The Sister Season (16 page)

“Enough is too much.”

C
laire couldn’t wait to get home. Even if it meant sitting on that long flight from Kansas City to L.A. between a set of colicky twin babies, she would welcome it.

She’d never heard of such a thing, burying a man nearly a week after his death. She couldn’t help but get grossed out by the idea. The only images she could conjure all involved extensive skin decay and smells that made her sick to her stomach without even actually smelling them.

Dead people weren’t like canned chili; they had a pretty short shelf life.

She supposed she understood why her mom was waiting so long to bury the old son of a bitch. When you had a personality like Robert Yancey’s, and you found someone who actually wanted to befriend your mean ass, you waited around for that friend to be there when you died. Joe Dale was probably the only person who would show up to Robert’s funeral for any reason other than to silently bid good riddance to bad rubbish.

But still. She didn’t want to be here anymore. This place was toxic.

Not that she expected a reunion with her sisters to be something out of a Disney movie or anything. But . . . shit.

To be fair, it wasn’t going spectacularly bad with Julia. Julia seemed to have left what happened ten years ago behind. Like maybe she wasn’t wholeheartedly believing Maya’s bullshit anymore. Like maybe she might be willing to give Claire the benefit of the doubt. Or like maybe she had her own shit to worry about. She had bigger problems taking up her attention, which was fine as far as Claire was concerned. She didn’t need someone getting all up in her business.

Claire wasn’t heartless. She was really worried about Julia’s problems, actually. She wished Maya would get her head out of her ass long enough to see that Julia’s problems were big too. She had a suicidal kid.

God, a suicidal kid. Claire had a hard time even wrapping her head around what that must feel like. Queenie, struggling. She never would have thought it possible.

Claire wondered what would happen if the kid really did it. What would happen to Julia and to their family? She shuddered just thinking about it. She knew loss. Nobody else in the family would believe it, but Claire knew loss well. Her belly ached with loss every single stinking day.

As if on cue, she sat back on her bed and reached into the front pocket of her backpack again. For about the billionth time since she got here, she rummaged around until her hands landed on a small navy blue box, velvety and cool.

She pulled the box out and stared at it, afraid to open it. Afraid not to.

Afraid that no matter what she did, she would never make the hurt go away. Never.

She didn’t open it. She didn’t need to. She’d opened it enough times. She’d been gutted by what was inside over and over again.

She grunted and stuffed it into her backpack again, zipped it closed with ferocity. She couldn’t do this. Not now. Not today. Not after that scene with Maya storming out of the den and then their mom getting that strange gift from their father. Not after her mom’s breakdown in the kitchen that nearly burned down the house. Not after the silent, awkward makeshift breakfast—cold cereal and some fruit Claire had cut up on the fly after throwing away the burnt mess on the kitchen stove. Nobody had seemed into it anymore. If they ever had been. Why couldn’t they just heave the old man into a landfill and call it done so they could all get out of here?

She slipped into her yoga pants with their weird clinginess. The bottoms were still wet from the night before when she’d walked to the pond.

Her pond, really. Had it ever been anyone’s but hers?

She couldn’t resist that pond. She’d been a swimmer her whole life, had always loved the way the water felt against her, like it was a part of her skin. An extension of herself. She’d lifeguarded at the lake, had been on the high school swim team, and had lived like an otter in the Yancey Farm pond since she was old enough to doggy-paddle. It was her sanctuary.

She’d met Bradley at the lake, in fact, when she was lifeguarding all those years ago. He’d hounded her, always sitting at the bottom of her chair, always asking her questions, flirting with her. When his friends were around, he’d make crude jokes and sometimes she’d laugh. He was cute in the same way a puppy is cute. She’d played it up sometimes, puffed out her chest when she stood to stretch, spread her thighs luxuriously when she uncrossed her legs. She’d thought he noticed, but then he began dating her sister instead.

At first she was crushed, and remained aloof to him. Anyone who was into her uptight sister would never be a good match for her anyway. But then she noticed that he would follow her to the pond when Maya wasn’t around. She would pull up onto the bank after a swim and see his shadow skittering in the woods.

