The Good Sister (7 page)

She saw his expression harden like a flexed muscle.

“I want you there with me, Roxanne.”

“And I want to go. But the state I’m in? I’d be no good to you.” Drops of sweat popped out across the back of her neck. “I’d
be a distraction. You’re better—”

“Bullshit.”

“Don’t walk away from me, Ty.” She followed him into the house. “Look at this from my point of view.”

“Oh, I have. Believe me, I’ve examined your point of view from all angles.”

“You can’t expect me to ignore Simone. She’s vulnerable—”

“When I get the job—
if
I get it—what’ll you do then? Chicago’s two thousand miles from your vulnerable little sister.”

“Tyrone, I will move with you to Chicago.” She spoke to him as if he were a student who needed a lesson
repeated one time too many. “I told you I would and I meant it.”

“Thanks for the sacrifice, Roxanne.”

She heard the sarcasm that was so unlike him and the vibrations of a long, minor chord echoed through her like a warning.
She dropped onto the couch.

“I love you, I love her.” Ty could take care of himself but Simone could not. “I thought you understood.”

“Haven’t you heard, Roxy? Understanding’s the booby prize.” He sat on the hassock opposite her. “I knew when we married that
this thing with Simone would be a struggle, but I underestimated how it would make me feel.” He stared down at the square
of carpet defined by his athletic shoes. “And I thought, I believed, we could work it out because we felt the same about marriage
and making a commitment to each other. I mean, otherwise we could have gone on as we were, just living together. Isn’t that
right?” He stopped. “Why did you marry me, Roxanne?”

“I love you.” His question, so simple, was really a trap; and she knew that however she replied, she’d never get it right.
“I want to spend my life with you.”

“What about kids?”

“We’ve had this conversation, Ty. You know I want us to have children.”

“And if we do, who’ll come first? Our kid or your sister?”

“Well, our child, of course. How can you even ask?”

He nodded as if his hypothesis had been confirmed. “That puts me third in line, doesn’t it?”

Panic fluttered in her throat. “This is a stupid conversation. These numbers don’t mean anything.”

“But they do, they do. Listen to me.” He took her hands in his. “All that old-fashioned stuff in the marriage ceremony? I
believe it. Sickness and health, rich and poor, forsaking all others. Those words mean a lot to me. Before we got married,
I read the ceremony a dozen times, Roxanne. I wanted to make sure I meant it when I promised to be faithful to you for as
long as I live.”

“And you’re saying I didn’t?”

“I’m saying when you made that vow you were already pledged to be faithful to Simone. You just tacked me on after her.”

“That’s so unfair.”

He seemed not to have heard her. “Your happiness, your health and well-being and all, it comes first with me. I don’t even
have to stop and think about it. If we have kids you’ll still be number one with me.”

Did he expect her praise because his priorities were simple? Did that make him a better person or just one who’d never been
tested?

He said, “If you really, powerfully, do not want me to go to Chicago, I won’t go. I’ll call them up right now and say I’ve
reconsidered and decided to stay at the Salk.”

This
was
what she wanted but admitting it would be the same as saying that she
couldn’t
leave Simone, that she
was bound heart to heart to her sister in a way that she was not to him. Even if that were true—which, of course, it wasn’t—she
wouldn’t have given him the satisfaction of hearing her say it.

“Just tell me,” he said. “Do I make the call or not?”

“Ty, it’s just not that easy. You come from a Norman Rockwell family. No big neuroses, no hidden agendas. You and your siblings
are all grown up and independent and happy.”

She knew she was exaggerating. Among Ty’s siblings there were disagreements, private grudges were held, emotional brokering
went on as it did in any family.

“I am the only person Simone completely trusts. If I let her down, she has nothing. Forget our mother, she’ll always put her
own life first. And Johnny loves an image of Simone. When she gets on his nerves or disappoints him, he leaves for the office
or goes fishing with the mayor. Or he hires another babysitter or cook or whatever. I’m the one who stands beside her no matter
how awful she is. I’m the one who always picks up the phone.”

“Well, you’ve got to stop doing that.”

Maybe. Yes. But not this weekend, not today.

