Wish You Were Here (29 page)

“Thank you, and ow. Yeah, a little blonde with boobs. There's nothing more humiliating than being dumped for a cliché. Of course the kids don't know. They think it's all my fault.”

“I'm sure they don't.”

“Believe me, they do. Dad's the fun one, Mom's the bitch. That's how it works.”

He thought of himself and Lise, and his mother and father, and couldn't deny it.

“That's all right,” she said, but then didn't explain why. “Let's go see how your fire's doing.”

Later she told him, laughing, that she had come to the conclusion
that she was too chicken to kill herself long before she ever met Jeff. And later still, sobered, deciding a final time to go to bed, she said she'd been through times like this before and lived. She waved everything off as if it were an unpleasant smell, nothing serious.

He hugged her and sent her upstairs, then banked the fire alone, breaking apart the brittle, glowing logs with the poker, unsure why he'd doubted her power. She was used to trouble, was attracted to it the same way he chased after success. She was just better at getting what she wanted. But this didn't relieve him of the feeling that he had somehow let her down, had not been a good brother to her.

It was late, and his eyes felt bathed in vinegar, dusted with salt. The light of the fire didn't reach the stairs. He walked like Frankenstein in the dark, his arms out to fend off the invisible, and then when he found the door, he had to crawl up, his hands feeling each carpeted step ahead of him.

The kids were asleep, the watery reflection of a flashlight coming from the cracked bathroom door. Ella was curled tight, Sam flat on his back. He tucked the flap of Justin's bag over the stuffed Tigger in his arms.

He couldn't see Lise, just a shape under the covers, a shadow on the pillow. It was past two, and he didn't want her to know how late they'd talked. By the foot of their bed, he slowly emptied his pockets, placing each item quietly on the low wardrobe's hard top, a thief in reverse. Among the clinking change was the Ballantine ball mark, its thin edge a dull razor. He could barely see the three intertwined circles in the dark, but the cosmic thought came to him that they were like the three of them, Meg and himself and his mother, joined forever.

His father was separate from them, lost.

Only for now, he thought, and then was afraid he was just trying to comfort himself. He would live the rest of his life without him. Thirty, forty years. There would be days, weeks, when he wouldn't think of him, not even fleetingly, and this seemed wrong.

Meg wasn't done in the bathroom, so he stood there waiting in the dark, the mirror giving back his shirt, his arms at his sides. The roof tapped, and he hoped it wouldn't rain tomorrow. He wanted to shoot the Putt-Putt, and the Gas-n-Go, its short aisles lit by jittery fluorescents. He could use the Nikon, that wouldn't be cheating.

The door opened, letting out a dim wedge of light that fell over the children.

“All yours,” Meg said. “I left you the flashlight.”

“Thanks,” he said.

He was quick, trying not to run the water too much, sitting down so he could pee quietly. When he came out, Meg was already in bed. He turned the light off and set it on the cedar chest, stripped to his boxers and got in, the sheets producing goose bumps, a rush across his front. He needed to warm up before he pressed against Lise, and lay there rigid as a mummy, eyes shut.

He thought of his father lying like this in Homewood Cemetery under the ground and the stones and the dark, starred sky. He thought of Tracy Ann Caler's family, awake, waiting, any second, for the phone to ring. He wondered if there was a way he could help search for her.

“Sweet dreams,” Meg said from the dark, as she had when they were kids.

Then, it had been offered literally, an invitation to another, better world at the end of the day. Now it seemed just an affectionate habit that had stuck, little protection against the lives that went on inside of them, real or imagined. And yet, then and now, he thought, she was the one who wished it first, for him, and truly meant it. His sister.

“Sweet dreams,” he said.