“You can come out, you know,” she’d called one day, lying on her back in the dirt, still breathing heavy from her backstroke, letting the sun soak into her bones.

He’d come slinking from the trees like a guilty child.

“Does my sister know you come down here to watch me swim?”

He shook his head. “She’s on a run.”

“Then why are you here?” She opened one eye, squinting against the sun, and turned her head so she could see him.

He swallowed, looking truly miserable, and then gazed at her with a look so intense it made her want to curl up and shield herself. “You’re so beautiful,” he answered.

“Don’t be gross. You’re dating Maya,” she said matter-of-factly. “So you can forget it if you think you’re going to get anywhere.” And she meant it.

But he’d kept coming around anyway. Sometimes back into the trees with Maya, where they didn’t think Claire could see what they were doing. Maya may not have known it, but Claire understood that he was watching her swim lazily back and forth the whole time. Sometimes he hung back in the trees on his own, just watching, always watching. And sometimes he would sit on the bank and ask her questions.

“Why do you come down here every day?”

“To get away. To swim. Why do you?”

“To watch you swim.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“I can’t help it. I’m in love with you.”

“I should tell my sister.” But she never would, because she knew that it would break Maya’s heart. And she knew that nothing would ever come of his following her around. What harm was there in letting him watch? Plus, she sometimes enjoyed the company. He was her friend.

“What are you trying to get away from?” he would ask her.

“The same thing Maya is. Him.”

“That bad, huh?”

“You have no idea.”

“Tell me.”

“Doesn’t Maya?”

“Not really. I want to hear it from you.”

So she did. Day after day she told Bradley about her father, about his abuse. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she pulled her swimsuit strap up or down or to the side a few inches to show him a bruise. She told him about what Robert did to Maya. And somehow she felt like, by telling him, she made Bradley fall even more deeply in love with Maya, who experienced and felt and stowed away all the same injustices she did, but did so with a sturdy grace. While Claire whined and raged, Maya gutted it out and carved out a great life for herself.

In some ways Bradley was her best friend. The one she told everything. The one she trusted with her secrets. And in some ways the pond was their spot.

Even in the winter Claire loved the pond. She loved sliding across the thin layer of ice in her boots, tempting the ice to crack, wondering what it would be like to swim under that layer of protection, the ice between her and the air. And when the ice got thick, she loved putting on skates and twirling and jumping and daring herself to test gravity over and over again. She loved sitting on a blanket at its edge, just thinking. She loved imagining the fish underneath, staring up at her with their bug eyes, their mouths sucking, sucking, sucking.

When she’d come home for her father’s funeral, all she’d wanted was that sanctuary. That place to go to think, even if it wasn’t her father she was thinking about this time. It was truly the only reason she’d come back. Not to pay respects to him, nor to beat her head against the wall trying to connect with her sisters, not even for her mother. She’d come back for the space, the perspective.

The first night she’d gone out and sat on the bank, watching the moonlight shimmer over the ice, thinking about Michael, about the mess she’d left behind in California. She’d damn near frozen out there in her shorts, but she didn’t care. The creaks and pops of the trees around her, the smell of the dirt under her, the feel of the blanket around her . . . It was as if she’d been transported back in time to her childhood. It was as if she’d gone back to the only place she’d felt comfortable and at home.

That was, until the day Maya caught them there, ten years ago.

Bradley and Maya had only been married a short time. Maya was so full of herself and her marriage Claire could hardly stand to be around her. It was as if Maya had landed some great coup or something. As if she and Bradley had invented marriage.

“You should really stop fooling around with all those boys, Claire,” she’d say. “Pick one and get serious.”

“I don’t want to get serious. I’m having fun.”

Maya would hold her hand out, spread her fingers wide, admiring her ring. “Marriage is where the real fun is, though. Having a man like Bradley living to please you is just . . .” She would sigh deep and dreamily, as if about to break out in song. “Bliss.”

