Everything's Relative

by Jenna McCarthy

  Brooke dashed to the closet and grabbed her suitcase, the one that still had the faded, battered tags on it from the one time she’d been on an airplane in her life. She’d been sixteen and her grandmother had sent plane tickets for her and Lexi to visit her in Florida. Juliana had forbid it at first; with Jules out of the house, she kept a tighter rein on Brooke and Lexi than ever. That was the year she’d forced both girls to chop their waist-length locks into boyish little matching bobs (“I will not have my daughters looking like hippies,” she’d said), and had grounded Brooke for a month after she found a candy bar wrapper (“Who said you could eat that?”) beneath her bed. Brooke had been terrified to fly, terrified to spend a week with an old lady she barely knew and whom her mother had nothing kind to say about whatsoever, but the thought of seven days away from Juliana was enough incentive to overcome just about any fear she could imagine. So she’d worked her mother very carefully, pointing out how nice it would be for her to have the house to herself and not to have to shuttle her and Lexi around for a few days. Eventually, miraculously, Juliana had given in, and it had turned out to be one of the best weeks of Brooke’s life. Her father’s mother, who asked them to call her Nonnie, had been sweet and doting and had spoiled the sisters rotten, teaching them to play canasta and baking cookies with them and even taking them to get matching pedicures. She’d told them stories about their dad that they’d never heard before and taught them songs she’d once sang with him. When the sisters got back and told Juliana what a great time they’d had, their mother hadn’t said a word. Nonnie had never invited them to visit again, at least that they knew of. The next time they saw her face was in her obituary picture two years later; they hadn’t been allowed to attend the funeral.

  Now Brooke stuffed clothes and shoes and toiletries into the suitcase. She huffed and puffed and tugged and pulled and finally got the zipper closed. It was straining at the seams. When she stood it up it popped open, the broken zipper dangling limply over the spilled contents. She looked around and finally pulled a pillowcase off the bed, then scooped up her things and shoved them angrily into it. She kicked the broken suitcase as hard as she could afterward and watched it spin across the floor. When it stopped, she ran over to it and ripped the American Airlines tag off of it and stuffed that into her pillowcase, too.

  She grabbed her purse and began fishing in it for her keys when she remembered: Jake had her car. That married, probably-about-to-be-a-father, pathetic excuse of a man had her car. And she didn’t have a single dollar. Or anywhere to go. She slumped into a chair. Defeated, Brooke put her head down on her pillowcase full of fat-girl dresses and granny panties and sensible shoes and wept.

  Lexi

  Lexi was watching TV when Shawn came home. It was after one in the morning. She mumbled a surly hi and was relieved when he padded off to bed without trying to make polite small talk with her. All she wanted was to be left alone.

  When she heard the grumbling that was her brother-in-law’s snoring, she tiptoed to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer, muffling the top with her hand as she cracked it open. She felt like she was fourteen years old again, sneaking around behind Juliana’s back. She’d gotten caught only once, after downing her mother’s vodka and foolishly refilling the bottle with water before putting it back in the freezer. She hadn’t known that water would freeze and expand and crack the bottle, although she could have predicted Juliana’s reaction. Lexi had been grounded for six months—no television, no friends, and certainly nothing resembling fun. It was just enough time to really hone her delinquency skills. She’d learned how to slip out her bedroom window undetected, forge her mother’s signature perfectly and catch a nice little buzz by stuffing moth balls into a bag and inhaling the fumes. Although she’d gotten remarkably proficient at staying below her mother’s radar, she’d been sure those days were far behind her. How the fuck had she wound up here, in her sister’s shitty little boring, ugly-ass house, when there were people living on yachts and in mansions and traveling the world and walking down red carpets? Life was so not fair. Then she remembered: She was about to be a millionaire. This was all temporary. In five minutes—relatively, at least—she could have and do whatever the hell she wanted. All she had to do was get a job.

