The Never Never Sisters (30 page)

“YES,” I SAID
when my mom opened the door, her eyes worried, “I’ve seen the news.”

“Is the Boy okay?” She stepped aside, and I collapsed on the couch in the sitting
room. She eased down next to me tentatively.

“Fine. He’s at home.”

“That poor kid,” she said. “We just found out this morning, and your dad called some
defense lawyers. He’s planning to meet with some today.”

“Why?”

“Just to get a handle on the situation. We don’t think Dave did anything wrong, but,
you know, in case he got caught up in something.”

“Sloane left.”

“Oh?” I could tell she was making a point not to react, as though she were fine either
way.

“I found out what she’s stuck on.” She turned her head ever so slightly. “Your affair.
She’s pissed about your affair a billion years ago.” I focused on one of their new
art pieces—a big light box with neon script spelling out
Diner
. Why was I here? I hadn’t even thought about how illogical it was, how I’d trudged
straight over after seeing Nell like I was on some sort of zombie heartbreak scavenger
hunt, but after I said it—“affair”—I understood.

I’d been reading the journals, identifying with her connection to another man, likening
it to mine with Percy. But I’d been totally outclassed. “You probably knew that, though.”

“What are you talking about?” She folded her lips together, rejecting that. “This
is why you don’t go reading people’s private things, Paige. Because you get the wrong
idea.”

“Tell me, Mom. What’s the right idea?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Try.”

Her eyes sparked dark and flinty. “She needs her anger toward me. It keeps her going,
so in a sense I welcome it.”

“That’s insane.”

“Trust me, Paige. She and I are peas in a pod. You wouldn’t understand. You’re made
of different stuff.”

When I regained my breath, all I wanted was to shock her back. “You’re wrong. She’s
nothing like you. She saw you guys in the car one night—you and this G. That’s why
she hates you, and you know it.”

“In the car? I have no idea what that even means.”

“Come on. You were having an affair.”

“It wasn’t an affair.”

“Okay. Your
special friendship
. We can put it in the vault along with all the other things we don’t need to talk
about. Your father. Sloane—”

“It wasn’t an affair. It could’ve been. But it wasn’t.”

“G.”

“Yes. His name was Geoff, and we spent a lot of time together in a way that was perhaps”—her
cheeks colored—“inappropriate. It’s nothing I ever expected to have to rehash, but
it was not an affair.”

“Does it even matter?”

“Maybe not. Well, to me.”

It was an escape, she explained. He had the appointment after hers at Pressman’s,
and they started talking in the ten minutes between their sessions. One day, he told
her to wait for him after. They went for coffee and from there, spent regular time
together: dinners and walks. A movie or two.

“So what did Sloane see?”

“We were probably talking. We used to do that.”

“Talk in cars?”

“Talk . . . anywhere. We’d go places—the strangest places, like a bank, the supermarket—and
just talk about everything for hours. I don’t remember seeing Sloane. Who knows what
she thinks she saw? She was hardly a reliable observer.”

“She’s certain.”

My mom sighed, dragged her left hand across her eyebrows. “If that’s the excuse she
needs to keep her distance, then what can I do? I know what I know.”

My mom cheated or she didn’t; her marriage to my dad worked or it didn’t. Dave’s lies
were our sum total or just a tear that would heal. I thought of what Percy had said
while we drifted in the hammock: truth is perception.

“Why did it stop?”

“I went to his house once. It was in the morning. As a surprise. I’d never been there
before and I don’t remember what I thought would happen, but when I got there, he
was hanging out with his friends, people from his band. They clearly knew who I was,
knew about Sloane. They were asking me questions about her, like—I can’t describe
it—like, they owned my problem.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, this one woman—her name was Dolores—asked about her son’s pot use. Minor pot
use and did I think it was a big problem. As though I was an expert. And they wanted
to know about Gentle Breezes, mostly how much we were spending, gawking at the expense.
They were so casual about it all. I felt violated. Like this thing that was so special
to me—this time that Geoff and I had—wasn’t. And I realized that your father would
never betray me that way. It was just this crystal clear moment that I knew your dad.
I understood him and he understood me, and even though things weren’t perfect, having
that between us was pure gold. It was enough. I knew what I wanted.”

