Chapter Five
five
Lanie
Lanie made sure that Merton Road was empty before retrieving the key from the clay pot that held her grandmother’s marigolds in the summer. Stealthily, she unlocked the entryway door and eased it open with a quiet pop of the latch. She slid in soundlessly, but silence greeted her on the other side anyway. Hanging up her coat, she left her carry-on bag next to the wall.
Where is everyone?
It was still a little early for night owls like Gemma and her twin brother, Leslie Junior. But Gran was normally up with the birds, moving around, humming Catholic hymns under her breath at dawn. Still, as she pushed the frosted glass door to the kitchen open, Lanie was greeted by continued silence. Lanie checked the time on her phone. It wasn’t that early. The red-eye from New York had gotten in slightly ahead of schedule, landing them at Heathrow at 7:25 a.m.
Lanie shook her head. It was currently nine a.m. Maybe Gran had gone to market on the high street?
She turned to try upstairs just as whispering voices came up the hall. Giggles and shushes preceded them loudly. The dining room door opened. Her cousin Gemma, looking more like her own wayward mother, Elliot, than Lanie had ever noticed before, stepped inside. Her cousin’s eyes went wide, settling on Lanie, pronounced cheeks riding even higher on her delighted face as she let out a squeal.
“Mel-a-nie!”
At the sound, the lanky man behind Gemma pushed through the door, alarmed. He eased back smiling when he saw Lanie there.
Jonah.
“A wah-gwan!” Gemma bellowed in a faux-Jamaican patois, pulling Lanie’s attention back.
She stamped her feet in place as Lanie approached with open arms. The two cousins met in the middle, both screeching and wrapping excited, flailing arms around one another. It was as if they hadn’t seen each other in thirty years instead of thirty months.
“Gemma!” Without warning, Lanie’s voice broke as she brushed back her cousin’s hair to place her hands on Gemma’s shoulders. “Oh, Gem!”
“Hello, darling!” Gemma said, with her brilliant South London accent, holding Lanie’s face between her hands. She pulled it down to plaster her with kisses as Lanie laughed. “Oh, Big Cuz!”
“Little Cuz!” They both broke into laughter at the old joke.
Though Gemma was the older of the two of them by four years, Lanie had outgrown her older cousin by seven inches at thirteen. Looking her over now, Lanie marveled. She’d forgotten how tiny Gemma was. And with her bare, makeup-free face and hair in its natural state for the first time in years, she looked even younger. Her long, loose sandy-brown ringlets cascaded over her shoulders and were pulled back on either side of her heart-shaped face by two simple clips. There was strain in those normally mischievous, now slightly weary eyes that hadn’t been there the last time Lanie saw her almost three years ago. But Gemma was still effortlessly lovely, maybe even a little more luminous now that she was in love.
“Ya look good !” Gemma pronounced, deepening her voice and putting a further accented emphasis on the word good to indicate this as high praise.
“You too,” Lanie replied sans the generic Caribbean accent. She’d never been a particularly gifted mimic of her Antiguan relatives, unlike seemingly every child born to Caribbean parents in the UK...and even some Africans and British whites besides. So, she never tried, leaving the patois to her family.
“We’ve missed you, Mel.”
Jonah’s soft voice and her name on his lips still did things to her. The words cut through the cousins’ laughter and sheared Lanie’s heart to tatters like sharp scissors. The world stopped as Lanie’s heart floundered like a bird with a broken wing.
Feeling things she’d never admitted before and now never could, Lanie swallowed, clearing her throat and forcing her lips into a wobbly smile. “Jonah.”
Gemma watched, stepping aside so that Lanie’s childhood best friend could get his turn.
“Hey, Mel.”
Lanie smiled up at her friend then brushed an errant curled lock of his raven hair from his face before going into his arms. She steeled herself against how right he felt in hers, but still her eyes slipped closed. Jonah smelled like his usual spicy mix of sandalwood from his preferred Imperial Leather soap and the warm chai scents, like honey, cloves, star anise and ginger, that permeated his mother’s kitchen. There was now something else too, something floral, like roses or ylang-ylang... Gemma.
Lanie’s eyes popped open. She patted him quickly, using her other hand on his biceps to break away and step back. This was wrong now, her natural inclination to lean into him, she had to remember that.
Clearing her throat again, she caught the tail end of an exchanged glance between Jonah and Gemma. Lanie’s heart tugged at the sight, cheeks burning, stomach clenching. But she knew she couldn’t allow herself to be anything but happy to see them together.
“Hey!” She tried for nonchalance. “And where were you two coming from?” She turned on Gemma, a small genuine smile trying to appear. “Where’s Gran?”
“Did you check upstairs?”
