Once Two Sisters

by Sarah Warburton

  ONCE TWO SISTERS

  A NOVEL

  SARAH WARBURTON

  For my whole family, especially Tim.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I couldn’t have written this book without my husband, Tim. I love you every day and always.

  One could argue I wrote this book despite our kids, but they definitely added joy to the process. My favorite part of every day is when we gather together around the kitchen table.

  My talented agent, Melissa Jeglinski, believed in this book, found it a home, and offered moral support along the way.

  I’m thankful for my editor, Terri Bischoff, for her encouragement and insight, and for the talented and dedicated team at Crooked Lane Books, Madeline Rathle, Melissa Rechter, and Ashley Di Dio, as well as Rachel Keith and Melanie Sun.

  I’m no solitary writer, so I thank all the friends and writers with whom I’ve traded pages and critiques, commiserated and rejoiced: Felicia, Barbara, Erin, and Kena; Bill, Chuck, Heather, John, Melissa, Rodney, and Vanessa; Alice, Anne, Betty, Cheryl, Ginger, Grace, Kathy, and Mona; Angélique and David; and my relentless taskmaster Stacey, who repeated “You’ve got this” until it came true.

  As a beneficiary of Ursula DeYoung’s mission to celebrate first chapters as well as the ongoing writing journey, I’m thankful to her for including the first chapter of this book in Embark: A Literary Journal for Novelists.

  My parents have always been encouraging, involved, and very present. I’ve never doubted your love, and I hope you know how very much I love you.

  Finally, my sisters—Rachel, Mary Curtis, and Rebekah. You are my friends, my cheerleaders, and my inspiration. I think you’re all intelligent, funny, dedicated, and endlessly amazing women.

  And I don’t think any of you is the “bad one.”

  CHAPTER

  1

  I’VE BEEN KILLED and incarcerated, tortured and seduced, stalked and obsessed. I’ve been the murderer and the victim, the detective and the fugitive, the hero and the villain. I’ve died over and over again. In the swamps of Louisiana, on the streets of Chicago, in a small suburban town where nothing ever happens. I’ve been a housewife, a call girl, a forensic anthropologist, a secretary, an assassin, a nun. And whether I am angel or demon, innocent or damned, only one person is to blame: my sister, Ava Hallett.

  Everyone in America has read my story in her books, seen her on the talk-show circuit, eaten popcorn while I weep and bleed on the silver screen. The only reason she doesn’t have a television series is her apparent inability to write a series. One stand-alone best seller after another, and I’m the common denominator.

  Ava is older than I am, and she laid claim to writing as casually as calling dibs on riding shotgun. And she didn’t stop there. Every job, every hobby, every boyfriend or passion or goddamn private thought I’ve ever had, she’s jammed into a novel. She takes my life and murders it, over and over again.

  I wish I were more zen, a person who could let this shit go. I should have joined the Peace Corps or backpacked through Thailand. Without her, maybe I would have been ordinary, the kind of girl who goes to college in her hometown and marries the boy next door.

  Instead, I ditched everything—my life in Northern Virginia, my relationship with my dysfunctional family, and the girl I used to be. Because of Ava, I’m living over fifteen hundred miles away in the suburbs of Houston, under an assumed name.

  Now I sit, anonymous, with two other moms—Bethany and Felicia—at the edge of a playground, pretending to watch all the kids going up and down the slides. And I feel as if my happily-ever-after days in Texas must be numbered. This happiness is too easy. There’s no way I can hold on to it.

  The three of us watch our kids, parallel-playing in separate areas. In sync but apart. Bethany’s son is hanging by his knees from the climbing frame, Felicia’s son spins around and around with his arms flung wide, and my stepdaughter Emma is digging through the mulch with a stick.

  Bethany sits next to me in the shade. She’s heavily pregnant, and sweat beads lightly under her bangs. Although she’s pushing forty, her blonde hair is up in a ponytail and she wears denim cutoffs like a teenager. She’s been talking at a brisk clip around the wad of gum in her mouth, words pouring out of her.

