Pieces of My Sister's Life (21 page)

23

I
SLEPT IN DADDY’S ROOM
the night of my birthday and woke early, well before Eve. I couldn’t face her, I knew I couldn’t, and so I pulled on a shirt and jeans and went outside. I walked, not quite sure where I was walking to, up north where the houses were grander, with walls of windows that gazed blankly out to sea. And even when I reached the Macleans’ it took me a minute to realize why I was there and what I was going to do.

I slowly undid the top two buttons of my blouse and tucked my hair under my collar to hide its length. I lifted my chin, stretching my neck. I knew how to play Eve, a tilt of the head, a slender smile, that was all it took. No magic in Eve, not really.
Honey,
is what I’d call him, no matter how weird it felt.
I’m sorry, Ryan, honey, but this has to stop
.

I hid behind a neighbor’s bush and waited. The flag masted against the porch rail hung limp and still. Congressman Maclean. All-American Adulterer.

Through the front window I could see the Maclean boys with popsicle-blue tongues outstretched and comparing, Mrs. Maclean facing the television and hugging a coffee mug in both hands. I watched them. I watched and the guilt was mine, the sourness in my belly. How could Eve do this to them? Knowing what it was to lose a father, how?

I’m sorry, honey, but I’m getting sick of this. If you even look at me again I’ll tell your wife, I’ll tell the news and you’ll lose everything you worked for just because you couldn’t see past your own stunted prick
. And then I’d give him one of Eve’s disparaging sneers.
By the way,
I’d say,
you were by far the worst fuck I ever had.

I was there less than ten minutes before Ryan Maclean appeared at the window to kiss his wife and ruffle his sons’ heads on his way out the door. He closed the door behind him, a paper tucked under his arm, and headed for his car. I watched him walk, his brown hair streaked with gray, his deep-set eyes, the things that made him a grownup. I watched the confidence of his stride, a man who knew what he wanted and where he was going, and then made myself remember how his face had looked trapped in a helpless moan.

I stepped out from the bushes.

The flush on his skin was instantaneous, would have been kind of fascinating if I’d been in a different mood. The color rose from under the collar of his blue shirt, up his neck and to his cheeks. And in that minute, with the wide grin on his face, he might’ve been a little kid thrilled with the weight of a fish pulling at his pole. In that minute I thought I understood some of what Eve might see.

I gave him Eve’s narrowed eyes and uptilted nose. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But this has to stop.”

He stepped closer, and the flush drained from his cheeks as suddenly as it had come. “Holy Christ,” he said, backing away. “What the hell!”

He knew it was me. What was it he hadn’t seen? There was a time when even Daddy couldn’t tell us apart. But times had obviously changed. “Congressman,” I said.

“What do you want.” Not a question. A threat.

“What do I want? What
do
I want.” This was all feeling too adult for me. I knew what I wanted, but I was suddenly reasonably sure this wasn’t the right way to get it.

He glanced back at his house, then shook his head at me. “Not here.” His voice was dark with disgust. He wiped his hand across his mouth and walked down the street without looking my way. I followed.

“I guess they don’t have any idea,” I said.

He didn’t answer, just kept his eyes on the road ahead, the brambles overhanging the gravel, the rambler roses smiling blankly up at us.

“What’re you doing, Mr. Maclean?” The musical tone of my own voice scared me. I was pretending to be Eve, and I wasn’t Eve. I didn’t know how long I could keep on with it before I did something stupid, apologized or ran away. “Do you love her?”

He walked faster. “What do you want from me? If you want something from me, Kerry, you tell me now.”

“It’s a legitimate question, isn’t it? Do you love her?”

He was quiet for a minute, then suddenly burst into laughter. It hit me that he might actually be insane, but then he turned to wave at Nora Beaufort sweeping the front porch of her Victorian inn. “Morning, Nora,” he said. “How many today?”

“Three couples,” Nora said, “plus a single man in the Wyeth Suite. You imagine one man wanting a whole suite?”

“All filled up then!” Mr. Maclean rested his hand on my back, pushing me along.

“You better be careful,” I said brightly. “People are going to start to think we’re having an affair.”