“And if not for that?”

“Probably, yes. Probably something would’ve happened. Or not. I don’t know.”

“Does Dad know?”

She shrugged. “He might have suspected something. I wasn’t around much that year,
but we were both sort of muddling through for a while there. We’ve given each other
latitude for that, Paige.”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” I said. “Why have we never talked about it?”

“About Geoff?” She blinked at me incredulously. “I don’t think children need to know
about that much of their parents’ marriage, Paige.”

“Not Geoff. Sloane. Your dad. Russell Cohen. Why have we never talked about it?”

“I couldn’t.” She was silent for a long time. “The way I grew up, Paige. It was awful.
And I felt so powerless as a kid. As I got older, though, I realized I could move
past it. I could control what it meant to me, how often I thought about the past.
When it started with Sloane, it felt like something was catching up, as though I’d
escaped only because I’d unwittingly sacrificed my daughter, like in one of those
fairy tales. I didn’t want any of that to be your backdrop.”

“Guess what? It was my backdrop.”

“I know it doesn’t make any sense, but sometimes if you give in to the weaknesses,
if you acknowledge them aloud and build everything around them, you get trapped by
them.” She shrugged and her voice got a little harder. “You didn’t need to know everything
that was going on.”

“Not everything. But maybe something.”

“I would protect you from it all over again.” Our gazes clashed like swords. I’d never
know the half of it, I realized: her motivations or the past that had left her so
broken and impressive.

You can go crazy watching other people’s behavior, imbuing meaning and motive, trying
to uncover the exact truth of their secrets without getting to the bottom of it. That
little whiff of mystery remains, no matter how close you get. There is no turning
of a person’s hinges, no seeing inside to anyone else’s motivations.

The intent of Dr. Pressman’s artist was inconsequential. It was a bunny; it was a
duck; it was both. It was whatever
I
saw; it was whatever
I
wanted it to be.

“I want you to be okay, Paige.” My mom was asking, I knew, whether
we
would be okay. This was, I realized, the type of question—vague, unanswerable—that
I usually deferred to her. I wasn’t sure why I’d stayed tucked so far under her wing—perhaps
Sloane’s absence had scarred me more than I’d ever admitted; perhaps I was just born
to be the type of person who bobbed in others’ wakes rather than setting off a thousand
expanding ripples. But in that moment, as she started to cry, I felt something between
us unlink, and frankly, it made me a little lighter.

“I’m okay.” I threaded my fingers through hers and gripped her hand. “And we’ll be
fine.” It was the truth as I knew it then: there might be new boundaries between us,
but the love would always be there.

I was dry-eyed until I walked out of their building, but there, on the same sidewalk
where Sloane had first introduced me to Giovanni and Percy, it overtook me like a
swoon: the lack of sleep and all the things I was now poised to lose. I leaned against
a blue construction wall for a moment, too stunned to notice the man who approached
from the direction of my parents’ building.

He must have seen how stricken I was, because he put his arms around me before saying
anything. We were both a little tentative and awkward—we hadn’t hugged as grown-ups
really, and he wasn’t much taller than I was. I leaned my face down into my dad’s
shoulder, though, and let myself sob. I couldn’t stop, and as I ruined the fabric
of his suit with my tears, he stroked my hair and told me it all would be okay.

Vanessa

“FRANKIE, YOU’RE SURE
you can take off today?” He hadn’t changed and was still in his suit as we walked
east to the promenade around Carl Schurz Park.

“I can,” he said. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. Plenty of people were enjoying the break in the heat wave, walking their
dogs and running and lazing on the benches as though they wanted to spend the whole
day there. Frankie and I stopped at the railing and pushed our heads into the breeze
to watch a tugboat usher a barge down the East River.

It was kind of a marvel. The tug was so small that at first I couldn’t tell that it
wasn’t just a section of the bigger barge. It was a victory for tenacity, that little
tug, the universe’s way of letting me know that a strong latch could hold, if only
in the world of maritime construction.

I didn’t share these musings with Frankie. He didn’t think the universe sent us such
messages and would worry that I was obsessing. “You know,” I said, “before we met,
I used to walk in the city all the time.”

“Where?”

“If the weather was okay, sometimes all the way downtown. Mostly to avoid the Lexington
line. Do you remember how bad the trains were?”

