How We Started

by Luanne Rice

  I wanted to tell Frederik if he desired art, obsession, or spiritual madness, he should try Central Park. Paul is one of the great sky watchers. By night he guided star walks, taking people into the darkness of the park and watching the Perseid and Leonid meteor showers, the transits of Mars and Venus, phases of the moon, constellations bright enough to be seen through the city’s ambient light.

  Some days Paul incorporated bird walks with “skying”—a term he’d picked up from a note by John Constable, the nineteenth-century British artist and possibly the greatest cloud painter ever to live. Paul could identify every cloud in the sky—cirrus, stratus, nimbus, cumulonimbus, nimbostratus, cumulus—feel the wind speed and direction, and predict the weather.

  Paul knew every tree by its bark and leaves, every flower in the Shakespeare garden and the plays and lines in which they were referenced. We were in love, but we were also partners in nature and the city. How could Frederik think that was anything less than passionate obsession, gazing at the sky but with our feet on the earth we loved?

  Anne had quit her job as a researcher in the NYU Biology Lab when she’d married him—giving her scientist boss three days’ notice.

  “How can you just give up your work and screw your chances of any kind of recommendation?”

  “Frederik wants to take care of me.”

  “That’s a weird way to put it.”

  “Why? I’ve always wanted that.”

  “Love is one thing, but why do you need him to take care of you?”

  “Because no one ever has.”

  The words stung. Hadn’t we looked after each other our entire lives?

  “Be happy for me,” she continued. “Frederik says we’re fremstillet i himlen. Made in heaven.”

  “I am happy for you,” I said, and I meant it, but I already felt worried. Turns out, I had reason to be. Frederik’s heaven meant separating Anne from our family. He’d controlled her the best he could, and I’d never returned to their house until I showed up today.

  Gilly, five, colored pictures for me as I held three-year-old Grit and read her Owl Moon, one of the books I’d brought. I wanted Anne to remember our own owl story, to remind her of how close we’d been. Grit clutched my hand, excited to find the hidden creatures in each illustration. I stroked my niece’s dark curly hair, thinking of how much it was like Anne’s when we were little.

  We drew pictures. Trees, owls, clouds. I sketched the three cats, telling Grit and Gilly about each of them, how they liked to sleep on the bed just as if they were people, but how they stalked at night, chasing shadows and moonlight.

  Through it all I kept watch on Anne. I saw bruises on her wrists and cheek.

  “Did he do that?” I asked.

  The kids were listening. She hesitated.

  “Daddy hurts her,” Gilly piped up, throwing his arms around her neck.

  “Come with me,” I said. “Pack some things, and let’s go.”

  “Where would we stay? The three of us—”

  “In the apartment, in your old room! Come on,” I said, driven by Gilly’s words and the fact that she hadn’t denied them. “Anne, we can figure out everything later. Let’s just leave.”

  “Where are we going?” Gilly asked.

  “To New York,” his mother said. “To your aunt’s house.”

  She rose, stood looking around the room as if saying good-bye, or deciding what to take, or perfectly stunned by what she had just decided to do. Or maybe she had heard the front door lock click. Frederik stepped inside, a mild smile on his face.

  “If I hadn’t come home for lunch, would you have left me?” he asked, shining that frightening half-smile on Anne.

  “Daddy,” Gilly said.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Frederik said, knocking Gilly aside to grab Anne by the throat.

  I slapped and scratched Frederik, tried to pry his hands from Anne’s neck. The kids screamed, and so did I. I reached into the fire and grabbed the charred end of the burning log. I swung it like a baseball bat, straight into his face. It smashed his cheekbone with a loud crack, and he let go of my sister. That’s all I cared about.

  The cops don’t believe my version of what happened.

  After being booked I called Paul and asked him to have my lawyer meet me. She never made it to the station house and hasn’t yet arrived here at the jail.

  Now I’m in a cell. No window, no natural light, but there are brash greenish-white overhead fluorescent tubes over which I have no control. There’s a half sink/half toilet, stainless steel with no seat. Just the bare frame like the kind you see at arenas.

  The cell is cinder block with a drain in the middle of the concrete floor, and a narrow bed attached to the wall. I’m alone. They’re not granting me privacy out of kindness; they consider me dangerous to others and myself. It’s a fact, and I’m not denying it, that I bashed my sister’s husband in the face with that burning log.

  I hear my sister choking, the children shrieking, and see myself dive at the fireplace and come out swinging. The smell of my burned flesh makes me throw up. Or maybe it’s the sensation in my wrists, bones reverberating with the violence, the impact of the log breaking Frederik’s nose.

  I’m on suicide watch. When the sheriffs turned me over to the prison staff, a female guard strip-searched me. I looked at her nametag: Officer Fincher. She is tall, stocky, and muscular. She’s built like marble. I had expected depersonalization, but her eyes met mine. I saw a woman-to-woman flicker, almost as if she was sorry for me.

  She told me to strip, and I did. Everything off—underwear included. My gauze-wrapped hands are like paddles, so she helped me unclasp my bra. Clothes went into a pile. Then she slipped on a pair of latex gloves and had me stand tall, spread my arms and legs.

  “Open your mouth,” she said, and looked inside with a flashlight. She checked my ears, up my nose. She examined my armpits, navel, and the hair on my pubic bone.

  “Hands on the wall, bend over,” she said, shining her light at my buttocks.

  She gave me cotton underwear and an orange jumpsuit, a pair of sneakers with Velcro closures. No belt, no laces.

