The Almost Sisters

  He had long, sharp ears shaped like katana blades, and I’d frilled his neck and belly with barbs of black fur. He looked less postapocalyptic and more gothic. I set my pencil down, plagiarism bells going off in the back of my mind. He was derivative, but who was I stealing from?

  Then I had it. He looked a lot like a vampiric Batman, the way Kelley Jones had drawn him in “Knightfall.”

  If I was looking for permission to put my Batman back in the closed-story file, instablocking him, my hands weren’t giving it to me. They’d drawn him right into the picture. They had put him with Violet, too, and she seemed pretty pleased to have him. No one had ever accused me of being an optimist, but my hands were saying that Lav’s coup could be a good thing. Were they right?

  I stared down at the town square as if the answer might drive itself around the corner, but all that appeared was a white SUV. A Nissan Pathfinder. It was very new and high-end for a Birchville car, and so spanking clean in the sunrise light that it reminded me of Rachel’s.

  I stood up almost involuntarily, the chair scraping back.

  Holy crap, it was Rachel’s. As it came closer, I could see her blond head behind the wheel. It was like waking to find that the Statue of Liberty had yanked itself out of the Hudson while no one was looking, Weeping Angel style, and come speeding across the country toward me. I blinked and scrubbed my eyes, and when I opened them, the SUV had pulled into our driveway.

  I reached for my robe and yanked it on, both to better hide my Digby bulge and because the town had seen quite enough of me standing in the yard in my yummy sushi pj’s. I jammed my feet into my purple Chucks and hurried down the stairs with the laces untied and trailing. By the time I got out the door, Rachel was standing beside the open hatchback, dragging out a massive piece of luggage.

  “Rachel, what on earth!” I said.

  She let her very expensive suitcase tumble to the ground, bruising the leather.

  “Thank God it’s the right house,” she said. Dark circles ringed her eyes, and her hair was scraped into an untidy pony. She was wearing sweatpants, or whatever exalted name sweatpants that cost two hundred dollars went by. They had crumbs stuck to them, and she was breathing heavily, a fraught, pre-cry kind of breathing. Her chest heaved as if this were a bring-your-own-emergency party and she’d come fully equipped. “Where’s Lavender?”

  “Sleeping. That’s what normal, human people do at this hour of the morning,” I said, but very gently, because I’d never seen Rachel in such a state. I was already coming down the porch stairs toward her, worried but also the smallest bit fascinated. “Rachel, did you drive all night?”

  “Of course I did,” Rachel said. Now she was hauling an even larger piece of luggage out of the back. I stepped over to help her. “I told you I was coming.”

  No, she had told me she would handle it. I’d assumed she meant she’d make reservations and then send me instructions, detailed and precise, in her usual levelheaded way. But I wasn’t going to argue with her, not when she was in such a ruined, un-Rachel-ed state.

  “This is sure a lot of luggage,” I said, overly hearty. I ought to hug her, or pet her frazzled hair, something. In my darkest hours, Rachel enveloped me in strong, medicinal hugs, firm and sure, like I was a tube of sad toothpaste and she was trying to squeeze every bit of sorrow out of me. Now I couldn’t even put a friendly hand down on her shoulder; the very air around her seemed to vibrate with a touch-me-not unhappiness. “Are you sure we need to bring all of this inside?”

  “I don’t want it to get stolen,” Rachel said, slamming the hatchback shut.

  “It won’t get stolen,” I assured her. Rachel had never lived in a small town.

  She grabbed the larger piece and began dragging it toward the house, saying, “You never know.”

  “I pretty much do know,” I told her, but I pulled the handle out and started dragging the smaller bag. It was something I could do that felt like helping her. I followed her up the porch stairs. “We could leave it all in the car—unlocked, even—and it wouldn’t get stolen. Or if it did, three witnesses would be calling the police and telling them exactly who was stealing it, by name, before the thief got halfway up the block.”

  “Tell that to the dead guy in your attic,” she said.

  Touché.

  “You sure did pack a lot,” I said in that same overly hearty voice, opening the front door.

