“So,” Ken said, sitting down beside her, “how’s it going? I haven’t seen much of you.”
“All right,” Meg said, but subdued, as if tired. The flames smoothed the lines around her eyes, and he could see her as the teenager he knew, the tough girl. Though he’d never told her, he’d taken pride in having a wild sister, her parade of boyfriends in hopped-up cars giving him a kind of secondhand cool. She’d seemed indestructible then.
“Did you do your list?” he joked, and she laughed for him.
“She never changes.”
“You don’t think so?”
“A little, with Dad,” she allowed. “She calls more often. I’m sure she’s lonely all by herself.”
“How are you?”
“All by myself? Going a little crazy. I was telling Lise, all I can think of is the money, but it’s everything. You’re married fifteen years and then—boom. On top of all the other shit.”
“How’s that?”
“Good,” she said, but accompanied it by a dip and a twist of her head, as if working out a kink in her neck.
“I can’t stop worrying about money either. You’d think by now we’d be doing all right.”
“Lise’s folks can help you out.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
“You should be glad,” she said, and then, as if closing the subject, “It’s just money.”
He and Lise had savings bonds for the kids, and two mutual funds for their college, and though Lise would never let him touch them, he wondered if five thousand might help. She ran her hand over Rufus’s coat.
“Hey,” she said, “remember the time we stole the Smiths’ canoe?”
“You stole the canoe, I was just along for the ride.”
“And the light came on and Jimmy Smith came running down their dock, and you dropped your paddle?”
There was the time she ran over the lawn chair with her Jeep. The time Arlene broke the tire swing. The time Duchess jumped through the screen door. He relaxed into the rhythm of their shared memories, glad not to talk about where their lives were headed. It reminded him of how they used to talk at night up here, her voice reaching him from the other bed until their mother climbed the stairs and said it was time to go to sleep. Tonight was just another installment of that ongoing, lifelong conversation.
“It’s weird,” she said, “to think this is it. Last year I thought we shouldn’t be here—”
“It’s what he wanted.”
“It’s what she wanted. It was terrible. All I could think of the whole time was him in that hospital. She just didn’t want us there because it would have been harder on her. Well, tough. This year I’m thinking, Where are we going to go next year? I’m not going to be able to afford anywhere nice. I don’t understand why she thinks she has to sell it.”
“She wouldn’t come up by herself.”
“She’s not going to be by herself. Arlene will be with her. Arlene loves it up here.”
She was getting loud, and Ken glanced at his mother’s door. “She needs the money.”
“How much money does she need? Do you know how much she got for it?”
“She was asking three-twenty-five.”
“She probably got at least three hundred. What does she need with that kind of money?”
Though she’d justified herself countless times over the phone, his mother had never told him precisely why, only that he and Meg weren’t in any position to take it over and she had no business dumping it on them. The taxes alone would kill them. He’d believed her, just as, now, he believed Meg.
“Have you talked to her?” he asked.
“You think she’d listen to me? She thinks I’m not smart enough to deal with something as important as real estate. And you know who made all their investments—Dad. He made all their money, and now she’s the big financial genius. It drives me nuts. Until last year I handled all of our money, and did quite well with it.”
“‘And did quite well with it,’” he mimicked.
“I know—I’m starting to talk like her. I hear myself saying something to Sarah and think, Oh shit.”
“It’s like a horror movie, you’re turning into her.”
“Then why does she still hate my ass?”
“She doesn’t hate you.”
“Just what I stand for, whatever that is. Anyway, it sucks.” She looked around her on the floor for her cigarettes and surprised him by standing up. In the old days she would have just lit one here, tossed the butt in the fire. “Come on,” she said, and led him through the kitchen and outside into the rain and then into the garage, damp and smelling dangerously of gasoline.
“We shouldn’t leave the fire.”
“You still get high?” she asked, and packed a pipe.
“Are you allowed to do that?”
“It’s medicinal,” she said, and handed it to him.
He knew the etiquette from high school, from attics and basements and cars, concerts like milestones, and then college, apartments with mended, mismatched furniture, TVs you turned on with vise grips. Flick the wheel, tip the lighter and the flame bends, sectioned like candy corn. Breathe in the burning flower, leaves vaporized like a jungle under napalm, the brain a map of lost colonies. One hit and he was back there, this weird minute of the future a vision, his sister an old ghost come to warn him of something.
“It’s been a long time,” he said, and passed it back.
The dark rear of the garage was built of lines and angles he hadn’t noticed before. He thought of Tracy Ann Caler, and how little room it took to hide a body, and was surprised to find himself thinking like a murderer.
He coughed and couldn’t stop, as if he were allergic.
Meg popped the fridge and handed him a beer. It was cool in his palm, the foil label scratchy. He twisted the top off and it left a hot spot on his skin. She gave him the pipe again and he realized he’d only had one hit. It seemed he’d been high for hours.
