Pieces of My Sister's Life (27 page)

“She’d never forgive us if we tell what we did. Christ, Justin!”

I shook my head slowly. He wanted to confess? He couldn’t. He couldn’t!

“I just hate how this feels, living a lie. And the thing is, the thing is, Eve, I’ve replayed that whole night over so many times in my head. And what I think is maybe it wasn’t a mistake, maybe it was fate. We didn’t do anything wrong, not really, not morally wrong. And the truth of it is if I had it to do over again, I don’t know that I’d do anything different.”

“Neither would I,” I said.

Eve gave a little yelp and scooted back against the corner. Her cheeks flushed a ruddy pink at the same time Justin’s drained pale, like she’d sucked the blood from his face. He glanced at Eve, then back at me.

“I don’t think I would,” I said, my eyes on Eve. “He wasn’t a good man, Eve. And maybe he didn’t deserve to die, but truth is, the world’s a better place without him.”

Justin’s shoulders loosened and I reached my hand to him. He stared at it, then finally took it. “You can’t really be serious about telling anyone,” I said. “Not now. It’s too late now.”

Justin was quiet a minute, then nodded. “You’re right. Of course we can’t.”

I looked back at Eve. Her eyes were wide, the guilt hanging over her whole body like a scent. She nodded sharply.

“And you remember what I told you,” Justin said. “Things won’t always be like this.”

I reached for Eve, but she flinched away. So I slid onto Justin’s lap, let him wrap his arms around me.

“We’ll all be okay,” he said. He squeezed his arms so tight around me that my elbows jabbed against my ribs. “Whatever happens, whatever we do, Eve, we’ll all get through this.”

30

J
USTIN HAD SPENT
most of his free time in his office that first month of summer, writing feverishly. He was escaping perhaps, or fencing off his thoughts within the safe skin and skeleton of pen on paper. Every night now he came home late. I’d watch for his car and then go to his room to hold him. We’d kiss so deep, so passionately it made me dizzy. But each time I tried to move past the kiss he’d recoil, and then he’d apologize:
I’m just so tired, just can’t stop thinking, can’t shut it off. But you know I love you, don’t you? You know how much I love you.
And I’d nod and pull away, let him escape back to his writing, his world. There next to him, that was all I needed on those foggy days. The long blank page of an island summer and a man who could keep me from looking past it.

And then one night he returned from the shop with a flat box. “This is it,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows. “This is…”

“My story. I’ve weeded it where it needs to be weeded, added what needs to be added and I put it in some semblance of order. I wanted you to be the one to read it first. It’s as much your story as mine.”

I took the box, smiling widely, then pulled him into a hug. It was done. Morwyn and Gaelin and our future were all in this bundled box of notepaper, and waiting to come true. We could separate our lives into Before the story and After the story, like before and after a marriage or a birth, when the before hardly seemed to matter anymore. What happened was awful, it was hellishly awful, but it was done, and it was time to reclaim our lives.

“I’ll read it now,” I said.

What I did was bring the box up to the bedroom. Eve was on the bed in a stained T-shirt and nothing else. I showed her the box. “Justin’s story,” I said. “He brought it to me. I thought we could read it together.”

“Justin’s story.” She stared at her bare knees. “Maybe not tonight, Ker. I’m not feeling so great.”

“This’ll help, though, I know it will.”

“Yeah, right.”

I sat beside her and said, “What did you mean in the grocery store when you said there was something I didn’t know?”

She gazed blankly into the middle distance. “I keep seeing him,” she said. “Do you keep seeing him?”

I searched her face then said, “Sometimes. A little. I try not to.” This was the dream I’d had the night before: I was wading on the beach, jeans rolled to my knees, with a red plastic fishing pole. And the hook caught in his mouth and dragged him to the surface, all bloated cheeks and blue lips, rotting pustules of flesh.

“He’s floating there,” she said. “Peaceful, you know? Like he’s suntanning or stargazing. And he starts…” She cackled with a strange, dry laugh. “He’s lying there and he starts reciting the fucking Declaration of Independence. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…’”

I sat there facing the wall. I couldn’t turn to her.

“‘…that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.’ Did you know I have the whole freaking thing memorized? I could recite it for you.”

“How did you know about the rape, Eve?”

She was silent for a minute, then pulled her knees up to her chest. “He told me. A warning, I guess. He told me about it on the first day we were together. He said he couldn’t believe he was letting himself fall in love with me, how risky it was.” She laughed sharply, a sound like splitting wood. “He said the last time he let himself get close to a girl, just as a friend he said, she turned around and accused him of rape.”

I watched her, unblinking.

