Henry's Sisters

by Cathy Lamb

Genres: Family Life

Synopsis

Family, forgiveness and cupcakes - a recipe for a story you won't forget.

Ever since the Bommarito sisters were little girls, their mother has written them letters on pink paper when she has something especially important to tell them. This time, the message is urgent and impossible to ignore. River Bommarito requires open-heart surgery, and Isabelle and her sisters are needed at home to run the family bakery and to take care of their brother, Henry, and grandmother, Stella, who believes she's Amelia Earhart.

Release date: July 18, 2009

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 448

Sample

I


would have to light my bra on fire.



And my thong.



It is unfortunate that I feel compelled to do this, because I am particular about my bras and underwear. I spent most of my childhood in near poverty, wearing scraggly underwear and fraying bras held together with safety pins or paper clips, so now I insist on wearing only the truly elegant stuff.



“Burn, bra, burn,” I whispered, as the golden lights of morning illuminated me to myself. “Burn, thong, burn.”



I studied the man sprawled next to me under my white sheets and white comforter, amidst my white pillows. He was muscled, tanned, had a thick head of longish black hair, and needed a shave.



He had been quite kind.



I would use the lighter with the red handle!



I envisioned the flame crawling its way over each cup like a fire-serpent, crinkling my thong and turning the crotch black and crusty.



Lovely.



I stretched, pushed my skinny brown braids out of my face, fumbled under the bed, and found my bottle of Kahlúa.



I swigged a few swallows as rain splattered on the windows, then walked naked across the wood floor of my loft to peer out. The other boxy buildings and sleek skyscrapers here in downtown Portland were blurry, wet messes of steel and glass.



I have been told that the people in the corporate building across the way can see me when I open my window and lean out, and that this causes a tremendous ruckus when I’m nude, but I can’t bring myself to give a rip. It’s my window, my air, my insanity. My nudeness.



Besides, after that pink letter arrived yesterday, I needed to breathe. It made me think of my past, which I wanted to avoid, and it made me think of my future, which I also wanted to avoid.



I opened the window, leaned way out, and closed my eyes as the rain twisted through my braids, trickling down in tiny rivulets over the beads at the ends, then my shoulders and boobs.



“Naked I am,” I informed myself. “Naked and partly semi-sane.”



I did not want to do what that letter told me to do.



No, it was not possible.



I stretched my arms way out as if I were hugging the rain, the Kahlúa bottle dangling, and studied myself. I had an upright rack, a skinny waist, and a belly button ring. Drops teetered off my nipples one by one, pure and clear and cold. I said aloud, “I have cold nipples. Cold nips.”



When I was drenched, I smiled and waved with both hands, hoping the busy buzzing boring worker bees in the office buildings were getting their kicks and jollies. They needed kicks and jollies.



“Your minds are dying! Your souls are decaying! Get out of there!” I brought the Kahlúa bottle to my mouth, then shouted, “Free yourself!
Free yourself!
”



Satisfied with this morning’s creative rant, I padded to my kitchen and ran a hand across the black granite slab of my counter, then crawled on it and laid down flat like a naked human pancake, my body slick with rainwater, my feet drooping over the edge.



I stared at the pink letter propped up on the backsplash. I could smell her flowery, lemony perfume on it. It smelled like suffocation.



No screaming, I told myself.
No screaming.





Suddenly I could feel Cecilia in my head. I closed my eyes. I felt abject despair. I felt fear. I felt bone-cracking exhaustion.



The phone rang, knocking the breath clean out of my lungs.



It was Cecilia.
I knew it.





This type of thing happened between us so much we could be featured on some freak show about twins. A week ago I called her when I heard her crying in my brain. I couldn’t even
think
she was so noisy. When I reached her, sure enough, she was hiding in a closet and bawling her eyes out. “Quiet down,” I’d told her.



“Shut up, Isabelle,” she’d sputtered. “Shut up.”



We are fraternal twins and our mind-twisting psychic link started young. When we were three, Cecilia was attacked by a dog. He went straight for her throat. She was in our front yard, I was at the grocery store with Momma. At the exact same time she was bitten, I started shrieking and clutched my neck, which felt as if it had been stabbed. I fell to the ground and frantically kicked the air before I passed out. Momma later told me she thought the devil had attacked my very soul.



