‘Thank you for your incredibly patronizing and self-serving analysis of my marriage,’ I managed to grit out.
‘Is it patronizing?’ she asked, her voice smooth. Untroubled. I wondered if these were the conversations Carolyn practised in her bathroom mirror. ‘Or is it true?’
‘What makes you think you have the right to comment either way?’ I realized my hands were in fists. ‘It’s none of your business. Even if Tim regains all of his memories tomorrow and never wants to lay eyes on me again, you don’t know a single thing about our marriage. All you know is what you wrecked.’
She hugged herself again, and started rocking, slightly, in her chair, which made me think she wasn’t quite as calm as she wanted to appear.
‘You can’t wreck something if it’s already broken,’ she said, and her voice was a little rough then, as if there were some emotion buried in there.
But not, I was sure, for me. Never for me.
And that was the part I couldn’t seem to understand, not even after all of this. Especially after all of this. Sure, my relationship with my sister had always been a little bit rocky. We had never dressed in matching outfits or called ourselves best friends. We had never shared secrets or whatever else the world fantasized sisters did. She was never my first call when something went wrong; most of the time, in fact, we didn’t talk much at all between major holidays. And not because there was some kind of falling out between us, but, I’d always thought, because we didn’t have anything much in common besides our parents. The house we grew up in. The remnants of a shared childhood. We were two very different people who happened to be sisters.
We didn’t have to be close, I’d always thought, but that didn’t make us enemies, either.
She’d had her wild-child Portland years, and then she’d moved to Boston, claiming she needed a complete change. She’d pursued that goal the same way she did everything else: with 150 per cent total commitment. Damn the torpedoes, etc. The last few years or so she’d been in what Tim and I had called her elite goth phase, which involved the dyed black hair and severe lipstick she’d suddenly seemed to prefer, but also her perfectly unobjectionable marketing career. She’d seemed happy in Boston. And that life had made more sense to me than her self-righteous, hemp-clothed communal existence in Portland, all Burning Man and medicinal weed. I’d actually wondered if maybe, with her laid off all those months and living with my parents, she and I might reconnect the way that people claimed adult siblings sometimes did. And the crazy part was, I’d thought we had. We’d seen so much more of each other, and it had been pleasant enough. No scenes, no drama. I even remembered thinking at some point over the summer that it was nice that Tim was so much more accepting of her than he had been …
I was such an idiot.
But it had never occurred to me that my older sister might not care about me. Not really. Not enough. That she might weigh up her options and decide that hurting me was an acceptable risk. That had never crossed my mind until I’d walked into my own bedroom and seen the proof of it. It was still so hard for me to accept, to really believe, and yet here she was in my house, telling me so from her own mouth.
‘I don’t understand why you’re okay with this,’ I said finally. Painfully. ‘Why doesn’t it give you any pause at all that you’re sitting here debating with me – with your sister – about the way you broke up my marriage? About whether or not I love Tim the way you think I should? Where’s the shame, Carolyn? The regret? Do you think the way you’ve hurt me is more noble somehow because you did it for love? You have to know that’s ridiculous.’
She looked away for a moment and when she looked back, her eyes seemed darker. Her mouth trembled. But it still wasn’t enough. I wasn’t sure what would be.
‘I didn’t do any of this to hurt you, if that’s what you think,’ she said in a low voice.
‘Sometimes I think you must not have thought of me at all,’ I whispered, giving voice to the things that moved in me, the things that kept me awake on that sofa in the den all hours of the night, ‘and sometimes I assume the fact that I was the wife whose husband you were stealing made it that much sweeter for you. And I don’t know which is worse, to be honest.’
Carolyn stared at me. I watched her swallow. I imagined I saw regret there, then, washing over her face. But if it was, it was gone too quickly for me to be sure.
‘It just happened,’ she said, her voice cracking slightly. ‘It was an accident and then … we couldn’t help it.’