  Lexi rifled through Jules’s desk until she unearthed a fat pad of paper and then fished around in vain for a decent pencil. Her sister was supposed to be a writer, and she didn’t even have one pointy pencil with an eraser on it in the house? That couldn’t be a good sign. Lexi found one broken one with a nice, sharp tip and another with a nub of an eraser and no lead at all and curled up on the couch with her supplies.

  She’d intended to make some notes of things she might be good at, jobs that might be suitable for her, but instead she began sketching. Drawing was the one way Lexi knew—besides snorting or inhaling or injecting something deliciously mind altering—to quiet her mind and collect her thoughts. When she was lost in a sketch, hours could pass before she realized she hadn’t eaten, hadn’t gotten up to pee, hadn’t worried about money or life or tried to count how many guys she’d screwed in her lifetime. Plus it was free, a fact that trumped all of the other advantages combined.

  Her pencil flew over the page as she sketched now, pulling haunting faces with piercing eyes and perfectly proportioned limbs out of thin air. She’d never had a single art lesson, yet she understood on a cellular level how to contour and shade and shadow things to remarkably realistic effect. Very few people had ever seen her drawings, but she’d been busted drawing in the library in high school once, and the librarian had insisted that her work had “an incredible M. C. Escher quality” to it. Lexi had nodded and pasted on her best fake smile, refusing to admit that she didn’t know—and frankly, didn’t give a rat’s ass—who that was.

  Without even realizing it, Lexi had drawn a woman and three young girls. The woman was tall and beautiful with the graceful body of a ballerina; she stood alone, far apart from the little girls. The sketch was rich with detail, with the pattern on the woman’s skirt disappearing into the folds of fabric and popping back out again. The three girls were identical, save one identifying marking apiece. One had a skinned knee, one had a bandage on her hand and one had a tiny tattoo of a broken heart on her arm. The picture was so lifelike it could almost have been a photograph but for the fact that Lexi had drawn the woman with no eyes at all; the little girls had no mouths.

  Lexi sketched and sketched until she could barely keep her eyes open, then flipped the pad closed. She looked around the living room for a place to hide it, finally sticking it between two tall books on the small bookshelf. She scanned the other titles with amusement: Why We Write. Advice to Writers. The First Five Pages. Her amusement quickly turned to dull despair when she realized that if her sister had to read books about how to write one, her odds of actually doing it were up there with her own odds of ever landing an actual job.

  Jules

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” Jules told Lexi, shaking her sister’s shoulder as she did. “Did you hear me?”

  “’Kay,” Lexi slurred. She pulled the blanket over her head and curled up into a tight ball.

  “Alexis, please get up and get this bed picked up before I get back, okay? That was one of our deals. You promised.”

  “’Kay,” Lexi mumbled again. Jules sighed, grabbed her things and headed out to fetch her dogs. Of course, Lexi would be right where she was now when Jules got home, but it’s not like anything Jules said would change that. Lexi had been with her and Shawn for two weeks and it felt like they were living in a pressure cooker. Jules had hoped that Lexi would be gracious and thankful, but instead she was as touchy and sarcastic as Jules had ever seen her. She commandeered the TV and growled when Jules or Shawn suggested watching a different show, and she ate the meals Jules prepared in stony silence, without so much as a “this is good” or “thanks.” Jules realized that what she was offering wasn’t much—she was hardly a gourmet
chef, and they tried to keep to a strict budget—but it was certainly better than any other option available to Lexi, as far as she could see. But her sister refused to show an ounce of appreciation. She didn’t come right out and say anything directly, but Jules got the distinct feeling that beneath every interaction between them Lexi was silently screaming, You’re not my mother so quit acting like you are. Jules certainly didn’t want to be Lexi’s mother, but there was no question her baby sister needed somebody to assume that position.

  Jules hadn’t gotten a half mile with her charges when her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She put all four dog leashes in one hand and fished the phone out to see who was calling. Brooke’s name was flashing on the screen.

