“Yeah, Sam. How do you think that worked out?” She starts to say something, but I hold up a hand. “No. For once, you listen to me. There was nobody here for me, not even my sister. You took every chance you could to humiliate me, embarrass me, needle me, get me in trouble.”
“I did not.”
“Oh yeah, what about when I burned off my eyebrows? How about when I got locked out on the roof for a whole night and you wouldn’t let me in?”
She looks away. “I was a kid.”
“Yeah. You were. But you aren’t now, and you’re still mean and petty and horrible to me.” I pick up my violin bow. “You’re mean and petty to everyone, and it’s getting you exactly the life you deserve.”
She slaps me. So suddenly, so hard, that it makes my ears ring. I gape at her, my hand over the place that stings.
I shake my head. “I’m done.”
I grab my violin and leave.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Gloria
It takes me less than two hours to return to Manhattan, a trip that took five hours on the train. By the time the Lyft drops me off, I’ve been up for nearly thirty hours, not counting naps on the train. I let myself in and call out, “Willow? Sam! I’m home.”
The cats come tripping into the foyer on their pretty little feet, and my heart swells to quadruple its size. I sit down on the bench and bend over to pet them. “Hello, my sweet girls.” Esme butts her cold nose against my wrist, and Eloise twirls around my ankles. “I’m glad to see you too. We just haven’t spent enough time together lately.” Esme squeaks her agreement.
Sam comes into the foyer, barefoot and draped in an oversize sweater, and rushes across the space to fling herself into my arms. “Gloria!” she cries.
I wrap my arms around her, eyes closed, smelling her hair. Emotion wells in my throat. “Oh, my dear, sweet girl. I love you so much.”
She clings to me, hard, very unlike her, but I revel in it. “I thought you were gone,” she says. “I don’t want you to go anywhere.”
“Me either,” I say quietly.
She lets go finally, her hands still on my shoulders. We are face to face, the tallest women around most of the time. “But I thought you were in trouble?”
“I am, but I don’t want to run. That’s not my way.”
She tightens the sweater around her middle, and I see now that her eyes are swollen, as if she’s been crying, and the illness lingers in the paleness of her skin. But she says, “I don’t think you have to run. I’ve been going over scenarios, and I think there might be a way out.”
I kick off my shoes. “I called my lawyer on the way home. He does think there’re some possibilities. Why don’t you show me what you have in mind?”
“Yes. Let me get you a cup of tea. Are you hungry?”
I blink. Sam thinking of someone else’s needs? “That would be great,” I say cautiously. “Let me go wash my face.” Then I realize the silence. “Where’s Willow?”
She looks over her shoulder toward the music room, and I see something in her expression, but I’m not sure what. “I don’t know.” She heads for the kitchen. “I’ll make you some tea.”
I wash my face, grateful for my own space, for my beautiful bathroom, for the fern in the corner. Please, I think.
Sam is hunched over the kitchen table, nibbling a cookie. I smell chamomile, which she’s made properly in a sunny ceramic pot. More cookies and a pile of grapes are arranged on a plate. “This looks lovely, Sam. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Her eyes are almost a neon blue when she looks at me. “You’re very important to me, Auntie. I’m sorry I don’t say that more often.”
I pat her hand. “Thank you.”
“Now,” she says, opening her laptop with efficiency. “Let me show you what I found.”
She’s searched every case of this nature, including variations in a dozen ways, and has come up with a plan that has genuine merit. Together, we call my lawyer, and by the time an hour has passed, it seems I might actually get out of this.
By the time we’re finished, I am beyond exhausted and stand up to go to my room. It’s odd that Willow is still gone. “You have no idea where Willow is?”
Sam bows her head. “No. We had a fight.”
I sit in the chair, taking this in. “It must have been quite a fight for her to leave you alone.”
She’s plucking a loose string at the end of her sleeve and suddenly bends over, putting her face in her hands. “It was awful.”