Another example: Two years ago, when I was working in some squalid village in India, teeming with the poorest of the poor, my stomach started to burn and swell. I had to ride back to the city in a cart with chickens. Cecilia needed an emergency appendectomy.



One more bizarre example: When I was photographing the American bombing of Baghdad, I dove behind a concrete barrier as bullets whizzed by. One grazed my leg. Cecilia’s message on my cell phone was hysterical. She thought I’d died, because she couldn’t move her leg.



It’s odd. It’s scary. It’s the truth.



I covered my face with my hands. I did not answer the phone, waiting until the answering machine clicked on. I heard her voice—think drill sergeant meets Cruella De Vil.



“Pick up the phone, Isabelle.”



I did not move.



“I know you’re there,” Cecilia/Cruella accused, angry already. Cecilia/Cruella is almost always angry. It started after that one terrible night with the cocked gun and the jungle visions when we were kids.



I tapped my forehead on the counter. “I’m not here,” I muttered.



“And you’re listening, aren’t you?” I heard the usual impatience.



I breathed a hot, circular mist of steam onto the counter and shook my head. “No,” I said. “No, I’m not listening.”



“Hell, Isabelle, I know you’re wigged out and upset and plotting a trip to an African village or some tribal island to get out of this, but it’s not gonna work. Forget it. You hear me, damn it. Forget it.”



I blew another steam circle. A raindrop plopped off my nose like a liquid diamond. “You swear too much, and I’m not
upset
,” I said, so quiet. “Why should I be
upset?
I will not do what she says. If I do I will be crushed in her presence and what is sane will suddenly seem insane. Mrs. Depression will come and rest in my head. I’ll have none of that.” I shivered at the thought.



“And you’re scared. I can feel your fear,” she accused. “Ya can’t hide that.”



“I don’t do scared anymore,” I said, still shivering. “I don’t.”



“We’re going to talk about what happened to you, too, Isabelle. Don’t think you can keep that a secret,” she insisted, as if we were having a normal conversation. “Pick up the damn phone before I really get pissed.”



I loved Cecilia. She did not deserve, no one deserved, what had come down the pike for her last year with that psycho-freak pig/husband of hers. My year had not been beautiful, either, but hers was worse.



“Isabelle!” Cecilia/Cruella shouted, waiting for me to pick up. “Fine, Isabelle.
Fine
. Buck up and call me when you get out of bed and the man’s gone.”



I flipped my head up.
She knew!
So often she knew about the men. She told me once, “Think of it this way: I don’t get the fun of the sex you have, but I sometimes know it’s happened by the vague smell of a cigarette.”



See? Freaky.



“I’m already out of bed, so quit nagging,” I muttered.



“Is,” she whispered, the machine hardly picking up her voice. “Don’t leave me alone here.”



“Cecilia hardly ever whispers,” I whispered to myself. “She is beyond desperate.” I ignored the tidal wave of guilt.



“You have to help me. You have to help
us
,” she said.



No, I don’t have to help. I do not have to help you, or her.



“I can’t do it without you. I will go right over the edge, like a fat rhino leaping over a cliff.” She hung up.



I am going to live my own life as sanely as possible. My answer, then, has to be no. No, no, no, Cecilia.



I conked my head against the counter, then tilted the Kahlúa bottle sideways into my mouth. I rarely drink, but Kahlúa for breakfast is delicious. I licked a few droplets right off the counter when they splattered, my beads clicking on the granite.



The man in my bed stirred. I raised my head from the counter, mildly interested as to what he’d do next.



I couldn’t remember his name. Did he have a name? I flipped over and stared at the open silver piping on my ceiling. Certainly he had a name. Because I couldn’t remember it didn’t mean he had no name.



The man turned over. Nice chest!



Surely this man’s mother gave him a name.



For a wee flash of time, I let myself feel terrible. Cheap and dirty for yet another one-night stand.



“Ha,” I declared. “Ha. This night must end right now.”



I rolled off my counter, grabbed a pan from my cupboard, and filled it with cold water.



When it was filled to the brim, I balanced it on my head, still clutching the Kahlúa bottle with two fingers, and teetered like a graceless acrobat on a wire to the man with no known name. “Good-bye to the night, hello to the incineration of my blue-and-white lacy bra.”



