Things You Won't Say (25 page)

“You don’t have to do all this,” Lou had protested, but Jamie had continued to load a new pair of flip-flops (“You’ll want these for the dorm showers, trust me,” she’d said) and a small coffeemaker (“You’ll need this during exams”) into an old milk crate.

“I don’t mind,” Jamie had said, and Lou had suddenly wondered who, if anyone, had helped Jamie prepare for college. Lou had used the flip-flops every morning, and at night she’d snuggled gratefully under the warm comforter and sweet-smelling sheets.

Lou wondered what her sister was doing right now, and whether she was still furious at Lou for her indiscretion.

At the sound of a knock on her door, her head jerked up eagerly, but it was only Donny. He looked around, taking in the bare walls and uncovered mattress. Rooms always seemed lonely and vulnerable once you’d stripped away their decorations, Lou thought.

“Need any help?” Donny asked.

“Thanks, but I’m all done,” Lou said.

Donny took a step forward, then paused. “Mind if I come in?” he asked.

“Of course not,” Lou said. “It’s your place.”

Donny walked over and sat down beside her on the edge of the mattress. As she looked at him, Lou felt a wave of nostalgia. Donny was a kind, decent man, and she wondered why she hadn’t loved him enough. Was it because Donny wasn’t the right man for her, or was it because something was broken within her? Maybe the part of her that sometimes missed or misread social cues was responsible for the limits she seemed to hit in her romantic relationships. Or maybe her issues were rooted in the loss of her mother. Baby monkeys who were separated from their mothers had trouble forming attachments later in life.

Of all the memories she was missing, the one that bothered her the most was her mother’s funeral service. Lou knew that she and Jamie had worn matching navy-blue dresses, bought for the occasion, and she remembered hers had itched around the neckline and given her a rash. At the reception afterward, a woman Lou didn’t know had squeezed her shoulder and whispered into her ear, “You need to be strong for your fa
ther.” Lou had thought that meant she wasn’t supposed to cry, so she didn’t. But that didn’t mean she didn’t grieve.

Lou respected grief, and understood everyone experienced it in his or her own way. Some elephant mothers who gave birth to stillborn babies had frantic reactions and others seemed depressed after the loss. Just because grief didn’t always look the same didn’t mean its various colors didn’t exist.

Lou did know, because Jamie had told her, that their father was the most wounded of the three of them by the loss. He and their mom had been such a pair. They’d met in college, where they’d sat side by side in classrooms, holding hands whenever they weren’t taking notes. They’d gone out for dates together on Friday nights, and had slept in on Saturdays while Jamie and Lou rode their bikes to the library to take out stacks of Judy Blume and Nancy Drew books. Once the sisters had found an injured bird in the backyard and had spent the day trying to save it, fashioning a nest from a shoe box and placing a saucer of water and a few plump, wiggling worms inside. The bird hadn’t lived, so Jamie had decided they needed to bury it in the backyard. She’d instructed Lou to gather small white stones to mark the grave with a cross, and then she’d led them in the Lord’s Prayer, stumbling over a few words. It bothered Lou that she could remember that service so clearly while she’d retained almost nothing of her mother’s.

After their mother died, their father ate the simple meals Jamie prepared, even the ones she burned, and he went to his job as an assistant manager of a department store every day, but at night he stared blankly at the television without bothering to change out of his suit. When he remarried, he explained to Jamie and Lou it was a kind of tribute to their mom: He’d had such a wonderful experience being wed that he wanted to re-create it. His new wife was a former college classmate, too, and she’d known their mother. “Was she the one Mom always said had a crush on you?” Jamie had asked their father once.

“Mom said that?” their father had asked, a smile breaking
out over his face. In that moment, Lou had known he’d truly moved on. In the past, any mention of their mother had left him with a quivering chin and full eyes. Now his focus had shifted to his new love.

Their stepmother was perfectly fine. She didn’t beat them like in the storybooks or try to dress like a teenager and become their best friend, like a character on a television show Lou had once seen. She was petite and talkative, with close-cropped auburn hair, a whirlwind of a woman who was always going for a run or reorganizing the kitchen cabinets. Maybe she would’ve liked to have been closer to them, but by then the family pattern was firmly established: The parents were one unit, the sisters another.

