Lucas and I exchanged a quick glance, and I braced myself for the sound of crockery hitting the wall—but there was nothing.
And I could swear my mother looked triumphant, somewhere in there, beneath that same smooth surface.
Chapter Fourteen
What the hell just happened?” I demanded of Lucas when we were finally on our way home. I swung my arms as we walked down Germantown Avenue, in a vain attempt to generate a breeze. “I can’t believe I witnessed that!”
“I have to say, I didn’t think your mother had it in her,” Lucas agreed. He laughed. “I’ve waited a long time to watch somebody put Norah in her place.”
“That’s not fair,” I said quickly, thinking of the way Norah’s fingers had shook as she’d excused herself from the table. And also about her jet black aura, which I hadn’t seen but had started to imagine hovering around her when I thought of her. Which made me feel like a horrible person. Which did nothing to dispel the image.
“It is fair,” Lucas said at once, snapping me out of imagining Norah’s aura, whatever color it might be. “I think everyone’s perfectly clear on how she feels about Raine. It’s unfair of her to keep throwing fits. You have just as much right to like Raine as Norah does to dislike her.”
“I hate when she’s sad,” I muttered, shoving my hands in the back pockets of my jeans. The ones I very much wished I hadn’t worn, since the late afternoon was unpleasantly warm, and no one needed to be quite so aware of the circumference of her thighs. “Particularly when I know perfectly well I’m the reason she’s sad. I just want to fix it.”
“It’s not up to you to fix everyone,” he said.
“I guess.” I felt that even if it weren’t up to me, I should make more of an attempt. What I couldn’t figure out was how to do what I wanted while also trying to keep from hurting other people’s feelings. Why did every choice that involved my family seem to pit those things against each other?
I asked Lucas.
“Because it’s family,” he replied with a snort of laughter. “That’s what families do.”
I didn’t feel that answer was at all sufficient.
“I don’t know,” I said noncommittally, because I didn’t have an argument against the answer, either.
“I do know,” Lucas said. “I don’t like to mention it, you know, because it’s up to you to handle your family however you see fit, but you put up with a lot of shit from these people. You know that, right?”
“Norah has this thing—this justifiable thing—about Raine, and my wanting to see Raine clearly exacerbated it.” I waved my hand in the air in a sort of loopy gesture, as if that could explain my sisters.
“Norah has a thing about Raine, Raine has a thing about Norah . . . ” Lucas shrugged. “Where are you?”
“You can see how different they are,” I said, not answering his question. “Norah gives lectures on the Industrial Revolution and Raine exhibits pictures of her vagina on the walls of a bar. Of course they don’t get along. I love both of them,” I said, to stave off another visual of those pictures, for the love of God. “I’m not an idiot. I know they’re both . . . ” I searched for the right word. “Challenging. They both have very strong, very different personalities, and they always have. I guess I’m more like my mother, because I kind of let them have their strong personalities while I did my own thing.”
“Except maybe your mother could have put a stop to all this a long time ago, by not doing her own thing so much and being a little more involved while you were all fighting this out,” Lucas said not unkindly, but firmly. “I’m just saying. Norah thinks she runs things because your mom let her run things for years. It was weird to see her step up and be the mom today. My mom lets everyone in a seventy-mile radius know that she’s in charge, all the time, and she always has.” He made a rueful noise. “Which is one reason why I live outside that radius.”
One of the joys of locating a life partner: if you wanted him to be involved in your life, he got to comment on it, too. Even if it was an incisive, unpleasant truth about your family. No one ever mentioned that side effect of love and intimacy in the movies.
“Do you want me to say I’m mad at all of them?” I asked him. “Is that what this is about?”
“Hey. I’m on your side here.”
“I don’t have a side,” I told him, trying and failing to keep the cranky out of my voice. “But I am having a wedding. And when I thought about my wedding as a little girl, it didn’t include a blood feud between my sisters. I’m having some trouble adjusting.”
“You’ve been back from San Francisco all of two days,” Lucas pointed out after a moment. Maybe to let his own crankiness subside, if the snap in his eyes was any clue. “I don’t think you’re required to have figured out how you feel about stuff just yet.”
“What stuff?” I could hear that my voice sounded far sharper than it should have.
Which was when I remembered that in all the hustle and bustle of packing, seeing Raine one last time, and flying back East, I’d somehow forgotten to tell Lucas about Matt’s appearance outside our hotel.
I’d meant to. But there’d been so much rushing around and now here we were. I should tell him right now, except how could I bring it up? I’d just denied I had stuff to think about, so I could hardly admit there was more stuff than he knew.
Lucas stopped walking and looked at me more closely. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows along the pretty row of houses, and I felt as if he could see inside me to all the dark, ugly places I preferred to hide.
Places shot through with golden threads, one of which was the fact that Matt had said he’d loved me. Even all these years later and long after it mattered, I found I clung to that. How could I possibly tell Lucas that?
“I mean, what stuff are you talking about?” I asked after clearing my throat a little bit. “Specifically.”
“I mean, the stuff that has you acting a little bit strangely,” Lucas said. “Like now. Specifically.”
