Wish (2 page)

“D
ad?” Olivia called into the downstairs hallway, kicking the front door shut. A pane of decorative glass shuddered behind the layers of cardboard her father had taped to one side. The house, a four-story Victorian with canary yellow shingles and lopsided periwinkle shutters, was in various stages of disrepair. Olivia was having a hard time remembering that nothing actually did what it was supposed to do: doors didn’t close, windows didn’t open, and—

“What the hell?” Olivia swore as one boot dropped straight through a torn-up two-by-four, catching around her ankle and tossing her sideways into the wall.

Apparently, floors weren’t floors.

After extracting herself from the subfloor, she dropped her bag in a heap by the stairs and started back toward the kitchen. The commute home from school had been almost more exhausting than the rest of the day combined. She’d had to switch buses and had ended up traveling ten blocks in the
wrong direction, ultimately deciding to get off and walk back through the Mission.

“Hey, O,” Mac Larsen called as Olivia stepped into the kitchen, turning down the volume on the black-and-white TV balanced precariously over the sink. He was kneeling on the counter, elbow-deep in a ceiling light fixture. A wiry man of average height, Mac was always crunching his knotted limbs into tight, awkward spaces, to get a better look at a leak or a plug.

“Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves?” Olivia craned her neck to see her father’s hands, twisting free a broken bulb.

“Probably,” he grumbled. “How was school?”

Olivia opened the stainless-steel refrigerator, the only new appliance her father had insisted on buying immediately, her eyes scanning rows of containers of half-eaten takeout, two bottles of ketchup, and a lonely onion.

“Fine,” Olivia answered, unfolding some leftover Chinese and picking around with her fingers. “What happened to the floor?”

Her father wiped handfuls of dust on his pants, faded jeans he’d had since college, and motioned for her to pass the lo mein. “What floor?”

Olivia handed over the greasy container. “The floor that used to be in the hallway,” she said, as he settled on the countertop.

“Had to get in there to look at some pipes,” Mac explained through a mouthful of cold noodles.

Olivia grabbed a plastic bottle of water from an opened twelve-pack on the sawdust-covered counter, starting back out into the hallway to her room.

“Mom’s gotta stay late at work,” he called after her.

Olivia stopped short in the hall. “Again?” she asked, without turning around.

Her father nodded and hopped down from his perch. “Looks like we’re on our own for dinner.”

“Delivery?” Olivia guessed, slouching back against the molding door frame and feeling it sway dangerously under her weight.

“What do you feel like?”

Olivia shrugged as her father squeezed behind her to get to the fridge. “You know,” he said, “that’s one thing about this city I might be able to get used to. Anything you want to eat, you got it. Chinese, Italian, Indian, sushi—”

“You hate sushi,” Olivia interrupted.

“So what?” her father continued. “I can still get it at midnight. Can’t get a piece of toast at midnight back home.”

“That’s true.” Olivia nodded, trying for chipper and starting back into the hall toward her room.

Her dad had always tried to make it better, no matter what “it” was. When Olivia was six and sprained her ankle jumping off dunes at their beach house on Martha’s Vineyard, Mac decorated her crutches with iridescent streamers. When their mother, Bridget, was on a case in North Carolina for three weeks, Mac had given the girls leftover cans of house paint, setting them loose in their rooms and, more important, defending their artistic choices (sky blue for Olivia, a Pollock-inspired smattering for Violet) when Bridget returned.

One of the most infuriating parts about Violet being gone was that there wasn’t a thing Mac could do to fix it.

“Hey,” Mac called again. “School. Was it terrible?” He
leaned back against the sink and was gripping the edges of the speckled linoleum countertop with his rough, calloused hands. It was obvious he was trying to lounge, or at least approximate the posture of somebody engaged in casual conversation. But his face was strained and his voice sounded like he’d been swallowing shards of glass.

“Not terrible,” she said, forcing softness.

“Make any friends?” he asked.

Olivia’s stomach tightened. Of course she hadn’t made any friends. She’d gone through her whole life with a built-in social ambassador. Violet had always been a chameleon, able to be anyone at any time, if it meant easy conversation and a fast friend. Olivia thought of herself more like a gecko. Or a newt.

She opened her mouth to speak but stopped when she looked closer into her father’s bloodshot eyes, hollow and heavy at the edges. His once-red hair seemed to be attacking itself, and the scruff on his chin was tinged with more gray than before.

