The Good Sister (12 page)

Merell said, “Mommy, I can help.”

“Omigod, Merell, will you stop trying so hard? It’s not your job—”

“That’s enough, Simone.” Johnny put his hand on the small of her back. “Let’s go upstairs. Franny’ll take Olivia.” His voice
had the kind of false calm Roxanne associated with police dramas, the officer on the street trying to talk a jumper off the
roof.

“I want to go home.”

“We don’t have a plane here and even if we did—”

“We’re trapped.”

Franny tried to take the baby.

“No!”

Simone jerked away and as she did, Olivia slipped from her arms and fell. The twins screamed and Roxanne dropped to her knees
beside Olivia, who lay on the floor on her back, stunned into silence.

“Shit,” Johnny said.

“Bad Daddy!” Victoria began to cry.

Roxanne did a quick examination. “She’s okay. Just surprised.” Franny took the baby.

Johnny said, “Go upstairs, Simone. Now.”

From Franny’s shoulder Olivia, temporarily more curious than unhappy, looked at her family with wide, wet eyes.

“She hates me.”

Johnny reached for Simone, but she jerked back as if his hand carried an electric current.

“You all hate me.”

She began to wail, a half-human sound that rose and grew thin and splintered into racking sobs. Roxanne knew
she should do something to help her sister but like the rest of the family she was spellbound by the scene playing out before
her and waiting to see what would happen next.

“Well, go ahead and hate me.” Simone’s eyes were huge and black. “The more the fucking merrier! You can’t hate me more than
I hate myself.”

*       *       *

Late Sunday afternoon the mountains of cloud cover began to break apart, revealing ponds and lakes and eventually oceans of
blue sky and finally the sun.

Daddy said, “Come for a walk with me, Roxanne. I want to go to the general store down the road. Bring Chowder. Do us good
to get the kinks out.”

“Can I come too?” Merell asked. “I could ride my bike.” The mountain bike was black with a silver stripe and the lake was
the best place to ride it.

“Let her,” Roxanne said, laying her hand on Johnny’s arm. “She needs a break too.”

In the sunlight the forest seemed enchanted, like in a book. Every leaf and needle, the trees and shrubs and even the surface
of the mulch that lay deep on the ground, sparkled as if, just seconds before Merell rode by on her bike, a wizard had passed
among the trees and sprinkled everything with gold dust and diamond bits. She liked that idea and wished there were such things
as wizards who could cast spells and grant wishes.

Chowder gamboled ahead of her, ranging into the woods and back to the road, checking on his humans
every few minutes, his tail whacking with joy. Merell enjoyed the wet dirt smell of the woods and the quiet broken only by
Chowder’s thrashing and the sound of water rushing down every gully, dip, and furrow of land. Water after a storm was like
laughter. Merell squinted and imagined the forest populated by gleeful elves and fairies no bigger than her hand. She wished
for a wizard to make Mommy happy, then whooped and sped through a deep puddle, throwing up a rooster tail of water that drenched
Chowder from head to tail. He stood where he was, barking rapturously.

She biked on the road most of the time, ahead of her father and aunt, occasionally falling behind when she detoured up a private
road to one of the houses already boarded up for the winter. None of these houses was as handsome as the cottage and some
looked shabby and neglected. Chowder went crazy, smelling mice under every porch and deck. A red plastic toy in the weeds,
forgotten, no longer favored at the summer season’s end, meant kids had once spent their holidays there. The fishing pole
against a shed wall was probably a man’s. Merell got off her bike and spied through a window into a roomful of boxes and furniture
covered in sheets. She pretended the window gave her a view into the future and it was the cottage at the compound that was
closed up, its toys and fishing gear abandoned.

She wondered if other people could feel two things at the same time the way she did: happy to be out in the
enchanted woods, but at the same time melancholy.
Melancholy
was one of her favorite words. She’d found it in a book and looked it up, and immediately she’d understood exactly what it
meant. Sad in the head and in the heart and in the bones.

*       *       *

Johnny walked with his head down, and so fast that Roxanne barely kept up with him. His stride was half again as long as hers
and he seemed determined to reach the general store as fast as he could; but once it was in sight he slowed down and stopped.
He stood a moment, staring at the
CLOSED
sign in the front window.

