Chapter 2
I step into the pink house and kick off my tennis shoes out of habit.
They land next to a pair of well-worn leather sandals I haven’t seen since they were new.
Beside them is a pair of men’s loafers. I squint at them briefly and then put my bags on the narrow set of stairs that leads up to one end of the upstairs hall.
Just like on the ride over, I don’t need to scan the environment for its familiar details.
I can shut my eyes and navigate this house as clearly as if they were open.
I know it all, and I know it’ll be the same.
The pictures on the mantel—my grandparents on the front porch with friends, drinking tiny martinis and smoking the cigarettes that ultimately killed them; Sammie and me back when we were both towheaded in matching pink bathing suits with tan lines on our behinds like two Coppertone babies, standing in the surf with our arms around each other; Babe at age twenty-two, right before she found out she was pregnant with me, leaning on her Bronco when it was new and getting ready for a Big Life that would never come.
No one understands how it could be nice, the smell of mildew, unless a house they’ve loved is by the sea. Some mildew smells dirty and musty and clammy, while some, like here, smells like long, empty days.
I hear my sister, and my heart pounds.
Despite myself, I feel a little excited to see her.
I can’t tell exactly what she’s saying or who she’s saying it to, and for a moment I’m silly enough to hope it’s him, but then remember he’d never wear loafers like the ones in the hall.
The timbre of her voice is the same. Light as air and heavy with the quality she had that always made people say she had an old soul.
A part of me wants to delay somehow, wonders if it might be easier for both of us if I do, but I find my body marching on anyway.
I open the sliding screen door and two heads turn to me from the outside table, which is set with cheese and crackers and an open bottle of wine, as if it’s some kind of nice night or something.
I take in both of them at once, unable to prioritize the sight of either of them. In a flash, I take in so much about my sister. How she’s changed. How she hasn’t.
Her hair, still that same light blond, is pulled into a side braid, hardly a flyaway to be seen.
She’s barefoot, as she always was here. All of us were used to this place, once.
Her legs are tucked up under her on the chair, still as lithe and limber as ever.
Around her left ankle are some faded anklets made from embroidery floss.
She’s tanned with a hint of scarlet on her freckled shoulders.
She looks almost as she did a few years ago, and I’d need more time than I’m willing to stare in order to find the differences in her, besides a few new additions to the tiny tattoos that pepper her skin.
I just barely clock a delicate V formation of starlings on her narrow tricep before I look away.
But beside her is someone I did not expect to see.
“Matt?” I ask in shock, accidentally, verbally skipping my sibling, walking past her as if the sight of her had not plumed in my mind like a smoke bomb.
“Didion!” He rises to greet me. I think we might hug, but then we don’t. He leans on the back of his chair, a hand in his pocket, another holding his wine. “How are you?”
I never know how to answer that question. “I’m great.” Probably not like that, considering. “How are you?”
“I’m, you know, I’m good,” he says. Then, “It’s so hard to answer. It’s been a long time. Everything is different.”
I give a laugh, my heart hammering in my chest. “I know. How’s your daughter?”
He points down into the lawn, where a little girl is playing quietly with two dolls.
I raise my eyebrows. “Ah, I see. She’s quiet.”
“For now,” he says. “Sorry, I’m in the way, Sammie.”
Sammie stands now and our eye contact is loaded.
Usually, her expressions are easy to read.
Her eyes are the only ones I’ve ever regarded as truly being a window to the soul.
I used to wonder if that was true for everyone, or just me, who knew her so well.
I guess I still wonder now, as I try to puzzle out if it’s the complexity of her feelings or the distance that’s grown between us that prevents me from being able to read her.
Now, her pale, crystalline blue eyes, shaded by long dark lashes, are impossible.
We don’t hug either, which confirms it. We’re not going to go back to normal.
We’re not going to remember what really matters or whatever, not going to set everything aside in the face of our shared loss.
A spike of anger rises in me as I think I would if she did, but even as I feel it, I know she could say the same thing.