I ignored the three- by-four-foot framed black-and-white photographs I’d taken hanging on my wall. Everyone in them was traumatized and I didn’t need to stare at their eyes today. They were people. They were kids. That bothered me. That’s why I hung them in my loft. So they would never, ever stop bothering me.



That nagging question popped up: Would I ever shoot photos again after what happened?



The man in my bed had been impressed when he’d found out who I was. I am not impressed with myself. I was not impressed with him.



I put the pan down, tore my white fluffy comforter away from the man, then dumped the cold water over his head. It hit him square between the eyes and he shot out of bed like a bullet and landed on his feet within a millisecond, his fists up. Military training, I presumed.



“That was fast,” I told him, dropping the pan to the floor and swilling another swig of Kahlúa.





“What the hell?”
He was coughing and sputtering and completely confused.
“What the hell?”





“I said, that was fast. Most men don’t jump up as fast as you did. You’re quick. Quick and agile.”



He ran his hand over his face and swore. “What did you do that for?
Are you insane?”





“One, yes, I am. Insane. I’m still sensitive about that particular issue so let’s not discuss it, and two, I did it because I need you up and at ’em.” I sat down in my curving, chrome chair and crossed my legs. The chrome chilled my butt. “You can go now.”



I did not miss the hurt expression in his eyes, but I dismissed it as fast as I could.



“What do you mean, I can go?” he spat out, flicking water away from his hair.



“I mean, you can go. Out the door. We had one night. We don’t need another one. We don’t need to chitchat. Chitchat makes me nauseated. I can’t stand superficiality. I’m done. Thanks for your time and efforts.”



I watched his mouth drop open in shock. Nice lips!



“Out you go.” See, this is the part of me that I despise. I truly do.



He shook his head, water flicking off like a sprinkler. “You’ve got to be kidding.”



“Nope. No joke. None.” I got up and went to the front door and opened it. “Good-bye. Tra la la, good-bye.”



He stood, flabbergasted, naked and musclely and wet, then snatched up his shirt and yanked it over his head. “I thought…” He ran a hand through his hair. “I like you…we had fun…”



“I don’t do fun.” No, I was past fun with men. That died when he couldn’t control his nightmares followed by the rake and fertilizer incident.



“You don’t
do
fun?”



He was befuddled, I knew that—completely befuddled. I love that word.



I felt a stab of guilt but squished it down as hard as I could so it could live with all my other guilt.



“Tootie scootie,” I drawled at him. “Scoot scoot.”



He wiped trickles of water off his face.



For long seconds, I didn’t think he was going to do what I told him to do. He did not appear to be the type of man who took orders from others well. He appeared to be the type that gave the orders.



But not here.



I took another swig of Kahlúa. Yum. “Don’t mess with me.”



“I’m not going to mess with you. I thought I’d take you to breakfast—”



“No. Out.” Out. Out of my life. Out of my head.



He shook his head in total exasperation, water dripping from his ears. “Fine. I’m outta here. Where are my pants?”



I nodded toward a crammed bookshelf where they’d been thrown. He yanked them on, his eyes searching my loft.



“My jacket?”



I nodded toward the wood table my friend Cassandra had carved. We had met in strange circumstances that I try not to dwell on. There were smiling mermaids all over it, swimming through an underwater garden. She’d painted it with bright, happy colors. Two weeks after that, she jumped off one of the tallest buildings in Portland after a luncheon in her honor. She’d left her entire estate to an after-school program for minority youth, which I administered.



Days later I received a letter in the mail from her. There were two words on the yellow sticky note inside the envelope. It said, “Rock on.”



I watched him toss my pretty, blue and white lacy bra off his shoe and onto my red leather couch. It would soon be ashes, taken away by the wind off my balcony. Hey. Maybe my bra would land on a mermaid’s head!



I opened the door wider.



He stared down at me, his eyes angry and…something…something else was lurking there. Probably hurt. Maybe humiliation.



I nodded. “Please don’t take offense. It’s not personal.”



“Not personal?” He bellowed this. “
Not personal?
We made love last night, in your bed. That’s not
personal?
”



“No, it’s not. This is all I can do. One night.”



“That’s it? Ever?” He put his palms up. “You never have relationships with people more than one night?”



