Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “We’re in the car leaving the park,” Hank said. “I have a confession, and I need you to absolve me.”

  “Is it Mommy?” I heard Amelia say, and Hank said, “It’s Kate.” Then he said, “The family that had us over for dinner served lasagna with M-E-A-T in it, and I ate it.”

  “Should I call the cops?” I asked.

  “Probably, because there’s more. It was delicious. It was like an old friend giving me a big warm hug.”

  I laughed. “Did Amelia have any?”

  “Maybe a bite. Not really.”

  “Speaking of killing animals, I think we have a mouse. I just set my first traps.”

  “Congrats.”

  “Do vegetarians set mousetraps?”

  “You’d have to ask one.”

  “Ha,” I said. “Where are you guys, by the way? You’re welcome to come over.” Hank was quiet, and I said, “Amelia probably needs to go to bed.” Already, it seemed a little weird that I’d invited them.

  “We’re on Skinker right now.” His voice sounded completely normal. “Yeah, we’ll come and say hi.”

  “Rosie and Owen are asleep,” I said, which felt like a retraction of my invitation, but all Hank said was “We’ll be quiet.”

  I waited for them in the living room and opened the front door before they knocked or rang the bell. “Where’s Rosie?” Amelia said. “I want to see Rosie.”

  “Owen and Rosie are sleeping,” I said.

  “I want to wake them up.”

  As they entered the living room, Hank said, “At the rate you’re going, you will.”

  “Kate, can I have some milk?” Amelia asked.

  I looked at Hank, who said, “Sure. Why not?”

  Because they needed to get home so Amelia could go to bed was why not, though it occurred to me that maybe Hank didn’t want to leave any more than I wanted them to. This, I supposed, was the reason people had earthquake parties. “You need a beer?” I asked, and Hank said, “Nah, I’m good.”

  Rosie still used a sippy cup, but Amelia had graduated to a regular glass, which I filled halfway and carried out to the living room. Hank and Amelia were side by side on the couch, and Amelia was turning the pages of Frog and Toad All Year. I set her milk on the table, and as I sat in the armchair, I said to Hank, “So how long had it been since you last ate you-know-what?”

  He looked up toward the ceiling, calculating. “A really long time. Ten years?”

  “And you never even had a bite?”

  “Once at Courtney’s parents’ house, her mother was all proud for having made vegetable soup. If you know her mom, she was really stretching herself—first her daughter marries a black dude, then she stops eating meat. We’re all at their dining room table, and Courtney says, ‘This is delicious,’ and her mom says, ‘It’s so easy. I just cut up some carrots and celery and zucchini, added a little chicken stock—’ ” Hank smiled, shaking his head. “So it was a cheat, but not even a satisfying one. And her mom was trying so hard.”

  “Someday I might join the vegetarian club,” I said. “When you least expect it.”

  “We’ll be honored to have you as a member.” He made a self-mocking expression. “If I haven’t been kicked out by then.”

  They stayed for only about fifteen minutes, by which point Amelia’s eyes were fluttering. Hank lifted her into his arms, and as I opened the front door for them, I said, “You’re sending Amelia to school tomorrow, aren’t you?”

  “Kate, if I kept Amelia home because of Vi’s prediction, Courtney would file for divorce.”

  I was glad then that Rosie wasn’t in school yet, that this was an argument I didn’t have to have with Jeremy. I said, “Well, here’s to things being uneventful,” and as I spoke, I again had that wish for Hank to stay, that sense of us as safe in his presence.

  “You’re okay, right?” Hank was looking at me with unusual seriousness.

  What would he say, what could he do, if I told him no? He was holding a half-asleep child; we both were married to other people. Really, there was no room for me to not be okay. “I’m fine,” I said.

  Hank nodded his chin toward the staircase. “Tell O to let you get some sleep tonight.”

  The reason I went down to the basement after they were gone was to get Jeremy’s sleeping bag, but I paused to survey the supplies I’d amassed: the gallons of water, the diapers and wipes, the crank radio and propane stove and first-aid kit. There was a peculiar pride I took in this collection, which might have been a sign that I had more in common than I’d ever realized with members of the survivalist movement.

