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Back in her old bedroom, Natalie unpacked her suitcase. Little remained of her early life here. A few books and stuffed animals on the bookcase, but she’d cleaned out the room after she finished undergrad, before moving out to Vancouver to do her PhD. Still, she continued to sleep here whenever she came for a visit.
She sat at her old wooden desk and pulled out her laptop, figuring she’d start reading her student’s draft of his master’s thesis.
Ten minutes later, she was forced to admit that she couldn’t concentrate at all. She kept thinking about the wedding. The rehearsal and dinner had gone reasonably well, and she felt like they were ready for tomorrow. Except in the Chin-Williams family, it was inevitable that something would go wrong, though there was no telling what it would be.
She got up and knocked on Rebecca’s door.
“Come in,” Rebecca said.
Her little sister was lying on her stomach on top of her bedspread, which was purple with bright yellow and blue flowers. When Rebecca was ten, she’d thought it was the height of coolness. A plastic storage container was open in front of her, and she had a stack of paint chips in her hand.
“I thought you were writing your speech,” Natalie said.
“I got stuck.” Rebecca nodded at the sheets of lined paper beside her.
Natalie picked them up and looked at what she’d written. “Love conquers all” and various other clichés.
Rebecca had never had a way with words. Her talents lay in math and physics.
For example, if Sarah had 50 strawberries and Billy had 40 watermelons, and they were cycling across the country at 20 km/h, and the slope of the hill was 10°, and the coefficient of friction was 0.5, and everybody’s eyes glazed over...
Rebecca could figure out the answer faster than anyone else. She’d studied engineering in university.
She was also fairly artistic. Natalie peeked in the storage container—it was full of art supplies from when Rebecca was a kid, as well as paint chips.
Rebecca handed her a paint chip. “Don’t you think the lemon cream is pretty?”
“Mm. It is.” But Natalie had never been obsessed with colors the way her sister was.
Natalie remembered when Rebecca had discovered paint chips. Rebecca had been eight or nine, and Natalie had been home from university for the summer. Rebecca had burst through the front door after a trip to the hardware store with their parents.
“Did you know they give these away for free at the hardware store?” she’d asked Natalie, holding up the paint chips. “Mom said I could only take three. Will you drive me back tomorrow?”
Rebecca would stare at the paint chips, fascinated by the myriad of colors and the creative names. Peach jam. Pink magnolia. Autumn maple. Foggy morning. And since they were, apparently, Canadian paint chips: Halifax blue, Toronto thunderstorm, Algonquin green. Natalie had wondered whose job it was to come up with the names. Some didn’t describe the color at all. Why was childhood innocence a warm, pale pink, and luxury a deep purple?
“Look at this one,” Rebecca said now, handing another paint chip to Natalie as she sat down on the bed. “The second color matches my wedding dress, don’t you think? Lavender mist. I love the sound of that.”
Since Rebecca had always loved color, she hadn’t liked the idea of getting married in white. “Plus I’m hardly pure,” she’d said.
Well, Rebecca might not think of herself that way, but she was Natalie’s little sister, and that wouldn’t change.
There was a knock on the door, and their mother stepped into the room. “I thought we should have a talk about what happens on your wedding night. When a man and a woman—”
“Mom!” Rebecca covered her ears. “Shut up!”
Mom laughed. She’d probably said that just to get a reaction out of her youngest daughter.
“Any other sage advice on marriage?” Rebecca asked.
“Don’t go to bed angry,” Mom said.
“That’s a bit of a cliché,” Natalie said, “as is everything else Rebecca has written down for her speech tomorrow. Perhaps she inherited her love of clichés from you.”
Mom turned to Rebecca. “You’ll figure it out. You always do.”
She left the room, and Natalie picked up the sheets of paper again. “What do you want to talk about in your speech?” she asked her sister.
“I want to thank everyone for celebrating with us, thank the wedding party and our parents...mention the great example of love and marriage they set for me...”
“So just say it like that. Don’t make it too complicated. Short and simple is best for wedding speeches. You don’t want to go on and on.”
“You’re right.” Rebecca smiled at her. “That’s what I’ll do. I won’t try to write any fancy words.”
“Are you nervous about tomorrow?” Natalie asked.