  “Your lawyer coming?” Officer Fincher asked.

  “My boyfriend called her,” I said.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Mary McLaughlin,” I said.

  “I know her,” Officer Fincher said. “I know most of the defense attorneys.” I waited for her to make a comment about Mary McLaughlin being smart, or good, one of the best, but by then our eye-to-eye, woman-to-woman moment had passed.

  Finally Officer Fincher left, and I was alone.

  I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. I couldn’t stand looking at those scrubbed mint green walls terrorizing me with the idea I might be here forever. I kept hearing the panic and disbelief in Paul’s voice when I called him at our apartment. I wondered if I’d ever get to return to Chelsea, to Paul, our cats, our friends, and my work at the institute for Avian Studies.

  I thought of Anne. She must have gone to the hospital with Frederik. I wondered how badly I had injured him—not because I care about him, but because I’m worried about my sister and what he’ll do to her and the children if he recovers. He doesn’t deserve her lying for him.

  On my way into jail, I passed through two sets of locked metal doors. The sound of them clanging shut has lodged deep in my brain. Guards were stationed at desks behind bulletproof glass, with just a slit at the bottom, through which one sheriff’s deputy handed my papers. A radio was playing, and between the first set of doors I heard the sung phrase “We stole some clothes, but I wanted love; I know that my sister did too …” And by the time the sheriff’s deputies, one on each side of me and my heart skittering up my throat, rushed me through the second set of steel doors, my mind called up the next part of the song: “… Lilly Pulitzer gave up her ghosts; we wore pink, but inside we were blue …” I can’t be sure whether I actually heard that second phrase or only imagined it. But it didn’t matte
r because suddenly I was not only hearing “Crime Spree”—a song from long ago—but singing along with Anne, years before she’d met Frederik, one summer day in Central Park, lying on our blanket in the Sheep Meadow, tanning in bikinis and listening to WABC. We were fifteen and sixteen. Blue sky, sun, the park, being together.

  The Sheep Meadow was packed with sunbathers, but we found a clear spot without too many little kids around, within easy sight of three Collegiate School boys we knew from the Gold and Silvers, the Christmas dance at the Plaza, who were playing Frisbee.

  We sprayed Sun-in on strategic face-framing strands of our black-brown hair—blond was one dream that would never come true. My hair was long and straight, Anne’s short and wavy; I wanted hers, and she wanted mine.

  Scorching heat filled the city like milk in a bowl—it rose up from the sidewalks, the pavement, and the park’s walkways, benches, dry grass, and lumpy boulders of New York gneiss and Manhattan schist.

  “Crime Spree” came on, and we liked the song’s cockiness, the attitude: two sisters against the hard world, behaving badly in ways we would only sing about. They’d lost each other somehow, an idea unthinkable to us.

  She kissed the lawyers on Folly Beach

  I scammed on Azalea Square

  Northern good girls on a southern crime spree

  On the road with nothing to wear.

  Sometimes the world is a crazy place,

  It gives and it takes right away,

  If I could trade everything just for a space

  In her life, well I’d do that today.

  We had to leave home but we didn’t know why

  We each had a stone in our shoe

  We spoke the same language no one else could hear

  Big sister, you know I miss you.

  Kids came around with black garbage bags full of ice and Heinekens, and Anne bought six beers for us.

  We were underage, but she was my older sister, and no one cared anyway. We both liked to get numb. We lay on our stomachs, bikini tops untied to drive a group of Frisbee-playing Trinity School boys crazy, and she told me the tallest was named Park, and she kind of liked him.

  Sitting in jail, I wished for “Crime Spree” to be a sign. I felt the spirits of our young selves fly down from the heaven where wisps of brave, radiant teenage girls go once their dull, inducted middle-aged replacements take over.

  I had to believe that the ghosts of the young, wild Burke sisters had taken over the guards’ favorite radio station just long enough to blast twelve seconds of that song to give me strength and remind me of my sister: not the Anne now, but the Anne then. To remind me of why I’d done this for her.

  I want the song and memory to drive away the knowledge that I’d completed Frederik’s job for him, convinced Anne to cut me from her and the children’s lives for good. The spider silk of today’s reconnection would break. We would become reestranged, only in a much worse way. The song is in my head, but so is a map of the future.

  I tried to kill her husband. My lawyer will say I was defending my sister, but Frederik will convince Anne at least to pretend to see it his way. He will get her to deny my story and show the court my letters and e-mails, proof of my feelings about him. I will serve time in jail, no matter how good Mary McLaughlin—a friend of Sarah’s—might be. Anne will never visit or write to me. Her kids will grow up and I’ll never know them.

  A man who fears and despises me will write my future.

  • • •

  For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit

  www.penguin.com/lricechecklist

  Also by Luanne Rice

  How We Started

  Little Night

  The Silver Boat

  Deep Blue Sea for Beginners

  The Geometry of Sisters

  Last Kiss

  What Matters Most

  The Edge of Winter

  Sandcastles

  Summer of Roses

  Summer’s Child

  Silver Bells

  Beach Girls

  Dance with Me

  The Perfect Summer

  The Secret Hour

  True Blue

  Safe Harbor

  Summer Light

  Firefly Beach

  Dream Country

  Follow the Stars Home

  Cloud Nine

  Home Fires

  Blue Moon

  Secrets of Paris

  Stone Heart

  Crazy in Love

  Angels All Over Town