  I shoved a flashlight into my back pocket before pulling Jeremy’s sleeping pad and sleeping bag from the closet; taking these items wasn’t a spontaneous decision. Upstairs, I unrolled them both on the hardwood floor in the hall, right outside Rosie and Owen’s rooms, and I pulled the pillow I normally used from our bedroom. I still needed to brush my teeth, but when I lay down, my head would be next to Owen’s door and my feet next to Rosie’s.

  On a typical night, I slept approximately twenty-five feet from my children; on this night, I’d sleep, or not sleep, five feet from them. Which was perhaps ridiculous—Jeremy would have thought so—but I didn’t see the harm. If shaking started, my plan was to grab Owen first, take him with me into Rosie’s room, get her out of her crib, and sit on the floor holding them both, my back against the interior wall of Rosie’s room. I’d sleep with the flashlight and my cellphone next to me. I was ready, insofar as it was possible to be ready for something completely amorphous.

  And whether or not my behavior was ridiculous, Jeremy wasn’t home to witness it. He had gone to Denver and left us behind.

  It was raining when I awakened in the morning, and I thought, Vi’s wrong. There wasn’t going to be an earthquake. I knew because I’d never heard Vi mention rain, because it had never occurred to me that October 16 would be rainy, and yet the rain had that murmuring, all-day quality, as if it were pacing itself. But even as I felt relief, even as I thought about how removing the wall hangings and putting away the china had been a waste of time, I still wanted the day to be over.

  It was five after six when I climbed out of Jeremy’s sleeping bag and went downstairs to check the mousetraps, all of which were empty. When I returned upstairs, I could hear Owen and Rosie making noise in their separate rooms, neither of them sounding displeased, so I took a three-minute shower, then nursed Owen, changed him into clothes, and carried him with me to get Rosie. By the time we’d made it through breakfast and post-breakfast cleanup and settled to play in the living room, it was seven-twenty. Which was, of course, still punishingly early; there was still so much day to get through. But Rosie was in an excellent mood—she kept tapping my face with her index finger, saying, “Mama’s nose is friends with Mama’s mouth”—and not one but two dogs walked past our house with their owners, making Owen squawk with delight when I held him up to the window.

  Jeremy called as Cinnamon the schnauzer was disappearing from view. “My cousin Joe in Minneapolis just texted to ask if Matt Lauer is really in Vi’s living room right now.”

  I grabbed the remote control. And sure enough, there they were, sitting on chairs about two feet from each other. With Jeremy still on the line—it was an hour earlier in Denver, meaning Vi wasn’t on there yet—I turned up the volume on the TV and put him on speaker so he could hear it, too. So distracting was the fact of Matt Lauer in Vi’s house that it took me a few seconds to focus on Vi herself; she looked exhausted. She was wearing, I noted, the navy blue short-sleeved sweater I’d picked out for her to try on at Lane Bryant, which fit well, though she’d paired it with a somewhat tacky necklace of interlocking silver circles. “I wonder who did her makeup this time,” I said.

  “Will you be embarrassed if you’re wrong?” Matt Lauer was asking.

  “I’ll be thrilled,” Vi said. “That’s what I’ve been telling people all along.” She knew, I thought. She, too, knew already that an earthquake wasn’t going
to happen.

  “But your credibility will be undermined,” Matt Lauer said.

  “Do you think I’d put thousands of people’s lives at risk just so I don’t look bad?” Vi said. “Shame on you, Matt.”

  Jeremy laughed. “You gotta love her self-righteousness.”

  “I want to ask you a question a lot of our viewers have asked since you and I last spoke,” Matt Lauer said. “If you have the ability to see the future, why don’t you take advantage of it by, for example, playing the lottery?”

  “I wasn’t given this gift to use for my own gain,” Vi said. “I’m sure some mediums do that, but I’ve always wanted to help others.”

  “One last question: What are your plans for today and tonight?”

  “I’ll be attending a low-key vigil with old friends,” Vi said. “This is the kind of day you want to spend with people you’re close to.”

