The Second Sister (10 page)

“My grandma and grandpa built that cottage,” Barney said quietly. “When I was little, we'd go there after church and Grandma would make a big dinner for the whole family—pot roast or ham or chicken. In the summer, when it was hot, my brothers and I would ride our bicycles out to the cottage and swim in the lake. Sometimes Grandpa would join us. When we got tired, we'd climb out of the water and lay on the grass in the sun to dry off. Grandma always came out with a big pitcher of cold lemonade and a plate of bars for us, her special recipe. You Like-A Me Bars, she called them.”

“That was my great-great-grandma's recipe?” I asked. “I never knew that.”

“Uh-huh,” Barney confirmed as he sank down into one of the kitchen chairs, looking across the room at nothing in particular.

“And now somebody is going to buy her house and bulldoze it. Half a million dollars,” he said softly. “I guess money counts for more than memories.”

I crouched down next to my cousin's chair.

“Nobody is going to bulldoze the cottage, because I'm not going to sell it. But I'm not going to live in it either. If Alice wanted the pet rescue people to have it, then fine. Let them have it. I'm not going to uproot my whole life just because my sister was crazy.”

Barney frowned and the wrinkles around his mouth deepened.

“Uproot your life? You have no life, Lucy. You said so yourself. You're always at work or traveling. You don't have time for yourself or anyone else.”

“I never said that,” I countered impatiently. “Yes, I'm busy. Yes, I work really long hours. But I never said I have no life.”

Peter cleared his throat again. This seemed to be his preferred method of inserting himself into conversations that were none of his business.

“Yes, you did. You said the same thing to me last night when I was driving you home. You repeated it three or four times.”

I got back to my feet, giving Peter my absolutely nastiest glare, the glare that had been known to make interns cry. It had no effect on him. He just stood there, leaning against the kitchen counter.

“Why are you here? Do you always show up at people's homes uninvited?”

“I told you last night that I'd come by in the morning to bring your keys and give you a ride back to your car. Don't you remember?” he asked sweetly, knowing full well that I didn't.

Peter reached into the back pocket of his jeans, pulled out two sets of keys, and set them on the table.

“I brought the keys to the cottage too. Thought you might want some help getting settled in.”

“No! I don't! Because I am
not
moving into Alice's cottage! I am not allowing my sister or anyone else to manipulate me into disrupting my—”

Cousin Barney groaned and I turned quickly, worried that something might be wrong with him, but he looked fine. The faraway expression was gone from his face. He was clear-eyed and obviously unhappy with me.

“Boy, you are just your dad all over, aren't you? Stubborn as a mule. Lucy, if you turn down a half-million-dollar inheritance just because you don't want to let your sister have the last word, then you're the biggest fool on God's green earth! What good would that do? You don't think that letting the pet rescue get the house is going to save it from being bulldozed, do you?

“Sure, I had dreams of you coming home for good. You can't blame an old man for wanting some family around, but I know that's not going to happen. Just like I know that nobody is ever going to live in the house, not ever again. But if it's got to come down, then I'd just as soon see somebody I care about get the money. You say you don't have a life? A half a million dollars would go a long way toward getting one. Wherever you land— Washington, DC, or someplace else—you could afford to get yourself a nice house, a real home of your own.”

He paused for a moment. “Who knows? You even might want something with a guest room so your country cousin could come visit you every now and then. But the main thing is, I want you to be happy. Whether you believe it or not, that's what Alice wanted for you too. And if you've got any arguments against that, then you go ahead and trot 'em out. I've got nothing to do today but listen.”

I looked at Barney, then at Peter, then back to Barney, who looked right back at me, eyebrows raised, waiting for my decision. When I reached it, I took in a big breath, let it out with a whoosh, and snatched both sets of keys from the table.

“Eight weeks,” I said, raising a cautionary finger. “But that's it. That's as long as I'm staying. Not one day more.”

Barney's eyes misted and he walked to the table and gave me a hug. Peter watched us, still leaning against the counter. I saw one corner of his lip tug into a lopsided grin.

