The Sister Season (18 page)

“I wasn’t—,” Claire began, but clamped her mouth shut. Now was not the time to insinuate herself into their fight. No matter how wrong her sister was.

“I could smell them on you, for God’s sake. But I pretended I knew nothing. How stupid you must have thought I was.”

“I never thought you were stupid,” Bradley said. He looked up at her at last, his eyes watery. “I felt sorry for you. I pitied you for what I was doing to you.”

This was the wrong thing to say. Claire knew it before the blood had fully gathered in Maya’s face. Maya was not one to be pitied. Maya would never be okay with giving up that strength. Maya would see it as a loss of control, and if there was one thing Claire knew about her sister, it was that control had been the only way she’d made it through those bleak, dark years of childhood. What she could control, their father couldn’t.

“Don’t you dare pity me, you bastard,” Maya said, her voice going dangerously low and ominous.

Bradley’s eyebrows cinched together; he had the balls to look annoyed. “Stop with the name-calling, Maya, okay? We’re both adults here. Let’s discuss this like adults. I’ve apologized and I’ve broken it off and—”

“Don’t tell me what not to do!” Maya shrieked. Julia jumped, pulling both legs up into the chair with her. She looked embarrassed to even be witnessing this scene. “Do not fucking tell me what to do!”

“Lower your voice. You’re making a fool of yourself. Claire and Julia are sitting right here.” He gestured helplessly toward the sisters.

“You!” Maya screeched, jabbing her French-tipped finger in his face. “
You
made a fool of me! You are not an adult. You’re a cancer! You’re a fucking cancer and you will kill me if I don’t cut you out!”

Claire’s heart sank. This, Claire thought, was the reason why she couldn’t put that ring on her finger. This was the reason she couldn’t say yes.

Thank God the children were outside and weren’t hearing this. Her sister seemed like she was on the edge, screaming about cancer, raving about Bradley’s “fuck buddy.” Claire wished she could take it all back, turn back time to when she and Maya were friends. To a time before Bradley, when Claire could stand up and wrap her arms around her sister and tell her everything would be okay. That it didn’t seem like it now, but a year from now she would look back on today and think,
Thank God I made it past that horrible time.

“Stop it!” Bradley was yelling back, and for a second Claire and Julia simply looked at each other, eyes wide, as if they’d stumbled into something they wished they could get out of, but without any idea of how to exit the situation gracefully.

They began shouting over each other.

“...can’t believe I let you do this to me . . .”

“If you’d just stop yelling for a minute . . .”

“...tried so hard to be perfect for you and you never gave a shit . . .”

“I didn’t want a perfect wife!”

“I should never have married you! I wasted my life . . .”

“...the kids will hear you if you don’t stop screaming.”

And then Maya, who’d been so steely as if to appear almost as a statue throughout this, finally broke down. Her voice came out in ragged chokes, tears raging from her eyes.

“Leave! Just leave!” she began screeching, pointing toward the door. Bradley was struck silent, his face red, his eyes bulging. He shifted his weight from hip to hip, breathing hard, but when he didn’t move to her instruction, Maya stomped around him and up the stairs to their bedroom. A few moments later she reappeared at the top of the steps with a suitcase. She heaved it with a grunt and it sailed through the air and hit Bradley in the back of the legs with a mighty thump. “Get! The! Fuck! Out!” she screamed from the top of the stairs. “Go home, get your shit out of my house, and don’t come back. Ever!”

She ended the last bit on such a scream that everyone in the front room—Julia, Claire, and Bradley, his back still to the stairs—flinched. Then she retreated to their room and slammed the door.

For a few minutes there was nothing. No noise. No movement.

Claire didn’t know what to do. Say something? What? What did you say after witnessing something like that? Go to her sister? As if her sister would have anything to do with her. Go to Bradley? He would be receptive—maybe too receptive—and the last thing she needed was to “side” with him. Pretty much nobody in the house would understand. Maybe not even her.

Finally, Bradley bent, turned and picked up the suitcase. Without a word, he walked toward the front door, pulled his jacket off the coat tree, and left the house. A few minutes later Claire heard a car door shut and the sound of an engine gunning and then gravel stirring under tires.