“The twins are going to be disappointed.” He’d promised to bring them a special candy only sold in this store. He shrugged
and confessed to Roxanne that the walk to the store had been an excuse to get out of the house. They watched Merell turn down
a side road that led to the water, one of the lake’s few stretches of beach. They followed her for a few steps and then Johnny
stopped again. In the fading light he looked like two men, their faces superimposed on each other, one young and handsome,
the other haggard and old.

“What am I going to do? Tell me, Rox. Help me.” He sank back against a tree and covered his face. “I don’t know how much more
of this I can take.”

He wanted her to sympathize, but she couldn’t although she knew exactly what he meant. Trapped in the house, Simone’s tormented
spirit was contagious. But how could
she feel sorry for Johnny when it was he who insisted on more and more children in pursuit of the ideal, a son?

He said, “She wasn’t always like this. Remember? At first she was perfect. I was the happiest man on the planet.”

They watched Merell bounce along the potholed road with Chowder loping close by, the first child of a perfect wife and the
happiest man on the planet.

He said, “I know a side of Simone that no one else does. Even you, Rox. She and I, we had so much fun together. She made me
laugh….”

He walked back to the main road, where they waited for Merell to catch up.

“You’ve got to get her help, Johnny.”

“Help? She’s got a housekeeper and I pay Nanny Franny more than I pay my secretary.”

“I mean she needs to be in therapy. Someone good.”

He shook his head. “No, that’s out of the question. I told you, when we were talking about Merell, I said—”

“I know what you said, but that doesn’t change the facts.”

“I am an old-fashioned man, Roxanne.” She could tell from the way he said this that he thought
old-fashioned
and
superior
were synonyms. “I don’t want to fight and I don’t want to be the bad guy and I am so fucking tired of worrying about Simone.
I could send her to all the therapists in the world and they wouldn’t do her any good. Psychology isn’t a science. Mostly
it’s just professional nosiness.”

She might as well run head-on into the Great Wall of China as hope to change his point of view.

“Listen,” she said, going at the wall from a different direction. “Here’s something I’ve been thinking about. Did you know
that Simone used to sail?”

“There was some kid who chased her all over the boat until she had to give it up just to get rid of him.”

Shawn Hutton’s history rewritten.

“I think if you told her she could—”

“Sail? Her?”

“She and Merell could take lessons together.”

“Merell, sure. But Simone, no way.”

“Why not?”

“I love my kids, Rox, but I don’t want to raise them alone. Besides, I’ve taken her out on the boat up here, and she sits
in a corner like a scrunched bug.”

“She doesn’t like fresh water.”

“Water’s water. If she really liked sailing, if she wasn’t just talking, she’d do it anywhere.”

Off in the woods Chowder barked at something. Johnny looked toward the sound, suddenly irritable.

“You better call that dog. Get him on a leash before someone complains.”

“Sailing would empower her.”

“She doesn’t need power, she needs you. You keep her level, Roxanne, you’re the balance she needs.”

“Johnny, that’s not fair!”

He said, “If you didn’t work, or maybe if you worked part-time…”

She walked back toward the compound, using all her self-control to keep from running. Chowder tumbled out of the woods and
ran circles around her, wet from scrambling through the undergrowth. Ahead, Merell was trying to ride with no hands. Roxanne
couldn’t drag enough oxygen into her lungs. After a moment she stopped in the road and bent over double. Johnny’s hand touched
her shoulder.

“Don’t do this to me,” she said. “Don’t make this about me.”

“I don’t know what it’s about anymore,” he said, embracing her. Though she wanted to tear away from him, though she despised
him at that moment, she was grateful for his arms around her, holding her up. “I just know what I can’t do. And this therapy
stuff—”

“It’s not magic or witchcraft. A therapist is just someone to talk to, a neutral third party.”

“You’re someone, Rox. Why not you?”

“I have a life, Johnny. I have a husband and we want to have a family before I get too old. I have a job I love. I can’t be
Simone’s caretaker for the rest of my life.”