“Eight weeks,” he said. “That should be enough.”

Chapter 15

I
tossed my suitcase into the back of Peter's truck.

“Is that all you brought?”

“I hadn't planned on being here very long.”

I was quiet as we drove toward town, embarrassed as I recalled, however vaguely, the details of my last ride in this vehicle. But five miles is a long time to keep silent. After a couple of minutes I said, “Thanks for coming out to pick me up. And for bringing me home last night. I hope it wasn't too much trouble.”

Eyes on the road, Peter shifted the truck into a higher gear.

“No problem. I hosed out the cab as soon as I got home.”

I gasped. “Oh, no! Peter, I am
so
sorry. . . .”

He glanced quickly from the road to my face and back, a grin on his face.

“Calm down. I'm kidding. I was able to pull over in plenty of time, remember?”

“You jerk!” I swatted at the air next to his head. “What a mean trick to play! Like I wasn't already humiliated enough about last night.”

“Sorry,” he said.

But he didn't look sorry. In fact, he looked pretty pleased with himself. I stared out the window. I'd had enough of Peter's jokes. Law degree or not, he obviously hadn't grown up a bit since high school.

“Lucy?” Peter looked at me, but I didn't say anything. “Oh, come on. It was just a little joke. You can't be mad at me. After all, I'm the guy you picked to deflower you.”

My head snapped toward Peter like it was spring-loaded. He was still looking at me. The nausea I felt when I first opened my eyes that morning returned, but this had nothing to do with my hangover. Yes, you can actually be so humiliated that it makes you want to throw up.

“I
told
you about that?” I said weakly.

“Afraid so.” Peter shifted the truck into another gear and shook his head. “Boy, you really don't remember, do you? You really shouldn't drink that much.”

“Tell me something I don't already know.” I groaned and buried my face in my hands.

“Oh, come on. Don't be so hard on yourself. It was right after your sister's funeral. You were emotional and you had too much to drink. Could have happened to anybody.” His words might have been sympathetic, but his buoyant tone of voice made it clear that he was enjoying my humiliation. “And, hey, I was
honored
to learn that you picked me as your stud of choice. Really. I'm only sorry that we never got to go through with it.”

He reached across the seat to pat my shoulder. I pushed his hand away.

“Leave me alone. I am not talking to you.”

“Oh, come on. Don't be mad. I was just teasing. Lucy?”

I shook my head, hands still covering my face. Peter said my name again, but this time his tone was different, softer, and there was no laughter in his voice.

“Lucy. Look at me.”

Reluctantly, I lowered my hands from my face, straightened my back, and turned my head to the left. Peter wasn't grinning now. He wasn't even smiling.

“I won't joke about it anymore. But you know something? Even though it never happened, I really was proud to know you'd wanted me to be the first. You know what a huge crush I had on you in high school.”

“Oh, stop it. You did not.”

“
Huge
crush,” he repeated. “I actually wrote poems to you, terrible, lovesick, teenage poems that I kept hidden under the mattress in my room.”

I rolled my eyes. “Sure you did. Right next to the ragged copies of
Playboy
you stole from the drugstore, no doubt.”

He shrugged. “Just one copy, an October issue. And I didn't steal it. I borrowed it from Jimmy Grinell's older brother. Actually, Jimmy and I dug it out of the trash can when he was packing his room to go to college. He let me have it.”

I sat back in the seat, relaxing a little, smiling to think that adolescent Peter, who I had thought of as worldly and experienced, had been just as awkward, confused, and driven by hormones as any other teenager.

“So what happened to them?” I asked.

“The poems?” He laughed to himself. “One day while I was at school, my mom went in to clean my bedroom and found the poems. And the copy of
Playboy
.”

He removed his eyes from the road and tossed me a stricken glance. I laughed. I couldn't help myself.

“What'd she do? Wash your mouth out with soap? Make you go to confession?”