She wiped her palms across her eyes. “And brilliant as I am, I thought he was telling the truth. Part of me’s still trying to rationalize it, because if it was rape then what was he doing with me? Fucking asshole ruined my life, you know that?” She tilted her face to the ceiling. “You fucking shithead son of a bitch!”

I smoothed her hair behind her ears, pushed her bangs to one side and kissed her forehead. When she didn’t respond I pulled the stack of paper from the box. “I wonder if it’s some kind of record, to spend ten years writing a children’s book. You haven’t heard any of it since we were kids, right?”

“He’s finished with it,” she said. The words sounded stilted, ragged, like they were pieces torn off some other stream of thought flowing through her head.

“We’ll read it and it’ll feel like going back. You remember how it was those days on the porch? You and me sitting there listening, and it became everything. Everything else disappeared.”

Eve smiled crookedly. “And when Justin left we’d act it all out. The porch beams were princes. We kissed the porch beams.”

“Sluts in the making. But for me it was a porch beam with Justin’s face.”

Eve’s smile faded. She flipped through the notepaper in the box. “Okay, let’s read.”

So Eve and I leaned back on the bed and started to read aloud, alternating chapters. Something loosened as we flipped the pages. Justin had written quite a bit over the past weeks, and it had come together, incredibly beautiful in places. There were new characters I recognized: Arianne, the soulful hippie-child, who I knew was Justin’s mother; Kaltos, the gruff, tough-talking, tattooed palace guard, was Daddy. There were the townspeople we’d grown up with: the Hudsons, the Knights, the Barringtons, now become talking bats and cats, and birds that spoke in rhymes.

And then…then there was Eve. I flipped through the next pages, skimming through the words, my throat closing as I read.

Morwyn newly married to Gaelin, both of them living on a glass mountain that only the virtuous could climb. Beautiful, enchanting Esmerelda, queen of the elves, with her thorned crown of roses and her seductively piercing eyes, who sees Gaelin only once but once is all it takes to fall in love. Who claims to be Morwyn’s long lost sister and lures her with a potion of sleep. Then calls a flock of crows who fly up the glass mountain, past the sleeping Morwyn to where Gaelin mourns over his lost bride. And they carry Gaelin away.

“She’s you,” I said.

Eve pushed the box away. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Stop it, Eve, don’t even say anything. This has to do with you trying to take Justin away. Which upset him so much he had to write about it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her voice shook, the voice of truths held back.

The images were coming at me, one on top of another, slicing like whiplashes across my back: Justin holding Eve in her lace panties and torn silk dress; Eve peeling her stockings to her knees, twirling in a black halter as Justin gaped; Eve at the kitchen table, lips pressed against his lips, her hand reaching for his crotch. “You slut,” I said, my voice guttural.

She watched me, her eyes red. “Kerry, stop.”

“You goddamned slut!” I grabbed Justin’s box and it happened before I knew what was happening, in a blank second that flashed heat up my arms, that slammed the box at the side of her head with a dull clunk of bone, her rush of startled breath echoing my own.

She skittered backwards on the bed, her hand pressed to her temple. “I can’t believe you just did that.”

“
You
can’t believe
me
?”

“You really think I’m the one after him? You really think…”

I stared at her, saw so much, too much. “I can’t believe you,” I whispered. “I can’t believe you!” I spun away.

Mrs. Caine was out back, pulling in the wash. She waved to me but I pretended I didn’t see, clattered up the stairs and burst into Justin’s room. “She tried to sleep with you, didn’t she.”

Justin was sitting on the bed clipping his toenails. He flinched as the door slammed back against the wall.

I held the box towards him. “It was in your book, Justin, all of it. They’re happily married and here comes Esmerelda to steal you away. Tell me she’s not based on Eve.”

He dropped his nail clippers, stared at me, then raised his eyebrows. “Christ, Kerry, would you listen to yourself? You’re freaking out over what’re basically cartoon characters. You’re getting jealous about the goddamned queen of the freaking elves!”

“Why are you protecting her?”

“I can’t stand you when you act like this. If we don’t have trust, we don’t have anything! If you don’t trust me, Kerry, it means our whole relationship is a sham.”

My eyes stung. I spun from the room, ran down the steps out to the drive, down graveled streets and on. I ran down to the water, clutching Justin’s box, out to the dock, past the bands playing at Ballard’s with their requisite flocks of teenagers hooting and calling in a desperate search for someone to hold on to.

When I got to Daddy’s boat I climbed inside, inhaling the fish and damp of it, the scent of something long buried. I curled myself against the hull and opened the box of Justin’s papers, knowing out here it wouldn’t matter so much. The ghosts here were strong and horrible enough to smudge these pages to nothing more significant than a story. All that mattered was what happened in the end.

