5. Elyse
Elyse
One of the benefits of working evenings is that I’m free to help my sister out during the day. Otherwise, I would worry about what being in the house by herself all day might do to her morale. Besides, someone needs to pick Fleur up from school, and walk Jambon, and do the grocery shopping.
Today, especially, I need some fresh air and distraction before this indecent proposal tips me from severe anxiety into full-blown panic.
I park Sylvie’s wheelchair next to the bench and put the brake on with my foot. “This good?” Jambon crosses in front of me, wrapping his leash around my legs so he can rest his cutesy face in my sister’s lap. He wants to care for her more than he wants to stretch his old legs.
“Yeah,” she says, looking around us and digging her fingers into our dog’s scruffy fur with both hands. “Thanks.”
I’ve driven us to Dennis Collins Park so that we can look out at the water and Fleur can work off some excess energy.
She’s still in her first month of kindergarten, and I suspect the schedule will take some getting used to.
As we hit the end of September, it’s warmer than I’d like, but not unbearable.
The breeze coming off the water helps. The unbearable heat is one aspect of living in Hell’s Kitchen that I do not miss.
“How about you, missy?” I ask Fleur as I take a spin to untangle myself from the leash. “What are you going to do?”
“Wanna go to the playground,” Fleur whines, and my sister and I exchange an amused look. She’s so predictable.
“I know,” I tell her, tucking a strand of her dark hair behind her ear. “We’re gonna go shortly, I promise. But let’s just sit here for a while first so your mom and I can enjoy looking at the water, okay? Then she can watch you while I walk Jambon.”
She nods, her little rosebud mouth in the same sulky pout that her mom perfected when we were young. She knows the score, knows the dog’s not allowed in the playground. But she won’t go down without a fight.
“You wanna throw his ball for him?” I ask, fishing around in my bag with my free hand.
“It’s gross.”
“It’s not. I washed it. Here you go.”
I hand her the red rubber ball, pocked with teeth marks, and she sighs as she takes it. I unleash Jambon and give his fur a galvanizing rub. “Come on, boy. Go play ball with Fleur.”
“Go on,” Sylvie tells him, giving him one last scratch behind the ears. He raises his snout from her lap with a baleful look before backing out as if from a parking space and heading toward Fleur.
“Catch this, Jambon!” my niece calls as she lobs the ball down the sidewalk that separates this grassy area from the water.
It flies past the dog, and I’m pretty sure he mentally curses her before he turns and lumbers after it.
He’s getting so old, and it kills me every time I notice it, even if he’s moving more easily since we started him on arthritis meds.
We’re not entirely sure how old Jambon is, given as he’s a rescue dog, but we’ve had him for nine years.
The vet estimated his age at around three when he wandered into Dad’s repair shop, looking for—and instantly finding—someone to love him.
He’s as much of a mutt as they come, with gangly legs, oversized paws, and fur that’s a few shades duller than golden and stays scruffy-looking no matter how much we brush him.
And his name? Jambon is French for ham, which is a specialty of the original Bayonne in France’s Basque district.
Our mom emigrated from there when she was twenty to try her luck in the Big Apple.
She couldn’t believe it when she found her hometown’s namesake right across the bay, even if the similarities between the two places begin and end with their proximity to the ocean and the lines of brightly colored houses that grace their waterfronts.
“Total energy mismatch,” my sister observes as Jambon reluctantly closes the distance to the ball.
I snicker, taking a seat on the bench I’ve parked her next to. “We should be throwing the ball for her, not him.”
“They’d both be a lot happier in that scenario.”
“Poor old man.”
“Yeah,” she says quietly. We stare out at the expanse of water.
Between the enormous container ships stacked high with multicolored boxes, and the tankers, and the assist tugs, the Kill van Kull is a hard sheet of sunlit glare, the sun itself nudging closer to the Bayonne Bridge to our right.
Relaxing it is not: the long honks and the low roar of the ships’ engines jostle with the noises of locals enjoying the park.