“Naw. She came into my room, closed the door, and showed me what she'd found. That was humiliation enough. I wished the floor would open up and swallow me. She told me that the magazine was going into the burn barrel, but gave back the poems. Then she left the room and never mentioned it again. Oh, but not before reminding me that ‘exquisite' is spelled with an ‘e' at the beginning
and
the end.”

I laughed again. That sounded so much like Mrs. Swenson.

“I always did like your mom.”

“She liked you, too, said you were one of the best students she ever had. As long as you're going to be in town for a while, why don't you drop by the house and see her? In fact, why don't you come for Thanksgiving?”

“Oh, I couldn't impose,” I said, lifting my hand.

“You wouldn't be imposing. Mom always cooks enough for an army. And think of it this way—you'd be doing my dad a favor, saving him from one more round of dried-out turkey sandwiches. You've got to spend the holiday somewhere, don't you?” He cranked the steering wheel to the right, heading south on Bayshore. “What do you usually do for Thanksgiving?”

“Last year I ate a turkey wrap, sweet potato fries, and a Diet Coke in my hotel room while reading polling data and watching a rerun of
Dance Moms
.”

“Gee. Sounds like fun,” Peter said flatly.

“You're sweet to invite me, but I can't. Barney always had Thanksgiving with Alice, and this will be the first year . . .”

I let the rest of the sentence fade away and looked out the window, remembering that after Thanksgiving came Christmas, the holiday that I'd always spent in sun-kissed Orlando, or Miami, or Charleston, or Bermuda, accompanied by my work and my sister.

This year I'd spend the twenty-fifth of December in frigid, frozen Nilson's Bay, with only Cousin Barney for company. The first year alone.

“So bring him along,” Peter said simply. “My folks would love to have him too. Mom loves a full table. Seriously.”

We turned into the parking lot of the church. Peter pulled up next to my car and set the parking brake.

“I don't know. I should really talk to Barney first.”

“Fair enough.”

We got out of the truck. I reached for my suitcase, but Peter beat me to it.

“I got it,” he said, pulling it out of the truck bed and carrying it to my car.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

I meant it too. It was nice of him to make sure I got home safely and then come to collect me the next day. I was sure he had better things to do.

“No problem,” he said. “And, Luce, that stuff you told me last night? What happens in The Library stays in The Library. So don't worry about it, okay?”

“Thanks.”

He bobbed his head, just once, and started to walk away from me.

“Peter!”

He spun around, looking startled.

“Yeah?”

“I . . . I just. Never mind,” I said, realizing how panicked I had sounded. I waved my hand and let out a nervous laugh. “It's stupid.”

“No. What is it?” Peter took a step toward me.

“I'm going to be here until New Year's. Seven weeks.”

Still frowning, he nodded. “Uh-huh. So?”

“So . . .” I spread out my hands. “What am I supposed to
do
while I'm here?”

Peter took another step toward me, looking bemused, and kissed me on the forehead.

“Live,” he said with a grin. “Just live.”

Chapter 16

L
akeview Trail, the aptly named road leading to a cluster of homes on the shores of Lake Michigan, about a mile and a half north of downtown Nilson's Bay, hadn't changed a bit. It was still narrow, unpaved, and studded with deep potholes that rendered the fifteen-mile-per-hour speed limit sign unnecessary.

The houses on Lakeview Trail had been summer cottages back in the twenties and thirties. They were small and rustic and sat on tiny lots. The original buyers were working-class folk who couldn't afford more and were satisfied with simple accommodations in glorious surroundings.

The only reason our cottage sat on such a large plot of prime land, jutting out from the shore with an unparalleled view, was because my family, some of the earliest inhabitants of Nilson's Bay, had once owned more than fifty acres on the lakeshore. At some point, they realized they could make more money by selling the land than cultivating it, and so they did, one parcel at a time, as financial necessity required, until there were only two acres—the best two acres—left.

That was the land on which my ancestors had built their cottage. It had been passed down through the generations, eventually to my mother, then my sister, and now, assuming I could stick out the ridiculous required residency, to me.

