Except… did they?
One day in the summer of 2002 Carrie had sat down with her. They’d taken the trolley to the waterfront and walked along the beach next to the Hyde Street Pier, both of them licking ice cream.
You know I’m leaving for college in a few weeks, Carrie had said.
Of course I do, Alexandra replied.
“I’ve always kind of tried to be… sort of a big sister to you and the twins and Andrea. Almost like a mom when I could. You know, for when Mom’s all crazy.”
Alexandra shrugged.
“The thing is,” Carrie said. “Me and Julia, we made a pact. That we’d always watch out for you guys. That we’d always watch out for each other. Sisters.”
The words were intense, dripping with heavy meaning that Alexandra didn’t completely get. Finally she said, “What about Mom?”
“She’s… not always the best mom she could be. You know? I’m just saying… with me gone… it’s up to you, Alexandra. To watch out for the twins and Andrea. Just to make sure they’re okay, you know?”
Alexandra nodded. “Of course, I’ll watch out for them.”
Carrie had stopped and looked her in the eye.
“Promise me,” she said.
“I promise.”
The thing was, you can’t keep promises like that. You can try, you can do everything you can, but Alexandra was only thirteen years old when Carrie left for college.
Thirteen year olds can try to keep promises, but they can’t keep their younger sisters from being sent away.
She did everything she could. But in the end, it wasn’t enough. Andrea did go away, first for a few weeks, then a summer, then eventually for the school year. By the time she was a pre-teen, Andrea only came home for the holidays.
This year, not even that.
Nobody said anything to her. Julia and Carrie didn’t look her in the eye and say, You failed her. They didn’t say out loud that they blamed her for not protecting Andrea. But she knew. She’d heard about their promise to each other, to the family, for years. That’s all she’d heard about was their sacred fucking promise.
The promise she couldn’t keep. Julia and Carrie had cared for each other, and they’d cared for her. But Alexandra couldn’t manage to watch out for her sisters. She’d left behind a rebellious punk rocker, a pill popping preppie and the sister who went away and wouldn’t even return her phone calls.
Alex’s legacy was failure, but she didn’t intend to keep it that way. She wasn’t going to fail Dylan. No matter what.
So she kept him close. She talked to him every day. She tried.
When they arrived in Bethesda for Christmas, the family was already in an uproar. Dylan followed Alex into the condo, where they immediately heard Adelina’s voice from a back room. She was shouting. Alex gave Dylan a worried look as they walked in. The first person they saw was Sarah, sitting in her wheelchair near the couch, a book open in front of her. She looked up at them over the top of the book. Her face was shiny with sweat.
“Hey, Alexandra,” Sarah had said.
“Sarah!” Alex rushed over to Sarah, who said she was fine, just running a bit of a fever.
The next four days were chaos. Jessica spent the bulk of her time in her room, because every appearance resulted in another outburst of argument between Richard and Adelina.
“You were supposed to be taking care of our daughter!” Adelina would shout.
“I’m fine, Mom!” Jessica replied.
“Have you seen her report card?” Adelina called out.
Richard, as always, retreated. He hadn’t regularly occupied the office in the Bethesda condo in more than ten years—it was Carrie’s office now—but that didn’t stop him from disappearing into the office and locking the door behind him.
The sisters were torn on how to react. Julia was staying with Crank at the Hyatt Regency a block away. She said, “Mom’s making a crisis out of nothing, as always.”
Carrie was more reserved. “I’m concerned. Dad probably stayed locked in his office the entire fall. God only knows what Jessica’s been up to.”
Alexandra, who had done more than her share of drinking in college, backed her mother.
Sarah, fighting another infection, mostly stayed in bed or parked in her wheelchair near the couch, glassy eyed from painkillers.
It was an incredibly uncomfortable, tense couple of days. Dylan spent a fair amount of it standing out on the balcony, freezing his ass off, smoking.
