The Never Never Sisters (4 page)

“I don’t know.” My mom pressed her fingers against the stem of her glass. “She mentioned
a flight.”

“For when?”

“Saturday.” I glanced at my dad, who leaned back and nodded again, satisfied that
the story was being told and that he wasn’t the one telling it.

“Let’s talk about something else.” My mom jutted out her chin toward the door. I glanced
over my shoulder and saw Dave coming in from outside, rearranging his features into
a can-do grin.

“Why can’t he know?”

“Let’s just see what we’re dealing with first before we tell people.”

“He’s not people, he’s—”

She lifted her own fork and knife and started cutting through her radicchio to signal
that she was done talking about it. Dave pulled out his chair and sat down in the
silence of us carefully examining our silverware.

“It’s still brutally hot out there.” You’d have to be listening for it to hear, but
his voice had a nervous edge. “What’d I miss?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Don’t say nothing.” Greens were on my mom’s fork, poised upside down in front of
her mouth. She had always eaten like someone in a period film, and I had never been
sure at what point they’d covered that when she was growing up in the tenement off
Flatbush Avenue. “I was just telling your wife about a cute dress I saw.”

Dave’s work phone rang again and he ignored it.

“You need to get that?” I said.

“Nope.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he said. “They don’t need me right at this moment. They just think they
do. Cute dress, huh?”

THE AIR OUTSIDE
was still heavy with heat when Dave and I walked home from the restaurant. I pulled
my hair up off the back of my neck with one hand and fanned it with the other in my
best Southern belle impression. “My golly, Mr. Turner. Isn’t sundown supposed to promise
some
relief?”

Dave was silent.

I dropped the twang. “We weren’t talking about you in there.”

“I know.” His hands were in his pockets, his eyes straight ahead on the sidewalk.
Obviously his lighthearted dinner banter had been an act.

“We were talking about Sloane.”

“Your sister Sloane?”

“Are there any others?”

“There’s a Sloane at work. In word processing.”

“Yeah, not that one.” I shoved him affectionately, even though it really was far too
hot for contact; in response to my touch, his shirt suctioned to his side. “She e-mailed
about a possible visit. They’re being really bottled up.”

“They probably just don’t want to focus on it. Why waste time planning for something
that’s never going to happen?”

“Maybe.” My mom didn’t have to divulge the real reason she’d excluded the Boy from
the announcement—she was embarrassed, worried that sharing our demons was like showing
off a clubfoot on the first date. Dave and I had been married for two years, after
all, and only a handful of people really knew about Sloane: the three of us and our
close family friends the Rabinowitzes, who had been around that last, horrible year
and borne witness, namely by babysitting me for long stretches of time.

Dave’s work phone rang. He removed it from his pocket and glanced at the screen before
returning it. “When’s the last time she was here?”

“My mom has flown to California a few times to try to see her, I think, but the last
time Sloane was here and I knew about it was”—I calculated—“twenty years ago.”

“How old is she now?”

“Thirty-six.”

“I almost forgot she’s a real person.”

“That’s exactly what I thought earlier.” She hadn’t been a real person to me as much
as a rallying cry.
At-ti-ca!
Remember the
Maine
!
The mistakes of
Sloane
Reinhardt!
If I strained hard enough, I could access faint memories of her, normal sister stuff:
running through the sprinkler in our old front yard and the time she hit me with a
rented tennis racquet at the town courts and wailed over and over, “But it was an
accident!” I’d needed stitches under my eye, and she’d spent all of her allowance
money on a teddy bear for me with my name stitched on its heart.

This was the one I’d never forget, the one that was crystal clear while the others
were hazy: I’d been a babyish eleven, still sleeping every night with a night-light,
a pile of stuffed animals and my bedroom door wide-open. I’d like to pretend this
lack of maturity was a reaction to family tensions, but I can’t; I don’t remember
sensing them at all.

