The Weird Sisters (36 page)

He must have been a good shot, because for a moment there was just the scrabble of the doe’s hooves on the road, and then sharp thunder, echoing again and again into the night and making our ears ring, and then nothing. Cordy ran to the side of the road, gripping the sharp edge of the wire fence in her hands, and she vomited her ice cream into the pasture.

We never did anything like that again. Any of it.

We think about that night often, but what comes back to us isn’t the terrible ending but how free and happy we were together, and how we felt like together we could do anything, rule the world and damn the consequences. We remember the open windows, the breeze pushing hard against our skin, howling into the night, the sound of that song fighting the scream of the wind and the tires on the pavement, the way Rose stood strong and steady, protecting us from harm, and we remember the promise we made never to hurt anything ever again, and we wonder where those girls went, if they died with the doe that night on the road, or if they would have disappeared anyway.

NINETEEN

I
know,” our father said, wiping corn kernels from his beard, turning birds out of the nest, “illegitimacy does not carry the stigma it once did. But it seems to me a capitally bad idea to bring a child into the world without a father.”

“My baby has a father,” Cordy said. “It’s not going to spring fully grown from my head.” They were alone at the table, our mother having struggled vainly through some soup and a fresh tomato, and excused herself to rest, and Bean off for the evening.

“What kind of father? You haven’t even been able to name him.”

“I am a bastard, too; I love bastards: I am a bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in every thing illegitimate,”
Cordy said. Which was mostly patently untrue, but we had always loved that line.

“And the father has responsibilities,” our father said as though she had not spoken. “You may feel you can give the child what it needs emotionally, but what about financially? He should be held accountable for that, at least.”

“I don’t want his money,” Cordy said.

“Wanting and needing are two different things, Cordelia.
I am a fool, and full of poverty.
” He moved his silverware, setting his fork and knife across the plate, handles at four o’clock. Cordy, waitstaff instincts kicking in, wondered if this was a signal for her to clear. She stayed put.

“I’m not a baby anymore, Daddy,” she said, thereby managing both to support and undercut her point with just one sentence.

Our father only harrumphed. “Do you even know who the father is?”

Cordy thought of the painter. He had spoken little to her, asked her for less, and in the end, she had gone to him, one of the few times that, in sharing her body, she had still felt she possessed it. Why did the thought of naming him feel like a betrayal? “It doesn’t matter,” Cordy said.

Our father slammed his hand on the table. The silverware jumped, chattered against china. “Goddammit, Cordy, stop being so irresponsible.”

Cordy looked up at him, mirror to mirror.
“Why speaks my father so ungently?”
she asked. Oh, Miranda, our father’s undoing. Shakespeare is full of fathers who will not let their daughters go, who desire to protect them, to keep them young, virginal, owned. But none melts our father’s heart so as Prospero and Miranda, the release from the prison of Eden. He looked at her, waiting, and Cordy’s heart leaped. It was the first time since she’d told us of her pregnancy that she felt like he might actually hear her.

“I have made a million mistakes,” Cordy said, staring down at the table. “I’ve been a child. I’ve allowed you—I’ve begged you to support me.” She paused, looking up at him, searching his dark eyes for a sign to allow her to go on. He nodded, and Cordy nodded back and continued.

“I’ve been running for seven years, trying to make myself into someone special, someone important. I’ve fallen for men just so they would hurt me, and shied away from the ones who would help me.” She clenched her fingers into fists, loosened them again, spreading her palms flat against the table. “But I came home because I was done. Not because you asked me to. Because I was tired of spinning in circles. So the baby isn’t a new leaf. It’s part of the leaf I already turned over.” She looked up at him again, her speech finished. He was sitting, his arms folded across his chest, his glasses slipping down his nose so he looked at her over the rims as though he were teaching one of his classes.

Our father sat silent for a long time. In class, he often did the same thing, listening to a student’s comment and then staying silent, holding it in his mind like a crystal, watching the light hit it from different angles before replying. The habit took some students time to get used to, those seemingly awkward pauses, but they grew to appreciate it, taking it as the compliment it was that he would so carefully consider their words, this Great Man who could have felled their ideas with one verbal blow. “You cannot support a child on what you make at the Beanery,” he said. “And you don’t have insurance.”

Bean nodded. “I know. I’m working on that.”

“And you’ll live here?”

“I don’t have to. There’s the apartment above the Beanery. Dan usually rents it to college kids, but he said I can have it if I want.”

“Your mother wants you to live here. I think she wants to have a baby around, but I don’t know if it will be good for her. Babies . . . You get so little sleep.”

“She’ll be finished with the treatments by then,” Cordy said. “And it might make her feel better. I think it makes her feel like she has something to look forward to. But I haven’t decided yet.”

He stood, clearing his dishes, rinsing them slowly, deliberately, setting them in the dishwasher. He held his hands along the rim of the sink and stared out the window, the palest breath of light allowing him to see out before the glass became a mirror in the darkness. “Why do you make it so hard for yourself, Cordelia? Why can you girls never choose the easy way?”

“I don’t know,” Cordelia said sadly.