“No.” I tilted my head. He was gorgeous. Cut the hair and you’d have a dad. But I would not be the mom, that was for sure. I closed my eyes against that old pain. “Never.”



He gave up. “You take the cake.” He turned to go, his shirt clinging to him.



Poor guy. He’d woken up with a swimming pool on his face. “I like cake. Chocolate truffle rum is the best, but I can whip up a mille-feuille with zabaglione and powdered sugar that will make your tongue melt. My momma made me work in the family bakery and darned if I didn’t learn something, now get out.”



I put a hand on his chest and pushed, leaning against the door when he left.



I would burn the bra and the thong and try to forget.



The rain would help me.



Rain always does.



It washes out the memories.



Until the sun comes out. Then you’re back to square one and the memories come and get ya.



They come and get ya.



 



I grabbed my lighter with the red handle from the kitchen, lighter fluid, a water bottle, my lacy bra and thong, and opened the French doors to my balcony. The wind and rain hit like a mini-hurricane, my braids whipping around my cheeks.



One part of my balcony is covered, so it was still dry. I put the bra and thong in the usual corner on top of a few straggly, burned pieces of material from another forgettable night on a wooden plank and flicked the lighter on. The bra and thong smoked and blackened and wiggled and fizzled and flamed.



When they were cremated, I doused them with water from the water bottle. No sense burning down the apartment building. That would be bad.



I settled into a metal chair in the uncovered section of my balcony, the rain sluicing off my naked body, and gazed at the skyscrapers, wondering how many of those busy, brain-fried, robotic people were staring at me.



Working in a skyscraper was another way of dying early, my younger sister, Janie, would say. “It’s like the elevators are taking you up to hell.”



Right out of college she got a job as a copywriter for a big company on the twenty-ninth floor of a skyscraper in Los Angeles and lasted two months before her weasely, squirmy boss found the first chapter of her first thriller on her desk.



The murderer is a copywriter for a big company on the twenty-ninth floor of a skyscraper in Los Angeles. In the opening paragraphs she graphically describes murdering her supercilious, condescending, snobby boss who makes her feel about the size of a slug and how his body ends up in a trash compactor, his legs spread like a pickled chicken, one shoe off, one red high heel squished on the other foot. That was the murderer’s calling card.



No one reports his extended absence, including his wife, because people hate him as they would hate a gang of worms in their coffee.



Janie was fired that day, even though she protested her innocence. That afternoon she sat down and wrote the rest of the story, nonstop, for three months. When she emerged from her apartment, she’d lost twenty pounds, was pale white, and muttering. At four months she had her first book contract. When the book was published, she sent it to her ex-boss. And wrote, “Thanks, dickhead! With love, Janie Bommarito,” on the inside cover.



It became a best-seller.



She became a recluse because she is obsessive and compulsive and needs to indulge all her odd habits privately.



The recluse had received a flowery lemon-smelling pink letter, too. So had Cecilia, whose brain connects with mine.



The rain splattered down on me, the wind twirly whirled, and I raised the Kahlúa bottle to my lips again. “I love Kahlúa,” I said out loud as I watched the water river down my body, creating a little pool in the area of my crotch where my legs crossed. I flicked the rain away with my hand, watched it pool again, flicked it. This entertained me for a while. Off in the distance I saw a streak of lightning, bright and dangerous.



It reminded me of the time when my sisters and I ran through a lightning storm to find Henry in a tree.



I laughed, even though that night had not been funny. It had been hideous. It had started with a pole dance and ended with squishy white walls.



I laughed again, head thrown back, until I cried, my hot tears running down my face off my chin, onto my boobs, and down my stomach. They landed in the pool between my legs and I flicked the rain and tear mixture away again. The tears kept coming and I could feel the darkness, darkness so familiar to me, edging its way back in like a liquid nightmare.



I did not want to deal with the pink letter that smelled of her flowery, lemony perfume.







S


he was wielding a knife.



It had a black handle and a huge, jagged, twisty edge.



If evil was in a knife, this was evil incarnate.



She rotated it in front of my face, wearing a fixed, contemplative, detached expression. I whipped my head back, my breath catching.



“I think she’ll use this,” Janie said, poking it into the air. “This would do the job.”



