ANNA STARES AT Hank as they wait for Gloria and Billie to arrive for dinner. She stands behind him in the kitchen as he excavates the dark space underneath the sink. He’s bent down on his knees, his wide butt peeking out from the boxers she gave him for Valentine’s Day and a pair of khakis she just washed. Say no to crack is all she can think of—the sight gag of a plumber you laugh at who doesn’t know that his ass crack is out there for everyone to see, a blubbery clown with a wrench and a tattered white V-neck with pit stains, just clueless. Anna, however, isn’t laughing like she might have been if she had received a similar photo in an e-mail from one of her sons. They often send her inappropriate jokes and pictures, knowing their mom will chide them later, feigning shock at the obscenity of it, only to then share a giggle with them on the phone. Sometimes it seems like she’s a schoolgirl, in love with her own children.
The beginning of Hank’s ass crack—announced by a tuft of gingery hair that begins to blossom from his third-to-last vertebra long since buried in flesh—stands out like the opening of an oceanic fissure, something inviting Anna to peer closer. She cringes slightly at the sight of this man she used to lust over. When Hank was on the wrestling team back in college, he meticulously counted calories, maintaining a svelte 157 for all four years. Anna would help weigh him, taking off his clothes one piece at a time until he was naked before her, standing in the small bathroom of the apartment they shared during their junior year at the University of Vermont. She’d knead his muscled hamstring as she pulled the last article of clothing off him. She’d slide down his jockstrap and place each of his feet on the rubberized landing of the scale. And they’d both watch the needle bounce, stuttering indecipherably between 150 and 160 until, finally, it would land on his target number, which, eventually became their target number. They were a team.
She’d grab his ankles. How knobby they were with the hair from his legs ending just above them like a pair of furry pants he never took off. She’d bring her hands up the meaty thighs she loved so much until she cupped that wrestler’s butt, the one she’d watch from the stands, all snug in his red satin singlet.
He’s now on his knees in front of her, trying to retrieve her wedding ring that fell down the disposal. She somehow dislodged it from her finger while she was doing the dishes. Hank grunts, his neck twisting so he can inspect further underneath the sink, deep into the maze of piping.
“I think I’ve juuust got it,” he says, panting. He draws out the word just as if the retrieval of the ring hinges on his holding the vowel as steadily as the hand that holds the wrench that grips the faucet pipe. Sweat drips from his brow onto the brown linoleum floor—a floor that wouldn’t have even registered the small spatters had Anna not washed it to a fine sheen that morning.
“Hank, don’t kill yourself,” Anna says, fingering the grooves in a salt shaker, the one that looks like a doorknob, the one she always keeps on the wooden island in the center of the kitchen. These are the artifacts of her life, the things she touches. Through touching them, she knows who she is. She is Anna, wife of Hank, daughter of Gloria, and now sister of Billie.
It isn’t that there’s nothing left to say between the two of them. They actually speak quite a bit. “Oh, c’mon, Hank. Can’t you please at least make an effort to clean out the gutters, or do you not live in this dorm?” and “Anna, there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you, but picking up your IBS prescription isn’t currently part of my course load.” Since they met in college back in the ’70s, they often default to this kind of collegiate vocabulary and speak to each other as if they’re both somehow still there—in their twenties, still in love.
But three boys and years of drifting away from each other, sexually at least, have transformed them back, almost without their knowing, into the platonic roommates they’d started out as back in school when they’d pooled their resources to share an apartment off campus. If not for her boys—Ben married, Ian at Middlebury, and Wade, still at home—Anna wouldn’t know what to do with herself. She has an intense desire to feel needed.
“When are Gloria and Billie coming over for dinner?” asks Hank. The hollowness of the dark space underneath the sink almost swallows up his voice.
“What?” Anna asks.
“Gloria and Billie!” he yells.
“We’re here!” says Billie’s voice from the foyer.
“I always loved being announced.” Gloria follows closely behind her into the kitchen.
Gloria, Anna’s mother, was living alone in Washington, D.C., when she fell and broke an already weak hip. What began as a temporary convalescence in Montpelier to help heal her bones became, at some point, something much more permanent. First, at Hank’s urging, she leased a small apartment across town. Then she began to amass a bevy of friends, whom she regaled with dramatic tales of modeling at Garfinkel’s in downtown Washington and going on dinner dates with the likes of Tab Hunter. “I had him before he became a gay,” she’d state resolutely. These were old, sheltered Vermont women, many of whom had never set foot out of the state. They seemed to regard Gloria as if she were a minor celebrity, and Gloria, of course, loved it.