Sammie is usually quick with affection. She used to think nothing of springing her full body weight onto her friends and showering them in kid-like kisses.
She would loop her arm under yours when you walked.
Throw her legs on you when you sat next to her on the couch.
She would braid your hair absently while telling a long, pointless, yet somehow interesting story about …
I don’t know, a bug she saw in the yard.
Instead of winding her fingers through mine now and leaning her head on my shoulder, she’s just standing there. Unwilling to share any part of herself.
“Did you fly?” she asks. She sounds a little sad maybe, and definitely as uncertain how to be as I am.
“Yeah, yeah. I flew.”
“Oh, shoot, let me get you a glass,” says Matt, heading toward the kitchen, and therefore to the cabinet of mismatched wineglasses.
“No, I’m good.”
I don’t even think before declining. It’s been my normal lately.
Even at work when the staff stays after for shift drinks, I leave them to their fun.
I always rationalize that it’s because I think I need some distance between us since I’m in a position of authority, but it’s really because I don’t know how to be myself around them, and even one drink makes it hard for me to hide my personality.
Even on a shift like New Year’s Eve after crushing a night of beef Wellington and bananas Foster, I rejected a glass of Krug while we cleaned up.
“What, are you pregnant?” asks Sammie, immediately, instinctively.
“No?” I say too defensively, remembering just too late that are you pregnant used to be the joke we’d make whenever one of us didn’t want a drink.
Until my recent era, it was understood that a Bennett woman never turned down a glass of wine.
Not in a problematic way, just in a way like, if we were Barbies, we’d come with a little plastic champagne flute.
It’s just been a while since I’ve been offered a drink by anyone I don’t work with. It’s possible I’m working too much.
Then again, this trip might as well be business; it sure isn’t pleasure.
“Oh, okay, sure,” says Matt, sitting back down.
It would have been an easy lubricant, something to hold, something to break down the nerves that are so obviously buzzing between us all, or at least coming from me.
I can’t believe I’m standing here with them.
“So, Matt, are you … you just came for the funeral?” I laugh self-consciously. “I mean obviously, but—”
“I know what you mean,” he allows, even though I’m quite sure neither of us do, and then explains. “I’m actually here as executor of Babe’s estate. And, of course, to pay my respects.”
Estate. Respects. Executor.
Sammie stops fidgeting and takes a sip of her ruby-red wine. I’d guess it’s a Gamay.
“Hey, how’s the restaurant going?” he asks. “It looks great. I saw the Times article.”
“Oh.” I laugh, feel my cheeks flush. “I didn’t know that would be the headline.”
“What was it? ‘The Last Good Chef in New York’?”
“Yeah, that’s … what they wrote.”
“Can’t believe we’ve been in the city so long and we haven’t seen each other,” he says. “I kept meaning to reach out.”
“Same, it’s been—I’ve been so busy with everything.”
“Me too, yeah, the firm has been swamped.”
Matt is a lawyer and lives in Cobble Hill, and I live in Gramercy. Not only are we a stone’s throw from each other, but New York is infamous for ensuring that, if someone you know—especially someone you’re trying to avoid—lives there, you see each other everywhere.
It would be surprising if we hadn’t run into each other. But we have. Even if only one of us knows it.
One time I saw him at Sinclair Tavern and I made my boyfriend (at the time) leave with me, dashing out like I owed Matt money. Which, on top of everything else, I probably do.
“Yeah, don’t worry about it, it’s…” And then I give my well-worn spiel about my restaurant, Baccarat.
A really, really nice place where high-rolling, flexing clientele can come drink rare wine and be served complimentary surprise-and-delight courses like they’ve seen on the recent influx of restaurant TV dramas, or where touristy families can come split meals and go home with the story of having been to one of the country’s greatest restaurants, spending a small fortune for the bragging rights.
“Sounds amazing,” he says, when I finish delivering a slightly more charitable summary. He tops up Sammie, who has quietly drained her glass. She watched me the whole time I talked, and I still can’t figure out her inscrutable eyes.