I rolled my eyes and pushed past her into her houseboat, being careful to avoid the evil one.



“You need to smile when you come through my door, Isabelle.”



“I smiled.” I had not smiled. I wiped rain off my face.



“You did not.” My sister stood by the door, her arms crossed, that shining blade pointed toward her ceiling.



“I smiled in my heart, Janie. Behind the left ventricle.”



She tapped her foot four times.



“I can’t believe I’m doing this.” I stalked past her, opened the door, slammed it behind me, knocked four times. More rain dive-bombed down on my head. She opened it. She smiled.



I smiled with my teeth only, like a tiger in menopause, and sidled by her. She was playing a Vivaldi CD.



“Thank you,” Janie said. She patted her reddish hair, which was back in a bun.



Cecilia and I are protective of our younger sister, Janie, and her…
quirks.
As she said one time, “The whole planet does not need to know that I have to touch each one of my closet doors in the same place with the same amount of pressure before I go to bed each night and if I do the wrong amount of pressure on one door I have to do it again. And again. Sometimes a third time.” She’d let a little scream out and buried her face in her hands when she’d told me that one.



“What do you think of this knife, Isabelle?” she asked me.



Janie’s eyes are bright green. I mean
bright green.
Luminescent. As usual, she was wearing a prim dress with a lace collar and comfortable (read: frumpy) shoes. She wore sensible beige bras that a nun might wear if she was eighty and blind. She was also wearing a white apron.



“I think that knife is sharp and twisty.”



She sighed. I had disappointed her.



I headed toward her great room. Janie’s houseboat is located on a quieter part of the Willamette River, although you can see the skyscrapers in Portland from the front decks. The windows are floor to ceiling, and the river rolls right on by, as do storms, ducks, Jet Skis, canoes, and drunk boaters.



The rain made the view blurry and gray.



“But do you think it offers up a sufficient amount of blinding fear?”



I turned around. “Yes. I’m blindingly scared to death of it.”



Janie uses white doilies and has plastic slipcovers over all her pink chairs. She has pink flowered curtains and has
tea
—tea with scones and cream and honey and sugar—every afternoon, like the British; listens to classical music; and reads the classics, like
Jane Eyre.
If she’s feeling wild, she listens to Yo-Yo Ma. She takes one bite of food, then four sips of tea. One bite of food, four sips of tea.



When she’s done with her tea she goes back to wringing people’s guts out of their stomachs with cattle prods.



“You know, the next killer in my book is a grandma. She goes after mothers,” Janie said. “She hated her own mother. Her own mother made her work all the time, locked her in closets, and schlepped her around the country in a dirty white trailer. She worked in a bar. The kid got lice.”



I stopped at that. “Now that’s special, Janie.
Special.
Think she won’t recognize who that is?”



“I’ve changed her name.” She said this with not a little defiance. “And we were never locked in closets. We chose to go there all on our own. To hide.”



I put my hands on my hips and stared at the ceiling, imagining how bad things would get once
she
got her hands on it. Oh, it would be ugly.



“And!” Janie said, stabbing the knife in the air. “The grandma in my book has white hair, she volunteers at the hospital in the gift shop, and at night—whack and stab, whack and stab.”



I groaned. “Must you be so graphic?”



Janie put the knife back in a case on her kitchen counter, slammed the lid, and tapped it four times. “Well, then. Fine.
Fine.
”



I ignored the tone.



Janie patted that bun of hers. “This grandma scares me. Last night, after I finished writing at 2:02
A.M
. I went in my own closet and hid.”



“The woman that
you
created scared
you?
” Gall. “So, even though she’s only in your head, you hid in your own closet from her.”



She stared off into space. I knew she was waiting four seconds to answer my question. Why the obsession with the number four? I had no idea. Neither did she. She told me one time it was the “magic number in her head.”



“She’s so uncontrollable. I can’t even control her when I’m writing about her. She does things and says things and I follow her around and write what I’m seeing and hearing and smelling. She’s a sick person. I don’t like her.”



“Me, neither. Maybe you should embroider her out of your life.” Janie has to embroider flowers each night or she can’t sleep. When she’s done, she sews a pillow up—always white—and gives them to a group that counsels pregnant teenagers.



