London Undone

by Nan Higgins

  “It’s okay.” She looked at her phone. “Oh my God.”

  “What?” Quentin asked.

  “I’ve missed six calls from her in the last ten minutes.” She hit the call button and held the phone to her ear. Jasmine answered halfway through the first ring, sounding breathless.

  “London! Thank God.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Your sister was just here looking for you.”

  “My sister?” Her voice squeaked. “There must be some mistake. Diana wouldn’t set so much as a toenail in Hell.”

  “But she did. And when I told her you weren’t here, she said she would just come to your house. I’ve been trying to reach you since the minute she left, to warn you. I didn’t even know she knew where you lived.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “I didn’t either,” London said. “Jas, she’s here. I gotta go.”

  “What’s going on?” Reggie asked as soon as London hung up the phone. “Who’s here?”

  “Diana.” London shifted around her guests toward the door.

  “Who the hell is Diana?” Herb asked.

  Betty shushed him, and Reggie answered, “London’s sister,” at the same time.

  London opened the door, and standing there, looking as regal in her designer coat and scarf as her royal namesake, was Diana Craft. “London,” Diana said.

  “Diana.”

  “You’re not surprised to see me. Did your employee warn you of my arrival?”

  “My friend told me you were coming, yes.” She wondered if Diana knew what she was doing. Her sister had a terrible knack of putting a distance between London and the people with whom she felt close. Was it mere snobbery or a deliberate move to make her feel isolated? Either way, it never failed to make hot shards of anger cut through her.

  “May I come in out of the cold?”

  London hesitated, then opened the door wider and stepped aside. Diana frowned as she looked from face to face around the coffee table.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I’d be interrupting a party.”

  “That’s probably because you didn’t call first,” London said.

  Reggie quickly crossed to the door. She reached out. “Hello, Diana, you may not remember me. I’m Reggie.”

  “Why, yes.” Diana shook Reggie’s hand using only the tips of her fingers. “You were one of London’s friends who accompanied her to our mother’s funeral. It was good of you to come.”

  “She’s my girlfriend,” London said between gritted teeth. The anger hadn’t even begun to subside before this fresh wave hit. “Not my friend.”

  Reggie rested her hand on London’s arm and said, “Diana, we just started eating dinner. It’s lasagna. Would you like me to fix you a plate?”

  Diana surprised everyone when she said, “Lasagna sounds lovely. Thank you.”

  “Here.” Grant grabbed his plate and wine. “I’ve finished my food. You can take my spot.”

  She looked at the coffee table and the now vacant spot on the floor Grant had designated for her. She hesitated before moving.

  “I’ll take your coat,” Grant said.

  “Thank you.” She removed it and handed it to him. She slowly descended to the floor, then sat, legs tucked under her and hands resting tentatively on the table.

  London followed Reggie into the kitchen as Herb began to speak to Diana. “Awfully snowy night for a road trip,” he said.

  “What in the actual hell is my sister doing here?”

  “I have no idea,” Reggie whispered. Then out loud, she said, “Hand me a plate.”

  “This is a nightmare. And you! Why did you invite her to dinner?”

  “What should I have done? Let the two of you keep shooting icicle daggers at each other with your eyes at the front door?”

  “Maybe.” London grabbed a couple pieces of garlic bread and put them on the plate beside the lasagna.

  “Does Diana drink white or red wine?”

  “How should I know?”

  “She’s your twin!”

  “Reg, neither of us were even legal drinking age when I got tossed out.”

  Reggie sighed. “Fair enough.” She turned to the living room. “Diana, we have red and white wine, if you’d like either one.”

  Diana half turned and said, “Just some sparkling water will be fine.”

  “Oh, ah…we don’t have sparkling water.”

  “All right. White wine, please.”

  Reggie grabbed a stemmed glass from the cupboard and poured the wine.

  “Not too full,” London whispered. “We don’t want her to get so tipsy she can’t drive home.”

  Reggie put her hands on London’s shoulders. “Breathe, baby. Breathe. Let her eat some dinner, say whatever she came to say, and then we’ll send her on her way. Okay? I need you to just breathe through this night.”

  London took several deep breaths and nodded. “Okay.” She took the plate and wine glass and went into the living room with Reggie close behind her.

  As much as she didn’t want to deal with Diana, London was proud of herself. Her initial instinct was to send her sister back out into the snowstorm from which she had come, but she resisted. She would face whatever tonight brought, and she would live to tell the tale.

  “Here you go.” London set the food and drink in front of her sister. “Bon appétit.”

  Quentin giggled. “Bon appe-what?”

  “It’s French,” London said. “And fancy.”

  “It’s weird,” he said.

  “Well, you know me,” London said, and even though her estranged sister was sitting on the floor in her living room, she couldn’t help smiling at him. Something in his laugh and teasing reminded her of Tate.

  Diana cut the lasagna into several tiny pieces while everyone else in the room looked on. She resembled a surgeon making the most delicate and strategic of slices. Finally, she put a miniscule bite in her mouth, chewing slowly.