He hadn’t signed up for this, either.

It had been her mom’s idea to pick up and leave Willis in the middle of the school year. Olivia had thought it was a bit of a coincidence that her mother had randomly been offered a top position at a prestigious firm in San Francisco, the same San Francisco where she happened to have access to a house that had been in her family for almost a century. Never mind that up until then the house had been referred to only as “that deathtrap Great-aunt Peggy left us”—all of a sudden, everything was falling into place. Bridget had a new job, Olivia had a new school, and Mac, an out-of-work contractor, had a new project.

A project that, by the looks of things so far, was quickly turning into a thousand little projects, none of which seemed to be approaching any form of completion.

“A couple,” Olivia lied. “Everybody’s really nice. And the building’s cool. Really old, with lots of big windows.”

“Yeah?” Her dad had turned to face the sink and was already fidgeting with a stubborn faucet. She could keep talking, if she wanted to, but she knew she’d said enough. He’d gotten what he needed. She’d communicated. She was functioning.

All was well in familyland.

She mumbled something about homework to the back of her father’s head, and left him to fix the things he still could.

Olivia collapsed onto her bed after a quick and quiet meal of Indian takeout with Mac, her body sinking into the lavender comforter she’d brought from home. She closed her eyes and inhaled the thick, downy fabric, which still reminded her of Itsy and Bitsy, the twin calico kittens the girls had adopted when they were six. They’d only been allowed to keep the cats for a few months, before Bridget had started breaking out in head-to-toe hives and discovered she was allergic.

Olivia remembered squeezing Violet’s hand as they walked up the long driveway back to the MSPCA, tears streaming from Violet’s chin and careening onto the gravel. Olivia promised her sister that one day they’d move into a house of their own and have twenty cats and eat nothing but Oreo sundaes and watch all the TV they wanted. This had worked, and Violet had stopped crying, until they got home and she realized
that their blankets still smelled like the kittens, who, after much begging, had been allowed to sleep in the girls’ room.

Olivia’s eyes were closed when a crisp, hair-tickling breeze blew in from the open window, rattling the doors in the room on their loosening hinges. She sat up and saw that one door was slowly creaking open—the narrow, knotted door at the back of her room.

Connected to Olivia’s bedroom and facing an overgrown garden at the back of the house was a tiny corner room with a low, garret-style roof. A little bit smaller than Olivia’s room, it had two arched bay windows with a cushioned love seat between them. When Olivia had announced she wouldn’t be taking this room, but the more ordinary, larger, street-noisy room beside it, her parents hadn’t argued. Nobody said anything, but they all knew.

The smaller room was the one Violet would have wanted.

And when the moving trucks arrived and all that was left to unload were several unmarked boxes, nobody said anything then, either. But somehow the boxes—sealed after a silent afternoon spent stowing Violet’s things—had ended up in that room, behind two doors that would always stay closed.

Olivia slowly rose to her feet and walked over to the door in the corner. She reached out and held the cold brass knob, lingering for a moment.

It was almost as if she could feel Violet, waiting for her on the other side.

A chill spiked the hairs on the back of her neck and she snapped the door swiftly shut.

The gauzy white curtain ballooned again and Olivia moved to the window. As she tugged it open even wider, sharp city
sounds came flooding in—a squealing car alarm, the steady whoosh of wet traffic, boisterous after-dinner voices—as if she’d unmuted a movie she hadn’t known she was watching.

Before she knew what she was doing or why, Olivia had maneuvered her narrow limbs through the window and onto the rickety little balcony, slick from an evening drizzle. She carefully pulled herself to her feet and looked down. From four stories up, the city felt formal and strange.

Hugging her sweater close, she used a sleeve to mop a puddle from one side of the railing and settled herself down, looking up toward the sky.

Back at home, after their parents had gone to sleep, she and Violet would climb out of Olivia’s bedroom window, swinging up and over an angled eave and leaning flat against the white cedar roof. The girls would whisper whatever new gossip they had to share, which usually meant Violet did most of the whispering. Gazing up at the clear night sky, Olivia would redraw constellations with her finger, and Violet would hold her breath, searching for shooting stars to wish on. It was the kind of quiet that was almost scary, like they were the only two people left on the entire planet.

