Secret Sister (27 page)

But I didn’t. Even in the screwed up state of mind I was in, I wouldn’t do that to Zoë. Despite what Seth had said about me being a dick to my family, I always tried to be the brother and son Zoë and my mom deserved.

I opened my eyes and turned toward the bar at the moment Bradley walked out. I fumbled with the car door and nearly fell onto the sidewalk. “Bradley. Hey, wait up!”

He stopped, body language on guard, and then he recognized me and jogged across the street. “Nick. What the hell, dude? I thought you were on a plane.”

We shook hands, then hugged and slugged each other on the back. I smelled the hot, sweet scent of whiskey on his breath. It made my mouth ache and I forced myself to swallow. My spit tasted like an ashtray.

“Yeah,” I said. “I had a change in plans, buddy. So what’s up with you? You’re leaving alone? No hotties in there tonight?”

“No one that interests me.” He grinned. “And nothing about me interests any of them,” he added. We both laughed.

“So, you want to go get some coffee?” I asked. “I’m sure the pancake joint is still open.”

“Sure.” Bradley regarded me, his glassy eyes still sharp. “But tell me first, did something happen tonight, Nick? Something to make you change your mind about leaving?”

“Yeah. I went to see Roxanne’s mother. She’s dying, Bradley. Cancer. She’s at Hospice.”

“Oh my God.” A shudder went through him. “Wow, Roxanne didn’t say anything about her mom being sick when I talked to her last.”

“When was that? When did you last talk to Roxanne?”

He blinked. “I saw her a couple of weeks ago. I’ve left her some phone messages since then, but she hasn’t called me back. I thought she was avoiding me because I pissed her off.”

“You? What would Roxanne get pissed at you about?”

“Same thing she’d get pissed at you, or any other guy, about. Not paying enough attention to her.” Bradley looked down at his pristine running shoes. “Although since the accident, Roxanne hasn’t been so much all about herself, has she? She’s changed a lot, don’t you think?”

“Why ask me?” I could hear the edge in my voice.

“Why not you?”

“I don’t know her that well.”

“You’ve known her for more than fifteen fucking years, Nick.”

Several moments passed. “Okay,” I finally mumbled.

“What’s up with you and Roxanne, anyway? Last time I talked to her, she spent most of the conversation asking me to check up on you.”

“On me?”

“Yeah,
you
,” Bradley retorted. “She told me you’d been drinking. That you and she had a fight. Now you’re telling me you’ve been over to see her sick mama.” His eyebrows rose. “Sounds like a lot is going on there, friend. What gives with you and Cathy’s best friend?”

The noise in my head started up again, at low level, insistent. I hovered for a moment between laughing and throwing a punch at him for what he was implying. A fight could clear the air. Or maybe I’d get a handle on what to do with the rest of my life if I spilled my guts to Bradley.

But I could no more share the story of the last few weeks, and what had happened between Roxanne and me, with him than I could have with Zoë.

Jesus, what would he think if I told him I’d slept with her?

Despite what I’d seen in the movies, I realized there were some things too impossible to say out loud, even to a good friend.

“Nothing gives, Bradley. If there were something more to say, I’d say it. Look,” I glanced up at the stars for guidance, but they glittered silently. “The reason I didn’t go to France tonight is that I didn’t feel up to all the shit with security and everything right now. I’m tired. But I may change my ticket and go on a flight in a couple of days. If they let me. Do you think there will be a hundred red flags up on my name if I try to rebook now?”

Bradley nodded. “Probably. And with that institutional haircut of yours, they’re sure to think you’re a terrorist.”

“Hey, Zoë cut it for me.”

“Great. Okay, so you don’t look like a terrorist. More like a cheap-ass nutcase. And were you really going to wear that piece of shit old jacket to Paris?”

I looked at my coat, a bruised leather bomber with a broken zipper that my Dad had worn a million years ago. “Hell, yeah. Ugly American. That’s me.” I laughed and Bradley joined in.

My joke seemed to dilute the tension between us. We drove my car to the pancake joint on Grand that stayed open all night. On the way over, I told him the truth about what had happened a few weeks ago, that I’d considered getting drunk but got mugged instead and ended up in the hospital. That earned me some kudos from Bradley, and he was relieved I’d gone back to AA.