He threw back his head in another hearty laugh as he pulled his arm away. The laughter stopped abruptly as it had started, an actor leaving the stage. “Look,” he said under his breath. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing. I hope you can be adult enough to have some kind of sense.”

“You hope I’m adult enough. And if I’m not, then I guess Eve’s not, and what does that mean exactly? That you’re screwing a kid? Who’s got more sense here?”

“I’m repeating myself, Kerry. What do you want? You want me to tell you I love her?”

But what I wanted, what I really wanted, I realized, was for him to tell me he didn’t love her at all. To tell me she was just this fling he was having, that all his life he’d been having these kinds of flings with pretty girls. Did the fact that he hadn’t said anything to deny it mean this was actually something more?

“Do you want to marry her?”

This question stopped him in his tracks. He pulled the newspaper from under his arm, eyed it as if he was scanning the headlines. “I know you’re concerned about your sister,” he said. “I understand you’d be concerned.”

Of course he didn’t understand anything, but I’d let him go with concern. It was more acceptable than rage and disgust and fear. And jealousy of him.

“Eve knows how things are, we’ve talked about it many times. In my career, unfair as it is to either of us, appearances are everything.”

“Unfair? Seems to me like appearances should be everything. Seems like cheating on your wife to sleep with someone who’s in high school says a hell of a lot about the kind of person you are.”

He ignored me. “No matter how I feel about her, no matter if I love her—”

“Do you love her?”

He was silent for a minute, then looked back at his newspaper. “Are you going to talk to her?” he asked. “To Eve, will you be telling her about this conversation?”

“Probably not. There’s no reason to tell her.”

He gave a single nod and then something changed in his face, a tightening behind the skin. “Does anyone else know? Did you tell anyone?”

“Justin knows,” I said, “that’s all.”

“Justin. Justin Caine? The mechanic?”

This made me want to slap him. “The mechanic knows,” I said, tightly.

“Dammit,” he muttered. “She knew better than to say anything.”

“Us kids like bragging to our friends about the men we’re sleeping with. It bonds us.”

He flinched. Congressman Maclean, Rhode Island elect, flinched at my words and I smiled. This was the power Eve felt. This is how it felt to be an adult. “Look, I won’t tell anyone and neither will he. I don’t give a damn about your career, but I know what it would do to your kids.”

He nodded. Not grateful but calculating, a politician’s nod. “I don’t know if I love her,” he said after a minute, his voice so low I could hardly hear. “But I’d do anything for her, I’ll tell you that much.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, hoping he could see my disgust, wishing it would at least make him listen to himself, to think. But then Mr. and Mrs. Lynch approached with Sheila Jessup, and Mr. Maclean broke into a roar of greeting, slapping backs and shaking hands, no sign of anything else.

I listened as he spoke to his constituents, a light and limber filibuster, and after a minute I turned away. Knowing the only thing I understood of people was the lie of them.

My stomach was complaining, and so as soon as I returned home I searched through the kitchen cupboards. In the back of an up-high cupboard I found a bag of Daddy’s pork rinds and I opened them, imagining him with the bag between his knees, telling us about the lady who’d been so terrified of the parasail that she’d pulled off her husband’s toupee as her feet left the ground. I sat with the bag on the chair that had been his and inhaled the onion salt of it, and I imagined his laughter and the red crumbs in his beard that would stay there until someone reminded him to brush them away. It was eight months since anyone had sat here. I swept my hand across a spider web between the chair’s legs, and then on impulse I began to clean.

We hadn’t cleaned for quite a while. In fact, except for random tidying, we had never actually cleaned at all. So now I wet rags and went over every surface. I pulled our childhood drawings from the walls, fingering each one: Eve and Kerry, age three, age four, age five.
ABAD GUY
, some adult had printed on one.
PRETTY FLOWERS; A
BIG MACHINE
. Each picture I removed uncovered squares of too-dark wallpaper, like vacant eyes that watched me no matter how hard I tried to ignore them.

I set the paintings in the hall and moved out to the den, retrieving some of the kitschy things Daddy had bought either to make us laugh or because he had exceptionally bad taste. Rocks with googly eyes, shells painted with stripes, a furry stuffed eyeball and a Sylvester-the-Cat clock; I set them all out in the hall. I rolled up dark rugs that looked like winter to reveal the shiny, protected hardwood and then began to sweep. When I was done I sat cross-legged on the floor and fingered the sweepings: a dead leaf, an earring back, a mat of curly black hair. Daddy’s hair. I tucked it into my pocket.