On her new balcony, Olivia tried to block out the rhythm of cars and snippets of conversation floating up from street level. Yellow sidewalk lanterns blurred in her vision as she made out the shadows of low town houses stretching back toward the horizon. The pointed rooftops blended together against a blue-black blanket of sky, a layer of dark fog and heavy clouds obscuring any stars that might have been hiding behind them.

Olivia wanted to feel disappointed. She actually
tried
to miss home. But really, she didn’t.

She couldn’t.

It was around February when Mac and Bridget sat Olivia down at the dining room table and told her she wouldn’t be going back to Willis High after spring break. Olivia remembered staring through a square, crystal vase at the shape of her father’s knuckles, thick and distorted as they rapped against the faded oak. Predictably, Bridget did most of the talking, her voice careful and composed, as if she were bracing herself for outrage or, at the very least, impassioned dissent.

Olivia couldn’t remember if she’d actually said anything at all. Probably a question or two about logistics—had they already booked a flight? When would they be leaving?—but any words she’d spoken would have been muttered in the cold, empty voice of somebody who didn’t have enough left in her to care.

That night, she lay awake in her old canopied bed, trying to convince herself to feel
something.
She’d done the same thing after Violet’s funeral—the whole afternoon she’d moved from room to room in their house like a robot, her features frozen, her body aching and hollow. She hadn’t cried once, and, staring at her reflection in the oval-shaped mirror hanging in the downstairs hallway, she’d wondered if forcing herself to conjure up specific details about her sister would remind her body how to feel again.

She remembered the way Violet’s nose twitched and wrinkled at the bridge when she was confused. The way her laugh, her real laugh, reserved for when something was truly, actually funny, caught in the back of her throat, and sounded a little like snoring.

But still, no tears.

And again, when Olivia learned she’d be leaving her house, her school, all of her friends at once, she knew the appropriate reaction would have involved some kind of resistance. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t access anything inside of her that resembled a nostalgic twinge.

Since Violet’s death, the house had felt too big and silent, anyway. And at school, she wasn’t sure what was worse—being the new girl, or being the girl who looked exactly like the other girl who’d died over the summer, the girl who loved everyone and whom everybody loved.

The girl who was so much fun.

Olivia had packed all of her things a week early, living out of one suitcase and sleeping on spare sheets. As far as she was concerned, she’d already left. No place would ever be home again, no matter where it was or how much of her own stuff she had around her.

And now, looking up at the foggy sky, she
tried
to feel sad that she couldn’t see any stars. She
wanted
to want something that reminded her of Violet. She
wished
she could feel something, anything, standing in the darkness, alone.

But all she felt was cold.

Olivia shivered, crawled back inside the window, and drew the curtains tightly shut.

H
er eyes still blurry with sleep, Olivia fumbled her way to the kitchen early Friday morning, feeling automatically for the pot of coffee her father always brewed before going out for the paper—i.e., to sneak an illicit donut and cigarette. Usually, Olivia wished he would give these indulgences a rest, but secretly she loved that her dad was consistently less undercover than he thought, always returning with telltale crumbs on his collar, or the subtle musk of stale smoke in his hair.

Olivia tipped the solid metal urn over the lip of her favorite Red Sox mug, watching with muted frustration as the last lukewarm drops of grainy liquid sputtered out. Olivia had only recently inherited her parents’ caffeine addiction, and whether it was out of conscious resolve or absentminded oversight, Mac had yet to adjust his morning measurements accordingly.

Too foggy-brained to fathom brewing another pot, Olivia filled the teakettle with water instead. Violet had detested Olivia’s growing coffee habit, insisting that green tea was a healthier
alternative. Olivia thought green tea tasted like gunmetal, but had saved the economy-size box Violet had ordered online from some healthy-living website, just in case.

Olivia leaned against the sink, waiting for the water to boil and staring vacantly at the sloping kitchen table in the center of the room. The house had been partially furnished when the Larsens moved in, with a few worn, antique pieces covered with drop cloths and wedged awkwardly under stairwells. Mac claimed he would refurbish them all, explaining how easy it would be to polish here, reupholster there. But Bridget had insisted that Mac haul just about everything to the Salvation Army, in order to make room for the new dining set and leather sofa she’d picked out from a Crate and Barrel catalogue on the plane.

