Coming Back to Me

by Caroline Leavitt

  Molly grew quiet. “I’m not an only child. I have a sister.”

  “You do?” He looked at her, surprised. People with siblings were always threading the names of their brothers or sisters casually into their conversations, but Molly hadn’t mentioned a sister at all. Not until now.

  “Suzanne. She’s three years older. She ran away when she was seventeen and I haven’t seen or heard from her for a few years now.”

  “Are you serious?” Gary shook his head in astonishment. If he had had any family at all, a brother, a sister, even a cousin, he would have made sure that they lived next door to him for life. He would have been on the phone with them every day. “Years,” he repeated. Molly looked distractedly off in the distance. She bent to pick up a stray sock, to straighten a magazine on the table. There were things that people didn’t want to talk about, and usually he respected that. Usually, he let people keep their secrets or take their time revealing them to him. But Molly wasn’t “people.” Not to him. “How come?” he persisted.

  Molly stopped bustling about the room. She tapped the sock against her hand.

  He gave her a loopy smile, trying to make her feel more relaxed. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  She looked at him as if she were deciding something important, and then she slowly put down the sock. She walked over to a table and picked up a clear acrylic box, pieced together like a puzzle, with four steel balls rolling around on top. Inside was a piece of paper folded over. She handed it to Gary.

  “What’s this?” Gary said.

  Molly half smiled. “Suzanne’s unlisted address and phone number. You have to get all these balls into this hole to open the box and get the paper. I know it’s kind of silly, but I put it there anyway, like a symbol, just to remind me she’s still present in my life. And to remind me to think twice before contacting her.”

  “I’m good at these things.” Gary reached for the box, and Molly snatched it back toward her.

  “No. Don’t you dare.” She put the box back on the dresser. “It’s a whole long story.”

  “I like long stories.”

  This time she smiled back at him, considering. “How about we get to know each other a little better before we talk about Suzanne?”

  Gary looked over at the rumpled bed. “Wait a minute! We don’t know each other now?”

  She laughed. “Well, we do, and we don’t.”

  “Well, then we’d better start changing that. How about dinner and a movie? You name the day.”

  chapter two

  Molly Goldman couldn’t stop thinking about Gary. How easy he was to talk to. How funny. How smart. How much he seemed to like her already. After he left, she rushed to get to work. She kept seeing his face, kept feeling his hands sliding across her body.

  She didn’t want to blow it. She was a little worried, though. She had seen the look on his face when she said she didn’t want to talk about Suzanne. She had seen that look before. People got suspicious of you if they found out you had a sister and didn’t bother with her. No matter what the story was, they blamed you for not being loyal, for not being forgiving. “It’s a sister, after all,” they said. Molly knew that. Molly knew that better than anyone.

  There was a time when she and Suzanne had been real sisters. When they had been happy together. It was back when they lived in California, crowded with their mother into a tiny rented house in La Jolla, a mile away from the beach.

  They were pretty much on their own back then. Angela was a single working mother, and although she managed to find cheap sitters for them when they were babies, as soon as they both were in grade school, she gave Suzanne keys to the house and a little pocket money and instructions to watch Molly and to try not to burn the house down. “I’ll be back by five,” she promised, and she was.

  Molly liked the way things were. She had invitations, but she didn’t really care to go home with her friends because their mothers always looked at her with a peculiar sympathy she didn’t understand. They were always coming at her with a sandwich she didn’t want, an extra sweater they had got on sale, and would Molly, perhaps, like it? She didn’t envy the way her friends couldn’t blast their music in their own houses, or stomp their feet, or even choose when and what they wanted to eat. Her friends’ mothers could look at her with compassion all they wanted, but Molly knew she had something better. She had a kind of freedom. And she had Suzanne.

  Every day after school, Molly would run outside and find Suzanne leaning along the fence, waiting for her, her choppy black hair blowing into her face, her eyes bright with excitement. “Come on, let’s run wild,” Suzanne said, a phrase one of the girls at school had told her was the reason why her mother wouldn’t let her play with the Goldman girls. They hightailed it to the beach and swam. They roamed the dunes searching for valuables people might have dropped. They ran over to the duplex theater and paid for one movie and halfway through snuck into another, gorging themselves on popcorn and stale candy, laughing and making so much noise, other people would always tell them to shush.

