The Good Sister Read online

  For now, she enjoys her job as a bank teller. It’s simple, methodical, and predictable. She likes the steady days, the adding and subtracting of numbers and dollars from accounts. She likes the order, the calm, the hum of the air conditioner, the comfort of busyness and the satisfaction of doing what she knows how to do and doing it well. She doesn’t need anything else.

  A splinter of lightning jabs the dark sky. Emilyn hurries up the flagstone walkway, ducking against the wind lashing her hair into her face. Daddy opens the glass door and ushers her in. She’s barely shrugged off her jacket when the roof begins to thrum in earnest.

  3

  “No umbrella?” Gloria, her mother, says from her perch on the arm of the leather loveseat. She’s sitting primly, her legs crossed at the ankles, back straight, manicured hands folded in her lap. A string of pearls encircles the white stalk of her neck. Her hair is puffed into perfect little auburn clouds. With the house and inherited money, they’ve moved up a notch—several notches—in society. Her mother is determined to play the part.

  “I didn’t know it was supposed to rain,” Emilyn says, smoothing her hands over her wet, frizzy hair. She slips off her tennis shoes and pads from the foyer into the large, dimly lit living room. She barely glances at the lush carpets, wood-paneled walls, and wide, imposing furniture.

  “Sit down, Emmy,” Daddy says. She looks at her father and immediately looks away. He’s aged ten years in ten days. Loose pockets of shadowed skin gather and pull at his eyes, making him look like he might shatter at any moment. His rough, granite face is sallow, smudged with sleeplessness and anxiety. His hands rummage through his salt and pepper hair like he’s searching for something but his fingers can no longer find it. He drops his hands to his lap.

  Something dark rustles beneath the fabric of her skin. She doesn’t want to see her father like this. She doesn’t want to be in this situation, to be living this part of her life. She wants to fast forward through it, to forget, to have these days linger in her mind only as a haze, a dusky, faraway dream. “Oh, Daddy.”

  “I just don’t understand how she could do this.” Her mother’s red mouth puckers into a frown. She uncrosses her ankles, then re-crosses them.

  Emilyn sinks into a plush chair next to the window. The fabric has tiny rose petals and vines snaking all over it. She rubs her thumb against one of the roses and glances out the window. Rain slaps against the glass. The sky is dark, the trees in the yard nothing but huddled, shadowy shapes trembling in the wind. She feels somehow disconnected, separated from her body. The preciseness, the tidiness and stability of her life have been disrupted. It feels like she’s been thrown off a ship into a frothing sea.

  “Ava betrayed us,” Daddy says. He sags into the opposite end of the leather loveseat, a full cushion separating him from his wife. This is nothing new. Emilyn and Ava have acted as the mediators in the war between their parents for years. Gloria is cold and aloof toward her daughters and bristling with indignation toward her husband. He can never do anything right. He is too late or too early home from work, he doesn’t make enough money, he wastes his brain in front of the tube, his shoulders are too sloped, he doesn’t take care of his body, he is weak, he cannot say no to his daughters, he is spoiling them, he is too affectionate, he tells too many bad jokes in public.

  When they weren’t screaming at each other behind the bedroom door, their conversations consisted of: “Ava, tell your father he’s spoiling you. Life will not hand you hugs whenever you want them,” or “Emmy, let your mother know she’s a stone-cold bitch.” Ava always wondered aloud why they remained married. Emilyn tried not to think about it.

  “How could she do this?” Gloria says. One manicured finger rubs the nub of her left wrist bone. Her foot tap tap taps against the carpet. She’s as uncomfortable as Emilyn. Neither cares for conflict, but her mother detests displays of emotion, particularly in herself. This betrayal has unhinged her in ways Emilyn doesn’t want to contemplate.

  “You’re her mother,” Daddy says. “Why don’t you tell us?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You raised her. You let this happen. You saw what she was like and what she was capable of.” His voice remains even, but it’s laced with bitterness and accusation.

  “Don’t you dare start that again, Steven,” Gloria says shrilly. “You always spoiled her, gave in to whatever her heart desired. You should have cut her off years ago. You knew where that money was going—straight to drugs and who knows what else.”

