to be clutter-free anyway. As I entered it now, it appeared unchanged in my absence. Clean and sparse. No piles, no knickknacks. Even my horse ribbons were displayed in a perfect line along the top of the window frame, not a single one crooked or frayed. But they were looking a little dust-coated. I knew I wouldn't fall asleep until I'd wiped them clean.

“Aren't you coming back down?” Susannah hung in the doorway, picking her cuticles. “We could name the kittens.”

“Name them before you take them to the shelter, you mean?”

“Sure.” Though we both knew it was a lie. Susannah never delivered to shelters, only retrieved from them. She shopped at animal-rescue centers the way old ladies prowled department stores.

I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said. “I'm not really in the mood. All I can think about is my showdown with Gigi. This whole thing seems like some kind of brutal mind game to force me to come home. Or maybe she's just lost her mind for good this time.”

“Shh, lower your voice,” Susannah warned, even though Gigi's room was at the other end of the house.

“She can't hear us. But she's such a shitty guardian or executor, or whatever she wants to call herself, that she can't be bothered to make a simple payment. What do I care if she
does
hear us?”

It wasn't lost on me that I was acting a bit like Beth-Ann Bracelee. But I didn't care.

“I told her a bunch of times that you needed the money,” Susannah said, her own voice hushed, just in case. “The last time I said it, she just started crying. It was really sad.” I rolled my eyes. “No, really, Lorrie. It was. Did you ever think that maybe she needed you at home?”

“Whatever. You could've at least clued me in to her meltdown.”

“I just figured it had all worked out.”

“You knew she hadn't gone to the bank to replenish the Money Drawer. In what world do you think that means things are ‘all worked out'?”

“What I know is, you don't want to be home, and you're taking it out on me. I'm going to go downstairs and take care of my babies.”

“Kittens. Not babies. You didn't give birth to them. But that's not . . . Fine.” My last word was spoken to an empty space, as Susannah had already jumped away in her usual quicksilver fashion. She was never the girl who would duke it out, but rather was always hiding around a corner, under the table, or, most often, up in a tree. One hard-flung word was all it took. I might not see her again for a day.

I'd been harsh, but I'd been right. My brain was sizzling with anger at both my aunt's uselessness and my sister's indifference. And right now the most important thing for me was to get myself settled, physically and emotionally, in the safe space of my own room. My only refuge in this sorry excuse for Home Sweet Home.