This time, he didn’t have Crank to keep him company. “Trying to quit, man,” Crank said. “I’m not getting any younger.”
Dylan gave Crank a wry look. “You’re not exactly an old man yet. What are you, thirty?”
“Thirty-three. But that’s not the point. Point is, you gotta grow up some time.”
“Yeah,” Dylan said. “True enough.”
The fussing and yelling between Adelina, Richard and Jessica continued right up until the morning after Christmas. It was a little after 11:30 in the morning, and all of the sisters (except Andrea) were seated around the table with their parents, Crank and Dylan. The family only rarely used the formal dining room in the condo, but with this many people, they were seated around the large table. Platters were piled high with bacon and eggs, pancakes and French toast, all of it carefully laid out by caterers from the Hyatt.
“You’re staying in Washington,” Adelina announced just after breakfast, glowering at Richard. “I will return to San Francisco with Jessica.”
He raised his eyebrows, then took his napkin from his lap, carefully wiped his mouth, and tossed the napkin on the table.
“I think that’s a good idea,” he said. “It appears I need to move back to Washington, anyway, I’ve been asked by the President to come out of retirement.”
With that, he stood and walked out of the room, leaving a stunned silence in his wake.
1. Jessica. April 30
JESSICA THOMPSON LEANED against the wall, her eyes drooping, shivering a little.
“Do you need a break?” The question came from Sister Kiara Langley, her therapist. Sister Kiara was a web of contradictions. An African-American from Los Angeles. A Roman Catholic nun with a PhD in psychology. For the last ten days, she’d been in Jessica’s room three times a day to probe and ask questions. Questions Jessica wasn’t prepared to answer.
For the first several days she’d said as little as possible. A few times she screamed until Kiara left. But by the end of the fifth day, she felt nothing but exhaustion. Her skin and her soul were numb. Everything was numb.
“No,” Jessica said. “I’m just… still tired. So tired.” She closed her eyes.
“Jessica, I need you to stay awake for a while. I told you, you’re going to feel tired for quite a while, and probably depressed. It’s a common side effect.”
“Yeah, I know,” Jessica said. Depressed was an understatement. She couldn’t laugh. She just felt dead inside. The night before, a dozen or so of the residents of the retreat had gathered to watch a movie: a romantic comedy. Her mother had laughed, a lot. So had a lot of the others there. But Jessica just sat there, staring. It wasn’t funny.
“Why couldn’t I laugh?” she asked.
Kiara said, “Well, it’s complicated. You know what dopamine is? In your brain? Basically, that’s what gives you pleasure. The meth makes it so you can’t produce as much of it. And on top of having less of it, the dopamine receptors are… basically burned. There’s less of them functioning. And it’s going to be a long, long time before those function normally again.”
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime you stay clean. When you go home, you’ll be in therapy. You’ll go to a long-term treatment program. But it’s mostly up to you. You’re eighteen years old. I can’t keep you here, and your mother can’t keep you here. It’s up to you now.”
Jessica didn’t want it to be up to her. She wanted to just curl up and let someone else take care of her.
“I want to s
tay clean,” Jessica said.
“So what do you need to do, Jessica?”
She nodded, slowly. “Talk.”
“Right.”
She crossed her arms across her chest. “Can we turn up the heat in here? It’s freezing.”
“Sure,” Sister Kiara said. The nun walked to the door and adjusted the thermostat, then returned to her seat. “Tell me a little about when all this started.”
“The meth? Or the other stuff.”
“All of it.”
Jessica took a deep breath. “It started in the womb, really. My twin got all the personality and smarts and… everything, really.”
“What’s her name?”
“Sarah. She won’t tell you, but Sarah means Princess, and that’s just what she is. She likes to dress all shocking—combat boots and black clothes and makeup, but even when we were little girls, it was always Sarah who had the attention. Sarah made friends. Sarah smiled, and—she had it all.”
