Chapter Twenty-One
Sterling
SIENNA COMES BACK TO the estate bald, fragile, and past the first real danger.
Osgood says the graft is holding, and Sienna’s counts are recovering, with every qualification a transplant physician can attach to good news.
There are months of outpatient monitoring ahead.
Immune recovery will take the better part of a year, Still, the word engraftment is real now, confirmed, and it infuses us with hope that was only tenuous before.
Casey carries Sienna inside. I carry Bart.
Sienna is wearing a purple hat Hettie knitted for her, covering the bare head that still startles me every time I see it, even though I’ve been seeing it for three weeks.
She weighs less than she did when Casey first brought her to Charlotte.
The conditioning took weight she couldn’t spare.
She’s past the worst of it. The neutrophils are climbing. Her first chimerism test shows donor cells where they should be. My cells are making blood inside her bones, and I understand the science of it while understanding this is only one of the things I can give her.
I settle Sienna in her room. Bart goes on the pillow. The silk elephant is still on the nightstand where Sienna put it the first day. She hasn’t touched it. She hasn’t thrown it out either, which Casey tells me is Sienna’s version of keeping her options open.
Casey unpacks the hospital bag in the hallway. Medications, discharge instructions, and the follow-up schedule printed on three pages. She organizes them on the kitchen counter with efficiency from doing this for eighteen months and could do it blindfolded.
I watch her from the doorway, thinking about my ring under her shirt.
I haven’t seen it since the day I confirmed it was what I thought, but I hope she’s still wearing it.
I reach into my pocket and touch the wedding band I’ve been carrying around for weeks, since the night we slept together again.
I took it off almost immediately after I told her to leave.
I don’t wear it, because she’d probably be angry at me for even trying, but I’ve started keeping it close.
brITTANY COMES TO THE house on a Thursday afternoon.
She hasn’t been here since the dinner six weeks ago, when she couldn’t look at Casey and flinched when Casey corrected Gretchen.
She’s been avoiding the estate, me, and everything connected to the questions I asked in her apartment.
When I told her Sienna was discharged, she texted back a single word, Good.
When I invited her to come see Sienna, she waited three days to respond.
She arrives at two. I let her in. She’s wearing a dress that’s too formal for a Thursday afternoon, as though she put on the wrong armor for the wrong conversation.
Her hair is pulled back. She’s lost weight since the dinner, enough that I notice, which tells me the thing she’s been carrying hasn’t gotten lighter in six weeks.
Sienna is on the living room rug with Bart, working through a puzzle Casey bought at the hospital gift shop.
Twenty-four pieces, it’s a picture of a real elephant on the savanna.
Bart is supervising from his usual position, trunk accessible.
He offers no help for puzzle alignment, but she expects none.
Brittany sees her. Not glances at her as she did at dinner. She truly sees her this time. The bald head under the purple hat, the central line scar, the gray eyes that are mine, and the fierce concentration on a puzzle piece that won’t fit. Sienna looks up.
“You’re the elephant lady,” Sienna says. She remembers Brittany from dinner. She remembers that Brittany said she liked elephants. In Sienna’s filing system, that makes Brittany relevant. “My aunt.”
“I am,” Brittany says. Her voice catches.
“This puzzle has an elephant. Do you want to help?”
Brittany sits on the rug. Well, more like collapses. She picks up a puzzle piece, and her composure holds for about forty seconds. Then she puts down the piece, covers her face, and cries.
Sienna watches her cry with the pragmatic concern of a four-year-old who has seen adults cry in hospitals and knows it usually means something hurts. “Are you sad?”
Brittany can’t answer. She nods.
“Bart helps when I’m sad,” Sienna says. She holds Bart out toward Brittany.
It’s the most generous thing Sienna has ever offered anyone outside of Casey and me.
Bart is sacred territory and doesn’t get loaned to guests.
Bart doesn’t leave Sienna’s arms unless someone has earned it, and apparently, a crying woman on the rug has earned it, because Sienna understands hurt, and she’s decided Brittany needs him.