Right after Lou left for college, her dad and stepmother moved to New York, where her father found another job managing a clothing store and their stepmother taught tap-dancing classes. They lived in a small but conveniently located apartment, saw off-off-Broadway plays nearly every week, and jogged together in Central Park. “Our door is always open if you want to visit,” their father had told them when they’d gone by his house before the moving trucks arrived to pick through the attic for the remnants of their childhood that they wanted to keep.

And Jamie and Lou
had
visited, at least until Jamie’s kids were born and Lou began working two jobs. Their dad came into town once a year or so, usually just for a single night, and Lou spoke to him on the phone every couple of weeks, but that was the extent of their contact now. He was family, but not like Jamie, who knew all of Lou’s flaws and secrets and loved her still.

Did Jamie still love her?

“So,” Donny was saying. “I guess this is it.”

“Thanks for letting me stay so long,” Lou said. “I know you and Mary Alice would’ve been happier if I’d moved out a while ago.”

Donny removed his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose in the same sort of absentminded way her father used to. His glasses had left two tiny dents on the sides of his nose. Her dad had sported those parentheses at the end of the day, too. “It’s okay,” Donny said. “You’re easy to have around.”

Suddenly she was missing her mother
and
her father—or maybe it was finally hitting her that she was losing one of the few people who truly cared for her.

“She seems nice. Mary Alice, I mean,” Lou ventured. They hadn’t talked much about Donny’s new relationship.

“Yeah,” he said. “She really is.”

“I’m glad you’re happy,” Lou said, and meant it.

“How about you?” Donny asked. “Are you going to be okay living at your sister’s? I know there’s a lot going on for them.”

Lou nodded. “Jamie’s never needed me before. I want to help her.”

Assuming she didn’t keep messing things up, Lou thought. She wondered if Donny had seen
The Washington Post
’s gossip column, which had picked up the blogger’s report. If so, he was sensitive enough not to mention it.

Instead of continuing their conversation, Donny did something surprising: He leaned over and gave her a gentle kiss on the forehead. Lou closed her eyes, smelling Ivory soap and Crest toothpaste. Donny never used cologne, so those were his signature scents.

“I wish you well,” he said, his words oddly formal yet sweet. Lou found herself blinking away tears. When they were a couple, Donny had always driven to pick her up at the coffee shop at the ends of her shifts so she wouldn’t have to walk home in the dark, even though she told him she didn’t mind. He’d sat through half a dozen elephant documentaries without complaint, and once, when they were short on volunteers at the zoo, he’d helped Lou dole out wheelbarrows of food, despite the fact that he was secretly terrified of elephants. He’d tried to hide it, but he’d leapt a foot into the air when one of
them had trumpeted. Donny had a steady job, he loved to cook, and he always put away his clothes in the closet instead of leaving them strewn on the floor. He was a considerate man, which wasn’t something you should underestimate.

But it was too late. Mary Alice was moving in, and Donny was moving on. Lou felt panic flood her veins. What if Jamie didn’t want her around anymore? Who would she have, other than Tabitha?

“I—” Lou began, but then the buzzer sounded, breaking apart the moment.

“That must be your sister,” Donny said, and he got up.

Lou blinked, feeling disoriented. She’d been on the brink of begging Donny to take her back, but she didn’t love Donny. She was just scared. Somehow she’d muddled the two feelings.

Jamie had saved her again, Lou thought. She quickly wiped her eyes and stood up, feeling an intense rush of relief that her sister had shown up. She wondered how Jamie would act. Lou would try to follow her lead; if Jamie was still mad, Lou would keep quiet and out of her way.

But when Jamie came through the door, she hurried straight over to Lou, wrapping her arms around her sister.

“The AC is working! How did you do it?” Jamie asked.

“Oh!” Lou said. She’d momentarily forgotten. “It wasn’t any big deal. I called the repair company this morning and asked if they had any cancellations. They did, so the guy was able to come over. You weren’t home so I let him in.”

“It’s a big deal to us,” Jamie said. “I just can’t tell you what it felt like to walk into air-conditioning. To have something finally go right . . .”