We went inside and ordered, talked about sports, cars and his latest techno gadget with a price tag of two grand. I relaxed as we managed to eat enough for four people. When the waitress brought the check, and the last cup of coffee, I felt drowsy and less panicked than I had for several weeks.

“Mitch and I used to come here,” Bradley said suddenly. “He always wanted hot fudge sundaes, and they have good ones. Well, they used to, anyway.”

“You mean when he was sick?”

“No. Back in the day. When we were young, studly men around town.” Bradley shoved his change into his jeans, and slumped against the booth. His eyes had lost their liquor luster, and he looked older than his thirty-five years.

“How long has Mitch been gone?” I asked quietly.

“Six years. You know, sometimes I miss him so much I think I could die.”

“Still?”

“Forever. Tonight, I miss him as bad as if he died this morning. He was at Sierra Monte Hospice, where you were earlier with Betty Haverty. They’re very good. Decent.”

Mitch was there the last three weeks before he died at twenty-five of AIDS. All the new drug regimes in the world hadn’t helped him. I’d only gone to see him once, at Cathy’s insistence.

“I’m sorry, I forgot about that when I mentioned the clinic.”

“No problem. And I’m sorry to be such a downer, Nick. But sometimes you can’t fight it. How are you doing with it?”

I fumbled for my remaining cigarettes, took one out, then remembered you couldn’t smoke anywhere inside a building in Southern California. I stuck the thing behind my ear and folded my hands together. “‘It?’ You mean Cathy?”

“I mean
losing
Cathy. The grief. You lose a love like that, a real love, it leaves a wound that in my experience does not heal over. You can run from it, like to Paris,” he added. “But you can’t hide.”

“I’m not trying to hide.”

“No? I thought that might be why you decided to stay in town a little longer. I thought, when I saw you tonight, that you needed to grieve a little more, give yourself some extra time before you set off on the next great adventure.”

“How much is enough time? You’ve had six years. And tonight you’re no better than when it happened.” I replied. I thought of the young man Bradley had been seeing a lot of last year. “This surprises me, man. What about that guy, Stephen? Weren’t you happy with him?”

“Yeah. I was ‘happy’ with Stephen. But Stephen isn’t Mitch. And happy doesn’t mean content. With Mitch, I felt like I had everything I needed. He was my other half. When you get involved with someone new, you’ll know what I mean. No one will ever replace Mitch for me, Nick. No one.”

I felt jittery again. “I’m not interested in getting ‘involved’ with anyone. Jesus, Cathy’s only been gone for a few weeks. Besides, who could replace her?”

“No one,” Bradley said. “But here’s the thing. People do go on. They build new lives. The trick is letting go of your yearning for the old one. As long as the new life feels like second place, it ain’t going to cut it.”

“That’s what your problem was with Stephen? He felt like second place?”

“My problem with Stephen was that he wasn’t Mitch.” He shook his head. “Poor guy. I called him ‘Mitch’ one night. He said it didn’t bother him. I told him it should have. Because I would have given my life—or his—if I could have Mitch back for five minutes.”

With his words, a searing, vivid memory flooded through me. I was holding a woman in my arms, kissing her, smelling the sweetness of her hair where it curled lushly at the nape of her neck. In the memory I was filled with joy that she loved me, that she was mine, that she was safe in my arms.

I swallowed. The memory was of the day Roxanne followed me into my bedroom, when she shut the blinds and told me to trust my heart. No matter what my brain had told me, my heart said something different. It had told me Cathy was back in my arms.

What kind of madman trusts his heart over his brain?

Fear tapped on my shoulder then, leaned over and whispered in my ear, his breath foul. He told me what I could do to end my pain. He suggested I do it quick, put myself out of my misery,
suck down a bottle of Jameson’s and
drive off a cliff.

“Nick?”

My head jerked up. “What? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Bradley said. “I just asked you a couple of times if you were ready to go. But you kind of zoned out on me.”

“Sorry.” I needed to get out of this restaurant. I needed to go, right now. “I’ll drive you back to your car.”

“You going to be okay?” Bradley asked. “You want to come by my place? I can make you some coffee. Or you can crash there, if you don’t want to go back to your house tonight.”

“I’m fine. But thanks. Thanks for everything, buddy.”