Admittedly Anna and Gloria had never had the best relationship. For years it was just the two of them. The man Anna had considered and loved as her father, a man whose last name was Ferenbach, had been driven out of the house by Gloria when Anna was only thirteen. Her mother complained that he had bored her, that he had been incapable of taking her seriously as an actress, an occupation she’d adopted based solely on one screen test she’d done in Hollywood at the suggestion of a producer whom Anna could now assume had used the promise of fame to sleep with her. Too much make-believe involved. Too much pretend.
Billie is a product of pretending. People pretended she didn’t exist. Billie is Anna’s half-sister. Two years ago, Anna had been at her mother’s apartment while Gloria was recovering from hip surgery. She was there to collect some of Gloria’s personal belongings to have with her in the hospital. From as far back as Anna could remember, Gloria had claimed she was terrified of doctors and hospitals. She told Anna she wanted to have her things with her in case she didn’t wake up. “People go to sleep in hospitals, and they don’t wake up,” she said. Anna was putting an old photo album in a bag when Gloria’s phone rang. The woman on the other end, quite bluntly, claimed to be Gloria’s daughter.
At first Anna didn’t know what to think. In a way, it wasn’t surprising at all: Gloria, like a tornado, funneling through town after town, taking out small houses and farms along her path, leaving behind unwanted children and discarded lovers along the jet stream. There had been so much crisscrossing the country that Anna never had time to make any true friends. Gloria was the only person who could know whether Billie’s claim possibly could be true, whether her existence, always a distant fact to Gloria, one that might never even surface, had in fact done just that. Anna’s first instinct was to find something to give the woman—medical records, old pictures, money—anything so she might go away. It was too late to tell Billie that Gloria was dead; that was an awful thought and an even worse plan.
She had to tell Gloria about this woman. She was Anna’s sister.
“Mother, I have to talk to you,” she’d said several days later, dropping off a couple of things she’d picked up for Gloria at the Grand Union as she recovered.
“Okay, well, talk then,” Gloria said, pushing her glasses down and looking up from her crossword.
Anna stared briefly at a drawing of an elderly black woman in an intricate maple frame that had always donned the walls of whatever apartment or house or rented room they’d occupied at the time. Gloria had it set up on the table next to her hospital bed. She claimed to have been this old black woman in another life, a former slave who still had a hump on her back from when she was beaten as a young girl. Some of Anna’s earliest memories were of rubbing her mother’s supposed hump for luck.
“I know about the baby you had before I was born. She’s found you, Mother.”
The color drained from Gloria’s face, and her milky white eyes went blank. She began to sob. “I didn’t want to do it. Mother and Daddy made me! Oh, God, I want to die!” They cried together for hours, and Gloria went into fits of rage alternating with hysterical crying about how much her life was a lie and everyone was now in on it.
A half-sister. No one had seen fit to inform Anna that Billie had existed at all. So it turned out that Anna was not the only child she once so completely self-identified as. Gloria had gotten knocked up at sixteen and was immediately sent to a home for wayward girls located in upper Georgetown, Washington, D.C. The identity of the father is another of Gloria’s mysteries. Anna has reason to believe it was a young man named Dash Sinclair whom Gloria used to speak of in almost exclusively transcendental terms, a high school beau Anna could believe had been quickly distanced from Gloria’s “situation” and probably at the behest of well-to-do parents. He saw what the future held and decided Gloria and a baby were not in it. These kinds of things happened back then in a quiet, antiseptic way. You popped out an illegitimate child, and you moved on.
