The Good Sister (22 page)

Merell thought this over a moment, weighing Aunt Roxanne’s words carefully. So this was the truth, finally. Lying wasn’t a
bad thing or a good thing either. Sometimes it was just necessary, the simple and safe thing to do.

S
imone, we have to talk.” Roxanne shut the bedroom door and walked across the room to where her sister sat on the bed. Her
face was flushed and tearstained.

“Olivia’s fine but you have to go back to urgent care before Monday or they’re going to file a report.” She sat on the edge
of the bed. “If that happens, there’ll be an investigation.”

“You’ll come with me?”

“Johnny will go with you.”

“No, he won’t. He has to work. And I don’t want… I don’t…” She hiccupped a sob. “I can’t tell him what happened. If I do…”
She covered her face. “You have to help me, Rox. I swear on my children’s lives, I’ll never ask you for anything ever again.”

Her promise meant nothing. In a week or a day she would forget she’d made it.

“He wants to separate. I’ll have my own house and Alicia will stay here and take care of the girls.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mean it, Simone.” Roxanne felt oddly aloof from her sister, concerned but disconnected, and she knew
this was the way it had to be. “Johnny’s tired and under a lot of pressure.”

“I never should have had any children.”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

“They’d be better off never born.”

“Get off the bed, put on some clothes, and go downstairs. You don’t have to do anything except sit in the family room and
make sure no one has a fatal accident. You can do that much. Celia’s going to make dinner for you.”

“I hate her food.”

“Too bad. You’ll have to force it down.”

“Why are you being so mean?”

“I’m being realistic and I want you to be the same.”

Roxanne’s choices were clear: she could sit on the bed and hold Simone’s hand, on Monday she could give up a day of school
and take Simone and the baby to urgent care for Dr. Hamid’s approval. She could spend the rest of her life protecting Simone
from the consequences of her actions.

No. No to all of it.

“I called Johnny. He’s still in Nevada but he’ll be home by eight.”

“I don’t want to see him.”

Roxanne wasn’t going to follow that line of conversation.

“Merell needs a school uniform. I’m going to take her down to Macy’s and get that taken care of.”

“What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t he love me any—?”

“Johnny loves you, Simone. This isn’t about love.”

“I just wanted to make cupcakes….”

Roxanne thought of her babysitter, Mrs. Edison, teaching her to read using
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
as a text, and the way she’d thought that Bakersfield meant a field of bakers. She remembered being five years old, driving
north on Highway 99 with no idea where she was going or why; and as if it had happened only the day before, she felt the intense
reality of childhood: longing to grow up, doomed to grow up, not quite believing it would ever happen. But it had and it would
be just so for Merell and the twins too. Only for Simone was it different. Only she would stay as she was, a little girl in
a woman’s beautiful body.

“I’ll call Franny,” Simone said. “I’ll say I’m sorry and then she’ll come back.”

“I already tried the number she left. She’s gone.”

“Gone where?” As if Franny should have stayed around waiting to be insulted again.

“After we get her uniform, Merell and I will have dinner.”

“And you won’t tell Johnny? We’ll go see the doctor, you and me?”

“I’ll come back here with Merell and wait up with you until Johnny gets home.”

Simone grabbed a handful of hair, curled it around her index finger and twisted it.

“I’ll stay with you and you can explain everything that happened. Then you and your husband can figure out what to do next.”

“No.”

Roxanne put her hand over Simone’s and gently pulled her fingers back, letting the corkscrewed hair unwind. She said, “I’ll
be with you, Simone, but you must tell Johnny everything that happened today and then you and he will figure out what to do
about Dr. Hamid.”

*       *       *

Simone lay on the bed, half-paralyzed with fear.

Alicia.

An arrangement.

A separation.

How many times had she wanted to wake up in a house without the clacketing demands of children? Now she saw that it would
be hell: the twins’ idiotic chatter, Olivia crying, Merell knowing everything; this confusion was what gave her life a shape.
Without it what was the point? What would she do if she had a little house all to herself? Right then she wanted to bring
the girls into bed with her, close the door and hold them so tight they couldn’t speak. They would lie there together until
Johnny came
home and when he saw how sweet and peaceful they were he would be sorry he’d made threats.

