Chapter 4 #2
He makes the rest of the journey to the triplets’ apartment anyway, trying to put Dani and her stupid crusade out of his mind.
She’s always trying to set him up with some guy or another, and it’s never a good fit, never worth the agita of bothering.
He thinks that maybe they’re wired differently.
Dani is a serial monogamist, someone who finds it deeply uncomfortable to be unattached, and so she must find Sam’s long-term refusal to settle down an agony.
Sam himself isn’t that bothered by it. It’s not that he doesn’t get lonely, but.
Well. He’s never been the kind of person who could get out of bed for anything less than the real thing; for anyone who doesn’t make him feel, in whatever way, like all his nerve endings are on fire.
He’s never seen the point. So while he’s been on an enormous number of dates—most of them set up for him by Deb, Talya, or Deb’s best friend, Joanie—and even turned a few of those dates into relationships, he’s never been with anyone longer than about six months.
It always fizzles out, and a year or two ago, Sam decided to do his best to stop expecting anything else.
The last thing he needs right now is to add Dani to the list of people who have permission to call him up and instruct him to meet a potential match somewhere.
Forcibly, he turns his mind to other subjects.
As they usually do on the way to the triplets’, Sam’s thoughts turn to Luce.
He worries about her. The situation is an unusual one.
Daisy and Iris are identical, like carbon copies of one another, but Luce isn’t, for all they were born at the same time.
It’s a strange, rare thing for that to happen, and David and Mara had been thrilled by it, wanted to talk about it long after the pregnancy was done.
Sam thinks it wasn’t so bad for Luce when they were all small children; she looked enough like Iris and Daisy then that people assumed all three of them were identical, and didn’t single her out.
But early in their teen years, Luce’s looks diverged from Daisy and Iris’s, making the distinction clearer.
Daisy and Iris both have their mother’s heart-shaped face, while Luce has their father’s more squared one; Daisy and Iris both have glossy, smooth, medium-brown hair, while Luce’s, like Sam’s, is both darker and less tamable; Daisy and Iris are both tall and willowy, while Luce is shorter and stockier.
Ever since the differences between them became obvious—and probably, if Sam’s honest, since before then—the dynamic between the three sisters is one that Sam can’t help but think Luce doesn’t enjoy.
Even the apartment itself reflects the way things work between the triplets.
It’s a nice enough place, the second floor of a well-maintained duplex on a little street called Delaware Drive, at the top of Cedar Hill.
That means that for Iris and Daisy, it’s only a few minutes’ walk to Case Western Reserve, where they’re both seniors; they’re even able to catch a university-funded shuttle to and fro most of the time.
But Luce, studying at the Cleveland Institute of Art, has a half-hour walk each way to get to her classes, with no way home that doesn’t involve ascending a punishing slope.
Sam sighs as he pulls the van up in front of the curb.
This is in part out of sympathy for his sister, but, admittedly, it’s partially because through his open window, he hears a voice that sounds like Daisy’s call, in a slightly singsong tone, “It’s Saaaaaam.
Lucy, do you want to maybe hide your bong? ”
I’m not your dad, Sam thinks, not for the first time; not that he’s ever been able to bring himself to say it out loud.
I’m only eight years older than you. How far into adulthood do we all have to get before you stop looking at me as an authority figure I never even asked to be?
I was a kid, too, you know. Just because I was older than you doesn’t mean I knew what I was doing, and that’s still true, right now.
On the other hand, Sam notes wryly, he is walking up the stairs to their apartment unannounced, laden with bags of treats for them, and offended that they don’t want him to see their bong, so. Maybe he has a lot of nerve being annoyed that they see him as a father figure.
Regardless, when he knocks it’s Iris who answers.
She’s irritated to see him so early until he offers her the coffee, which seems to placate her somewhat.
Never particularly food-motivated, she’s indifferent to the groceries, but Daisy’s excited by the various snack options, and Luce—the only one of the three who’d ever bothered to pay attention when Sam attempted to teach them to cook—is clearly pleased by the ingredients he’s chosen.