“What is this shit?”
“It’s supposed to be Thai. Guy in AA hooked me up with it.”
“It’s pretty good.”
“It works.”
“How do you do it?” he asked—before he could take it back. He’d never asked her before, and now to do it so offhand seemed wrong, as if he were trespassing.
“Not drinking? By not drinking. It’s not like there’s a patch.”
“It must be hard.”
“It’s not like it’s my whole life. I do other things too.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“I’m sorry, I’m just sick of talking about it. It’s not you personally, though it’s kind of tough with that beer there.”
“You gave it to me,” he protested.
“That’s what I get for being nice.”
He took a swig and the bubbles spread across his tongue and fizzed, a wheat field of white balloons, water rising over a thatched welcome mat, dropping in the walled lock of a canal.
“I bet you’re sick of talking about Jeff too.” It came out like a thought, uncensored.
“He was a shit. He was sleeping with this little bimbo at work even before I went into rehab. It’s all a big soap opera.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and stepped on her foot as he went to hold her.
“Thank you, and ow. Yeah, a little blonde with boobs. There’s nothing more humiliating than being dumped for a cliché. Of course the kids don’t know. They think it’s all my fault.”
“I’m sure they don’t.”
“Believe me, they do. Dad’s the fun one, Mom’s the bitch. That’s how it works.”
He thought of himself and Lise, and his mother and father, and couldn’t deny it.
“That’s all right,” she said, but then didn’t explain why. “Let’s go see how your fire’s doing.”
Later she told him, laughing, that she had come to the conclusion that she was too chicken to kill herself long before she ever met Jeff. And later still, sobered, deciding a final time to go to bed, she said she’d been through times like this before and lived. She waved everything off as if it were an unpleasant smell, nothing serious.
He hugged her and sent her upstairs, then banked the fire alone, breaking apart the brittle, glowing logs with the poker, unsure why he’d doubted her power. She was used to trouble, was attracted to it the same way he chased after success. She was just better at getting what she wanted. But this didn’t relieve him of the feeling that he had somehow let her down, had not been a good brother to her.
It was late, and his eyes felt bathed in vinegar, dusted with salt. The light of the fire didn’t reach the stairs. He walked like Frankenstein in the dark, his arms out to fend off the invisible, and then when he found the door, he had to crawl up, his hands feeling each carpeted step ahead of him.
The kids were asleep, the watery reflection of a flashlight coming from the cracked bathroom door. Ella was curled tight, Sam flat on his back. He tucked the flap of Justin’s bag over the stuffed Tigger in his arms.
He couldn’t see Lise, just a shape under the covers, a shadow on the pillow. It was past two, and he didn’t want her to know how late they’d talked. By the foot of their bed, he slowly emptied his pockets, placing each item quietly on the low wardrobe’s hard top, a thief in reverse. Among the clinking change was the Ballantine ball mark, its thin edge a dull razor. He could barely see the three intertwined circles in the dark, but the cosmic thought came to him that they were like the three of them, Meg and himself and his mother, joined forever.
His father was separate from them, lost.
Only for now, he thought, and then was afraid he was just trying to comfort himself. He would live the rest of his life without him. Thirty, forty years. There would be days, weeks, when he wouldn’t think of him, not even fleetingly, and this seemed wrong.
Meg wasn’t done in the bathroom, so he stood there waiting in the dark, the mirror giving back his shirt, his arms at his sides. The roof tapped, and he hoped it wouldn’t rain tomorrow. He wanted to shoot the Putt-Putt, and the Gas-n-Go, its short aisles lit by jittery fluorescents. He could use the Nikon, that wouldn’t be cheating.
The door opened, letting out a dim wedge of light that fell over the children.
“All yours,” Meg said. “I left you the flashlight.”
He was quick, trying not to run the water too much, sitting down so he could pee quietly. When he came out, Meg was already in bed. He turned the light off and set it on the cedar chest, stripped to his boxers and got in, the sheets producing goose bumps, a rush across his front. He needed to warm up before he pressed against Lise, and lay there rigid as a mummy, eyes shut.
He thought of his father lying like this in Homewood Cemetery under the ground and the stones and the dark, starred sky. He thought of Tracy Ann Caler’s family, awake, waiting, any second, for the phone to ring. He wondered if there was a way he could help search for her.
“Sweet dreams,” Meg said from the dark, as she had when they were kids.
Then, it had been offered literally, an invitation to another, better world at the end of the day. Now it seemed just an affectionate habit that had stuck, little protection against the lives that went on inside of them, real or imagined. And yet, then and now, he thought, she was the one who wished it first, for him, and truly meant it. His sister.
“Sweet dreams,” he said.