Anna only gets the story in bits and pieces from Gloria and never in a coherent, plotted fashion. The whole ordeal is so painfully clichéd that she finds it difficult to imagine she can now actually claim it as family history. Suddenly there’s a reason that Gloria has cried every Christmas (Billie was born on December 24). Or made such a fuss about women’s reproductive health in the seventies (she’d been firmly pro-choice before it was ever in fashion to say so). Or went out of her way to avoid shopping in Georgetown when she and Anna had lived in D.C. She’d turned down an invitation to go to a cocktail party at JFK’s townhouse once when he was a U.S. senator and speaks about it now as if she’d turned down an invitation to watch the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Everything that Anna has ever wanted to be, Billie seems to have happened upon effortlessly. Billie grew up in California, the place where Anna has always dreamed of living—sunglasses and Hollywood. Billie was a stewardess back when it was still something of a status symbol of beauty. Anna always loved the uniforms they wore with the perfectly matched silk scarves and the cute little tri-peak caps. She secretly wished she was part of their cozy warren, traveling in the handsome wake of a gorgeous pilot. But it’s Billie’s current occupation that really plagues Anna, almost to the point of rage. She writes books for young adults. That is Anna’s secret dream! The one that no one knows about, not even Hank. Billie’s books are stories about young girls abandoned by the world and saved by the love of dolphins and horses. The latest one features a chimp, Anna seems to recall, after looking up customer reviews on Amazon.
She feels a tinge of jealousy at the lifestyle Billie seems to lead: flitting from here to there, switching careers on a whim, and being successful at absolutely everything she does.
The first time Anna met Billie, in a café with Gloria, she’d been wary from the start. In had walked this reddish-haired beauty, tall and statuesque, like a Chanel model. She was older than Anna but had the kind of milky skin that appears ageless.
“My God, you look just like my Great-Aunt Faye,” Gloria said when Billie sat down. Faye, a woman Anna had never even heard of. Of course, Billie’s features had to have been plucked from some distant, goddess-like branch of the family tree Anna had never known about. “I can’t believe I’m actually standing here in front of you both,” Billie had said with a smile that revealed a slight dimple on her left cheek. “It’s a little overwhelming.”
“Honey, let’s take it all one step at a time,” Gloria said. Anna had smarted from Gloria’s use of the word honey. That was what her mother always had called her. Anna already sensed Gloria falling in love with Billie.
Anna told the boys at Christmas that year that she now had a sister.
“What do you mean you have a sister?” her oldest, Ben, had asked.
“Your grandmother gave birth to a baby when she was a teenager and didn’t tell anyone. Believe me, this is as much of a shock to your dad and me as it is to you,” she’d stated. Diplomatically, she thought.
“Does she look like you?” Ian had asked.
“Well, no, she doesn’t really, no.”
“What does she do?” Wade asked.
“She writes children’s books. Young adult novels, I suppose. Just make her feel welcome when she’s around, for your grandmother’s sake.”
“HANK, WHAT ARE you doing down there?” Billie asks, directing her question lower, toward the cabinet, where Hank’s head is.
“He’s attempting to retrieve my wedding ring. It fell down the drain,” Anna answers.
“You take it off?” asks Billie. “Why? If I had one, I’d never take it off.” She smiles.
“It came off while I was cleaning a skillet.”
“Cleaning a skillet.” Billie turns her head in profile, directing herself to Gloria. “You know, how does one even clean a skillet? I can write about doing it, but I’ve never actually cooked in a skillet, let alone cleaned one. Isn’t that funny, Mother?”
“It’s hilarious, dear,” Gloria says, smiling back at Billie.
“I found it!” Hank leans back on his left heel and rocks back a bit, his pants and boxers bunching back up to cover the crack. He anchors himself to the floor with his left palm face-down on the linoleum, then slowly begins to rise, bringing the slimy wedding band up to Anna’s face like a Chaplin flower.
“Will you marry me?” he asks. “Again?”
“Once you wash that thing off,” Anna says.
“What happened to ‘for better or for worse’?” Billie asks.
“For better or worse or indisposed,” says Hank.
“Or in disposal,” Billie says.
“Ha! You’re right,” says Hank, laughing at her. Not only can Anna see them laughing with each other, but also their eyes are laughing with each other, which is so much worse. “Anna, I’m not going to Montreal with you tomorrow to chaperone Wade’s school trip. It’s decided,” states Gloria.
“Mother!” Anna exclaims.
“I’m tired and don’t feel like going on an overnight, especially at my age.”
“But Mother, you promised you’d do this with me. And now I don’t have a partner.” Anna nearly pouts.
“That’s why I’m going with you,” says Billie, affecting a curtsy, as if she’s suddenly in a royal court. It is bizarre.
Anna glances at her mother, who looks at her with pitiful, watery eyes. Her Stanislavski acting eyes.
