The Whole Thing Together

by Ann Brashares

  “Emma!”

  She put it in her mouth, sucked off the soup, and pulled it out again, clean and shiny.

  Jamie was caught between laughing and crying. He grabbed the ring from her hand, but she had it long enough to see it was a beautiful flat bezel setting, platinum, just what she would have picked. The diamond was too big for him to be able to afford in any comfortable way.

  He dropped onto one knee in front of her chair. Most of the other diners were staring at them by this point. “Em, can we just erase the whole last episode? Pretend it never happened? Restart? Please?”

  She was still laughing, a nervousness and buoyancy launching her heart into a new state of possible joy. “Never.”

  “Yes. I’m restarting now.” He cleared his throat. “Emma Thomas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though I’m an idiot and terrible at playing tricks and always manage to embarrass myself around you, will you marry me anyway?”

  Her face got quivery and full. She pretended to consider.

  “I know we’re really young—you especially—and I know I should probably wait, but I can’t.”

  She nodded tearfully.

  “You don’t have to say anything yet. You can wait a year or five years or even ten years if you want. I just have to lay my cards on the table. I want you to know my intentions and not hold anything back from you.”

  Emma started to cry in earnest.

  “I want to be with you forever. I want to make a home and a family and do everything together. I know I’m always falling off balance with you, but you make me feel safer and happier than I’ve ever felt.”

  She wiped her eyes. “Okay, I will.” She didn’t actually need to consider.

  She’d thought, before she met Jamie, that deciding to get married would be an agonizing decision. How do you know? How can you possibly know? How can you be sure? Especially with her parents in the background. And now she didn’t think at all. She just felt sure.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” She stuck her hand out and he put the ring on her finger. They were a little shaky on both sides. It fit fine. It was pure platinum and diamond loveliness.

  “Really?” He came over and lifted her out of her chair.

  “Yes.”

  He spun her around. “Just like that?”

  “Yes.”

  He kissed her. “You sure?”

  “Yes, Jamie.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  She put her mouth to his ear. “I’d rather go make out on the beach than stay here with every single person watching us.”

  “Oh my God, me too.”

  Jamie paid and zipped them out of that place at lightning speed. They walked onto the darkening beach, toward the empty part.

  He slipped his arm around her. She held up her hand for him to see the ring and he kissed it. “Shit, that completely backfired, and I’m still happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

  She nodded, that happy too.

  “Yes, it was a surprise. Completely.”

  —

  Sasha could hear Emma on the phone in the living room from where she sat on the patio. She could see the back of Emma’s dark head, her shoulders tense and high as she sat on the sofa. She could feel Emma’s excitement, overexcitement, anxiety, certainty, uncertainty rising and filling the room, pushing through the screens. She imagined what an aerial view of the house would look like if you could pick up Emma’s energy as a color, like infrared, on film.

  That combined with the wind off the pond raised goose bumps on Sasha’s skin. She tucked up her knees and stretched her sweatshirt over her bare legs and even her feet. The fabric would remember itself but wouldn’t go all the way back.

  “I know, I know.”

  It was Emma’s mom, of course. Lila would be the first call.

  Sasha felt a queasy strain for Lila that an event this big happened on Not Her Weekend, but she trusted Emma to talk over it.

  “We’re thinking next June. Almost a year…Yeah, at the house.”

  Sasha had no experience of Lila at all, but she often imagined her. It was embarrassing how she sometimes had to remind herself that Lila was not her mother, and that in fact she’d never met her. It shamed her how quick she was to see through her sisters’ eyes, to respect Lila’s authority, to see her own mother through judgmental stepdaughter eyes.

  “Not that huge. I guess we could get a tent.”

  Emma was quiet while Lila talked for a while. Sasha wished she could eavesdrop on both sides of the conversation while she criticized herself for listening to the one.

  “I’ll be twenty-three by then,” she heard Emma say a little huffily.

  Emma was quiet for another couple of minutes. Sasha could practically feel her sister’s spirits deflating. She couldn’t overhear, but she could imagine some reasons why Lila would be less than jubilant.

  “Can’t you just say congratulations? Can’t you just be happy if I’m happy?”

  Sasha got up to sneak away through the other door.

  “Yeah, is he there? Can I talk to him?”

  Sasha stopped.

  “Hey, small bro.” Emma’s voice was softer now.

  Sasha moved closer to the screen. There was no way she could leave now.

  “I know. I know. Thanks. Crazy, huh?” Emma sounded different when she talked to Ray from when she talked to anyone else. She didn’t sound like that when she talked to Sasha, did she?

  There it was again. The heave and the ho. The zero-sum game of her and Ray. It summoned the old feelings and insecurities. They had a brother and she didn’t have one, and he lived with them in a cool place like Brooklyn, the place they went when they left where she could never go, and he was funny and he was annoying, and he made gross sounds when he ate cereal and his friends were also boys, and what was she but just another girl?

  But now she had her own access to Ray, limited though it was; her own private thoughts, her zinging heart when she saw his name pop up on her email list.

  Emma’s voice changed again. “What do you mean?” She was quiet for an unusually long time.