  “I thought Lavender and I might take a road trip. Maybe head down to Disney World. I told Mom and Dad that’s where we were going. We. Like me and Jake were coming down here to get Lavender together. So maybe I should take her? I could stand to see the Happiest Place on Earth,” she said.

  “Oh. Disney sounds nice,” I told her, even though it sounded crazy. I pictured Lavender, alternately texting and sulking her way through It’s a Small World while this fraught version of Rachel wept and wiped her nose into her feral ponytail. Even so? It seemed less crazy than having an unraveling Rachel here, now spinning slowly in the middle of the foyer, looking up the stairs and down the hall and into the living room beyond. “Where is everyone?”

  “In bed,” I said. “Don’t you think you should tell Mom and Keith what’s going on?”

  “God, no, not until I have some kind of plan,” she said, and I was way too secret-pregnant to push her on it. She finished her turn, coming back around to face me, and now she looked almost forlorn. “Where is everything?”

  “Rachel, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “I thought . . .” She plopped down onto her suitcase like Anne of Green Gables abandoned at the train station. “I thought there would be people, and a chalk outline. And tape and dogs. Techs in jumpsuits. Where is everything?” It was rhetorical, and she didn’t give me a pause in which to answer anyway. “What am I doing, Leia? I’m so tired.” Her eyes filled up with tears. “I drove all night to get here. And now look at this place. There’s little birds singing outside. It’s so clean. The whole town is so clean, and in here? I could serve food on that banister. It’s like I came down here on an emergency rescue mission to pull my kid out of Mayberry.”

  “I tried to tell you on the phone,” I said, glad that she was missing the undercurrent. I could feel how deeply the town was disturbed, whether she could or not. Even now, with the world asleep around us, there was an electric buzz of pent-up stress, like a cloud around First Baptist’s steeple. Birchville had taken it in the teeth recently, what with public announcements of adulterous liaisons in the choir room, the subsequent firing of the associate pastor, the revelation of the One True Birch’s illness, and now, worst of all, the bones. The bones trumpeted to us that our recent troubles were inevitable, and maybe even just; there had been something rotten at this town’s sweet and sleepy heart for years and years.

  “Look at that Tiffany lamp. What bad things could happen in a room with that lamp?” Rachel asked, sniffling. To her, an urban outsider, Birchville in a state of greatest frenzy looked as placid as an untroubled lake. “What am I doing here?”

  “Running from Jake?”

  At the mention of his name, she stood, instantly prickly, as remote and closed as a human Fortress of Solitude. But she’d driven overnight to plop herself uninvited down in the middle of my mess. It was as close to permission to jam my nose into hers as I was ever going to get.

  “Rach, just tell me. Is Jake cheating on you?”

  “Ugh, of course not!” she said, affronted.

  “Okay,” I said. I wasn’t perfectly convinced. She hadn’t really known Jake back when he was JJ. She’d thought of him as my creepy little friend, if she thought of him at all. She’d been shocked when Mom told her that the charmer who showed up at our Christmas party was the fat kid who used to practically live in the basement with me.

  “Was he ever, like, your boyfriend?” she’d asked, overly casual, as we were helping Mom clean up post-party. Before I could answer, she was hurrying to add, “Because he asked me out, and of course I wouldn’t date
your ex.”

  “He was never my boyfriend,” I said, because it was true, and also because I could see how badly she wanted me to say it. It came out terse, but Rachel didn’t notice. Her shining smile in response made it clear that she wanted very much not to notice.

  When she went to take the trash out, Mom said quietly, “Leia, if you’re not okay with this, you should tell her.”

  “He never was my boyfriend,” I repeated, although I had felt us start. I had held his body in my body, and I had seen a future.

  “I could tell her,” Mom said, but I could hear reluctance in the offer.

  We both knew from long experience how much it hurt Rachel when Mom backed me in a way that seemed against her. I shook my head. It wasn’t worth it. JJ wasn’t worth it, and anyway, I thought, there was no way she’d get serious about him.

  I never told Rachel about those seven sad, slick minutes in the basement, and I was pretty sure JJ hadn’t either. Not that it mattered now. Surely sex had an expiration date; every human secret must eventually get too old to matter, disintegrating all the way past bones to nothing. But I thought a man who kept that kind of secret from his wife might well keep others.

