The Never Never Sisters (21 page)

Lentoptical
was pleasing: a large, round blue eye with pretty eyelashes and a wide-open lid that
made me wonder why the project had gotten such a bad rap.

“I think,” said Giovanni, walking around it, “that the name is a play on lenticular
printing.”

“Which is . . . ?” Sloane said that to him, but to me she said, “It’s hard to be a
genius. Always having to stop and explain things to the little people.”

“It’s the technology behind this kind of image. Many different pictures beneath and
a layer of grooved layers above it. The image changes depending on where you are.”

“Like those stickers we had when we were young. Do you remember those?”

“Those, I remember. There was that one of the guy punching another that said—”

“Kablam,” said Sloane, and I stepped to the side. The eye shifted—blue open iris to
green narrowed one, then a few more shuffles and it was closed, swollen and puffy
and discolored.

I stepped back. “Creepy.”

“I love it,” said Sloane, snapping pictures with a camera she’d pulled out of the
bag. “The power of perspective.” When she rested the camera by her side, Giovanni
took it from her hands.

“Let me take one,” he said, motioning his hands together. “Memorialize the day, which
has been as fun as promised, right, Paige?”

“It has. Stand there.” I pointed to the right. “So the blue one is our backdrop.”

Sloane and I stood, smiling in front of the eye, arms around each other. When Giovanni
showed us the digital image, the only thing that stood out was how normal we looked.
Just one sister in town to visit another, catching an art exhibit.

WE’D PACKED FOR
Quogue the disorganized, drawn-out way. By midafternoon the hallway was lined with
the canvas bags of food for our trip, which would be two days max, we’d decided. The
plan had been to leave an hour earlier to avoid rush-hour traffic, but Sloane was
taking forever to buy cigarettes and Giovanni was having trouble focusing. He was
right then using his foot to kick Bandito’s mesh carrier soccer-ball style.

“Hey,” he said when it landed askew, partially on one of the bags. “Should we summon
Percy here, or is it easy to pick him up at his apartment?”

“Oh.” I’d forgotten how Percy had initiated the trip. Or maybe I hadn’t. Maybe my
subconscious had tricked me into
pretending
to forget that I’d be in a car with Percy for a couple of hours so that I’d invite
myself along with impunity. But it didn’t matter anymore, I reminded myself. Percy
had lost his magic as soon as I’d set foot in his apartment. It was all no big deal.
No. Big. Deal.

“He’s downtown,” Giovanni said, trying to be helpful. “Wrong way, right? Past the
Long Island Expressway?”

In fact, it would easily add an hour to the trip to schlep downtown and back again,
but so what? This trip was obviously not about scheduling. “We can get him.” I straightened
Bandito’s carrier against the wall. “Where’s he staying in the Hamptons? With friends?”

“Paige.” Giovanni arranged his features in the sternest look I’d ever seen him command.
“You offered your place. Is that a problem?”

“Oh, right. No, of course not. We have three bedrooms. And a pull-out.”

Giovanni texted Percy the news that we were almost en route, and I rushed into the
bedroom, shutting first that door behind me and then the one to the master bathroom
where I sat on the toilet lid, dialing Dave’s cell. He didn’t pick up, so I called
his direct line and asked his secretary to page him in the office.

After about four minutes of silence, he picked up the phone. “Are you okay?” Paging
was understood between us to be strictly in case of emergency.

“Fine. So—we’re about to leave for the Hamptons.”

“Right.” When I had broached it with him, Dave had not had a problem with the Hamptons
trip. Of course he wished he could go, he’d said. He didn’t feel abandoned, he’d said,
unless I was planning to stay there forever. Was I? Ha, ha, ha, ha. It was a couple
of days; he was pretty sure he could handle it.

I had lost my ability to take anything at face value. Was Dave really okay with the
plan or putting on a brave face? Had I cleared the coast so he could have secret meetings
with members of the criminal underworld in our living room? The biggest question,
though, the hardest to answer, was whether I was tagging along on someone else’s vacation
because I wanted a beach getaway or just to avoid being home with Dave.

It was crazy to start second-guessing a summer trip to the Hamptons. I was slowly,
smoothly, surely going mad, picking at the corners of the yellow wallpaper of my life
and peeling it all away.