  For a split second her heart stopped. Brooke and she rarely if ever spoke on the phone. In fact, the last call she’d gotten from Brooke had been to deliver the news that their mother had been in an accident. Jules had been paying bills at the time and had ignored a call from an unknown number. She routinely didn’t answer the phone when she was crunching numbers, but when Brooke’s call came in moments later, she’d known she needed to take it. And if she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have gotten to see her mom take her very last breath. Jules wasn’t sure if she was grateful or regretful now.

  “Hey, Brooke, what’s up?” Jules tried to keep her voice light even though she was annoyed that her sister hadn’t returned a single one of her dozens of calls or text messages since their meeting in Mr. Wiley’s office. There are millions of dollars at stake here and you need them more than I do, she wanted to scream each time, either with words or all capital letters, but instead she usually just said something benign like, “Just checking in, call me!” Her sisters obviously resented her for trying to keep them accountable, but somebody had to do it, and it wasn’t like there were people lining up at the plate.

  “Jules . . . I . . . need . . . help . . .” Her sister was sobbing and Jules nearly dropped the phone.

  “Brooke, what is it? Are you okay? Are you hurt?” No matter how pissed off she was at either of her sisters, a lifetime of feeling responsible for them and worrying about them was knitted tightly into the deepest fibers of her being. She couldn’t ignore her concern if she wanted to.

  “I . . . have nowhere . . . to go . . .” Brooke howled.

  “Okay, calm down and tell me what’s happening. What do you mean you have nowhere to go? Where are you?”

  “I’m in Woodland Hills . . . near the bank and Sharky’s . . . I had to leave, Jules . . . All I have is a pillowcase . . . He took all of my money . . . and she’s a private investigator . . . and she found me because I’m a fat preschool teacher and I’m pretty sure that asshole got her pregnant and he has my car.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jules shouted. If Brooke had been standing in front of her she would have hauled off and smacked her across the face. That was what you were supposed to do with hysterical people, wasn’t it?

  “Jules, please . . . can you come get me? Please. I don’t know what else to do. I had to get out of there. I . . . I need you.”

  Jules didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t leave her hysterical sister wandering around town with a pillowcase and no money, that was for sure. She didn’t even want to ask about the pillowcase. Or the pregnancy. Or the private investigator, for that matter.

  “I’ll come get you,” Jules finally said despite herself. “But then what? Where are you going to go? I don’t know if you know this but Alexis is staying with us right now. We’re sort of maxed out at the moment.”

  “I don’t know. Please, Jules. Please? We’ll figure something out. I’ll figure something out. Just come get me. I’m scared.”

  Jules yanked on the tangle of leashes and twisted the mess to turn the dogs around. “Give me an hour or so, okay?” she said. That should be enough time to get these dogs back home, leave Shawn the message that might end our marriage and get over to Woodland Hills to rescue another sister.

  Brooke

  “You have to call him eventually,” Jules told her. “He has your car. And a bunch of your other stuff, right? Just call him, Brooke.”

  “And say what, exactly?” Brooke pouted.

  “How about, ‘Hey, douchebag, give me my fucking car back or I’ll sit on you and smother you to death with my gigantic ass,’” Lexi suggested.

  “Helpful,” Jules said, shaking her head.

  “Drive me over there and I’ll get it,” Lexi said. “I’m serious. I’ll walk right in and grab the keys, and if that fucktard so much as looks at me funny, I will karate-chop him in the nuts.”

  Brooke hated to admit it, but the fact that her scrappy little sister would do that for her filled her with something close to joy. Plus, she wouldn’t mind watching that happen.

  “Would you?” Brooke asked with a sniffle.

  “Totally,” Lexi insisted. Brooke looked at her sister now and felt the familiar pangs of envy. She knew she shouldn’t be jealous of Lexi; after all, her little sister was what people commonly referred to as a hot mess. But Lexi was ballsy and confident and she didn’t take orders from anyone—or even care what they thought. Plus she really was ridiculously, unreasonably gorgeous. With her long, lean legs and minuscule waist and perky, perfectly proportioned boobs, it was hard not to begrudge her a little bit. If Brooke looked like that, her life would be completely different, she just knew it. It wasn’t fair that she’d gotten her dad’s sluggish metabolism. Not that he’d been fat; nobody in the family had ever been fat. But Juliana had been a dancer and had died with a dancer’s body at fifty-nine, so obviously Brooke had gotten her genes from somewhere.