I thought about Alec, then. Alec who I could never really have. Alec who was impossible to hold on to, and oh, how that made me wish I could. Alec who was profoundly unsafe; demanding and never easy and so much work. I thought about how I’d driven all the way up there, and stayed there, and jumped back and forth over that fire between us as if begging it to burn me alive. As if I’d wanted it to. I thought of all the times I could have stopped him, stopped myself, stopped the whole thing. But I hadn’t wanted to stop it. I’d wanted to see where it went. Where we would go. I’d wanted to know how it felt, again; if I was remembering it right. If I was remembering him right. I’d wanted whatever came next, even if there would be a price to pay for it, and for that long night I hadn’t cared about that price. I hadn’t even considered it.
‘You’re lying,’ I told Carolyn now, with more weariness than accusation. ‘You could have helped it. You just didn’t want to.’
The kitchen was silent for a long while. Outside, freezing rain began to fall, lashing the windows with the year’s last storm. I didn’t know what Carolyn saw as she looked at me. Happy memories from our childhood, whatever those looked like for her – like maybe stealing my Halloween candy in preparation for far greater thefts later on? Or maybe that air of sadness that both of us seemed to wear now, mirror images of each other, like the hazel eyes we’d inherited from our maternal grandmother? Or did she only note, as I did, how empty this all was – how little there was to yell about after so much had happened. There was only surviving whatever came next.
‘You’re right,’ she said eventually, meeting my gaze and holding it. ‘I didn’t want to. And I guess I’ll have to live with that.’
‘So far you seem to be doing pretty well,’ I observed.
‘Appearances can be deceiving,’ she said softly. ‘I do love you, Sarah. You’re the only sister I’ve got.’
‘But you love him more.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘I do.’ She shrugged, helplessly. ‘I’m sorry, but I do.’
I was surprised to feel tears prick at the back of my eyes, and had to blink hard to keep them at bay. I pulled in a deep breath somehow, then another, and somehow, seemed to turn into some kind of stone. Because she’d admitted it, maybe. Finally. Because she’d actually said it to my face.
‘And what are you going to do if he never gets those memories back?’ I asked her then. ‘Some people with his type of head trauma never do.’
‘I can’t let myself believe that,’ she said, in a tone that indicated she’d spent a lot of time worried about it herself. ‘I have to focus on the future and the baby and hope everything will work out the way it should.’
‘Okay,’ I said, feeling outside of myself. As if I danced around the outskirts of this remarkably quiet conversation, somehow the more painful for its lack of fireworks. ‘But let’s be realistic, here. Let’s say his memories don’t come back. He and I don’t divorce. He doesn’t remember you as anything more than his sister-in-law. You have his baby. What happens then?’
She cocked her head slightly to one side, as if she were searching my face for clues. Her hands clenched over her belly, betraying a level of agitation I didn’t see anywhere else in her.
‘Are you just going to live here in town with the kid?’ I asked, my voice entirely too reasonable. I wasn’t sure why I was painting this particular picture for her. But I could see it so easily. It would be such an obvious outcome here. We could end up there with so little effort that it seemed almost preordain
ed. ‘What about if Tim and I have kids, too? Will they all go to school together and swap lunches as well as DNA? How do you see this all playing out?’
‘Wait a minute,’ she said, shaking her head slightly, as if baffled. As if I wasn’t making sense. ‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m just wondering what the future looks like.’ I crossed my arms over my chest. ‘Right now he doesn’t want anything to do with you. That may never change, Carolyn. Are you prepared for that possibility?’
Her mouth actually dropped open slightly, and I could see the colour high on her cheeks. She pushed to her feet, pulling her coat back over her shoulders, and it looked like she was shaking.
‘I keep forgetting,’ she said in such a low voice that I almost couldn’t hear her, ‘that you would do anything to maintain the status quo. That all you want is for everything to go back to how it was. Even now.’
‘It’s not about what I want,’ I said then, feeling, it was true, ever-so-slightly self-righteous. And good. Like what a great person I was for even caring what Tim wanted should have been shining off of me, blinding the world around me. ‘It’s about what Tim wants.’
