Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
NAOMI
I stood on the front step looking at that for a minute before I pressed the button.
"Nay?" My sister's voice came through the grille, thin and tinny.
"It's me."
The vestibule door buzzed open. Inside it smelled like old radiator heat and somebody's curry. The stairs were narrow and steep, the brown carpet worn bald down the middle.
The door to 3R opened before I could knock, but first I heard all of it from the other side: a chain rattling in its track, a deadbolt turning, a bar scraping across the floor.
Lila was in jeans and a gray sweater, no makeup, her hair in the clip.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
I didn't know whether I was going to hug her, or whether she wanted me to, so neither of us moved. Then she stepped back and let me in.
The apartment was one long room with two tall front windows, the same ones I'd watched from the loading zone across the street.
Now they had curtains, cheap white panels from Target with the creases from the package still in them.
It was small and clean: a gray couch, a rug with a faded blue pattern, a floor lamp, a card table with two folding chairs by the kitchenette.
Through the half-open bedroom door I could see a mattress on a low frame.
There was a candle burning on the windowsill. Fig.
Along one wall, a row of cardboard boxes was still waiting to be unpacked. Somebody had labeled them in black marker. I didn't go over to see whose handwriting it was.
"Do you want tea?" Lila said behind me. "I have ginger. It's all I have. I can't have caffeine right now."
"Ginger's fine."
She filled a kettle at the tiny sink. Her hands weren't steady, and it took her two tries to get the lid back on.
I sat down at the card table. The folding chair was cold through my jeans.
"He really came to your office?" she asked the kettle.
"With an orchid."
She made a sound that wasn't a laugh. "He always brings an orchid. When he's sorry. When he wants something. We had a whole windowsill of orchids in that house, and I killed every one of them. He said it was because I didn't pay attention."
The kettle began to tick as it heated.
"Tell me," I said.
"Graham told you."
"Graham told me what Graham knows. I want you to tell me."
She turned around and leaned back against the counter with her arms crossed tight, looking not at me but at the candle on the windowsill. Then she told me.
Some of it I'd already heard, the account, the card, the phone, but she told it differently.
Graham had told it like a list of problems. Lila told it like a place she'd lived.
How she used to sit in the car in the garage for twenty minutes before going in the house, just to hear herself think.
How he'd correct the way she loaded the dishwasher while she was loading it.
How she'd started to believe him, that she was bad with money, that she was too emotional, that she remembered things wrong.
How in June she'd said the word lawyer at the kitchen counter. He'd put his hand over her wrist and leaned on it. How it hadn't left a mark, and somehow that was the worst part, that there was nothing to show anyone.
The kettle clicked off. Neither of us moved to get it.
"Why didn't you come to me?" It came out quieter than I meant.
Lila finally looked at me.
"Because you'd have been right," she said. "You told me at the engagement party. You asked me if I was sure. I spent eight years in that house proving you wrong. I couldn't come to you and say, you were right, Nay, you were always right, here's my whole life on fire, fix it."
"I wouldn't have said that."
"You wouldn't have had to."
I opened my mouth and closed it again.
She poured the water into two mugs and brought them over, then sat down across from me. The tea smelled sharp and hot. Neither of us drank any.
"And Graham?" I said.
Lila wrapped both hands around her mug and didn't answer for a long time.
"I didn't want him," she said. "Not like that. I need you to know that. Never, not once. I swear on Grandma Ruth."
"I believe you."
"But." She pressed her lips together, and when she spoke again her voice was very small. "I liked it, Nay. I liked that he picked up."
I held still.
"Every time I called, he picked up. Midnight.
Six in the morning. In the middle of Mom's birthday dinner.
He'd look at his phone, he'd pick up, and I'd think, he picked up for me.
" Her eyes were filling. "He left his house for me.
He left you for a couple hours to come sit on my floor.
I knew it was wrong. I did. I knew what it would look like.
There was part of me that liked having something you didn't have. "
Down on Pine Street a car alarm went off, whooped three times, stopped.
"You always had everything," Lila said. "You were the easy one. That's what Mom said my whole life, and you know what I heard? That you were the good one, and I was the problem. The thing everybody had to handle. For once somebody picked me first. Over you. And I liked it."
I looked at my sister across a card table in an apartment my husband had found for her, and I thought about all the ways I could answer that. I thought about being so good about it for the rest of her life.
"The easy one," I said, "means nobody ever asks what I want."
Lila blinked.
"That's what it means, Li. It doesn't mean I'm the good one.
It means you got to have the crises, and I got to understand them.
You were three with an earache, so we left my eighth birthday party early, and I understood.
You couldn't have lemon, so we had tiramisu, and I understood.
Dad left, and you cried every night for a year, so Mom slept in your bed.
I was fifteen. I made my own lunches. I understood.
Your wedding. My wedding. Every Sunday dinner.
Every restaurant." My voice was shaking, and I let it.
"I understood so well that nobody bothered checking anymore. Not Mom. Not you. Not even my husband."
Lila had her hand over her mouth.
"You told him what you'd want," I said. "For my birthday."
"I told him what I'd want," she whispered.
"You knew I hate beets."
"You ate them out of the jar."
"When I was eight. You were three. You don't remember that. You remember Mom telling it."
She shut her eyes and kept them shut while she talked.
"Last Christmas. At Mom's sink. You said he makes the same dinner every year."
"I remember."
"You said you hoped he never stopped." When she opened her eyes, they were red. "And I told Graham you were tired of it. I told him you wanted something new. Because I was jealous of a pot of soup, Naomi. That's who I am. I'm thirty-six years old, and I was jealous of your soup."
She put her head down on the card table next to her tea and cried.
I didn't go around the table. I kept both hands around my mug until the heat came through the ceramic into my palms. I'd come around a lot of tables for my sister. But I didn't leave, either.
When she'd quieted down, I said, "I'm glad you left him."
She lifted her head.
"I mean it," I said. "I'm so glad you're out. I'm glad you have locks, and I'm glad you have a lawyer. I wish you'd called me, and I'm furious that you didn't. Both of those things are true."
"Okay," she said thickly.
"The hearing's November fifth."
"Yes."
"Do you want me there?" I held her eyes. "You can say no. I'm asking. I'm not telling you I'm coming."
My sister looked at me a long moment, then wiped her nose on her sleeve.
"Can I think about it?"
"Yes," I said. "You can think about it."
I stood up, my tea still full, and put on my coat. She walked me the four steps to the door.
"Nay?"
"What?"
"What do you actually like? For dessert, I mean. Now. Not when you were eight."
I stood there in my coat in her little apartment and really thought about it.
"Lemon," I said, and it surprised me how fast it came. "Still lemon."
She nodded.
Out on Pine Street, a thin cold rain had started, the kind that can't commit, and my phone buzzed in my coat pocket.
Tess: Well?
I stepped under a neighbor's awning and typed She's okay, then deleted it, because I didn't know if it was true. I typed I'm okay and deleted that too. Then I put the phone back in my pocket and walked to the car.