The Good Sister (4 page)

The day after Merell Duran did the bad thing that made the police come, she was in her hideout between the pool house and
a clump of pampas grass reading Harry Potter. Nanny Franny had taken the twins and Baby Olivia to the park, but Merell had
been there about a thousand times and she knew she’d get stuck pushing the twins in the bucket swings while Nanny Franny tried
to make Olivia stop crying. She had acid reflux and cried all the time. Screamed.

This was the third time Merell had read
Harry Potter
and the Order of the Phoenix
and she liked it better every time. But today the words blurred on the page because she couldn’t concentrate. She kept remembering
the day before: the cameras and the police and everyone telling lies while the police wrote it all down as if it were the
truth. It made her mad that they all believed she was so dumb she’d call 911 for no good reason at all. Last night her father,
Nanny Franny, and Gramma Ellen had stayed up late talking. Merell sat on the stairs and tried to hear what they were saying
until Daddy came out of his study and told her to go to bed; they would deal with her tomorrow. Tomorrow was today. Her father
had gone to work and no one had dealt with her.

She wondered if Mommy was angry with her because of yesterday. Everyone else sure was. At breakfast Gramma Ellen gave her
a look like if she were a wizard Merell would be turned into a houseplant. She closed her book and went into the house and
upstairs. It wasn’t a good time to remind her mother of her promise, but if she waited for a good time, she’d be an old woman.

Merell Duran was not quite nine but already she knew that she wasn’t beautiful like her mother or even cute as the twins were.
But she was smart, even smarter than her mother, which didn’t seem right to Merell. Her arms and legs were long and skinny
and the elbows and knees might as well belong to a boy, they were that bouldery. Her hair was sort of mud-brown and nothing
special at all, just ordinary hair made horrible by the fact that she had three
cowlicks on the back so anyone standing behind her could see her pink skull. The tip of her nose bent a little to one side;
and when she smiled at herself in the mirror her face looked lopsided so she tried to ignore mirrors as much as she could.
Daddy said she was gorgeous, but she knew he wasn’t telling the truth.

The subject of honesty and lies was of great and perplexing interest to Merell, almost as baffling as gravity and sex.

She squeezed her hand on the knob of her mother’s bedroom door, opened it carefully, and stepped into the gloom. She had learned
to slip into rooms and disappear into the shadowy corner spaces, becoming practically invisible. Grown-ups didn’t like it
if she ran into a room talking, better to enter silently and stand as she was now, next to the door and a little behind a
chair, away from the light. Across the large bedroom, her mother lay buried under a blue comforter against a half dozen pillows,
with celebrity and fashion magazines scattered around her. The blackout drapes were pulled, and the room was dark except for
a wedge of light from her mother’s dressing room. The air-conditioning was set so low that Merell got goose bumps, and it
didn’t smell good. When the meany-men came to call, Merell’s mother got unhappy; and when she was unhappy she didn’t shower
and she hardly ever washed her hair unless Aunt Roxanne or Gramma Ellen helped her.

Earlier in the month her mother had a lot of good days
one after another, and Merell had almost forgotten what it was like when the meany-men were in her head. Only last week she
had been happy to help Celia fold the big fitted bedsheets, and when she emptied the dishwasher she sang the alphabet song
with the twins, mixing up all the letters on purpose, which Merell didn’t think was a good idea. Earlier in the week Mommy
and Nanny Franny, Merell, and her sisters had gone to the zoo and afterward they ate dinner at the Big Bad Cat, where Mommy
gave the DJ a twenty-dollar bill so he would play “Chantilly Lace.” She asked one of the waiters to dance with her, in and
out and between the tables, and the other food handlers stood around chewing gum and clapping hands in time to the music.
Afterward everyone cheered and Mommy made a bow like a princess. She was the only mother Merell had ever seen dancing at the
Big Bad Cat. As she thought about it now, she realized the dancing might have been a warning that the meany-men were coming
back.

Merell studied her mother’s moods the way a sailor read the wrinkle of the wind on the face of the sea. She didn’t have to
see her mother to know how she felt. The air in the house vibrated with her moods.

