Chapter 6

Monday, February 3, 2014

Colleen

Today I visit Alex in her new, strange house. How does it happen, that a person inherits a house out of the blue? A person who never had a house, wasn’t looking for a house, and did not want a house. I find the whole thing inordinately bizarre. I emerge from the shower, towel off, then dress in a sweater, jeans, and a light, printed scarf. Pretty, warm, but not overly fancy. I glance outside; it is a cold but dry February day. I’m glad it hasn’t snowed this year. Spending the whole day stuck inside with the kids always made me restless. Eric used to march them a half a mile away to a hill for sledding, and they’d all come back cold and exhausted and ready for popcorn and a movie. I’m not up for the march or the sledding. Or the shoveling or negotiating with a plow person.

All the things Eric used to do. Went to every soccer game. Helped Ethan with the boy issues. Brought Maddie to every father-daughter dance. Took the kids to Water Country. And I helped with homework and baked for the bake sales and volunteered for the PTA. I thought we had a good balance of things. I still don’t know why it had to end.

I look in the mirror to apply a little makeup in spare but noticeable tones: powder, blush, lip gloss, mascara. The usual daytime mix, just enough so I look like me. Or closer, anyway, to what I think I should look like.

Alex, my older sister who sometimes feels like a younger sister. Do we look alike? I examine my face in the mirror. A little, I guess. My skin is pale and slightly freckly; hers is the same, and actually, Riley’s is like that too. My mouth is small, lips thin. Alex’s mouth is wider, I think, sort of clunky. My hips are flatter, my build less bulky and I’m a little bit taller too. Riley, the youngest, is the tallest. And though she was slender when she was young, she’s become downright skinny since she became a model. Alex’s nose fits her wide face, slightly bigger. Riley and I have our mother’s smaller, more delicate nose.

What about eyes? Alex has Dad’s eyes, deep-set, brown. Riley’s eyes are crystal blue, but shaped like mine. My eyes—the color is a murky dark green, papaya shaped. I don’t like to look at my eyes; they are too much like my mother’s.

I think of Alex’s eyes, the light brown of autumn leaves, and I remember the time I saw a look of sheer, bottomless panic in them. Suddenly time flattens, and I am nine years old. Alex’s face, filled with horror, even though she was smiling. Even that day she stayed composed; she was born to be a nurse. Her breath stuttered, and she ordered me, desperately but quietly, to bring Riley next door to Mrs. Herman’s house. Stay there for a while, she said. Ask her to make you chocolate milk. Ask her to show you the puzzles she keeps for her grandkids.

I didn’t ask what happened; I knew it was bad.

I think about Riley, how little she was, and how she wept—every day—for weeks. Strange that her grief was so overwhelming, but when she got older, she couldn’t even remember that she had a mother, much less that she lost one.

I turn away from the mirror and look through a window, watching a few cars drive past. They don’t know I’m up here; I am hidden from sight, just as I have hidden the truth about our family. I’ve told the fictional story to so many, the story feels like a sweater I put on to shape the person that people think I am. I don’t see any harm in that. I am a certain kind of person in a certain kind of town, and if the facts of my life don’t support who I am, I change them.

Looking back to the mirror, I like this scarf; it brings out my eyes. I tie it quickly around my neck, very French; then I undo it and tuck the ends under. That works. Now I am ready to go see Alex. There’s a lot we need to talk about.

I stop for coffee and bagels, then drive through town into Newbury—there are sections of lovely new homes in this town, but it also contains wild, open spaces; farm stands; antique houses, some picturesque, some half-rotted, barely standing. In the luscious early fall, armies of sunflowers rise from these rolling hills, and the air is rich with the smells of manure and mulch. But now the fields are cold and quiet, empty as bones. I watch the side roads—Hay Street, Bayview Lane, Cottage Road—until I see the one I’m looking for, Killdeer Road. I have been down this way so many times, but until this moment, I never noticed that road.

I pull down the street, not much of a street, but this area is so choked with waterways and streams, all leading through the marsh, there’s not much room for houses. I pull into the driveway, and there it is, another old, neglected farmhouse. The lot is surrounded by woods fully encroached by thicket. It desperately needs landscaping. And paint. Or maybe a wrecking ball.

I grab my bag of bagels and Styrofoam cups of hot coffee and walk across the sunken walkway slates. Alex opens the door before I knock.

“Let me get the door for you, it sticks,” she says. “Welcome to my haunted house!”