Meanwhile, Bradley was still showing up at the pond’s edge. Practically the second their honeymoon flight had touched down in Kansas City, there he was, standing in the trees, watching Claire do the backstroke, his jaw slack. Was this bliss?

“Oh, Claire, you really don’t know what you’re missing, to have an amazing man adore you and only you.”

The more Maya aggravated Claire, the more she played it up, pulling herself up out of the water sexily, arching her body as she floated on her back, drying herself off with her ass facing the woods, bending straight-legged and seductive until her fingers brushed her toes. She knew he was watching, and she knew he was loving it all. And she knew what she was doing was wrong on some level, but she couldn’t quite pinpoint why.

But then there was the argument about the car.

Claire had wanted to take it into town to pick up a new swimsuit. Hers had been looking a little threadbare. She’d asked her father, who promptly said no.

“I don’t need to be letting no teenager take a ten-thousand-dollar piece of machinery out on the road to do God knows what.”

“Dad, I’m eighteen. I’m not a little kid. And I’ve had my license for two years now. I’ll be safe. And it’s not God-knows-what. I just need to go shopping.”

“I said no. I don’t expect to have to say it again, damn it!”

But Claire had been relentless. Something about his refusal to hear her out made her all the more adamant that she needed that car. He was unfair and pigheaded and stupid and she was sick and tired of backing down to him.

She followed him into the house, where he shucked off his work gloves and started straight for the freezer, where he kept his bourbon.

“You’re being unfair,” she lobbied.

His eyes hardened on her and, not for the first time, she felt real fear. This man was strong and lean-muscled. And mean. He could kill her if he wanted to, and she guessed he wanted to more often than she’d ever known. Still, she gathered herself tall and followed him as he walked toward the stairs, taking swigs of bourbon as he went.

“You’re being unfair,” she tried again, only louder. “You never listen to anything I say. You never listen to anything anyone says.”

“Girl, I said no, now shut the hell up,” he boomed, still walking, but Claire could see his shoulders tensing. She didn’t care. She’d come too far to care. She was nobody’s “girl” and she was fed up with cowering in the face of his abuse. She couldn’t take it anymore.

“You shut the hell up!” she shouted to his back. “You are nothing but a hardheaded jerk! And nobody in this house loves you. Not one of us can even stand you. How does that make you feel, huh? Knowing that the only reason people stay around you is that they’re afraid of you? Well, I’m not afraid of you. Not anymo—”

She didn’t get to finish, as he reeled around so quickly she never even saw his hand coming. She felt it, though, as it landed across the side of her face so thunderingly hard it knocked her off her feet. She skidded backward on her butt almost into the front room, her head buzzing with shock and surprise. It wasn’t until minutes later that the sting would finally break through the numbness. It wasn’t until half an hour later that the bruising would break through to the top of the skin, a dark mark across her cheekbone that would stay there for weeks.

She gaped at the retreating back of her father as he trudged up the stairs, as if laying out his daughter had no more slowed him down than stepping on an ant. Her mom appeared at the top of the stairs, peering down at Claire curiously, as if she couldn’t quite figure out why Claire was on the floor.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Without a word, Robert reached out and shoved Elise forward, tipping her down the staircase. Her arms wheeled as she caught herself, just falling down a few steps, on her knees. A door slammed from within the shadows at the top of the steps and then it was just the two of them, mom and daughter, both breathing heavily and staring at each other in embarrassment and surprise.

After a few moments, Elise pulled herself to standing, one of her shins skinned and bleeding, and walked the final few steps down to where Claire lay.

“Are you okay?” she asked, her voice soft. She looked over her shoulder as she said it, almost as if she was afraid that he was there listening in.

Claire nodded. “I’m fine. But . . . I can’t take it anymore, Mom. I can’t do this anymore.”

Elise nodded. “I know,” was all she said.

Claire had gotten up and gone to her bedroom, pulled on her swimsuit, and headed straight to the pond, where her face was cooled by the water.

When she finally climbed out, Bradley was standing there, just like always, his wedding band catching the sun and glinting at her.