The kitchen table, with one floppy leaf and a huge, branch-like crack twisting across its middle, was the one piece Mac had managed to hold on to, most likely due to the fact that the only time Bridget spent anywhere near the kitchen was early in the morning, before she was awake enough to complain.

The kettle squealed and Olivia poured herself a cup of tea before shuffling upstairs to get ready for school. From the back room on the second floor, envisioned as a full-service gym but now doubling as a storage space/living area, Olivia heard the hushed dialogue of the television and the slow, methodic thumping of her mother on the treadmill.

A track star in high school and college, with yearbooks and scrapbooks to prove it, Bridget spent an hour every day, no matter the day, no matter the hour, chugging on the treadmill and watching the trashy daytime soaps she had TiVo’d the afternoon before.

“Olivia, is that you?” Bridget’s sturdy voice called out, midstride.

Olivia stalled on the landing, bringing the mug close to her nose and inhaling a wet cloud of herbal steam. She closed her eyes for a moment and leaned back against the wobbly banister before turning and making her way back down the hall.

Bridget’s routinely frosted dark blond hair was pulled up in a tight, high ponytail, her prominent cheekbones dotted with little patches of red—the only sign that she was working at all. Her slender arms pumped almost imperceptibly at her sides, her gaze fixed on the small TV nestled precariously in the middle of an empty bookshelf.

“Morning,” Olivia said quietly, resting the angle of her hip on the doorjamb and tilting her head toward the set, wondering which disgruntled housewife or conniving stepfather was holding court today. She could never understand how her mother, who spent thirteen hours a day deposing white-collar witnesses and decoding multimillion-dollar contracts, could lose herself so thoroughly in the melodrama of overacted soaps.

“Good morning,” Bridget huffed, wiping her forehead with the back of one slim wrist. “I thought we might go shopping later.”

Olivia turned her head from the television back to the treadmill, her eyes wide with scrambled alarm. “What?” she asked, trying to remember the last time her mother had proposed that they do anything together. “I mean, why?”

Bridget jabbed at the electronic buttons on the dash, lowering the incline and slowing her pace to a brisk walk. “There’s an event Saturday night,” she said, gripping the handles, her manicured fingernails wrapping delicately around the shiny
metal bars. “A cocktail party at the office, to welcome me—all of us—into town.”

“Tomorrow?” Olivia asked, as if she might already have plans. It seemed the only possible way out.

Bridget nodded. “All of my nice things are still in boxes.” She sighed. “And it’s been a while since we’ve shopped for you. What do you think?”

Olivia tucked one bare foot back behind the other, her eyes blurring over the hypnotically cycling mechanical belt. It hadn’t been a
while.
It had been exactly seven months, two weeks, and three days.

The only thing Violet and their mother had ever agreed on had been the overwhelming satisfaction achieved by touching things in fancy stores, trying them on, wrapping them up, and bringing them home. Although it was not a pastime Olivia had much interest in, she often tagged along, if only to watch Violet veto Bridget’s more conservative selections. It was the one occasion on which Bridget deferred to her eccentric daughter’s expertise, and Olivia loved to see her mother, for once, in the position of asking for help.

Now the idea of the two of them wandering aimlessly in and out of boutiques, not only strangers in a new city but doubly lost without the guidance of their shopping guru, was enough to make Olivia’s inner ears ache.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t really feel like going to a party.”

Bridget’s light eyes were sharp and focused as she slowed to a stop and stepped off the machine. “Well, you don’t have to come,” she spoke evenly. “But it might be fun.”

Olivia shifted her weight from one bare foot to the other,
every cell in her body begging to be released and allowed to run back upstairs to her room, where nobody asked her to do things like shop or be polite.

“Phoebe Greer will be there with her son,” Bridget continued. “Miles, I think. I asked her to arrange for him to show you around yesterday. Did he find you?”

“Yeah,” Olivia managed. “He found me.”

“Good,” Bridget confirmed. “Then you’ll have somebody to talk to at the party.” She laid a firm hand on Olivia’s shoulder as she squeezed past her into the narrow hall. “But,” she said, with a tight, awkward smile, “only if you feel up to it.”

Just about the last thing Olivia felt up to doing was getting dressed up and standing awkwardly with plastic cups and tiny plates of hors d’oeuvres and not enough hands to eat them. But she knew that smile. And she knew where arguing would get her. This was her mother’s game, and Olivia’s only option was to play along.