“Alex, this is amazing,” I say, trying to emit enthusiasm. “Hey, welcome home!”

We hug, do hellos, how are yous, etc. Alex in pajama bottoms and a big gray UNH sweatshirt. Her face is pale and tired, rings under her eyes. She tries to smile, but she seems exhausted. Did she lose weight in India? If she were really skinny, I would have been jealous, but either she didn’t lose weight or her figure is covered up by that tent of a sweatshirt.

I bring my things into the kitchen and set the food on the faded linoleum countertop. “Thanks for the coffee,” she says, helping herself. “I’ve been up since four.”

“Four? Why on earth?”

“Jet lag.” She pops open a little creamer and pours some into her cup. “I should have gone out for coffee, but I couldn’t make myself face the cold.”

“Alex, it’s a beautiful house,” I say. She gives me a dubious look. “With some fixing up, it could be gorgeous. So, how did this all happen?”

Alex sighs and plops down in one of the rusted, wobbly chairs around the table. “Can I have a bagel first?”

“Help yourself,” I say.

She takes a bite. “I forgot how much I love bagels. No bagels in India. Only idli. They’re fun, but they’re not the same.”

“Glad you like them,” I say. “So what happened?”

She sighs, then tells me about how she met a dying woman who needed to leave the house to somebody. So she put Alex in her will and then croaked.

“I need to start being nicer to people,” I say. “Maybe someone will leave me a house.”

“Don’t you already have a house?” she says. “Like a perfect house?”

“No house is perfect, Alex,” I say. I look around. “You know, now that I’m looking at it, this place could be lovely. Paint the walls, polish the floors, make a few strategic updates, and you could probably get some real money for it. I could donate some furniture if that would help.”

Alex gives me a bemused smile. “Thanks, Colleen, I’d be delighted to help you clean out your garage.”

“Don’t do that,” I say, crossing my arms. “I am offering free furniture so your place feels less empty. I’m trying to be nice.” She does not respond. “Well, can I have a tour?”

She gestures with her thickly cream-cheesed bagel. “Be my guest,” she says, mouth full.

“Ahh, self-guided, I suppose.” I stand up and gesture to a pizza box in the corner of the kitchen. “That’s a nice touch.”

“That was lunch yesterday, plus dinner and then today’s early breakfast. I haven’t been to the grocery store,” she says. “And actually, I don’t know how the trash here works. Do you know? Does someone pick it up?”

“I live in Newburyport,” I tell her. “Who knows what they do in Newbury.”

I wander into the front room and look out the window. The view of the marsh is startling, stunning. The marsh, flat like the Great Plains, but open and moving like the ocean, stretches out as far as I can see. Wisps of birds flit about—birds I do not know, do not recognize. These are the winter birds; come spring and summer, the air will be raucously thick with birds of all sorts, passers-through and year-rounders. It’s kind of amazing. If I didn’t have other things on my mind, I might actually be a little jealous.

I do not share these thoughts. Instead I mention bugs. “It’s a great location if you like greenheads.”

“Ugh,” she calls from the kitchen. “I forgot about those monsters. When do they come out?”

“New moon in July to the new moon in August, more or less. They come right off the marsh with their little green jaws hungry for blood.”

She comes into the living room still carrying her Styrofoam cup of coffee. “I plan to be gone by summer.”

I float into the little dining room. The rooms are all stark and empty, no rugs, no curtains; my boot heels thunk loudly on the floorboards.

“Really? But I like this place,” I say. “I bet you could ride a bike to the beach.”

“Make me an offer, and it’s yours.” She follows me to the dining room. An old chandelier hangs in the middle of the room; I have to duck to avoid walking into it. The paint on the walls is peeling, and there is a distinct draft coming from the window.

“Sorry,” I say. “My separation has put a serious dent in my ability to acquire real estate.”

“Ahh, yes,” she says. “Am I allowed to ask what happened?”

She leads me upstairs to see three rectangular bedrooms with funny little closets. What did happen? I don’t want to tell Alex how I took Eric to dinner to tell him that I wanted another baby and found out he had a different plan.

I shrug. “We’re reassessing. A relationship is a process, Alex. When you’ve been together for a long time, you sometimes need to take stock of where you are and the people you’re becoming, and recalculate.” I am regurgitating the jargon the therapist used with us, and I can see in her eyes that Alex is not buying it.

“Okay,” she says. “So he moved out?”