From somewhere behind us, a radio plays tinny jazz, but it’s better than the boomboxes that will show up later.
But this park holds serious memories for all of us, bittersweet memories that far outdate the shiny new playground that was installed a few years back.
The brackish smell of diesel and salt water is in our bones, and I truly believe it’s good for Sylvie to come here.
It’s good to be around other people, to sit and observe folks going about their daily lives, and it’s also good to make new memories.
Tragedies happen, but they don’t rob us of our future.
We sit in silence for a few moments as Fleur and Jambon play catch with vastly different levels of enthusiasm.
My niece is young for her school year—she won’t turn six until June—and I can’t believe she’s already in kindergarten.
She’s petite like me and Sylvie, like Maman was, and the dance genes are strong, even if Fleur is more into street than ballet.
Sylvie was the only one who ever showed an ounce of interest in Maman’s field, but ballet for her was never anything more than a hobby.
I guess that’s a good thing.
The air is smelly today in the way it always is when hot weather meets low tide.
Still, I needed this—needed to be somewhere that isn’t the house or the hospital or Walmart.
And I definitely needed to be someplace whose only view is across to Staten Island.
In a couple of hours, I’ll make the journey over to Manhattan, but I don’t even want to think about it right now.
I don’t want to think about a concrete jungle where a certain billionaire playboy wants to do unimaginable things to me in a certain upscale sex club.
I want to sit here and watch my niece put our dog through boot camp and pretend none of the other stuff exists.
“You okay?” Sylvie asks me out of nowhere.
I jerk and turn to her. She’s only a year older than me, but her face is gaunt.
I seriously need to get her outdoors more often.
We both inherited Maman’s dark hair and pale skin, but there’s paleness and then there’s pallor, and my sister definitely has the latter.
Not that I blame her. Having relentless Eldest Daughter syndrome is hard enough without having to let your family help you in all manner of frustrating, humiliating ways.
“I’m fine,” I say a little too quickly. “Why?”
Her eyes, dark brown like mine, narrow. “You’re very quiet.”
I’m about to tell a partial lie and say I’m just tired, but I stop myself. She knows I’m tired. She knows we’re all pushing ourselves too hard at the moment. I’m not about to pile any more guilt on her.
“I was just soaking up our surroundings,” I say instead with a smile.
“It smells like shit and moldy garbage.”
I inhale dramatically. “Mmm. So wholesome.”
“How’s work going?” she asks. “Any interesting gigs?”
My smile drops and I sit up straight. “What?”
She stares at me. “What has you so jumpy today? I meant modeling gigs.”
“Oh.” I slump down against the back of the bench and fix my eyes back on Fleur and Jambon.
For a second there, I thought Sylvie’s freaky sister-radar was onto my Sinclair Voss conundrum.
“No, not really. Maybe. Olivia wants me to go in next week and shoot some video content they can submit for a big cosmetics job. But honestly, the odds are tiny. Microscopic.” I pinch my thumb and index finger together in a scientific representation of my chances.
“I’m sorry,” she says, reaching across and putting a hand on my arm. “That sucks.”
I shrug. “Hey. It pays the bills.”
“I mean, that’s not technically true,” she says. “Or even remotely true.”
We both cackle. Thank God Sylvie has a dark sense of humor about all this shit. The truth is, there are few things harder to joke about than a concept that, until a few months ago, wasn’t even part of our vocabulary:
Underinsurance.
“It pays for the utilities,” I amend. “And it keeps Fleur in Pompeii pizza.”
“It does, and you know I can never thank you,” she says, her face so solemn I can’t bear it.
“No thanks necessary. You know that.” My voice is artificially bright. Sylvie’s job is to heal her broken body, and my and Dad’s jobs are to keep the lights on and to care for her and Fleur until she does.
She sighs and releases my arm. “Meanwhile, the medical bills are piling up like fucking landfill.”
“Yeah.” Can’t deny that, and she wouldn’t expect me to.
“I was thinking,” she says slowly, “that I could cut a physical therapy session or two per week. It would definitely help.”