  Molly remembered money wasn’t so tight back then. The bills were kept in check by Angela’s job, and there was often enough left over for small surprises. A new dress now and then. A new portable radio. Everyone helped out, and to Molly, it seemed kind of fun. Dinnertimes were raucous and noisy, the radio blasting, spaghetti boiling in a pot, a store-bought, sugary cake for dessert. Afterward, Angela did laundry or cleaned the house while Suzanne helped Molly with her homework. And then, they all watched movies on TV or took walks, and by ten each night, all of them were yawning. “Who’s tired?” Angela said, stretching. “I’ve got work tomorrow and you girls have school.”

  The girls had twin beds, pushed to opposite corners of the room. Molly loved sharing a room with Suzanne because Suzanne was so strong and capable and unafraid of anything. Suzanne didn’t think twice about shooting out into the backyard in just her nightgown and bare feet to check out a sound. “Any robbers out here?” she shouted gleefully. “Any bad men?” And she wasn’t the least afraid of the dark. Not the way Molly was.

  To Molly, the dark was a living, breathing thing, with a personality you didn’t want to mess with. It waited for Molly. It stalked her. And Molly saw things at night. Shadows that changed their shapes even as she looked at them. She heard things. Deep, throaty growls. Insect whines, the beating of wings, everything getting closer and closer. Molly arranged the sheets so that only her nose poked out. She jumped at every noise, rustling the sheets, so that Suzanne finally sat up. “Do you think you could keep me awake a little more?” Suzanne said acidly.

  “Did you hear a noise?”

  Suzanne sighed. “No one can get in. It’s safe. Now shut up and go to sleep.”

  “Do you think there are ghosts?”

  “No. Go. To. Sleep. Now.”

  Molly lay in bed, listening, staring at the ceiling. Finally, there was silence. If Suzanne was asleep, Molly was totally unprotected. “Suzanne?” She sat up, bundling the covers about her. She shivered and made a noise with her feet knocking against the footboard. Silence. She did it again, louder this time, and then she looked over and there was Suzanne sitting up, glaring at her.

  Suzanne didn’t say anything. She stuck her arm out, her fingers reaching for Molly across the divide that separated their beds. “Go to sleep,” she said. Molly shut her eyes. Five minutes later Molly opened them, and kicked her legs on the footboard again. Suzanne’s eyes flew open. Suzanne sat up. “Oh, for God sakes,” Suzanne said. She sounded disgusted. She got up and headed for the door. Molly cursed herself and then Suzanne suddenly turned and came back and stood beside Molly. Her brow was furrowed as if she was thinking of something. She folded her arms across her flowered nightgown. “So are you going to give me any room or what?” Suzanne said, and climbed into bed beside her.

  Molly fell asleep next to Suzanne in two seconds, not waking until morning, the birds fussing outside the window. That morning was the first time, in a long while, she felt
rested. She rubbed her eyes. There was Suzanne already up, pulling on her dress, sliding into her shoes. “Don’t think this is an everyday thing,” Suzanne told her. “Don’t get all cocky about it.” But that night, and every night after that that she needed, all Molly had to do was look across the room at Suzanne. She didn’t have to say a thing. Suzanne rolled her eyes. She sighed. And each and every time she got out of her bed and into Molly’s, and she stayed in that cramped little bed with Molly until morning.

  Molly was nine and Suzanne was almost twelve when Angela’s company was sold to a conglomerate in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and if anyone was willing to relocate, they could have a job—and with slightly better pay. That was all Angela needed to hear. “We’re going,” Angela said.

  The day before they were to leave, the girls went to the beach for the last time. It was night, clear and cold and there was no one on the beach except for them. Molly didn’t know how she felt about the move: strange and scared and a little excited, too. “Do you think we’ll like it?” she asked Suzanne. She thought of tall, needlelike buildings. People rushing by so fast you could be knocked over in a minute. Winter and snow.

