Chapter 23 2011
“You think the world is going to end when you lose your sister, but the truth is, it doesn’t.”
Sebastian watches Aunt Sadie bite into a free burger—her postshift perk.
On a Wednesday night, Sully’s American Bar and Grille is a dead zone.
The televisions blaring out Red Sox games are hung so high up that the five remaining customers have to crane their heads back in order to gape at the leaps and dives of their familiar saints: Jacoby, Beltré, Big Papi. Their faith is unwavering.
“Jesus, Sadie, she’s not dead,” he says. Though it kind of feels like she is.
It’s hard to believe Lola is still gone.
Even after he moved out and they more or less stopped speaking to each other, he always sensed her proximity.
At least he could imagine where she was or what she was doing at any given time.
Now he has no map of her terrain. Online she is tagged in photographs with so many strangers, and it overwhelms him, her belonging to these fairy-tale people.
He looks again at the message on his phone, written in a manner that he might have mistaken for stream of consciousness if he had not known Lola, who hasn’t texted him about anything in six months, who analyzes everything to the point of death.
Lola
Yo yo
Hope everything is good with you !
I have a favour to ask…
Would you mind (pretty please)
going to my room and sending me
… my driver’s license
He had almost laughed at the labor of it.
The u in favor (as if to emphasize that she has become English-and-therefore-superior), the parentheses, even the space before the exclamation point, as though it were an afterthought rather than an immaculate calculation.
She would have stared at this for hours.
Still, it feels nice to be the one who is needed.
Always it used to be him: asking Lola to help with his homework or forge their father’s signature.
Asking Lola to trust him with anything. Why on earth does she want her license? She hates driving.
A few months ago, she texted about Orson Grey. He thought it might lead to something else, but it was nothing. Is it worth it, even pretending we can be friends? Still, the silence is its own kind of exhaustion. Maybe she wants an excuse to talk to me, he thinks. Maybe she feels bad.
Sebastian
Yo yo
Looking to mow some people down
on the wrong side of the road?
He returns to his father’s house every few months, slipping inside and grabbing a thing or two.
Gathering information. Tillie is there all the time now.
On one visit, the power went out. He’d had to text Viola then—the idea of being alone in the dark with the she-devil filled him with no small anxiety.
He avoids mealtimes and any of his father’s attempts to engage.
Recently, Al asked: Want to go fishing next weekend?
They hadn’t gone fishing since he was a kid.
He claimed he was busy. Come on—the trip was a trap, an excuse to wheedle information out of him, to press judgment upon him. He only felt a bit guilty.
Lola
I ACTUALLY need it for ID thanks
Shouldn’t you want to invest in me
becoming a degenerate ;)
The reply is rapid, her relief at his response almost palpable. The thought of Lola drinking, misbehaving, fills him with hope and melancholy. He is missing out on her life.
“Why don’t you sneak me a beer, Sadie?”
“You’re nuts, kid, I’m not losing my job. I’ll pay for your burger though.”
He hesitates for a moment, because it’s a fair offer, because he’s saving up for a new car, taking on extra shifts at CVS, because he knows she likes his company while she’s working. But he checks himself. He flips his card onto the table.
“No chance.”
She picks it up and waggles it. “You better not ditch me as soon as you’ve got your new wheels.”
“I’d never ditch you. I’ll just stop asking you to tow me around everywhere.”
To: Dad
i have to come by later
dont wait up
“Do you mind stopping by Dad’s on the way back?”
She raises an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Sorry,” he says. It’s out of the way.
“The things I do for you,” she moans. She’s teasing, mostly. She’s been driving him around quite happily for two years now. “How does he seem, your dad?”
“The same.”
“Still with that woman?”
“Tillie? Yeah.”
“That’s a shame.”
“You’d say that either way.”
She tries to repress a grin, but can’t help herself. Sadie collects misery the way some people collect stamps. They trade in bad news—as long as it isn’t theirs. “I wish your dad the best,” she says.
“And I wish for nuclear winter.”
Sadie sips her beer, looks contemplative. “You know, I had a friend of mine whose dog died a couple years ago.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
Sadie shrugs. “Doesn’t matter to me, wasn’t my dog.
But she really loved that animal, a big Newfoundland, loved it more than anyone else in her family.
Tied at the hip. It was like losing a limb, she said.
A couple years later, she got the tiniest white dog, so delicate you could break it with your shoe. ”
“What are you saying?”
“Not much. Just that it’s hard to repeat things in life, you know?”
His mother would have hated Tillie. No one but Sebastian seems to care about this fact. And Sadie, he supposes. When it comes to his mother, she is his most reliable source, even if she is prone to exaggeration.
A manager sticks his head out of the kitchen and says Sadie’s name in a slow, even tone.
She turns, nods, reaches out to gather up glasses and dirty plates.
It is odd not being able to help. At Sadie’s house, he is always helping.
Lola always did all that stuff at their dad’s house: putting things away, vacuuming.
Now the bar shape-shifts into a set of things to be done.
He can see it more easily, perhaps, because for Sadie the effort is heavy.
Dad
Sure. Drive Safe.
Last week a program came up on TV about a man who discovered that he had a hundred and fifty siblings.
His father was a sperm donor. They all met up and touched each other’s faces and commented on each other’s earlobes, hand gestures.