Sam’s glad; some of them are expensive pantry items, things like tahini and cashews and good chocolate, and he’s relieved that someone appreciates them.
She kisses him on the cheek when she takes her coffee, and Daisy gives him a bubbly one-armed hug.
Iris raises an eyebrow at him over the rim of her cup, but that, for Iris, is fairly demonstrative, and he smiles back.
At this point Pastrami, who was until now, presumably, sprawled unconscious on Luce’s bed and sleeping the deep, luxurious sleep of a dog who has been given both a glut of attention and too many liver treats, bursts from the bedroom.
She barrels towards Sam at a dead run, leaps into his arms, licks every inch of his face with a frankly unsettling efficiency, and then leaps back to the ground again.
She circles him three times before she settles on the floor at his feet, panting happily.
Sam would have had to train that jumping out of her if she did it with anyone else, but only he has ever had this particular reaction from her. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t proud of that.
“She needs out,” he says, instead of this. “Do you want me to—”
“I’ve got it,” Luce says, standing and stretching, coffee still in hand, without spilling a drop. Then she smiles slightly at Sam and adds, “But you can come with, if you want.”
Sam nods and waits patiently while she clips Pastrami into her leash and puts her shoes on.
Then they descend the stairs together, Daisy crying, “Bye! Have a blast! Love you!” as Iris gives them both a curt, brief wave.
They’ve always been like that, the two of them, as though the personality traits that were meant to be split evenly between them simply went one way or the other instead.
Luce is more like Sam: somewhere in between two extremes, warily trying to bridge the gap.
She listens more than she talks, like he tries to, and does her best to be helpful, like him.
He wonders, sometimes, if she’s like him in less visible ways, too; if deep down inside she’s often more upset, or angry, or hurt than she lets on.
He hopes not. It’s a complicated hand to be dealt.
Regardless, they’re enough alike that they walk in comfortable silence for nearly ten minutes.
The sky is gray and vaguely threatening, but Sam’s pretty sure it’s bluffing, and it’s just starting to feel pleasant to be outside again after a winter of cursing the weather.
Pastrami has the time to use the facilities and move on to smelling absolutely every object they pass, in search of, Sam assumes, news of the canine world; Sam gets the chance to notice that Luce has dyed a small section of her hair neon yellow, and another bit lime green.
It’s not finals week for her so much as it’s been finals year since last August—it turns out that art school is more about long-term capstone projects than exams, at least in Luce’s program—and he wonders if she’s managing the strain all right, without knowing how to ask her at all.
Finally, he clears his throat, steeling himself. It’s ridiculous, he knows, to feel afraid; she’s his little sister, for God’s sake, and Pastrami is his dog, and, anyway, of the triplets, Luce’s the kind one. “Listen, I’m sorry to do this, but I need to take Pastrami back early.”
“Oh,” Luce says, blinking at him in surprise. He notices her pull the leash towards herself a little, though he doubts it was on purpose. “Um, okay. How early?”
Sam winces. “I was thinking like. After this walk?”
Luce might be the Kind Triplet, but she’s still his little sister, and thus subject to the laws of little sisters everywhere. She groans, a slightly whining element thrown into it, and briefly sounds like the seven-year-old she once was as she snaps, “But Sam, come on, it’s my turn with Pastrami!”
“And yet, is it ever your turn with Pastrami when she’s eaten half a pound of cocoa powder and needs her stomach pumped, I wonder?
” Sam muses aloud, reflexively defending his territory the way he can’t quite help with his sisters sometimes, even Luce; even now.
“I mean, if we’re moving to a taking turns model here, that implies shared ownership, right?
So, let’s see, this month your half of pet insurance would be—”
“Ugh, Sam, God. Fine,” Luce snaps, rolling her eyes at him.
“I know she’s your dog, it’s just… during their finals week Daisy and Iris get a little—oh, whatever.
It doesn’t matter.” She sighs, and as a stab of guilt sinks deep into Sam’s abdomen asks, a little plaintively, “What do you need her for so urgently anyway?”
