The Never Never Sisters (27 page)

DAVE HAD LEFT
an apology note on the floor outside the closed bedroom door. I was sure he’d never
done that before—left an apology note after a fight—but it felt like the fiftieth
time. Like we had this dynamic down pat.

I’m so sorry,
it said.
I wanted things to be different
.
Fire drill at work but home by dinner
. I was pretty sure that by “things” he meant “last night,” but perhaps he’d meant
more. It could easily mean between us—we were fighting, we were apologizing, we were
veering off track.

Bandito was probably the only living creature I hadn’t alienated. Maybe my dad too,
which was more a sign of apathy than anything else.

My phone buzzed for the sixth time that morning. My mom had apparently found her voice.
As soon as I picked up, she launched in, her tone rat-a-tat and accusatory: “We need
to talk about yesterday.”

“Listen,” I said.

She kept going. I held the receiver away from my head. A bit louder, I said, “Listen.”

She stopped.

“I’m sorry I exploded at you and Binnie and for—” She waited. “I read your journals.
From twenty years ago—”

“I know which ones.” Her voice was neutral.

“It was a violation and I’m sorry. But I don’t want to—I can’t—talk now. After I cool
down, okay?” Silence. “Okay?”

I heard her suck in her breath. “Okay,” she responded. And I turned off my phone and
went to the office.

Selena Richards might have been the tallest person I’d ever seen, except for her girlfriend,
Bianca, who was even taller. I welcomed their kneecaps and pointed them to their seats,
feeling like the lollipop guild greeters for Dorothy. I tried not to be intimidated
as they folded themselves into chairs.

“Candy?” I pushed the jar closer to them.

“No, thanks,” Bianca said in a crisp British accent, and Selena shook her white-blond
hair and laughed that tinkly giggle she’d used on the phone. Of course they didn’t
eat candy. They were shiny gazelle creatures who subsisted on wheatgrass and egg whites.
Their hands cradled, Bianca’s café au lait skin entwined with Selena’s peach, draped
together like some expensive fabric.

This was when I should ask what they wanted.

They would be amenable. They had the ideal body language for clients—focused and open,
both encouraged and encouraging.

“How did you guys meet?” I popped a Hershey’s Kiss in my mouth. It was a punt of a
question, small talk.

Selena looked surprised and relieved. “At a friend’s party. About two years ago.”
They smiled with the memory and narrated it together, interrupting each other and
telling their own versions in a way I knew they’d done before. I could picture it:
two sequoias seeing clear to each other above a bumpy terrain of indistinguishable
scrub brush.
Your hair was spun from fairy dust and the finest Chinese silk! Oh my gosh, oh my
gosh, mine too!

I half listened, but I had skipped forward in my head to that question, my cornerstone:
What do you want?

It was a bid for an impossible conclusion. If someone had asked me the same question
in that moment, I would have stalled for a bit and tried to come up with something
more graceful than the truth:

I wanted to eat that entire jar of candy and not get a cavity. I wanted the summer
to be over and for Lucy to come back to Manhattan. I sort of wanted a dog like Bandito,
for goddamn scientists to find a cure for addiction—what was taking them so long if
it was all just an issue of chemistry?—and the ability to communicate with my mother
as badly as I wanted a fifty-year break from her. I wanted Bianca and Selena to be
happy, and I wanted to want to gaze at Dave the way they did at each other. I wanted
to be an only child again. I wanted back my childhood with Sloane.

It wasn’t simple, what I wanted. My answer wouldn’t have been anything as concrete
as what I demanded from the couples in my office.

About twenty minutes after Selena and Bianca glided out the door, my buzzer sounded.
I assumed they’d forgotten something and didn’t even look at the monitor before pressing
the button to let them back in. Giovanni opened the door instead.

“I tried to call.” He was slightly out of breath. “But you didn’t pick up.”

“My phone’s off. Why aren’t you flying home?”

“Nice office.” He glanced around. “Hey! You made a rainbow out of your bookcase. Love
it.”

“Thanks.”

“I told Sloane that I was going out to get Ziploc bags for the flight—which was an
excuse—but I really do need some. Is there a place around here I can get them?” He
exhaled and said in a rush, “I’m so glad I caught you.”

“She doesn’t know you’re here?”

“I know. I feel awful. She’s so sad, though. And you are too, right? I had to do something.”

“Sad? The vibe I got was mad.”

“No. Sad.” He collapsed on the couple’s couch, fanning himself. “Sorry. Hot. I assume
she never told you the real reason why she came to New York this summer?”

“No.” I sat down right next to him, across from my usual space.

“From the beginning, I asked her about you guys—her family. She always said the same
thing, that there wasn’t a relationship, there would never be one. She claimed to
have a very strict belief that people should be able to choose their family, the same
way they could their friends.”