Jamie began to cry, and she leaned her head against Lou’s shoulder. Lou had sought comfort from her sister dozens of times when she was small, because of skinned knees or bruises sustained when she’d fallen out of trees, but she didn’t think Jamie had ever cried in her arms before. Even on the day
of their mother’s funeral, Jamie hadn’t broken down. But early the next morning, something had awoken Lou and she’d crept to the bathroom to see Jamie curled up on the cold tile floor, weeping. Lou had quietly shut the door and slipped back into the bedroom. Now Lou did what she wished she’d done on that long-ago morning. She reached out and stroked tentative circles between Jamie’s shoulder blades.

“I’m really sorry,” Lou said. She needed to tell Jamie this, no matter how hard it was. “I don’t know if you saw
The Washington Post
yet . . . but they published some of the things I said today. If you don’t want me to move in—”

“Shh . . .” Jamie kept her arms around Lou, and Lou squeezed her eyes shut tight. “Let’s not worry about that now, okay? I know you’d never talk to a reporter about us. I was just scared and overwhelmed yesterday. That’s why I yelled at you.”

“No!” Lou protested. “I’m the one who was wrong. I should have been more careful . . . I thought she was being friendly.”

“It was just an accident,” Jamie said. “Another accident.” She sighed a warm breath of air across Lou’s cheek. “Let’s not let it become anything more, okay? Mike’s angry with me. I can’t stand to be fighting with you, too, Lou.”

Lou nodded. “I promise I won’t do anything like that again. I won’t mess up anymore. And I tried to write out a list of the bedtime routine so I could help, but I wanted you to check it to make sure I remembered everything . . .”

“Oh, Lou,” Jamie said. “You wrote a bedtime list?” Jamie began laughing and crying, creating an emotional stew.

But that was okay, because suddenly, Lou was doing the same thing.

•••

Christie pulled open her front door and glimpsed the only face in the world she wanted to see: her son’s. She pulled him into a hug, ending it long before she wanted to. She still re
membered how her mother used to act after a bottle or two of cheap Chablis, all sloppy and overly affectionate. Sometimes her mother would drag Christie to the bathroom mirror and squish their faces so close together that Christie couldn’t escape her sour-smelling exhales. “We could be sisters, right?” her mother would demand, pinching Christie’s chin in her hand. Christie quickly learned that if she didn’t say yes, her mother would cry, then become furious a drink or two later.

Only after Christie released Henry did she realize that Mike was standing to one side of the door. Usually when Mike or Jamie dropped Henry off, they gave a quick wave and headed back to the elevator. Or, more often during the past year or two, they simply dropped Henry off in front of the building.

“Hi,” Christie said. She was wearing spandex shorts and a purple tank top and she’d just finished doing a Jillian Michaels Shred workout video, which had her panting and sweating and yelling right back at the bossy woman on-screen within the first ten minutes. She’d finished it, though, and she’d vowed to do it every day, to offset the word
fat
, which had been knocking around in her mind ever since the jerk had attacked her.

“Hey, do you have a second?” Mike asked.

“Sure,” Christie said. She stepped aside to let him come in. Mike was one of the few men she’d let see her in this state. He’d seen her in labor; anything else was an improvement.

Henry went up to his room, muttering something about a summer reading assignment that Christie translated to mean he wanted to be texting with his friends, while Mike followed Christie into the kitchen, where she opened a bottle of Budweiser and slid it down the counter toward him. He took a long sip. “Needed that,” he said. “Thanks.”

“So what’s up?” Christie asked.

“I already talked to Henry,” he said. “Thought you should know, too. I’m probably going to be indicted soon.”

“What?” Christie gasped. Mike’s affect was so calm she thought for a moment she’d misheard.

“Henry seems okay now,” Mike said. He wasn’t calm, after all. Christie could see the truth in the set of his jaw and his rigid posture. Mike reminded her of a wild animal who’d just been trapped in a net—disoriented and filled with a coiled-up energy. “But if he’s upset tonight, will you call me? I can come over and talk to him.”

“Yeah, sure,” Christie said. She reached for Mike’s beer and took a long sip herself. “I mean, what the hell, Mike? Why are they doing this?”

Before he could answer, her doorbell rang again. Christie hurried to open it, and when she caught sight of the familiar Domino’s box—dinner for her and Henry—she dug into her purse for a twenty and handed it to delivery guy, then shut the door without waiting for change.