Glancing briefly up at the sky for strength, Sam says, “I have a new neighbor. In the building behind the deli.”
Luce stares at him. “So?”
“So,” Sam says, and winces in spite of his best efforts not to, “it’s… Jake Thompson.”
Luce stares for another second. Then she whistles, shaking her head, says, “Dude,” and passes him the leash without any further argument.
Another long stretch of silence, one that lasts for nearly half of the next block, and includes a cross-street where they could turn back towards the apartment.
Wordlessly, without looking at each other, they don’t, opting instead to take the longer route, to Pastrami’s obvious and ecstatic delight.
After a while, her voice thick with sympathetic horror, Luce says, “And you’re…
sure it’s him? It’s not… I don’t know, like a thing where you got wrongly delivered mail that said that name, and so you’re assuming it’s him, but it could be some other Jake Thompson?
He could be a fifty-five-year-old car salesman from Poughkeepsie—”
“Oddly specific,” Sam points out, a question for all it isn’t one.
“Yeah, so, there’s a girl in one of my sculpture classes who should wear a T-shirt that says, ‘Ask Me About Catfish Hunting,’” Luce says, shaking her head and grinning.
This results in a brief conversational detour, in which Luce explains the recent digital misfortunes that had befallen, indeed, a fifty-five-year-old car salesman from Poughkeepsie.
Sam doesn’t feel bad about laughing at his misery.
The guy was pretending to be a twenty-six-year-old actress online in order to con people, so Sam thinks he got what was coming to him.
Sam also thinks Luce might have a serious crush on this so-called catfish hunter, but he doesn’t mention it.
That’s not the way the two of them talk about things.
Born loners in a family full of people with little to no sense of what boundaries are supposed to look like, the two of them have always given each other the grace to bring things up when they’re ready to discuss them.
Usually, anyway, because as they round the next corner and her story draws to a close, Luce says, brightly, “Anyway, about Jake—if, that is, it’s even him—”
Sam groans a little on the words, “Yes, Luce, it’s him. It’s him! He came into the deli; I talked to him.”
At this, Luce comes to a dead stop. Sam, surprised, nearly tangles himself in Pastrami’s leash in turning around to stop, too, and raises his eyebrows at her.
He tries to keep his expression cool, calm.
He tries to look like someone whose stupid heart has never even thought about pounding like a runaway jackhammer.
“You talked to him?” Luce’s eyes are wide; Sam nods. “And was it, like. Okay?”
Sam shrugs. “Yeah, sure.”
She stares at him.
“I mean it wasn’t… not okay,” Sam says, putting a hand to the back of his neck.
She stares at him some more.
“Okay, fine, I don’t have any idea how it went,” Sam snaps, and starts walking again, leaving her to keep up.
She does. “I don’t know how a person is supposed to tell?
In these circumstances.” He thinks of the shadows in Jake’s eyes, the way he’d run off and then come back half-crazed with the awkwardness of the whole situation, and still been so… so…
“He was… Jake,” Sam says, helplessly, with a broad shrug. “You remember Jake, right? I mean, it’s okay if not; you were basically an infant.”
Laughing, but also lightly shoving him, she says, “Dude, I was like eight when you started bringing him around; you’re not that much older than us.” Then, more soberly, she adds, “And I was ten—we were ten—when it all, uh. Went down? So… plenty old enough to form memories, I think.”
Sometimes, in moments like these, Sam considers the merits of assigning randomized names to traumatic events, the way they do with hurricanes.
It would be so much easier to talk about the whole thing if Sam could say, “Hey, you don’t have to dance around The Hasselhoff Event, we all know what happened and we can all agree it was terrible. I don’t need you to baby me.”
But Sam can’t say that. He does need her to baby him—his baby sister, indignity of indignities—because there is no fake name with which to sum up what happened.
There is no shorthand, no way around it: Talking about it would mean talking about it, and Sam hasn’t, not in over a decade. Not with anyone.