I sigh. Willow would not attack or fight unless Sam started it. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“No.” She rubs her forehead. “I don’t know why I do this, why I’m so mean to her. Asher even commented on it.”
“If you’re looking for absolution, sweetheart, you’ve come to the wrong person.”
She looks up. “I don’t think I want absolution. I want to stop doing it.” She swallows, unravels a row of her sleeve. “I did it with Asher too.” She clenches her jaw to stay in control, but I see the tears in her big blue eyes. “At Tina’s wedding, we got together, and it was . . . amazing.”
I wait.
“And then we got back to the city, and he wanted to stay over, and I just got so scared that we’d ruin everything, our friendship, that I started a fight, and it got way out of control.” She closes her eyes, touches her eyelids. “So, so out of control.”
“That’s why you haven’t been talking?”
“Yeah.” The string from her sleeve grows, unraveling, unraveling. “And then, I mean, when I was so sick, I had this hallucination that we were married and we had two little boys, and I must have texted him the SOS, because that’s how he got to me.” She pauses. “Before I died.”
I rest a hand on her shoulder. “Are things fixed, then?”
She shakes her head. “No.” The word is hushed. “I thought they were. I thought we could move forward. I mean, we’ve been best friends for decades. How can we just not be anymore?”
“Do you want to be friends, or do you want to be lovers?”
“I want us to be married,” she cries. “I want to have babies and live in Brooklyn and have meals together every night.”
“Have you told him that?”
“No. What if he rejects me?”
I shrug. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” I brush hair from her face. “Have you ever talked about your fight?”
“No. How do you even start a conversation like that?”
“You could start by apologizing.”
She looks at me. “I have.”
I incline my head. “Really?”
She bows her head. “Not really.” She gives me a thin smile, then gives a hard sigh and squeezes her eyes tight. “Oh, how am I going to fix things with Willow? I said awful, awful things.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why,” I repeat. “Why did you say such awful things?” As she considers, I pick up the teapot and pour a cup, then offer it to her.
She sips. “That’s so soothing.”
“Mmm. Why did you get so angry with Willow?”
“It was this whole awful thing this afternoon. My dad came over with his wife, and Asher got mad when Eric came over, and then he left, and then Willow was just in the music room, and—” She lowers her eyes. “I was jealous. So jealous. She makes life look so easy.”
I don’t say a word. The back of my neck is aching from the tension of the past forty-eight hours, and my eyelids are grainy over my irises, but I wouldn’t miss this moment for the world. Sam has needed to come to this place for literally years.
“How do I stop doing this, G? The people I love the most in the world are mad at me. And they have every right to be.”
“First of all, you need to talk to them, each of them, and take ownership, apologize, and make amends.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. That’s up to you.” I pat her knee. “And then, my dear, I think you need some counseling. You
do have abandonment issues, with good reason.” I touch her hair, tuck a lock behind her ear. “If I could go back in time and fix things for you, I would. But I can’t. Only you can do that now.” I pause. “You might need some anger management too.”
“What? It’s not like I’m beating people up.”
“Not physically.”
“Oh,” she says softly and bends her head.
“You need to get some rest,” I say, standing. “And I need to get ahold of Willow.”
“Okay.” She holds the cup of tea between her palms. “Thank you.”
I brush her cheek. “Of course, my love.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
Willow
When I leave the apartment, I don’t really know where to go. The day is breezy and sunny, so I just start walking aimlessly south toward Midtown, taking pleasure in the anonymity of the crowds, people busy on their way to something.
At first, anger carries me along at a fast pace. I’m walking to calm myself, to get myself back into my body. I’m so angry with Sam, and I’m worried about Gloria to a degree that makes me feel like I’m walking on coals. Where is she? When will I see her again? How can I get a message to her?
Music and walking are the only things that will help. On my earphones plays a list I’ve assembled for such times, a combination of fast and slow violin, in all sorts of modern and historic compositions. Lindsey Stirling, Bach, and Paganini, the madman. A little of everything.
