Eight
I’m pulling my T-shirt over my head when the bathroom door bursts open and a whirling mass of blond hair, wiry legs, and tanned
skin flings itself at me.
“Nico!” I laugh despite myself as I lean down and scoop him up. He rubs my nose with his. When my mother was affectionate,
this is how she showed it. Rubbing our noses together in what she used to call a nose kiss, that would make me giggle in exactly
the way Nico is giggling now.
The nose kiss, which was really a rub, was my secret handshake with my half siblings. I shouldn’t have been surprised that
they have passed it on, but it was disconcerting last year to see my stepmother giving each of them a nose kiss.
“Isn’t it adorable?” She saw me watching, misinterpreting my aghast stare as one of curiosity. “It’s become our thing!” She
laughed as I excused myself to get more coffee.
I didn’t bother telling her that her children had learned it from me.
“Whose house is this and why are you here?”
I put Nico down and together, we head to the stairs. “This is Jerome’s house. You know Jerome. From Daddy’s work.”
Referring to my father as Daddy doesn’t feel strange anymore, but I would never call him Daddy, or Dad, myself. Occasionally I make the mistake of referring to him as Marty when I am talking to Nico or Paloma, and they instantly correct me. “Do you mean Daddy?”
“But why are you here?” Nico pulls me down the stairs by my hand.
“Jerome is my boyfriend,” I say. Nico stops still and turns to me, shocked.
“But Jerome is a grown-up!”
I start to laugh. “I’m a grown-up too.”
“You’re not a grown-up! You’re my sister.”
“I know. But I’m much older than you! I’m twenty-nine.”
At six years old, Nico can’t fathom what it is to be twenty-nine. His world is divided into children and grown-ups, with me
falling somewhere between the two.
If Scarlett were here, she might correct him. “Half sister,” she would remind Nico, if my father wasn’t around. My father considers us all his family, not getting hung up on the technicalities,
whereas Scarlett is very clear that Nico and Paloma are hers, whereas I . . . I am the daughter of Marty’s very brief first
marriage.
If I am honest, I like it that way.
I was used to my dad and me being a team. When Clara married Jim, I was supposed to be my father’s date. Clara had asked me
to be a bridesmaid, surprising me with a champagne-colored dress, the skirt covered in tiny silk flowers. I had never worn
anything as beautiful.
On the day of the wedding, my father announced that a “new friend” of his was joining us. New friend was his code for girlfriend.
I was curious, and disappointed. A girlfriend meant that instead of being my father’s equal, his date, I would be relegated
to third wheel.
That was the first night I met Scarlett, shocked at how she was only a few years older than me.
Whenever I had tried to picture my father with a woman, it was someone more like my mother.
Scarlett could have been my friend. From the minute I saw them together, I knew my father was smitten.
He laughed at everything she said, even when it wasn’t funny; he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.
Scarlett was charming, tried so hard to make me like her.
Ironically, had she not been my father’s girlfriend, I probably would have loved her.
But she was my father’s girlfriend, and the bright fire of jealousy burned in my stomach—she had access to all of him. I didn’t. And
it was all I wanted.
At the wedding reception, Clara visited our table and told Scarlett how my dad and I always came to the annual ipryy New Year’s
Eve party together. Scarlett laughed, shaking her head. “She should be off having a life of her own. Don’t worry . . .” She
laid a hand on my arm and rolled her eyes. “You won’t be forced to do that anymore.” I didn’t know how to tell her that I
loved the New Year’s Eve party, loved being my father’s date; that I didn’t need her to protect me from anything.
That night at the wedding, she had been wearing inch-thick makeup, but today my father’s influence is apparent in her now-natural
face, only a slick of mascara and lip gloss. She’s beautiful, but with plenty of help over the years. She will disappear for
a couple of weeks, or go on vacation, returning looking ever-so-slightly tweaked. Her nose is now tiny, a perfect ski jump,
her lips a full pout. She has always looked like a model, belying the fact that, as my father regularly boasted, she had a
Stanford degree in computer science.
“She’s nineteen!” insisted Scarlett at Clara’s wedding. “She doesn’t want to be with a bunch of old fogeys. She should be
with her friends!”
My father was bemused. It had never occurred to him that I would want to be with anyone other than him on the holidays.
It had never occurred to me either.
“She wants to be there,” he said with uncertainty in his voice. “We do it every year.”
“There’s no way she wants to.”
I tried to protest, but the next thing I knew Scarlett had agreed to go to Clara’s with my father, who told me that Scarlett
was right and I should see the new year in with people my own age.
What about Scarlett, I thought? If that’s the case, shouldn’t she be seeing the new year in with people her own age as well?