Ty said, “I watch the struggle that goes on in you every time she calls. And when you talk about her—listen to your voice
sometime, Roxy—it’s like there’s this subsonic scream under your words. It’s tearing you apart, but you’ve been caretaking
Simone for so long, you don’t
feel anything. You don’t know what this relationship is doing to you, but I do. And I hate it, and sometimes I hate her.”

He dragged his hand down his face. “I know you had a weird childhood and I know you can’t get yourself untangled overnight.
But it’s gotta happen, Rox, or you and I aren’t going to make it. Even if I could accept that I’ll never be the most important
person in your life, I can’t see you suffer like this. I’d rather let Simone win.”

She heard his words, the ultimatum, but they were spoken in a language she barely understood.

“I can’t fight anymore,” she said.

“We’re not fighting.”

“This isn’t a fight?” She tried to laugh. “What is it then?”

“Sorting stuff out, I guess.”

Her brain wasn’t fit to sort out anything. It moved in slow motion like an ancient computer the size of a battleship.

“I just know I love you.” The words weren’t enough. He wanted a pledge of some kind, a scientific proof that he could see.
“And if you truly want this job then I want it too. Go to Chicago. I know my relationship with Simone isn’t good the way it
is. Elizabeth has been harping on it since the day we met, but…”

She closed her eyes, seeing constellations.

“I’ve tried to get free of her so many times, Ty. But it never lasts. I’m like one of those game fish who’s bitten on
the hook and can’t get free. It fights and fights, but eventually it just can’t struggle anymore.”

“It’s going to work this time, Roxanne, because you don’t have to do it alone.”

“I fear for her.”

“I fear for you. And us.”

“I’ll try,” she whispered. “I swear I’ll try.”

Because our life depends on it, because I love you.

Constellations, galaxies, universes beyond number: time and gravity and energies as yet unknown tore at them; and yet, wondrously,
the stars and planets survived and the center held. Maybe love did that. Maybe love explained it all. Who knew?

Roxanne and Chowder drove Ty to the airport, and afterward she was afraid to return to the empty house on Little Goldfinch.
She’d left her phone there; in the car she was cut off from all demands and responsibilities. She had made a promise, one
she meant to keep. But how was she to begin to do what had always before been impossible?

Go home,
she told herself.

Keep busy,
she thought.

She sat in the car at Mission Bay, watching children in bathing suits with sand stuck to their bottoms as they played in the
last light, pushing and shoving and crying while the adults around them packed up blankets and towels and chairs and coolers.
In the backseat of the car Chowder whimpered and squeaked, making sure that
Roxanne knew Mission Bay was a great dog-walking place. She fastened his leash and they set off north in the direction of
the Hilton Hotel. After half a mile she wanted to turn around, but Chowder was enjoying himself so she kept going until they
reached the turnaround in front of the Visitors’ Center. Back in the car, Chowder licked her ear and lay down on the backseat,
happy and contented.

It takes so little to keep a dog happy.

On Sunday she had breakfast with Elizabeth, waiting in line thirty minutes for bacon and eggs at a joint in North Park that
served the best hash browns in the city and made creamery-style milkshakes. The long narrow space smelled of coffee and hot
grease, and the fry cook—a stocky woman known in the neighborhood as the shit lady—muttered the same expletive over and over
as she tended the sizzling grill.

“Remind me why we come here,” Roxanne said, scooting into a booth, avoiding a torn strip in the leatherette.

“The classy atmo? The irresistible lure of bad cholesterol?”

Roxanne thought about what Ty teasingly called her addiction to fast food, and suddenly she was mad at him, resentful of his
ultimatum and eager to enlist Elizabeth on her side. She told her about their fight, or conversation, whatever it was. Where
details had begun to fade, she filled in the spaces with indignation, the sense of
having been wronged growing in her as she recalled the way he went on about vows and forsaking and fidelity. She told Elizabeth
about her promise to stop being Simone’s caretaker.

“Good luck, huh?” She ate a bite of bacon. “I am so screwed up.”

“I’d have to agree with that.”

No one, not even Ty, knew Roxanne better than Elizabeth.