  “Wow,” Jeremy said. “The irony.”

  “She’s roped my dad into driving her to the bookstore tonight.”

  “He could have said no.” We were both quiet—it seemed we’d missed Vi and Matt Lauer’s final exchange, and the interview had wrapped up—and I muted the TV and said, “You think Matt Lauer used her bathroom? I hope she cleaned it.”

  “If he did, she should install a plaque. Did you get Mickey Mouse, by the way?”

  “Not yet.” I could have told Jeremy that in spite of Vi’s latest appearance on TV, I felt the calmest I had since she’d made her prediction—that the day felt ordinary and not like the occasion of something terrible. But again, to reveal my own calmness would have been a kind of olive branch I still wasn’t ready to offer. Yes, Jeremy had been right about the earthquake, but that didn’t mean he should have gone to the conference. He hadn’t known he was right. Instead, I said, “I wonder if our family should stop eating meat.”

  “But mice are so delicious! They’re so tender.”

  “Seriously,” I said.

  “We can talk about it when I get home,” he said. “I’d be up for cutting it out at least a couple days a week. You think Rosie would deign to say hi to me?”

  I held the receiver toward her. “Want to say hi to Daddy?”

  Rosie took the phone and said, “Hi, Rosie.”

  “Hi, Daddy,” I said.

  “Mama cleaned pee-pee on Rosie’s pajamas,” Rosie said.

  “Say, ‘I miss you.’ ” Then I realized that without deciding to, I’d acquiesced, because surely Jeremy could hear me coaching her. “Say, ‘Rosie misses you.’ ”

  “There’s no more pee-pee on Rosie’s pajamas,” Rosie shouted.

  “Rosie misses you,” I repeated.

  “Mommy misses you,” Rosie said.

  If Vi was wrong, then I was wrong, too—after all, I’d thought the earthquake would occur on October 16 before she had. And yet hadn’t I been wrong before, over and over? Wrong in believing that Scary Black Man would attack me; wrong that I would adopt Chinese girls; wrong that I would marry Ben Murphy or David Frankel and, on our first date, that I wouldn’t marry Jeremy. Confirmation bias was what Jeremy had called the tendency to pay greater attention to the times I was right, so what was its opposite? Because considering the many errors of my past was oddly comforting. Though I wouldn’t have believed that anything other than an emergency could have induced me to take Rosie and Owen on an outing on what I’d imagined to be the most anxiety-provoking day of my life, it felt increasingly ridiculous to stay cooped up. As the rain continued, as seven forty-five became eight-twenty and eight-twenty became nine-twenty, as Owen went down for a nap, woke, ate, and it wasn’t yet eleven, it just seemed silly for us to stay inside. And perhaps all I’d ever wanted was this—not the assurance of permanent, unbreachable safety for my children, because that was impossible, but the ability to distinguish between anything less than extreme caution and tempting fate. Because I didn’t think I was tempting fate as I said, “Hey, Rosie, want to go look for a Halloween costume?” I felt that I was doing what a normal parent, a normal person, would do.

  Besides, I meant at Target, which would not be, by most people’s standards, a bold journey. The store was two miles away, and though we’d drive, I’d have the stroller in the trunk so we could walk home if necessary—if the highway cracked open, say.

  Before we left, I called Hank and said, “I did end up watching Vi on TV this morning, and I can tell she doesn’t believe her prediction anymore.” If I couldn’t offer this gift to Jeremy, at least I could share it with Hank. I added, “And I’m feeling so brave that we’re going to Target to look for Halloween costumes. You need anything?”

  In a surprisingly serious tone, Hank said, “There were so many kids out at Amelia’s school this morning that I had a moment of wondering if I shouldn’t leave her.”

  “I really don’t think so.”

  “Now I keep watching the clock till it’s time to go back.”

  “You’re welcome to come with us to Target if you want a distraction.”

  “Mmm—” I could tell he was considering it, but then he said, “I was about to fix the leak in our tub. I promised Courtney I’d do it while she’s gone.”