  “I did cut her off. And look what happened.”

  Gloria snorts. “Not soon enough.”

  Emilyn turns her head and looks out the window again. The rain falls harder, splashing the glass like tears. If this keeps up, it will be a long drive home. Black tree limbs wave and gesticulate at each other, the wind yanking off orange and umber leaves and sending them churning and swirling into the yard.

  “I never even saw you hug her,” Daddy says.

  “And I saw you hug her too much!”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “What the hell do you want it to mean?”

  “Nobody wants it to mean anything,” Emilyn cuts in quietly. Her fingers curl into fists in her lap. No one speaks for a few minutes. Her parents stare at everything but each other. If they once knew how to apologize to each other, they’ve long forgotten.

  “Do you want me to come with you, Daddy?” Emilyn asks finally. “To the hearing?” The lawyer told them he’s filed a motion to dismiss. He’ll submit her witness statement to the judge—she doesn’t need to testify until the trial. If there is one. She doesn’t even want to consider the possibility of what a trial would do to her father.

  He mashes his palms against his eyes. “That’s alright, darling. No need for you to get exposed to all that.”

  “You don’t need to miss work for something so ugly,” Gloria says.

  Her father clears his throat. “But thank you, Emmy. You’re here, that’s what matters. What would we do without you?”

  “You would be going to jail,” her mother says. “Emilyn’s testimony is the only thing that might save you.”

  Emilyn stirs uncomfortably in her chair. Outside, thunder rumbles over the lake. Something bucks inside her. She stifles it down. “What did you do today, Daddy?”

  After Ava’s accusation became public record, her father was suspended immediately and indefinitely. High school history teachers cannot stand under allegations of sexual misconduct, no matter how stellar their reputation. And her father is friendly. He likes to pat shoulders, ruffle girls’ hair.

  He shrugs his shoulders. He’s wearing an oversized collared shirt that makes him look hunched, like he’s trying to disappear inside his clothes. “Bummed around. Watched TV. You ever watch that Judge Judy show? I can’t believe it’s still on.”

  Gloria rolls her eyes. “He’s driving me insane.”

  Lightning zigzags across the pitch-black sky. The clock above the mantle ticks. The refrigerator hums from the kitchen. It always surprises Emilyn how little they have to say to each other, the silence settling on the three of them like dust.

  She clears her throat. “You ever get flies in here?”

  “Hmm?” her mother glares at her suspiciously. “Flies? No, of course not. What on earth are you talking about? You aren’t communicating with your sister, are you? Has she called you?”

  “No, Mom.” Emilyn gives a brief shake of her head. She hasn’t spoken to or seen Ava since the week before she made her accusation. Ava came to the apartment, antsy and high on something. Emilyn was still trying to conceal Shane’s existence and blew her off.

  “Emmy would never do such a thing.” Daddy stares past her out the window. He looks like he might cry. “Never aired family laundry, never got in trouble. Coming over here all the time like this. Always Daddy’s little girl, even now.”

  The air suddenly feels dense. It’s hard to breathe. Emilyn tries to smile and manag
es a quick jerking upward of the corners of her mouth. She makes a show of looking at the clock and stands up, smoothing the wrinkles in her slacks. “I’ve got to go.”

  Her parents rise with her. “Aren’t you lonely in that apartment all by yourself?” her father asks, placing his hand on her arm. “Don’t you want to be home where you belong?”

  She glances down at her father’s hand, at the white hairs growing over his knuckles, the blue veins bulging beneath his thickly creased skin. He’s getting old.

  She thinks suddenly of Ava’s first boyfriend when she was fourteen. He was a stringy-haired guy who smoked weed and played the guitar, a college dropout nearly twenty years old.

  Her father had been outraged when he’d found the images she’d sent the boyfriend on her phone. “I forbid this!” he’d roared at her. “You better not see him again!”

  “Try and stop me!” Ava screamed at him. “I hate you!”

  Emilyn stood in the doorway to Ava’s room. She heard the slap, loud and sharp. Ava’s features flattened. Her eyes went still, still and cold.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said in a dull, emotionless voice, like she was asking for someone to pass the milk.