“But it wouldn’t be the rest of your life. Just for a while, until she gets through this rough patch.”

“How long do you think it’ll last? Until you have your son? It might take years, it might never happen. Meantime my clock
is ticking. Hear it, Johnny? Tick-tock, tick-tock:
it’s telling me I’ll be forty before long. I don’t have much time.”

He interrupted. “You’re wrong about a therapist being neutral. Whoever she is—and they’re mostly all female, I know that,
it’s a female kind of business—she’ll take Simone’s side and she’ll shove a wedge between us. You know what they’ll talk about?
Me.”

A therapist might give Simone the courage to stand up to him and refuse to have more children. Of course, he feared that.

“Simone and I talk about you, Johnny. What’s the difference?”

“You don’t want to turn her against me.”

“Honest to God, Johnny, I’m not that neutral. If I could teach Simone to stand up to you, I would.”

It might be too late for that.

T
he family returned to San Diego on Monday. The next day Simone got out of bed at nine a.m., drank six glasses of water, put
on a loose blouse and a skirt with an elastic waistband, and took a taxi to her obstetrician’s office, leaving Merell, Olivia,
and the twins with Franny.

After sitting in the waiting room for twenty minutes trying not to think about her full bladder, she was shown to an examination
room and directed to lie down. A nurse wearing scrubs patterned with Disney characters asked her to pull down her skirt and
on Simone’s exposed stomach she applied a clear gel, warning her first that it might be chilly. The woman spoke as if by rote
and Simone knew what she was going to say before the words were out of her mouth. She warmed the transducer between the palms
of her hands before she laid it on Simone’s abdomen. Again she warned of chilliness. After listening a moment she grinned
and said, “That’s a good strong heartbeat. I’ll call the doctor.”

Simone had been with the same obstetrician since
her first pregnancy. Dr. Wayne was in his early sixties, a white-haired man with warm pink hands and a daunting confidence
that Simone assumed came from having brought so much life into the world. He treated her with a proprietary manner she found
reassuring at the same time she was certain he knew virtually nothing about her apart from her medical history.

“Let’s see what you’ve got in here,” he said, as if he thought she’d swallowed something plastic from the twins’ toy box.
He hummed, repeating the first bars of “White Rabbit” as he moved the transducer over her belly, watching the image on the
video until he saw what he wanted. Simone tried to imagine him as a young man of the Woodstock generation smoking weed and
making medical student hooch with pure alcohol.

“Here we go, here we go.” His grin was very wide and toothy. “Wow, what a great picture. Simone, you are a pro and this one’s
a real movie star.” He turned the monitor so Simone could see the screen.

She closed her eyes. “Just tell me.”

“Looks healthy,” he said. “Strong heart, fingers and toes where they’re s’posed to be.”

“Tell me.”

Dr. Wayne sighed and patted her hand. “You’ve got another girl, Simone.”

At home she reset the bedroom air conditioner to sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit, drew the blinds, took off her
shoes, and got into bed fully clothed. It was a little after eleven on the first blue-and-gold Tuesday in September, and she
wanted to sleep for the rest of her life, which she hoped wouldn’t be too long. Her eyelids trembled and wouldn’t close completely.
She put on a sleep mask but they still quivered. Blindly, she reached for the Xanax vial. It wasn’t where she’d left it. She
shoved up her mask and rummaged through the drawer in the bedside table. Johnny had hidden it from her. Or possibly Franny
had sneaked into the bedroom while she was at the doctor’s. She grabbed the water glass beside her bed and heaved it across
the room where it hit the deep pile carpet with an unsatisfying thunk.

Somewhere in the house Olivia was screaming.

If that girl would just do her job…

The nanny’s faults lined up in Simone’s mind: her incompetence, her air of superiority, her ingratitude.

She got out of bed, shoved her feet into slippers, and went downstairs to the family room, where Franny was walking back and
forth before the French doors, holding the glassy-eyed, red-faced baby. In the midst of the screaming din, Franny looked offensively
cool and tidy in her T-shirt and shorts.

“Give her the medicine.”

“She’s already had the max. Poor little pumpkin must think there’s nothing in life but misery.”