“No?” Lanie frowned. “I hadn’t gone up yet.”
It was Friday morning. Normally, if she wasn’t puttering around the house, off at the market or visiting a sick friend, their gran would have been sitting in the reclining chair off in the corner watching the morning “chat shows,” her daily dose of This Morning or Loose Women .
Gemma exhaled, her shoulders relaxing. “Well then.”
“She couldn’t still be upstairs, could she?” Lanie was incredulous. “Doing what? Cleaning?”
Gemma crossed Lanie’s path, placing herself under Jonah’s arm, splaying a hand across his flat abdomen possessively. Gemma was so short she didn’t even reach his armpit, Lanie noted before dragging her eyes away. Gemma looked like she was preparing for something.
“Mel,” Jonah started.
“What aren’t you guys telling me?” Lanie began a chuckle that fell away as she watched them watch her.
“We’re...” Jonah said, rubbing Gemma’s shoulder, bracing her, fortifying themselves.
Lanie followed his action, pursing her lips. Maybe her mother and her best friend Narcisa had been right. Maybe this was going to prove too much for her. If this was what she had to look forward to for the next four days, she would have done better to stay at home.
“We’re moving the wedding up,” Gemma finally blurted out.
“You are?” Lanie’s stomach sank, but she was immediately engulfed in guilt for the jolt of sorrow that information gave her, and the underlying desire that it laid bare.
They nodded. “June. We don’t want to wait.”
“A-and we’d really love it if you’d be our best mate?” Jonah asked.
“Your best man?” Lanie asked, unsure of what to think of this. It made sense as she was one of Jonah’s best mates, male or female. But still it was a bit of a surprise; she’d assumed she’d be enlisted into Gemma’s bridesmaid corps.
“Maid of honor,” Gemma added, clearing that up and adding to the confusion simultaneously.
Lanie frowned. “Huh?”
Jonah smiled. “Our best mate of honor. Both of us.”
Gemma looked up at Jonah again and a palpable exchange of ideas happened. They were really going to have to stop doing that or Lanie was sure she would lose her mind before the day was out.
“We argued about who would get you,” Gemma explained to Lanie’s confused face. “Each of us had very valid arguments. But we’ve decided to share you. Best man plus maid of honor. Best mate of honor.”
They smiled proudly. Lanie wondered where she had been during this deliberation but affixed a Plasticine smile on her face anyway. “Oh really?”
“She hates it. I told you,” Jonah fretted.
Gemma patted his stomach. “No, she doesn’t.”
Yes, she does.
“Give her a chance to speak.”
They stared at her expectantly.
“Melanie?” Gemma prompted.
When she opened her mouth, no sound came for a moment. Lanie’s diaphragm constricted. “I—I guess I’ll go up and say hi to Gran.” She turned and headed to the narrow, carpeted staircase.
“Mel?” Jonah called out.
Lanie was surprised to find Gemma on her heels. “Well, Melanie? What do you think?”
Gemma had always been this way. Spoiled, pushy and intent on her own way. Ryan said it came from being raised by their grandmother. But their grandmother had spoiled Lanie too, during the few short years she lived in the United States. She wasn’t like that.
Lanie shrugged. “You seem to have already decided.”
Gemma sighed as if with forbearance. “This is a big deal for us, Mel.”
Ya think?
“I know that.” Lanie sighed then paused. “Wait, are you following me?”
“You’ve got me wondering if Nan’s up here now, so, I want to see too,” Gemma lied transparently, clearly hoping her continued presence would impose her will.
Classic Gem.
They navigated the narrow upstairs landing as they had as kids, trying to edge each other out of the way, which devolved into a silly slap fight in front of their grandmother’s door.
“Gran?” Lanie said. Gemma took that last second to stick a wet finger into Lanie’s ear like she used to back when she was more technically the “Big Cuz” of the two of them. “Ugh!” Lanie glared and slapped her cousin’s hand away as Gemma stood there innocently and knocked lightly on the door.
“Come in. It’s hard to believe you are both over thirty,” their grandmother admonished, tsking. But there was a smile on her face as she did it.
Lanie smacked Gemma a final time then turned back to her grandmother, seated comfortably in a recliner situated catty-corner from a flat-screen television that took up so much space in the small square bedroom that it looked like a theater screen.
Lanie nearly gasped. “Gran, what happened?”
Gemma stepped into the room, seemingly perplexed about what Lanie was referring to. Lanie rushed to her grandmother’s side as the older woman brought the recliner back to its upright position and rose slowly. Her normally statuesque grandmother was gaunt, the large Turner eyes lost in a now hollow-cheeked face.
