by Leah Stewart
She had had reasons for her choices. Good reasons. Hadn’t she? At this moment she couldn’t recall what they had been. What she wanted was Wes. That was finally clear to her, just in time for it to be too late to matter. It seemed bizarre and fantastical that by her own volition she’d made it impossible to go straight to his apartment and climb into his bed, to lie with her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat, that steady, persistent, essential sound. A week ago she could have done that, and now she couldn’t, and that was her very own fault. How had she failed to see what luck it was to have found him, what a blessing it was to be found?
She pushed herself off the island, straightened her clothes, and went upstairs to face the judgment of her aunt.
Upstairs in her bedroom, Eloise was yanking the dirty clothes from her bag so she could replace them with clean ones. Theo appeared in the doorway, looking rather like she had all those years ago when she’d shown up in the middle of the night to confess her drunkenness. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?” Eloise asked irritably.
“For the scene downstairs.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Eloise said. “Though I’d prefer not to have seen that. Someday we’ll be able to have memories erased, and I’ll go get rid of that one.”
“You must think I’m awful.”
“Why? Because he has a girlfriend?”
“They broke up last week.”
“Then why would I think you’re awful? I’ve known for a while you had a thing for him.”
“Really?”
“Sure. I could see it all over your face every time he came around. If he broke up with his girlfriend, why shouldn’t you get what you want?”
Theo came into the room, a little timidly, like she thought Eloise might shoo her out again, a bothersome, naughty child. When that didn’t happen she sat down on the end of the bed and looked at her hands. “I’ve been seeing someone. More than that—I’ve been living with him, up until a week ago.”
“Josh told me.”
“He did?”
“He sent me an email letting me know where you both were. In case I was worried.”
Theo nodded.
“That’s not a criticism,” Eloise said, sighing, because she could see Theo had taken it as one. “I could’ve been in touch as easily as you. I was in kind of a state.”
“Me, too,” Theo said. “Except the state I was in was ignoring my life to hang out with a twenty-two-year-old.”
“So you broke it off with him?”
“He said that’s what I was doing, when I left his place to come back here.”
“But you don’t want it to be over?”
Theo sighed. “No. No, I don’t. What’s wrong with me that I’ve had such trouble deciding what I feel about someone I’ve been . . . ” She glanced at her aunt and finished, lamely, “seeing.”
Eloise shrugged. “Feelings go up and down,” she said. “Feelings aren’t sitting there like an object, or ticking on forward like a clock.”
“I feel like I just cheated on him,” Theo said. “Should I tell him? Should I apologize?”
Eloise frowned. “He thinks you broke up with him, so no,” she said. “But then I’m perhaps not the person to ask.”
“What do you mean?”
Eloise hesitated, but, really, what reason was there at this point not to tell her? “I cheated on Heather just a few weeks ago. Well, I guess it depends on your definition of cheat. I made out with this guy. She’d probably define that as cheating, so I guess I have to, too.”
“Wait a minute,” Theo said. “You cheated on Heather?”
“Yeah, I know, I suck. I have no excuse.”
“No, I mean, you cheated on Heather?”
“Oh,” Eloise said. She laughed. “You actually didn’t know?”
Theo stood up. “She’s your girlfriend?”
“Yes, she is. Everyone’s been announcing that this was in no way the secret I thought it was, so I assumed I’d been equally deluded with you.”
“Who’s been announcing that?”
“My mother, for one. And Gary told me that Claire knew.”
“Claire knew? She never said a word. What about Josh? How long has she been your girlfriend?”
“About three years. I don’t know about Josh.”
“Three years? I can’t believe this.”
“You have that in common with Heather. She’s been quite put out with me.”
“With good reason!”
Downstairs the front door opened and closed. Footsteps crossed the foyer. “Who is that?” Eloise asked.
“It must be Josh,” Theo said. “He’s been staying here, too.”
“Oh,” Eloise said. Then she called, “We’re up here, Josh,” and moments later he appeared in the doorway. He looked at his aunt, then his sister, then back at his aunt, and frowned. “What’s going on?”
“She’s a lesbian,” Theo said.
“Huh.” Josh looked at Eloise, who couldn’t repress an urge to wave. “Heather?” he asked.
Eloise nodded.
“It turns out I’m not actually that surprised,” Josh said.
Theo looked at him in astonishment. “Why not?”
Josh shrugged. “They spend a lot of time together.”
“They’re friends!”
“Well,” Josh said. “There was just something.”
“Just something? Why does nobody tell me about this something?”
“Simmer down, Theo,” Eloise said.
“Why should I? You’ve been lying to us for years. You threw us out of our house.”
“You’re twenty-eight years old.”
“It’s still my house.”
“Not technically. Technically it’s your grandmother’s house.”
“You know, you were always like this,” Theo said. “I’d come to you with something and you’d shrug and say, ‘Ah, well,’ or make some dry aside and that was all I’d get from you. I mean just today, with what happened today, all you say is, ‘People screw up, get over it.’ How helpful is that, Eloise? Could you have thought of anything else to say to me in the last seventeen years?”