“And we’re going to be driving up with someone.”

“Okay.”

“Giovanni’s childhood friend.”

“All right.” I hadn’t wanted to say his name, and Dave didn’t ask it.

“I’ve met him before—he’s nice and kind of young, I guess, but he didn’t have a place
to stay, so I offered him one of the bedrooms at our house.”

“Sounds good.”

“You don’t care.”

“I mean, is he an axe murderer?”

“I don’t
think
so.”

“So reassuring.” He laughed. “Guess we’ll find out!”

Driving downtown to Percy’s building took about forty minutes. In the garage, I had
insisted that Sloane sit up front next to me. She’d mumbled, “Whatever,” and looked
longingly at Giovanni, but I held firm. We would not be coupling off, with Percy riding
shotgun while she and Giovanni drooled all over each other in the backseat. We would
not.

Because it took us forty minutes to reach him, Percy was waiting for us outside, leaning
against his building, a knapsack slung over one shoulder. Giovanni got out and held
open the door rather than sliding behind me in the driver’s seat—god forbid he and
Sloane couldn’t hold hands through the seat gaps, which they had been doing since
the garage.

While Percy loaded his bags and settled in, I texted Lucy that I might be coming out
that weekend. I had visions of her meeting Sloane and Giovanni, even Percy, but I
thought I’d leave things deliberately vague until I knew everyone’s plans. When I
looked up from my phone, they were all buckled in, watching me.

“Let’s go!” Percy was right behind me, which was probably worse than shotgun; I was
hyperaware of him, and every time I glanced in the rearview mirror, his piercing blue
eyes met mine.

I put the music on shuffle, and when a song from
Graceland
came on—the guitar strumming out the melody of “Under African Skies”—Sloane sat up
straight in her seat. “I love this,” she breathed.

“You remember it?” I said. “From growing up?”

“Same as you. The backseat of Franklin’s Toyota Camry.” She started singing along
with Linda Ronstadt’s harmony. On the second verse, I joined in too.

This is the story of how we begin to remember,

This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein

The harmonizing had such sheer beauty that accompanying it was enough to make us feel
like we could sing. Still, we had more feeling than tone, warbling and wavering loudly
on the high notes. When the song ended, I waited for a smartass comment from someone,
but none came.

“This,” said Giovanni, “is a great album.”

“Every song is a masterpiece,” Sloane agreed. “Except ‘Homeless.’”

“But every album needs a ‘Homeless,’” said Percy. “A decent B-side song to let shine
the genius of the ‘Myth of Fingerprints.’”

“Do you have the whole thing on here?” Sloane scrolled through my music. “Yesss!”
She pressed the screen and leaned back in her seat.

Three songs in, we were all four shouting the whoops of “I Know What I Know” when
Sloane stopped abruptly. “Can I smoke in here?”

“No,” I said. “Do you need to because of the music?” It might bother her, I realized,
given that I remembered it as the sound track of our childhood.

“Paul Simon?” she said. “No, it just seems like from someone else’s life.”

It didn’t to me. I could visualize it: sitting in the backseat of my dad’s sedan,
right in the spot where Percy was now, Paul Simon singing about poor boys and pilgrims
going to Graceland, my head leaned as far back as it could go so I could stare straight
up and out the rear window. Above me would be the thicket of bare tree branches reaching
across the yellowing evening sky. To my right would be Sloane, zipped into a brown-and-orange
puffy coat, her knees pressing through holes in her jeans, her Keds inked with graffiti
and pressed flat against the back of my mom’s seat.

A whoosh of air drowned out “Gumboots.” Next to me, Sloane had opened the window on
the highway, forcing her lit cigarette out into the gusts.

“Sloane!”

“I
need
to because I’m addicted. Don’t mess with addiction, Paige. Seriously.” But after
three drags, she let the cigarette slip out of her fingers. It flew away and upward
as if yanked by a string. Sloane rolled up the window, sealing us back in. Then she
turned to me and sang, “Don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.” Still
to the melody, she pointed to the dashboard and sang, “Mr. Bonedigger, bonedigger—you’re
almost out of gas, you are.”

When we pulled up to the gas station, Giovanni announced he had to pee.