“It’ll be a good bonding trip for you girls,” she says. Anna winces at the way Gloria uses the term girls, at the way the word suggests that Anna ever knew Billie as a girl. As if to suggest they have anything in common at all.
At dinner, Billie sits to Gloria’s right, across from Wade and to the left of Hank, who sits at the head of the table opposite Anna, who is at the other end. Anna and Hank have always arranged themselves like this, across from each other at either ends of the table. They share knowing looks, nonverbal cues during dinner when all the boys surround them at the table.
What’s so surprising for Anna to think about now is that this is the same kind of thing she did with Gloria as a child. Even when they were at one of Gloria’s all-night dinner parties that inevitably arose out of an earlier cocktail party and then gave way to a boozy game of poker with cigars, there was Anna up way past her bedtime, mixing it up with the adults—always the only child. Gloria would stop flirting or drinking or accepting a cigarette from whichever male suitor had been beckoned to her side to give Anna their secret look—an exaggerated rolling of her eyes as if to say, “Isn’t this all ridiculous, babe?” topped off with a wink.
“Are you working on a new book?” Hank asks Billie, pouring her a little more wine.
“As a matter of fact, I am,” Billie answers, picking up the glass to take a sip.
“What’s this one about?” he continues. Anna looks at Hank, hoping to catch a wink or a knowing nod. He read one of Billie’s books once and didn’t think it was very good. He called it “trite,” if she recalls correctly, yet he now appears to be intrigued by her new one. He fails to return Anna’s look.
“It’s a novel about a group of children who escape from an abusive foster home, then become exposed to a chemical agent that allows them to see people’s thoughts. They use their new skill to make the most private desires of the people around them come true. Or, in some cases, redirect those people whose unsavory desires might lead them down a bad path.”
“It sounds kind of like The Boxcar Children series. Anna, I used to read that to you when you were little,” Gloria says. She looks at Billie, and Billie nods.
“So it’s science fiction?” Hank prods.
“It is, yes. Kind of. I’m thinking of doing a trilogy.”
“What kind of ‘unsavory desires’?” Wade asks. Wade, who is rarely checked into what is happening at the dinner table outside of eating, is unusually attentive to Billie. He is involved in the conversation. During a normal dinner, Anna might be able to get three or four sentences from him before he inhales his meal, then rushes off to hang out with friends or play basketball.
“Well, it’s a young adult novel, so there’s nothing too obscene in it. I have a bit of leeway with my editors, though. Listen, I think everyone has a stray bad thought in the course of a single day. It doesn’t mean you’re an awful person; it just means you’re a human. What makes the children in my novel special, I think, is that they’ve tapped into their intuitive powers to ‘read’ people. It comes off as telekinesis or something supernatural, but I think it’s something we all can do to a certain extent.”
“Are there animals in this book, like the others?” Anna asks. She chooses a moment in which Hank, Wade, and Gloria all seem to be totally enraptured by what Billie is saying. Private desires and secret thoughts. This isn’t groundbreaking territory, Anna thinks, and has to stop herself from saying it out loud.
“That’s kind of my trademark, so yes, there’s one animal.”
“What kind?” asks Anna.
“There’s a golden retriever the children save from being abused by their foster father. They take her with them when they escape. I’m thinking of naming the dog Gloria after Mother, of course,” she says, turning toward Gloria.
“I’d be so honored!” says Gloria.
“Can I get anyone a second helping of chicken?” Anna asks Hank, who passes the casserole to her.
“Who’s your father?” Wade asks Billie.
“Wade!” shouts Anna, letting the serving spoon on the chicken casserole clank off the side and spill to the table. A stunned silence takes over the room that lasts three seconds but feels much longer. Wade sits back in his chair with a confused expression. “Don’t be rude,” Anna says, placing the spoon to the side on her napkin.
“He’s not being rude, Anna,” Billie says. “He’s just curious.” Gloria begins to nod to agree with Billie but stops to sneak a glance at Anna. “I suspect that’s more of a question for you, though, Mother. Don’t you think?” Billie asks Gloria.
Gloria looks back at Billie, who, for the first time that night, appears as if she might not entirely trust Gloria. The chummy togetherness of the two of them seems broken for a moment. But put on the spot, Gloria is always at her best. She is, of course, an actress and has, presumably, been rehearsing these lines for decades.