“What happened today?” Josh asked, but they both ignored him.
“What did you want me to say?” Eloise asked.
“I don’t know! Something motherly. I wanted you to be comforting. Sometimes I wanted you to tell me I’d done wrong. Or tell me what to do. Just tell me what to do! You always assumed I knew.”
“You always seemed to know.”
“I was eleven years old!”
“I’m not completely sure what we’re talking about here,” Josh said.
“I believe she’s accusing me of having been an inadequate replacement for your mother.”
“That’s not fair,” Theo said, her voice trembling. “That’s totally unfair.”
“How so? That’s not what you were doing?”
“Guys,” Josh said.
“You can’t ever let me make a point!” Theo said. “You can’t let me have a legitimate reason! If you can’t win the argument by logic you just try to make me feel bad.”
Eloise yanked open a dresser drawer and grabbed a pair of jeans. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“I’m talking about the house!” Theo said. “I’m talking about the house!”
Eloise turned on her, the jeans still in her hand. “I have a legitimate reason for wanting the house. It’s called ‘money.’ It’s called the money I need and all the money I’ve spent. What’s your logic, Theo? I want it so I should have it? I want it even though to get a job I’m going to have to move away?”
“Maybe I’m not going to move away,” Theo said.
Eloise’s hands were shaking as she put the jeans in her bag. “You’re not, huh. And you’re not worried about what you’ll have to live on? Okay, I understand you now. You don’t understand the need for money, never having needed it yourself. Know why you’ve never needed
it yourself, Theo? Because I gave it to you.”
“You wish you’d never taken us,” Theo said.
“Theo!” Josh said.
“You wish you’d left us with Francine and gone back to Boston. You think we ruined your life.”
Eloise shook her head. She wanted to deny this. She couldn’t find the words, choking on her own guilt and grief and Theo’s bitterness. “Now who’s trying to make the other one feel bad,” she managed to say. She zipped her bag, not looking at either of them.
“Where are you going?” Josh said.
Eloise looked at him, but she could still see Theo in her peripheral vision. She could feel her there, accusation personified. “Claire has run off again, this time to your grandmother’s, and your grandmother, true to form, can’t handle the drama. So I’m going to get Claire. You can come if you want.” As soon as she lifted the duffel bag she knew she’d packed it too heavy, but she hefted it anyway, doing her best to carry it out of the room as though it wasn’t heavy at all. Her eyes were stinging. It seemed like a long way to the car.
She reached it, though, and sat inside, trying to decide how long to wait to see if either of them would follow. Josh, to come with her. Theo, to say she was sorry, she hadn’t meant it, not any of it. Or, even better, wouldn’t it be nice if Claire suddenly appeared from nowhere, and announced that the last couple months had been a massive practical joke? Eloise didn’t want to go get her. She was afraid of a Claire who couldn’t stop crying. She was afraid like she hadn’t been in years, not since she’d first encountered tears and tantrums and realized with shock that now she was the one who had to know whether the child needed comfort or firmness, and if comfort, how much and if discipline, what kind and if advice, what was it? She was the one who would wear herself out with trying do the right thing and still make a great many mistakes. What had Rachel been thinking, leaving her children to Eloise?
Still in the bedroom, Josh looked at Theo, who seemed to be struggling against tears. Critical words were on his tongue, but at the sight of her face he couldn’t voice them. Poor Theo. She took things so to heart, and spent so much energy trying not to show it. “Let’s go with her,” he said.
Theo shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t want to.”
“Come on, Theo,” he said. “Things can’t go on like this.”
She shook her head again. “Nobody wants me,” she said, in a child’s tremulous voice, and then she put her face in her hands and began to sob. She sat down hard on the bed and cried, curled in on herself. For a moment—just a moment, before he went to her and took her in his arms—Josh saw her clearly, more clearly than he had in a while, or maybe for the first time ever. She was his sister, his older sister, his role model, his judge and jury. She’d known life without him, but he’d never known it without her. She could understand him like no one else or crush him like no one else. She and Claire were the people in the world who came closest to being him. Wasn’t that something to marvel at, how little DNA separated them from being each other? And yet she was a person outside all of that. She had her own secrets. She hid her own hurts. She struggled and she failed. She needed him.
He held her until her sobs diminished into sniffs, and then he got her tissues, and ran after Eloise, who was sitting in her car staring at the house with a blank expression, not yet gone. He told her to wait for them, and then inside he packed his own bag quickly and supervised Theo, now wrung out and moving slowly, while she packed hers. Then he carried both bags to the car and opened the back door for Theo, who climbed inside without a word to Eloise and closed her eyes. It felt good to take care of people, to set his own worries aside. He offered to drive and Eloise took him up on it. “Don’t worry,” he said to her worried expression. “It’ll be okay.”
Later, after they’d stopped for dinner, with Theo asleep in the backseat, Eloise asked, “Do you feel like I didn’t want you?”
He didn’t, but he knew he would have told her, no, never, even if he did.
The car slowed for the turn onto the road through Sewanee, and Theo woke to murmuring voices, darkness, movement. Josh was talking. “I thought you just knew the place from when we all visited Francine.”
