Names My Sisters Call Me

by Unknown

  I might have savored it all day, but our buzzer went off in the kitchen, announcing someone’s presence on our front step. Seconds later, both cats shot through the bedroom door and streaked across the room to burrow beneath the bed, as if pursued by the noise of the buzzer.

  I frowned and looked at the clock, unable to imagine who would be stopping by at 9:30 in the morning. I swung out of bed and pulled on the nearest pair of pajama bottoms. Then I zipped up an old, green sweatshirt over my T-shirt. I was raking my hair back into a ponytail as I headed down the hallway, and turned the corner just as Lucas opened our front door.

  Norah stood there, which was in itself amazing, because she didn’t visit very often and when she did, her visits tended to be planned out months in advance. I was exaggerating. Weeks in advance. Norah wasn’t much for the spontaneous drop-in visit. Or, I would have said, spontaneity of any kind.

  And yet here she was on our doorstep, looking determined.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked her as she stepped across the threshold and nodded at Lucas.

  “No, of course not,” she said. She looked at Lucas, and then at me, and then she took a visible breath. “Can we talk?” she asked me.

  Lucas sent me an inquiring look, indicating that he’d be happy to run interference if I wasn’t up to talking. But I shook my head. Something about yesterday’s catharsis made me feel almost calm about Norah’s appearance. Whatever she wanted to say, it couldn’t possibly be any worse than the things I’d been saying to myself.

  Lucas motioned that he’d be in his office, and he kissed me on the top of my head as he walked past me.

  “I’ll make some coffee,” I told Norah.

  I busied myself pulling mugs from the cabinet over the sink, and poured the divine-smelling macadamia nut coffee into each mug. Then I rooted around for the Splenda packets Norah preferred, and the sugar bowl for me. Norah followed me into the kitchen, looking around as if she’d never seen the apartment before. She looked at the pictures on the wall and the photographs in frames. Lucas and me in London. Me and Eliot in the lake at the beach. I fixed my coffee with appropriate proportions of milk to sugar and offered her the same, only with fake sugar and less milk, and then we both moved into the living room. I sat on the chair as she settled herself on the couch, and then I watched her as she set her mug down on the coffee table in front of her. She put her purse on the ground. She ran her hands down her thighs, and then swallowed.

  I was astounded to realize she was nervous. What could that mean? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “Are you sure everything’s all right?” I asked tentatively.

  “Phil and I had a big fight,” she announced then, lacing her fingers together in front of her and putting them down on her lap, very precisely. Then she let out a short laugh. “Or, to be more precise, Phil ripped me a new one.”

  “I didn’t think Phil did that,” I said, startled. I thought of my brother-in-law as in his own world, at best. Prone to daydreaming about quantum physics and always available to offer incomprehensible (to me, anyway) explanations about things like electrons or the cosmos. I would have said he was incapable of ripping into anyone.

  “It’s funny,” Norah said, looking down, her voice tight, “but everyone seems to think that he’s a silent automaton who does my bidding. Which is insulting to both of us. He’s the most independent person I’ve ever met, and I wouldn’t actually be interested in someone I could order around, you know.”

  I attempted to process that. I had never seen Phil not do as Norah asked, but then, that didn’t mean he was taking orders. It was entirely possible he chose to do it. A crucial distinction, that. Lucas often chose to do what I wanted, too, but I knew perfectly well that if he didn’t want to do it, he wouldn’t. The joys of an equal relationship.

  “I didn’t mean to insult you,” I said.

  “I know you didn’t mean to insult me.” She let out a breath. “I didn’t come here to talk about my relationship with Phil. Which is fine.”

  “Good.” Then why had she brought it up? I sipped my coffee and waited.

  “Phil observes a whole lot more than people give him credit for,” Norah continued after a moment. I got the impression she was choosing her words very carefully. Or that she’d practiced. I had a sudden, amusing vision of Norah and Phil practicing family discussions the way Lucas and I did. Why not?

