The Winters in Bloom (24 page)

I just found out this morning that my dad and stepmother are dragging me on their vacation to Colorado against my will, so I’m going to be offline for the next two weeks. We’re going on some wilderness adventure. Ugh! I have two little half brothers that I’ll be stuck in the backseat with. I can’t stand them, but as you always say, such is life.

Talk to you soon I hope.

Hannah

Courtney would have been very skeptical about Hannah’s vacation claim if the girl hadn’t mentioned two half brothers in the backseat. It sounded like such a teenage thing to say, at least from what she could remember of being that age. She herself had only one brother, and he was so much older that they had never gone on vacations together, much less in a car, but if they had, she would have said the same thing.

At the time she was too upset to consider the fact that she’d told Hannah about her feelings for her annoyingly successful brother Christopher, the film producer. She’d also told Hannah about Liz’s wilderness adventures in New Mexico. She’d even told Hannah about a few of the long vacations she’d been forced to go on with her parents when she was a teenager.

Courtney wasn’t thinking about how well Hannah knew her, making it easy for the girl to construct a lie that she would believe. But even if she had seen through the lie immediately, what could she have done differently? She didn’t know how to get hold of Hannah’s parents. The girl’s aunt didn’t have any relationship with Hannah, nor did she seem to want one.

It was a little shocking to Courtney that David’s “perfect” wife had not only ignored her sister but also rejected her niece. It made her wonder what Kyra was really like. Not that it was any of her business, but she couldn’t help worrying what this meant for Michael. She wanted the little boy who looked so much like Joshua to have a good mother, a nice home, everything.

She wrote back to Hannah within minutes of receiving the girl’s email.
Please don’t disappear. I’m going to worry until I hear that you are back from Colorado
. At the end of the email, she added,
Your aunt has no idea what she’s missing out on, not having you in her life.

TWENTY-ONE

I
n the
middle of Kyra’s junior year in college, her sister mentioned that she’d missed a period. Amy figured it was just a product of her crazy life, working all night and traveling with the band, and, Kyra thought, thinner and more hyper than she’d ever been—though definitely not on drugs. Kyra had spied on her for months after Zach said her sister was using; she was sure about this. But when Amy started throwing up whenever she smelled hamburgers or bacon or basically anything greasy, she peed on a stick and discovered the depressing truth. She’d been so careful with birth control, but as Kyra, the math major, knew, birth control only has a high probability of working. Someone has to be part of that unlucky three percent.

Kyra made the phone call and set up the appointment. She offered to go, but Amy said she wanted to do this alone. It was scheduled for Wednesday, and Kyra skipped her philosophy class to take care of her sister when she got home. When Amy walked into the apartment a few hours later, Kyra was sitting on the wooden chair by the bookshelves she and Amy had made from concrete blocks and pine boards. She had a pamphlet in her lap about the
abortion experience
that she’d been trying and failing to comprehend.

Her sister threw her coat on the kitchen cabinet and plopped down on the wicker chair by the window and arranged her ever-present blue blanket on her knees. She joked that she’d turned into Linus, but the truth was she was always cold now that she was so thin.

“I went to the address you gave me at ten on the dot, like you told me,” Amy said. She pushed her hair behind her ears, but one side fell out again when she looked down at her hands. “They got me on the table, you know, ready to go.” She pulled the blanket up so that everything but her face and blond hair disappeared into the blue cloud. “I hope you’re not mad, sis. I just couldn’t do it.”

Kyra was so relieved—and so surprised she was relieved—that she couldn’t find her voice. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized how much she’d hated being the one pushing her sister to get an abortion. When she was ten years old she’d marched with the anti-abortion crowd in St. Louis on the anniversary of Roe versus Wade. Amy was there, too; the whole Catholic grade school was there; but Kyra had really believed in the cause. She’d made her own sign using her stepmother’s red and black magic markers: “What If
Your
Mother Had Chosen Abortion?” By the time she was in high school, she wasn’t quite as confident that abortion was wrong, but she still thought it should be used only as a last resort. If the idea of having one herself was horrifying, the idea of her sister having one was almost as bad.

Amy being way too immature to be a mother wasn’t a good enough reason to qualify for a last resort, but Amy not knowing who the father was or even seeming to understand why knowing the father’s identity was important—that did qualify. A child needs a father, as Kyra had told her sister over and over. And when she recovered her ability to speak, she said it again while Amy and her blanket slumped down in the wicker chair.

“I get it,” Amy said, rubbing her thumb against her forehead. “And I do know who the father is.” She looked out the window though there was really nothing to see. It was a gloomy day in February: dreary and drizzling and threatening to ice up that night. “It’s Zach,” she said softly. “Who else?”

The question seemed strange. In the last few months, Amy had slept with Peanut and possibly Tim, in addition to having a one-night stand with some guy she’d met when the band was on the road. And these were only the ones Kyra knew about it.

She took a breath. “Are you sure?”

Her sister nodded.

Kyra put the useless pamphlet down. “Then you have to tell him.”

“I knew you’d say that, so I stopped at a pay phone outside the clinic.” She was still rubbing her forehead, like she had a headache. “He’s looking for an apartment for us right now.”

“Good,” Kyra said, but she leaned forward and covered her face with her hands. A moment later, she felt Amy’s arms around her. “Naturally, I told him I’m not moving anywhere without my sister.”

“You and Zach should stay here. It’s two bedrooms, perfect for a baby. I’ll move to a studio apartment closer to school.” She looked up at Amy, kneeling in front of her. “Please don’t argue with me.”