Jessica shook her head. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming her for all of this. That was just the way it was. Sarah smiled and everyone came running. Sarah got in trouble, said something funny, and everyone laughed. For me it was just—always a little harder. I stayed quiet and in the background and just… did my thing.”
Sister Kiara smiled at her and said, “How did that make you feel?”
Jessica looked away. Then she turned back to Kiara and said, “Sometimes I felt really alone. My oldest sisters were all gone. I used to get along great with Andrea—she’s my youngest sister—but she moved away to Spain to live with our grandmother. I did make some friends at school, and… I dated a girl for a while. But she broke up with me.”
Jessica looked away again. Up until now, Kiara had mostly just asked questions, but she was certain the admission that she was attracted to girls would prompt condemnation from her. After all, Kiara may have a PhD, she might have been dressed in jeans and a button down shirt, but she was a nun.
Kiara, though, only said, “Talk to me about your relationship with your sisters.”
She rolled her eyes. “I have almost no relationship with my sisters. I’m the good one. The quiet one. Besides, can you even imagine the pressure I’m under? Julia went to Harvard and runs a multi-million dollar business she built herself. Carrie went to Columbia and Rice and is a scientist at the NIH for Chrissake. Even Alexandra, she’s at Columbia in pre-law and had perfect grades and the perfect boyfriend and then the perfect wedding. Everything’s so perfect for all of them I could just puke.”
Sister Kiara leaned back in her seat and murmured, “Now we’re getting somewhere. Do you really feel like their lives are perfect?”
“No,” Jessica replied in an empty voice. “Carrie’s a widow. She just had a baby.”
Kiara looked startled. Somehow her briefings from Jessica’s mother hadn’t included this bit of information. “Tell me more.”
Jessica said, “Car accident last summer. I was in the car too. Sarah was hurt really bad, and Ray—that’s Carrie’s husband—was killed.”
“Drunk driver?”
“No. Murder. Or… murder-suicide, I guess.”
“I see,” Kiara said, her eyes wide. “Were you hurt?”
“Just some glass fragments. Scratches.”
“So what is home life like now? Is Sarah in school? Do you two get in much conflict since the accident?”
Jessica shook her head. “I don’t really see her. She stayed with Carrie and my mom in Washington after the accident. I came home with Dad.”
Sister Kiara looked troubled. “Are you and your father close?”
Jessica snorted. “Are you kidding me?”
2. Adelina. April 30
The dream always started the same.
It was 1981. She was in what should have been her normal seat, violin at her chin, eyes fixed on Antoni Ros-Marba, principal conductor of the Orquesta Nacional de Espana in Madrid. Eyebrows arched over his rounded glasses, his hair swept back on his head, he held his conductor’s baton high in the air. A broad smile on his face as his eyes met her. She knew that he knew she had talent that would one day land her in the first chair. They all did. She held her breath, and the audience stirred in anticipation.
Ros-Marba’s arms fell, signaling the music to begin, but she froze. Her stomach twisted in pain. Richard was there, in the audience. Thirty-one years old to her sixteen. Handsome. His dark hair fell down over his forehead, his lips curled up in a cruel grin. He stood, but no one else in the audience noticed as he made his way down the aisle. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. Richard reached Ros-Marba and shoved him out of the way effortlessly, and the other members of the orchestra turned away.
Adelina dropped her precious violin. The instrument cracked, fragments of wood flying everywhere. Her right hand uncurled and the bow fell to the floor with a crash.
Richard finally reached her. Almost gently, he reached out a hand and wrapped it around her throat.
“What are you doing up here, Adelina? You know better.”
The room was dark and smelled of ammonia and sweat. In the first row of the audience, her mother and brothers slowly turned their backs.
She woke up choking.
A blanket was stuffed in her mouth, balled up in her fist, keeping the pain inside, where it belonged. She lay on her side, curled up, knees drawn up to her chest, the chest pains familiar. She slowly pulled the blanket away from her mouth, once she was sure the accumulated regret and terror wouldn’t force its way out in the form of sound.