“Eh-eh, yuh forward,” her grandmother declared in her thick Antiguan patois, affronted, then code-switched fluidly into the more enunciated and British-inflected voice she generally used around Lanie. “I don’t look okay?”
Lanie modulated her tone of alarm at the rebuke.
“Nan’s been on a whole health kick. Smoothies, low calorie, vegetarian, the whole bit,” Gemma announced, beaming.
Their grandmother smoothed down her housecoat and raised her chin with pride. “Down three stone already.”
Over forty pounds? Lanie knew their grandmother had been a diabetic for the past decade, but it had always been well-controlled. Forty pounds didn’t seem under control.
“Are you planning to lose more?” Lanie gave a panicky exhale before she could stop herself. Both women fixed Lanie with a glare she withered under.
Tulip Turner had always been a full-figured woman. Legend had it, it’s what her husband, their grandfather, liked most about his far younger wife—that, and her green eyes. At nearly six feet tall, she was a big woman in that way too. Taller than anyone else in her family, male or female. And coke-bottle curvy even when, after two kids, the bottle became exaggerated and bottom heavy. That, her height and her pronounced cheekbones were the ways Lanie resembled her grandmother most closely.
However, all that was gone now, and in its place stood this stick-figure version of Tulip. Lanie looked between them, confused as to how they could not see what she saw. Their grandmother didn’t just look thinner—she looked emaciated. Jowly in places that used to be plump and round, sunken in places that used to be ample and full. Lanie was stunned...and maybe a little bit scared.
“You’re not done?”
Their grandmother straightened further. “I don’t know. Perhaps.”
“I told her she’s trying to get back into her own wedding dress just to show me up!” Gemma said.
They both chuckled at that while Lanie still stood aghast.
“Gran,” she started again.
“She looks great!” Gemma cut Lanie off firmly, brooking no dissent, brows gathering like storm clouds.
Tulip’s light brown skin flushed an actual red like a delighted schoolgirl.
Lanie, pulled up short, closed her mouth and allowed it to curve upward into some semblance of a smile while her cousin and grandmother tittered.
“So that’s it? ‘Granny, yuh maaga now.’ But no hug, kiss? Nuting?”
The words startled Lanie back into movement. She laughed, reaching for her grandmother, remembering they hadn’t seen each other in nearly three years. Outside of semiregular phone calls, they had been out of touch. Gratefully, her grandmother’s hugs were still the same. Smothering Vise-Grips that could choke the life out of you.
“Well, I’m off, then. I’ll leave you two to catch up.” Gemma dropped her shoulders with a sigh. “My fiancé is waiting on me. Gah! I can hardly believe it!” Gemma gushed, still marveling at a development that was already two months old.
She paused at the door. “You’ll do it though, right, Mel?”
Their grandmother’s arm was still draped across Lanie’s shoulders as Gemma spoke and she gave Lanie two sharp squeezes. Lanie knew what Gemma was still asking but refused to give her an answer, only smiling in a brief contest of wills. Gemma finally gave up and retreated from the room.
Gran gave Lanie another squeeze as Gemma closed the door behind her. It was the kind she used to give Lanie as a toddler back in New York when she fell in the playground and was encouraging her to walk off the pain.
“So, how yuh been keepin’?”
“I’m okay,” Lanie muttered.
“Are you?” her grandmother asked, sounding like Lanie’s mother, Ryan. Even the pitch was the same, condolences and concern threaded through the words.
“I am,” Lanie lied, forcing a smile onto her face.
“Save that for tomorrow night when your cousin will need you. How are you now?”
Pressure built behind Lanie’s eyes. She prided herself on the fact that she’d never once cried about this, not even when she first heard the news. But it only took a moment to be back there, sitting in her kitchen in the Bronx with her hands on her knees, composed. That morning, two months ago, she’d been totally unprepared to see both Jonah’s and Gemma’s faces appear on the same Skype call, sitting together when she opened the link. Still, she feigned delight. Then listened patiently as they announced through excited giggles and overlapping statements that they were getting married.
Then she cracked.
“What?” Lanie squeezed her eyes shut before reopening them in a new reality where Jonah was marrying someone other than her. “How could you have possibly been dating for over a year? We couldn’t even go anywhere for most of it!”
Lanie hit them with a barrage of questions that they could barely answer before she asked more.
After a few minutes, Gemma laughed nervously before tipping her head to the side, muttering something to Jonah that Lanie couldn’t make out. He replied in another whisper, before addressing Lanie out loud.
“Mel, we live across the street from each other.” Jonah’s smile was strained but his voice was a low, soothing mellifluousness. Calm and quiet...as was his way, always.
Lanie took a breath before speaking again. “No, your parents live across the street from each other! You live in Brixton!” Lanie could hear her pitch rising but was unable to stop herself.
