by Maggie Estep
“Eloise?” I said, standing up.
Some of the loose dogs ran up to Eloise and surrounded her.
“Alice,” she said, seeming unsurprised to find me on this remote trail, surrounded by dogs, with tears staining my cheeks.
“What are you doing here?” I asked as she came closer.
“Walking,” she said dreamily. “Ava and I just got back. She’s unpacking. I decided to stretch my legs.”
I had forgotten that Ava Larkin’s house sits near the mouth of the Rabbit Hole trail and that it was here that Mom met Ava in the first place.
“You’re going to get foot diseases,” I said, motioning at her bare feet.
She smiled a strange smile that seemed to say that kind of thing was beneath her. Her eyes were far away and sparkly at first, then she seemed to really see me for the first time and her face changed.
“Alice, you’re crying?”
“I’m sad.” I shrugged.
“What’s the matter?”
“Let’s walk, and I’ll tell you,” I said since the dogs were getting impatient.
I got Eloise to take two of them across the creek while I handled Rosemary. I remembered Elo struggling to cross the creek the time we’d come here with Mom, but that was pre—movie star lesbian lover Elo; this new Elo crossed barefoot with a dog in each hand and didn’t miss a beat.
On the other side, we took up the narrow, slightly muddy path leading deep into the woods. The creek was at our left, a lush hill to our right, little waterfalls bursting from it every few steps.
“So?” said Eloise after we’d walked in silence for a few minutes.
“I think Mom’s getting high again.”
“No way.”
“I think so.” I told her about the pills.
“Maybe she’s really in pain.”
“We’re all really in pain. But pain-meds pain? No. She’d have told us.”
Eloise agreed that it was a worry. That, between taking up with a man, taking a vacation, and apparently taking pain meds, something had to be wrong with our mother.
“You think the relapse made her heterosexual?” my sister asked.
“What, because she’d have to be stoned to have sex with a man? Are you an expert on lesbianism now?”
“I’m not an expert on anything, Alice, that’s your department,” my sister said sadly. “I wasn’t implying that it would take a drug relapse to make someone switch back to men. I just mean she’s not in her right mind and she ended a long-term relationship, and, seemingly out of the blue, took up with someone of a different gender.”
I said nothing.
“So you were crying over our mother?” Eloise asked after a couple more minutes of strolling in silence.
“Is it my crying you’re skeptical about or my crying over our mother?”
“Well,” Eloise said carefully, “a bit of both.”
“Yes. I am crying over our mother. And there’s the problem of that man,” I added.
“Clayton?”
“Well, him, but William too. You know. The architect with the brown pit bull.”
Suddenly, my sister’s head pivoted on its neck so fast I thought it might twist off.
“Brown pit bull?” she practically hissed.
“Yes. Gumdrop,” I said, frowning at Elo’s reaction.
“Gumdrop?” She looked like she was going to pass out.
“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“His name is William? As in Billy?”
“Not Billy. Just William.”
“Sometimes he calls himself Billy. Must just depend which sister he’s fucking.”
“What?”
“Billy Rotten is an architect. I gave him Turbo, the brown pit bull. He called me not long ago, after not making contact for weeks, to tell me how well the dog was doing. He had changed her name to Gumdrop.”
We had both stopped walking.
I felt the blood draining from my extremities. Eloise was no longer that peaceful-seeming being of a few minutes ago. Her face was twisted up and her eyes looked black.
“William is Billy Rotten?” I said dumbly.
“Evidently.” Eloise looked furious.
“You know that I had no idea, right? He was just some guy I met in the park.”
“He was just some guy I met in the park too. I guess that’s his M.O.,” Eloise said bitterly.
“But, Elo, you’re with Ava now, do you really care?”
“Of course I care. He broke my heart and fucked my sister.”
“I don’t think he knows I’m your sister.” I said it soothingly even though I was beginning to get angry with her. After all, I was the one actively sleeping with the guy. I was the one who had to put everything about William into a new context, a context that included his being intimate with my baby sister. I felt betrayed. By William but, somehow, by Eloise too. I knew this wasn’t logical and was probably also exactly what she was feeling. But there it was.
We had started moving again though it wasn’t the companionable walk we’d embarked on a few minutes earlier. The woods seemed darker, the dogs did not look quite as carefree, and Eloise wasn’t walking as lightly on her bare feet. Her limp was pronounced now.
She cursed when she stepped on something sharp, then, just as we came to the second creek crossing, announced she was turning back.
“You’re not actually angry with me, Eloise, are you?” She was. But by asking, I thought maybe I could point to the ridiculousness of such a stance.
She didn’t even dignify me with an answer. She shrugged and started walking the other way.
“Elo, come on, what about Mom? We have to talk,” I called after her.
She turned back around. “Talk to someone else, I’m sick of your shit.”
I stood there, stunned under a canopy of beautiful trees.
I’d walked all the dogs and given medicine to the ones that needed it. I had tried calling Eloise’s cell phone but it went straight to voicemail. I considered calling William but didn’t even know where to begin. What would I ask? Why did you leave? Why did you fuck my sister and leave her too?
