I hope things will get easier for you over time. I promise to behave more like an adult if our paths ever chance to cross in the future.
Sincerely yours,
Elaine Barrett
Then, before she could change her mind or spend any more time fretting, Elaine neatly folded the paper in thirds, slid it into a matching envelope, and put a stamp on it.
• • •
The deal Ava made with Katy after the Fourth of July was simple: she would offer Gigi a job in her pottery studio and keep an eye on her.
Katy didn’t seem to have gotten out of bed since the last time Ava was here a week ago. She looked up at her with gray eyes wreathed in plum shadows. “What if Gigi hates pottery, too?”
“She won’t,” Ava said with confidence. “But if she does, we’ll think of something else. Is Gigi close to anybody else in your family?”
“Not really. Only my brother, Simon, maybe. I hear her talking to him sometimes when he visits.”
Ava felt her cheeks grow warm, remembering how Simon had held her as she cried after the service. He would want to be aware of how his sister was struggling; on the other hand, Katy probably didn’t want him to know. How could she get Simon here without making Katy feel embarrassed or defensive?
Then Ava had a thought. “Maybe Gigi would like to see Simon. If you give me his number, I’ll call him and let him know what’s going on. He could check in with Gigi from time to time.”
“Okay.” Katy’s voice was listless, but at least she wasn’t objecting.
Ava found an old envelope on Katy’s dresser amid the rubble of clothes and jewelry and wrote down Simon’s cell phone number. “All right, then,” she said. “I should get back. The boys will be home soon and they’ve started a band. I like to be around when they’re practicing just in case groupies show up.”
“Your dad would have loved that,” Katy said. “He always wanted to be in a band.”
Ava was so surprised that she stopped and turned around. “He did? I never knew that.”
“Oh yes. He was a frustrated musician. Maybe next time you come, I could show you a video of him singing with Gigi.” A pair of frown lines appeared, marring her pretty forehead. “You will come back, won’t you?”
“Of course,” Ava said.
She went downstairs and said good-bye to Gigi, who looked panicked by the news that Ava was leaving. “It’s all right,” Ava said. “Your mom and I talked. You can come to the studio tomorrow. I’m offering you a job if you want it. Do you?”
The girl nodded so hard that her pink and orange hair flopped over one eye. “Do you really have work for me to do? Seriously?”
“Don’t worry,” Ava said, waving a hand. “I’m a slave driver. I promise you won’t be bored. And you’ll learn more about pottery than you ever wanted to know.”
When Gigi smiled, as she did now, she was so startlingly pretty that Ava could almost overlook the lip, nose, and eyebrow piercings. “Also, I’m calling your uncle Simon so he can look in on your mom,” Ava added. She gave the girl a quick hug.
Outside, Ava dialed Simon’s number from the car. When his voice mail picked up, she stammered through her message. “I was really grateful to you for comforting me during my dad’s service,” she said, hating the stiff way her voice sounded. “I hope you don’t think it’s too weird that I’m calling you, but Katy and Gigi need you to come around more if you can. Like you said, we’re family and we need to help each other through hard times.”
She hung up then, before she could make an even bigger fool of herself than she already had.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ava had e-mailed the portfolio shots two days ago, but Elaine had been too overwhelmed at work to sort through them or do anything about starting to design Ava’s Web site. This made her feel guilty, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Know your priorities: that was one of her key mantras.
When Ava called midweek to invite her to dinner on Friday night, therefore, Elaine said yes despite her plan to go clubbing and maybe hook up with someone for the night. Maybe she could do both: she’d review the photos and design the Web site at Ava’s house, with her sister’s input. It couldn’t possibly take more than an hour or two. Choosing pictures of pots had to be easier than selecting photos for school Web sites, where you had to tediously toss out shots of homely kids, professors with their eyes closed or scratching their butts, and any photos that revealed graffiti or crumbling buildings.