  “Dan was in oil, so he spent years traveling overseas, working for the money. He banked every dollar he made. Then he had a layover in Atlanta, went to a Waffle House, and I was his waitress. I tell you what, his family was not thrilled that he’d found himself a divorced single mom with a teenager, a toddler, and a crazy ex, but now that we’ve got a boy of our own on the way, they’ve got nothing to say.” Bethany pats her stomach complacently.

  I glance over at Felicia, and sure enough, she’s not even suppressing her smirk. The beautiful thing about Bethany is that she gives you all the gossip you’d ever want to know about her, right to your face. She’s not ashamed of anything.

  Felicia and I, we like to know what’s going on with people, their stories. Felicia used to work behind the scenes in television, something about scripts and layout, which I always thought was just for magazines. She’s very visual, and I know she’s loving the picture Bethany makes as she tilts her head back and takes a swig from her Diet Pepsi.

  You’d think someone with secrets like mine couldn’t be friends with someone like Felicia, wouldn’t you? But the key to covering up your past is to layer in a story that’s good enough to be a distraction. My personal smoke screen is the way I met my husband, Andrew, on FindMyMatch.com.

  In a way, our story is the inverse of Bethany’s. He was the single parent, I was the self-sufficient stranger—although I wasn’t rich, and I was on the run. Not that Andrew knew that. For him, my smoke screen had to be that I was an only child, in mourning for my parents, who’d died together in a car crash. I almost backpedaled when I learned his wife had died in childbirth. But in the end I just added that guilt to the pile I’d already accumulated.

  Andrew was calm, smart, and patient, and Emma seemed like the one thing I’d been waiting for my whole life. I fell hard for them both, but I didn’t kid myself that I deserved them. All I could hope was that starting over as a new person with a loving family would give me a chance to earn it for real.

  When I told the story to Felicia, I spun a dozen tales of online dating nightmares. I could get laughs for the imaginary guy with the foot fetish, the one whose wife crashed our date, the one who referred to himself in the third person. “We are so lucky,” I told her. “We’ve got great guys. The world is full of crazies.”

  Not like me. I’m only crazy on paper. Once I shed my name, I left all the madness behind. Maybe I am lying about my past, but I’m being honest here in the present. I love the feel of the sun on my face, my friends beside me, the happy shrieks of children. I’m not lying about anything that really matters.

  “Lizzie!” Emma comes running over to me with something clenched in her hand. “Look what I found!”

  I brace myself as she sticks her hand uncomfortably close to my face. This discovery could be anything from a beetle to a used eraser. She unfolds her chubby fingers to reveal a rhinestone pendant with the top loop broken off. The letter is L.

  “It’s real diamonds, and L is for Lizzie.” Eagerly she presses it into my hand and takes off again, mulch flying under her feet. I curl my fingers over the trinket, wishing Lizzie had always been my real name or anywhere close to it.

  “Sweet,” Felicia says, and I can see she’s glad she isn’t holding somebody else’s discarded junk. Her turn will come around again. I still remember when her son started collecting leaves—everything that came out of Felicia’s purse for weeks was powdered with dried brown leaf fragments.

  “Want a piece of gum?” Bethany asks, adding a
nother stick to the bulge in her cheek.

  I shake my head as Felicia’s phone buzzes. She pulls it out, then looks up at us. “Getting together a carpool for book club. You going?”

  Bethany shrugs. We all know she isn’t interested. Even at the pool, she never pulls so much as a magazine out of her bag. I have been a regular at the book club, even though I tell myself it’s a mistake every single month. And when this month’s book was nominated, I tried to trash it. I said I’d heard it was derivative and slow, with nothing to discuss. But it didn’t work. Ava’s books are always best sellers. Even a book club with a taste for literary fiction couldn’t overlook a thriller for women, about women, and by a woman. By everyone’s favorite author—everyone’s but mine.

  “I can’t make it this month,” I lie.