“It’s good,” I say to Matt. “You should come sometime, we’d love to have you.”
We. We as in the company. I couldn’t sound more impersonal.
“It looks good,” says Sammie. “I see the pictures.”
“You’d hate it, I think,” I say, without thinking.
There’s a beat of awful silence before she says, “Well, then.”
I want to take it back, but I don’t know how. “I only mean it’s really fussy. You, I feel like you don’t like that.”
“Maybe I do like fussy food now,” she says. “You wouldn’t know.”
“I wouldn’t know, you’re right. Sorry,” I say. “Where did you see pictures?”
“I know you probably think I live in some field making daisy chains all day, but I do actually have the internet.”
“But you don’t—” I start to say she doesn’t have Instagram anymore, and it’s only then, despite the past few years of looking her up, that I realize she might have blocked me. “Okay, I don’t think you live in a field.”
Matt has a sip and then says, “So are you both staying the whole weekend?”
“Of course,” says Sammie, at the same time as I say, “No, I booked a room in town at the Sandcastle.”
“You’re not staying here?” asks Sammie, looking horrified.
I flush. “No, I wasn’t sure what the deal was, so I just … booked a room. Are you, Matt?”
He nods. “Yeah, the invitation said accommodations would be provided. I figured I could see if my old room still fits.” His mouth turns up in a smile, his light joke a feeble attempt at defusing the tension.
There’s a sound then, of a car pulling up out front. Sound travels in a funny way around the property. Some sounds bounce through the lush canopy of trees and others seem to be swallowed by the atmosphere. And the funny thing about those sounds is they stick in your mind like a familiar melody.
My whole body freezes. It may sound like his tires, but it can’t be.
“Ah, that should be Ms. Collie,” says Matt, standing. “She’s going over the will with us. I’ll go greet her.”
Sammie and I both breathe in at the same time, and I know she’s hoping to suggest an alternative that doesn’t mean the two of us are left alone on the old porch with nothing but the candles and resentment flickering between us. That much of her mind, at least, I can still read.
I want to apologize and get through the hardest part. I want to know about her life. If she doesn’t live in a field, where does she live? Has she finally found a way to make money that wasn’t temporary? Is she, for the love of god, finally without the living satanic barnacle that is Johnny Hart?
I’ve always thought she was like Nicole Kidman’s character in Practical Magic, only without the whole keeping-in-touch-with-her-sister thing. Johnny Hart was her Jimmy Angelov.
All I really know about the last three years of my sister’s life is that it was about the same as all the years had been since we finished high school: She was constantly unrooted.
Even when we were close, there was always some crisis that meant she had to change everything, detonate her entire life.
Move across, out of, or back to the country.
Eventually Sammie stopped telling me things, undoubtedly hearing my concern as bossy.
It hurt to hear it filtered through other people.
Thinking she would eventually come back around, I told Babe I didn’t want to know any more updates about Sammie’s life.
Our mother had reluctantly agreed, and hardly mentioned her name to me again. That was only a couple years ago, but knowing Sammie, anything could have changed since then. Everything could have. Everything probably did. I can only hope Johnny Hart was one of the things that did.
I open my mouth to tell Sammie I’m sorry we haven’t talked, but then she holds up a finger to pause me.
She furrows her brow and shifts her eyes in the direction of the sound coming from inside the house. “I thought the lawyer was a woman.”
I now hear the other voice too. Low. A little raspy. Deeply familiar.
No, no, no.
That’s when a golden retriever comes galloping out, straight to me, like she knew I’d be here.
“Oh my god,” I say.
“Is that—” asks Sammie.
I already know it’s her, but I reach under her red bandana for her tag just to make sure, scratching her velvet-soft ears as I do.
BIRDIE JAMES.
On the back, a phone number I have long since blocked.
I look up, and out strides Birdie’s owner. Someone I have long since tried to forget.
I should have taken that glass of wine.