Rebecca looked up from a green paint chip. “There’s a chance of rain, so I’m a little worried about that, plus you know what weddings are like in our family. But I’m completely sure I want to marry Elliot. Even though we’ve only been together nine months, I’m sure. I know you think we’re rushing it—”
“I just want you to be happy.” Natalie had always looked out for Rebecca, particularly when their parents weren’t able—or couldn’t be bothered—to do so.
“We will be.”
“I’ll leave you alone to work on your speech now. Let me know if you want me to read it over later, okay?”
“Don’t worry, I will.”
Natalie hesitated. “I love you.”
“Love you, too.” Rebecca smiled, then turned back to her paint chips.
* * *
Twenty-five years ago...
Natalie’s little sister was tiny and funny looking and wailing at the top of her lungs, but Natalie loved her anyway. She had always wanted a sister.
“Can I hold her, Mom?”
Her mother had been in the hospital for three days. There were dark circles under her eyes, and she looked like she was about to pass out.
“Okay, honey.” Mom’s voice sounded flat. “Make sure you support her neck.”
Natalie took the baby and held her the way Mom showed her. The baby kept crying.
“Shh,” Natalie whispered. “It’s okay. It’s me! I’m your big sister.” She turned to her mother. “Is she hungry?”
“I hope not. I just fed her. Maybe I should change her diaper soon.”
Natalie walked around with her baby sister and rocked her back and forth. Eventually, her sister’s screams quieted to the occasional sob.
Seth ran up to her and wrinkled his nose. “Why does she cry so much? What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing’s wrong with her,” Mom said. “It’s just the way babies are.”
In the next few weeks, however, it became apparent that something wasn’t quite right.
As far as Natalie knew, her sister was healthy, although she did seem to make an awful lot of dirty diapers and cry at the most inconvenient times. But something was off with how her parents behaved with the baby.
Natalie didn’t know a lot about babies, but she’d seen mothers and their new babies before. The mothers might look tired, they might look frustrated, but they would still snuggle their babies and coo over them and stuff like that.
Her baby sister didn’t get any of that from Mom and Dad.
Didn’t babies need love and affection? Wasn’t that important, in addition to being fed and having their diapers changed?
Natalie had a sinking feeling that she was the only one who loved her baby sister. Had her parents been like this with her and Seth? She couldn’t remember, but she didn’t think so.
Since nobody else played with the baby, Natalie started showing her stuffed animals and reading her books and taking her for short walks in the stroller. She’d hurry home after school each day to spend time with her little sister. Mom always seemed happy to hand her over, and she showed Natalie how to change diapers. Dad more or less ignored her.
Three weeks after the baby had come home from the hospital, Natalie finally asked her mother a question that had been bugging her for a while.
“Why doesn’t the baby have a name?”
Mom, who was sitting at the kitchen table, sighed as though she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. “I don’t know, honey.” Her voice still sounded horribly flat and un-Mom-like. “I guess I just haven’t given it much thought.”
“Doesn’t she need a name so you can put it on the birth certificate?”
“The birth certificate.” Mom shut her eyes for a moment. “Another thing I have to do.” She paused. “Why don’t you name her?”
“Okay.” Natalie nodded decisively. “I will.”
“What are you thinking?”
“You want me to have a name already? I need to do research first.”
Mom laughed, but it didn’t sound like a normal laugh. “Okay, you do your research. There’s a book of baby names on my bookshelf.”
Natalie dutifully read every page of the baby name book. Under each name, its meaning was listed along with its origins and sometimes one or two famous people who shared the name. Two nights later, Natalie had a list of twenty-two names she thought were acceptable. Then she carefully went through each name and crossed out any that didn’t seem to suit her sister, or that were the same as the names of her classmates or neighbors. She was left with three options.
Although Mom had told Natalie that she could name the baby, Natalie wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea. It wasn’t her baby—shouldn’t Mom or Dad choose the name? She figured Mom could pick from her short list of three names.
Natalie took the list to her mother, who was watching TV in the living room. Her sister was asleep in the baby swing.
“Here are the names I thought of,” Natalie said.
Mom read them out loud. “Lindsay, Alexandra, and Rebecca.”