I toyed with the idea of taking some of Mom’s pills. Knocking myself out for a day or two until I could forget that this day had ever happened. But there were the dogs to deal with. And I don’t like losing time the way drug addicts do. I don’t mind a buzz sometimes, but total annihilation? I never really did understand that.
I was at a loss. I skulked into the living room, turned on the TV and found TVG, the racing channel, among the hundreds of channels Mom gets through her satellite dish. I hadn’t even planned on wagering, had expected to spend the day with William, but with the afternoon’s jaws yawning wide, the only sensible thing to was throw myself head-first into horses. I put my laptop on the coffee table and pulled up one of my online wagering accounts; in a matter of moments, I was getting lost in the numbers. There was horseflesh on the TV, live odds and past performances from the Daily Racing Form on my computer screen. I was at peace. Or, at least, I was doing what usually puts me at peace. After hitting two lucrative trifectas, I signed onto my Gmail account. Nothing good. Nothing from William. Nothing from Eloise, and, of course, nothing from Clayton. I didn’t know what the Rikers Island e-mail policy might be but Clayton had never been interested in computers, email, or any form of non-tactile communication anyway.
I went back to wagering, managing to hit the $1,265 late Pick 4 at Belmont. I hadn’t really done my homework so it was mostly dumb luck. I hate dumb luck. It never makes me feel better.
I walked the dogs again. Four at a time, in shifts, along Upper Byrdcliffe Road and part of the way up the Mt. Guardian trail. By the time I’d walked and fed all fifteen dogs, it was dark out and I felt somberness creeping up on me. They say old people and crazy people get disjointed when darkness falls. I am probably both at this point.
I wanted to call someone, but who? Arthur was one of the few people I knew who was both in the country and speaking to me.
But I didn’t feel like talking about Todd Pletcher—trained horses or teenage girls. So I didn’t call him.
I pictured my mother. Tried to put myself inside her head, to figure out what exactly she was up to with the pills, the man, the vacation. I remembered Eloise and I meeting her outside a church down on Route 212 where she attended Narcotics Anonymous. I glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was close to 8 p.m. I could go loiter outside the church where I might recognize some of Mom’s NA friends as they drifted out of the meeting. I could accost one of them, see if they knew what my mother was up to. It was probably some sort of infraction of their traditions to tell an outsider what was going on with one of their members, but it’s not like I was a law enforcement officer. I had a right to know.
I arranged Mom’s dogs in various rooms throughout the house then leashed Candy and put her in the backseat of my mother’s Honda. My little mutt sat down and regally lifted her muzzle in the air.
As I pulled into the church parking lot, people were emerging. Most of the men had strange facial hair and the women looked like biker chicks. They were congregating in little groups, some smoking, some standing near motorcycles. They looked like a bunch of thugs. Mom always says the people in AA are more upstanding but proportionally duller. So she goes to NA.
I noticed a familiar-looking girl who was wearing sunglasses even though the sun was almost gone. I remembered Mom talking to her though her name wasn’t coming to me. As I got out of the car, telling Candy to stay put, the tall, willowy girl detached herself from the people she’d been chatting with and started heading toward a gold-colored Subaru.
“Hey,” I said, feeling like some sort of weirdo.
The girl frowned and stopped in her tracks.
“I’m Kim Hunter’s daughter. Alice. I think I met you once.”
“Oh,” the girl said. “Right.” She was very pretty with sharp cheekbones and fawn-colored hair. She was wearing a printed dress and ballet slippers.
“Could I talk to you for a second? I just want to ask you something about my mother.”
The girl removed her sunglasses and leveled her gaze at me. Her eyes were a piercing blue.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“I found pills in my mom’s medicine chest.” I decided it was probably best to get straight to the point.
“Oh?” she said cautiously.
“Painkillers. A lot of them.”
“And?”
“And I’m wondering if my mom is on a relapse. She’s been behaving erratically. My sister and I are worried.”
Bringing Eloise into it seemed to legitimize the whole thing somehow.
“What are you doing right now?” the tall girl asked. “Doing?”
“I mean, do you want to go to town and grab a coffee? We can talk.”
My heart sank since surely her wanting to talk to me over coffee signaled something significant to talk about.
“Sure, okay.”
“I’m Ida,” she said, extending a hand to shake. Ida? I thought. I would have imagined her to be an Isabelle or at the very least a Julia, but never an Ida.
We agreed to meet at Joshua’s, a café in town, and I got back into the Honda where Candy greeted me as if I’d been gone for weeks. I returned the effusive greetings then put the car in drive.
Town was packed even though it was a weekday. It was June now and all the city people had opened up their summer houses and were swelling the tiny local economy with their needs for lawn-care products, organic foods, and ice cream. The municipal parking lot was full but I crammed the Honda into a dubious spot near a fire lane. I found some dog treats in my pocket, cracked the windows, and told Candy I’d be back soon.
Ida was already there in the café, standing at the counter ordering a coffee. I ordered one too and we made our way to a table.
“I’m up here watching my mom’s dogs while she’s on vacation,” I explained.
“I know, it’s a small town.”
“Oh,” I said, wondering what else she knew.