When Cordy turned the conversation—the argument, really—over in her mind that night, her cheeks flushed with chagrin. Rubbing angrily at the red stains of embarrassment, she tried to stop herself from saying aloud the words that sounded so childish to her now. An apartment above the Beanery. A leaf she had already turned over.

How did he have this power to make her sound so young, so silly? Those words that sounded so strong in her mind and her heart fell from her lips like jump-rope rhymes. Staring out into the garden, she blew sharply against the glass. He was right. She wasn’t prepared. She couldn’t do this—couldn’t take care of a baby when she was such a baby herself.

It hardly seemed like a surprise when she heard a car in the driveway and then a soft knock at the door, a muffled tap in the sleeping house. She pulled herself from the window seat and opened the front door to find Max, the friend who had dropped her off in the middle of the night when she’d first come home. His hair fell over his forehead in greasy strings, and he wore a T-shirt studded with holes over a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of threadbare cargo shorts. It seemed to her that it had been years since the last time they’d seen each other, and Cordy felt inexplicably relieved at the sight of him.

“Cordy,” he said with a quick jerk of his head. “I could use a place to stay.”

She hesitated, standing there in the doorway, the night’s heat wrapping itself around her. Max needed a shower—she could smell the road on him: unwashed clothes and gasoline spilled on his shoes from the last time he’d filled up, the remnants of coffee and cigarettes on his breath. A rush of memories came at her so hard she had to wrap her hand around the door handle to keep from stepping backward. That was where she should be. On the road. Free. Where no one judged and no one questioned and no one ever thought about tomorrow.

“I could use a ride,” she replied.

B
ean was grateful for the instinct that had told her to keep a couple of good outfits back from the consignment shop, even if it meant that many more hours of Story Time in the children’s room to pay off her debts. She had something important to do that day and she wasn’t doing it without the armor of good clothes.

She dressed carefully, the way she always had in New York, and had done less and less of since she was here, letting the layers of artifice she’d shellacked over herself peel away each day. She straightened her hair until it lay smooth, used every brush in her makeup kit, and finally nodded at herself in the mirror, satisfied.

It was sad how eagerly Edward leaped from his chair in the living room when she knocked on the front door, watching him through the front window. She felt suddenly, magnanimously, sorry for him, how horribly lonely it must have been to have Lila and the kids away for so long, how hard it was to watch youth and your looks drifting into the realm of memory, how he worked to hold himself up to standards he’d adopted long ago—which books to read, which wine to drink, which music to listen to—when he could have thrown it all aside and been who he wanted to be.

“I was hoping you’d come by tonight,” he said, reaching for her. “It’s been too long.” He went to kiss her, but she stepped aside and his mouth only brushed against her hair, thick with perfume.

“I can’t stay, Edward. I just came by to say I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. He went to kiss her again, his breath heavy with wine, and she let him get close, let herself feel his warmth one more time before she stepped away again.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Bean clasped her hands in front of her waist. “I can’t do this anymore, Edward. We have to end it.”

He looked surprised, then shocked. He reached out for her hand, took it in his. “Don’t be silly. We don’t have to end it. We’ll have to be a little more careful, of course . . .” His smile turned into a leer, and her mood soured. The very thought of being with him revolted her now, and the idea of sneaking around behind Lila’s back, sending him home to his children with the taste of her on his lips, made her want to cry.

“No, Edward. It’s over. We should never have done this in the first place. God, I think about Lila and I just . . .” She thought of the picture of Lila on the refrigerator and felt sick and angry. She turned away, looking at the blankness of the wall behind the door.

“I don’t want to talk about Lila.”

“You don’t want to talk about her?” Bean nearly shouted, turning back to him. She paused, composed herself. “We have to talk about her. You are married to her. And she loves you. I can’t imagine why, but she does. And you should be on your knees every night thanking God that she puts up with you, that you have anyone who loves you enough to promise to put up with your bullshit ’til death do you part. We should all be so lucky.”

Edward was wide-eyed and speechless. Bean’s palms were sweating, and she could feel herself breathing as though she’d run a lap.

“Goodbye, Edward,” she said, and turned on her (couture) heels and walked out the door, feeling like, for maybe the first time in her life, she’d done something completely right.

W
hile Cordy had packed her bags, Max had showered and eaten approximately half of the contents of the refrigerator, and then they had left, Cordy behind the wheel, her belly brushing its fake fur cover.

They spent the night in an empty, anonymous house, Cordy sleeping on a racked-out couch that pressed its frame urgently into her back. When she awoke coffee-shop early, she wandered the house, no different from a hundred others she’d slept in before. At some point it would have been inherited upon the death of a parent, and taken over by some slacker with only the mildest of intentions to update the tired décor. But then the furniture began to swell with the bodies of friends just passing through, and the refrigerator filled with beer instead of food, and the screened porch was speckled with the tiny ends of hand-rolled cigarettes, and it became a way station instead of a home, and it just wasn’t worth fighting anymore. And though Cordy had certainly been grateful for houses like this time and time again, they always left her feeling bleak and a little empty, as though she were walking away from a mewling stray kitten.