  That night, she packed a bag and sneaked out of the house. The police couldn’t seem to find her. What friends of hers they knew about had no idea where she was.

  Her father was wrecked. He sank into a devastating melancholy. After Ava left that first time, he barely made it to work. When he was home, he slumped in his study, barely eating or drinking.

  Gloria offered Steven no comfort, only criticism and blame. Without Ava’s histrionics, the house descended into a tense sort of stillness. But Emilyn had her father back. Every day after school, Emilyn was the one who checked on him, brought him Mountain Dew or Heineken, offered to rub his feet, make him a grilled cheese sandwich, his favorite. They spend hours in front of the TV, watching the History channel.

  “What did I do wrong?” he kept murmuring, over and over.

  “Nothing, Daddy,” Emilyn said over the droning voice of the narrator discussing the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She tried to sound convincing. “Ava doesn’t care who she hurts. She does what she wants.”

  “But why doesn’t she want to be here? Where she belongs?”

  To this question, Emilyn had no answer.

  A week later, Ava came flitting back, as casually as if nothing had happened. Emilyn’s treacherous heart plummeted to her stomach as she watched Ava waltz through the front door, her face blazing with a hostile, triumphant grin. She should be thrilled her sister had returned, safe and sound. But she wasn’t. A flame of jealousy flared inside her, deeply hidden but burning all the same.

  Things changed again. Her father stopped yelling at Ava, as if he was afraid to break the fragile truce they’d forged, as if next time she’d slip away and never come back. In return, Ava took everything: his energy, his time, his concern, every scrap of his attention and affection.

  “Oh, please. Do spare me the drama,” her mother says now, gliding toward the coat closet. “Emilyn is an adult. She needs her own space. You agreed that it was time, remember?”

  Daddy’s hand slips off her arm. She feels the absence of his touch like a hollow spot beneath her skin.

  “I didn’t agree to anything,” he says heavily. He turns his face away from the women, hiding the weakness of his tears.

  “Daddy.” She pauses, the desire to stay and the compulsion to flee both so strong in her bones that for a moment she feels she will be split apart.

  “Take my umbrella, Emilyn. It’s still pouring out,” her mother says, thrusting Emilyn’s jacket and a slim black umbrella into her hands. “You can give it back later. We’ll let you know how the hearing goes.”

  She doesn’t hug either of her parents.

  4

  In the car, she can still sense the heat of her father’s touch on her arm. The tires make slick squelching sounds against the wet pavement. She feels the rumble of the engine beneath her, the electric hum of power, the steady thrusting of pistons.

  The thought comes out of nowhere. She could kill herself with one small turn of the wheel. The car would do all the work, hurling itself along the path she’s chosen. All she has to do is guide it away from the road, gently coach the wheels to tilt toward the mass of trees on either side of the road. No one would ever know. Everyone would think it was an accident. She’d been going too fast, had bent her head to change the radio, never saw it coming.

  No. She could never do something like that. She could never betray her family. Not like Ava. Rain glitters on the windshield, blurring her vision. She will not cry. How could Ava do this to them? To Daddy? She stifles the thought before it can grow. She will not think about it. It is too large, too frightening for her to begin to comprehend, a shadowy monster looming just out of her vision. She can see the shadow, cannot even imagine the monster.

  She gets to the apartment after midnight. Shane is already in bed, so she checks all the locks and windows with the lights off. In the bathroom, a fly buzzes next to her ear and she slaps it away. When she slips through the bedroom door, Shane sits up. She can barely discern his shape in the darkness. “Hey,” he says groggily.

  “Hey,” she says back. She disrobes, pulls her pajamas out of the drawer and puts them on. She climbs into bed. “I’m sorry I’m so late.”

  “No worries, babe.” He hesitates. “I’m sorry about earlier.”

  “Me too.”

  “Are you doing okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going on Thursday?”

  The words taste like ash in her mouth. “They don’t want me there.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “No,” she lies. “I’m sure it’ll all work out.”

  “They need to cut Ava out of their lives. So do you. She’s toxic, babe,” he says, repeating his argument from earlier.