And so I read on through the night. And when I was done I leaned back to look up at the stars. Happily ever after. Okay. It was okay.

Because love prevailed. Love always prevailed in life as in fairy tales. Eve had her strength and cunning, her deception, a body that spoke of sex, but I had Justin. Justin was strong enough to know his heart. And I had his heart.

I walked home and paced down the hallway squeezing the edges of things—the table, a lamp, a banister rail—as if they could hold me down. I climbed the stairs to the bedroom. The door was closed, the light on. What I’d do is tell her she had one last chance.
Look,
I’d say,
I know you want him and it’s not fair of me to get mad at how you feel. But if you go to him again, I swear I’ll never forgive you, Eve. Never.
I opened the door.

And they were there. Both on Eve’s bed. His hand pressed to her cheek.

Something dark burrowed deep inside me as I watched, my eyes feeling huge and dry as sandpaper. A knowing, something quivering and trying to take hold as I saw him, saw Eve, saw Eve seeing me and her face shifting like something round going flat. She glanced at Justin, then stood.

“What?” I whispered.

Justin shook his head, slowly.

I stepped into the room. “Tell me.”

He shook his head again.

I grabbed Eve’s arm and she shrieked, then looked into my face, pleading. “It wasn’t, it really wasn’t. Oh God, you have to understand.” She looked down at my hand where it gripped her arm, then bit her top lip and pulled away, her skin flushed nearly purple. “Listen, okay? Whatever he tells you, you can’t believe him. He hates me, Kerry.”

No, no
. “What?”

She searched my face. “He’ll tell you things that you know I wouldn’t do. I wouldn’t hurt you.”

“Hurt me?” Something was rushing through me like a waterfall of slime, down my throat and over my skin, my thoughts coated with a glossy hard glaze. “What did you do?”

Eve whirled around to look at Justin. She mouthed the word
Please.

Justin’s eyes flicked to her, then back to me. Eve turned and raced down the hall. I started after her.

“Wait!” Justin called.

I spun to face him. His face was tight with panic. “Just let me tell you.”

I shook my head, no, please no, don’t talk, don’t say it, I don’t need to hear.

“I swear I wanted to say something in the beginning,” he said, “but I didn’t know how. And Eve convinced me it would only hurt you to tell the truth. Which I really thought maybe made sense.”

In the beginning.
Something hit me in the lungs. I dimly felt my body sink to the bed.

“But that was so stupid of me to think it would just go away by me wishing it. Maybe Eve’s the kind of person who can just bury things and then forget them, but I know I’ll hate myself until I tell you.” He tilted his head to the ceiling. “Because everything I say feels like a lie, and I know we can’t ever be close again unless I know you forgive me. I came here tonight because I knew I had to tell you all of it, because us, you and me, it means everything. All I ever wanted in my whole life was you.”

“So tell me already.” My body was shaking but my voice was steady and deep. I felt like I was swimming, scissor-kicking through lake water. “I can take it. Just tell me.”

“Okay.” Justin nodded. “Okay, what happened is Eve came to me.” He spoke to the wall over my head, then shifted his eyes down quickly to my face. “She came to me after the night on the boat. She’d had a nightmare, she said. And she needed me, she said. And I needed something too, needed you there.” His voice was high, his words fast, like a tape on fast-forward. “I know there’s no explanation, I don’t have any excuses. But once it started it just kept on going, and I wasn’t thinking the whole time, just feeling this incredible hollowness.”

What was he saying? I heard his voice but couldn’t combine the syllables into words, the words into phrases, the phrases into sentences with meaning.

“I actually thought it was you at first, I swear I did. She opened the door and the light was behind her and I thought, she understands how I’m feeling. Everything in me she understands and she knows what I need to make it all go away. And I swear she wanted me to think it was you, she had her hair back behind her ears, she didn’t talk, she felt the same, the sounds she made, and by the time I realized…” He shook his head quickly. “It was only that once, that one night. Eve tried to convince me not to tell, even said she’d sleep with me again if I didn’t. But I don’t want her, I never did.”

I needed desperately for him to stop talking. Every word from his mouth wrapped around my heart like a rubber band, squeezing. “Could you leave please? I can’t listen to this right now.” Strange how bright, how melodic my voice.

But the pause after his jumbled words was loud, almost as painful. He stepped forward, back, away with the other foot like the stilted steps of a line dance. “Okay, okay, Kerry, I’m sure you need to think about this alone. I’ll be at home if you want to talk to me, if you want to yell at me, I’ll understand. Or hit me, whatever you need. Oh Jesus, Kerry, I’m so sorry.” He backed towards the door, backed into it so heavily the floor shook. “I’m sorry,” he repeated in a whisper, and then he was gone.