The Never Never Sisters (17 page)

AT SEVEN THIRTY
in the morning of the first day he was due back in the office, Dave was conked out
on our living room couch, binder-clipped documents littering the floor around him.
His arms were folded on his chest; his head was tilted to the right; the front shock
of his dark hair was even more vertical than it usually was.

I tiptoed closer, hoping for a message from his inner consciousness, a fleeting expression
or a muttered word. He was expressionless in sleep, though, as if anticipation of
the day ahead had him too exhausted to dream. I sat down next to him, resting on the
sliver of a couch in the margin next to his torso. When that didn’t wake him, I stretched
out, easing my body on top of his, our faces aligned so that my toes stretched down
to his calves.

His hip bones pressed into the fronts of my thighs, and his heartbeat pounded through
my abdomen, warming it. I counted the pulses. One. Two. Three. I noticed for the first
time that summer how pale he was, paler than I’d ever seen him.

Are you that desperate, Dave? Hungry enough to break the law?

When I pressed my forehead right up against his, as if I could access his thoughts
through osmosis, the magnetic pull of my brain to his, his eyes flew open.

Dave’s eyes are brown, but they are so warm, so lit within, that when I picture him,
I inevitably imagine his eyes lighter than they are. Liquid chocolate, I’ve described
them. Molten amber. Weapons of charm.

Lying there, our faces so close—eyelash to eyelash—all I saw was the blurriness and
light. One thousand little dots of beautifully illuminated pigment.

I could understand if you did it, Dave. I could forgive you. You can tell me. Blink
if you did it. One little blink and I’ll know.

I tried to push the thought from my mind to his. For a second I thought I had. He
stared back at me and moved his hands down my back until they were resting in the
waistband of my pajamas. He didn’t blink.

We lay there for minutes, transferring body warmth to each other, wordless. When my
cell phone rang, we both shifted by pulling back our heads—only a little, but enough
to ruin the moment. I climbed off Dave in a scramble and he got up off the couch.
“Shit,” he said with a casual yawn. “It’s late.”

I picked up my phone.

“Paige?” I recognized Percy’s voice immediately. “Is it too early? You sound like
you just woke up.”

“No, I’m up.” I checked the clock. “It is early, though.”

“I know, sorry. But I won’t be able to call later. I referred you to some people and
just wanted to leave word.”

“For what?”

He paused. “For marriage counseling. Are you interested in referrals for something
else?”

“Um, no. Marriage counseling is what I do.”

“Great. She’ll probably call you today—Selena. I gave this number, okay?”

“Yep. Thanks.”

“Okay, see you tomorrow.”

Twenty minutes later, Dave came out to the living room, showered and in a suit. “Who
was on the phone?”

“Potential client.” I followed him down the hall, where he picked up his messenger
bag and slung it over his shoulder.

“Any golden therapist advice for me going back?”

“You’ll be fine. Just act normal.”
Act like it’s no big deal
.

“You mean if I act normal, I’ll fool them all into thinking I feel normal?”

“Something like that.”

He gave me a peck on the lips, opened the door and closed it behind him. I opened
it and ran down the hall after him. “Dave?”

“Mmm?” He was already gone, concerned with the day ahead.

“What were you thinking?” I hated that question; it was impossible to ask without
sounding desperate. I’d always told clients if you sprang that question on someone,
hoping to receive reassurance, you should expect either lies or disappointment in
return. “On the couch?”

“I wasn’t thinking. It was just nice.”

“Yeah.” I waited for him to ask me too, but he was apparently confident enough to
not need to know. He gave me another peck, then continued down the hall to the elevators.

“Good luck,” I called after him. Without turning around or stopping, he raised his
arm in victory and punched the air.

I was in the drugstore, buying more candy for the jar, when my dad called my cell
phone.

“What a treat.” My tone was a little too bright and phony from the surprise; he never
called.

“How’s, um, work?”

“Fine. You?”

“Good.”

“So, what’s up?”

“Have you heard from Sloane?”

“No.” I had called her and left a message to debrief her on my break-in mission, but
she hadn’t called back. Or checked in. “Where is she?”

“I was hoping you knew.”

“I don’t. Sorry.”

“Have you spoken to her recently?”

“Saturday, I think.”

“So not since acupuncture.”

“Mmm.” I scratched my collarbone as if I could brush away the lie. “She’s probably
seeing the
Eyes
or taking the ferry to Staten Island or something.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“No—I’m just saying. They’re ingesting a steady dose of tourism while she’s here.
What are you guys up to?”

“Paige,” he said, lowering his voice, “are you in the middle of something? I was going
to go home for lunch and was wondering if you could come. I think it would mean a
lot to your mom.”

She was hunched over the counter when I walked into the kitchen. Seeing me, she brightened
with the meager energy of a fritzy lightbulb. “Have you eaten?”

“No,” I lied. “I’m starving. Feed me.”

The three of us sat down at the set table—place mats, candles, flowers—in silence,
picking at our food with all the gusto of actors on their thirty-seventh take of a
waffle commercial.

“What are you doing after this?” my mom said.

“Just some administrative catch-up.”

“No clients?”

“Not today, although I got a call from someone new. Summer’s always slow.”

“Any news with the redecorating?” I realized that we hadn’t talked about any of this
stuff—the updates that usually flowed so easily between us—since Sloane’s arrival.

“Nah. Taking a break.”

Mom stirred her iced tea with a tiny spoon, her fingers crooked delicately. “Why?”

“It just got lost in the shuffle.”

“The shuffle of?”

“I don’t know.” She accepted this without comment, stirring her tea. Stirring and
stirring and stirring.

“Are you guys really worried about her?”