What she had done to earn this was a mystery. Ella didn't recognize anyone at the party, or the room she was in, the long powder-blue couch, and she seemed to be drinking champagne, her hair frosted blond, stiff bangs hanging in her eyes. Her teeth were perfect, her braces gone. Laughter, music, a brick wall and a window behind her and the guy in the black suit with red socks talking. There were so many people dancing she couldn't hear what anyone was saying, and then Sarah was there, sitting down right beside her, so close she could see the sparkle eye shadow they'd tried the other day, and Ella wanted to say, Let's get out of here, this is crazy, wanted to stop
Sarah because she could feel Sarah was going to lean in and kiss her, wanted to kiss her, had wanted to kiss her for so long, and now it was almost happening and Ella didn't know what to do. It would happen, it had to, she just had to wait for it. It didn't make sense, she couldn't figure out why Sarah was in love with her, but she was happy anyway. It was exciting, and frightening. Here it was, Sarah was leaning in, her face inches from hers, her eyes closing, her eye shadow bright. Ella knew she would let Sarah kiss her—had known all along, couldn't stop—and then anything could happen.

Emily woke to Rufus yipping, voices and a red light flashing in the folds of the curtains. Her first reaction was that the police were outside taking care of the Lerners' alarm. It took her a confused minute to realize it was the clock on her bureau blinking, telling her urgently, again and again, that it was exactly midnight. Beyond the wall, the dishwasher surged.

“Oh for God's sake,” she said, and kicked free of the covers and took her bathrobe down from the hook. She didn't know what time to reset the clock for, guessed three
A.M
. and turned it to the wall, then hit herself with the door as she opened it.

“Honestly now.”

Rufus trotted along beside her. The TV was on in the middle of
The Third Man,
someone walking up a dark staircase. She clicked it and the VCR off, and the lights by the couch and in the kitchen. The outside light was fine. The dishwasher she let run.

“All right,” she said, and closed her door and hung up her robe and climbed back under the warm covers. In the corner Rufus circled his spot before folding himself down. He sighed once, disgruntled, and then the night was quiet again.

The rain had not abated. The radio said the front had stalled over the Great Lakes; they could expect the same for the next forty-eight hours.

“Well I'm not staying here all day,” Emily said over her eggs.

It was a bold statement, Arlene thought, seeing as she didn't have a car. To her, the idea of hunkering down until the storm blew over was appealing, a chair pulled close to the fire, and hot chocolate, but it was too early to get into it with Emily. She'd been in a snit since discovering their garbage capsized, corncobs and paper plates strewn across the road.

“What are the children going to do?”

“That,” Emily said, “is up to their parents. I'm sure they're quite capable of entertaining themselves.” She tipped her head toward the living room where the boys were playing their Game Boys in their pajamas. No one else was up yet, and it was well past nine.

Emily proposed lunch somewhere, just the two of them. “Somewhere fun. It's so dreary in this house. I have some things I need to do around here, but I want to say I'll be done with them by noontime.”

“What were you thinking of?”

“I don't know. Not Webb's, we're saving Webb's for Friday night.”

“Naturally.”

“You know what I was thinking, and stop me if this sounds a little odd, but I was thinking the Lenhart might be a fun place. I have no idea how the food is—it's probably awful—but I'd like to see the dining room. It's supposed to be completely restored. It always had that view Henry loved so much, with the ferry right there. I'm sure the bridge ruins it, but I'd like to see it again.”

“That sounds fine,” Arlene said.

They were of the same generation, and she couldn't help falling for the same nostalgia. For her, it went even deeper than Henry and the war years, when the big bands played the casino dances. Her grandmother
had stayed at the Lenhart as a little girl. There was an old photograph of her on the long porch there, standing at the top of the stairs, holding her father's hand, the entire picture bleached as if by sunlight.

“I'll call and see if we can reserve a window table,” Emily said. “We can take the ferry over and then go up to the cheese place afterward. I think we're running low on the sharp, and I'd like to take some home.”

“I could use some too,” Arlene admitted.

“It's decided then.”

Emily cleared her place and rinsed her bowl in the sink, fitted it into the empty dishwasher and began wiping down the cutting board—all with a brisk industry, without pause, as if she was in a hurry. She scrubbed the sink, squeezed out the green pad she was using, then rinsed and filled Rufus's water dish.