And, maybe, about winning. About beating Carolyn at this game. I didn’t really want to admit that, but I knew it was in there.
‘Of course it’s about what you want!’ she said with an outraged sort of laugh. She raised a hand then, taking in the kitchen, the open-plan design that flowed out into the great living room. ‘Jesus Christ, Sarah. What is so great about your life – about this stupid house – that you would live in it knowing that it’s fake? Knowing that he could get his memories back at any moment and when he did, he’d hate you? But you think I’m the sociopath here?’
‘Why should I give up my marriage if he can’t remember that he wanted that?’ I asked her. I hadn’t necessarily thought about it in such stark terms, but there it was. And so what if there was a hollowness to that? There would be a satisfaction, too. The satisfaction of the life we’d led. It had been a good life, no matter what Carolyn thought. No matter how unlike the other lives I might have had it was. It could be good again. Smooth. Easy. Sensible.
Of course it could, I thought wildly. And then all of these months would simply be a bad dream, easily forgotten once the light of day came. Maybe this was the answer, after all. Maybe all those other lives I’d tried on didn’t fit me because I wanted the one I’d had, even if it was a little more imperfect than I’d imagined it. Maybe this was where I was meant to be after all. It could be.
‘Why would you want to hold on to your marriage if you know that it’s only the head injury that makes him think he wants it any more?’ she asked me then, sounding appalled. As if I were the monster here. ‘Why would anyone want that?’
‘Why does anyone want anything, Carolyn?’ I threw back at her, and maybe I was more angry, still, than I’d thought. Maybe the weariness was only the outer layer of the things I felt. I rocked back on my heels as I regarded her, feeling unduly powerful. In control. And I realized how long it had been since I’d felt that way. ‘You wanted your sister’s husband. Maybe I want him back, and I don’t care how. Maybe it’s not any deeper than that.’
*
But that wasn’t precisely true.
Later, I sat by myself in my favourite spot in the den and watched the ball drop in Times Square on the big flat-screen TV that Tim had been so excited about. Finally, this long fall was over. Finally, we were at the end of this terrible year. I should have been jubilant. I ate cheese and crackers from one of the pretty china plates we’d put on our wedding registry, drank my champagne straight from the bottle, and told myself I was perfectly fine.
I was fine.
I could have spent the night at Lianne’s. She and Billy threw a party every year, and I knew I would have been more than welcome there. I could have mingled with our old high school friends and drunk too much of Billy’s famous holiday cocktail – it involved a very doctored version of mulled wine and was vicious – and woken up sometime on New Year’s day on the floor of Lianne’s guest room. I’d done it before. Alternatively, I could have gone down to New York and gone out somewhere glittery and fabulous with Brooke.
How glittery? I’d asked in response to her texted invitation.
As glittery as possible, she’d texted back. You’ll love it. Nowhere near Times Square, of course! We glitter elsewhere, thank you.
But in the end, I’d chosen my couch. I had too many ghosts to sort through, and I was old and experienced enough now to know that this kind of thing was best done in private, rather than in the middle of someone else’s party. There were too many loose ends that seemed to flutter around me, tripping me up, choking me, even as I sat still. That conversation with Carolyn had unsettled me. Deeply. I’d spent the whole first part of the evening vehemently denying it, but now, sitting cross-legged in the dark while the entire nation partied elsewhere, glittering and oh so freaking happy, there was no avoiding the truth of it.
Are you upset that you lost Tim? Lianne had asked me a hundred years ago. Or are you upset that Carolyn took him?
How could I still not know the answer?
I reached over and picked up my phone like every teenage girl in the nation, scrolling through the old list of calls and messages, looking for something that wasn’t there. That wouldn’t be there. Alec wasn’t the kind of guy who called, and even if he were, he certainly wouldn’t call me. Not the way we’d left things.
Because he hadn’t been mad at me for leaving that morning. Of course not. He wasn’t a jealous lunatic; that had always been more my style. He’d helped me pack the car. He’d made me more of his perfect coffee and put it in a travel mug for the road.