Of course Amy tried to persuade her anyway, but for once it didn’t work. By the middle of March, Kyra had moved out and Zach had moved in. Zach was predictably ecstatic. He cut back his school schedule and got a full-time job selling medical supplies to support them. A good thing, too, because when Amy was four and a half months pregnant and definitely showing, Peanut dropped her from his band. “People don’t come to clubs to see that,” Peanut said, pointing at her stomach, and proving what Kyra had always thought: Peanut was a total lowlife.

Zach pressured Amy to marry him, but she kept saying no—until Kyra told her sister that she had no choice. Zach’s new job had health insurance and a 401(k). It was the responsible thing to do. Amy reluctantly agreed, and Kyra served as a witness at their wedding in the courthouse. She would never forget how unhappy her sister looked that day.

To say the pregnancy was uneventful, though true on some level, would be to ignore how it must have felt to be Amy. She was alone in the apartment most of the time, with no school or band to distract her as her twenty-one-year-old body underwent the strange, necessary metamorphosis to accommodate a new life. Zach adored her, but it clearly wasn’t enough, though he remained confident that her sister would come around sooner or later. He never understood that Amy couldn’t seem to find a way to love him, no matter how hard she tried.

Kyra thought it was a serious flaw in her sister, that Amy failed to recognize how great Zach was. But she truly believed Amy was trying, until the hot afternoon when Amy was eight months pregnant, and she found out otherwise.

Zach was working nine to five at the medical supply company, and Kyra had been working all summer, too, as an actuarial clerk. It was a paid internship, but the only thing she’d learned was that she most definitely did not want to be an actuary when she graduated. By the middle of August, she was so sick of running programs of meaningless numbers and formulas that she decided to take the afternoon off, telling her supervisor that she was coming down with something. It wasn’t a lie. She was coming down with extreme ennui.

It was 97 degrees, according to the sign at the bank across from her office, and so humid that the leaves on the trees looked as droopy as Kyra felt. She thought about going to the mall and wandering around in the air-conditioning, but then she remembered her sister and how miserable she must be. Amy and Zach’s apartment had a window AC unit, but half the time the blower didn’t come on. The landlord was supposed to have replaced it weeks ago.

As Kyra climbed the stairs, she could hear music coming from inside the apartment, but when she knocked, Amy didn’t answer. She knocked again, harder, and when Amy still didn’t answer, she reached for the knob. Amy had left the door unlocked, as usual. Kyra said, “It’s me,” as she walked in. She could hear water running in the kitchen. The radio was playing, too, a Nirvana song. No wonder Amy hadn’t heard.

When she walked into the kitchen, she saw her sister awkwardly kneeling on a chair, which had been pushed over to the sink. Amy’s head was as close to the sink as she could get, given her huge baby bump. It was a ridiculous way to wash her hair, but that was what she was doing. Or, more precisely, that was what
some man
was doing for her. One of his hands was holding the nozzle of the spray hose, the other was pulling up sections of Amy’s hair, which had become much thicker since she got pregnant. She was always complaining that it was itchy, especially in the heat.

The first thing Kyra noticed was that the man looked old. He had gray hair and a graying beard and lines around his eyes and mouth. Some people probably considered him distinguished, and he was definitely well-off, judging by a very expensive-looking watch that was lying on the card table that served as Amy’s kitchen table, next to a briefcase that also looked expensive. But he was old enough to be their father. Literally. Their real father was forty-four. For all Kyra knew, this guy was older than their father.

He was wearing Amy’s goofy cow apron over pin-striped pants, a white oxford shirt, and a burgundy tie. The cow apron had been a gift from Zach for her birthday. Amy was wearing nothing but her stretchy black shorts. Her large breasts were hanging down, touching the edge of the sink.

At some point Kyra must have made a noise. She felt like her throat was too tight to let any sound escape, but suddenly, both Amy and the man were looking in her direction. Or maybe they just looked over because the radio had switched to a woman talking about the mayor, and the strange man had finished rinsing Amy’s hair and turned the water off.

Amy walked over without bothering to wring out her hair or grab a towel. When she was standing right in front of Kyra, she pulled her wet hair off her neck with one hand. She sounded furious. “What are you doing here?”

Kyra tried not to stare at her sister’s belly, but it was right there, between them, enormous and pink and glistening, with a strange line down the middle that made Kyra think of the indentation of a peach.

“I don’t know,” Kyra said. She was so shocked that for a moment, she honestly couldn’t remember. Then she said softly, reminding herself, “I was going to take you to the mall. Buy more booties.”

The booties were a joke between them. Their stepmother had sent eight pairs of crocheted booties for the baby, and she was reportedly working on another pair or two; their father wasn’t sure how many more were coming. Amy and Kyra knew she loved to crochet, but why not a blanket or a hat or a sweater? Why only booties? Amy said it was her obsession with feet, which wasn’t a joke: the woman had more socks and shoes than anybody in their town. From the calves up, their stepmother wore strictly polyester from Venture or Kmart; from the ankles down, she could have been featured in
Glamour
magazine.

The man walked over. He handed Amy her towel and her white robe, and introduced himself as Gregory Todd. Or was it Todd Gregory? He made some comment about people reversing his name, but Kyra wasn’t listening. She was staring at the ring on his left hand.

“This is my sister,” Amy said.

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard so much about you, Kyra,” he said far too pleasantly. She hated everything about him, but she hated his insouciance most of all.

After a moment or two, when no one had spoken, Gregory or Todd or whoever he was said, “I should go.” Kyra stood on the right side of the doorway, sweating, as the man took off the apron and put on his watch. Amy walked with him into the hall. They kissed for a very long minute. He whispered something in her ear and she laughed.

When Amy returned, she went into her bedroom without saying a word. After a minute, Kyra remembered how to move and followed her. Amy was lying on the side of the bed closest to the air conditioner, which was working, at least. The bedroom was actually a little chilly.