The momentum of the cleaning was soothing in its way, but with each old thing I piled by the door I felt myself sinking, no way to stop, the empty floors a sign of transience, one step closer to blowing away.

The afternoon grew long. I ate stale saltines and some spaghetti strands straight from the box. Returning to the den, I gasped. Eve was at the window.

She was watching me, her hair uncombed and greasy at her neck, so long now it hid her eyes. We stood for a minute, face to face, expressionless, and then Eve started to the door. I stood there, numb and nauseous. I didn’t think I’d be able to lift my legs.

I watched as she knelt to sort through the things I’d left by the door. She lifted a TV tray, examining a stain from a long-ago dinner. “You’re going to throw this all away?”

I looked down at the floor. “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess I am.”

She nodded, kicking at a footstool shaped like a turtle. “Can you imagine buying crap like this? I mean seeing it in a store and paying actual money?”

I smiled at the floor, suddenly wanting to stop, to drop everything and grab onto her, but instead I shook my head. “No accounting for taste.”

“We should keep them,” she said, without looking at me. “I mean, there’s room in the attic, so why not? In case someone ever wants to know who we all were. I always wanted that when we were kids, some kind of history.”

“Okay.” There was a sharp squeeze in my chest. I lifted a plastic goldfish bowl, its multicolored plastic fish swimming through blue gel. I glanced at her, then started up the stairs to pull out the ladder to the attic.

We went down for more, and then again. And with each trip I felt something in me settling as our childhood found its place. When we’d finished, we sprawled onto the bottom stair exhausted. We didn’t speak, just watched the dust we’d stirred swirling in the fading afternoon light. And then slowly I bent my knee so it touched her leg. I knew she must feel it but she didn’t move away.

After a minute, she nodded at the window. “Take a look.”

Through the front window I could see LoraLee marching towards our drive. I started to get up but Eve pressed me back. “Just watch.”

LoraLee strode to our doorstep, then glanced up and down the street before reaching into the pocket of her skirt. She quickly slid a brown envelope onto our porch, lightly touched the porch rail, then traipsed away.

“Birthday money,” I whispered. “She’s the one been giving us money.”

Eve nodded. “I saw her a while back.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? How can she give us money when she hardly has enough for herself?”

“It makes her happy, can’t you see that? People want to help us, Kerry, like the Caines. They do it for themselves as much as us.”

I leaned my head against the banister rail, tears filling my eyes, tears for us, for LoraLee who thought ten dollars could make a difference, for the pieces of the past I’d almost thrown away.

“That money under my bed, it’s not what you think. I didn’t steal it.”

I nodded without turning to face her, wishing she wouldn’t talk about this, not now.

“It is the Caines’ money, Kerry, but it wasn’t stolen, it was given. I don’t know why Justin told you I took it, maybe he was embarrassed. But the truth is he gave me the money because he knew you were too proud to take it. We’ve been planning, me and Justin, for our future, all our future.”

Her voice hitched and she blinked quickly before continuing, her words too fast. “We were thinking maybe we could open a bed-and-breakfast, it could be perfect for us. I know you always talked about us running some kind of shop, but really this might make more sense. We’d meet people from all over the country, all over the world even.”

I looked up at the small circular window above our door, feeling the breath rush through me, through the earth, up through my legs and chest like I was a hollow pipe with solid, echoing walls. I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe a word of it, but at that moment I didn’t care. I tilted my head. “You’d dust and change sheets and I’d learn how to make five kinds of French toast.”

She glanced at me. “I’m not going to see Ryan Maclean anymore, I’m telling him that. He’s getting too psycho for me, wants to be with me every minute it seems like, and I’m bored of it. He doesn’t even know who I am really.” Her voice trailed off and she clutched at the step.

Without thinking I reached for Eve’s hand. She flinched but then, her eyes on the floor, she slowly interlaced our fingers. Her fingers pressed against mine, then harder, gripping me as if my hand could save her. And my fingers were tingling to numbness but I held on.