  Rosie, Owen, and I were in the car but still in the driveway when my phone rang: Dad cell, the screen said. Which was an identification that had never shown up; Jeremy had entered a few numbers into my father’s cellphone, but my father called me only at home. When I answered, it wasn’t my father’s voice on the other end. It was a woman.

  “Your dad fainted, but he doesn’t want to go to the hospital,” she said. “You need to come get him.”

  “Who is this?”

  “He’s at Relax Massage. Can you come get him? He says he’s fine, but he’s still out of it.”

  “My father was getting a massage and he fainted?” Since when had my father gotten massages? My heart was tightening the way I’d thought, when I’d awakened to rain, that it wouldn’t.

  “Can you come get him?” the woman said.

  “Is he conscious?” I asked.

  “Yeah, yeah, he’s drinking a pop. He didn’t want us to call you, but it’s like, ‘We’re calling an ambulance or your family. Take your pick.’ ”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  I heard her say, “Your daughter wants to talk to you,” and after a few seconds, there was a beep that I was pretty sure was my father inadvertently pressing the keypad of his phone, and then he was saying, “Kate, I’m perfectly fine.”

  “What happened? Do you need to go to the hospital?”

  “I stood up too quickly, but I’m fine.”

  “And you’re getting a—” I almost couldn’t say it; it seemed intimate in an unsavory way. “You were having a massage?”

  “When she was finished, I stood up too quickly,” my father said. “That’s all.”

  “Your daughter come get you,” said a female voice in the background, a different voice—this one was accented, perhaps Eastern European or Russian, and more forceful. “She get you or we call ambulance.”

  “Will you pass me back to the person I was talking to before?” I said.

  “Truly, I’m fine,” my father said, and it seemed that the second woman grabbed the phone because she said, “You come get father now. We are on Olive Boulevard. Relax Massage.” Then she hung up.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror at Rosie and Owen before calling Hank. “I just got a really weird call. This woman who doesn’t identify herself says my dad was having a massage, he stood up and fainted, and I need to come get him.”

  “Has he come to?”

  “Yeah, I actually talked to him. He sounded normal, I guess.” I paused. “I should go out there, right?” Without waiting, I said, “Yeah, of course I should. You don’t think they, like, kidnapped him, do you?”

  “Did they say anything about money?”

  “No.”

  “You want me to go with you?”

  The air of embarrassment around whatever was happening—I knew that for my father, it woul
d be bad enough to have me witness it without Hank present, too.

  “At least let me come over and watch the kids,” Hank was saying. “But if you’re worried it’s unsafe, call the police.”

  In fact, as I thought about it, it was like the opposite of a kidnapping—these women seemed intent on getting rid of my father.

  I said, “The whole massage thing—isn’t that code for prostitution?”

  “Not always.”

  “No, I know there are legit places, but I just got this feeling—”

  Hank laughed, before saying, “Sorry. But if at his age, he’s still—well, more power to him.”

  “Yeah, if he’s not your dad.” I looked once more at the backseat and made a decision. “If you really don’t mind, maybe I’ll leave Rosie with you and keep Owen. Hopefully, I’ll be back by the time Amelia’s school lets out.”

  “Come on over,” Hank said.

  It is tempting, in retrospect, to assign a starting point to the sequence of events that unfolded on this day—tempting as well as futile—and when I do so, this is the obvious moment. Because surely, if I had decided to keep Rosie with me instead of handing her over to Hank, everything would have gone a different way. And I did feel a fleeting uneasiness about separating myself from my daughter, rain or no rain, but this was Hank, who was practically a third parent to Rosie, whom I trusted far more than Vi or my father as a caretaker. Plus, dealing with whatever situation I was about to enter at the massage place would be considerably easier without Rosie running around, grabbing things, and shrieking.

  I pulled into the Wheelings’ driveway, where Hank was waiting, and as he opened the back door, I said, “You swear this is okay?”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “I’ll fix your tub later,” I said, and he grinned.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Rosie, you get to stay with Hank while I run an errand,” I said. “Maybe you can play with Amelia’s grocery cart.”

  She was looking at me with suspicion in the rearview mirror, and as Hank unbuckled her car seat, she yelled, “Rosie wants a costume!”