We knocked fists and slapped each other’s back one last time.

After I dropped him at his car, I concentrated on the road. The buzzing inside my skull got louder. On the radio, the DJ spun an ancient Randy Newman tune, about love, about how love makes your heart pump and your blood pound.

And how they don’t know what love is. But Randy knows
.

And I knew. And I knew what I had to do.

Fear chuckled, along for the ride. He was happy. He figured he’d won.

When I got to Roxanne’s apartment, she wasn’t asleep. Somehow I’d known she wouldn’t be. She answered the doorbell on the first ring, almost as if she’d been waiting for me.

“Hello, Nick,” she said. “Do you want to come in?”

“Yeah.”

I walked past her into the dark living room. On the coffee table a single, squat candle burned, smelling of vanilla bean. I perched on the couch and folded my hands, like I was in church.

She shut the door. “You didn’t go to Paris.” She sat down a few inches away from me.

I looked at her face, tanned and smooth, washed clean of makeup. She had dark circles under her eyes, and the tiny spark of gold glinted at me.

“I couldn’t go without you,” I said. My brain sizzled as I forced the next words. “I couldn’t go to France without my wife.”

Tears spilled down her face. “What?” she whispered. “What did you say?”

I took her in my arms and crushed her to me. I did not think in words, only in sensations, like an animal. I cried and kissed her and buried my hands in her hair. “Cathy. Oh my God, Cathy. I love you. I am so grateful you’re still here. And that you fought so hard to make me see the truth.”

“You believe me, then?” Cathy cupped my face. “Please, Nick, don’t lie to me. You really believe me?”

“I believe you, baby. I do.”

And I did.

Cathy collapsed into me and I dragged her onto the floor and undressed us both in what felt like one motion. If flesh could devour flesh, there would have been nothing left of the two of us. Those hours passed in a blur of motion and sensation, not of explanation, and I reclaimed my wife.

We finally stilled and lay quiet as the sun peeked through the curtains at six a.m. In the faint light I saw only Cathy, her sweet face, her familiar, thrilling body curled against me now.

My Cathy, in my arms.

EPILOGUE

July 9, One Year Later

Bougival, France

I watch Nick leave for work in the evening, then have a bath and read in bed. Around me the sounds of the quaint little village we live in seem magical, and it is a rare night I don’t close my eyes and pray, thanking the universe for my blessings.

Nick and I left Roxanne’s apartment the day after he came to me and told me he believed me. Determined to be together from then on, we secretly fell back into the rhythm of our early-married life, cooking, making love, and talking about everything and anything.

We spent a lot of time rehashing Betty’s story about how Roxanne and I were sisters. I am still shocked when I think of it, and I mourn Roxanne’s loss from my life every day.

Knowing we were blood kin didn’t increase my pain, for I don’t think I could have loved her more than I did. But I so wish Rox had told me the truth before she died, and I wish that I’d been a better friend to her, so that she would have trusted me and told me the truth about
everything.

But of course, I don’t know, even now, what I could have done to reach Roxanne, to make her believe she could tell me anything. I loved her, she loved me, but I’ve learned there are limits to how much love can chase away the demons for some of us.

During those first two weeks after Nick and I got back together, I spent several hours every day at the hospice, and Nick was very kind, bringing flowers and sitting with us, reading while Betty slept. She died twenty days after entering the hospice, not peacefully, but stoically, her papery dry hands in mine, her eyes fixed somewhere I could not see, and I comforted her as a daughter would have, as I never had the chance to comfort my own mother.

It was another gift from Roxanne, that chance.

After the funeral, I gave notice at school that I was leaving at the end of the fall term. Nick and I stayed in California through the end of December, and then we closed Roxanne’s apartment, sold Betty’s house, and moved to Europe.

We were seen together on occasion before we left Sierra Monte; a late dinner at Simone’s, a Christmas cocktail party Bradley had, but we didn’t tell anyone we were leaving together, or try explaining my true identity.

But I think Zoë knows. She caught me at the house a couple of times early in the morning. She’d stared at me with a faraway look in her eyes. One night she and I baked brownies and watched
Gone with the Wind
together. When I started crying over little Bonnie’s death, she put her arm around me and said, “That scene always made you cry.”

She was right.