I nod. “He moved into our condo in Newburyport, the place we owned before Ethan was born.”

I bend over to look out a small window under the eaves of the house. I don’t like talking about this. I wish I would notice some fracture in the house that I could bring up to sideline this talk. Nothing. Damn it.

“How are the kids doing with all of it?” she asks.

I open a closet, an unpainted enclosure with a rod supporting three or four old wire hangers that look like they’ve been here since the Great Depression. “Kids are resilient.”

We wander into the bathroom; it’s simple, looks like it was redone in the eighties with black and light-pink tiles that are now cracked, the grout between them crumbling. And the bathtub, cast-iron claw-foot. The kind some people covet. “Nice tub,” I say.

“Yup,” she says and quickly leads me back into the hall.

We walk back down the stairs and into the kitchen. I remark cheerfully about the house, call it homey and charming, point out that it could use a second bathroom. But there are real things we need to talk about. I have to tell her about Riley. I open my mouth to say it, but only more small words come. “I can’t believe you went to India,” I say.

“Me neither,” she says. “Actually, I think I’m in shock. Part of me is still back there. Part of me is still in the airport, convinced they will never let me leave Delhi.” She sighs deeply and leans against the wall in the dining room and looks out the window. “And some of me is here. So, I’m feeling a little scattered.”

“You’ve been scattered for a while,” I say. “You should stay here. Get unscattered. How bad could it be?”

She takes a drink of coffee and looks at me. “And do what?”

“Whatever you want,” I say. “You don’t have a mortgage, so all you have to pay is real estate taxes and utilities. You can take it easy. Get a part-time job in a doctor’s office, weigh kids and give out flu shots. Go for long walks on the beach. Get a hobby; drink. I don’t know.”

“No,” she says. “I want to go back to India. I didn’t even make it to the clinic where my friend Maura was working.”

“Was Maura at that brunch you gave last summer?” I ask. Alex nods. “She was so cute and young. What’s she doing again?”

“She’s a medical volunteer at a clinic,” she says. “I was going to join her. I should show you her Facebook page sometime. She’s doing amazing things, getting to know the people in the village, and starting health programs and all that. Learning the language.”

“And you didn’t even get there?” I ask.

“I thought I had . . . plenty of time,” she says. “Maura told me I should see India before I got to the clinic. So I traveled and, I don’t know, experienced things.”

“Well, it sounds amazing, Alex,” I say. “But we need you here.”

“Colleen,” she says, her eyes narrowing, turning inward. “You don’t know how it is for me. I never found . . . a place in my life where I felt like I was where I was supposed to be. India is as close as I’ve ever come.”

I blink at her in surprise. “What do you mean you never found where you were supposed to be? What about nursing?”

She shrugs. “I burned out. That’s part of why I left. The hospital got sold and the new management company was going to cut our pay. Which is crazy; you don’t know how hard everybody works. I got involved with the union, and then everybody was mad at me, management and other nurses. It was time to move on.”

“So what’s your plan? Just sell the house and go off again?”

She nods and plays with the plastic coffee cup lid. “Yup.”

“Alex, I—” I begin. “Don’t you think about . . . I mean, you’re not a kid anymore. You might want to start a family.”

She laughs and looks away with a very bitter expression. “You think I haven’t thought about that? In the last ten years, twelve-hour shifts and double and triple shifts have been my life. I never had time to go see a movie, much less have a social life.”

“That’s what I mean. You’ve been working hard for a long time,” I say. “Take a break.”

She shrugs. “The thing is . . .” She stops herself.

“What is it?” I ask.

Her expression looks resigned, and finally she says, in a matter-of-fact tone, “Before India, I had this . . . almost panic attack. And suddenly, I knew that even though I didn’t have a partner, I wanted a baby.”

“Alex!” I say. My heart rushes into my throat. Alex has always kept herself closed, managing the crisis in front of her, but never talking about her heart. I am amazed to hear that she’s even considering parenthood. “That’s huge news!”

She shakes her head. “Well, it’s not news. Before I went to all the trouble of picking out a sperm donor, I had my reproductive system tested. And I found out that I have a condition—” She stops herself and grimaces. “Anyway, my gyno told me that . . . conceiving would be hard. I could try fertility treatments, but it was going to be expensive and, I don’t know, for a lot of reasons . . . I decided that route wasn’t for me.”

“I’m sorry, Alex,” I say, and I am genuinely sorry. “What about surrogacy? Adoption?”