Listening to violin reminds me of what I’m here to do. I mean, I knew when I was a little kid and Mom fit that tiny one-eighth size into my hands and showed me how to rosin the bow. I was starstruck, right from the start.
That’s what I want to think about. Violin.
But my mother was my teacher at times, and it’s that I remember now, stomping toward Central Park with a mad violinist in my ear. My mother fitted that violin in my hand, nudged my elbow higher, and picked out a simple series of notes for me to play, and I tried to reproduce them. She wore tiny skull earrings and a long feather clipped into her hair.
“That’s so good, Willow! I just have a feeling you’re going to be really good at this.”
“What am I going to be good at?” Sam said, coming in to slump in a chair.
“Everything,” I said. And that’s all I remember.
Poor Sam. Tears sting my eyes, because I do understand why she’s so hostile, but at the same time, my body feels scored with slashes, her cuts true and deep. A manic pixie dream girl—I have played that role many times, trading the illusion of myself for a sense of security or a boost in self-esteem or—whatever. An album.
She’s not wrong. That sticks in my throat, makes it hard to swallow.
I reach the park and realize I don’t want to go wandering through all those pathways and sidewalks. I’m getting a little bit cold and hungry, a state I often knew as a girl. Where can I go?
But I realize I’ve walked right where I need to be. My feet have carried me to Lachman’s Bookstore, the shop Asher’s dad runs, a place that gave me great comfort when I was a girl.
I sidestep the main door and pause in front of another one, smaller, next to the nail salon that used to be a barbershop. I ring the bell, and a woman answers, “Hello?”
“Mrs. Lachman, it’s Willow Rose. Can I come up?”
“Willow! Of course, dear.” The buzzer rings me in. The stairway smells familiar, slightly mildewy and warm, and my body eases immediately. Mrs. Lachman opens the door at the landing of the third floor and ushers me in. “It’s so good to see you, Willow,” she exclaims and waves me into the main room, the living room with comfortable, overstuffed furniture. A golden retriever leaps down and comes over to greet me. “This is Herman. Be nice, Herman.”
I open my palms to let him sniff them, then scrub his silky head. “He’s beautiful.”
“Come, sit,” she says. “What would you like? Coffee? Lemonade? Maybe.” She holds up a finger, opens the fridge. “Yes, lemonade. Soda?”
She will not settle until I choose, so I say, “Coffee.”
“Good choice. It’s chilly out there. Your nose is red.”
I touch it. “I didn’t realize.”
She makes a pot of filter coffee by rote and stands beside it, one hand on her hip. Her blouse is a camel color, tucked neatly into her jeans, and her salt-and-pepper hair is short, where it used to be a heavy black pageboy. Otherwise, she looks very much the same. “How are you, Willow? I bought your album and loved every note. Tell me everything. How’s it going?”
“It’s been very up and down, but that’s the music life, right? How are you? The kids? Mr. Lachman?”
“He’s downstairs. You’ll have to say hi before you go.” She peers into the distance. “Everybody is good, you know. Doing their thing, I guess. Everybody is married but Asher—and hey, he told me Sam’s been sick with meningitis! Is she all right?”
To my absolute horror, tears well up in my eyes and spill over before I can do a damned thing to stop them. Mrs. Lachman is right by my side before I can blink. “I’m sorry; she’s not okay?”
I nod. I can’t talk about Gloria, which is part of this, but I can talk about Sam. “No, she is. We just had a really, really terrible fight.” I squeeze my hands together. “Said terrible things, things we can’t take back.”
She pats my shoulder and says nothing. Goes back to the coffee maker and stands there. “She had a bad fight with Asher a while back too. He hasn’t talked much about her since then.” She looks at me. “Do you know what happened?”
I shake my head. “Sam never told me. I only found out they weren’t speaking when I saw him in the hospital.”