Call me when you have a minute, he’d said, and that had started it. When things settle down a little bit.
Come on, Alec, I’d replied, feeling helpless and something else, too – something much closer to furious, though I’d thought I’d shoved that down deep. I’m not going to call you. What’s the point?
He’d stared at me, and I’d hated imagining that I wouldn’t see those dark eyes of his again, that clever mouth. That I wouldn’t get the pleasure of talking to him again, of following the twists and turns of the way he thought. That I wouldn’t get to laugh like that, feel like that, be like that again, because I felt free with Alec in a way I’d never felt free anywhere else. But he wasn’t staying around. He already had his plane ticket out. And I’d lived through all of that before, hadn’t I? This time, I hadn’t let myself fall too far. This time, I’d kept myself safe.
Even if I’d realized in that grocery store that Tim and I had never connected like that, had never moved in concert, had never felt so close – well, Tim also never hurt me so much, so badly. Not even by sleeping with Carolyn, which I could already see my way to overlooking if that would preserve the marriage.
Meanwhile, everything about Alec hurt. He called that honest. I called it too much.
He hadn’t much liked it when I’d said that. He’d lost it, in fact.
He’d even called it revenge.
I took another swig from my champagne and grimaced against the sour taste.
‘Buck up,’ I told myself, my voice way too loud in the quiet of my den with the TV on mute. ‘This is fucking festive.’
What did Carolyn know, anyway? It wasn’t like she didn’t have a vested interest in this situation. It wasn’t like it wasn’t to her advantage to make me feel bad about wanting to save my marriage.
If I’d had pompoms, I might have dragged them out then, to cheerlead my own thought process.
But I was no cheerleader, and anyway, I didn’t believe my own rationalizations. Not even when I was sucking them down with a bottle of champagne, alone and unchallenged. The fact was, I couldn’t deny that Carolyn had a point. I could hate her all I wanted, and hell yes I wanted, but that didn’t make her wrong.
What is so great about your life – about this house – that you would live in it knowing that it’s fa
ke? she’d asked.
Alec had said something similar. Loudly.
It careened around inside me, leaving cuts and bruises wherever it hit, and I couldn’t answer that one, either. I didn’t know.
I saw that blue blouse of mine, coffee-stained and still warm from my skin, hanging in the air in front of me, frozen forever as a marker of what I’d thought my life was versus what it actually was. How long had I been so wrong about my life? For at least six months, certainly. Probably longer.
And who was to say Carolyn was Tim’s first affair, for that matter? Why had I blithely assumed that? For all I knew, he’d never been faithful to me at all. Our entire relationship could have been a sham from the start. He didn’t even have to be particularly evil for that be true, I knew; there were far too many men who seemed to believe that they shouldn’t have to give up sleeping with as many women as possible simply because they’d acquired wives. Maybe Tim was one of them. Given that I’d missed the fact that he was sleeping with my own sister, how could I be sure that I knew anything about him at all?
And if I accepted all of that as possible, the question remained: why would I want to hold on to a marriage that was that fake? This was just a house, after all. Just a quiet little life, maybe even a good one, but nothing spectacular.
It’s really pretty here, Brooke had said Christmas night, when she’d stayed over after the day’s revelations. She’d gazed around the great room and had seemed almost sincere. Really.
You’re not convincing at all, I’d said with a snort.
It’s the prettiest suburban house I’ve seen, she’d said, grinning at me. But I’m not cut out for the suburbs, Sarah. You shouldn’t pay any attention to what I like or don’t like. It’s what you like that matters.
But … what did I like? Why was that question still so hard to answer?
The fact was, I was all Goldilocksed out. There was no just right. I didn’t want Brooke’s life, much as it made me nostalgic for the one I’d left behind. I didn’t want whatever life was with Alec, where it was so great when he was around and then I could wait for him to come back to me as if from the wars, doing God knows what with myself in the meantime. And here I was back in my marriage, playing the dutiful wife to a husband who, for all I knew, would hate me the way Carolyn said he did when he fully recovered from his accident.