By the time Alice and I were born, the neighborhood was settled. People were always upgrading, of course, adding a carport, a deck, vinyl siding, extra insulation, or improved plumbing, whatever was required to turn summer cottages into year-round residences; about half of the houses were now occupied full-time. But that was as far as it went. People fixed up what they had or bought, but nobody built new.

Until now.

It wasn't yet common—far from virulent—and perhaps only one plot in ten had succumbed, but here and there among the little cottages, I could see brand-new homes built on land laid bare when the old houses had been razed and the ground scraped clean, until no trace or memory of the former dwelling remained. These new homes were far from rustic. They were expansive. And expensive.

They gobbled up every available inch of ground, creating maximum square footage for their owners, people who lived here four or six or eight weeks a year but who had decided they couldn't do so without replicating their luxurious urban lifestyle amid this cluster of cabins on a remote piece of land in rural Wisconsin. The houses they built on those teeny cottage-sized lots had double garages and double entry doors, paved driveways and palladium windows. One had a wrought-iron gate across the driveway with an electronic keypad to keep away intruders.

“What intruders?” I said aloud as I drove past. “What are they so afraid of?”

It was crazy. And depressing.

 

I rounded the curve and took a left into the driveway, pulling up behind a blue 2001 Subaru, Alice's car, which had once been Dad's car. I twisted the key to turn off the ignition and sat there looking at the blue bumper, the not-too-clean rear window with a pink stuffed teddy bear suction-cupped on the inside.

It was strange to see it sitting there in the carport, right where Alice had left it, strange to think that both of its former owners were gone. I sat there for a while trying to get my head around it, but finally got out of the car and circled around the house to take a look at the lake, walking across the long expanse of lawn to stand at the water's edge, the spot where, if you keep your face fixed forward, you don't see a single object made by man and can imagine yourself in splendid isolation, the first human to draw breath here. Or perhaps the last.

It was breathtaking, especially on such a crisply cold but bright and sunny day in an autumn that was lingering long. Every breath of wind raised sparkling ripples on the endless blue-gray surface of the water and rattled the leaves of the trees, releasing showers of still brilliant yellow, gold, orange, and red foliage that floated to the ground like little flags of welcome.

I had always loved this view. Even as a little girl, running along on this same stretch of grass, playing tag or hide-and-seek or capture the flag, I would sometimes stop in my tracks, chest heaving for breath, just to look at the water, to watch the gulls soaring and calling overhead or the sun dipping toward the horizon. As a child, I hadn't yet heard the phrase “million-dollar view” and didn't understand that not everyone was lucky enough to have this kind of natural beauty right outside the door. And even this morning, when Peter had informed me that the lowball sales price of these two isolated acres would top four hundred thousand, I balked at such a figure.

But now, standing at the water's edge and gazing out on that truly magnificent vista, I understood completely.

I could have stood there for an hour staring at the lake, but it was chilly and I didn't have a proper coat, so after a few minutes I went back to the car, got my suitcase out of the trunk, and unlocked the cottage door.

I felt so odd, taking that first step through the door, like an intruder. The house was so incredibly quiet and still. It had never been like that when I was growing up.

When I'd come through that door as a girl, the first assault upon my ears was the barking of several dogs. We never had fewer than three in residence. Dad was a vet and tended to get on with animals better than with people. The next layers of the Toomey noise collage might include a roaring vacuum cleaner, feet walking on the poorly insulated floors of the upstairs bedrooms, a toilet flushing or a running shower in the bathroom, also upstairs, a banging of screen doors as kids and dogs ran in and out of the house, or Alice practicing an etude on our upright piano. There was always noise, always somebody around, always the sense of the house being too small and too crowded. But now . . .

I stood in the foyer—really just a four-foot square of beige linoleum, a place for people to take off their snow boots or wipe their feet before walking onto the beige carpeting—and breathed in that strangely familiar aroma.

The house smelled like pine and vanilla and wool and mothballs and cooked meat and twenty other things I couldn't pinpoint but knew so well. It was the scent I'd never thought of as a scent because, growing up, it was all just air to me, the thing I inhaled and exhaled every day of my life. I had to go away and come back to recognize it as something unique to our house, but there it was. And all these years later, it still hung in the air unaltered, the smell of us.