I kept waiting for her to bring ‘it’ up, who I was. But she didn’t. If she ever does, I’ll tell her everything. Nick agrees with me on this. Of all the people in our lives, we want Zoë to know the truth.

But for now, she’s concentrating on being in love with a boy named Ramon. Nick and I bought her a used car before we left California, and in her letters and phone calls she seems content with school, her job, and Ramon.

Zoë and Nick’s mother are living in our house, and taking care of Pitty while we’re away. It was hard to leave my old fur ball friend behind, but I’m sure she’ll live long enough to greet us on our return.

Althea Cordell acted as though she sensed something strange was going on with me, though she is too God-fearing a churchwoman to consider it possible that an illogical karmic wrinkle in the universe enveloped my life as it did.

Vera Apodoca was relieved to see me go. In light of what Nick revealed about Roxanne and Freddy, it’s no wonder. I avoided talking to Freddy, mostly because I can’t pretend to be Roxanne very well anymore, and I thought I might punch him out.

I never saw Michael Cimino again after that night with the Chinese food. I’d be lying if I said I never thought of him or the surreal night of sex we shared before I knew who I was.

I haven’t gotten around to telling Nick about that. Frankly, I’m not sure if there’s a confession in the cards. My husband is the best, but even the best husband has his limits.

Bradley wondered about this new, ‘changed’ Rox, but his imagination, or his rational, ‘all things can be explained’ math brain hasn’t carried him to the truth. He knows Nick and I are together, and he wishes us well, though I am not sure if he completely approves. He loved the ‘Cathy and Nick perfect couple story.’ I wish I could tell him the real ending is a million times better than his fantasy.

I’ll work on my friendship with Bradley someday. And hopefully he’ll love me as this new Roxanne he knows, not as his old friend Cathy.

As with Betty Haverty, I realized I have to accept that to the rest of the world I will always be only who they think I am. And that’s okay. Love is love, no matter who the person behind the smile really is. Betty felt my caring, so did it matter that it was Cathy Chance calling her ‘Mom’ as she died?

Neither Nick nor I called Seth to say goodbye, but Jen told Bradley, who told me, that the good doctor and Inga came in to Simone’s a few weeks ago and got the scoop from Jen. Seth told Jen not to worry about Nick, that he would find his way home.

We have a small inheritance that came to me as Betty’s heir, and the life insurance money from the accident. Nick feels queasy about all this money falling to us as it has, but I don’t. I enjoy the freedom, but let him handle the day-to-day allocation of it, as it will take a whole lot longer for us to spend our windfall if Nick is the designated budget guy.

I don’t know when we’ll go back to live in the States. We are content for now in Bougival. Our flat is very small but charming. It’s in a stone building that’s a couple of centuries old, and the floor is uneven in the kitchen, which is modern by 1940s American standards, but the view out the bedroom window is glorious.

Below the front windows is a wooden box Nick keeps planted with flowers that burst with color and fragrance. We have furniture we bought at the street fairs, and good books and ancient, charming dishes.

We spend a lot of time in bed, and sometimes make love with the lights on, but mostly not. I look in the mirror and, with my now-dyed blonde hair and extra pounds I managed to gain, I think I look a lot like my old self. In a kind of ‘Benicio del Toro looks like Brad Pitt’ way, I mean. When I told Nick I thought those two actors looked like brothers, he cracked up and said I was nuts. But when I told him to look at their eyes, the way they squint, the way they are quiet and watchful, he said he could see it.

I think, as usual, he was humoring me. But you get the picture. I see ‘me’ in the mirror now. Sure, I’ve got a way, way nicer body, but I don’t see a stranger like I did when I woke up in the hospital after the accident. The expression in the eyes is mine, the movements; and the new skin growing on this form I inhabit is imprinted daily with my experiences,
my life.

I still don’t recall all of my past. Sometimes things are a jumble. One night I awoke and remembered a dream I was having, one that even today feels almost like a memory of something that actually happened. In my dream I was sixteen and meeting Nick for the first time, but not like I had, on the Fourth of July. In this vision I was standing with Betty in the grocery store, and Nick and his mom and Zoë introduced themselves to us, and Nick looked at me hungrily, and I wanted to kill myself, I felt so alone.