“What do you think? Which one is your favorite?”
Mom shook her head and sighed. “Not Alexandra. How about...Rebecca?”
Natalie knelt on the floor beside the swing. “Hello, Baby Rebecca.”
Mom smiled—as much as she smiled these days, anyway. It barely counted as a smile.
“Will Dad be okay with it?” Natalie asked.
“He won’t care.”
Natalie hesitated before asking her next question. “Mom, are you okay?”
Mom’s pregnancy had been rough, and she’d had horrible morning sickness—not restricted to the mornings—for most of it. It had been enough to make Natalie resolve that she’d never get pregnant, though Mom had insisted she’d change her mind when she was older.
Natalie had thought her mother would be better once the baby was born, but Mom still wasn’t herself.
Mom sighed once more. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I’m just tired because I was up all night with the baby—with Rebecca, I mean.”
“Why doesn’t she sleep more than an hour or two at once?”
“She’ll get better soon. It won’t be like this forever.”
“I wish I could feed her so you could get more sleep.”
“Oh, honey. That’s sweet of you.” There were tears in Mom’s eyes. “But it’s okay. You do enough for her.” Mom held out her arms, and Natalie let herself be embraced.
Then she went to her room and made a fancy nametag for Baby Rebecca’s room with dolphins and starfish and seahorses. Dad had taken Natalie and Seth to Toronto to visit family several weeks ago, and they had seen an IMAX film about the ocean, after which Natalie had decided she wanted to be an oceanographer when she grew up.
For the next few months, it felt like Rebecca was hers. Natalie spent hours a day with her. She changed her diapers and gave her baths, and when her mother stopped breastfeeding, sometimes Natalie would feed her, too. And every day, she would read to her.
When Rebecca smiled for the first time, it was for Natalie.
Seth didn’t care about his baby sister, but that wasn’t a surprise. Boys were silly. But even as Rebecca grew and became more playful, Mom and Dad didn’t seem to take the appropriate interest in her.
The summer came, and Natalie spent even more time with her sister. Sometimes she’d play outside with her friends, but a lot of the summer was spent with her little sister, and she delighted in each milestone Rebecca reached.
One day in September, she came home after school and found her dad reading to Rebecca. Not from a picture book, but from one of his hardboiled detective novels. Rebecca giggled when he said “disemboweled.”
“She laughs now,” Dad said.
“She’s laughed for a while.”
“Really? I never noticed.”
Natalie would usually take care of Rebecca after school, but her father had come home early and was reading to his youngest daughter instead, and that was good. It was the way it should be. Natalie felt a twinge of jealousy, but she was also relieved. She’d gotten a book on the ocean from the school library last week, and she hadn’t had a chance to look at it yet. Now she could read it without feeling guilty, without feeling like there was something else she ought to be doing instead. She took out her fancy set of fifty pencil crayons and copied some of the pictures from the book. Such strange creatures lived in the depths of the ocean. She had never been to the ocean, but when you were on the shore, would it look all that different from Lake Huron? You couldn’t see the other side of Lake Huron, either. When she was grown up, she was going to travel a lot and see all the natural wonders of the world.
After that day, Dad took more interest in Rebecca. Natalie no longer felt like she was the only one providing Rebecca with love and affection, even if her father’s version of love was reading aloud murder scenes. He would also play peek-a-boo and cuddle her in his lap.
Something still wasn’t right with Mom, though.
Natalie frequently came home from school to find her mother lying on the sofa or the bed, spaced out but not sleeping. She didn’t smile or laugh anymore—it was as though the ability to do those things had been transferred from her to Rebecca.
Natalie asked her father what was wrong with her mother.
“It’s difficult being home with a baby all day,” Dad said. “That’s all.”
Perhaps that was true, but Natalie had a feeling this wasn’t quite normal.
Rebecca started crawling and walking while holding onto furniture, and Natalie was fascinated by her development. Her parents had a few books on babies, and she read them to make sure Rebecca was developing at the proper rate. She seemed to be doing just fine.
Her first word was “Nattie.” Natalie was thrilled when Rebecca started speaking, but she also felt a little uneasy. Shouldn’t Rebecca’s first word be “Mama”?
Her second word was “murder,” thanks to her father.