“Why don’t you spend the night?” Ava suggested. “I mean, if you can stand the music. Evan and Sam have turned my living room into a practice studio.”
Elaine hesitated. Hanging out at her sister’s overnight would definitely be a healthier choice than her original plan to cruise the Matchbox Bar, but a lot less fun. “Let’s see how late it gets,” she hedged. “I’ll bring the wine. What are you cooking?”
“Probably spaghetti, since the boys are with me this weekend, along with who knows how many of their friends.”
“Wait. Wasn’t last weekend your weekend with them, too?”
There was a slight hesitation; then Ava said, “Yes, but Mark is seeing somebody. He doesn’t want the boys to meet her yet.”
“They don’t know, but you do? That’s a little twisted, don’t you think?” Elaine regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth, but she’d never understood how Ava could have forgiven Mark for cheating on her and making her look like an idiot. If any guy did that to her, she’d for sure find a way to ruin his life, if only by posting egregious photos on Facebook.
“I fixed him up with this woman, actually. She and I play tennis once in a while.”
“Oh. My. God. You did not fix him up. What planet are you from? Your own husband!”
“Ex,” Ava reminded her. “And why not? Mark’s a good guy. Besides, if Evan and Sam are going to have a stepmother, I’d rather help pick her out.”
They hung up shortly after that. Elaine sat at her desk and stared sightlessly at her monitor for a few minutes, thinking about how Ava had once told her that most divorces happened long before the marriages were over.
Life was too short to let things slide by, yet that’s what people did. The human condition was just plain tragic when it came to relationships. Maybe you loved a few people and did some good work, added some new souls to the planet. You felt useful for a while.
Then, when you were done with accomplishing the requisite goals society considered signs of success and responsibility, you breathed a sigh of relief and thought, Okay, now I can do what I want. Only by then you’d run out of time. Your marriage was on the rocks, you got laid off, or your kids had turned out all wrong. You spent your last years wading through a swamp of regret, crippled by anger or struggling for salvation.
Even if you avoided most of life’s dismal pitfalls, even if things did go well for you, then what? What did it matter if you loved certain people with your whole heart and soul, your fingers and lips and words and tears, and had been loved in return? You still died alone and left them behind. Or they left you first, paralyzed by grief until the day your heart stopped beating.
Ultimately, no matter how you lived, you were faced with the same profound, pitiful, and unanswerable questions: Why are we here? Why do one thing and not another? Why love one person and not someone else, or anyone at all, if everyone’s story ends the same way?
Elaine gave herself a vigorous mental shake and opened a new document. She didn’t have time for pointless navel-gazing.
She stayed late at the office and then went to do her shift at the suicide hotline. She’d been volunteering for over a year now, at Tony’s suggestion, when Elaine finally decided the third therapist she’d seen after her mother died had nothing more to offer. Through the years, she’d literally heard it all, every stage of grief mapped out in painstaking detail, as if Lewis and Clark themselves were cataloging her
thorny, swampy trail of dissolution with their explorers’ zeal. At Tony’s insistent urging, she had volunteered to talk people off the proverbial ledge—well, the literal ledge, in the case of one guy who wanted to jump out of his apartment window after losing his job—mainly to prove she wasn’t as pitiful as most of the nutters out there.
Instead, Elaine had been fascinated, horrified, intrigued, saddened, and terrified by the level of misery swirling about in the world. Everyone, it seemed, had something going on. Only the rigors of daily life kept you above the black muck rising around your ankles and threatening to swallow you whole.
“We don’t expect you to be an expert,” said Katrina, the woman who trained her. “But you being here to answer someone’s call might make the difference between life and death. Fewer than a third of the thirty-two thousand people who commit suicide in the U.S. each year are seen by mental health professionals. We really can guide people to make different choices.”