“What was . . . ,” she began, but Julia shook her head at her sister perfunctorily, her eyes looking meaningfully to the door between the kitchen and the front room. Claire followed Julia’s gaze and saw all three children—Eli, Molly, and Will—watching the scene.

“How long?” Claire whispered.

“Enough,” Julia answered, looking down into her lap balefully.

Enough,
Claire thought,
is too much
.

H
is name was Michael and he was an ER doc.

Claire met him when she stepped on a shard of glass on the beach, slicing the bottom of her foot open during her roommate’s birthday party. The pain wasn’t too bad, probably because she was half-drunk, but the cut wouldn’t stop bleeding and she was pretty sure she would need stitches.

“God, I’m sorry to ruin your birthday,” she’d lamented over and over to Judy, her roommate, as she’d lolled in the front seat of Judy’s car, blood leaking out onto a sponge that somebody rounded up from somewhere and rubber-banded to her foot. The sponge was filthy and it stank, and on a sober night Claire would have never put it on an open wound, but that night she was sloshy and carefree, trying to forget about her ugly breakup with Rob the Terminally Boring Investment Banker two nights before.

“Don’t worry about it,” Judy said, slurring her words a bit, and Claire had a distant alarm bell go off in her head about her friend’s ability to drive. “I was getting tired of volleyball anyway.”

“Yeah, but Ben was totally into you tonight.”

Judy laughed. “We were probably about half a minute away from a hard-core make-out session.”

Claire pushed her head back against the seat again and closed her eyes. “God, I’m sorry,” she repeated.

“No big. He’ll wait for me.”

When they rounded the corner into the hospital parking lot, Claire said, “Just pull up to ER. I’ll probably be here for hours. You can go back to the party and I’ll get a cab when I’m done.”

“You sure?” Judy had asked, and Claire had nodded, pulling herself out of the front seat, trying to steady herself while the sidewalk was lurching and she was trying not to walk on the ball of her foot.

But Claire hadn’t needed to get a cab that night. The adorable doctor with the dark hair and tan, gentle hands who stitched up her foot had offered to drive her home.

“Just don’t tell anybody,” he said. “I could get into big trouble.”

Right away Claire knew that Michael was different from all the other men she’d dated, and it scared her. She’d always prided herself on the way she’d so efficiently protected her heart, at first by necessity, an eighteen-year-old, fresh off the farm, in a new, big city all alone. The vastness of California had frightened her. The people. The possibilities. They all seemed so dangerous, even deadly. She felt like she was constantly scurrying—scurrying to get groceries, scurrying to work, scurrying to the beach, just hoping to go unnoticed. The men, they were everywhere! And constantly on the make. She dated more men her first six months in California than she had her whole life in Missouri.

But she always feared them. When would one of them hit her? When would he call her fat or ugly, tell her she wasn’t good enough? And would she have the guts to stand up to an abuser twice? Somehow she doubted it.

But as she grew more comfortable with her surroundings, she began to get more into a groove. She liked being unattached. She liked having that sheath of protection around her heart. She would be hurt by no one, because she would be damned before she’d let it happen.

She’d never fallen in love before, but even that first night, when he touched her foot so gently as he bandaged it, and when he helped her hobble into her apartment, Claire knew that Michael would be different. He had that soul—that one soul—that matched hers and that she would be unable to keep out.

He stopped by the following Monday.

She’d been cleaning, her hair mostly captured in a bandanna, her running shorts full of holes, when the buzzer rang.

“Who is it?” she shouted into the microphone, her voice still on louder-than-the-vacuum mode.

“Michael Bowman,” came the answer.

Her brow furrowed. She tried to remember if she knew a Michael Bowman. The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but the name totally did not. Maybe he was someone she’d met at one of Judy’s beach parties and she’d been too tipsy to remember having met him. She pressed the button on the buzzer to talk. “Do I know you?” she called down.

The voice responded, “Um, it’s Dr. Bowman. From the emergency room?” He said the last as a question, as if he wasn’t quite sure if that was where he was really from or not.