That night, I was asleep until I heard a crash that made me sit up in my bed, my stomach
knotting in fear. I lay back down, but then I heard a clanging and a man’s voice—rough,
loud. I waited for my parents to do something before I remembered that they were out,
which meant Mrs. Chanokowski, the neighbor from three houses away, was snoring on
the daybed in the spare room down the hall. I went into Sloane’s room, but it was
empty.

My clock said one in the morning, so I tried to go back to sleep, but I heard more
voices and then laughter. I could tell from the way the light shone up the stairs
that it was coming from the living room, so I grabbed a baton—I still hadn’t mastered
twirling, but perhaps I could swing it at someone—and inched down the stairs until
I could peer down.

They were in a circle, five of them—Sloane and four guys who were probably all still
in high school. To me, they looked like men: broad shouldered, stubbly faced, hands
like cuts of raw meat. One of them was passed out. Another had a little metal canister
and a yellow party balloon. He filled the balloon, shot the air in his mouth like
I’d seen people do with party balloons and helium, but then instead of his voice coming
out like Mickey Mouse, he fell back, gasping and laughing, before crashing into a
glass cabinet that broke in pieces around him. He rubbed his head with his hand, and
there was blood everywhere.

“Fuck,” he said, and Sloane grabbed one of my mom’s throw pillows and pressed it to
his head before grabbing the balloon. It probably was from a prior indulgence, but
at the time I connected her nosebleed to the balloon: first a trickle, then a gush.
I shouted out, and when she turned toward my voice, her eyes were glinting and narrowing.

“Fuck,” said another one of the guys, and I have since realized that he was being
decent, having spotted me standing there in my nightgown and appreciating that it
was not an ideal scene into which to insert an eleven-year-old armed with a glitter
baton. Sloane didn’t seem to care, though. I don’t know if my memory has embellished
this, but she started to laugh uncontrollably and offered me the balloon.

Mrs. Chanokowski appeared, her hair in some sort of shower cap, swatting the boys
with her hands like they were flies until eventually all of them buzzed away defensively.
(Not the passed-out one, of course, but he was gone by the time I crept downstairs
to find my dad talking brightly and making waffles instead of reading the paper as
he usually did in the morning.)

People talk about defense mechanisms like they’re a weakness, but spend enough time
in the mental health field and you’ll recognize them as a safety net. Consider repression:
some experts say it’s dangerous, that suppressed memories inevitably return to bite
you in the keister, as my mom might call it, and that can be true.

I was pretty sure, though, that the acrobatics my mind had done to dim my other memories
of Sloane were in the name of self-protection. That image—her possessed eyes, the
blood from her nose, the way she offered up the nitrous oxide to me like she was inducting
me into some club—kept me from mourning her loss unnecessarily. My family, all I needed
or knew after my sister’s disappearance, was my mom, my dad and now Dave. Sloane had
fundamentally different wiring from the rest of us and belonged somewhere else.

When Dave’s phone rang again, we looked at each other, rolling our eyes at the work
intrusion, and I smiled permission to answer. He shook his head.

“But shouldn’t you? In light of . . .”

He lifted it out of his pocket and shut the thing off. “No,” he said. “Sometimes,
you just have to draw a line in the sand and not be available.”

“At least they still seem to really need you.”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said, but his expression was sour enough to make me suspect he
didn’t agree.

Vanessa

ON THE WAY
home from dinner with the kids, I held out my arm to make Frankie do the Regency stroll—his
term, not mine. I’d first seen it done on a BBC production of
Mansfield Park
. One person held out her arm straight and the other linked his arm around hers, tucking
in his hand like the spare end of a belt.

“Vanessa.” Frankie sometimes, like now, sighed my name instead of saying it. “As we’ve
discussed, life was not better then.”

“Yes, it was.”

“How?”

“The entertainment, for one. They put on plays and concerts instead of watching those
Housewives
shows. Also, the fashion: Empire waist dresses are highly flattering.”

“We wouldn’t have done any of that.” Frankie held up three fingers, pressing them
down as he listed. “You would have been a scullery maid. I would have probably been
tubercular. And you know opium would’ve made a huge appearance.”

We strolled in silence after that. Frankie was thinking about work or insurance policies,
and I was thinking about whether and when there would be a call from my elder daughter.