  I returned my attention to what she was saying.

  “And he suggested to me that I’ve been letting my . . . need to somehow even the score with Raine blind me to what’s happening with you.”

  “With me?” I echoed, surprised, pushing the vision of Norah practicing from my mind. “What do you mean?”

  “I told him he was crazy,” Norah said, her eyes meeting mine again. “Of course Courtney knows how much I love her, and how proud I am of her, I told him. Of course she doesn’t think I have some jealous obsession with her cello and how talented she is, because of course she knows that it was always Raine who was angry about that. And he told me that I was letting my temper blind me to the fact that you, in fact, don’t know those things.”

  I stared at her, wordless. Her lips tightened. She looked at me, and then she looked over at the cello in the corner.

  “Phil and I go to at least two of your concerts each season,” she said. “And the piece you played at our wedding was so beautiful it brought me to tears.” She swung her head back toward me. “I don’t think you’re conceited, Courtney. I think you’re amazing. I can’t carry a tune, and I’ve never gotten over the fact I can’t read music. I probably am jealous of you, too, but not in a bad way. I think it’s fantastic that you do what you do. I brag about you all the time.”

  “Norah,” I began, but she shushed me with an impatient sound.

  “I know how I am,” she said when I fell silent, her voice low but firm. “My life runs the way I want it to, and I’m proud of that.” She took a breath. “But I hate the fact that you might have confused my control issues for something worse. I wouldn’t try to micromanage you if I didn’t love you, Courtney. I feel terrible that you don’t know that.”

  “I do know it.” My hands felt useless there in front of me, and my voice sounded harsh in the stillness of the room. “Of course I know it.”

  We looked at each other for a moment, then away. I thought the room felt smaller than it should.

  “I hate that Raine is here,” Norah said then. “I hate what she does.” She met my gaze. “But it’s been pointed out to me that I don’t get to decide how you feel about her, or what you want to do about her. That none of what’s happened since you decided to find her has anything to do with me.” She shrugged. “And I’m struggling to accept that.”

  “Norah . . . ” But I didn’t know what I wanted to say.

  “Nothing she said to you at Mom’s has anything to do with you,” Norah said fiercely. “Of course it can be difficult to have a sister who’s as talented as you are. It tends to make you look a little hard at your own lack of talent, I find. And for Raine, who needs to think of herself as incredibly talented—if tragically undiscovered—it must be heartbreaking to be in the same room as you.”

  I wondered how I felt about that. It was so hard to let go of my idea of Raine. I pictured her as so unfettered, bright and shining far above the kinds of lives other people lived. The other Raine, the one who looked at me like I was a rival and said horrible things to me, I had trouble accepting. I kept thinking the second Raine wasn’t real, that I was misunderstanding her, that she was the first Raine but lost somehow in translation.

  “Well,” Norah said then, into a silence I realized with a start had gone long, “I hope you were speaking in the heat of the moment when you said you didn’t care if I was at your engagement party. Because I want to be there, Courtney. I really do.”

  She braced herself, preparing for a hit.

  Because she expected me to hit back at her.

  Because that was her role. She was the bad guy
. The responsible one. The one who jumped into every uncomfortable situation first. Hadn’t I spent years exasperated with her, thinking of her as a pain in the ass? Knowing she loved me but annoyed that it came with strings?

  “I would love you to be there,” I said, holding her gaze. “I always wanted that. I just wanted her there, too, for some reason.” I took a breath. “And I didn’t stop to think about how that must have felt for you. I’m sorry.”

  “I appreciate that,” she said softly.

  I remembered standing in her house, and the look on her face. Maybe this is about how you live your life, she’d said.

  “I don’t think you’re crazy,” I said now. “Raine treated you badly. I don’t know why I never jump to your defense the way you jump to mine. I think I should apologize for that, too.”