Claire’s finger jerked away from the intercom button as if it were on fire. One hand involuntarily flying up to the bandanna on her head, she raced to her living room window, which stretched across the front of the building, allowing for a perfect view of the front stoop. She used one finger to split the Venetian blinds just slightly and peered down between them.

Oh, God, it was him. The hot doctor from the ER who’d brought her home Saturday night. The one she thought she’d felt a connection with. Standing there in scrubs and a gray T-shirt, his hair tousled and shiny in the sunlight. She watched as he leaned forward and rang the buzzer again.

Unsure what to do, Claire raced back to the intercom and pressed the button. “I’m here . . . um . . . just . . . can you give me a min . . . I’ll be right . . . come on up.”

She did something she’d never done before—pressed the button to unlock the front door to let a strange man walk right up to her apartment. Her heart raced with the danger of it all. And the excitement. There was definitely excitement. Something about him made her feel exhilarated and windswept, like she’d just gotten off of an amusement park ride.

Quickly, she glanced down at what she was wearing, and remembered that she hadn’t even had time to brush on a little mascara. She looked like death on a platter. But he was already knocking on her front door; there was nothing she could do about it now.

She walked to the door, waited just a beat before opening it, then swung it all the way open with a smile. “Dr. Bowman! Hi!” She stepped aside to welcome him in. He stepped over the threshold awkwardly, his eyes pointed toward her foot.

“I just thought I’d check to see how you were doing.”

“Great,” she answered, though she held her foot up just slightly off the ground like an injured animal, because for some reason that felt like the right thing to do.

“Good. How’s the pain?”

She shrugged, trying to ignore the flipping and turning sensation in her stomach. It was almost as if she could feel his . . . vibe . . . coming through the air toward her. She remembered being attracted to him in the hospital, but she’d also been drunk. To have the same—no, stronger—feelings with him nearby when she was stone-cold sober was surprising. “It’s not bad. Sucks that it’s on the bottom of my foot, though. Hard to do much of anything.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Mind if I take a look?”

At first she wasn’t sure what he meant, and her face burned with the thought,
Please do. Look all you want
. Then she realized he wanted to check the wound. “Oh, sure, okay,” she said and backed up to the futon and sat down, propping her foot up on the coffee table so that the bottom of it was facing him. He turned and closed the door, then loped over to the table, still never taking his eyes off of her foot, and knelt down.

“The wrapping help?” he asked, all business.

“I guess. It’s kind of a pain to put a shoe on. And I miss the beach.”

He grinned. “You love the beach, huh?”

“When you grow up your whole life in a dry, hot, muggy bowl of land, you love anything to do with water. The beach is like paradise to me.”

He wound the bandage around and around until her foot was bare. She wiggled her toes in relief. Only then did he look up at her, just briefly, and she thought maybe she saw the same crushy fluster in his face as she guessed she probably had in hers. “You grow up in the Midwest?” he asked.

She nodded. “Missouri. You?”

“Omaha. I thought I recognized a Missouri accent.”

“I don’t have an accent!” she protested, giggling. “Missourians don’t have accents.”

“Oh, yes, they do,” he said, poking and prodding around on her foot. For a moment she let herself imagine that he was giving her a foot massage, but the prick of pain she felt every so often when he hit a certain spot chased that image away.

“So you make house calls? How very nineteen-fifties of you.”

He chuckled. “Only for special cases,” he said. He glanced up at her and the glance, combined with his hands on her feet, practically melted her.

“Oh, well, what makes me so special?” she said, hoping that witty banter would make her sound much more confident than she felt.

But he didn’t answer. Kept his head down and began winding the bandage around her foot, rewrapping it. Claire noticed that the tops of his ears were flaming red. “Looks good,” he said, as if she’d never spoken. “Whoever gave you those stitches knew what he was doing.”

Their eyes met again, his mouth set in that reserved little grin. When he finished, he stood up.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I’ll let you get back to . . . whatever you were doing.”

She blushed, reminded of how dumpy she looked. “Cleaning,” she said. “And, gee, thanks.”

She walked him to the door, wanting nothing more than for him to stay.

“Actually,” she said, touching his arm. “Really, thanks. It was nice of you to come check on me.”