“Surrogacy is a hundred thousand just to get started,” she says. “Even if I could somehow scrape together the money for that, I wouldn’t have money left for daycare or . . . jeez, Friday night pizza.”

“If you’re sure you want a child, there are options,” I say. “Adoption, fostering . . .”

“Thanks, but I’ve done my research,” she says, and she goes to a door and fidgets with a knob that’s on the brink of falling out. “Believe me. Sperm donation was the only option I could bring myself to invest in. Everything else was . . . just too much.”

I want to hug her, but I feel like she is closed, mourning a child who was never born. “Alex, I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” she says. “Then Maura went to India. I thought, ‘I read Eat, Pray, Love, I’ll go to India.’ Once I decided, I bought my airplane ticket to leave in a month and had barely enough time to get in the shots.”

“Wow,” I say, which is all I can say. “But did you have a good trip, anyway?”

She thinks about that a moment. “Yes. It was beautiful. I saw things I never thought I’d see. The Taj Mahal, the Golden Temple . . .”

“What’s the Golden Temple?”

She gives me a quick, awkward smile. “It’s a Sikh temple in Punjab, northern India. It’s incredible . . .” She glances at me, and I guess I have the wrong look on my face because she stops herself. “Don’t worry about it. Anyway, sure, good trip. So, what’s going on with Riley?”

I sigh, trying to absorb all that she has told me. “I wish I knew,” I say.

She sinks down to the floor and leans against the wall, her knees pulled up to her chest. She grasps the ends of her curly dark hair and twists them. Just like she always did. “Any news?”

“No. She moved out of her apartment, but I don’t know where she went.”

Alex nods, leans her arms across her knees. “What happened when you called her?”

My gaze drifts down to a spot on the floor where large dark-brown knots in the wood form circles overlapping circles like moon craters. “She stopped answering. I filled up her voice mailbox with messages, but she never called back. Then her number was no longer in service. A couple of days ago, the agency gave me a new phone number for her. I called, left messages, but still, nothing.”

“Did you try—”

I nod, because, whatever she’s going to suggest, I have tried it. “Apparently, she’s alive because she’s showing up for work.”

“Did you ask the agency for her address?”

I nod and pace the floor. “They refused. This tinny-voiced girl; she even sounds skinny. She just loves telling me no. I keep explaining, I am Riley’s sister, please, please tell her to call—” My voice is cracking. I lean against the opposite wall.

Alex bites her bottom lip. “Any idea why she’d cut you off like that?”

I shake my head. “Last November, I called her to wish her happy birthday. We talked about her coming for Thanksgiving.”

“And?” Alex says.

“Same as always. She said she’d think about it.” I close my fist so my fingernails are biting into the flesh of my palm. “And I haven’t heard from her since.”

Alex sighs. “Maybe she just needs space. Maybe we should respect that she needs us to leave her alone for a little while.”

“I know what you’re saying, but I have a bad feeling.” I pause. She won’t like this next part, so I stall for a breath. “I hired a private investigator.”

Alex looks surprised. She stands up and walks around the room. “An investigator?”

I nod. “He said he could probably find her in a couple of days online, but then he’s been working on some other case and hasn’t been able to focus on it.” I’m embarrassed to have to tell her someone else’s excuses. “But I already gave him a retainer, so I can’t just pull out and hire someone else.”

“Did you tell Dad?” she says. I shake my head. Alex pauses for a moment. Finally, she makes her pronouncement. “Can you cancel the investigation? If he hasn’t done anything, maybe you can get your money back. Tell him you changed your mind.”

I look at her. “I don’t want to,” I say. “I want to find Riley.”

“We’ll find her, Colleen,” she says. “We have to.”

I roll my eyes. “How, Alex? I’ve combed through all her social media stuff—which is, weird, by the way, this public side of Riley that she’s trying to sell. I don’t know where she’s staying, no email, she won’t answer her phone, and her agency won’t tell me anything.”

“Did you go to New York? Ask around her apartment?”

The tension in my jaw feels like it’s about to snap. “Yes.”

She pauses. “Could she be out of town?”

“It’s been three months,” I say. “Letters, emails, phone calls, texts, messages on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Give me one of those, and I’m with you, yes, things happen. I get it. Two weeks? Three? Sure. But it’s been months.” I pause to take a breath. Alex does not meet my eyes, which tells me that she’s beginning to understand. “Plus, there’s something I didn’t tell you. A couple of years ago, she had a drug problem.”