“Do you need a hand with anything?” Arlene asked.

“No, but thank you for offering. All I need from you is your list.”

“I'm not finished with it yet.”

“Well, take a few minutes and finish it. Whatever I have by lunch-time is what I'm going to go by.”

So that was it, Arlene thought. She should have known nothing was that simple with Emily. So many times, as a teacher, she'd reached a stubborn child by discovering what they loved, distracted them from the hard process of learning with pretty window dressing.

But she wasn't a child, and after Henry, Arlene thought there was very little she had to learn.

“I'll have it for you,” she said.

“I'm not going to nag people about it anymore.”

“Is that a promise?” Arlene said, and then, when Emily gave her a put-upon look, reassured her, “I'll get it done.”

The dream wasn't real, as she'd feared (it had been too easy, too good), and Ella scolded herself for believing it could have been true. She was so stupid, thinking that could ever happen to her, and for wanting it to. Her life wasn't like that.

She expected to change, to wake up and discover she no longer felt the same way—to find she was free of whatever spell had possessed her. But every day it was still there, and stronger, if that was possible, the passing time making her frantic even though there was nothing she could do about it. For the first time she understood what her mother meant by her nerves not being able to take it anymore. Every minute seemed desperate, like she might seriously go insane, break into pieces, scream.

The worst thing about it was knowing how much better of a person Sarah was, and how pathetic she was herself. Ella felt like she was lying all the time, every second they spent together. Sarah would be so creeped out if she knew Ella was watching her sleep—as creeped out as Ella was that she was thinking about another girl.

She wasn't like that, or she'd never been before. She didn't want to be.

But Sarah's face. Her thin eyelids, the delicate tip of her nose. The place where her upper lip flattened and turned lush on its way to the corner. Just her name—Sarah!—so much prettier than her own. Sarah was smart, and funny, and kind. She would probably try to be nice about it, not laugh at her. She would try to understand.

Ella rolled over and faced away from her. There was so much going on inside her head, yet the rest of the world was infuriatingly the same. Her parents and Aunt Margaret were asleep, lumps of dirty clothes at the foot of their beds. The light through the curtains was white and stopped before it reached the ceiling. Rain again. The carpet was like frayed
yarn, a mix of red, white and blue. She couldn't believe anyone would choose something so ugly.

She caught herself gnawing at the corner of a thumbnail, as if struggling with an impossible question, and made herself stop. It was so stupid. Sarah was her cousin, she'd known her since they were little.

She couldn't answer why she was suddenly in love with her. There was no reason, just as there was no reason why in three days she'd turned into a lesbian.

She'd had crushes on boys, her eyes following them in the halls or the cafeteria, their names jumping out of conversations, their favorite shirts becoming hers, but she'd never done anything about them. At the Friday-night dances she hung out with Torie and Kim and Caitlin, the four of them a group. For all their speculation about who liked who, none of them had actually kissed anyone.

She didn't feel this way about any of them, but none of them were pretty like Sarah. She never checked them out, only their clothes.

Maybe this was how it happened, she thought. It wasn't like an adept becoming a sorceress, where you had to practice under a mentor, serve an apprenticeship. You just were. For some reason, she couldn't believe it.

Maybe it was from the way she touched herself in the shower, that secret love of herself spreading out, finding someone more beautiful to practice on. Maybe she was afraid of guys, like Torie making sex sound scary, or Mrs. Greco in health.

She got up, purposely not looking at Sarah, and went into the bathroom. She locked the door behind her, turned on the shower and took off her PJs. She decided not to think. Instead, she watched the clouds of steam billow up, stirred by mysterious currents beneath the ceiling, leaving a slick sheen on the walls. The water warmed one side of her, left the other goose-bumped. Under the spray she scrubbed herself clean, careful where she touched.

“What time did you come to bed?” Lise asked, and she knew exactly how it sounded.