“And probably illegal or against at least a dozen privacy regulations. You’re not going to turn me in, are you?”

His grin was contagious, as was his awkwardness. Claire felt silly, like a smitten thirteen-year-old, but she couldn’t help herself. “Nope,” she said. “I’m actually thinking of getting injured again because the service is so great.”

He paused and her hand fell away from his arm as he reached for the doorknob. “Instead, you could just go to dinner with me,” he said. “Look on the bright side—you might choke. If your goal is to get back into the ER, that is. I do know the Heimlich.”

Claire laughed out loud. “Okay,” she said, feeling pleasure well up in her chest. “Deal.”

That had been almost a year ago, and they’d been practically inseparable ever since. Michael was romantic and beautiful, and Claire loved to drape herself across him, wondering what the world must look like through those long eyelashes, wondering what the world must feel like on the other side of those soft, precise fingers. He made love to her the way he stitched her foot—like nothing else in his world mattered at that moment, like he wanted to memorize her, like he was afraid of breaking her.

She fell for him. Despite her efforts not to, she fell. He was everything she wanted to be, everything she wanted to have.

And the thought of that scared the shit out of her.

She began pulling away from him about a month before her father died. She’d hoped it would make things easier. That he would stray, find someone better, someone who knew a thing or two about how to treat him, how to act in a relationship. Her heart hated it, but she hoped he would fade away.

Instead, he proposed.

He’d taken her to dinner at a little Thai place they frequented, where Claire adored the tofu pad thai and he drank sweaty bottles of Singha and their table was so small their knees touched.

Claire had been brooding, so confused and frightened about the fact that even though she’d been pulling away he’d only seemed to grow more concerned about her, had only given her more space, and had done it lovingly rather than resentfully. She didn’t know how to handle this, and feared that she would eventually have to break up with him, which she knew would break her own heart in the process. But better to break it now, she thought, than to wait for him to disappoint her later. To wait for him to beat her, call her names.

“So I’ve been thinking,” he said after his second beer. Claire had dunked a spring roll into peanut sauce, but was caught holding it midway to her mouth as her stomach dropped. He’d sounded so serious. Maybe this was it. Maybe he was going to finally dump her. The thought both relieved her and brought tears to the corners of her eyes. She set the roll on her plate and looked down at the table.

“I don’t blame you,” she murmured, and wondered if it was too late to stop him from doing this. If maybe she’d made a mistake by pulling away from him. She reached for his hand, swiped it with her finger, not yet ready to let it go.

He dipped his head to try to look into her eyes. “Blame me?”

“For breaking up with me,” she said. “I’ve been asking for it.”

He laughed, leaned to one side, and rooted around with his fingers in his front pocket. “I’m not breaking up with you,” he said. He pulled out a box and set it on the table between them. Claire looked at the box, her heart thunked once, hard, and then she looked up at him. “I’m proposing,” he said quietly, calmly, as if this was the most expected thing in the world.

He scooted his chair backward, palming the box and getting a very serious look on his face.

Claire jumped up out of her seat, the flimsy wooden chair flopping back onto the concrete floor behind her with a smack. Heads turned all around the restaurant and she felt even more panicked. This wasn’t how she wanted to do this. Not with everyone watching. Not with him clutching a ring box and looking like a lovesick little boy. Not with her heart ripping into shreds inside her chest. Not with her wanting to lie down and die.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

He stopped, looked confused. “What do you mean? It’s not five-star here, but I thought . . .”

“I’ve been so distant,” she said, almost to herself, as if trying to convince herself that this proposal was not her fault. “I’ve been pulling away from you.”

“You’ve been stressed. I haven’t been taking it personally. I love you.”

“Is that how it is, then? You just let someone treat you like shit because you love them? You just let them take and take and you let them abuse you and you let them betray you, and nobody is ever happy, because they’re all in love? Doesn’t that sound ridiculous to anyone but me? Isn’t it wrong?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean. You haven’t treated me like shit. We’re great together, Claire. I’ll make you so happy.”

“Don’t,” she said, her voice full of tears. She held out one hand toward him in a stop gesture. “I can’t . . .” She took a deep breath. “Please don’t ask me to marry you.”

“Why not?”