She pours two mugs of coffee and carries them over to the table, then gets a half gallon of milk out. “Sorry, I don’t have cream.” She sits down, her rangy hands palm down on the table. “What’s going on with poor Sam?”
“Poor Sam?” I burst out. “Poor Sam? She said horrible things to me, and she is always mean. And not just a little mean. Really mean. Always, always, always. All I’ve ever wanted was for her to just love me, and all she does is sneer.” My voice breaks a little on the end. “I’m so tired of poor Sam.”
Mrs. Lachman smiles faintly and covers my hands with one of hers. “She has a tongue as sharp as a serpent’s tooth. I’m sorry she attacked you.”
“But.” I roll my eyes.
“No but. She needs to learn how to deal with her emotions so she doesn’t cut everyone off.”
“I don’t know how she’s coping without Asher,” I say, and it strikes me that she’s not coping very well.
“Nor do I.” The buzzer rings twice, and then we hear footsteps on the stairs. “I believe that’s him now. He’s coming over for dinner.”
He comes through the door, and at first he’s perplexed, then frowns. “Is Sam all right?”
“Yeah, fine, why?”
He can’t quite meet my eye, and I think of him storming out of the apartment. “Just wondering.”
“Asher!” his mother says. “Did you have a fight with her too?”
“Too?” He points to me. “You did?”
I nod, but now I’m wondering if . . . “You fought?”
He shakes his head. “Not exactly. We’ve just had really good boundaries until the past few days, and they’re all broken. I’m trying to get mine back in place.”
“Boundaries? What’s going on with you two?”
He closes his eyes. “Nothing. I mean, I just can’t get into it. But maybe she was pretty upset at me.”
I’m thinking about the flow of the day. Giving her a shower, and she was so embarrassed by her body, which really is awfully thin. Her father showing up, not to see her but to bring his wife in to see if she could sell the apartment. Eric showing up. Asher storming off.
Then my little band playing so cheerfully, and my good news about the reporter, and the discovery that we’d hid everything from her. For a good reason, but still. We left her out.
Damn. I clos
e my eyes. “I have to go.”
My phone rings in my pocket, and I stop to look at it. Unfamiliar number, so I ignore it. Then I remember that Gloria doesn’t have her phone, so she might call me from anywhere. Urgently, I say, “Hello?”
“Willow,” she says, “I need to know where you hid the paintings.”
Behind me, I hear Asher say, “I need to go talk to Sam.”
“Wait!” I cry, phone down. “This is G.”
Understanding dawns. “Ah. The paintings?”
I nod.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Sam
After a shower and a quick nap, Gloria leaves to meet her lawyer, and I’m alone again. It feels very, very, very empty here, and my heart is hollowed out, too, and I lie on my bed with headphones on, Tupac turned up high to drown out the voices in my head. I can’t sleep. The words I flung like knives at my sister echo.
Why am I so mean?
The fight with Asher was the same kind of fight—he wanted to stay, to kiss me and sleep with me, in my apartment, and I suddenly couldn’t breathe. Literally.
Tupac is too intense, and I scroll through my music and settle on Keb’ Mo’. The quiet bluesy sound eases my nerves, clears some space for me to really think.
Fact: I’m in love with Asher. How did I not know that before the wedding when we got together? If I look backward, I see him in every single frame of my life—eating dinners of takeout while we worked side by side on a game; falling asleep on his couch or he on mine before waking up and starting again; attending bar mitzvahs and weddings and graduations; being happy and being sad.
The day my mother died, I was over at Asher’s apartment, playing Final Fantasy. His mother appeared at the door of his bedroom and just stood there for a long, long moment. “Samantha,” she said, “I need to talk to you, honey.”
I don’t know what I thought it would be, but I said, “Hang on just a minute. I’ve got to—”
“Now, Sam,” she said.
I gave Asher the controller and stood up. He, alerted by something in his mother’s voice, followed us out to the hall. “I have terrible, terrible news, sweetheart,” she said, her hands on my shoulders. “Your mother is dead.”
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