  “Why, this is delicious,” she said once she swallowed. “London, did you make this?”

  Quentin started giggling again. “London can’t even cook a salad!”

  Everyone laughed, including London. “It’s true. If it’s not microwaveable, it’s not for me.”

  “I see.” Diana took a sip of wine. “Some things never change.”

  “What do you mean?” Reggie asked.

  “I had an Easy-Bake Oven when we were kids. One day I came home after gymnastics, and my room smelled horrible, like burning rubber. London had decided to make brownies, but she couldn’t find the pans that came with the oven, so she put the batter into some ice cube trays. They, of course, melted, and in the meantime, London had gone outside to play.”

  As the others howled with laughter, London shook her head. “I forgot all about that.”

  “You’ve been a terrible cook since day one,” Diana said with a small smile.

  “To be fair, that’s a terrible toy. Someone could’ve gotten really hurt with one of those. Who gives an oven to children?”

  “I don’t think they got much hotter than a heat lamp.” Grant chuckled. “How much harm could they really do?”

  “Tell that to the stench in my room,” Diana said. “It took days to air out the smell.” But she was laughing now too.

  Reggie looked around the table. “With the exception of Diana, it looks like everyone is done. Does anybody want more food?” Everyone shook their heads. “I’ll start clearing the plates. Quentin, Grant, can you help me out?”

  “Sure,” Quentin said. The three of them became a whirlwind of action, and within minutes, the table was clear.

  “Oh, rats,” Reggie said, returning from the kitchen with Grant and Quentin.

  “What’s the matter?” Quentin said in a voice that sounded rehearsed.

  “Well, I forgot to get dessert, and we don’t have anything here in the house.”

  “No dessert? That’s terrible!” Grant said, and London scowled at him. He grinned back at her an
d winked.

  “It really is,” Reggie said. “Mama, Dad, would you be willing to go out for dessert? We can hit BabyCakes for some sweets.”

  “I wouldn’t be opposed to some cake,” Betty said.

  “And I could stand to stretch my legs.” Herb rose from the couch.

  “London, I’ll get your usual flourless chocolate cake.” Reggie kissed London on the head even as London frowned at her. “Diana, can we bring you back anything?”

  “Do they have crème brûlée?”

  “They sure do,” Grant said. “Best in the city.”

  “We’ll be back,” Reggie said. “Well, Quentin and I will.”

  Five people put on five coats faster than London would have thought possible, and she was suddenly alone with her sister for the first time in two decades.

  London was struck by the divisive nature of her thoughts. On one hand, she had years’ worth of questions to ask. She had half a lifetime of pain and anger stored, and tonight, Diana had appeared on her doorstep, the only time anyone in her family had come to her in all this time. She knew this might be her only chance to say everything she’d wanted to say. On the other hand, she didn’t know where to start and didn’t know if she had the energy to open up a conversation that had no clear beginning or end.

  Diana dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her paper napkin. It was from a holiday set London designed and sold both in the shop and in New York and Los Angeles. It said, “Ho Ho Hoes have the happiest holidays.” London didn’t think Diana read the napkin because if she had, she would have voiced her disdain.

  “This really was a delicious meal,” Diana said. “Thank you for having me.”

  “Thank you for having me?” London couldn’t help letting out a coarse laugh. “As if this is a normal dinner with family who hasn’t shut me out for the last twenty years, and you’re not dropping a bomb by showing up here tonight.”

  “Regardless, saying thank you is the polite thing to do.” Her eyes narrowed.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Diana looked across the room at the stout tree covered in twinkle lights and Star Wars decorations. “Is that the tree you stole?”

  “That’s the one. Did you drive two hours to get it back?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why?”

  “He’s taking back his offer for the extra fifty thousand dollars,” Diana said. “And he’s trying to get Larry Kopp to rescind Mother’s inheritance money to you as well. I don’t know that he’ll succeed, and I’m sure you’ll be getting a letter detailing everything. But I thought you should know.”

  “You came to tell me that money I’ve refused to accept is going to be rescinded?”

  Diana paused, drank the remaining wine, and set her glass down on the table with a clunk. “The letter you wrote, the one that started all of this…may I see it? Please?”

  She nearly said no. Who did Diana think she was, coming into her home and demanding to see something so private? Except it didn’t really seem like a demand. More like a plea and a slightly desperate one at that. It was the nervous desperation that caused London to agree.

  “All right.” London rose unsteadily from the floor. She forced her racing heart to slow down with a few deep breaths and wished she could find a way to slow the thoughts moving through her mind at record speed. “I’ll be right back. You can move to the couch if you’d be more comfortable.”

  London got the worn piece of green construction paper from her nightstand. As she always did when she picked it up, she traced some of the letters before going back into the living room where Diana waited. She was surprised to see that her sister still sat on the floor. She grabbed a bottle of wine from the counter, joined Diana, and filled both their glasses to the top before sliding the letter across the table.

  Diana picked it up, and London was fascinated when she slid her fingertips across the childish handwriting before beginning to read. She sipped her wine and watched her twin. She hadn’t really looked at her in a long time.