I woke Nick up and told him about this dream because it upset me so. He was very quiet for a long moment, but he kissed me and hugged me so tight I couldn’t move, then told me to go back to sleep.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re fine, don’t worry about the past. It’s over.”

So I don’t. If Nick can accept this weird, hybrid me, then I certainly can.

Nick goes to AA meetings a couple of times a week. He’s doing well, though he says he can feel his mouth sweat whenever he smells a particularly good bottle of red wine at the Café Roget, where we eat most nights. He’s working at a little radio station for a few Euros and loving it. He’s the on-air man on the midnight-to-six a.m. shift on the weekends.

He lets me tag along and help him pick out songs to play from their collection of oldies, which they only spin at night. They don’t have much, mostly rock standards from the sixties and seventies, but that’s the stuff Nick grew up with, listening to his folks’ collection, and it’s stuff he loves. I choose the Doors and the Stones and the Beatles and all the others, though Randy Newman’s “You Can Keep Your Hat On” is Nick’s favorite. I like that song, too, although it seems a little desperate to me.

I worry Nick has a bigger melancholy streak than he admits to. I’m planning a strip tease to that tune for his next birthday, though, so maybe that will take away the chill I always feel when Newman growls that he “knows what love is.”

Nick knows damn well what love is, too. It’s hard and painful. It’s wonderful and complicated, just like him and me. Which is why I always choose Etta James and that “At Last” chestnut for him to play when I’m in the studio visiting him. Nick’s taken to playing it for me as the last song every Saturday night.

I’m studying painting and French and plan to get another degree to teach art someday. God, there are literally hundreds of museums in this part of the world. And people go to them in droves. I love it.

The public schools are ridiculously difficult, but I’ve made inquiries at several private American schools and have already had a couple of offers. I miss my kids from Sierra Monte, but am not ready yet to spend time or effort on anything but Nick.

He took me to see my old bridge at Bougival, the one in my favorite painting. It’s still there, surrounded by modern buildings as well as vestiges of the nineteenth century world Monet lived in. The sunlight on the path is the same, seductive and pure, begging you to leave the road and slip down the banks to the cool blue water below. We walked up the hill to a tiny café and sat outside, oblivious to the traffic sounds.

Nick asked me why this painting was my very favorite, of all the ones we’ve seen at home or here in Paris. I had tried to explain this once to Seth, but am not totally sure I’ve ever made anyone understand what it does for me.

“I don’t know if I can put it all into words,” I told Nick. “Everything wonderful is in this picture. Trees and flowers, sun and water. The charming little town, people walking, a gorgeous sky, a mother holding her child’s hand.” I cried when I remembered this, and Nick wiped my tears.

“When I saw it at the museum with my mother,” I added, “she read to me from the exhibit notes about the strict geometric structure of the painting, the traditional notions of scale and style, blah, blah. But one thing she said that I remember most is that Monet took great pains not to showcase the one recognizable landmark in the picture. He hides the spire of the church in Bougival behind the leaves of the trees.”

Nick grinned and pulled me close and kissed my lips, still frothed with latte. “So Monet hides the identity of the church. Why?”

I smiled. “Maybe it was just for him. Maybe he didn’t want to make religion or faith the point of that beautiful location, but wanted those who stared at it to see and then realize the spiritual was always there, influencing your life.” My grin got bigger. “See, I can’t explain why I love it, but I do.”

Nick crinkled his forehead and I saw he couldn’t completely understand either, but it didn’t matter. He was happy that I loved it, for whatever reason.

Words fail, but the heart understands
.

“Let’s go home,” Nick said. I nodded and he took my hand and together we were, indeed,
home
.

I can’t explain our love, or understand the significance, if any, of Roxanne and the secret sister bond we shared, or the generous gift of a second chance at life that she gave me.

I don’t know if I am still here by accident, or selflessness, or if it was God with a capital ‘G’ that chose which one of us survived and which would perish. But I accept my good fortune, and celebrate it for the near perfection it is.

Sometimes, when he is sleeping, I look at Nick’s face and wonder, for I cannot ever really know, if he truly believes
that I am me
or if he is going along and pretending,
hoping.
Nick’s always been an optimist. It’s one of the things I love about him.

But I don’t let this small doubt poison my happiness. I put it aside and inhale the delicious breath of each new day, so thankful for him.
For love.