Before Johnny, Shawn Hutton had loved her.

How strange it was that until last month she hadn’t thought of Shawn for years. Or of sailing, for that matter. Now they were
both in her mind all the time. Even when she wasn’t thinking about them, they were nearby waiting for her attention. Perhaps
they had been there all along but she was too busy with children and Johnny to notice.

She closed her eyes and saw Shawn as he was at seventeen. Big teeth, eyes the color of turquoise water, nose always pink and
peeling. Such a funny-looking boy but sweet and always kind to her. When he taught her to tie a bowline hitch he’d been patient,
going over the steps again and again until she could do it herself and when the next day came and she’d forgotten it, he didn’t
mind starting all over. He was the sweetest person she’d ever known. Not sharp and impatient like Johnny.

That summer Simone and Shawn had often sneaked aboard the
Oriole
and made love on his parents’ double berth. The sheets never felt quite dry and she smelled the bilge, a weedy background
stink she didn’t mind. One night Shawn said, “My folks’ll skin me if they ever find out about this.” His words set Simone
off into giggles she couldn’t stop. Shawn grabbed for her as she ran up on
deck. He caught her and held his hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t wake the people who lived aboard the boats moored on
either side of the
Oriole
. After they made love again he took her home and she crept up to her room, slept a couple of hours, and then at seven he
picked her up and they were on the water all that day with his parents and their friends. The way Johnny wanted a son and
Roxanne wanted to teach, Simone and Shawn had wanted to sail together.

After the accident Ellen and BJ told her to put sailing out of her mind
once and for all
as if flying free across the water was something she could just forget like the times table. But they kept telling her she
couldn’t even think about it and so she didn’t, not knowing what she did now, that when something is right for you, you must
be willing to do anything for it.

She drifted into a sleepy, salty daydream where Shawn and sex and sea mingled together. She dreamed she was flying and woke
up after a few moments with the most wonderful idea.

*       *       *

In a special section of the girls’ department at the Fashion Valley Macy’s, a wide selection of school uniforms were arranged
under their various school crests and flags. Late on this Friday afternoon the department was crowded with excited little
girls and their mothers as well as a few blasé older girls shopping on their own, cell phones glued to their ears. Roxanne
bought Merell skirts
and blouses and, most important, the short cocoa-brown blazer with a gold embroidered Arcadia crest that distinguished the
girls in the Upper Primary from “the babies” in the Lower. After their shopping spree Merell threw off excited sparks and
the last thing she needed was sugar; but Roxanne took her to the Big Bad Cat in Hillcrest and didn’t say a word when she ordered
a chocolate milkshake and a plate of French fries doused in melted cheese the color of a Halloween pumpkin.

What a hell of a day Merell had been through. She deserved to have anything on the menu she wanted.

The tables around them were crowded with kids and adults who all seemed to be talking at the same time, trying to make themselves
heard over the din of rock and roll from the fifties and sixties played by a disc jockey in a glass booth suspended above
the dining room.

“When you were in the fourth grade did you have a best friend?” Merell asked. “I’m gonna have a best friend this year. And
I’m going to ask Mommy if I can have a sleepover at our house.” She stirred her milkshake with her straw. “You think she’ll
let me?”

Roxanne would bet her salary against it, and she suspected Merell also knew how unlikely it was. She tried to imagine what
changes the next few weeks and months would bring to the Duran family, but it was impossible to know how Johnny would react
to the news of Olivia’s trip to urgent care. She wondered if Simone’s talk about separation and Alicia had any basis in fact
or if she’d made
it up and then convinced herself it was true. Either way, it was the kind of idea that could send her into a tailspin. Roxanne
put her hand on her lap and surreptitiously glanced down at her watch, not wanting Merell to know that she had begun to feel
they’d spent too much time away from the house.

Merell pushed away her milkshake. “Daddy’s going to be really mad when he finds out about Olivia. They already had a big fight
last night after they got home from that dinner thing. Daddy yelled a lot of mean things.” She stacked her fries as if she
were building a log cabin.