  “Everything’s going to change now,” Suzanne said seriously. They were in their pastel flip-flops and shorts, their T-shirts flapping in the salty wind. There were signs pitched into the sand. Undertow. There were rumors that a Scotty dog had been pulled in and all that had been left was his rubber bone, floating up, along the waves.

  Suzanne abruptly began tugging off her top, her shorts, stepping out of her flip-flops. “What are you doing?” Molly said.

  Suzanne was in her white panties and T-shirt. She sprinted into the water. “Stop!” Molly called, but Suzanne kept going, all flashing white arms and legs and long black hair.

  “Suzanne!” she screamed.

  She ran down to the water. A wave splashed at her feet, so icy she felt panicked. “Suzanne!” she screamed. She scanned the water and then suddenly she saw her sister’s head, bobbing up, slick like a seal’s. Suzanne’s mouth was moving and then she went under again and Molly dove, unthinking, into the waves.

  She had never swum over her head in the ocean. She wasn’t even that good a swimmer, but she wouldn’t let herself stop. She took in great gulps of salty water, pinwheeling her body around to search for her sister. “Suzanne!” she cried, frantic. What did an undertow feel like? Did you have warning? Could you pull yourself free? Would you die? “Suzanne!” she screamed, and then she saw her sister’s head again, bobbing up, one hand gliding up out of the water, like a strange delicate flower, just inches from her and Molly lunged and grabbed onto it. She pulled Suzanne around.

  Suzanne was laughing. Her eyes were round blue marbles. “Isn’t this great?” Suzanne screamed. “Isn’t this the best?”

  Molly’s hands dug at the water. Her legs felt like anvils. The cold was like a thousand stabbing needles.

  “Your lips are blue,” Suzanne said. “Let’s go back.”

  By the time Molly made it to shore, Suzanne was already pulling her clothes back on, twisting the water from her long hair.

  “Dope. You swam in your clothes,” Suzanne said. She rubbed Molly’s arms with her own. She took care of her, the way she always did. “Rub yourself down,” she ordered.

  Molly was so freezing she could barely clap her arms about her body. “I thought you were drowning,” Molly blurted, trying to stamp warmth into her feet.

  Suzanne snorted. “You would. Ha. Like I need rescue. You watch out for yourself that you don’t catch a chill.” She rubbed Molly down with her hands a little more.

  “You can’t get sick from being cold. That’s an old wives’ tale.”

  Suzanne ignored her. “We’ll go home, get hot showers, and no one will be the wiser.”

  The next day, the only sign that the girls had gone to the beach at night was a fine spray of sand in the hallway of the house. Molly was fine, but Suzanne came down with a flu so virulent she was sick for weeks after.

  Both girls had hated Elizabeth on first sight. It was too gray, too faded, and the air had a strange metallic smell to it. There was no beach to run to, the shopping district was run-down, and the people seemed more sour than exotic. Even Angela complained. “This house is so small,” she said. She roamed the rooms, looking caged. She kept shaking her head.

  Almost immediately, it was clear that things weren’t better the way Angela had promised. Molly felt lost in her new school. She had had friends before, but here she felt as if all the other girls were speaking a foreign language. They seemed to know things she didn’t, about makeup and clothes and how to act. And they took one look at her frizzy red hair, her knees like teacups, and treated her with casual disdain, a California girl who didn’t have the sense to at least look Californian. In the cafeteria, she sat with the other outcasts, girls with sloppy ponytails and bad skin and braces, girls who stared at her as furiously and resentfully as she did at them, because they all knew if there were anyone better to sit beside, they’d be there. The only times she felt happy were when she passed Suzanne in the hallways. Suzanne walked alone, too, but she wasn’t hunched over the way Molly was. Suzanne whistled and bounced, and when she saw Molly, she winked broadly at her.

