The Never Never Sisters

by L. Alison Heller

  “Shouldn’t you wait for Dave?”

  I swiveled to peer through the front window of the restaurant at Dave’s body language: hunched and pacing, phone at ear. “He said to start. You’re aware, right, that there’s no way Sloane’s actually coming?”

  “I don’t know.” My mom pressed her fingers against the stem of her glass. “She mentioned a flight.”

  “For when?”

  “Saturday.” I glanced at my dad, who leaned back and nodded again, satisfied that the story was being told and that he wasn’t the one telling it.

  “Let’s talk about something else.” My mom jutted out her chin toward the door. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Dave coming in from outside, rearranging his features into a can-do grin.

  “Why can’t he know?”

  “Let’s just see what we’re dealing with first before we tell people.”

  “He’s not people, he’s—”

  She lifted her own fork and knife and started cutting through her radicchio to signal that she was done talking about it. Dave pulled out his chair and sat down in the silence of us carefully examining our silverware.

  “It’s still brutally hot out there.” You’d have to be listening for it to hear, but his voice had a nervous edge. “What’d I miss?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Don’t say nothing.” Greens were on my mom’s fork, poised upside down in front of her mouth. She had always eaten like someone in a period film, and I had never been sure at what point they’d covered that when she was growing up in the tenement off Flatbush Avenue. “I was just telling your wife about a cute dress I saw.”

  Dave’s work phone rang again and he ignored it.

  “You need to get that?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” he said. “They don’t need me right at this moment. They just think they do. Cute dress, huh?”

  chapter five

  THE AIR OUTSIDE was still heavy with heat when Dave and I walked home from the restaurant. I pulled my hair up off the back of my neck with one hand and fanned it with the other in my best Southern belle impression. “My golly, Mr. Turner. Isn’t sundown supposed to promise some relief?”

  Dave was silent.

  I dropped the twang. “We weren’t talking about you in there.”

  “I know.” His hands were in his pockets, his eyes straight ahead on the sidewalk. Obviously his lighthearted dinner banter had been an act.

  “We were talking about Sloane.”

  “Your sister Sloane?”

  “Are there any others?”

  “There’s a Sloane at work. In word processing.”

  “Yeah, not that one.” I shoved him affectionately, even though it really was far too hot for contact; in response to my touch, his shirt suctioned to his side. “She e-mailed about a possible visit. They’re being really bottled up.”

  “They probably just don’t want to focus on it. Why waste time planning for something that’s never going to happen?”

  “Maybe.” My mom didn’t have to divulge the real reason she’d excluded the Boy from the announcement—she was embarrassed, worried that sharing our demons was like showing off a clubfoot on the first date. Dave and I had been married for two years, after all, and only a handful of people really knew about Sloane: the three of us and our close family friends the Rabinowitzes, who had been around that last, horrible year and borne witness, namely by babysitting me for long stretches of time.

  Dave’s work phone rang. He removed it from his pocket and glanced at the screen before returning it. “When’s the last time she was here?”

  “My mom has flown to California a few times to try to see her, I think, but the last time Sloane was here and I knew about it was”—I calculated—“twenty years ago.”

  “How old is she now?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  “I almost forgot she’s a real person.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought earlier.” She hadn’t been a real person to me as much as a rallying cry. At-ti-ca! Remember the Maine! The mistakes of Sloane Reinhardt! If I strained hard enough, I could access faint memories of her, normal sister stuff: running through the sprinkler in our old front yard and the time she hit me with a rented tennis racquet at the town courts and wailed over and over, “But it was an accident!” I’d needed stitches under my eye, and she’d spent all of her allowance money on a teddy bear for me with my name stitched on its heart.

  This was the one I’d never forget, the one that was crystal clear while the others were hazy: I’d been a babyish eleven, still sleeping every night with a night-light, a pile of stuffed animals and my bedroom door wide-open. I’d like to pretend this lack of maturity was a reaction to family tensions, but I can’t; I don’t remember sensing them at all.

