The Other Sister, page 25
I remember we’re in the car, and I’m supposed to be driving. I ease us through the intersection.
“Where were you going?” I ask. “I take it you had some kind of plan.”
“The plan was to come and stay with you,” he mutters. “I thought you’d come up for graduation and then leave. Like…”
“Like always,” I finish for him.
“I told Shelly, Aunt G will let us stay with her ’til we figure things out. No problem. Maybe she can even help you get into Lillywell. Shelly wants a degree in design,” he adds.
“Is Shelly your girlfriend?”
“Yeah, kinda. Mostly.” I take us around another curve. “Are you going to tell Mom?”
“I don’t know.”
“Aunt G…”
“I said I don’t know!” He winces like I hit him. He has no idea. We ride on in silence for a little while longer. The country around us flattens out as the road turns away from the lake. We pass the fields and the houses, all dark for the night.
“What did you do?” Robbie asks me. “After you left. You never talk about it.”
“That’s because it was pretty much a disaster.”
“How come?”
We are actually going to have this conversation. Well, maybe it’s time. Actually, it’s past time.
“I kind of did the opposite of what you did. I’d gotten into college. State University of New York at Buffalo. But I hadn’t told anybody, because I didn’t want anybody to know where I’d be, for a while, anyway. I hitched a ride with a friend out to Buffalo as soon as I could, and kind of bummed around for the summer. Used most of my cash to buy the car off my friend and so I was living in that ’til school started and I could get some financial aid. Made some money the old-fashioned way.”
“What were you selling?”
“A little weed. Fake IDs. Stuff that didn’t belong to me.”
“And then?”
“And then school started, and things got better, and worse.”
“How?”
“I met this girl. Jeannine. She was really smart. Really good at working the system without anybody seeing her do it.” I pause. “She was a lot like your mom, actually. Anyway, she was the one who got me to expand away from just IDs.”
“Into what?”
I should not be telling him this. That’s how we protect the children, isn’t it? We lie to them about what we’ve done, so they won’t decide to follow our examples. That’s what we tell ourselves anyway. Really, it’s so we’ll never have to live through that moment when they look at us and say, “Well, you did it.”
“Term papers, bluebook tests, even journal articles. All very white collar.” I still remember that strange feeling of having moved up in the world because I was selling paper instead of pills. Mostly. Jeannine would sell anything she could move. “You would not believe what college kids will pay for if they think it’ll get them an easy A.” Or a quick thrill.
“Bet I would.”
Yeah, he probably would. “Anyway. Jeannine was the face of the operation. She brought in the customers. I found what was needed and packaged it to sell. We split the cash. I won a prize for writing, got into grad school, and we called it quits.”
“What happened to her? Jeannine?”
The trees have closed over us, and the road is rising again. “She’s chair of the anthropology department at Lillywell. At least she was.”
Robbie lets that settle in, and I can feel the way his sobering brain matches it up with my being here. “What happened?”
“The board found out she padded her resume and plagiarized some of her papers.” I say this looking straight ahead. “That’s bad news in academic circles. She had to agree to quietly resign.”
“Was this after you got fired?”
“Amazingly enough, yeah.” I brake, and turn us into the old parking lot. My house sits white and squat in the headlights. Something’s wrong. I feel it, but I can’t see it. My mind is too divided between my past and Robbie’s present.
I shut off the engine and the lights. Robbie and I sit in the dark, listening to each other’s breathing.
“I won’t tell your mom,” I say.
“Thank you.”
“But only if you do.”
He stares at me, his eyes starting out of his head. “What? Why the—”
I cut him off. “Because.”
Because of the water and the cold. Because of the current and the darkness. Because of the hospital room and the tubes and my raw throat and the look in Marie’s eyes.
Because of what I’m doing here. Because I am not going to be responsible for Marie losing her son.
So, I do the worst thing I can think of.
“Either you tell your mother, or I’ll tell your grandfather.”
That does it. Just like I knew it would.
“Okay, okay. I’ll tell her, I’ll just…it’s going to take a while, okay? I’ve got to figure out how.”
Because I love him, I say okay. Because I don’t want to hurt him. Because I can’t stand seeing that scared, furious look in his eyes. Because I want so very badly to believe I am not the villain in this piece.
I can’t blame him for what he is and what he’s done. He’s just another victim, and we’ve failed him. Marie, me, David, all of us. I know that. But I can’t leave him alone to just do what he wants either. That leads right back here to the Monroe trust fund and the blank white walls that are all that’s left of the Rose House.
I sigh and fumble with the door latch.
“Look, let’s get you inside, and you can sleep off…whatever, and then in the morning…we’ll figure it out.”
I climb out of the car, keys in my hand. That’s when Tyler pulls in behind us, and the white headlights of Robbie’s car light up our little section of the world.
That’s when I see all the broken windows.
2.
“Oh, Jesus H. Christ!”