“Traveling with you is like traveling with a toddler,” said Percy.

Giovanni didn’t argue. Instead, he rubbed his stomach in a circular motion and announced,
“It needs food.”

“Fat Charlie, the Archangel, files for divorce,” Giovanni mused while we sat at our
table in McDonald’s, yellow wrappers crumbled in front of us.

“You’re still on the Paul Simon?” I said.

“It sticks in your head. Who is this Fat Charlie, the archangel? Paul Simon always
makes me want to ask,
What do the words mean?
What does it mean? What does it mean?” He pointed at me.

“I don’t know.”

“Obviously not. If Fat Charlie, the archangel, had had as good a marriage counselor
as our own Paige Reinhardt, he wouldn’t be filing for divorce, right?”

“Obviously.”

“We didn’t listen to this Paul Simon in high school,” Giovanni said. “We listened
to Slayer, right, Perce?”

Percy, expressionless, lifted his hand in the death-metal devil horns gesture, index
and pinky finger up.

Giovanni devil-horned him back. “We just sat in the basement blaring loud music, smoking
pot, talking about how we were going to get out of Ohio, and look at us, we did it.”

“Please,” Sloane said. “You were all Four-H club and yearbook and stuff.”

“He was,” said Percy, “all of those things, although there was a brief period with
heavy metal music and a rattail.”

“That wasn’t a rattail,” said Giovanni. “That was a Mohawk.”

“Whatever,” said Percy. “It was an embarrassment.”

“What about his girlfriends?” Sloane asked.

“I didn’t have any girlfriends,” Giovanni said. “I never met a woman until I met you.”

Percy smirked. “There was the crush on Mrs. Stetler. Remember, Giovanni? She was the
Four-H adviser and she smelled, as Giovanni said, like lilacs in bloom.”

“She was a goddess,” Giovanni said, “and her husband did not appreciate her. At all.”

“Then there was Miriam. He used to watch her at cheerleading practice.”

“A lovely person,” said Giovanni. “Although she really, as it turns out, was only
interested in what I could do for her as the yearbook editor.” We looked at him curiously.
“She wanted the immortality only I could promise. Pictures in the yearbook. A lot
of them.”

“And then Valerie, your prom date.”

“Right. Valerie. Enough said.” They exchanged a loaded look, and Sloane and I glanced
at each other wide-eyed.

“You’re like brothers.”

“We are.”

I tried to soak it up, the bond between them, and respect it, rather than allow it
to be a referendum on Sloane and me. Maybe we could build up to this; I was starting
to think it was possible.

Giovanni pointed to me. “Paige. Share one of yours.”

“My what?”

“Childhood stories.”

I intercepted Giovanni’s glance at Percy because Percy was staring down at his soda
lid. “Well,” I said, pointing my chin at Sloane, “apparently this one used to dress
me up like Nana the sheepdog.”

“From
Peter Pan
?” Percy asked.

“Yep,” I said. “Word on the street is that young Sloane had her own fringe festival.”

“We did. Together.” Sloane looked at me. “You don’t remember that either?”

“Wasn’t I, like, three?”

“That’s the whole point of
Peter Pan
anyway, right?” Percy said. “The Lost Boys and the haze of forgotten childhood.”

“I like that.” Sloane brightened as she slurped her soda. “Paige, you’d make a perfect
Lost Boy, given your lack of recall.”

“Are you kidding me?” My voice had come out heated, so I lowered it. “First of all,
the Lost Boys fell out of their prams and went missing from their families. If anyone’s
a Lost Boy, you, Sloane, are the Lost Boy. I’m the perfect Nana, when you think about
it, stuck at home with Mr. and Mrs. Darling, barking to herself.”

“I don’t remember the falling-out-of-their-prams part,” Percy said.

“It’s in the book. But they all grew up eventually. One became a judge.”

“Oh,” Percy said. “I didn’t read the book. My analysis was based on the movie
Hook
, and I got the distinct impression that there was some forgotten, hazy childhood
stuff going on with Peter Pan and the woman from
Downton Abbey
. You know, like she remembered him, but she didn’t.”

“Right,” I said. “You’re absolutely right. We should be looking to
Hook
for themes and deeper meaning rather than the book.”