  While London was a mixture of her parents as far as her appearance went, Diana could have been their mother’s clone. It wasn’t just her facial features—although her delicate ice blue eyes and fine lips were nearly identical to Grace Craft’s—she also carried herself in the same regal manner, dressed in the same classic and understated style, and wore her hair in a similar bob that their mother had made her signature throughout most of her life. Only her hair color was different. Diana’s was more platinum than their mother’s dark blond locks, and London had a feeling that had more to do with visits to the salon than genetics.

  It was odd to see someone who looked so much like their mother sitting before her. An achy twinge spread from her throat to her chest as she was reminded again of all the things she’d never get to say to Grace.

  Diana looked up with her eyes full of questions. She pressed the old paper between her palms before setting it gently on the coffee table, careful to check for water spots or particles of food, and finding an acceptable place for it.

  “Do you remember the day we wrote this letter?” Diana asked.

  London gasped with the shock of Diana’s question. “What do you mean, we wrote it?”

  “I mean, we wrote it. You really don’t remember?”

  “No. I’ve been racking my brain trying to remember who I was when I wrote this. I haven’t been able to figure out how I could be so different now than I was then.”

  “Well, to be fair, I don’t really know you now. But my impression is that you aren’t that different.”

  “How is it that we wrote this letter?” She took another drink of wine; it wasn’t quite a gulp, but it was close. “Can you tell me that much?”

  Diana took a sip from her own glass and rotated the stem in her fingers, making the liquid swirl inside it. She stared down into the glass as a fortune teller would look into a cup of tea leaves. “Ms. Watson gave us a week to do the assignment, and you forgot about it. You were always leaving your work until the last minute, and still, you were so good at school. That killed me. You were so good at it, and you barely even tried while I did everything early, studied twice as hard, and got the same grades as you.

  “Anyway, you forgot this assignment, and somehow you charmed the teacher into giving you an extra day to finish it. Honestly, I think you selectively forgot it because you were in a complete panic about it. ‘What am I supposed to say to my future self? I don’t know who I’m gonna be,’ you kept saying.”

  “That sounds like me,” London said, and she couldn’t help giggling.

  “Exactly. You begged me to help you write it because you just didn’t know what to say.”

  “And you did?”

  Diana nodded. “I did. I thought of all the things I wanted to do when I was grown, and I told them to you. You wrote them all down.”

  London picked the fibrous paper up and stared at it. “You mean, this was all you?” For a moment, the world seemed to have fallen out from under her, and she felt as if she was floating in a whirlwind of disbelief.

  A few years earlier, London and Tate had ridden Power Tower, a ride at Cedar Point that lifted its riders two hundred and forty feet into the air and dropped them back down to earth. It was the only roller coaster that had ever made London feel queasy. “Never again,” she’d told Tate.

  She felt now as she had then. Her stomach seemed to have risen to her throat, making it nearly impossible to swallow. She was dizzy and unsteady and felt desperate for something solid to grab on to.

  “A lot of it,” Diana admitted. “Although we didn’t want our letters to be identical, so you thought of a few of your own things to add. The dog named Chowder was completely your idea and so was the volunteer work. Look, I know we haven’t been in touch in many years, and I know…” She paused to take a longer drink. “I know it’s basically my fault. I just wanted to remind you, before you got any official communication about the money being rescinded, that the terms outlined in this
letter were never about what you wanted. This was the result of your procrastination in fifth grade and my attempt to dictate what I thought a proper adulthood would look like.”

  London looked at the letter for a long time. This document she’d been using as a makeshift map to try to navigate her life since her mother died was nothing more than someone else’s version of what being a grown-up would mean. This was why she felt so lost. The letter had been her something solid, the thing she’d held on to since her mother and Tate died. She set the piece of paper down and felt a wave of sadness wash over her as she did. It felt as if she was giving up a security blanket that had seen her through some of her hardest days.

  “London? Are you okay?”

  “I was never going to take the money,” she said. “I was actually pretty salty about it. But I have been kinda…well, pretty obsessed with this letter.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I just…I wanted to understand who I was then, and how I came to be so different. Different from my former self, different from the rest of my family to the point where we haven’t been able to successfully be within five hundred feet of each other for almost twenty years.”

  “Well, we’ve been in the same room for over an hour with no major catastrophes.”

  “The night is still young.”

  To that, Diana raised her glass and clinked it against London’s, and they both drank deeply. “You may not be very different from who you were at ten years old,” Diana said, “but you’ve always been different from Mother, Dad, and me. It scared them, you know? They were always a little afraid of you.”

  “Because I’m so terrifying.” She was being sarcastic, but Diana nodded.

  “To our parents, image was everything. How scary must it have been to have a daughter who never cared what anyone thought of her? How terrifying to have created a person who valued expression and freedom over what was proper and accepted?”

  London thought about that. “And you? Were you scared of me too? Is that why you stayed away?”

  “No. I was jealous of you because their approval didn’t dictate your life the way it dictated mine. Do you know, I could cross every item off the list of that letter? Well, except for the Chowder dog.”