  “I guess everyone.” Brief uncertainty. Pause. “Yes, everyone everyone. Neither of them can skip it, can they? They’ll just have to deal.”

  It was never great to eavesdrop on Emma’s side of a conversation. She almost always said what you thought she’d say, but an ominous notion was beginning to seep through in spite of Emma.

  “Everyone everyone” was actually two people.

  You could sit on opposite sides of an auditorium at a graduation. You could attend different nights of a play. You could split the sports seasons in half. You could have two birthday celebrations and two graduation parties, but you couldn’t really require two weddings.

  Sasha listened through Emma and understood Ray exactly. “Everyone everyone” was Emma’s two parents, who had barely exchanged words since before Sasha was born.

  “All of ’em. Why not?” Emma had bustled quickly past uncertainty and settled on stridency. “It’s my wedding. Everyone.” She laughed, but her voice was tight.

  And stranger, more ominous, more thrilling, “everyone everyone” was also actually everyone: her and Ray. Lila and Evie. Robert and Adam. Even George and Esther from California, probably.

  In this one instance, they would go from an “or” to an “and.”

  “Anyway, it’s not until June. They have a year to get themselves figured out.”

  Whatever Ray said in reply, Emma wasn’t happy with it. She was fed up.

  Quinn said Ray often told the truth you didn’t want to hear.

  Emma stood from the couch so fast she sent a couple of throw pillows to the floor. “Don’t be such a downer, Ray,” she snapped. “Don’t act like it can’t happen just because it never has.”

  Big Sasha,

  Have you met Jamie yet?

  Little Ray

  LR,

  Yes, Em brought him to Brooklyn end of last month. Lila didn
’t even wait until he left to start complaining.

  BS

  BS,

  Robert acts like he’s the second coming, so Lila probably likes him in inverse relation to that.

  LR

  Ha! Lila did say something kind of like “Emma’s probably seeing him because Robert put her up to it. It’ll be over as soon as she meets a guy she actually likes.”

  Ouch.

  I know. In every way.

  How did Lila take the news about the engagement?

  She said to Emma “I don’t see what the hurry is” and put me on the phone.

  —

  For some reason, they always celebrated Adam’s birthday dinner at the Lemongrass on Seventh Avenue. As far as Mattie was concerned, it wasn’t the greatest food, and it was always pretty noisy. It was the kind of place you got takeout from on a Tuesday night on the way home from the subway, not a place you went for your birthday. The servers were happy to give you gross red bean ice cream for free but in too big a hurry to sing anything to anyone. Maybe that was the point.

  Adam never ordered the whole fish, because it was expensive. He gave Ray a look if he got the shrimp.

  Whereas her father would have ordered two of the whole fish and ten pounds of the lobster, if they had any, because at some point he’d gotten the idea that lobster = success. Robert wouldn’t have looked at the prices. That is, if he went to this restaurant, which he wouldn’t, because it was the kind of place you got takeout from on the way home from the subway.

  Mattie wondered if her mom cared about this difference. Her mother had always professed to loathe their father’s money and his showiness, and Mattie believed her. Her mom loved that Adam was scholarly and modest without a hint of materialism in him. But Mattie also wondered, not for the first time, how much her mom enjoyed the absence of money.

  “Adam’s not poor, he’s just cheap,” Emma had said once, in her offhand way, as if that made anything better.

  Mattie studied her mother across the table. Her mother capably chopsticked individual peanuts from her plate and nodded encouragingly at things Ray said, even though Mattie doubted she could hear half of it. You couldn’t have a conversation in this place. Maybe that was the point. When her mother caught Mattie’s gaze, she quickly looked away.

  Since Mattie had spoken the flammable name of Jonathan Dawes, she couldn’t get her mother to meet her eyes, much less allow her a minute alone together.

  Straggling home after dinner along Seventh Avenue, her mother kept her arm through Adam’s. Emma shot ahead, talking on the phone, while Ray kept appearing at Mattie’s side, no matter how many texts she sent or store windows she stopped to look in.

  “What’s your problem?” she finally asked him, in a friendly way.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you want to tell me something?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Girlfriend advice?”

  “God, no.”

  “Violet won’t leave you alone?”

  He shrugged one dismissive shoulder.

  “Okay, what?”

  He zipped the zipper of his hoodie up and down a few times. “Did I tell you that I met Sasha?”

  Mattie ditched her phone in her pocket. “My sister Sasha? No. What do you mean?”

  “I met her at a party in Manhattan. I didn’t even know it was her for most of it.”

  “What are you talking about? You’ve met Sasha before.”

  He shrugged. “I saw her face as a dot across Radio City Music Hall at your graduation. I’ve seen pictures of her from when she was younger. Obviously I’ve shared a room with her for seventeen years. But no, I had never met her.”

  Mattie was struck by this, and not just because of Ray’s uncharacteristic intensity. “That can’t be true.”

  “Of course it’s true.”

  Of course it was true. When would her parents have allowed themselves within shouting distance in the last seventeen years? “Now I can’t decide if it’s weirder that you hadn’t met or that you did meet.” She picked at her thumbnail. “I’m trying to picture it.” Her mind recoiled a little at the picture. She was pretty used to keeping the two families separate. “Did she know it was you?”