“No, we came a few times when I was a kid,” Eloise said. “Francine rented a house in the Assembly a couple of summers. Maybe three. Then she insisted we come visit when your mother was applying to colleges. Rachel was her good girl, you know, so Francine thought she might actually do what she wanted. She didn’t even try it with me.”
“I always liked coming here,” Josh said.
“I liked it, too,” Eloise said, “but mostly when we went for walks without Francine. I do like how peaceful it is. How little changes. It’s a good place for nostalgia because everything is always the same.”
“Kind of like Cincinnati.”
Eloise laughed. “More actually changes in Cincinnati,” she said. “Unbelievable as that is.”
Theo listened with her eyes closed, resisting the urge to combat Eloise’s reflexive dismissal of her city. She didn’t want them to know she was awake. Why? What was she hoping to hear? Some secret they hadn’t let her in on? Some life lesson? Some explanation for everything? Maybe she just liked being transported somewhere, listening to voices in the dark, memories of the sleepy arrivals of childhood.
They were silent a moment and then Josh said, “So you really think she’ll call me?”
“I really think she will,” Eloise said. “Or that she’d be glad if you called her.”
“Thank you,” Josh said, his voice heavy with emotion. And then, in a lighter tone, “But will she ever let me see her feet?”
Eloise laughed. Theo felt the pang of exclusion: They sounded so at ease with each other, so familiar, so full of immediate and intuitive understanding. While she pretended sleep in the backseat, afraid of how their tones might alter into wariness if they knew she was listening.
When the car stopped in Francine’s drive and Josh turned the engine off, Theo opened her eyes. Josh turned around to see if she was awake. When he saw that she was he gave her an encouraging, reassuring smile. “Should we go in?” he said.
Eloise didn’t look at Theo. She had her gaze fixed on her mother’s house—small, stone, on an isolated road that curled through woods full of deer. Nothing like Francine’s other house. Theo watched as Eloise opened the car door and swung herself out, moving as if against resistance.
Josh got out, and then Theo followed, the last duckling in line. What would happen when they saw Claire? Theo expected drama. She expected a return to earlier arguments, emotions lobbed like grenades. Around them the woods sang with insects. The night was so dark here, no streetlights, no city buildings. The stars were visible and bright. It felt like her sister had gone back to fairyland, and they’d followed, bound and determined to return her to the actual world.
The door to Francine’s house opened and Claire stood waiting in a rectangle of light. Her too-short hair was pulled back into an unsuccessful bun, so that an electric halo of hair stuck out around her head. She wore a long, sleeveless top over leggings and as they approached Theo saw her shiver a little in the cool night air, cross her arms over herself. Her eyes were frightened. She looked like what she was, a dumb kid. A dumb kid who had no idea what she was doing.
Everyone looked at Eloise to see what she would say. But Eloise didn’t say anything. She held out her arms.
22
Theo woke early to a room bright with morning light. Francine had inadequate curtains and no blinds on the windows in this room, which were small and looked out into the woods. It was the room Theo had always stayed in with Claire when they visited their grandmother, but this time she’d slept in it alone. Claire and Eloise had stayed up late talking, a conversation in which Theo hadn’t felt invited or entitled to participate. Claire had been sleeping in the other guest room, and Eloise must have slept there, too.
As soon as Theo opened the door she smelled coffee and knew Francine w
as up. Francine was an early riser, up at 5:00 A.M. and incredulous of anyone who slept much later than that. She’d already been in bed when they arrived. Theo could smell bacon, too. When they visited, Francine always cooked breakfast as soon as she herself got up, and then left it on the kitchen counter. Soggy bacon, cold eggs, toast a little too moist with butter. Theo and Josh always dutifully heated up these offerings and ate them. Eloise would make noises of disgust, mutter about passive aggression, and leave, taking Claire with her and returning an hour later with a cardboard cup of coffee from the local café. “I don’t know how you can drink that swill she makes,” she’d say to Josh and Theo as they grew older. It was true Francine’s coffee was awful, and not helped by the addition of skim milk, which was the only dairy in the house. It was the gruel version of coffee. But Theo and Josh never wanted to hurt Francine’s feelings, and found it unnerving that Eloise actively wanted to.
Josh was still asleep on the couch, a pillow over his head, when Theo tiptoed past. Sure enough, eggs and bacon were waiting on the counter. Theo was up so early that they were still warm. She fixed herself a plate and, steeling herself, a cup of coffee, and carried plate and mug into the dining room to find Francine. Her grandmother looked up from the paper and smiled as Theo came in. She was fully dressed in a collarless white button-down shirt and bright red pants. She wore purple glasses and dangling silver earrings, her hair in a neat white bob. “Good morning,” she said. “Would you like a section?” She pushed the pile of newspaper on the table toward Theo.
“No, thanks,” Theo said. She sat down and put her napkin in her lap.
“Did you sleep all right?” Francine asked.
Theo nodded, her mouth full of eggs.
“You must be tired, up this early,” Francine said. “You stay up too late.”