  “If he’s not cheating . . . what? Is he drinking too much? Addicted to something? Porn or drugs or gambling?” Rachel glanced reflexively up the stairs, making sure no Lavenders were peering down through the banister. We were alone, but she still didn’t answer. “Is it something weirder? Is he obsessed with World of Warcraft or those videos of women in high-heeled shoes stepping on roaches?”

  “Don’t be gross,” she said, and then she moved in close to me. She put her hand on my arm, and when I covered it with my hand, her fingers felt like icy sticks. I leaned in, and she bent closer to whisper, “He betrayed me.” She barely got those three words out, as if each were a serrated knife she had to shove up her throat and out her mouth.

  “How? How did he betray you?” I asked, getting frustrated. All that buildup, and for three words that told me nothing about Jake that I didn’t already know. “Come on, Rachel, what? Did he build a doomsday device? Is he secretly a cannibal?”

  She dropped her hand and wrapped her arms protectively around her middle. “I’m not comfortable talking about money.”

  That was not what I expected. It was better, actually. I hoped it was a money thing, because that seemed fixable in a way that cheating often wasn’t.

  “So he’s in some kind of debt?”

  She squeezed herself tighter. “Yeah. All kinds. The Nissan dealership is done. We’re close to losing the house. Last night I told the real estate agent I’ve been talking to that we were ready put it on the market. I had to forge Jake’s signature, and I left the papers in the mailbox for her on my way out of town. I should have done it earlier, but I didn’t think I could stand the questions from my neighbors. She’s probably at my house right now, hammering a sign into my lawn.”

  Now it made sense that she’d let Lav and me fly down coach. I’d even paid for both tickets, and Rachel—she who was always prearranging with waitresses to get the lunch tab and offering to replace my entire wardrobe with “some grown-up clothes”—had for once allowed it.

  “I’m so sorry. What about his dad’s old business?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. If the house sells quickly, and for a good price, he can maybe salvage it. Pieces of it. It’s not my problem.”

  I boggled at her. “Not your . . . ? Rachel, if you and Jake got into—”

  “We did not get into anything,” Rachel interrupted, and there was so much frost in her tone that I felt it, a crystalline bite in my lungs as I sucked in breath. “Jake got us into trouble all by himself. He never gave me so much as an inkling. He let it get bad and bad and worse, and he hid it, and he borrowed to cover it. For God only knows how long, Lavender and I have been living in a house of cards, while Smiley Daddy took us to Greece. He bought me an eight-hundred-dollar pashmina, and he couldn’t pay the mortgage.”

  “Okay, that’s bad,” I said.

  It was a sin that Rachel especially would have a hard time forgiving. Jake had . . . well, he had Rachel-ed her. He had taken his stuffed bunny to the laundry closet and cried there, with Rachel locked out, not even knowing. It was stupid, too, because if he’d told her when the trouble started, Rachel could have fixed it. She could have fixed the living hell out of it, then started a budgeting blog and landed on Good Morning America.

  It was a very Jake Jacoby thing to do, however. Not that I was taking his side. I would never take Jake’s side, even if he tripped and staggered by accident into the right. But this time I could see it. I could even understand it. Jake had reinvented himself for Rachel. He’d defined himself as this self-made successbot who followed trends in man fashion and cared a great, hollering deal about March Madness. Back when he was JJ, he and I hadn’t even known what March Madness was; I still wasn’t entirely clear on it. Jake Jacoby was such a fundamentally dishonest construct, it was a miracle that lying about debt was all he’d done.

  Still, it was all he had done, sounded like, and screwing up with money seemed forgivable. I recognized betrayal when it crossed my path, and fronting to stay successful in your wife’s eyes did not rise to that level.

  “That’s very bad, but he’s the only dad Lavender’s ever going to be issued.” Even as I said it, I realized what a hypocrite I was. Batman was the only father Digby would ever have, and a complete unknown. I wouldn’t even look at him on Facebook, but here I was advocating father’s rights for an absolute known jackass. This was not about me, however, so I soldiered on. “You could fix this.”