“I’m not acting strangely,” I protested, but sighed when he just looked at me. “I mean, not on purpose.”
“And yet.” He raised his eyebrows and waited.
“I want to reassure Norah,” I said, when that wasn’t what I should have said. It happened to also be true, so I ran with it. “But she wants to hear that I hate Raine and want nothing to do with her, and I can’t tell her that. What am I supposed to do?”
“I think you should consider giving yourself a break,” Lucas said. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked down at me, his face serious. His hands were hot against my skin. “You saw your sister for the first time in six years, which is bound to stir things up. You also saw your ex-boyfriend. Your only other boyfriend, really. I think you’d have to be superhuman or something not to be a little thrown.”
I could see that he was deliberately opening up this conversation—giving me a way to talk about Matt without me having to bring him up myself. But I felt that admitting exactly how thrown I was by Matt would somehow be a betrayal, so I looked down at the ground. I knew that this was the perfect moment to tell Lucas what had happened—what Matt had said and how shocked I’d been to discover that I still cared so much about the past.
But I didn’t see how I could explain all this to Lucas without also explaining how my traitorous heart had thrilled to the things Matt had said. How those words had been circulating in my head ever since.
I was still trying out possible ways to broach the subject in my head when Lucas leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead.
“Give yourself a break,” he advised me. “You don’t have to solve your entire family history in one week.”
And I knew, right then and there, that I was drawing a line in the sand. I was allowing something new, and potentially dark, into our lives—separating us into a before and after. It was a wedge between us, and it widened with every second I stayed silent. Maybe it had already happened, back in San Francisco, when he’d gotten back from work s
o late and I hadn’t turned on the light and told him immediately about Matt’s appearance and my confusion. But this moment, right here in the sweaty heat of a Chestnut Hill summer afternoon—this was putting the polish on it. This was deliberately not telling him, and I wasn’t just letting it happen. I was doing it.
I realized all of this. I knew it. But I said nothing about it to Lucas, and let him lead me home.
Verena, on the other hand, would not be satisfied with anything less than a word-by-word reenactment. And unlike Lucas, she didn’t trust me where issues of the Matt Cheney variety were concerned, and would, I knew, keep asking trying questions until I provided her with every last detail. So the following Monday I left Lucas hard at work in front of his computer monitors and set out on the longish walk to her theater. Of course, after my marathon walk in San Francisco, a mere mile or so walk across Philly was nothing.
I arrived at the theater and called Verena to let her know I was downstairs. Then I waited for her around the back, near the stage door. She came bursting through it moments later, laden down with shopping bags and with murder in her eyes.
“I cannot believe you didn’t call me back, or e-mail me, or acknowledge my existence in any way,” Verena threw at me, in lieu of a simple “hello.” “What happened to you out there? Did you get sucked into the black hole that is Matt Cheney?”
“Do you want me to tell you what happened?” I asked. “Or do you want to talk about your pain? And not everything is about Matt Cheney, you know.”
“Something I’ve been telling you for the past ten years,” she snapped at me. But she visibly shook off her annoyance as I glared at her. She raised her hand in the air, shut her eyes, and straightened her shoulders. Then opened her eyes to look at me. “Go on. Tell me. Really, I want to know.”
And so I did. I ignored the fact that she was annoyed. I also ignored the June heat that was sapping the will to live from my bones, and I told her every word that had been said. Everything I’d felt while talking to Matt, and Raine, and even that awful Bronwen. Everything, up to and including Mom’s intervention into Norah’s tantrum and the fact that I’d elected not to share any of my feelings on most of these subjects with Lucas the night before. No detail was too small, especially when it involved ukuleles or macaroni Hindu gods.
It took a long time. While I talked, Verena led me on a tour of some of her favorite Center City shopping spots, where she proceeded to return the contents of her shopping bags while greeting the employees by name. Verena felt that denying herself the pleasure of shopping constituted cruel and unusual punishment, so she bought anything and everything that caught her fancy. However, she lived on a paltry theater company salary these days, so she rarely kept her purchases. Half the fun, she’d told me once, was returning everything because it was like Christmas twice: once when you bought pretty things, and then when you maintained your pretty credit history.
When I was finished with my story, my throat was a little bit dry, but I felt somewhat better. No wonder Catholics claimed confession was good for the soul. Maybe they were onto something—not that I planned to find out, as I was fairly certain it would make my Jewish ancestors spin in their graves if I so much as considered entering an actual confessional. Verena would have to do.
By this point, we had exhausted most of Verena’s admittedly generous lunch hour-and-forty-five-minutes, and were standing in a sluggish Starbucks line.
“Well,” Verena said after she’d taken a moment to digest the whole story, “we’ll just have to jump over the photo display of Raine’s, uh—”
“Vulva,” I took pleasure in saying, loud enough to appall the preppy businesswoman in front of us in line, who actually flinched away from us. “The photographs were of her vulva.”
“—because it turns out I’m not mature enough to discuss it.”
“I wasn’t mature enough to see it in the first place!” I protested. “I know that I’m supposed to be all down with feminism in all its forms—”
“Oh, spare me,” Verena interrupted. “Despite what you might have heard in San Francisco, you can still be a feminist even if you think you could have lived without having your sister’s crotch up in your face. I mean, come on.”