“Makes sense.” It did, right about now, although I couldn’t think of any friends close
enough to be my family either, not even Lucy. The fact was, I’d confided in Sloane
more than almost anyone.

“It’s a bullshit theory.”

“Oh.”

“I said I understood, but come on, if she really believed it, would she be here? I
humored her at the time, because I liked her. A lot. I mean how could I not?”

I nodded as though anyone in his right mind would be defenseless in the face of Sloane’s
overwhelming charisma.

“But I secretly thought she was exaggerating and eventually I’d meet you guys and
you wouldn’t be as . . . alien as she made you all sound. Which, as it turns out,
you aren’t.”

“Thanks.”

“When I hadn’t met anyone from her family after we’d been together for a year, I started
to believe her. My family’s very embracing, a little too much, actually. She’s had
no choice but to get trapped in its fold, and I assumed my family would be
our
family and that would be enough. But then, when we got engaged, I threw her a surprise
party after, with some of her close friends and my family waiting for us at our apartment,
and everyone was so happy. And it was a perfect night. The most beautiful night until—”

“Until what?”

“When I woke up in the middle of the night and found her crying in the living room
because she didn’t have anyone to call about the engagement. I mean, she did—she has
friends, and some of the folks from her recovery support have been in her life forever,
but not having any family to call apparently meant something to her. I was so surprised.
I realized you weren’t out of her life; you were worse than that. You were one big
pile of unresolved. All the time she was pretending not to care, she was feeling awful
about it. And she kept talking about
you
. You were the one she wanted to see. You were the one she’d thrown away.”

“Her whole life, she’s basically acted like I don’t exist. Why did she vanish?”

“She was sixteen, Paige. Sixteen and messed up. I don’t think she ever meant to vanish
from your life. She says she tried to reach out to you a few times, right after she
left. When she was at that Gentle Breezes place and then, later, after she moved to
California. And you know Sloane—she’s too shy to keep trying if she feels rejected.
I’m not saying it’s a strength of hers, but . . .”

“She’s not shy. She’s mortar-tough.”

“Tough and shy aren’t opposites.”

Had there been something? I felt a fuzzy recollection of her reaching out—a postcard
maybe, or voice mail, hardly a deluge—and ignoring it, chalking it up to a therapy
assignment. It was possible; I’d certainly clung to my narrative of Sloane as a dark,
shadowy figure whom we were all better off without. I’d given myself permission to
clear her from my memory.

And you know Sloane
. My immediate reaction had been to shake my head. I did not know Sloane. All I knew
was that she ruined whatever she touched, and she was the one who’d been pushing me
forward down this horrible path with Dave.

But . . .

I played the last two weeks in my mind like a fast-forwarded tape—her stringy appearance
at the first breakfast; her general availability; taking me to the restaurants she
wanted to try; generally having my back; right up to my harsh words on the boat.

I
had
gotten to know her this summer: she was rough around the edges and vulnerable and
messed up, but she wasn’t intent on destruction. She was trying to be involved in
my life. If I had opened up to her about an interest in skeet shooting, rather than
my suspicions about Dave, perhaps we’d be happily pummeling shots into clay pigeons
right now.

“I’m not trying to force things with you two,” Giovanni continued, “but our flight
is later on today, and I was wondering if you had any interest in just saying . . .
good-bye. Leaving on a better note.”

I had already grabbed my bag. “Where is she?”

“Crapola,” he said as our cab pulled up to the Lincoln, which looked run-down even
in the early evening’s golden light. “After all that, I forgot the Ziploc bags.” He
checked his watch. “You go in. She should be in the lobby with the bags.”

As soon as I recovered from the lobby’s overwhelming smell of stale hot dogs, I saw
Sloane gesturing to someone behind a double-glass booth. Eventually the concierge
nodded and slid something through the partition. Sloane took it and shoved it in the
back pocket of her jeans. Her relief was evident when she turned around and saw me,
and then she gave me a look that asked,
How?

“Giovanni,” I said. “He’s out getting the right size Ziplocs.”

She sighed. “The man is obsessed with those.” She swept her arm toward the other side
of the room where two men in plaid shirts sat on a row of mismatched chairs. Their
heads were frozen in an upward tilt, watching NY1 News. “I invite you into our sitting
area. Lovely, right?”

We both perched on the edge of our chairs. “This place,” I said. “I feel so bad you
came here.”

“It was fine.”

“Where’s Bandito?”

She put her hand to her lips, but it was too late. At the sound of his name, one of
the bags—the black one on top with mesh sides—moved. “No dogs allowed,” Sloane mouthed.

“Sorry,” I mouthed back. “You don’t have to go back, you know.”

“It’s time,” she said. “But it’s not good-bye. I’ll come and visit you if you want.”

“Or I could visit you.”

“That’d be great. We’d love to have you guys.”

“Both of us?”

“I really wasn’t trying to break you up or anything.”

“I know.”