“Why are you hovering?” Mommy sat up a little and pulled off her black satin sleep mask. Her eyes were pink and puffy and
crusted with yellow crumbs. “You know I hate when you hover.”

“Were you sleeping?”

“Do I look like I’m asleep?”

“I’m sorry.” Merell knew that although her mother spent hours and often whole days in bed, she hardly slept at all.

“Mommy, I was wondering…”

“Merell, my head hurts.”

“I’ve been thinking about school.” She waited a moment, hoping her mother would remember on her own. “And I was thinking,
I was wondering… Do you remember I’ll be in Upper Primary this year?”

“And?”

“Did you forget?” She spoke softly because Mommy had sensitive ears.

“Will you get to the point, Merell?”

“You said we’d go shopping.” In September Merell would start fourth grade at Arcadia Upper Primary, and she needed a new uniform
because girls in fourth grade and older didn’t dress like the babies in Lower Primary. “You said we’d go in a taxi.”

At that moment Merell realized that she had never truly believed her mother would take her to Macy’s, walk around the crowded
store, and act like other mothers; and though this disappointed her, she wasn’t angry, for she knew her mother never intended
to break her promises. She just couldn’t help it.

“I’ve got the meanies today, Merell. I can’t do anything.”

Merell had a far-off memory of a time before she knew about the meany-men, when the twins were still in
their cribs and they had their own nanny. In that sweet time Merell spent hours in her mother’s bedroom, where they played
games and looked at picture books together. Sometimes they played Pirates of the Caribbean. Mommy emptied all her jewelry
onto the bed—earrings, necklaces, rings, and bracelets, everything that sparkled—and then buried it beneath the covers, under
the pillows, up inside the shams, between the mattress cover and the mattress. They wore scarves tied over their eyes and
pretended to be pirates searching for treasure. Afterward they draped the booty all over themselves.

One day Mommy had found her wedding dress in a box at the top of her closet and let Merell put it on, using safety pins to
pull it tight. Mommy wore a special suit called a tuxedo and held up the pants with suspenders.

“You’re the princess,” her mother said that day. “And this is your wedding day and all the important people in the kingdom
have come to see how beautiful you are.”

She turned on soupy music, made a little bow, and lifted Merell into her arms.

“Will you dance with me, my beautiful bride?”

Merell would always remember how her mother’s eyes sparkled like treasure as they held each other. They couldn’t dance because
the wedding dress had too much skirt and veil, and everything got tangled up around them. Instead they stood in one place
and hugged and swayed side to side in time to the music.

Mommy whispered with her lips touching Merell’s ear.
“I love you, I love you, I will love you forever, my beautiful girl. My wife.”

Soon after that the meany-men came for the first time Merell knew about, and in the months and years that followed they seemed
to come and go as they wished, taking up residence in her mother’s head for a few hours, days, or weeks. Once Merell had pulled
back her mother’s hair and looked in both her ears, hoping to see one of the little monsters. Now, of course, she knew that
the evil little men weren’t real, that Mommy was depressed; but
depression
was just a word like
sad
or
lonely
and she didn’t understand what gave it such great power, so she continued to think of her mother as possessed by tiny, evil-minded
creatures whose sole desire was to make her miserable. Since Baby Olivia was born the meany-men hardly ever went away, and
Merell wondered if she was the only person in the family who could see that they were hurting Mommy, making her sick.

“When does school start?”

Merell said that city schools opened the day after Labor Day, Arcadia Academy a week later.

“It’s still July, isn’t it? There’s plenty of time.”

“It’s okay, Mommy. I understand.”

Simone lay back, closing her eyes again. “You’re such a good girl, Merell. I wish I weren’t this… way.”

Merell’s mother slept as much as Baby Olivia. Nanny
Franny said that babies had to sleep a lot because their brains were growing.

“Mommy”—Merell took a tentative step closer to the bed—“is your brain growing?”

“Christ, no. It’s getting smaller every day.” She waved Merell away. “Off you go—”

At that moment Gramma Ellen walked into the bedroom without knocking. “Your sister’s here.”

Mommy said, “Crap.”

Merell stepped away from the bed and close to the window where the heavy drapes bunched against the wall.

Gramma Ellen said, “I just saw her drive through the gate.”