“His name was Dash. Dash Sinclair.”
Anna just knew it and feels temporarily vindicated at Gloria’s confirmation. Gloria tosses her brown mane with the white shoots at either side above her ears and kind of stares off into the distance at the movie of her life playing on the opposite wall.
There’s a sly way Gloria has of parsing out this information, telling it to the assembled table as if they’re at a reading in a coffee shop, waiting to be entertained. Or at a one-night-only Broadway event. “An Evening With…” type of thing. By this point, it’s not some painful memory she’s reliving; it’s been sculpted into a dramatic monologue, the facts of the story doled out in careful beats. “Dash was—well, it goes without saying—utterly dashing. He was the captain of the football team and the debate team. I wore his varsity jacket.”
“What did he look like? You’ve never really said,” Billie asks, her eyes hopeful.
“He had strawberry-blond hair, which is where you got yours, I suppose, dear.”
“What about his family? Whatever happened to him?” Wade asks. Billie appears ravenous at this opening.
“Mother and Daddy told me never to speak of him again. By the time I came home, he had graduated and gone off to school. I’m not sure where.” Gloria pauses for a moment, as if forgetting her lines. Then, as if she’s just remembered what she wanted to say, she asks Anna, “Can you refill my sherry?”
In this moment, Anna feels a certain kinship to Billie. She feels bad that Billie must rely on Gloria’s erratic whims in order to gain such basic information as the fate of her father, his appearance, his age—questions a fifty-something-year-old woman never should have to ask anyone.
Anna recalls asking Gloria the same questions in her childhood about her own father and being continually redirected in a way only her mother could do. Relying on crumbs of information to toss over and over inside her head like clothes in a dryer in the Laundromat downtown.
Anna remembers meeting her real father at a Senators game when she was about ten years old. She wasn’t told the man was her father until she was returned home. He bought her a hot dog and a Coke while he drank large gulps from a wide plastic cup of pilsner. He smoked Marlboros down to the filter, then shoved the butts off the steps next to a woman in front of them who seemed to become more agitated as the innings progressed and he got louder and drunker. Anna never saw him again.
“Dash Sinclair. Sounds like someone out of a novel from the turn of the century,” Billie says, a faint smile on her face.
“What about your adopted dad? Where’s he?” Wade asks.
Billie becomes very still. She picks up her glass to take a sip but holds it in midair. “He’s dead. And so is my adoptive mother.”
Gloria looks away from the table, as if she’s just heard a doorbell or suddenly remembered something she had tried to recall weeks before. Billie looks over at Gloria.
“I have a younger sister—Alicia. My…” Billie stumbles a bit before saying, “…adoptive parents had a baby after I came to live with them.” She finally takes a sip of her wine after the glass has been hanging in the air.
Hank stares at Anna. He finally gives her a look. But she doesn’t know what this one means. She’s never seen it before. He could be asking her to do something, but she’s not sure.
“Cheers to Billie,” Hank says, raising his glass. “Welcome home.”
THAT NIGHT, AFTER Gloria and Billie go home, Anna gets into bed with Hank, who’s already half asleep. She pulls the covers over and lies on her side, bringing her hand up to her face, bending it so that her cheek rests upon her knuckles. She feels Hank’s hand begin to encircle her waist.
“That was nice, you agreeing to take Billie on Wade’s field trip,” he says. “I think she was touched. And Gloria seemed delighted.”
“I don’t know why it’s so important to cultivate this relationship with her. She’s a stranger. To both of us. I don’t have the time for this.”
“Shh…Billie’s good.” He brings his hand down around her waist and pulls her close to him in a spooning position. He pushes up her nightgown from the back and pulls down her underpants with the other hand, so quickly that she can barely register what’s happening. They’re having sex for the first time in what must be over six months. He presses up inside her from behind and she loses her breath for a second, letting her body relax with his as he settles into her. Hank is always such a careful lover. They made three boys this way, there’s something still beautiful about that, isn’t there, she asks herself.
But she also wonders if he was turned on by the sight of her half-sister whose beauty is more traditional, less squinty than hers. More regal, less domestic. Is he making love to her, she wants to know? He doesn’t often take her from behind like this, so she has to ask. But she doesn’t. She goes along with the rhythm he’s established, like a good warm body, riding beneath the wave of him as he washes over her, up inside her. He’s asleep almost as soon as he pulls out, as if it were only a dream.