“What?”

“I saw her in New York. She was acting strangely, and she finally told me that she had just finished rehab. She asked me not to tell you and Dad.”

Alex sighs. “What are we talking about? Narcotics? Meth?”

“Opioids,” I say. “I thought . . . I thought it was over. I mean, she’d been to rehab. I thought . . . that was enough.”

She shrugs. “Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. But let’s not panic. This is why we have a pact,” she declares. “If we need help, we call each other. We call out a 911. We promised. We all did.”

The pact; I think about our pact every day. Ten years after our mother died, Dad sent us to a therapist, a young woman in Danvers named Dr. Andrews—Annabel, she said we could call her. Alex was twenty-one, I was eighteen, and Riley was fourteen. We only went for a few sessions before we all got too busy, but Annabel told us that depression can be hereditary, and sometimes they saw clusters of suicidal behavior in families.

“You three seem so close,” she advised us. “Lean on one another. When life gets hard, talk to each other. Nobody will understand better what you’re going through than each other. That’s a gift.”

Afterward, we sat on our front stoop as a cold spring drizzle fell around us. As a family, we were never big on sharing our feelings, but Alex made us talk about it.

“So, any of us might be . . .” she said.

“Yup, suicidal,” Riley said, her tone smug and sarcastic. She smiled and leaned back with her elbows on the concrete steps, her hair dyed black, her eyes ringed in eyeliner. Her punk rock phase. “I mean, it’s not me. Is it you, Colleen?”

“Be serious,” I said.

“I guess it’s easy to think that way,” Alex said. “That when things get hard, you could just kill yourself and the pain would be over. Sometimes I wish I could go away somewhere, you know, escape? But I don’t think about . . . my own life.”

“I don’t think about it,” I said. “I don’t think I could go through with it, even if I did.”

“I lied. I do think about it sometimes,” Riley said. We looked at her, shocked that she would admit it.

“Oh, Riley,” I said.

“You truly do?” Alex asked.

“Sure, sometimes, I guess,” she said, shrugging. “I mean, it’s not that big of a deal, is it?”

Alex looked down, her expression sad and thoughtful. “Maybe we can get ahead of this,” she said. “Let’s promise each other. We’ll never do what Mom did. If we’re ever in so much pain that we’re considering it, it’s like Dr. Andrews said, we have each other. Let’s talk about whatever is hurting us before . . . it eats us up inside. Until we can’t see any other choice.”

Calm, smart, measured. My sister Alex’s superpowers.

“I like that,” I said. “We can call it a 911. That way, we know it’s serious.”

“You good with that, Riley?” Alex asked. “Riley? Can you try to do that?”

Riley looked up, startled, like she was thinking about something else. “I guess, sure.”

Chills go down my back when I remember that moment. Was Riley just being a brash teenager, saying that to get attention? There’s no way to know. And now I’m even more scared.

“Alex,” I say, pleading. “The pact is useless. If she doesn’t want to reach out to us, we can’t make her.”

Alex crosses her arms. She is in triage mode. “All right, so what’s next? She’s alive, but we don’t know where she is. Substance use might be an issue. You haven’t moved and neither has Dad. She knows we’re here.”

“What if she’s like Mom . . .”

“That’s the worst-case scenario,” she says, her voice strong. “Riley’s not like Mom, though. Mom was so isolated. She had nothing of her own. She didn’t have friends or a job. Aside from us, she didn’t have family. She was far from home. She didn’t have any support.”

“She could have talked to Dad,” I say. “And she did have friends. She could have called someone if she’d wanted to.”

“Unless by the time she realized that she was depressed, she was in too deep to ask for help,” she says.

I nod. “Exactly. By the time she realized that the thing at the door was a monster, it was already inside the house.”

“The thing at the door,” Alex says. “The anniversary is coming up, you know. Twenty-five years in April.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I say. “Should we do something? Plant a tree or install a bench somewhere with her name on it?” The ideas sound inane to my own ears, but those are the things that people do.

Alex shrugs. “To tell you the truth, I’m hoping I’ll be gone by then.”

“You’re not even staying until spring?” I say. “For Pete’s sake, it’s just two months.”

“I don’t know. Everything depends on the house,” she says. “You know, Colleen, I’m not crazy for this private investigator. It feels like we’re betraying Riley.”

“We have to find her, Alex,” I say. “I don’t know what else we can do. We can’t wait until the monster is in bed with her.”