No way. Absolutely not. I twist around to face her fully. “It wouldn’t help your recovery, and that’s all that matters.”
“It won’t matter if my hip works and we can’t afford to eat,” she protests.
“We’re nowhere near that stage,” I say.
“But they’re piling up.” Her voice quietens, even though there’s zero chance of Fleur being able to hear her over the din of the park and the busy harbor.
She gazes at her daughter, who’s fooling around, pretending to throw the ball for the poor dog, as though Fleur hung the moon.
“If I did fewer, it would give us more chance to get up to date on the payments we owe.”
“That’s not going to help your hip,” I repeat as sternly as I can.
“You know what won’t help my hip? If they cut me off until we clear our outstandings.” She swallows, and I stare at her in horror.
“They wouldn’t do that.”
“Of course they would! The center has already threatened it. What’s the best leverage you have as a practitioner? Refuse treatment until debts are paid. I mean, it’s twenty-three fucking grand. What else can they do?”
“Jesus Christ.” I blow out a breath. I guess she’s right, but it honestly hasn’t occurred to me that they could hold our debts over our heads like that.
The insurance on rehabilitation for my sister’s injury ran out last month, but I figured we’d just…
muddle through until she got to at least be mobile again.
It’s the worst kind of catch-22. We need to get her back on her feet and back to doing what she takes so much pride in: parenting and working.
That’s what Sylvie is in her own eyes—and mine: a devoted mother and a conscientious professional.
No one is more resilient than my sister.
None of the patients at that physical therapy center work harder than her, and I know this because her therapist tells us, over and over.
But the financial cost of getting her back to the Sylvie she used to be before the accident is an uphill struggle the likes of which I could never have imagined.
Hearing her say that twenty-three-grand number out loud is rough, but it’s tiny in comparison with the overall total owed to Jersey City Medical Center for her acute trauma care immediately following the accident.
That six-figure sum sits at the bottom of Dad’s tally in the drawer in a kitchen dresser and is a bogeyman so great that I can barely stand to open the drawer at all.
Every day, thanks to interest and ongoing therapy, our medical debt grows. Every day, it threatens to swallow our family whole. And every day, the questions I ask myself are some variation of What the hell are we going to do?
Until today. The questions are far harder today.
Can I find the courage to do what I need to do for this family?
And can I live with myself if I can’t?
I think I need to get me some Demi Moore action. I need to remind myself of the fantasy, because it’s way less scary than the reality. In Indecent Proposal, Diana kept telling herself it was just one night.
This is just one hour.
Robert Redford was so freaking hot in that movie.
John Gage: that Big Billionaire Dick Energy.
His unshakable self-confidence. Sinclair Voss has every bit as much of all of that, and I desperately need something to latch on to here, some kind of assurance that I could do the unthinkable and survive it.
I turn to my sister. “Hey. Want to watch Indecent Proposal later?”
It turns out, watching the movie is exactly the right call.
That night with Gage didn’t break Diana. On the contrary, she came back stronger. It was her husband who couldn’t handle it. She could handle it just fine… and she even went back for more. Why wouldn’t she? Even as a teenager, I knew that a night with a guy like that would be the fantasy.
My real-life John Gage may be offering me substantially less—one hundred times less, to be precise—but I read Page Six often enough to know that, in my reality, Sinclair Voss is the fantasy.
He wants me.
He wants me so badly he wants to pay me.
He’s offering to do it in a highly boundaried and tightly policed way (a.k.a. Katrin will castrate him if he puts a foot wrong).
And it’s not like I have an adorable, out-of-work husband to consider, or even a boyfriend!
As the movie progresses, I feel galvanized to the point of recklessness. It’s an hour with the JFK Junior of our times, an hour that can also make a good enough dent in our debt to get the physical therapy center off our backs for a while.
When I consider it that way, there’s no question at all what my answer should be.
Furtively, I text Katrin as, on screen, David Murphy throws his toys out of the stroller in spectacular style.
I’ll do it.