She was drenched in sweat. It was nearly six o’clock, and the day wasn’t going to get started on its own. Out of habit, she rolled over and picked up her phone. No messages. No signal still. Ironic, she thought. For years she’d done everything she could to make sure she was never out of cell phone range. Checking for messages, checking for that phone call, was second nature. But when she’d arrived at Saint Mary’s ten days ago with Jessica, she’d noticed there was no signal and just shrugged it off. It had been sixteen years. If the call was going to come, it would come. Jessica came first. Richard had the number for the retreat center if there was an emergency.
Not that her children wanted her around anyway.
She slid out of the bed and padded her way to the shower. The rooms here were simple, but more than adequate for her needs. This retreat had been to save her daughter. But she was beginning to wonder if—just maybe—there was hope for her too.
The dreams had been troubling her increasingly in the last few months. Except for a few days at Thanksgiving and Christmas, she’d not slept in the same bed—or even the same city—as Richard. Not since last August. She would have thought the nightmares would get better. She would have thought the anxiety would get better. But it hadn’t. In fact, it had been worse, sometimes so bad that she lay paralyzed in bed, unable to function at all.
It didn’t make any sense. It was like she was a prisoner, just out of jail, just looking for an opportunity to go back. To go back to safety. To go back behind locked doors.
Ironic, because for thirty years she’d believed that when her children were grown, she was going to leave him at the first opportunity. Instead, her reprieve would soon be over. Jessica would graduate from high school in June (probably) and she would no longer have a legitimate excuse to avoid her husband. She would go back to Washington, the city she hated most of any in the world, and smile and be the diplomatic wife to the new Secretary of Defense and one day she would give up, walk into her bathroom and bleed out because there was no longer any point.
But for now, at least, Jessica needed her. This was their last day at Saint Mary’s Retreat. The retreat center was situated on the edge of the Sequoia National Forest, and had provided the most peaceful ten days Adelina had experienced since her childhood. She didn’t want to leave.
The days had a structure here. Each morning she awoke and joined one of the three meals served in the common area, sitting next to Jessica, her sullen, resentful daught
er. The first three days Jessica didn’t eat at all, but since then, she’d begun to astonish everyone in the center, putting away two or three meals at a sitting and sleeping almost all the rest of the time. She’d gained weight, a lot of it, in the last few days. It wasn’t enough—even after the weight gain, she was only approaching 90 pounds, and looked dangerously unhealthy.
Their next stop, had this not worked, would have been a psychiatric institution.
After the morning meal, Jessica typically slept most of the morning, then met with Sister Kiara, the no-nonsense nun and therapist who had so impressed Adelina.
Adelina herself walked every morning on the well-marked path through the forest. The sequoias were staggering in their beauty. She found herself stopping for long periods of time. Sometimes to sit. Sometimes to pray. Sometimes to weep. For years she’d held herself aloof, but here, it was impossible to deny the immensity of God. Here, she felt Him just in reach, in the deep shade below the trees, in the glades and the deep foliage, in the flowers that unfolded in the windows of sunlight that shone down to the forest floor.
After her walks, she often returned to the retreat center in a state of tears. Nobody commented on it, except for Jessica. On the third day of her withdrawals, she’d seen her mother crying, and said, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
In the afternoons, she met with Father Ross, one of the spiritual directors.
Ross generally dressed casually in blue jeans and thick flannel shirts, except on the days he performed Mass. All the same, he challenged Adelina.
“Everybody gets forgiveness, Adelina. Even you. That’s what grace is.”
She just shook her head. They argued. He gave her verses in scripture to read. Some of them helped. Some of them decidedly didn’t. But all of them made her think. All of them made her question. She was deeply concerned with both the spiritual and the temporal questions. She couldn’t solve the temporal ones… not today, anyway. But her soul, and the souls of her children… that was something else.
Girl of Lies (Rachel's Peril) Page 19