  Felicia won’t let it alone. “If Andrew’s out of town, just get a sitter. My neighbor’s daughter needs pocket money.”

  “We’ll see.” I try to be noncommittal, but she shoots me a look that says I see right through you. Liar.

  “Bring Emma over to my place. Tom won’t mind watching one extra.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  While normally I crave the feeling of being wanted and valued, I can’t handle three hours of discussing my sister’s latest, Bloody Heart, Wild Woods. It’s the only one I haven’t read, the one she wrote after I went off the grid. The book club provided a little description of the story, set off the coast of New England, and it didn’t sound like my life, but I’ve been fooled into complacency before, only to be struck by the dagger she hides—just for me—in the heart of every novel.

  I’m scared to read this book, scared that it could suck me back into the person I was before.

  And, honestly, I’m scared to see what my sister knows.

  * * *

  That night Andrew is home early, after Emma’s dinner but before her bath. “I’ll take it from here,” he tells me. “Put up your feet and relax.”

  Our grown-up dinner is waiting in the Crock-Pot, so I pour myself a glass of wine, listening to the sound of running water from the bathroom, the deep rumble of Andrew’s voice, the piping counterpoint of Emma’s. I never thought I would have this kind of life, and relaxing into it isn’t easy. Compulsively I run a dishrag over the counter top, even though there’s not a crumb on it. I always clean the house aggressively, using products that are safe or even homemade, with vinegar and baking soda. I want it fresh, spotless, safe for Emma. When this all falls down, no one will be able to say I didn’t do everything right.

  In the hour before Andrew walked through the door, I took a slug from a bottle of bourbon stashed under the sink among the cleaning supplies. The fire in my throat helped me push Ava and her book away as I arranged Emma’s bits of cooked chicken, leftover steamed broccoli, and goldfish crackers on a melamine plate divided into three sections.

  Emma is an easy child, especially considering that she has passed her “terrible twos” and her “even worse threes.” Now that she’s four, she likes order, so I made a point of choosing three kinds of food, one for each section, in equal amounts. She went around on her own, taking a bite of chicken, then broccoli, then a goldfish to close it out. Once her plate was clean she held out her hands, and I gave her a kiss on each soft palm, followed by a graham cracker.

  We are usually on our own for Emma’s meal and the rest of her evening routine. Houston traffic is unpredictably terrible, and we live in the suburbs “outside the loop” of the beltway. On any given evening Andrew might get home in half an hour or over two hours, depending on the situation.

  If Bethany’s in-laws were Andrew’s, they might say he’d found marrying a nanny cheaper than keeping one on. I don’t mind yet. Children live in the moment, in the little things of life, so Emma keeps me here, in this happy place. And maybe because she isn’t my flesh and blood, I never feel competitive or resentful. Sometimes I wish she were a little older, a little less of all the things a four-year-old child often is—hungry, tired, bored, whiny, messy—but for the most part we get on easily together. Being with her makes me a better person.

  Andrew is also easy to get along with. I chose him for his open gaze, his straightforward approach, and his undemanding nature. His wife died giving birth to Emma, something I didn’t think happened in America anymore, and eighteen months later he was ready to “test the waters,” as he put it. That’s how we came to meet on the dating site that served as my smoke screen. He doesn’t look for lies in me. And if you don’t count the big one, the one I told up front, I don’t have to lie to him.

  But sometimes I get that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Because lies have a way of surfacing, and I want so much for this Lizzie—wife, mother, friend—to be real. Andrew doesn’t deserve a fake.

  He returns with Emma in his arms, a fine mist of soapy sweetness hovering over them both. “Say good night, sweetheart.” He tilts her toward me.

  As her warm, damp cheek presses against mine, she whispers, “Good night, sweetheart,” and giggles.

  “Good night to you, my Emma bean.” For a moment, this is the only thing that’s real, this family—a mom and a dad and this loved child. Then Andrew turns with Emma, and I feel the chill of the air conditioning on my abandoned cheek.