I left my suitcase and briefcase on the floor, slipped off my shoes, the way Mom had taught me to, and walked across the carpeting and into the kitchen.

It was perfectly tidy, not a dish in the sink or a crumb on the countertop. Aside from the door shelves of condiments and such, the refrigerator was empty and perfectly clean. The floor was clean, too, and the dishwasher empty. A fresh kitchen towel hung over the handle of the oven door. I wondered if someone had come in to clean. Barney had said that one of the neighbors was taking care of the cats. Maybe whoever had done that had also taken it upon themselves to tidy the house as well.

The piano stood against the dining room wall opposite the china cabinet, where it always had. I found middle C and played a scale, pressing firmly against the ivory keys to bring forth the sound. It was tinny and a little out of tune. Maybe that was because of the humidity and being so close to the lake. Or maybe it just wasn't a very good piano.

When I was little, the house had been full of voices: my mother talking on the phone, planning the next neighborhood party or parish fund-raiser, Dad telling a patient how to get a Labrador to swallow a pill, Alice and me arguing over possession of the remote, yelling for Mom to referee, my parents' voices, sharp and shrill, overlapping in argument.

Back then, I used to play my music as loud as I could so I couldn't hear them fight. Now I'd have given anything to hear their voices, even raised in anger, anything to banish the silence. Had Alice wished the same thing? How had she endured the silence all these years? No wonder she kept trying so hard to get me to come home.

I circled back through the kitchen to the living room, past the stairway and hallway, and into the family room, looking at the pictures on the walls, the arrangements of objects on shelves, observing them from a distance the way you look at displays in a museum of history, artifacts that raised as many questions as they answered and had but little to do with me—except for the book, the papers and pencils. These were the only things in the house that hadn't been tidied up.

They sat on a little table in the family room next to a chintz-covered lounge chair, angled toward the window, facing the black walnut tree we used to climb when we were little.

The book,
The Encyclopedia of Animals,
was open, face-down, to an entry on meerkats. She'd been drawing meerkats, not copying the photographs but sketching them in completely different postures and groupings. The drawing pencils, in black, gray, tan, and brown, lay scattered haphazardly on the half-finished drawing, and a cream-colored afghan, another of my mother's creations, lay in a careless heap on the floor right next to the chair. It was as if Alice had only just gotten up to answer the phone, or the door, or run outside to get the mail and might return any minute.

I heard footsteps on the porch. My heart jumped and I spun around, startled. I heard children's voices, little-girl voices, high and shrill, and the sound of the doorbell. When I opened the door I saw two gray plastic boxes sitting on the porch and two little girls running away across the yard.

One was about eight, wearing jeans and a Packers sweatshirt two sizes too big. The other was four or five, wearing a red sweater, pink tutu over black spandex shorts, and bright pink rain boots.

I called out to the girls and the older one turned around.

“Mom told us to bring back the cats!” she shouted while jogging backward. “She said to feed Freckles separately because she's too fat and will eat all of Dave's food if you let her.”

“Thanks!” I shouted. “What's your name?”

“Ophelia!” she cried and then turned and ran off, adding to the distance between herself and the younger girl, who was running as fast as her stubby, rainboot-clad legs could carry her, the pink tutu bouncing with every step.

I called out again, asking their mother's name, but Ophelia disappeared through a little patch of pines, leaving behind the younger one.

“Felia!” the baby whined when her sister sprinted away. “That's not fair! Wait for me!”

Another person might have thought it was sweet and perhaps even smiled as they watched the ballerina in gum boots flounce off in pursuit of her older sister. But the sight of that little one chasing along behind the sister who so easily outpaced her made my throat feel suddenly tight.

There's no point in thinking about things you can't change, and so I don't. I try not to. But as I stood on the porch of our old family home and watched that little girl lumber off through the trees, crying for her sister to wait, the memories crowded too close.

My rain boots had been pink too. I, too, had been the second sister, forever falling behind, running the unwinnable race.