Despite that, Scarlett and I got on perfectly well, until Paloma was born, two years later. Just before Christmas, I had a
meeting with Tim Wellesley in corporate PR. The wall in the waiting area outside his office was filled with Christmas cards.
I wandered over to look at the happy families captured in elegant black-and-white, glorious technicolor, inspirational messages
wishing everyone peace, love, and joy.
And there in the middle was the biggest card of all, on thick, heavy stock, a black-and-white photograph of my father and
Scarlett, Paloma cradled in my father’s arm, the other arm wrapped around Scarlett. They were sitting on the steps carved
into the hill in the backyard of their home, Scarlett’s cat, Widget, staring into the camera by their feet. They looked like
the perfect family.
My heart jumped into my mouth, a wave of nausea as I leaned forward to open the card.
Wishing you a year filled with peace, love, and privacy! With warm Christmas wishes from the Cooke Family. Marty, Scarlett,
Paloma, it felt as if I had been slapped in the face.
“Are you okay?” Tim’s assistant called over. “Can I get you some water?”
“I feel a little dizzy.” I walked back to the sofa on shaky legs and sat down, accepting the water that was placed in my hands.
“I’m so sorry,” I said a few minutes later. “I think I’m sick. Do you mind if I reschedule the meeting?”
I left the office and drove home, my heart still pounding. Lucy was lying on the sofa watching daytime TV, eating a bowl of
Honey Nut Cheerios. It was the beauty of her job, she always said. Late night parties were followed by a couple of days of
intense laziness, before she started gearing up for the next.
“What’s the matter?” She could see something was wrong as soon as I walked in. I told her about the Christmas card as her
jaw set firmly.
“She’s a cunt,” she said when I had finished.
“Who?”
“Scarlett. This is her doing. Has your father ever sent a Christmas card in his life?” I thought about it. No. He wasn’t a
Christmas card person. In fact, he rolled his eyes every time he went to the mailbox and discovered another huge stack of
cards from people he mostly didn’t know or didn’t remember.
“This whole perfect family card thing was orchestrated by Scarlett, who deliberately left you out because you’re not part
of her family.”
“I’m sure this wasn’t deliberate,” I lied. I wasn’t sure.
Lucy pushed aside her cereal bowl and sat up, placing her feet on the floor, outraged on my behalf, allowing me to remain
somewhat passive in the face of her fury.
“Of course it was deliberate. It’s the most clichéd thing in the whole world. She can be all buddy-buddy with you, be the
perfect stepmother, until she has a child of her own and now the firstborn is ostracized.”
“I don’t know that I’m being ostracized.
” I thought of how I had been the first person they phoned when Paloma was born, how I was welcomed into the hospital room to meet my little sister; how the soft blue bunny rabbit I bought her became Paloma’s most treasured possession—she went nowhere without Wabby.
“The Cooke Family,” Lucy recited. “Marty, Scarlett, Paloma, and Widget. Where the fuck are you? If that isn’t being ostracized,
I don’t know what is.”
My eyes filled up with tears.
“Oh, honey.” Lucy squashed up next to me on the chair and wrapped her arms around me. “I’m so sorry. Stepmothers are the worst.”
I didn’t think Scarlett was the worst; I just felt extraordinarily hurt at being cut out of my father’s family.
“Tell your father,” Lucy demanded. “You have to tell him how you feel.”
My voice was shaking when I tried to tell my father. I waited until the weekend, when I was over there for brunch. He took
me outside to see the new basketball court he had installed inside a reclaimed barn, and I stutteringly told him I had seen
his Christmas card.
“Isn’t it awful?” He shook his head in disdain. “I told her I didn’t want to do a Christmas card. I hate those goddamned things.
I didn’t know anything about it until I saw it on Clara’s desk.”
“Did you see that I wasn’t included?”
“Don’t worry about it, Peanut. You know I love you. You’re my first, best daughter.” He put an arm around me and pulled me
in close, squeezing me as he kissed my head through my hair. All was forgiven. I didn’t care what Scarlett had done. In that
moment, for that moment, I knew my father loved me. Nobody could get in the way of that.
Nico leads me into the kitchen area where Jerome is pouring freshly squeezed grapefruit juice into five glasses.
“Missy!” Paloma, shy, sweet, almost identical to me except fair where I am dark, lights up when she sees me and leans into me as I kiss her on the top of the head.
“Hey!” My father gives me a quick hug before downing a glass of grapefruit juice in one. “I’m glad you’re here! Mind if I
borrow Jerome for a quick tour of a property we’re thinking of acquiring? You’re okay if I leave the kids with you?”
Paloma and Nico cheer at the prospect of me babysitting. As much as I love them, I feel left out. I look at Jerome, who shrugs
his acquiescence.
“What property?” I ask.
“I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. Come on, Jerome. Grab your bike helmet. Let’s go.”