One Saturday morning that winter, Natalie woke up late and found her mother playing with her sister in the living room. Mom was building small towers out of blocks, and Rebecca was flinging her arms around and knocking them down with glee.
“Who’s the sweetest little girl?” Mom said in a high-pitched voice.
Rebecca giggled in response.
Mom spent several hours in bed that afternoon, as though playing with Rebecca had exhausted her. But over the next few weeks, she slowly showed more affection toward Rebecca, rather than just taking care of her basic needs.
By the following summer, Rebecca had no shortage of attention from her parents and Natalie, and even Seth would play with her on occasion. He was more impressed now that his little sister could “do something other than cry.”
Twelve-year-old Natalie was more certain than ever that she was never having kids. Her mother’s pregnancy and listless existence for the first year of Rebecca’s life scared the crap out of her. She never wanted to go through that herself. Plus, babies were so much work—now she knew exactly how much work they were—and although she generally enjoyed looking after her sister, the experience had shown her that it wasn’t the future she wanted. She was going to have an exciting career as an oceanographer. No babies for her.
When she was seventeen—and no longer convinced that oceanography was the career she wanted—Natalie read an article in the newspaper about postpartum depression. She realized that was probably what her mother had had after Rebecca was born, though it didn’t explain her father’s initial apathy toward Rebecca. Was there an equivalent for fathers?
If she had a baby, Natalie wouldn’t necessarily get postpartum depression, and if she did, she could get help. But that wasn’t enough to make her want children. She liked kids, but the idea of being a mother didn’t appeal to her.
“You’ll change your mind,” Mom said, just like she had when Natalie was younger, and Natalie was frustrated that no one took her seriously.
She went off to university in Toronto when she was eighteen. When her family said their goodbyes in her dorm room, Rebecca, who was seven, threw her arms around Natalie’s waist and cried.
“I’ll call you every day,” Natalie promised.
She didn’t need to talk to her parents or brother that often.
But Rebecca was special and always would be.
* * *
Back in her old room after helping Rebecca with her speech, Natalie picked up an old photo of her and her sister, then put it down and sighed.
It had been years since she’d said “I love you” to anyone but Rebecca.
The last person had been Anthony, a guy she’d dated for six months, and she couldn’t help but cringe as she thought of him now. How the hell had she ever believed she loved him? When they’d broken up after the incident, he’d said she was too abrasive and pessimistic and a whole bunch of other things.
Anthony was a tool.
And yet.
Her past was littered with failed relationships, and the things he’d said hadn’t exactly been out of line with what other men had told her. She’d continued to date for a little while after Anthony, but she’d soon given up.
The whole child-free thing was certainly a problem, when any man who professed an interest in her wanted her to be a mother, and she told herself that was why she didn’t bother with dating anymore. That was why she tried not to hope for what Rebecca had. If she didn’t hope too much, she couldn’t be disappointed.
Sometimes, however, Natalie feared that regardless of that issue, she was simply unlovable the way she was.
She had no interest in giving herself a personality makeover for a man, though. No way in hell was that happening.
But could a guy truly love the real her?
You can be loved, she tried to tell herself. Think of your sister. You love her, and she loves you.
Still, she had her doubts.
Her phone vibrated. She grabbed it off her desk and smiled when she saw the text was from Connor. This would be a good distraction from her depressing thoughts.
How’s it going? he asked. Is Fuzzy Wuzzy happy to see you?
Natalie glanced at the blue bear that sat on her old dresser, the bear that had been in numerous pretend weddings twenty years ago. Well, his mouth is sewn shut, so he struggles with facial expressions, the poor thing. But I think he’s happy.
I still can’t believe you have a teddy bear named Fuzzy Wuzzy.
I was three years old, she replied. It seemed like a sensible idea at the time.
My teddy bear was just called Teddy.
How unoriginal.
I know. Shamefully unoriginal. Maybe I should have called him Beary McBearface.
She chuckled.
You ready for tomorrow? he asked.
As ready as I can be. Something will go wrong, though. I just know it. And don’t tell me to be a fucking optimist.
I wouldn’t dare.
When Natalie jumped in the shower a few minutes later, she was still smiling, despite everything on her mind.