  Angela began coming home later and later. She was working for a wolf-faced man named Lars whom she claimed never stopped riding her because she was a minute late, because she had made a single typo, because she had gone to the wrong room for a meeting and held everyone up. “Just because he looks like that, he doesn’t have to take it out on me,” she said. She mimicked his walk, stiff-legged, hands swinging like a soldier, making the girls laugh. “Oh, Miz Gold-mun,” she rasped. “Please could you do more slave labor? Oh, Miz Gold-mun, please could you work every single second of your life, not even taking time to breathe?” She began bringing some of her work home. Just to keep up. Night after night, she grabbed dinner standing up, a cold cheese sandwich, a hot dog, a burger. Weekends, Angela spread out piles of work all over the house. And as Angela’s work grew, so did the piles of laundry, the dirty dishes stacked in the sink, the dust floating like a pollen in the air.

  One day, Molly and Suzanne came home to find a big black chalkboard hanging in the kitchen with a list of things on it. Laundry. Shopping. Wash floors. Clean bathroom. Dust. Angela tapped the board and pointed to Suzanne. “A house is like a business, and what we need here is a little delegation.”

  “A little what?” Molly frowned.

  “Delegation. Parceling out the things I don’t have time to do to someone else. Someone like Suzanne.”

  Suzanne blinked at Angela, astonished. “Mom—” she said. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “We have no food in the house. We have no clean clothes. The dust bunnies are turning into rabbits even as we speak. You’re a big girl. It’s time you help out around here.”

  Molly watched Suzanne’s face darken. “What do I do?” Molly said. She was almost afraid to find out.

  Angela considered. “You take out the trash and do your homework and listen to your sister. Someone has to be in charge, run the ship. And Suzanne’s the oldest.” She looked at Suzanne. “And you watch Molly. I don’t want her here alone.”

  “But, Mom …” Suzanne’s voice trailed.

  Angela’s voice grew sharp. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m still your mother and what I say goes.”

  It was a lot to ask a young girl. Molly remembered Suzanne was always flying around the house, always busy. After school, Suzanne had to come right home now because she had to do the shopping or the laundry. Suzanne bought the groceries from lists Angela left her, she cooked the dinners and did the laundry, and she took care of Molly, rustling her out of bed mornings and taking her to school, picking her up to get her home, and bossing her into bed at night. Molly picked up some laundry and Suzanne knocked it out of her hand. “It’ll just take longer if you help,” she said, panicked. Molly was still with Suzanne all the time, but now everything felt different. Going
to the market wasn’t the same as going to the beach. Suzanne stopped joking, she stopped running for the door with Molly when Angela’s key rattled in the lock and instead waited in the kitchen, tense, as Angela looked around the house, inspecting. “The clothes folded?” Angela asked Suzanne. “Did you get to the bathrooms the way I asked?” Angela checked off each thing on the chalkboard. “What about the dusting? Did you do that?”

  Molly loved her sister, and she knew Suzanne loved her, but sometimes, when Molly looked at Suzanne, she saw the same anxious look on her sister’s face that Angela wore when Angela thought no one was looking, as if someone were chasing her, starting to gain ground. It was a look that made Molly want to shut her eyes and never open them again.

  One morning, Molly bolted awake from a bad dream. The house was still dark. Suzanne was still sleeping, the covers bunched about her head. Molly squinted at the clock. Six. Almost time to get up anyway. She padded out of the bedroom. The house was so quiet for a moment, she thought her mother had left. She felt a flicker of anger and then, there in the kitchen, she saw Angela standing in the middle of a pile of papers, staring out the back window, looking so lost and hopeless that Molly felt like grabbing her mother around her knees and holding on. “Mom?” she said, and Angela turned, smiling wearily. “Well,” she said, overly hearty, joking, “like my new filing system?”

  “I can help you—” Molly said.

  “Scoot,” said Angela. “Go get ready for school.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Of course I am.”

  But that evening, when the girls came home, Angela was quiet. She didn’t speak through dinner, hotdogs and frozen french fries, not until Suzanne got up to clear the table. “There’s got to be another way out of this,” Angela said.