  That night, I was asleep until I heard a crash that made me sit up in my bed, my stomach knotting in fear. I lay back down, but then I heard a clanging and a man’s voice—rough, loud. I waited for my parents to do something before I remembered that they were out, which meant Mrs. Chanokowski, the neighbor from three houses away, was snoring on the daybed in the spare room down the hall. I went into Sloane’s room, but it was empty.

  My clock said one in the morning, so I tried to go back to sleep, but I heard more voices and then laughter. I could tell from the way the light shone up the stairs that it was coming from the living room, so I grabbed a baton—I still hadn’t mastered twirling, but perhaps I could swing it at someone—and inched down the stairs until I could peer down.

  They were in a circle, five of them—Sloane and four guys who were probably all still in high school. To me, they looked like men: broad shouldered, stubbly faced, hands like cuts of raw meat. One of them was passed out. Another had a little metal canister and a yellow party balloon. He filled the balloon, shot the air in his mouth like I’d seen people do with party balloons and helium, but then instead of his voice coming out like Mickey Mouse, he fell back, gasping and laughing, before crashing into a glass cabinet that broke in pieces around him. He rubbed his head with his hand, and there was blood everywhere.

  “Fuck,” he said, and Sloane grabbed one of my mom’s throw pillows and pressed it to his head before grabbing the balloon. It probably was from a prior indulgence, but at the time I connected her nosebleed to the balloon: first a trickle, then a gush. I shouted out, and when she turned toward my voice, her eyes were glinting and narrowing.

  “Fuck,” said another one of the guys, and I have since realized that he was being decent, having spotted me standing there in my nightgown and appreciating that it was not an ideal scene into which to insert an eleven-year-old armed with a glitter baton. Sloane didn’t seem to care, though. I don’t know if my memory has embellished this, but she started to laugh uncontrollably and offered me the balloon.

  Mrs. Chanokowski appeared, her hair in some sort of shower cap, swatting the boys with her hands like they were flies until eventually all of them buzzed away defensively. (Not the passed-out one, of course, but he was gone by the time I crept downstairs to find my dad talking brightly and making waffles instead of reading the paper as he usually did in the morning.)

  People talk about defense mechanisms like they’re a weakness, but spend enough time in the mental health field and you’ll recognize them as a safety net. Consider repression: some experts say it’s dangerous, that suppressed memories inevitably return to bite you in the keister, as my mom might call it, and that can be true.

  I was pretty sure, though, that the acrobatics my mind had done to dim my other memories of Sloane were in the name of self-protection. That image—her possessed eyes, the blood from her nose, the way she offered up the nitrous oxide to me like she was inducting me into some club—kept me from mourning her loss unnecessarily. My family, all I needed or k
new after my sister’s disappearance, was my mom, my dad and now Dave. Sloane had fundamentally different wiring from the rest of us and belonged somewhere else.

  When Dave’s phone rang again, we looked at each other, rolling our eyes at the work intrusion, and I smiled permission to answer. He shook his head.

  “But shouldn’t you? In light of . . .”

  He lifted it out of his pocket and shut the thing off. “No,” he said. “Sometimes, you just have to draw a line in the sand and not be available.”

  “At least they still seem to really need you.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he said, but his expression was sour enough to make me suspect he didn’t agree.

  chapter six

  Vanessa

  ON THE WAY home from dinner with the kids, I held out my arm to make Frankie do the Regency stroll—his term, not mine. I’d first seen it done on a BBC production of Mansfield Park. One person held out her arm straight and the other linked his arm around hers, tucking in his hand like the spare end of a belt.

  “Vanessa.” Frankie sometimes, like now, sighed my name instead of saying it. “As we’ve discussed, life was not better then.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “How?”