Despite her honeyed voice and name, Katrina was the opposite of a blond bombshell, built more like a linebacker and with so many tattoos on her beefy arms that Elaine had thought at first the woman was wearing long sleeves. “Your job is to just listen, and maybe help the caller feel less alone.” She had instructed Elaine to collect as much information about the person on the phone at the beginning—such as where the caller was and whether he or she had abused any substances—to prioritize the calls they might share with emergency services.
“Then you want to build rapport,” Katrina had continued. “You may have a chance to direct them to mental health resources later. In the meantime, let them explain, vent, rage, whatever. Your job isn’t to cure people. All you can do is offer support, so the callers can maybe get through this one bad day to live another, better one. Sometimes we get enough information to warrant calling 911, but usually not. If no medical intervention is necessary, or if you can’t get the caller to tell you where she is, the main thing is to thank her for being brave enough to make that call. That alone might give her a reason to keep going.”
“That’s it?” Elaine had asked, stunned. “That’s all we can give people? A temporary reprieve?”
Katrina had raised one penciled eyebrow. “Isn’t that enough?”
The fact was, except for the few callers Elaine heard from over and over, she never knew if she had an effect on the people who phoned asking for permission to end things or a reason not to. She took calls from women whose boyfriends beat them, from drug addicts and cutters and alcoholics and some whose words she couldn’t understand between the sobs.
The calls picked up over the holidays, whenever there was a full moon, during heat waves and blizzards that kept people indoors. Elaine found that sometimes the most helpful thing wasn’t just to listen, with some of these callers, but to tell them about her mother, or about her own struggles with depression, and how she managed to keep going. She prescribed exercise, the pleasure of trashy television reality shows, and going to bed early.
“Forgive yourself,” she told people over and over, hoping that someday the words would sink in and she could do the same.
On Friday morning, Elaine went into work again early, after a hard workout in her favorite spin class, so she could leave for Ava’s before four o’clock. Traffic was light; it was the third week of July and most people were either already on vacation or leaving for their precious weekly rentals in New Hampshire and Maine.
You couldn’t pay her enough to be part of that scene, loading up kids and bikes and sitting in traffic with the destination being nothing more than an overcrowded beach where you had to withstand other people’s radios or a weedy green lake where the moms wore bathing suits with skirts, the dads wheeled coolers of beer, and the kids never stopped eating.
No, Elaine’s idea of a good vacation was the one she’d taken last year to a high-end resort in Mexico that catered to singles, a place where she could soak up some sun, sleep, and hook up to her heart’s content.
On that vacation, she’d seduced a noisy Texan. It hadn’t been difficult. She had deliberately waited until the man took a chair on her side of the pool. Then she untied the top of her bathing suit and turned onto her stomach, arching her back as she adjusted her butt on the lounge.
The Texan bought her margaritas made with a cheap mix that left a chalky aftertaste. The waiter brought the third drink with a disapproving shake of his head. When the Texan dove into the pool with an expert racer’s dive that barely rippled the water’s surface, the waiter bent low over Elaine’s chair to say, “Cuidado, el Tejano es un hombre sin vergüenza.”
Be careful, the Texan is a man without shame, was how that sentence literally translated. Though Elaine—always precise in her Spanish classes—knew it could also mean, The Texan is a bold man.
Either way, that’s exactly what she was looking for in a vacation fling. She wanted a man with no shame because she wanted to do shameful, naughty things. And she wanted a bold man who wouldn’t be intimidated by a woman with an appetite in bed.
When the Texan, a man with a satisfyingly flat stomach, broad shoulders, an expensive wristwatch, just the right amount of chest hair, and a thriving import-export business, returned to his chair, Elaine had turned over again lazily, pulling her swimsuit top up over her breasts almost too late.
“It’s so hot out here,” she murmured. “I think it’s time for me to get out of this sun.”
They went to his room. She didn’t ask his name and she was grateful that he didn’t ask hers. They’d showered first, and he had soaped Elaine up and down, admiring her body with words she’d never actually heard anyone use other than in porn movies. At one point, he’d slapped her ass and let out a whoop of joy.