  “Go ahead,” Norah invited me, with a small grin. “I’m always available for apologies.”

  “I think I’m having trouble letting go of who I wanted people to be,” I said. “It turns out I have a lot invested in the roles we all play.”

  I glanced over at my cello, feeling the usual twinge of guilt and the accompanying twitch of my fingers. It felt different, today, however. The cello was just an instrument. I was the one who played it. Whatever love I put into it, that’s what came out of it, but that wasn’t all the love in the world. It was just music. I had more in my life than just a wooden instrument and a bow. I knew that today in a way I never had before.

  “We’re all invested in those roles,” Norah said. “It’s called being related to each other.”

  “I had some fantasy about the whole family . . . ” I dismissed it, wrinkling my nose. “It was stupid. I guess I really am naïve.”

  “It was unlikely,” Norah corrected me wryly. She smiled. “But not stupid, Courtney. Everybody has a fantasy about family.” Her grin deepened. “That’s why I made my own.”

  Everything felt better, and we both sipped our coffee, but she looked as awkward as I assumed I must.

  “I wasn’t lying about Mom,” I said after a moment.

  “I know.” She made a face. “I told you, we’re all invested in the roles we’re supposed to play. How could Mom have a life? What would that say about my life? Welcome to my denial.”

  I considered her for a moment. “You’re harder on yourself than you are on anyone else, and that’s saying something.”

  “Well,” she said. “I should come over here more often.” Her face softened, and she looked away as if she didn’t want me to see it. “I love you very much,” she said.

  “I love you too,” I said in the same serious tone.

  She nodded once, and then surprised me by laughing.

  “And maybe someday,” she said, a wicked light in her eye, “saying that won’t feel medicinal and strange. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  “Nice, sure.” I grinned. “But not us.”

  “Okay, then.” Her face resumed its usual expression. “Next stop, the engagement party, which will be absolutely flawless or I swear to you, I will kill that girl with my bare hands.”

  “Forget about Raine,” I said with an ease I wanted very much to feel. “Who knows if she’s even planning to come? I don’t think she’ll be a problem.”

  Famous last words.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The day of our engagement party was hot and the sky was clear blue. It was a perfect July day in every way. Lucas and I spent the morning visiting with his family, most of whom had driven down for the party, and who were all staying in the same hotel in Center City. Around three o’clock, we left his significantly less dysfunctional family—or so it appeared to me, since they weren’t mine—went home, and changed into our party clothes, admired each other, and then headed out to the suburbs for the party.

  Out at the country club, we set up shop on the deck behind the clubhouse that overlooked the pretty lake where I’d learned to swim a million years before. Lucas and I had arrived early so we could be there to greet everyone and to attempt to convince my mother that she could lighten up a little bit, as she was accessing truly epic control freak levels.

  “It’s fine, Mom,” I tried to soothe her. “The party is going to happen one way or another now, and it’s going to be what it is.” I felt very Zen as I said this. “We have to relax, that’s all.”

  My mother was not, if her facial expression was anything to go by, particularly impressed with this approach.

  “I have entirely too many people coming tonight to relax,” she told me in her driest tone. “I’m the hostess, not the Guest of Honor.”

  Leonard, I noticed, was celebrating the outing of his relationship by staying far out of her way at the bar. No fool, Lucas headed over to join him.

  As he walked away, Mom went on to catalogue the numerous things that, in her opinion, had already gone horribly wrong, most of them involving the apparently surly waitstaff, about whom she planned to write more than one strongly worded letter. Then, suddenly, she noticed the one thing that had really gone wrong.

  “The favors!” she said.

  “You didn’t really make favors.” I frowned at her. “Remember how we agreed that favors were unnecessary, over-the-top, and a little bit creepy?”

  “I remember you thought so,” Mom said. “But then you also find the entire concept of planning a wedding creepy, so you’ll forgive me if I didn’t take your advice.”