  I take another sip of wine, a sip that’s a little too big. As I hear Andrew setting up Emma’s room with the nightlight, special blanket, and lullaby bear, I speed to the fridge. The bottle of white is almost empty, so I swig it down, hide the empty bottle at the bottom of the recycling bin, and fill my glass with a serving from a new bottle. Not cold, but that’s okay.

  I’ve put in the wine-saving plug and have the refrigerator open when Andrew comes back into the kitchen.

  “You want a glass?” I ask, hoping he’ll say no. Drinking warm white wine looks bad, and I’m invested in looking right. We’re just weeks shy of our first-year anniversary, and Andrew still thinks I’m a good person.

  He nods, then hesitates. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Beef stew. We have red.” I think we have red. Unless I drank it all.

  “I’ll go with a beer instead.” He comes up behind me and puts one arm around my tensed waist, reaching with the other to snag a bottle of Saint Arnold Santo. “Let’s watch the news before we eat.”

  Prime-time television in Texas comes on an hour earlier than it does on the East Coast, where I grew up. There’s no way we can watch the nightly news together unless we record it, so we always do. We settle together on the sofa, knees touching, drinks in our hands, and push play.

  The newscaster is in the middle of a story, but it’s the photo behind her that makes me clench my wineglass. Ava. A publicity photo that shows her leaning against a brick wall, her blonde hair barely brushing the shoulders of her tailored leather jacket. It takes a second for me to make sense of the words written across the photo: “Life Imitates Fiction.”

  That’s how I learn my sister is missing.

  CHAPTER

  2

  HOW IS THE disappearance of one woman national news? When that woman is a New York Times best-selling author whose books are made into blockbuster movies, when she writes story after story about women who are missing or kidnapped or killed, and when her husband makes a teary-eyed plea to the cameras for “any news at all”—that’s a guaranteed eyes-glued-to-the-screen scenario.

  I’m not prepared. Not for any of it. Not for the rush of fear and love I feel for Ava, even after all she’s done. I want to unsee the news, dial the evening back to me and Andrew on the sofa, safe and happy. The way he thinks we still are.

  One unfortunate side effect of cutting yourself off from your family is that nobody calls to tell you there’s been an accident or a tragedy. And when you learn that your sister has gone missing, you can’t let your husband know anything is wrong. Not without blowing up the new life you have with him. All he knows about Ava is that she’s a writer on our book-club list. That’s on me. I’ve got the schedule stuck to our fridge.


  The final notes of the nightly news theme are fading away. Andrew looks at me. “You should definitely go to book club tomorrow night. This whole thing is going to make the discussion unforgettable.”

  Unforgettable. I clench the stem of my empty wineglass, remembering the way Ava always sucked the life, the attention out of every space. I can’t believe she’s missing. I will not believe it. This has got to be another one of her games.

  As Andrew putters around the house after dinner, I step onto the front porch with the disposable phone I keep secretly charged and hidden in a sugar bowl in the china cabinet. All the china was chosen by Andrew’s first wife. Although he encouraged me to choose something else, I loved stepping into this ready-made life.

  The air is steamy hot, not cool and crisp like the autumns of my childhood. When the sun goes down in Texas, heat continues pulsing off the pavement, so there’s no reprieve. On the front steps, the street stretches away from me on either side, lined with rows of houses in brick. In this planned community, every home is a variant on a single plan. It would be a perfect setting for one of Ava’s stories, all the houses made of ticky-tacky.

  I open the phone and dial the only number I ever call from it, my parents’ landline, but it goes straight to voice mail. I hang up without leaving a message. Bitterly I acknowledge that I could leave them this number, ask them to call me when they know something. But if they wanted to find me, they would have already. The reason I’ve disappeared so successfully isn’t this burner phone, it’s that nobody is looking for me.

  I stand on my front step for another moment, trying to squash my rising anxiety. Ava is probably just building publicity for her next book, or holed up with a new guy, or looking for a quiet place to write. She’s never been overly concerned about the feelings of other people. She’ll turn up, and nobody will know who I am.