“Fine,” she grumbled. “But I don’t need to go shopping. I’m sure I can find something in my closet to wear.”

Bridget nodded and gave Olivia’s shoulder a tiny squeeze. “It’s up to you.” She shrugged, smiling coolly and inching past her daughter toward the stairs.

That afternoon, Olivia stood with her hands on her hips, staring vacantly into the open closet.

Her second day at Golden Gate had been interminably long and deafeningly quiet, and she’d somehow managed to get by without uttering more than forty-eight words. She’d gotten to each of her classes early, introduced herself to the
teacher (
Olivia Larsen, I’m new here; nice to meet you
= 9 words x 5 classes = 45 words), said, “Excuse me,” when she’d stepped on somebody’s toe, rushing on her way to AP Calculus (two words), muttered a curt and hurried, “Hey,” when she’d spotted Miles in the courtyard (one word), and smiled tightly when she’d clumsily bumped into the mysterious, green-eyed skater boy in the hall (zero words).

She’d been slowly unpacking since she got off the bus, starting with the boxes full of her favorite books and collection of tattered journals. But the new bookshelves her father was supposedly building were still in pieces in his shop in the basement, and she hadn’t felt much like writing in her journal lately. She’d moved on to the unopened boxes of clothing, stuffing sweaters into the bottom drawers of the clean, white armoire her mother had picked out at Pottery Barn. The last thing she wanted to think about was finding a dress for the stupid cocktail event tomorrow night, mostly because she didn’t want to go, but also because her collection of formal wear, recently unfolded and draped on a few sad wire hangers in the closet, was officially pathetic.

There was the thick, strapless gown she’d worn to the sophomore semiformal, which had made her feel glamorous at the time, but weighed about two hundred pounds and was way too fancy for the office. There were a few flowery cotton sundresses, sleeveless and not at all appropriate for any place other than the beach. And of course the mauve taffeta number she’d worn as a junior bridesmaid in her cousin Lorelei’s wedding, with puffy sleeves and a high, cinched waist that had made her feel like an Oompa-Loompa on the one occasion she was forced to wear it.

Olivia groaned and fell back onto her bed, covering her face with a pillow.

Shopping had been Violet’s number one extracurricular. When Olivia and her mother had gone through Violet’s things, even they had been astonished to discover the amount of clothing she’d managed to amass over the years. She hadn’t been a spree-shopper, coming home weighted down with bags from Saks or Nordstrom. It was all done piecemeal—a soft cotton tunic from that little boutique in Wellesley Center; a pair of enormous sunglasses from a flea market in Harvard Square; the vintage Pucci dress she’d found in a Somerville consignment shop and was planning on wearing to the junior prom…

It was smooth satin, almost liquid to the touch, and swirled with bright concentric circles. It had originally been astronomically expensive, but had been marked down to just within her budget because of an enormous, side-baring tear at the zipper.

Violet didn’t care. She’d had to have it, claiming that a seamstress would be able to fix it, no problem. But she’d never gotten the chance to find one.

Olivia sat up on her bed, her feet landing heavily on the carpet.

The dress.

Slowly, she stood and walked across the room to the door in the corner. Before she had time to change her mind, she took the knob in her hand and turned it, pulling the creaky door open and stepping inside.

The room was flooded with hazy sunlight and stale, trapped air. There was no furniture, only the windows, the built-in
love seat, and a sad row of boxes against the far wall. Olivia held her breath and walked purposefully toward the boxes. She knelt beside them, running her hands along the masking tape.

Carefully, afraid of making a sound, Olivia pulled back the cardboard flaps. Her nostrils immediately tingled at the familiar scent, a mix of sea salt and strawberry-kiwi shampoo.

She plunged her hands into the first box, digging around pairs of cowboy boots and metallic ballet flats. The second box was accessories, mostly chunky charm necklaces and printed scarves. It was in the third box that she found the dress, folded neatly near the top.

She let her fingers graze the soft, cool satin, the dizzying print starting to blur behind her clouding eyes. Her fingers caught in the hanging threads by the zipper, poking through the gaping hole down the side. All she needed now was a seamstress.

Crawling to her feet, she brought the dress out in front of her, held the fabric against her skin.

Of course.

Violet had had the answer all along.