The Never Never Sisters

by L. Alison Heller

“Hey,” said Dave.

  I ignored him and pushed faster through the heat.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Paige! Wait a minute!” And then he ran away to grab the door of an opening taxicab. Five girls spilled out, laughing and readjusting from the journey, yanking up tube tops, pulling down shorts.

  Dave held open the door. I hesitated.

  “Come on.” He gestured that I should get in. “I apologize. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’ll follow you to the subway if you insist, but wouldn’t this be better?”

  I slid into the back, my eyes laser-beaming ahead toward the windshield. Dave gave the driver our address.

  “I’m losing it, Paige.” Dave turned to me. “You know how much my job means to me.”

  “I thought you were fine.”

  “Not.” He cleared his throat. “I’m not.”

  “No kidding.” We were stopped in traffic, and a stream of people passed directly in front of our cab as they jaywalked across the street. “You need to get a grip.”

  “I know.”

  “This is a job, Dave. A stupid job. You can always go in-house for my dad. I mean, it’s not like we need to worry about—”

  “It’s what I do.”

  “Worry?”

  “No. The job you just called stupid.”

  “It’s not who you are, though.”

  “It is.” I searched his face for signs that he was kidding and found none. “Come on, Paige. Be honest.”

  “Your job is the most important thing about you? No.” I shook my head. “That’s crazy.”

  “It’s not. You haven’t known me any other way. It’s not like you married some . . . guy who paints street murals.”

  He slumped against the cab door, as if exhausted from his great exposé. It wasn’t my truth, though, and this—one-dimensional and hopeless—wasn’t my Dave. Had this guy asked me out four years prior, I would have given him the wrong number.

  I could see, though, how being so ambitious and devoted could result in Dave’s now being completely unmoored, how someone’s strengths could, in great concentration, become his weakness, curdling those same characteristics you initially found so attractive.

  I checked myself for the unfairness. Had Dave upon meeting me known how frequently I’d make him rehash things he didn’t want to, or, for that matter, had he seen me first thing in the morning instead of after an hour of grooming, he probably wouldn’t have asked for my number in the first place.

  We were past all of that now. We had committed to each other, for better or curdled worse.

  “Trust me.” Dave’s gaze charged into mine as though he knew exactly what I was thinking. “You can’t understand what this is like for me.”

  “I think your perspective is off.”

  “No, I mean, it’s good that you can’t. Your life has been simple, easy. I don’t fault you for it. It’s the kind of life someone should have.” His voice broke on the next words. “But I was nothing before this job. Just hard work poured into one goal. I’ve done everything anyone has ever asked of me at work. And now”—he snapped his fingers, which were in his lap—“it’s gone.”

  I felt cut by his words. Sloane’s disappearance and the void that followed had been neither simple nor easy. But how would Dave have known how panicked I now felt about her arrival? It was news to even me. Apparently, there was a leak in the neat little “Sloane” container in my brain. It was like I’d opened up my bag to find that my thermos had dripped milky, sweet coffee over everything inside, leaving it damp and permanently pungent. I put my hand on his leg. “What you’ve built is not gone, Dave. But even if it were, you can build it again somewhere else.”

  The cab picked up some speed, edging north on the West Side Highway. Dave fiddled with the seat belt nylon and stared straight ahead. “I feel like I’m drowning.”

  At home, Dave slouched on the couch and turned on the fireworks. I scanned the shelves of the refrigerator for food, picturing that Midwestern family looking up at the exploding reds and blues, tentatively nibbling at the roast beef sandwiches, weighing the temptations of the food against the likelihood that I cooked with arsenic.

  When I heard the booms of the 1812 Overture, I stuck my head into the living room to watch, but Dave had switched the channel to financial news. I tiptoed past him into his office. Not that I wasn’t allowed in there—I just thought it’d be easier to avoid the discussion. At his desk, I unfolded the newspaper that had earlier made him flinch. We didn’t have a subscription to the Metropolitan, and I wondered: if Dave hadn’t left our apartment, how had he managed to pick up a copy? I started to read, hoping it could tell me something about my husband’s state of mind.