Elaine was still smiling over this happy memory when she pulled up in front of Ava’s cottage, a gray shingled bungalow that squatted like a gull on the beach. She could never live here, an hour from Boston on an island with more piping plovers than people, but it was a breathtaking spot. The gray shingles of the cottage were tinged lavender from the sunset, the sand around it sparkling diamonds.
She sat in her car for a minute and admired the rushing sound of waves breaking on the beach. For a minute, she felt envious of her sister’s life on this beautiful island. Ava had no idea what it was like in the real world, where information came at you so fast it was like being tarred and feathered with factoids every day.
Elaine closed her eyes, took some slow deep breaths, and reminded herself of everything she’d accomplished. Tonight, she and Ava could relax together. They would share a bottle of wine and she could help Ava with her Web site. They’d talk about the boys and Ava’s pottery. Whatever differences she and Ava might have, they were sisters. They had to stick together, especially now that their parents were gone.
Suddenly, Elaine’s peaceful mood was shattered by raucous music: an electric guitar, a bass, drums, and the wailing of a girl who sounded as if her heart were breaking. Shit. This must be Evan and Sam and their new band. She hoped Ava planned to kick them out of the house before dinner.
Then she remembered what Ava had said about making spaghetti for the boys and their friends, and groaned. Even the Matchbox Bar in Cambridge had to be quieter than this.
Elaine grabbed the wine, climbed out of the car, and diligently locked it, leaving her laptop in the trunk. Inside, she took off her shoes in the kitchen and wiped her feet carefully on the mat.
Though, from the looks of things, whatever she did or didn’t do with her feet would hardly matter. The linoleum floor was gritty with sand and the counters were stacked with cooking pots and dishes. There was a bucket of compost on the counter, too, filled to overflowing. Ava insisted on loading leftover food into that bucket and kept some kind of bin contraption out back, where worms broke down the compost so she could spread it on her vegetable and flower gardens. In Elaine’s opinion, there was such a thing as being too organic.
The floor wa
s an obstacle course of shoes, at least fifteen pairs, most of them clown-sized and reeking. How many people were in this band? Elaine said a little prayer of thanks for her own peaceful condo with its garbage disposal, beige walls, and white shag carpet, uncluttered except for some tasteful linen pillows and a few bits of Ava’s pottery.
Ava, thankfully, was setting the dining room table with only two places and had shut the door between the dining room and living room. She wore her usual glaze-splattered overalls over a yellow T-shirt, her hair twisted in a blue bandanna.
“Oh good, you’re here,” Ava said. “I just fed the kids. If it gets too loud in here, we can take our plates out to the patio. It’s warm enough, don’t you think?”
What Elaine thought was that she’d rather sit outside, away from the mess and noise, even if she had to wear a ski parka. But something in her sister’s expression—an anxious look in her eyes—stopped her from saying so.
“Wherever you want to eat is fine with me,” Elaine said, just as the girl stopped singing and the drummer went into a crashing, frenzied solo.
This was enough to make Ava load everything onto a tray and carry it out to the patio. Elaine followed with the wine, a pair of glasses, and a corkscrew. She opened the wine while Ava served their plates. They balanced their food on their laps and ate as the sun went down, turning the sea from green to blue to cobalt. By the second glass of wine, the music was tolerable.
They talked about Elaine’s work and Ava’s Web site. Then Ava told her about the visit to Katy, avoiding Elaine’s eyes.
Elaine stabbed at a meatball. “It’s not like they’re family anymore. That ship has sailed. You’ve got enough on your plate with the boys and your studio. Why get involved in their problems? Let Katy’s family take care of her. That’s who she needs!”
“I know. I did call her brother after I left.”
By the way Ava was concentrating on her plate, Elaine suspected there was something else her sister wasn’t telling her. She didn’t want to know what it was, so she didn’t ask. She hated having Ava angry at her, and she knew whatever she said about Katy was bound to be the wrong thing.
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