“No.” My dad didn’t look up from the paper. “We’re not.” My mom was silent. “She’s
different now,” he said.

“How?” I asked. They looked at each other across the table. “All I remember is one
horrible night. Do you remember it, with the bloody nose and that guy passed out?
Poor Mrs. Chanokowski was there?”

“I remember,” said my dad.

At the same time my mom said, “Why would you even bring up that night?”

“Because it happened.” No response. “Does she really seem different this time?”

“Yes.” My dad didn’t look up.

“How?”

My mom stirred her tea. My dad sounded defensive. “She’s centered this time. She’s
doing acupuncture for chrissakes.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” said my mom.

“Why do you look like you didn’t really sleep last night?” I said, and my mom absently
patted down her hair at this. “And why are things so weird between you guys and Sloane?
What’s the tension?”

“Did she say there was tension?” My mom shifted her eyes from left to right.

“No. But it’s pretty palpable. Even Dave commented.”

“She’s had big problems, Paige. It’s normal that things are strained.”

“Plenty of people are addicted and recover and manage to do it without completely
ditching their family.” Dave had said the same thing to me when we were dating. At
the time, I had asked him if substance abuse ran in his family, and when he’d said
no, I’d countered—as sweetly as I could—that some things you just have to live through
before you can truly understand them. “Is there more to the story? Or is Sloane really
just that touchy?”

My mom got up and left the table, walking over to the iced tea pitcher and the pile
of mint next to it. She tore off a handful, rinsed the mint, chopped it into little
pieces and sprinkled it into the pitcher, even though no one had asked for it. “I’m
thinking of starting needlepoint.”

My dad nodded as though needlepoint were a logical segue.

“There was a story about it on the radio.” She brought the pitcher to the table. “A
club of women who meet in a library, somewhere in the Midwest. They knit and tell
their stories. It sounded like something I’d like to do.”

“Since when do you tell your stories?” At first I worried it was a little too harsh,
but when no one even reacted, I got up and left the table.

Vanessa

WHEN PAIGE WAS
four, we went strawberry picking at Mackahack Fields with Cherie and her kids. We
were walking around, plopping the berries in our buckets, nibbling on them as we skipped
along, when boom—Paige’s eyes got red and teary. She kept rubbing them with her little
fists, and Cherie and I tried to figure out what the problem was. “Maybe she’s allergic
to strawberries,” Cherie suggested. The pediatrician on call, a huge mustached man
with pockmarked cheeks, insisted I bring her in. I never liked his bedside manner,
but he looked like the boogeyman, so I usually did what he said.

During this visit, Dr. Boogeyman was glowering at me over Paige’s chart because he
thought that I was not concerned enough. (As it turned out, Paige was not allergic
to strawberries, and the redness was most likely due to some irritation, like dust
or an eyelash. Take
that
, Dr. Boogeyman, and add to it a little respect for Mother’s Intuition.)

“Mommy,” Dr. Boogeyman tsked, “food allergies are cumulative.” It was disturbing how
he did this, called us all Mommy and Daddy. The sign of some major issues, Cherie
and I agreed.

“What? Like she could become allergic to other things?”

“Of course she could,” he said. “But it’s not just that. Even if you start with a
mild reaction, if you test your body by eating just a little bit more, you can overstress
it. Your system will react by going haywire.”

“So you’re saying that the later reaction would be worse because of the earlier reaction?”

“I’m saying, Mommy, that she could die.”

Worry is fuel for parents. It enables us to do the job: we listen to our nagging sense
to gauge whether the child’s being overdramatic or the teacher is that bad, whether
the stomachaches are from a bug or being left off some little brat’s birthday party
list, whether the rash is something a doctor should observe firsthand.
You
trust your gut
.

There’s a physical element to the worry, of course: the pounding heart, the sour,
churning stomach, the hummingbird mind, unable to settle too long on any other topic.
If you didn’t have these indicators, you’d be as adrift as those poor kids born without
nerves—the ones who burn through layers of skin and smell it before feeling a thing.

Sloane didn’t answer my call on Saturday night. She had said she would be available
to discuss exchanging the VIP exhibit tickets I’d gotten her for Sunday, but she wasn’t.
Then I couldn’t reach her on Sunday, and I started to feel the first twinges.

I wasn’t overreacting; I’d dialed her twelve times. I went to the MoMA myself to see
if she’d somehow gotten other tickets for the exhibit, unlikely as that seemed. (I’d
had to pull quite a few strings for the exhibit, the
Room Full of Rainbows
apparently being the trend of the summer.) I waited outside the damn rainbow room
for an hour. I finally went in and saw it. It was actually kind of neat. They’d reflected
light through prisms, and you felt like you were traveling somewhere—to Oz, I guessed—over
the rainbows. Then I waited outside some more, and then I went home.

I’d braved far worse than a twenty-four-hour silence from Sloane, but for some reason
I was done and toasted on this one, too distracted to be comforted by any of my usual
cheap thrills. All I felt like doing was walking up and down the grid blocks in Manhattan
with Sloane’s picture, asking strangers if they had seen her.

The flip side of parental worry is that it works best on the small stuff. When you
actually have something to sink your teeth into, you can’t turn off the indicators.
Nobody can absorb that much frantic energy.

I thought Sloane’s return was all I wanted, but the fact was, I’d functioned without
her. I thought I needed her to enjoy my company, but I was able to handle being rebuffed.
The worry, though—the ups and downs of fear—I couldn’t exist while being whipped around
on those. My body had hit its limit.

My system, as predicated by that awful Dr. Boogeyman, was finally going haywire from
the cumulative effects. I hated that he was right.