There was no logical reason Sloane wouldn’t call—you don’t e-mail someone after two
decades unless you’ve seriously thought about seeing them—but I’d gone all belts and
suspenders to make sure she did. I’d given her my cell and Frankie’s cell, and the
home line, and even Frankie’s office number, because Missy was an excellent secretary,
so highly organized that you had to wonder why she’d settled for being an assistant.
I didn’t understand it—young women really had options these days. Missy should be
running the company, not managing Frankie’s calendar, and someday she and I would
get to the bottom of that. For now, I was grateful that she was still Frankie’s secretary
and that I could count on her to track us down.

The doorman, Tom, smiled pleasantly as we walked into our lobby. He probably had no
clue we had two children. If Sloane appeared in the lobby, he’d buzz her up, thinking
she was just a guest. Maybe even one of those bike messengers, depending on how she
was dressing these days.

When I first saw the incoming e-mail
From: S. Reinhardt
, my stomach sank and rose at the same time. I dialed Cherie with trembling hands
and, together, we shopped it out. I bought a leather handbag—tough, structured, with
pounds of hardware hanging off it. I emerged from the store calmer.

What if her voice was cold and frosty, like the last time we’d spoken? How would I
handle it? Or what if it was welcoming? Or, god forbid, slurred? There was something
animalistic about the way my senses heightened when I imagined the scenarios. The
leather bag—all skins and guts—had been the perfect purchase. I’d have to scour Madison
Avenue for some feathers too. Maybe a pelt.

But Paige, tonight at dinner, had barely reacted to the news. It was as if I told
her I’d bumped into Kirsty, the hygienist from Maplemount Dentistry. No, Kirsty might
have inspired a familiar smile; she’d always put together a crackerjack bonus bag,
with the different flavors of floss and the toothbrushes and stickers. It was more
as if I’d announced to Paige that it might possibly drizzle this weekend. “Can you
believe her reaction?” I asked Frankie.

“Hmm?” He was obviously lost in thought about his insurance widgets.

“Her reaction? It was so . . . blasé.”

“Better than the alternative.”

“Yes. A real relief.” We had painstakingly bricked up the drama for Paige, hidden
it behind a wall so that she could just grow up normally rather than in the shadow
of Sloane’s issues. “We’ll keep the first get-together just between the nuclears,
as quiet as possible.”

Frankie, bless him, did not respond. It was ridiculous to pretend that nothing had
changed in twenty years, but I didn’t want Sloane to feel she’d been replaced, that
we’d moved on without her.

When we got home, Frankie got absorbed by his study—I swear that man was going to
get fused to his chair one day like that Shel Silverstein poem I read to the kids
about the boy who grew into his TV set—and I went straight to the kitchen. The architect
had initially installed a computer system to make our apartment “smart.” It had been
composed of one slim tablet, a PA speaker system and some earphones, and I couldn’t
figure out the damn thing; anytime I tried to phone anyone or watch
60 Minutes
for that matter, I randomly pressed buttons, but nothing ever happened. So, we’d scrapped
the streamlined future. Nothing more high-tech than dimmer lights, we’d agreed, except
for the heated floors and towel racks, which were heaven in the winter.

We ended up using the early-model cordless with attached message machine that we’d
had for years. The SPAM luncheon meat of phones, it had proved indestructible through
being accidentally left in the fridge overnight and once, by a teenaged Paige, outside
on the deck during a thunderstorm. By this point, there was something comfortingly
familiar about the way it blinked red, as though whatever its news was, I’d heard
worse before.

Yet now the steady blink made my pulse, which had just started to return to normal,
race. Add in the tunnel vision and the way my feet froze to the spot, and I again
thought of animals: fight-or-flight response. Who was I kidding with the leather and
the pelts? Those were for warriors. I was the opposite of a warrior, whatever
that
was, passive and waiting, no weapons, just hoping for the best.

I pressed it as if she were somewhere watching me, gauging my commitment by the force
of my action. I jabbed my finger on the button as hard as I could, to show how much
I wanted her home.