A SIGN AT the front of La Ronde, the amusement park in Montreal, informs patrons that the staff of the park is currently on strike. The park—the sign announces with small insignias of construction hats and crossed pick axes and smiley faces—is being run by “independently contracted operators.” Scabs, Anna thinks to call them in her head.
“Well, isn’t that reassuring,” Billie says, winking at Wade and two of his friends as they make their way past the sign. The group walks past the welcome cottages and ventures onto a tree-lined path, surrounded by blindingly white three-picket fencing and globular bushes in fresh red chips of fertilizer. Anna walks a few paces behind, watching as Billie shoots her arm through the hook in Wade’s windbreaker. Wade looks at her and smiles.
The Ferris wheel at La Ronde dwarfs everything around it. Even the nearby arch, which is admittedly taller and resembles the one in St. Louis, seems to be bowing to it, dipping its apex in deference, quivering on its spindly iron legs. There’s something almost prehistoric about the Ferris wheel—its massiveness, as if the thing has always been there, cemented to the ground and moving perpetually in a calm, circular motion, the rest of the amusement park—the entire city of Montreal, in fact—only built around it, trying to reach the heights it so effortlessly inhabits.
Instead of the open-air compartments Anna had seen in the Ferris wheels of her youth—the ones where children’s legs would dangle and swing with each revolution—this one is fixed at the spoke of the wheel with a rust-red car able to seat four passengers, two seats facing each other. So gigantic it is, the wheel needs to contain its passengers in order to keep them from flying out into the sky.
Anna isn’t afraid of heights in the traditional sense. She once stood on the observation deck at Niagara Falls with Hank and the boys. They were driving Ben off to college. Holding the handrail with a firm grip, Anna hastened to look straight down. The swirling pistons of water, crashing into one another at the bottom of the great falls, lulled her into a sort of peaceful daze, drawing her away as if by hypnosis from the reality of just how far she was from the bottom. The sounds of the water pulled her closer to the misty whisper of the crashing jets. As if the whorls of water could envelop her like a claw, lift her straight off the deck, into the air and let her float deliriously above them.
But years later, after she had climbed a tree in their front yard to retrieve a kite for a sobbing Wade, who had begun to pitch a fit on the driveway, she temporarily had lost her footing as she descended the giant oak. After reacting quickly by grabbing the nearest thing, she found herself hanging from a thick bough of the old tree, clinging to it for her very survival. As she looks back, she realizes it was perhaps the most terrifying moment of her life. She could see the whites of her fingernails digging into the bark as she felt something slip out of her—a sense of the most basic security. By some miracle, she was able to shimmy down the long bough back to the trunk and make her way to the ground, thick chips of bark scraping her knees and elbows. Wade, who only minutes before had been hysterically weeping about his kite, was shocked into catatonic silence as he watched his mother climb down to the foot of the tree. When Anna had scooped him off the ground, her knees skinned and arms rattling on their own accord, as if the blood flowing through her were now some kind of hydroponic fuel, he awoke from his trance and burst into tears again. Too stunned to cry herself, she had held him tighter. From that moment on, she’d been afraid of anything higher than her second-story window.
As they stand in line to get onto the Ferris wheel, the kids quickly assemble themselves into groups of four. Wade, always so popular with his classmates, soon has a gaggle of teens of both sexes on either side of him. Anna and Billie, like two kids left over from choosing teams, climb together into a car by themselves.
“Is there a safety bar? What’s keeping me from falling out of this thing?” Anna asks the teenage girl helping them into the car.
“There are seatbelts inside. This door latch is controlled by those levers over there. No need to worry, ma’am. Enjoy the beautiful view!”
As the wheel lifts them higher into the air, Anna can see the other amusement rides become less focused in the distance. The roller coaster off to the far left looks like a Fisher-Price set she got one of the boys for a birthday years ago. The tiny cart zips along the tracks, fitting into tiny grooves, holding the tiny people with their tiny arms raised into the air. If she looks far enough, she can see the tall steel buildings of the business center of Montreal rising up out of the trees that surround the park. It would be easy, she thinks, to love the world from way up here. The way the air is crisp and clean and the silence is not threatening, but calming, organic. The wheel stops as they reach the top. Anna feels the same quiet take over yet now wishes they’d keep moving.