On the first day of student orientation at San Diego State University, a searing hot Friday blowing up a Santa Ana wind, Roxanne
met Elizabeth Banks: best friends forever, soul mates, the daring duo. If they had met a few years earlier Roxanne would have
been distracted by Simone’s demands; a few years later and their lives would have veered off in different directions. Instead
they stood next to each other in line on a day when each was carbonated with excitement, full of hope and a little scared
but eager too for new experiences and someone to share them with.

They were as different as two eighteen-year-old girls from the poles of California could be. Roxanne tall and thin, buttoned-down
and orderly, Elizabeth a blue-eyed blonde, pretty in a preppy way, but with a flamboyantly slapdash personality that completely
contradicted her appearance. She lived by a collection of New Age beliefs she seemed to make up as she went along. Her parents,
Santa Cruz academics, and her two ungoverned younger
brothers took Roxanne in like a stray and found in her orderly ways much to amaze and amuse them.

Elizabeth persuaded Roxanne to ditch orientation. They bought sodas and sprawled on a patch of yellowing lawn outside the
Aztec Center.

“Tell me everything about your life,” Elizabeth said.

No one had ever made such a request of Roxanne. She started talking and couldn’t stop. At one point she surprised herself,
saying, “If Mom had her way, I’d stay home and babysit Simone for the rest of my life.”

“Omigod! I’d die. I’d slit my wrists.” Elizabeth fell back on the grass, arms spread wide like a sacrifice, then sat up. “What
do you do for a life?”

For a long time that question had been living in the suburbs of Roxanne’s mind, but she had only surveyed it from a distance,
never let herself visit the possibility that life might hold more than caretaking her sister. The mantra that had calmed her
down and restored her patience when it flagged was all about the future. There would be time for that when she was out of
high school, was out of college, had a job and could support herself. On that hot day Elizabeth invigorated her like a breath
of Arctic air, announcing with the one hundred percent confidence that seemed to characterize her, “Your future begins today!”

Riding the energy of her new friend’s outrage, Roxanne went that same night to her stepfather, BJ, and asked him to intervene
for her with Ellen and persuade her to let
Roxanne live in a dorm on campus instead of at home as originally planned. He agreed, and following several noisy discussions
with Ellen behind closed doors, he prevailed. As if Roxanne were moving to South America and not just across town, Simone
wept and screamed; and from then on she nagged Roxanne to come home, calling at all hours of the day and night. She was relentless.
Ellen offered money and a new car if she came back. In retrospect, Roxanne was surprised she hadn’t succumbed and knew she
had Elizabeth to thank.

A sluggish waitress in a hairnet and a ruffled white apron over a uniform the color of dried blood paused to refill their
coffee mugs.

When she had moved on, Elizabeth said, “You should have gone to Chicago. If Eddie were here I wouldn’t let him out of my sight.”

Elizabeth’s husband was a Marine in Afghanistan and had been gone for seven months. Early in his deployment Elizabeth had
gone through a time when she was fragile and couldn’t speak of Eddie without tearing up; now, after months apart, she had
learned a stoic resignation unimaginable in the vibrantly impatient girl Roxanne had met the first day of orientation.

“I’m such a jackass, Liz, going on and on when you’ve got real things to worry about.”

“This morning I thought I heard him say my name. It was a dream, of course, but you’ve got to pay attention to
dreams. You never know what they might mean. I keep thinking maybe his spirit might be trying to get through to me.” Under
the fluorescent light her eyes shimmered. “What if he’s dead and I don’t know it? No, I’m sure I’d know. We’re too connected.
I’d know, I’d have to know.”

Roxanne didn’t know what to say to this. Her own concerns seemed trivial compared to her friend’s.

Elizabeth said, “There are a lot of hard things about military life, but the one you don’t hear so much about is the way it
stalls your life. Couples like Eddie and me who don’t have kids or a lot of years together, we have a hard time believing
in our marriages sometimes. I mean, how long did we have together, just normal married life? Not even four months. And now
we’ve been apart twice that long. We’re missing out on all the little things that build a marriage….” She stared down at her
plate. “Sometimes it makes me so sad, thinking about the years we’re wasting.”