  “The entertainment, for one. They put on plays and concerts instead of watching those Housewives shows. Also, the fashion: Empire waist dresses are highly flattering.”

  “We wouldn’t have done any of that.” Frankie held up three fingers, pressing them down as he listed. “You would have been a scullery maid. I would have probably been tubercular. And you know opium would’ve made a huge appearance.”

  We strolled in silence after that. Frankie was thinking about work or insurance policies, and I was thinking about whether and when there would be a call from my elder daughter.

  There was no logical reason Sloane wouldn’t call—you don’t e-mail someone after two decades unless you’ve seriously thought about seeing them—but I’d gone all belts and suspenders to make sure she did. I’d given her my cell and Frankie’s cell, and the home line, and even Frankie’s office number, because Missy was an excellent secretary, so highly organized that you had to wonder why she’d settled for being an assistant. I didn’t understand it—young women really had options these days. Missy should be running the company, not managing Frankie’s calendar, and someday she and I would get to the bottom of that. For now, I was grateful that she was still Frankie’s secretary and that I could count on her to track us down.

  The doorman, Tom, smiled pleasantly as we walked into our lobby. He probably had no clue we had two children. If Sloane appeared in the lobby, he’d buzz her up, thinking she was just a guest. Maybe even one of those bike messengers, depending on how she was dressing these days.

  When I first saw the incoming e-mail From: S. Reinhardt, my stomach sank and rose at the same time. I dialed Cherie with trembling hands and, together, we shopped it out. I bought a leather handbag—tough, structured, with pounds of hardware hanging off it. I emerged from the store calmer.

  What if her voice was cold and frosty, like the last time we’d spoken? How would I handle it? Or what if it was welcoming? Or, god forbid, slurred? There was something animalistic about the way my senses heightened when I imagined the scenarios. The leather bag—all skins and guts—had been the perfect purchase. I’d have to scour Madison Avenue for some feathers too. Maybe a pelt.

  But Paige, tonight at dinner, had barely reacted to the news. It was as if I told her I’d bumped into Kirsty, the hygienist from Maplemount Dentistry. No, Kirsty might have inspired a familiar smile; she’d always put together a crackerjack bonus bag, with the different flavors of floss and the toothbrushes and stickers. It was more as if I’d announced to Paige that it might possibly drizzle this weekend. “Can you believe her reaction?” I asked Frankie.

  “Hmm?” He was obviously lost in thought about his insurance widgets.

  “Her reaction? It was so . . . blasé.”

  “Better than the alternative.”

  “Yes. A real relief.” We had painstakingly bricked up the drama for Paige, hidden it behind a wall so that she could just grow up normally rather than in the shadow of Sloane’s issues. “We’ll keep the first get-together just between the nuclears, as quiet as possible.”

  Frankie, bless him, did not respond. It was ridiculous to pretend that nothing had changed in twenty years, but I didn’t want Sloane to feel she’d been replaced, that we’d moved on without her.

  When we got home, Frankie got absorbed by his study—I swear that man was going to get fused to his chair one day like that Shel Silverstein poem I read to the kids about the boy who grew into his TV set—and I went straight to the kitchen. The architect had initially installed a computer system to make our apartment “smart.” It had been composed of one slim tablet, a PA speaker system and some earphones, and I couldn’t figure out the damn thing; anytime I tried to phone anyone or watch 60 Minutes for that matter, I randomly pressed buttons, but nothing ever happened. So, we’d scrapped the streamlined future. Nothing more high-tech than dimmer lights, we’d agreed, except for the heated floors and towel racks, which were heaven in the winter.

  We ended up using the early-model cordless with attached message machine that we’d had for years. The SPAM luncheon meat of phones, it had proved indestructible through being accidentally left in the fridge overnight and once, by a teenaged Paige, outside on the deck during a thunderstorm. By this point, there was something comfortingly familiar about the way it blinked red, as though whatever its news was, I’d heard worse before.