“I don’t want to see her.”

Mommy loved Aunt Roxanne more than almost anyone else in the world, but the meany-men made her say things that weren’t true.

“What does she want?”

“What do you think? I suppose she’s seen the news like everyone else in this city.”

Mommy groaned and pulled the comforter up over her head. “Tell her to come back when it snows.”

“Very funny, but I don’t think you have any choice. You know how persistent she can be.”

“Say I moved to China.”

“She loves you, Simone. I’m sure she’s as worried as the rest—” Gramma Ellen stopped.

Aunt Roxanne stood in the doorway. “Who’s moving to China?” She gave Gramma Ellen a quick kiss on the cheek.

“You might knock, you know. You could have rung the bell.”

“If I did that, Simone, you’d pretend to be asleep.”

Gramma Ellen began making excuses.

Aunt Roxanne held up her hand like a crossing guard. “Truth time, folks. What happened yesterday?” She had a no-nonsense schoolteacher
voice and a tall, strong body. Merell thought it would take a whole lot to knock her down.

Groaning like she had a tummy ache, Mommy pushed back the comforter and sat on the edge of the bed. She wore her bra and panties
and her skin was the color of skim milk. “It wasn’t a big deal. I was in the pool with Baby Olivia and she squirmed out of
my arms. That’s all that happened. She was screaming and twisting around. You know how she is.”

Perhaps Aunt Roxanne had forgotten that Baby Olivia suffered from acid reflux and was in pain more often than she wasn’t.
The doctor said she would outgrow it, but she’d been screaming for eight months and didn’t seem ready to stop yet.

“It was no one’s fault, just a terrible misunderstanding.” Gramma Ellen tossed up her hands. “Honestly, I never saw such a
tempest in a teapot.”

“What about you, Merell? You called 911.” Though she
stood in the shadows, Aunt Roxanne knew right where she was, looked right into her eyes before she could look away. “Why did
you do that?”

Gramma Ellen said, “Nanny Franny had been teaching them about how to use the emergency number and Miss Merell here just had
to try it out.”

“Is that what happened, Merell?”

She wondered if lying would someday be easy for her, as it seemed to be for her mother and grandmother. Now it hurt, as if
there were a dozen thick rubber bands around her chest. Nevertheless she nodded, agreeing with her grandmother. A moment later
she slipped out of the bedroom unnoticed.

*       *       *

Ellen Vadis stood in the door of Merell’s bedroom and watched her granddaughter where she stood at the window overlooking
the back garden and the terraces down to the swimming pool.

She said, “Merell, I want to talk to you.”

Ellen wondered what was going on in Merell’s quick child’s mind, what story she was dreaming up. Roxanne had been a deep child,
but nothing like this one. This girl was the Mariana Trench, and Ellen had been dreading this conversation since Johnny enlisted
her for the job the night before. If he were here he would probably gather Merell into one of his enveloping hugs to soften
the resistance out of her before he said anything, but Ellen had never been able to show her affection that way. If
she couldn’t do it for Simone and Roxanne, this little girl wasn’t going to thaw the Arctic in her.

Merell had wobbled Ellen’s confidence from the day she started putting sentences together. She knew too much, read too many
books, and listened in on too many adult conversations, hovering in the shadows, hearing things never meant for a child’s
ears. If this talk with her were not absolutely necessary, Ellen would have turned and walked out the door rather than start
up.

She said again, “Merell.”

The child turned and for the flash of a second Ellen saw her own mother’s plain, strong features; and she was suddenly a child
herself, kicking the toes of her Buster Browns into the floor, getting lectured. Merell had the same narrow, straight back
and squared shoulders, the hair that was no color in particular. Her knees were bony, her arms were long, and her hands were
big. All indications that she would be a tall woman. Ellen’s mother had been almost six feet tall.

“I want to talk to you about yesterday,” Ellen said. “There are some things I want to make sure you understand.”

“Mommy’s sick. I know all about it.”

“She’s not sick,” Ellen answered automatically, without considering a more complicated explanation. Never mind how bright
Merell was, a child was a child was a child. “She’s sad. Everyone gets sad sometimes. And these
sad times pass. You know they always do. But it’s not a sickness.”