“The murder express.”

“Horrible. Although arguably safer than my apartment.”

“You got mugged in your apartment?”

“Once, I came home from being out late with my friends. My dad was of course on the
couch, empties all around him. We just grinned at each other. I’d just started with
the drinking and the experimenting and staying out late, and he, prince that he was,
had no problem with it. We were in it together. So we shared this father-daughter
moment, and then I went into the bedroom and passed out, and when I woke up, the door
was wide-open.”

“To the bedroom?” Frankie’s brow creased.

“The front door. He went out to do god knows what and left his fourteen-year-old daughter
sleeping at home, alone, with the doors to the apartment unlocked and wide-open.”

Frankie shook his head, met my eyes. “What about your mom?”

“She worked nights then, cleaning offices in Midtown. Which was actually a decent
job, but she didn’t get home until morning. Anyone could have come in. Anyone. And
it’s not like we lived in neighborhood-watch territory. No one was looking out for
shady characters, because everyone was a shady character. I understood it all that
morning when I woke up—I had no one to protect me, no one who’d stop me from self-destruction.”

“Whether they’re smart enough to appreciate it or not, your daughters are lucky girls,
Vanessa.”

“I’m starting to think that the stronger you grip something, the more you guarantee
it slipping through your hand.”

“I think there’s a poem about that.”

“This is why, Frankie. This is why—I can’t keep telling stories like that. It takes
me over. You know?”

“Sure.”

“I have to move forward. I have to let it go.”

“So let’s let it go.” We strolled south on the promenade until Frankie stopped right
there on the narrow steps down to the FDR Drive walkway. He put his left arm around
my shoulders and rested it there.

Runners and dog walkers and commuters, they all streamed around us as we stood, holding
each other in a firm grasp.

DAVE WAS SLEEPING
on the couch, his upper body half propped on the arm, his mouth open and his head
cast back. Yesterday I would have covered him with a throw blanket and tiptoed around
him, but now I pulled up a chair from the kitchen and watched him sleep.

I kicked him in the knee. Nothing happened.

I pushed harder and his eyes flew open.

“You look awful,” he said.

“Are my eyes red?”

He nodded, propped up on his elbows. “Did something happen on your run?”

“Yes, Dave. You know that ark scene in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
?”

“The face-melting one?”

“Yeah. I saw too much truth, and now my eyes are all red and puffy.”

He couldn’t tell if I was joking, so he frowned, then smiled, then asked, “What?”

“For starters, I just talked to Nell.”

He swallowed, his thought process transparent for the first time this summer:
What does she know?

“Don’t,” I said.

“Don’t what?”

“Spin.”

He swallowed again. An audible, dry-mouth click. “It really was nothing.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It was, like, five times—that’s it.”

I didn’t have a response to that.

“I’ll tell you why too. If you want to know.”

I nodded.

“We were working together all the time. I got caught up. I don’t even know. It’s the
stupidest thing. She was just there.” He watched me for a while, and I didn’t respond,
pressing into the chair. “We can get through it, though, right? People get through
this.”

“What’s that? Marital advice from Herb?”

“What do you want me to do? Seriously. Anything.”

“What do I want you to
do
? Doing something isn’t going to change this.” Although we would later, neither one
of us was crying or screaming. It was flat and colorless, the moment right after impact,
when the contusion-to-be is just a white trace on the skin.

“It wasn’t about real emotion.” He stared at me, his fingers distractedly playing
with the fringe on the couch pillow. “She was what I thought I needed at a particular
moment.”

“You made her your password.”

Dave regarded me with wary, disappointed eyes. Of the two of us, he’d assumed he was
the real cheater and liar. “That was . . .” He was debating saying something. “That
meant nothing.”

Meaning he had changed his password for me, not Nell. It was a calculated move, done
in order to keep me out. Something about that explanation made me feel like I was
seeing him for the first time.

I tried to access the love that must be deep down beneath the hurt and muddle.

What do you want?

I willed myself to reclaim the certainty: We were a pair. We were a pair.

What do you want?

I waited for that crystal clear realization that I knew Dave. That I understood him
and he understood me, and even though things weren’t perfect, having that between
us was pure gold. I waited to know that we were enough.