  She’s heard it all before. A hundred times.

  “What she did—it’s so wrong. Saying something like that to hurt your dad. To get back at him for cutting her off.” There’s real anger in his voice. She tries to imagine what he’s thinking. He’s never met her father or Ava in person. He only knows them through her stories.

  She makes a noncommittal sound in her throat.

  “Drugs change people. They’ll do anything.”

  She remembers Ava’s face at seven, scissors clutched in her hand, that vicious pleasure flashing in those huge, haunting eyes. “What if it started before the drugs?”

  “Exactly. It’s in her blood. I’m telling you, after this, none of you should ever see her again.”

  Shadow leaps on the bed and presses her wet nose into Emilyn’s forehead, whiskers tickling her cheek. She strokes the kitten’s fur, listens to her purr. “Maybe you’re right.”

  He wraps his arms around her, invading her with his warmth and the scent of his skin. He smells like sawdust, spearmint gum, and something musky. “You know I’m right,” he says, his breath rustling the hairs on the back of her neck.

  “It’s still raining. Will that stop the flies? Or make them worse?”

  “I have no idea.”

  There’s a long silence, where they both just listen to the steady beat of the rain pounding the roof. “Did you tell them?” Shane says finally. “About us?”

  She blinks into the darkness, her eyes dry and gritty. “I’ll tell them after the hearing.”

  “Yeah? You promise?” The hope in his voice could break her heart.

  “I promise.”

  “You need a massage.” He rubs her shoulder, his fingers trailing along her upper arm, bumping over the ridged bite scar.

  Her body stiffens. “I’m fine.”

  The headlights from a passing car throw shadows across the wall. The buzzing in the bathroom is a faint murmur. “You’re so tense,” he whispers into the darkness.

  5

  Wednesday morning, Emilyn makes it to work five minutes early. She chats with her co-worker Cynth
ia Black, a thirty-something woman with two toddlers and a scoundrel of a husband who keeps wandering into the arms of the babysitter. She always has a story to tell, and Emilyn is content to listen, throwing in the occasional nod or “What a bastard!” She tries to concentrate on the physical part of her job—the feel of crisp bills and envelopes, the cool discs of quarters and dimes pressed against her palm, the click of the computer keys.

  Around ten a.m., the glass front doors slam open. Emilyn feels her presence like a blast of frigid air. Ava rushes to the front counter, oblivious to the stares immediately directed her way. She is like an embarrassing caricature of dysfunction—dressed in a too-short red plaid dress and four-inch wedge heels, fists thrust into her faded army jacket, her bare legs goose-pimpled from the cold. Her mouth is an angry purple slash, her bloodshot eyes rimmed with plum eyeliner. Tufts of ice-blond hair jut out from beneath the black beanie pulled low on her forehead. And still, she is stunning, her delicate features perfectly aligned.

  “Ava,” Emilyn says quietly. “What are you doing here? I’m at work.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Like I just said, I’m working right now.” She can feel the weight of eyes on her—customers, co-workers, maybe even her boss. “Come by the apartment tonight.”

  “Is everything okay over here?” Cynthia asks, her eyes narrowing as she gazes at Ava.

  “I think you should go now.” Emilyn dreads the conversation she’ll now have to have, the explanations and excuses for her crazy, drug-addicted sister. This was supposed to be a space just for her, a place free of Ava’s drama.

  “I need to talk to you. Right now,” Ava says loudly. Her eyes seem too bright. She is chewing the lipstick right off her lips, smearing it on her teeth.

  “Go ahead, Emilyn.” Cynthia’s hands rest on her hips, her mouth turning down at the corners. “You can take your break early.”

  Emilyn sighs and gestures for Ava to come around the other side of the counter. She leads her sister into a storage room in the back, switching on the harsh florescent light. Ava leans against a shelf lined with stacks of printer paper, ink cartridges, pens, envelopes, and checks encased in small rectangular boxes. The bottom shelf is stuffed with industrial-sized toilet paper rolls. Emilyn accidentally bumps into the yellow mop bucket in the corner and grabs the handle before the mop falls. The room has a stale chemical smell.