Brittany takes Bart. She holds him against her chest, and the crying gets worse, because holding a child’s most important possession while sitting on the floor of the house where you helped destroy that child’s family is apparently the thing that breaks whatever my sister has been holding together for six weeks.
Seeing my sister hold my daughter’s elephant and cry, nudges aside the anger I’ve been carrying at her, at least a little. I can’t forgive her, but I recognize Brittany has been carrying this lie for almost five years. She just didn’t have to see the full consequences until now.
I take Sienna to the kitchen. Casey is there, organizing the medications. She reads enough of the situation in my expression that she doesn’t have to ask. She takes Sienna, offers juice, and starts a conversation about which puzzle Sienna wants to do next, after they finish the African elephant.
“The sparkling one in the city, ice dancing,” says Sienna.
Casey frowns. “We don’t have a puzzle like that.”
“I saw it on Ma’zon.”
They’re discussing ordering it when I leave them.
I go back to the living room, and Brittany is still sitting on the rug with Bart in her lap, tears streaking her face, makeup ruined, and the formal dress wrinkled underneath her.
She looks twenty-three again, like the girl who sat on a sofa in the penthouse and told a lie because our mother told her to.
“I need to tell you something,” she says.
“I know you lied.”
“You don’t know all of it.” She wipes her face with the back of her wrist. “At your apartment, I told you I never saw Casey with anyone. That’s true.
There was nothing to see. But I didn’t tell you the rest.” She takes a breath.
“Mom came to me three weeks before that night. She told me Casey was using you. She told me Casey married you for the money and she’d leave when she had enough.
She told me if I loved you, I’d help protect you.
” She stops. She starts again. “I didn’t want to do it, especially when she said I had to make up a story. ”
“And what did Mom tell you to say?”
“She told me what to say. She drilled me over and over until I had the words memorized about seeing your wife with a man she was kissing. It never happened.”
“Yet you said it anyway.”
“I thought it was probably true anyway. I didn’t know Casey.
I only knew what Mom told me about her.” She takes another breath, shakier this time.
“Mom made it sound like she’d seen a hundred women like Casey, smart enough to get close, and patient enough to wait.
She described it so clearly that I started seeing it too.
Every time Casey mentioned keeping her apartment or driving her own car, I heard what Mom told me to hear. ”
“Casey kept her apartment because she’s independent. That’s not the same as planning to leave.” Even as I say it, I admit to myself it had added to my own doubts. If my wife loved me and trusted our marriage, why not let go of her apartment? She finally had two weeks before I threw her out.
She nods slowly. “I know that now. I didn’t then. I was twenty-three. Mom was the smartest person I knew, and she was certain.”
“Mom is always certain. That’s not the same as being right.” I sound cold, and I am. A deep chill emanates from the inside out.
“I know.” She pulls at the hem of her dress. “I’ve known it for almost five years, Sterling. Knowing and saying it out loud are different things.”
I sniff dismissively. “You said you were protecting me. From what?”
“From a woman who was going to leave you. That’s what Mom said. She said Casey would leave the way Abigail did, and it would destroy you.”
I can’t breathe for a moment. “Tell me what she said to you.”
The room is quiet. She knows what I’m asking. Not whether Casey kissed another man, because I got that answer in her apartment. I’m asking for the rest. The part she couldn’t give me when she was shaking on her couch and telling me to leave.
“I’m sorry,” Brittany says. “I’m sorry, Sterling.
I’ve been sorry since the night it happened.
I watched you tell Casey to leave. I knew it was wrong when I saw Casey’s face.
She was devastated. I knew right then that she wasn’t the way Mom said she was, but I didn’t say anything because Mom was in the chair, looking at me, and I couldn’t take it back in front of her. ”
I shake my head. “You could have called me the next day.”
“I know.”
“You could have called me any day in the last four years.” The ice is breaking, and my tone is creeping toward angry. I’m filled with the urge to shout at her, but I maintain my infamous control.
“I know.” She’s holding Bart, loaned to her because a four-year-old saw a woman crying and offered the most important thing she owned.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you since the night it happened.
I rehearsed it a hundred times. I wrote you letters I never sent.
I drove to the penthouse twice and sat in the parking garage without getting out of the car. ”