“I’m glad we have a chance to talk, Anna, because I wanted to bring something up with you,” Billie says.
“Oh? What is it?”
“Well, Mother’s birthday is coming up in February, as you know, and I thought how great would it be if you and I took her on a cruise.” Excitedly, Billie looks out the grated window of the wheel car, looking, to Anna, as if she already can picture the three of them off in the distance, embarking on a mammoth white ocean liner.
“I don’t think that would be such a good idea,” Anna says.
“Why is that?” asks Billie.
“She was uncomfortable with the idea of going on this simple overnight trip. What makes you think she’d suddenly sign on for a vacation where she’s on the water for days on end? No, it’s not her at all. Not now at least.”
“That’s certainly not the impression I’ve gotten.” The Ferris wheel jerks back to life and starts to move again, waking their car on its descent to the ground. “Gloria seems to have traveled more than most people have in a lifetime. I’d think a cruise would be tame for her, considering the miles she’s logged throughout her life.”
“It’s so like her to exaggerate. If you went back into those stories—I mean, really delved into them—you’d probably find a lot less based on actual fact,” Anna states. She notices that Billie has pursed her lips a bit. “Besides, she has restless leg syndrome. She’d have to pace up and down the ship’s deck like a ghost every night. That alone would drive us both crazy enough to want to kill her.” Anna knows this, but Billie, of course, couldn’t possibly.
“What an awful thing to say,” Billie proclaims.
“Listen, Billie, you might think you know her, but you really don’t.” Anna pauses suddenly, almost breathless. The Ferris wheel has stopped at the top again after another revolution so that they’re at the wheel’s apex, above the clouds even, it feels like.
“No, I don’t know her like you do. How could I? What do you think I’m trying to do here but get to know her better? To get to know you better.”
“I meant that you don’t know her like I do. She’d actually find a way to think less of you for coming up with a trip like that—not more. Believe me.”
“What is this, Anna? What’s this really about?”
Anna looks to the floor of the compartment and sees dead leaves that have been tracked inside.
“I don’t know what that question means. What is what about?” Anna says.
“I’m trying to connect with you two, and you’re—you’re making it so impossible. You’re so cold.”
“I’m not cold! This is just who I am.”
“Then why can’t you let me in? Mother has.”
“Mother isn’t even thinking about you. She’s thinking about herself. This whole chapter in her book—the book in her mind—this chapter isn’t about you. This chapter, like all the others, is about her.” Anna’s voice has escalated into a kind of growl. She notices her teeth have temporarily gritted together. Billie pauses for a second to take this in. A quick snap of wind passes through their car.
“Tell me, Anna. Would you have rather I died in the orphanage where I lived until I was three? Or at birth, even? Would that have been better for you? More convenient?”
“That’s ridiculous,” Anna says.
“What do you want from me?”
“Nothing! I don’t want anything from you. I don’t even know you!” Anna screams. “None of us do.”
Billie stops looking at Anna in the eye. She’s staring right past her, out the grating of the wheel car. At first Anna thinks she’s simply angry at her. She had meant the things she said, but she hadn’t intended to say them.
Then Billie says, “My God, look at that.”
Anna turns around. Off in the distance, she sees a large black cloud that seems to be leaching out the sunlight and the airy brightness they had experienced when they first got onto the Ferris wheel, sucking it out of the air and making everything dark, like a black nylon over a nightstand lamp. The accompanying winds whistle around them so hard that they shake the car, a car that suddenly feels much more like a cage.
“We’re finally going down again. That must mean they’re going to start letting people off because of the weather,” says Billie.
Anna can only nod as they begin their descent. She hears Wade and the others hollering in the car behind them. What an adventure this must be for them. She only has to look down once to get that feeling again. They always say that people walking around on the ground look like ants from a distance. To Anna they look like earwigs, those little brown sticks that pick themselves up off the ground and announce to the world that they’re animated. If she had a shotgun, she thinks, she might take aim at one of them, just to see if she could hit the target.