“Yes, I know about your sister and Ava Larkin too.”
“You do?” I felt myself screwing my face up and immediately tried to stop. Ida had an unlined, untroubled face, the kind that made someone like me self-conscious.
“Yes. Well, for one, your mom and I are friends. But I’d probably know anyway. Not that many of the locals ever actually see Ava Larkin, but her landscaper apparently saw her making out with Eloise, who he’d met once through your mom. As a result, the entire town knows.” Ida smiled a little wistfully. “I never thought I’d like this kind of thing, this small-town thing. But I do. I love it.”
“You came from the city?”
She nodded and took a huge, unladylike gulp of her coffee. There’s nothing more wonderful than an elegant woman slugging a beverage back like a redneck.
“I’m from the South but I started modeling when I was fifteen so I moved to Manhattan. I had a good run and a severe heroin problem … I know. Heroin-addict model. Boring.”
I laughed.
“I lost most of my teeth by age twenty-eight and by thirty I was living on people’s couches with all my possessions in a black garbage bag. But I still wore cute little Prada dresses. Well, one cute little Prada dress. It probably didn’t smell very good.”
She flashed a smile. She had plenty of teeth.
“Fake,” she said, flicking a fingernail against a front tooth. “Somewhere in there I managed to fall in love. In spite of the drugs and the insanity. I married my husband five years ago and went into NA. We bought a house up here and never looked back. Now I’m forty and I garden and work at the Historical Society and fuck my husband and like it.” She grinned.
She started asking me about myself. I wanted to know about my mother but didn’t want to be rude, and anyway, it seemed like Ida was warming herself up for it, evaluating me, deciding whether or not she could trust me. I told her about my life. She cocked an eyebrow at my occupation as most people in twelve-step programs do. I told her about Clayton and even about William and the fact that he’d slept with both Eloise and me.
“Shit,” Ida whistled through her teeth. “That’s messy.”
“Yeah,” I shrugged, “it is.”
“But you want to know what’s up with your mom.”
“Yes. It really freaked me out finding all those pain pills.”
“The only reason I’m going to tell you this is that I’ve actually seriously considered tracking down your number and calling you to tell you,” Ida said.
I braced myself for the details. How Mom had been popping pills for the last three years but none of us had noticed.
“When you showed up outside the meeting, it seemed like a sign I should tell you. Even though I don’t believe in signs.”
I nodded, waiting for her to get on with it.
“Your mom has cancer.”
9. ELOISE
I was sitting on a tree stump, guzzling Pepsi from a plastic quart bottle as I watched Ava wielding a chainsaw. She was wearing cut-offs, a white tank top, work gloves, and protective goggles. It was possibly the sexiest sight I’d ever seen in my life. Sexy enough to momentarily take my mind off my wretched sister Alice who I’d been mentally cursing for thirty-six straight hours since running into her on the trail and finding out that she was sleeping with Billy Rotten. I wasn’t sure who I felt more vehemently toward, Billy or my sister, who’d had the audacity to leave me seven phone messages since, all of which I’d deleted immediately.
“What are you looking at?” Ava had stopped chainsawing and noticed that I was staring at her.
“You,” I said. “Want some?” I proffered the Pepsi.
“Get that vile swill away from me. Why are you putting that stuff in your beautiful body?”
“I turn to it when life throws me a curve ball.”
“What curve ball?” She’d pulled the goggles up onto her forehead and was squinting at me. Her long skinny arms were shiny with sweat, strands of blond hair were g
lued to her cheeks.
“My sister,” I said. I had mentioned running into and arguing with Alice but I hadn’t told Ava what we’d had words about.
“What did your sister do?”
“She’s seeing that guy I was with right before I met you.”
“The late trapeze instructor?”
“No, Billy Rotten.”
“Who is Billy Rotten?”
“I had a one-night stand with him. But a significant one-night stand.”
Ava cocked an eyebrow.
“I really liked him but I couldn’t bring myself to follow through with him. It was too soon after Indio’s death. Or something. Yet Billy haunted me. Until I met you and forgot all about him. Still, it’s not like I welcome the news of my sister sleeping with him.”
“You introduced them to each other? And then Alice stole him?”
“No.” I shook my head and explained the situation. How it was entirely possible that Billy didn’t even know Alice was my sister and that it was extremely unlikely Alice realized that her William was my Billy.
“So why are you mad at her?” Ava frowned.
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I don’t even know why I got so bent out of shape about Billy in the first place.”
“Are you in love with him?” Ava put a hand on her hip. She didn’t have much in the way of hips, had the classic fashion-model figure of a twelve-year-old boy, but even so, she looked stern with that hand on that hip.
“Of course not.”
“So why exactly are you mad at your sister?”
“She’s always doing the same things I do, only better. Plus, Mom asked her to dog sit, not me. Alice is just better at everything.”
Ava had both hands on her hips now and was frowning.
“Eloise,” she said, “your mother couldn’t ask you to dog sit because you were in Canada with me. Also, I don’t really understand the nature of big sister/little sister competitiveness since I only have a little brother, but from what you’ve told me in the past, your sister loves you. Maybe it’s best to remember that.”