  Yet now the steady blink made my pulse, which had just started to return to normal, race. Add in the tunnel vision and the way my feet froze to the spot, and I again thought of animals: fight-or-flight response. Who was I kidding with the leather and the pelts? Those were for warriors. I was the opposite of a warrior, whatever that was, passive and waiting, no weapons, just hoping for the best.

  I pressed it as if she were somewhere watching me, gauging my commitment by the force of my action. I jabbed my finger on the button as hard as I could, to show how much I wanted her home.

  chapter seven

  I HAD TWO hours until my first appointment and decided to use the time to organize my office bookcase by color. I pushed aside the azure Getting to Yes to make room for indigo Love Poems and Memories. Maybe because the blue reminded me of the speckled linoleum at the Patty Melt, it popped into my head as a tidy little thought: I still had questions about Dave’s story.

  Something—shame? fear?—had kept him from opening up about the whole story behind his suspension. Since the Patty Melt, he’d been hyperfocused on work. “Don’t even bother knocking,” he’d said.

  My phone rang with an unknown number, which was somewhat of a relief from the tension building in my stomach.

  “Dr. Reinhardt?”

  “This is Paige.”

  “Paige, it’s Helene Jacoby from the other day.”

  “Hi, Helene. You know I’m not a doctor, right?”

  “You’re not?”

  “I do have a master’s in counseling, though.”

  “Fine, that’s fine. We want to come in again.”

  “Great. Scott . . . too?”

  “Yes, he’s totally on board. We both felt very comfortable with you and liked your style.” I suppressed a smile at her word choice; at that exact instant I was trying to discern which of two book spines had more red in the purple. They thought I had style—wait till they saw the bookcase.

  “The thing is—Scott’s feeling stressed about work. Do you ever meet on weekends?”

  Little did Helene know that this particular summer I would’ve been grateful if they wanted to meet on Saturday nights. “Yes, if I’m free, I’m happy doing that.”

  “I’m traveling for work, so how about next Saturday?”
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  “Fine. Does eleven o’clock work?”

  “Great. See you then.”

  I hung up, feeling somewhat encouraged and energized. Obviously I could still read people—I’d sensed in that first meeting that Scott’s discomfort might be related to missing work. Whatever his concerns were, whatever his hesitation, we’d get to the bottom of them. As long as he was willing, I could coax him along.

  I stepped back and assessed the bookcase. Objectively, the color progression was far more soothing, key for a therapist’s office. I wasn’t sure Dr. Max, who shared the space with me during evenings and who owned some of the books, would agree, though, so I opened my one locked drawer and took out an entire bag of gummy bears. I would leave it for Dr. Max with a note with a smiley face. I was pretty sure the sugar would erase any objections.

  I don’t remember who started the tradition or when, but Dave and I got a kick out of trading terrible pickup lines. Dave was much better than I was, and I sometimes wondered if he’d spent a past life trolling in European discos; he’d lift one eyebrow, lean a little too close and breathe right in my mouth: “I lost my number. Can I have yours?”

  Last Hanukkah, he’d handed me an envelope from Murray’s Cheese, promising one cheese selection a month for a year. At first I didn’t get it, but on the card he’d written: Are those space pants you’re wearing? Because your ass is out of this world.

  I looked up, and he wiggled his eyebrows and leaned close. “Get it? Cheese of the month? Get it? Get it?”

  The cheese usually arrived on the first Thursday of each month, so I checked for it when I got home for lunch. Alas, the box hadn’t been delivered, so I went up to the apartment without the guaranteed laugh that we both needed.

  Per Dave’s instructions, I didn’t bother shouting a greeting to him before going straight into the kitchen. He had left his work phone on the kitchen counter, right next to an opened box of cereal and two empty soda bottles. When I opened the fridge to get some water, I felt the phone’s long vibrations—a mini earthquake rattling the hundreds of tiny Cap’n Crunches next door.