  Donald DeFranza was almost home, his key in his hand, about to unlock the front door of his luxury four-story mansion in Englewood, New Jersey, when they swarmed. As his two young children and wife watched horrified from the living room window, DeFranza was surrounded from all sides by federal agents. Before they could touch him, though, he collapsed on the front steps.

  “It was crazy,” said Byron James, his neighbor. “The feds came up on him and the guy just fainted. He would have cracked his freaking head open, but he fell right over one of the shrubs. Lucky, I guess.”

  Or not. The first words DeFranza heard when he came to? “You’re under arrest!”

  Authorities have not yet released many details on DeFranza, thirty-five, the latest Wall Streeter caught in the insider trading scandal hovering around Jelly Rocher of Mission Fund. Some are speculating that he followed the same path of Morgan Bell and Ricardo Lalouse before him: paying contacts hundreds of thousands of dollars for illegal tips and then using that information to line the pockets of Mission Fund executives.

  Experts say DeFranza is a bigger catch: “This is potentially huge,” said an unnamed source who worked with him. “DeFranza is big, he traded big, and he was a favorite son of the big guy himself, Rocher.”

  When I went back into the living room with a pile of take-out menus, Dave switched back to the fireworks. “Lots of exciting new shapes this year,” he said.

  “Such as?” I tried to inject some enthusiasm into my voice.

  “Watch and see.”

  I stood above him for a second before sitting. “I’m sorry for forcing you out tonight. It was selfish.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “We both sucked.”

  We rarely bickered, Dave and I. I’d listen to couples air grievances all day and tell them that conflict was natural in the face of living so closely with someone. There had been times I’d go home and wonder—where was ours?

  I’d asked him that once and he’d shrugged. “I’ve fought with other girlfriends. You and I just get along.” It did make sense, that some people were more compatible than others—liking each other in addition to loving each other—or maybe it was a testament to my insistence that we try to understand where the other was coming from, as annoying as Dave might say it was in the moment. Whatever it was, I was grateful. I hated arguing.

  Dave sorted through the menus with feigned interest, and I joined him, picking up one from the roast chicken place. I stared at the red drawing of a waving, headless chicken and thought of the newspaper article I’d just read.

  The image that had stuck even more than the poor guy fainting in the shrubbery was DeFranza’s wife at the window, watching the arrest from inside. Had she always been aware that she’d made a deal with the devil? That the four-story manse in Jersey was funded at least in part by stealing and lying? Had she tried to persuade him against breaking the law, or encouraged him, crossing her fingers that they wouldn’t get caught?

  Had she been floored, unable to link the scene playing out to the decent man she knew?

  And, more important, what on earth did she do now?

  chapter nine

&nbs
p; Vanessa

  PEOPLE WHO SAY money doesn’t buy happiness are idiots; money literally buys happiness. Take, for example, the Saskatoon berries I had express mailed from the Pacific Northwest. It took twenty-four hours from the time I realized I needed them to the minute I held them in my hands—the shipping costs were astronomical and I will take them to my grave.

  When the alarm went off at five in the morning, Frankie sat up in bed. “What happened?”

  “The Saskatoon berry jam needs attention.”

  “What?”

  “The jam that is currently in the slow cooker and must come out of the slow cooker. Flavor: Saskatoon berry.”

  “Ness, get a hold of yourself.” This was rich coming from a man who, upon making it big, bought four versions of the exact same suit. Yes, Frankie. I’m the one who doesn’t know how to relax. “Are you having a breakdown?”

  Frankie must have been thrown by the word “Saskatoon.” He didn’t accuse me of having a breakdown the night before when I discussed the menu: schmear and bagels, frittata, fruit salad and crumb coffee cake. There were only four of us, and it would’ve been understandable if he’d questioned the sheer volume. He didn’t—because all of those words, unlike Saskatoon berries, were familiar to him.