“He said she was useless and she kept crying and saying no, no, no. He’s going to be so angry when he finds out Mommy went
to sleep and left Olivia outside. Maybe he’ll blame me.” She looked up from her construction. “He called her a stupid slut
and that made her cry even more.”

Roxanne sat back. Her entire vocabulary, every word, had gone right out of her mind. She clutched her napkin in her lap, as
if it had the power to keep her upright in her chair.

“How did you hear all this?”

Merell looked down and then off to the side of the room where a magician was entertaining a table of little girls in glittery
birthday hats.

“Merell?”

“You know the cedar closet in the hall? Where the sheets and blankets are?”

The linen closet was next to Johnny’s and Simone’s bedroom. Lined with rough-hewn cedar boards, it smelled like the mountains
in summertime.

“If I go in there, at the back, I can hear them.”

“You have to stop that. What you heard was a private conversation between two grown-up people. People have a right of privacy,
even your mother and father.”

The magician pulled a chain of pastel scarves from behind the neck of one of the birthday guests. Her giddy shriek made everyone
in the room turn to see what had happened.

“That’s so lame,” Merell said. “He just pulls ’em out of his sleeve.”

“Listen to me,” Roxanne said, leaning in across the table. “I know that confusing things happen at your house and it probably
seems like if you could just listen to what Mommy and Daddy talk about, you’d be able to figure out what’s going on. But life
doesn’t work that way. Grown-up people sometimes say terrible things to each other, things they don’t really mean.”

Perhaps this explained Johnny’s talk of Alicia and separation. He didn’t really mean it.

“If you try to make sense of what people say when they’re fighting, you’ll only get more confused and unhappy,” Roxanne said,
convincing herself. “I want you to promise you won’t eavesdrop anymore.”

Merell was quiet. She looked up from her stack of fries. “She does bad things.”

“Who?”

“Mommy.”

Roxanne picked up one of Merell’s fries and stirred it in the cheese before she took a bite. It was like eating cardboard
dipped in salty melted plastic. “Is that your secret? The bad things she does?”

Merell nodded.

“Who else knows this secret, Merell?”

“Mommy and Gramma. Nanny Franny. The twins too only they don’t know they know it. And Olivia, but she can’t talk.”

Merell moved her milkshake glass around in the pool of condensation on the table, making the wet spot wider and wider. Roxanne
expelled a long breath and waited for Merell to explain.

“We were waiting for Daddy to come home and it was hot so we went down to the swimming pool. Mommy didn’t want to go but Gramma
said she had to. She said the water would do her good and Mommy said she hated the water and nothing would do her any good
ever, and Gramma said she was a miserable excuse for a woman.”

Merell’s gaze flicked around the room as if she expected the magician to cease his tricks and the children and adults in the
Big Bad Cat to lean forward to catch her secret.

“Mommy was crying and Gramma Ellen told her to stop being so dramatic. Mommy said she wanted to kill herself and Gramma said
she could drown herself in the pool if she wanted to. No one was stopping her.” Merell
was silent a moment. She seemed to be playing her grandmother’s words over in her mind. “I don’t think she meant that. I think
she was being mean and making a joke at the same time.”

“Sarcastic.”

“Yeah.” She sipped her milkshake. “They were by the pool and Gramma Ellen was drinking wine and Mommy had some too and Franny
said she shouldn’t because of the baby in her tummy and Mommy told Franny to shut up because she wasn’t part of our family.”

“Where were you?”

“Up on the steps. The twins were in the shallow end, in their inner tubes.”

“Why weren’t you swimming?”

“I was trying to read my book.”

Merell squared her shoulders, sniffed, and blinked fast. Roxanne had not realized before how much dignity a child has, the
pride that supports a small body.

“Tell me the secret, Merell.”

“Olivia started crying and Mommy was walking around with her, patting her back, trying to make her burp because sometimes
that helps stop the hurting only this time she threw up on Mommy. Olivia isn’t a bad baby. She’s a good baby, and she can’t
help throwing up and screaming because she hurts. It’s not her fault.” Merell was quiet for a moment and then the secret she’d
been holding burst from her as if the words were chased by a nightmare.