“I think a proper feminist would have thought it was all an act of courage, like that poet woman,” I hedged. Not because I suddenly believed in those photos, but because I wanted to believe that Raine had taken them for a reason. A reason beyond the need to shock, as I’d done with the preppy woman. Who was now treating me to a filthy look from behind her not-dark-enough-to-conceal-her-eyes sunglasses.
“I define acts of courage as things that I, a big coward, can’t do,” Verena said. “And since I could take embarrassing pictures and hang them on a wall, though I would rather die first, I think it’s excluded.”
“I don’t know,” I said, musing more than disagreeing with her. “I mean, there’s something to be said for living your life outside the lines, don’t you think?”
Verena stared at me for a long moment.
“Is this a joke?” Verena asked finally. “Are you defending those ridiculous pictures?”
“I’m defending Raine’s intention,” I said after thinking about it for a moment.
“Uh-huh.” Verena pursed her lips. “Did she change radically? Because that didn’t come through while you were talking. It sounded like Raine was still the same old attention whore she used to be.”
“I think attention whore might be a bit too—”
“We’re talking about Raine, Courtney,” Verena said in a withering tone. “Do you remember the first time I met her? I sure do. We were in your house for some weekend away from school and she pranced into your room wearing go-go boots, tap shorts, and no top.”
I’d blocked that out, but the image came back to me as Verena spoke.
“I think that was a Halloween costume.”
“Does it matter?” Verena shook her head at me. “Most people say hello, but not Raine. Why? Because she feeds off of attention. Always has, always will. Why she didn’t take her drama to the stage, where it belongs, the world will never know.”
We had made it to the head of the line, saving me from having to reply. We placed our orders with the barista, a young girl with a Technicolor dreamcoat of hair cascading from her scalp like she was some kind of anime heroine. It was so awe-inspiring that I was almost unable to complete my order. Verena and I exchanged looks.
“That takes a level of commitment I just don’t have,” Verena said, sadly I thought, when we had to search for a table and thus had to stop staring. “I mean, there are at least seven different blonds in there, Courtney. And the entire purple and blue spectrum!”
We found a tiny round table for two up near the windows, so we could gaze out at Walnut Street.
“And aside from everything with Raine, I don’t have the slightest idea how to feel about the whole Matt thing,” I said after a moment, playing with the oversize straw in my mocha Frappuccino.
Verena snorted. Loudly.
“What?” I asked.
“Here we go,” Verena said. “Didn’t I tell you this would happen? Didn’t I predict it?”
“You were right.”
That took the wind out of her sails.
“You were right,” I said again with a small shrug, when she only looked at me. “You told me to prepare and I didn’t. And it was really, really hard to see him.” I shook my head. “Talking to him made me feel like I was crazy. Like he thought I was so young and naïve that I should have magically forgiven him for taking off on me. How could he have believed I was ever that young?”
“You’re not crazy,” Verena assured me, reaching over to give my hand a squeeze, because she was my best friend even when she wasn’t happy with me. “Please. But when he knew you, you were twenty-two. And you know I love you, but you were kind of a young twenty-two.”
“I was not that naïve.” And it was annoying that she insisted otherwise. “No one alive, ever, could b
e as naïve as you think I was.”
“I’m sorry, Court, but you were,” Verena said. “And it’s not like Matt didn’t know that then. Or now, obviously. I hate that he tried to retroactively make you the bad guy.” She took a sip of her drink. “Though I’m not exactly surprised.”
“What do you mean?”
“And you claim you’re not naïve.” Verena squared her shoulders, and leveled a stern sort of look at me. “Courtney, hello. This is what he does. And this is also what you do—you sit around and agonize over everything he says or does, trying desperately to make it all mean something.”
“I think it does mean something,” I argued.
“I’ll tell you what it means,” Verena snapped. “It means he’s a dick.”
I didn’t like that at all. I especially didn’t like the unpleasant echoes from years before.
“Are you really going to pretend that it’s completely abnormal to want to talk about the interaction I had with my first love?” I demanded. “Because I was under the impression that it was pretty much the cornerstone of friendships to talk about upsetting encounters.”
“Wanting to talk about the interaction is fine,” she replied, throwing me a bone. I felt patronized. “But you’re worrying at it like a cat with a chew toy, and that’s not leading anywhere good. What did Lucas think about all of this? How did he handle the Matt Cheney Experience?”
“He was fine.” I could see that she didn’t believe me. “Really, he was. He thought Matt was kind of funny. He wasn’t threatened or anything, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“What I’m looking for is a scenario in which Lucas exterminates Matt Cheney once and for all,” Verena said dreamily.
“I always forget how much you hate Matt,” I said softly.
“I always forget how much you don’t,” she shot right back.
We were both quiet for a moment. I clutched my cold Frappuccino in my hand and let the sounds of coffeehouse traffic soothe me. But it wasn’t much like music. No sea or pine or California sun. It was just loud Motown music on the speakers, the hum of other conversations, and the loud whir of the espresso machine. And all the things I didn’t want to talk about, like static in between.