  I’m not trying to sound like a sexist, but it’s a matter of wiring. Fathers are incapable of remembering details the way mothers can. Sloane had tried Saskatoon preserves once, at the Museum of Canadian Wilderness, and had loved it so much, she’d insisted on a Saskatoon cake for her seventh birthday. I improvised: red food coloring in vanilla cake mix, with canned Saskatoon jam (from the museum gift shop) spread between the layers. An instant hit.

  Frankie, not recalling any of this, was nervous enough to follow me out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. It was still dark outside, and we both squinted when I switched on the track lighting. “Frankie, I promise. I’m fine.” I bent down to try to preheat the oven to four hundred fifty, which was difficult because my glasses were in the other room. “I just want to meet her halfway. More than halfway.”

  “That should be relatively easy, given that we bought the ticket.”

  “Because we insisted on it, as we should have.” I glared at him a bit. Frankie’s inner compass veered cheap, although through the years I’d gently nudged him away from drying up into a complete miser. “She’s putting herself out there. You don’t reach out and take the time to visit someone unless you really want a relationship.”

  “You don’t know what she wants out of the trip.”

  “And you do?” I lifted the washcloth off my bowl of rising coffee-cake dough and stuck a finger in. Nice and springy.

  He scratched the back of his head. “I guess I’ll go shower.”

  I shouted after him, down the hall. “Your outfit is hanging on the back of your closet door.”

  I picked it out not to be bossy, but because I knew that left to his own devices, Frankie would wear a suit and send entirely the wrong message: formal and about to leave for the office, not dear old dad enjoying weekend breakfast with his family, remembering fondly the time we tried the Saskatoon berries.

  Frankie really was wrong to be worried. I had been stressed at first, but now that Sloane was hours away, I felt good. I was about to hold in my palm what I’d dreamed of for years.

  chapter ten

  MY MOM OPENED the door at eight o’clock, not in her usual morning robe, but fully dressed—leggings, a black button-down shirt and espadrilles. She smiled, the expression tense and brief. “Was the Boy hurt about not coming?”

  “No. He understands.” When I’d left that morning, Dave had shaken his head in sympathy. “Good luck,” he’d said in a tone of voice that could be described only as one part pity, two parts relief.

  I put my head close to my mom’s. “How’s the scene in there?”

  “Great.” Again, the smile. “She got here about five minutes ago, and she’s in the kitchen getting coffee.”

  “But how does she seem?”

  “Really great. Come see.” She put her hand on my back and pushed me down the long hall.

  Sloane was leaning against their kitchen island, one leg crossed over the other, a mug of coffee in her hand. The teenager—stringy, sullen—had morphed into a ropy, sulky woman with crow’s-feet deepening her olive skin and a few threads of gray in her long onyx hair.

  “Hey.” She nodded dismissively and I felt myself shrink back to my stoop-shouldered preteen self.

  “Paige is so excited you’re here!” My mom pulled me closer to the island and stepped toward Sloane, only to retreat like a kid playing in the surf. She clasped her hands together and separated them and hung them at her sides before finally anchoring herself in the work of ripping foil covers off platters of lox and bagels. As she did it, a grin hinged crazily over her mouth, like a child performer who’s been coached to Smile! So it looks like you’re having fun!

  “I am.” I looked right at Sloane, not because I wanted to, but because watching my poor mom was making me nervous. “What made you visit?”

  “Paige.” My mom folded a sheet of tinfoil in half, smoothing down the edge. “Let her settle in. She just got off a plane.”

  “It’s okay.” Sloane shrugged, twisting one of the pieces of lank hair around her finger and pulling. She needed a better bra. “It had been a while. I thought it was time.”

  “Right.” Talk about a nonanswer.

  “How was the flight?”