Then the producers brought the father in and some of them cried and then the father cried, and the camera was right up in his face, capturing his wrinkles and regret. He had the same earlobes as well.
When she emerges, he says: “Hey Sadie, I was wondering. Did you ever visit my mom in California?”
“No. She was always so busy.” The note of resentment is almost too light to detect. Quickly she follows with, “I wish I had.”
It’s important, isn’t it? Knowing where you come from? You have to be able to explain yourself. You have to have the facts. Even if they aren’t always what you hope for.
“Do you think she—you know. Do you think there was ever anyone else?”
Sadie’s face clouds over. She blinks three times. She does not look at her nephew. There is a wobbling inside him. Sometimes he forgets that she was actually there. That they are not both engaging with limitless hypotheticals, the same amount of blank space.
“You really think she wouldn’t have told me?”
At his father’s house, Sadie’s car shuddering outside, Sebastian closes the door quietly. He assesses the scene. Awake or asleep? Upstairs or downstairs? Despite his estrangement, he misses the house. The people who aren’t in it now.
He isn’t expecting to find Tillie alone in the kitchen.
The Martha Stewart monstrosity is tucked in the corner of the countertop, pale pink manicured fingers holding a copy of a book that Lola had been reading a few summers ago when she was still obsessed with the concept of France.
The cover has a woman’s face on it with painted lips and eyes full of a desire that he can’t imagine Tillie could ever comprehend.
Sebastian is startled at first by the sadness of the scene, Tillie’s attempt to connect with a person so far beyond her.
But then he realizes he is dealing with a rival scavenger.
“I said he didn’t have to wait up.”
“He’s not waiting up. I’m not either. Just wasn’t tired.”
Sebastian scuffs the wooden floor beams. “I just need some things.”
Tillie turns, puts the kettle on as if everything is normal, as if she is supposed to be here, in his kitchen, at midnight. “That’s fine. Tea?”
Something inside him is bubbling, unresolved. “I’m not staying.”
“No one is making you stay. How was your day?”
“Fine.”
He can’t help but notice, on the small kitchen table, a stack of catalogues that he hasn’t seen before in the house; glossy prints of nuclear families clad in plaid and laughing as dumb puppies jump around their folded knees.
They are all sitting that way, even the fathers, which cannot possibly be comfortable.
Crisscross applesauce. He imagines cutting out all the Stepford Wife faces from the pages for his latest project.
“You can take those if you want,” Tillie offers. “I brought them over, but I don’t need them.”
It is astonishing how pale and thin her lips are when she isn’t wearing any lipstick. He isn’t used to seeing her like this, incomplete, or at least not for public consumption.
“No thanks,” he says. He can’t figure out how, but it’s a trap. Tillie shrugs. She doesn’t look hurt by it. She pours the hot water into an old pink mug with a faded flower pattern on it that his mother used to use.
In an episode of Life and Times last week, they cast a woman to play his mother’s character in a flashback. She looked like her, or at least, they had done her hair in the same way. It was awful. Sadie had to turn it off.
“If you change your mind about staying,” Tillie says, “your bed is made up.”
He doesn’t answer. His phone buzzes against his leg. He slinks back into the hallway, and around the corner to Lola’s room.
Lola
You should be asleep
Perhaps she’s right. It’s late, it’s already tomorrow where she is. She sends a few photographs from England: ancient courtyards; long, lavish tables.
Sebastian
I’m raiding your room
How did she decide what to take and what to leave behind?
Here are some of his T-shirts that she used to sleep in, the good nail clippers.
A small, lacquered jewelry box full of baby teeth.
He senses disturbance, Tillie’s meddling.
A photo of Lola smiling at the pond by their grandmother’s house, the two of them, sitting in the open trunk of his car: he is looking at her and she is looking at the camera—or rather, their father standing behind it.
Maybe he has been too stubborn. Maybe truth is less important than keeping the peace. Were they ever as happy as this? Or did happiness just always look like fighting? He tucks the frame into his bag.
Lola
Criminal
Did I leave my chapstick next to the bed
Sebastian
Don’t they have chapstick in England
Lola
It’s Carmex
Heavy duty
The good shit
He finds it, pockets it.
Sebastian
Mine now
He has to move if he wants to salvage things.
You never know what his father might get rid of, what Tillie might get her hands on.
In her bedside table, right where she said, is the license.
Tick. Underneath it is a folder marked SCIENCE.
Odd, he thinks. An odd place for science. Inside, a parcel of photographs.
Their mother naked. Her familiar, unfamiliar body, its smell and sound, her laugh, her everything.
Holy shit.
A complicated feeling: she was beautiful.
A more complicated feeling: Lola hid these. And all this time, she acted like he was insane.
He doesn’t owe her shit.
Sebastian
Couldn’t find it, sorry
When he gets back to Sadie’s, he lights a joint and spreads the photos of the two of them and his mother’s nudes and Lola’s license out across the floor.
Then, the scissors seem to be cutting on their own.
On black cardboard, he pastes what is left.
This is what it feels like to be the one who stays, he thinks.
From the floor, his mother squints up at him, freed at last from her paper prison.
She opens her mouth wide and laughs, unbearably loud, unbearably gone.