  “What did you do?” I asked. “Engraved champagne flutes? M&Ms with our initials? What?”

  “None of the above,” she retorted. “Lucas’s mother sent me one of his baby pictures, and I put it next to one of yours and made prints. Simple and cute.”

  “I’ll go get them,” I said, because I was touched in ways I didn’t want to explore that she had gone to the trouble. It was so sentimental and sweet—words I didn’t associate with my family.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Mom said. “You can’t leave your own party.” She looked around the room. “Where’s Norah?”

  “Norah is not responsible for every last thing,” I said, perhaps more sternly than was necessary. I cleared my throat. “I’ll go. Really. Where are they?”

  “I’ll go,” Mom said, frowning. “I can’t remember if I left them in the kitchen or the bedroom.”

  “You’re the hostess,” I reminded her. “You have to stay. I’m the Guest of Honor—I can be a few minutes late. It’s called an entrance.”

  And that was how I volunteered to drive the ten minutes back to the house and fetch them.

  “I can go,” Lucas said as he walked me out across the parking lot to the door of my mother’s car, still holding his drink in complete defiance of the law. “I really don’t mind.”

  “Your mother and aunts will be here any minute,” I told him. “You need to stay.”

  “Hurry back,” Lucas said, kissing me. “We have an engagement to celebrate.”

  I drove the familiar streets of my hometown, remembering all the other summers I’d done the same. Driving around the pretty little town made me nostalgic and restless all at the same time. It was as if ghosts of my former selves were hanging from the trees or just out of sight on every corner. It seemed funny to me that growing up involved so much shedding of selves. And when you least expected it, you tripped over your own ghosts again, because there always seemed to be something else to learn.

  I parked the car out front and let myself into the house. It was quiet and dark in the front of the house, and there was a cardboard box next to the door. I peeked inside and saw the stack of prints. Lucas and I as babies. It made me smile. Mom must have forgotten the box on her way to the car.

  I straightened, and then, maybe not surprisingly after the last few days, I found myself walking through the living room, into the sitting room. I stood there in the middle of the small room and looked around at all the pictures.

  I found my old favorite photo of him quickly, but didn’t pick it up. Instead, I held up a picture from a trip they’d taken to the Jersey Shore toge
ther. My mother had captured my father tanned and relaxed-looking, smiling in the sunshine, with the Atlantic bright and blue behind him. His dark hair curled slightly, and he looked completely at ease. Happy.

  I might never really understand who he had been, but this was how I wanted to remember him. Young and happy. With any life he chose in front of him.

  I moved the photo to the front of the table. I looked at it for another moment, and then I turned to go—

  And nearly suffered a cardiac arrest because Raine was standing in the archway.

  I actually jumped enough to put air between my feet and the ground.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  “What are you doing?” she asked in reply. She pursed her lips slightly. “I thought there was an intruder.”

  I looked at her, decidedly underdressed in her ratty cutoff shorts, a tank top, and bare feet.

  “So I guess you’re not coming to the party,” I said without inflection.

  She raised her eyebrows in feigned surprise.

  “I thought I wasn’t invited,” she said. Her tone very light, as if she had no opinion about that.

  “It’s up to you,” I said after a moment.

  Raine looked at me as if she was attempting to figure me out, and failing. Then she shook her head.

  “Explain to me how we got here,” she invited me. “You were so excited to see me when you came to San Francisco. Next thing I know you’re calling me a liar and telling me you don’t care if I come to your engagement party. I’m feeling extremely alienated from you, Courtney, and the animosity I’m sensing is really very painful.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, or defend myself, but then stopped. That was my knee-jerk response, and there was no time for knee jerking. There was a party being held in my honor across town, and I was about to be late for it.

  Raine probably knew this, as she probably knew what time it was. And yet she wanted to stand here in the room dedicated to the father we were never going to know—who, I could see now, had a lot to do with our common interest in Matt Cheney—and discuss our relationship.