“I was sheltering-in-place with my family to help out. You know my dad got sick last year.”
“I know, but...” Lanie sighed at the logic; she did know this. What she didn’t know was how that translated into a marriage proposal to Gemma.
Gemma!
Right then, Lanie felt a hand squeeze painfully tight around her shoulder. Her mother’s face dipped low from behind to appear beside hers on-screen.
“Did I hear good news?” Ryan asked loudly, as if they were on some old-school overseas call with an ocean of static between them.
Her smiling face on-screen nearly pushed Lanie’s out of the frame. Lanie, remembering herself, continued robotically through the requisite congratulations before ceding the entire call and the computer itself to her mother and shutting herself in her bedroom.
It took a few days, but Lanie issued profuse apologies to Gemma and Jonah even though her heart wasn’t in it, feeling like it was collapsing in on itself.
And that pain still lingered, suddenly as fresh as it had been that first day she heard. For whatever reason, here, given permission by her grandmother to feel the feelings, it became too overwhelming to bear stoically any longer.
“Dammit!” Lanie chided herself. Her lip began to tremble as hot tears started to slip from her lashes, streaking her face. “I am okay. I am. He never promised me anything.”
God, I’m pathetic.
Hadn’t she said the exact same thing to herself about Ridley, just this morning? Albeit with far lower stakes. It never failed. This was a pattern with her. She kept constructing these elaborate fantasies seemingly out of thin air. Departing on her very own flights of fancy that left her falling alone. Idealizing men who never wanted from her what she wanted from them. Was she so love-starved and desperate that she took even the tiniest crumbs of a smile or a kind word, a little attention, and spun whole love affairs?
The answer seemed to be yes. And how stupid of you to think it could be otherwise.
The tears of self-pity came faster after that. A viselike grip surrounded her heart. No one ever liked her, loved her, wanted her enough to make any sort of an effort, offer any semblance of a commitment. She was never important enough. She made herself easy, didn’t ask a lot. Only to love and be loved by one special someone. And she still couldn’t manage to find even that.
Lanie’s shoulders shook as the tears came from all the little places she’d secreted them away over these past weeks. Her grandmother moved her to sit on the bed when she began to shake.
“Ooh, Sec,” her grandmother cooed plaintively as they sat side by side. She unearthed an ancient nickname from Lanie’s toddlerhood that to this day, Lanie still didn’t know the meaning of. “There, there, now. You’ll find your one.”
“Did you know?” Lanie asked once the crying jag subsided and she could finally speak again, sniffling and hiccuping.
“No,” her grandmother answered her question with a sigh. “Not until it had been going on for over a year. Not until he’d moved back to Brixton and it became more obvious she was seeing someone. Not coming home nights. Back to living on her phone.”
Gemma was always seeing someone, always out late, always on the phone. Lanie couldn’t blame her grandma for missing it. Normally, that would be wholly unremarkable.
“But this time I could tell something was different,” her grandmother continued, smoothing her dressing gown over her knees. “When he had been across the street, she was never far. But once he was gone, so was she. She refused to say, so I spoke with Syreeta and Nishan—”
Jonah’s parents, who must have been as shocked as Gran when this all came out.
“They reported Jonah had been odd with them too. But since whatever was happening was making them both so happy when everything was so sad, we didn’t pay it any mind. Like a fleeting thing.”
Lanie’s heart ached anew at that. She truly wanted Gemma to have everything she wanted. Just not Jonah.
“But she’s good, Sec. And they are so happy. I’ve never seen Gem like this. And I think he’s a very good influence on her.”
Lanie’s next tears, a fresh set, were of joy for her cousin and friend who had managed to fall in love amid everything. Lanie smiled at the thought. “Yeah?”
Her grandmother nodded, a small smile ghosting her lips. For a single moment, Lanie empathized with her grandmother’s awkward predicament, having to walk this silken thread between the elation of one granddaughter and the heartache of another.
“Then I’m glad. I really am.” It was the first time Lanie said it that it even slightly resembled the truth.
“And if not now...” Her grandmother knew her too well. “You soon will be. I promise you.”
Gran pulled Lanie into her side, giving her another squeeze and a kiss on the temple. She nodded decisively, as if settling the matter.
“Now.” Gran sighed. “You’ll be staying in Les’s old room. Go take a nap, I know you’re tired. I’ll go make some lunch for us. And make sure you fix your face before they see you again. No more of this.” She flicked Lanie’s quivering chin with a long finger.
The tone of that last part was less the soothing words of a consoling grandmother and more a directive coming from a family matriarch set on peace in her midst.
Lanie nodded back, heaving another tremulous, cleansing breath, hoping to shake this all off.