“Wait, they’re not letting us off. Why aren’t they letting us off?” Anna can see one of the scabs working the controls of the Ferris wheel with a dull, blank expression. She’s wearing a yellow T-shirt with a Mountain Dew logo and white Keds. To Anna, she looks very eighties and very stupid. “You need to stop this thing so we can get off! Right now!” she screams in the girl’s direction. The girl only vaguely looks at them as she grabs a gray hooded sweatshirt to shield herself from the sudden onslaught of cold. Anna feels a few drops of rain blow through the grating. They have completed another revolution and are making their way straight back up to the top.
“Settle down. I’ve been up in a hot air balloon that blew out half of its heat source, and I made it out fine,” Billie says.
“Well, it seems you always land on your feet.”
As they get closer to the top, Anna senses a small swinging motion in the car, as if it’s trying to tip her out. Some of the high school girls below scream. It’s unmistakable.
“Anna, hold on to the handrail on the side here. Steady yourself. Everything is going to be fine.”
She suddenly can see how good a flight attendant Billie must have been back in the day, soothing nervous passengers, bundling up children with blankets.
Anna looks out the grated window, a compartment that feels smaller than when she first got in. The entire sky has turned a grayish black, and the rain comes down in cross-cut sheets across the sky, erupting like a furious curtain of water. The wheel car rocks with more regularity. Billie looks out from the grating behind them then quickly looks back, searching for Anna’s eyes so she can hold them steady. The Ferris wheel isn’t moving. They’re frozen at the top.
“You just saw something. What was it?” Anna asks.
“People are climbing out of their cars,” she delivers calmly.
“What?! How?” Anna says, starting to peer out the window grating herself.
“Don’t look down. Their door must’ve become unlatched or something.”
“Wade! Wade, it’s me! Can you see Wade? Is he one of them?” Anna screams.
“Wade is fine, Anna. He’s fine.”
Anna feels herself cave into a panic. The screaming around her has become even more manic and frightened (and not exclusively female, which scares her even more). She can’t hear Wade’s voice over the shouting and the creaking of the wheel car as they rock back and forth, not like she could hear it before. She prays they’ll get out of this alive. Then, almost immediately after that, she prays she’ll be struck by lightning before falling out of the car and landing on the cement near the base of the wheel.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” Billie says. “I saw some sort of maintenance crew on the ground. I’m sure they’re trying to fix the problem.”
“What’s happening?” Anna asks. “What’s happening?” But the question suddenly isn’t just about the Ferris wheel and whether they’ll get off. Billie leaves the seat facing Anna and moves to sit next to her.
“I’m not lucky, Anna. I know it’s probably easier for you to think that about me. To look at me and my life in comparison to yours and think how fabulous and fun everything is. But I’m not lucky. You’re the lucky one.”
“How am I lucky?” Anna asks, looking at her more closely.
“You’ve had our mother your whole life. You have Hank and those wonderful boys and—”
“Yes, I can see how much you like Hank,” Anna interrupts her.
“Oh, Anna. No. Really? Listen, I don’t want your husband. You’re all new family to me. I’m just trying to make the best impression I can.” Billie sits back in the cushioned seat and places her hands on either side, palms facing down. Anna does the same so that, for a moment, they’re mirroring each other side by side, like together on a swing, except Anna is leaning forward, not back. “Do you know what I would’ve given to be able to wake up in your house every morning the last however many years? To spend the holidays with you and Mother? To even have a mother? Do you?”
“I don’t know what you’re expecting to get out of this with her. Whatever it is, you’re going to be disappointed. Gloria is selfish to her very core.”
“Is that where you get it from?” Billie looks away, out through the grating toward the clouds. “I’m sorry for that. Why don’t you just let me find out for myself?”
“She didn’t look for you, Billie. She never even looked for you.”
Billie tells Anna about when her adoptive mother became pregnant almost immediately after she and her husband took Billie in. From then on, she was like an extra child around the house. Never allowed to forget that she wasn’t their biological daughter. “Do you know what that does to a person? To feel like a stranger in your own home? It’s devastating. When they died,” she said, “they left me almost nothing. My sister Alicia got it all.”
Anna grabs hold of Billie’s hand. Something feels right to her about doing it. The bones of her knuckles are very pronounced, but her hand is warm and silky. It has the feel of an artist’s hands or what Anna imagines an artist’s hand might feel like. Together they stare into the blackness of the cloud that hovers over the Ferris wheel, shaking their car. There’s no way to stop the cloud from moving closer, and Anna feels a sense of calm from finally being able to recognize that.