Tyler’s quicker, or at least less distracted, than I am. He jumps out of the Mustang and runs across to his old Toyota. The passenger-side windows have been shattered. Glass shards glint in between the weeds and gravel.
His car. The store. The front windows on the house. They’ve all been smashed in. Just a few jagged teeth still glint in the frames.
Robbie looks blearily at the damage. He’s swaying on his feet. Whatever sobriety came from putting his car in that ditch is gone now.
“We need to find out if anything’s missing,” says Tyler. “Have you called the cops yet?”
“Just got here,” I mumble and head for the front door. My hands shake as I struggle with the key.
I already know what I’m going to find. What I don’t know is how I’m going to lie about it.
Inside, nothing’s been touched. My gear, my computer, my files, all are exactly as I left them. If I looked, I know the money would still be in its hiding place.
I don’t look. I head back outside.
Robbie’s leaning against the hood of his car, both hands in his hair like he’s trying to keep his head from coming off. I see the flashlight beam bobbing alongside the old store.
“They got all the windows in the store, too,” Tyler says as he circles back around to us. “Did you call the cops?”
I didn’t even touch my phone. “I’m not calling the cops.”
The flashlight throws weird shadows across his face, but they are not enough to mask the utter disbelief of his expression. “Why the hell not?”
I can’t look at him. “Because it’ll only make things worse.”
“What? Why?”
Old, familiar thoughts race through my brain. I can still get out of this. I can still do this. I can. This is just a bad moment. I just have to get through it. I know it’s all a lie, but I grab hold of it anyway, because it’s better than sinking into what waits underneath.
“I know who did this.”
Robbie is staring at me, terrified of the accusation he thinks is poised on the tip of my tongue. Tyler is staring at me, waiting for me to name names.
I’m going to do it, too. I’m going to stand here and open my mouth and say it, to my nephew and lover. The two men I always intended to protect from what I’m really doing here, even when, deep down, I knew it was hopeless.
Just get through it. Whatever it takes. Figure out what to do about it later, when everything calms back down.
“It was my father,” I say.
3.
Tyler looks at me, stunned, blank. Robbie isn’t much better. Tyler can’t believe that someone would really do this. Robbie can’t believe I’d say it out loud.
“Your father?” Tyler repeats.
“He doesn’t want me here. He doesn’t want me messing up his money scams. He…”
“He smashed out your windows to convince you to leave?”
I nod. I can’t look at him.
“And that thing you said to me, about how your face got busted up?”
I let silence do the work for me.
“Jesus, Gerie!” He grabs my shoulders. He doesn’t shake me, but he swings me to face him. “Why didn’t you tell me!”
“What were you gonna do?”
“Get you the hell out of here!”
“No.” I pull myself away and reach into the car, where I tossed my purse. I yank out my phone and find David’s number on the list of recent calls. He answers on the second ring.
“Geraldine? What’s going on?”
Robbie has good ears. He’s shaking his head violently. Tyler has fallen back, his hands hanging limp at his sides. Helpless, for the moment.
“There’s been some trouble at the old house,” I tell David. “Again.”
“Shit. Bad?”
“Only kinda.” This is a lie, because I still can’t get myself to look at Tyler, and nothing can be worse than that. “But I’ve got Robbie here, too. He needs somebody to come get him.”
“Right. On my way.”
I hang up without bothering to say good-bye and drop my phone back in my purse.
David shows up twenty minutes later. It’s a very long twenty minutes. Robbie spends it sitting in my car, his thumbs busy with his phone.
I try to make a flashlight tour of the damage. The two house windows that face the road were taken out, and only the passenger-side windows on Tyler’s car. There was a single dent in the hood, but nothing that would make it undriveable.
All the store windows, though, had been at least cracked. Most of them were entirely shattered. Look, the vandal said, I could have done this while you were inside the house. I could have done so much worse. But I didn’t.
David’s wearing his security uniform jacket. His gun and radio are visible on his belt. He sees all the broken glass, his son in one piece sitting in the car, and me and Tyler without any new injuries, and he sags.
“Tyler, this is David, my ex-brother-in-law.” I perform the introductions because I don’t know what else to do.
The men exchange the little nod that passes for a greeting. David measures Tyler up, trying to use the space between us to gauge our relationship. Not that it’s hard. But David is in security mode, and he’s being thorough.
“I take it you didn’t see anything?” he asks us.
“No, we were up at the fish fry,” I tell him. Tyler doesn’t say anything. He’s looking at me, waiting to see what I’ll say. I feel the pressure of his impatience against my throat.
David’s gaze strays to Robbie in the car. I see what he’s thinking and I shake my head.
“It wasn’t him.”
I wait to see that slump of relief again, but it doesn’t come. David’s not sure whether he believes me. I can’t blame him.
I open my mouth to say I’ll report it first thing in the morning, but he won’t believe that either. Because David is not stupid.
“You better get Robbie home,” I say. “He’s still kind of messed up.”