  She snorted. “My marriage, you mean? ‘Can I fix it?’ is not even the question. You’re missing the point.”

  “Okay. What is the point?” I asked.

  She flicked at the air with all ten fingers, as if the answer were hanging in the atmosphere around us, obvious.

  “He never told me. He never planned to tell me. He was going to—” Her voice broke, and she clenched her eyes shut, as if Jake were standing right in front of us and she could no longer bear to look at him. “He was going to stick us with it, me and Lavender. Disappear and leave us in his mess.”

  “Oh,” I said, a long-drawn-out syllable, full of a dawning understanding. It was what Rachel’s mother had done when Rachel was three months old. It would hit her so hard and so directly that I wondered if her own history hadn’t made her jump to that conclusion. I asked her, “Are you sure that’s what he meant to do?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” she said, ice cold. “I was looking for an old recipe in MS Word, and I found a draft of a blubbering letter he was writing. It read like a suicide note. Leia, I thought it was a suicide note, but then I started digging in his browser history and e-mail, and he’d used our last dimes to buy a plane ticket to Oregon. Ticket. Singular. Just him. If I hadn’t had a craving for Nana’s lemon bars, he would have been gone.”

  Now, that was the JJ I knew. That was the JJ he’d always been. Of course he’d planned to poof, even knowing that it was something his wife could not forgive. When JJ did something so bad he couldn’t stand himself, he disappeared, ditching anyone who’d been dumb enough to love him. It was time for JJ, version 3.0. I could imagine him in Portland, growing a giant beard and a craft-beer belly, maybe moving into one of those tiny houses. He could call himself Jac. Do whatever people did out there. No more Superman-loving dork and now no more sportsy yuppie. Maybe he’d even take up boccie ball. That unmitigated asshole.

  Rachel said, “I confronted him that day, when you came over with the cake. I told him that he had to decide. He could stand and face his mess with us or run west like the lowest-crawling worm on the planet.”

  “Jesus, Rachel,” I said. Birchie would have fussed at me for taking the Lord’s name in vain, but this was, I think, an actual prayer. Lav had witnessed that fight. She knew that her dad had planned to ditch her. “What did he say?”

  “He hasn’t gotten back to me on that yet
,” Rachel said, both so glib and so bitter that it set my eyes to stinging. “I don’t even know if he got on the plane. I told him not to speak to me or look at me or even think my name unless he was ready to man up.”

  So when shit got real, JJ had filled a Whole Foods bag with underpants and left. Nice. At least Rachel had called him on it. When Jake screwed me over, I’d given him the luxury of never having to explain himself. Of course, I’d had the luxury of not having his child.

  “I know this hits you where you live, but Lav at least needs to hear from him. She—”

  Rachel’s eyes blazed. “I told him not to dare think her name either. Not if he’s going to leave her.”

  If Jake weren’t such a coward, he would have contacted his child anyway. I pushed through Rachel’s touch-me-not force field, practically visible around her, and I laid one hand on her clammy arm.

  “What can I do to help? Please let me help. I can get you caught up on the house payments so you have time to sell—”

  She blinked, several times, rapidly, as if she had just noticed me in the room. Her lips curled up oh-so-slightly at the corners.

  “That’s sweet. I know you make a living with your art stuff, and that’s great. So great, that you can do that. But it’s freelance, and you’re single. I wouldn’t dream of taking your nest egg.” She looked down at me like she was Supergirl and I was a toddler offering to help her lift a building.

  I squelched down an orange surge of irritation, sharp as citrus zest. I drew for freaking Marvel, and for DC, and Dark Horse, for the love of God. Literally thousands of art nerds would trade a good chunk of immortal soul to have my career. Thanks to V in V, my own house was paid off. If I wanted to, I could get myself a Lexus and a purse dog and shoot my forehead full of Botox like her friends in East Beach. Instead I bought mint-in-package Wonder Women, and the contents of my dining room built-ins were worth fifty times more than her Spode china. She always acted like this, though. Like I sold lumpy handmade pot holders door-to-door, but not to worry! She’d be there to pay the electric bill when the whole thing went south.