  “I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” Jules said.

  “Lighten up, Francis,” Lexi said. Jules stared at her in surprise.

  “It’s a movie line,” Lexi said.

  “I know,” Jules said. “From Stripes. Shawn and I say it all the time.”

  Lexi looked disinterested in this and turned back to Brooke. “Anyway, I probably won’t karate-chop him in the nuts, okay? How about only if he hurts me first? Then can I?”

  Brooke tried to stifle her excitement; Jules laughed outright. “Fine,” Jules agreed to Brooke’s delight. “If he hurts you first, you may karate-chop him in the nuts.”

  “Shotgun!” Lexi shouted as they walked out the door to Jules’s Honda. Brooke had already assumed she’d be in the backseat; the front seat had always been Lexi’s, even when they’d been kids. Although she was the baby—or maybe because of it—she’d been born with an excess of confidence and a grandiose sense of entitlement. If she wanted something, she got it . . . one way or another. Brooke wondered now if she’d ever once sat in the front seat of their mother’s giant Buick Century station wagon. She couldn’t recall it if she had.

  “I’m thinking when we get our money, you might want to spring for a new car,” Lexi said.

  “What’s wrong with this car?” Jules wanted to know. It was clean and dependable, and she thought sort of cute even.

  “Who buys a gray car?” Lexi asked. “It’s like the ugliest color ever invented.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Jules said, astounded by her sister’s insolence. “At least I have a car.”

  “I have a car,” Brooke said from the backseat. “Well, sort of.”

  “Tell us when you see it,” Jules said as they drove up and down the streets around Jake’s apartment.

  “There it is!” Brooke shouted.

  “Please tell me it’s the Volkswagen,” Lexi said.

  “It’s the Kia,” Brooke told her, pointing at a powder-blue minivan.

  “You drive a fucking minivan?” Lexi asked with a sneer. “That’s awesome. And by awesome I mean whatever the total opposite of awesome is.”

  “I’m a preschool teacher, I drive kids around a lot,” Brooke said.

  “They make these thing
s called SUVs now that hold a ton of people and are actually pretty cool,” Lexi said. “You should check them out.”

  “Who are you to talk? You don’t even have a car, Lexi,” Brooke said, doing a terrible job of hiding her hurt.

  “ALEXIS,” Lexi and Jules shouted in unison.

  “Sorry, Alexis,” Brooke said.

  Jules found a spot and parallel-parked her Honda. The three sisters got out and Brooke led them to apartment 4G.

  “Should I knock or just walk in?” Brooke whispered at the door. Lexi rolled her eyes and shoved open the door. It bounced off the wall behind it with a crash and she stopped it with her hand. Jules and Brooke jumped a little bit.

  “Honey, we’re home,” Lexi called out, storming into the tiny one-room apartment without a backward glance at her sisters.

  “What the fuck?” Jake shouted. He was in his underwear on the couch playing a video game. He grabbed a pillow and covered his crotch.

  “That was probably a good call,” Jules said under her breath. Brooke laughed nervously.

  “We’re just here to get Brooke’s car and a few of her things,” Lexi informed him. “We won’t be long, so no need to get up. Nice tighty-whities, by the way. It’s a good look for you.”

  “You’ve got three minutes to get the fuck out of here or I’m calling the cops,” Jake spat.

  Brooke moved automatically to the hook and grabbed her keys off of it, marveling at the fact that they were there. Jake had never put them back in their proper place when she’d lived there; not once, despite her frequent, pleading requests for him to do so. She looked around the apartment now; most of the beat-up, mismatched furniture was Jake’s. She’d sold all of her things since his studio was “furnished” and she didn’t want to pay to store her equally crappy belongings.