“Yeah,” answers David flatly. “Thanks.”
“David?”
“Yeah?” he says again.
“He’s eighteen, right?”
We’re looking at each other. He’s understanding everything I am not saying. We’re standing in the broken glass, in front of the old house, in the middle of our history, our insanity, in a present and a future that have a cracked and crazed foundation. We have power, and are powerless. We are miles apart and tied together so tightly that neither one of us can escape.
“In two weeks,” he tells me.
“Try to keep him indoors ’til then, maybe. He’ll miss his graduation, but that’s the least of anybody’s problems right now.”
“Yeah. Right. Okay.”
David goes to the Outback and opens the door. Robbie gets out and slouches silently at his father’s side like he’s in handcuffs. He’s trying for belligerence, but he’s too tired and too freaked out by the damage around him. He gives me one backward glance before he climbs into David’s truck.
Does Robbie believe what I’ve said about who did this? I can’t tell. Maybe he’s just grateful I at least tried to tell David he had nothing to do with it. I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’ll ever talk to him again. I picture David loading them into the car and heading out of town. Prince Charming, gone away to the woods, to find the princess and slay the wicked sister and whatever other monsters he finds. The problem is, once he leaves, Prince Charming rarely gets to go to his own family. It’s not like it is for the girls.
They drive away, and I am left alone in the dark with Tyler.
“You can’t stay here,’’ he says.
“I know.”
But I go inside anyway, all the way to the bedroom.
Tyler does not follow me.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened between that ugly daughter and her evil mother if the good sister hadn’t come back in the nick of time.
Somehow, I suspect it would not have been a happy ending.
—Out of the Woods: Musings on Fairy Tales in the Real World,
Dr. Geraldine Monroe
MARIE, PRESENT DAY
THE ROSE HOUSE
1.
It’s six in the morning when the phone finally rings.
I never went to sleep. I put on my pajamas and I tried lying down, but I knew actual sleep was entirely out of the question.
When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I dressed in the dark and sat on the edge of my bed. I needed to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. Someone would call. Someone had to. It was not possible that no one was coming for me.
Slowly, the world brightens from black to gray. Slowly, sporadically, the birds begin to sing. The walls lean closer, wondering what has disrupted my routine.
I have the phone up to my ear before the first ring finishes.
“David? What’s the matter…?”
“It’s fine, Marie. It’s all fine,” he says. “Robbie’s right here with me.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” The relief is real, but strictly limited. “What’s happened?”
He hesitates and I clench the phone, and my free fist. My scab pulls and threatens to break. “David, please.”
His breath rasps as he sucks it in. “You need to get down to Geraldine’s.”
“What? Why?”
“Something happened down there last night.”
“A little more information would be helpful, David.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. But…listen, it would be better if you talked to her. And then you can come talk to me, okay?”
“Let me talk to Robbie.”
“He’s still asleep. I’ll get him up if you want me to, but I don’t think you’ll get anything coherent out of him. He is fine, I promise. I’ll bring him home this afternoon, all right?”
“That’s not all right. How could that be all right?” My voice is high and tense. I am breaking. I know it. I need to hold appearances together, but I need to see my son even more. I need to have him right here beside me, where I know that he’s all right, that he hasn’t vanished into the cold and the dark, or fallen down and gotten lost or…or…
Anything could happen if he’s not with me. Anything at all.
“Marie,” David says. “I’m asking you to trust me this once. I swear, Robbie’s not going anywhere without me. I’ll bring him straight home. Please, just please go talk to Geraldine. I want to know what she tells you.”
I have so many other things I want to say, but they all wither and die. There’s a sound outside, a rustle that does not belong to the normal breathing of the house.
My father. Dad is outside my door, listening.
“Thank you for calling, David,” I say. “I do appreciate it.”
David hears the shift in my tone, and he understands. “I’m sorry about all this, Marie.”
I believe him, but it doesn’t make any difference. “We’ll talk this afternoon.” I cut off the call.
“Marie?” Dad pushes the door to my bedroom open.
He’s still in his navy-blue pajamas, and his hair is rumpled. I have to work not to shrink away from him. Only his eyes are as normal as he takes me in, sitting on the edge of my bed with my phone in my hand.
“Who was that?” he asks.
“David.” I don’t even think about shading the situation. “He says…” What? What did he say? “He says something’s happened with Geraldine. I need to go down there. I’m sorry.”
My father shakes his head. “I tried to warn you, Marie.”
“Yes. I know. You were right. Excuse me, please.”
I brush past him and head for the stairs before he can call me to stop. I can’t risk the possibility that I might obey.
2.
The old house is silent and still when I get down there. The shards of broken glass glitter fitfully as the clear morning sun touches them between the trees’ shifting shadows. There are three cars in the parking area. One of them is Robbie’s.
I stare. Understanding will not come. David said Robbie was with him. Why is his car here? Why is anyone here, with all the windows broken?