  “Fine.” She drained her coffee cup and looked around for the pot for a nanosecond before my mom swooped in with a refill.

  I went over to the cabinet and fetched a cup. “Where’s Dad?”

  “He’s on a call. For work.” Sloane’s voice was even, and I couldn’t tell if there was a slight edge of mockery.

  “But he’ll be out in three minutes,” said my mom.

  “He’ll be out in three minutes,” repeated Sloane, glancing at her watch as though she intended to hold him to that. “So, how’s life?”

  “Good.”

  “You got married?”

  “Yeah. Two years ago.” We didn’t know Sloane’s exact address when the invitations went out, and after much debate and some fruitless Emily Post research by Lydia the wedding planner, ultimately ended up scanning Sloane an image of the invite through an e-mail that might or might not have been hers. She hadn’t sent an RSVP.

  “Congrats on that.”

  “Dave is wonderful,” my mom said. “You’ll love him.”

  “I’m sure.” Sloane raised her eyebrows and nodded.

  It was my turn to ask about her life, but I was afraid of the answer—inclusive of angry words, no doubt, like “rehab” and “benders” and “dealers” and “fault” and “blame.” Most certainly, her response would rip off the thin veneer of civility we had established so far. “Are you still in California?”

  She nodded, willing to cop to that, but didn’t supply any additional information, like, say, a city or even which general area within the state. My dad, looking a bit burdened, walked into the room, wished me a good morning and ignored everyone else as though we were his usual breakfast crew. He grabbed the paper off the island and sank down in his regular chair at the table, unfolding it before him.

  “Franklin,” my mom’s voice sounded in warning. “No. Paper. At. Breakfast. Today.”

  “Christ on a crock, Vanessa.” He didn’t even look up. “I heard you the first fifty times. I’ll stop when we eat.”

  “On a crock?” I said. “Did you just make that up?”

  “I remember that,” said Sloane. “You reading the paper at the table every morning. You still do that.”

  “That’s right.” My mom brightened as if Sloane had recited an ode to family in iambic pentameter. “That’s exactly right. He reads the paper every morning.”
>
  I did not point out how pathetic it was that our family tradition, the thing we could all reconnect over, was my dad ignoring us in favor of the news of the world. Although, to be fair, the way he read the newspaper—as though it offered a sound and sight shield to everything within a two-mile radius around him—probably was unique.

  I sat down and then Sloane did, and my mom walked to the table with a large bowl of something red and gelatinous. With obvious pride, she placed it next to the bagels.

  “What’s that?” I bent my head closer, sniffed.

  “Saskatoon jam!” She said this happily, like it meant something.

  “Oh,” I said. “Yum, yum.” My eyes met Sloane’s, and she made a funny face, jam skeptical. I had to bite down my smile. Sloane and I would not be bonding at my mother’s expense.

  “You’ve changed your hair. You’ve got that whole”—Sloane moved her hand in a circular motion parallel to my face—“blond thing going on.”

  Blond thing? “Um. Yeah. I’ve changed a bit since puberty.” It came out sharply enough that the three of us looked around nervously. Sloane grabbed a bagel, slowly spreading cream cheese with one side of the butter knife, and my mom rushed into the uncomfortable quiet like the cavalry.

  “Paige is a therapist now.”

  I felt my eyebrows descend, low enough that their wiry translucence branched into my field of vision, reminding me I was due to get them done.

  “Wow.” Sloane’s voice was monotone—not overtly aggressive enough for me to respond in kind.

  “Marriage counseling,” said my mom, speaking again for me.

  “A marriage counselor.” Sloane smiled benignly, and my mom smiled too before tittering nervously.

  “O-kay.” The tittering had apparently annoyed Sloane, who jerked away from both of us.

  My mom and I exchanged a glance, and my dad tried to fill the silence. “So where are you staying?”

  “We’re staying downtown,” said Sloane. “With a friend.”

  If anyone else noticed the “we,” no one said anything about it.