  “We only figured it out at the very end when we were all leaving. One of her friends knows one of my friends’ friends, et cetera. That kind of thing.”

  She nodded. “I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. What did you say? What did she say?” Mattie wanted to keep the goodwill flowing. But some old, shadowy feelings were peeping over and around her shoulder that she’d never felt with Ray before.

  Was Sasha just one more person Ray could think was smarter and more serious than Mattie? It had always given her a small sense of liberty not to have to worry about Sasha on this side of the East River. Her fingers were already itching to call Sasha and get her side of things. Why hadn’t Sasha told her?

  “I don’t remember. I think we were both too surprised to say much. I guess it was kind of awkward.”

  Ray looked young and confused and sadly honest, the way he said it. He was clearly struck by Sasha.

  The shadowy feelings were hovering in Mattie’s ears, reminding her that Ray might have noticed, if he got past Sasha’s dark, slumpy clothes, her bowed head, and her turned foot, that she had an exceptionally curvy little body and the prettiest face of all four sisters. Mattie felt like an evil stepsister sometimes, wanting people not to notice Sasha’s buried charms in the presence of her own flashy ones. And the shallow fact was, they usually didn’t.

  Mattie remembered once confiding her insecurities about Sasha to her friend Sophie Marlow. “Seriously? Mattie, you are way prettier, way funnier, way cooler, and way, way more popular than her,” Sophie had said, interpreting Mattie’s concerns in the basest possible way. Mattie never hung out with Sophie anymore, actually, because Sophie was more viper than friend and had the habit of telling you what you thought you wanted to hear but actually just confused you and made you a worse person.

  Ray and Mattie walked in silence for a block, both of them preoccupied and a little stifled. She felt frustrated that they weren’t getting to any of the real things.

  “So how’s your boyfriend?” Ray asked. “The tall fellow?”

  Mattie jabbed an elbow into his rib. “Shut up,” she said laughing.

  Mattie did hang out with John Harman sometimes, but he was not her boyfriend and he was notably not tall. It was a sore point that he was at least three inches shorter than her.

  “I saw him on Eighth Avenue and he was wearing heels.”

  “Ray! He does not wear heels, he wears boots.”

  “Boots with heels, then.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  They admired the chocolate éclairs in the window of the President Street bakery and then lapsed into silence again.

  “So what did you think?” Mattie finally asked.

  “Of what?”

  “Of Sasha?”

  “Oh. Right. I don’t know.” Up and down went the hoodie zipper. “She seemed familiar. She looked familiar.” He considered. “It seemed strange that we’re strangers.”

  She considered too. “Familiar how? You mean she looks like us?”

  “Like Emma and Quinn, for sure.” He laughed and pretended to step on her foot. “You don’t look like anybody.”

  Sasha sat aimlessly on a chair at the kitchen table in Wainscott, watching the family go by. She was agitated by Ray feelings, so she needed to get out of her room. Granted, it was his kitchen too, but not in so powerful a way.

  She let her mother and Mattie come and go. When Quinn walked in she opened her mouth.

  “Can I tell you something strange?”

  Quinn stopped with a carton of milk in her hand and turned around. “Yes.”

  She idolized Emma and she admired and feared Mattie, but Quinn was the one she craved, for whom she felt
the fearful hope in her mouth whenever she called Quinn her sister, always warding off that ghost word “half.” “I met Ray last Saturday night.”

  Quinn’s eyebrows shot upward. “My brother Ray?”

  Sasha felt nicked by the wording. She nodded.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was at a party. He was at the same party. I didn’t realize it was him until we were standing outside on the sidewalk with a couple of friends.”

  Quinn looked at Sasha’s face carefully, nodding.

  “I’ve never been close to him before.” Sasha had to push herself to explain. She resisted talking about Ray head-on, even saying his name, for fear of giving away too much. “I only ever saw pictures from when he was young or saw him on the opposite side of an auditorium.”

  Quinn got a glass out of the cabinet, a pensive look on her face. She poured milk. “I guess that’s true. ‘And never the twain shall meet.’ ”

  “The twain did meet, though. On the corner of Eighty-Eighth and Lexington.”

  —

  Later Quinn came out to the patio and sat at the foot of her creaky chaise, turning it into a seesaw. Sasha scooted up to make the balance.

  “I guess it’s easier for everyone to keep you and Ray in separate worlds.”

  “That’s how we’ve always done it,” Sasha said philosophically.

  “Because of Lila and Dad.”

  Even that everyday locution was hard. Quinn always referred to her parents from Sasha’s point of view instead of her own. Emma, ever precise, said “my mom and our dad.” Mattie said “Mom and Dad,” though the mom she meant was not Sasha’s mom. There was something wrong about each of the ways. These were two people who could no longer be captured in a sentence together.

  “Of all of us, you and Ray are the only two who aren’t siblings or steps or related at all. You aren’t anything to each other, but you are my brother and sister.” Quinn pressed her thumb to her mouth, thinking. “It’s a weird way to have a family.”

  Sasha was quiet for a long time. “Do you think we would like each other? If we knew each other?”