She fiddled with her apron. “Stop telling me you think my embroidery is stupid.”



“I didn’t say that,” I protested.



“You didn’t need to. I can hear it in your tone.”



“My tone? My tone?”



“Yes, that condescending one!” She turned around and faced the front of her house, then gasped.



“What’s wrong?” I got out of my chair.



“Oh, nothing.
It’s nothing.
” She turned around, fiddled with her apron.



I moved toward the front window, so I could see the walkway in front of her houseboat. I saw a man. Brown hair. Tall, a loping stride, bigger nose than normal, but not too big. Not big enough to snarf down a fish. I figured he lived in the houseboat down the way.



I turned around. Grinned at Janie.



“Don’t even think about it—” she breathed.



“Is that?” I raised my eyebrows, laughed, and made a dart for the door.



“Oh, no, you do not, Isabelle Bommarito!”



I opened the door and the rain came on in.



“Come back here, right this minute!”



But I had already stepped over the threshold to the wood walkway. She was right behind me and grabbed me around the waist, both arms. “Don’t you dare.”



I whispered, struggling, “I can help you to meet him—”





“I don’t need your help!”
she hissed.



“Let go of me, Janie,” I whispered. “I’m helping you!”



I tried to pursue Big Nose, but she held on to me like a human octopus, one leg twisted around mine, both of us grunting with effort. “Get off of me.”



“Never.” She tightened her arms and lifted.



I wiggled around and tackled her and we ended up in a heap by her front door. Both of us went, “Ugh,” when the air knocked out of our lungs. I held both her arms down, then whisked myself off her zippity quick and got a few steps. She scrambled up after me, her footsteps thudding, and shoved me to the ground. We rolled twice to the left, twice to the right, huffing and puffing.



She yanked at my ankle, tried to drag me back in. “You’re always trying to butt in—”



“I am not trying to butt in.” I tried to kick her hand with my other foot as she yanked me halfway into the air. I had no idea how she got so strong. “You need to get out of the house and live,” I panted. “I’ve been hearing about that man for months—”



“There you go again! That’s your definition of living!” She wiped rain off her face. “I don’t want to sleep with each stud I meet! I want to find common interests, like a love of literature and the orchestra…and scones and tea! Besides, some of us like preserving ourselves for marriage!”



“What marriage?” I shrieked. “You can’t get married unless you date, and dating takes being able to say hello to a person of the male species from this planet.”



She flew at me like a little torpedo and landed on top of me, my face smashed down.



“Do you think it’s healthy to stay home all day thinking up ways to kill people?” I huffed out, rain running down my neck.



“Do you think it’s healthy,” she huffed back, “to put a wall between yourself and everybody else?”



I whipped her over to her back. “Do you think it’s healthy to count how many steps you take to the bathroom and tap toilet paper?”



She gasped in outrage. “Do you think it’s healthy to keep a huge secret from your sisters, Isabelle? We know what happened to you, but you shut us out and you hide behind your camera like it’s…like it’s an eighteenth-century shield!” (I’ve mentioned her love of the classics?)



“You hide behind your front door, Embroidery Queen!”



She got me with an elbow to my neck for that one.



You might think we would be embarrassed by our behavior: Two grown women rolling around fighting on a deck.



Here’s the truth: We are long past being embarrassed.



We kicked away from each other—kick, kick, kick—then Janie dove on top of me and we were face-to-face. She yelled, “Sometimes I think I hate you, Isabelle!”



“Sometimes I think I hate you, too, Janie!”



We both grunted.



“Well, I know I hate you both,” another voice cut through, sharp and low. “What’s that got to do with anything? Now get the hell up, your neighbors are all spying out their windows wondering why two grown women are wrestling on a damn deck.”



With that, our sister, Cecilia, who has swinging long blond hair, the voice of a logger, and weighs 280 pounds,
at least,
stepped over us.



Before she entered the houseboat, she smiled at Janie. As soon as she crossed the threshold she turned and scowled at both of us as if we were slimy algae. “Get the hell in here. We got big problems. We gotta get this figured out friggin’ quick. And don’t you two think you can say no. Your answer is yes, let’s start with that, damn it.
Yes.
”



She slammed the door.



“We’re together on this, right?” I panted. Janie was still laying on top of me, rain streaking down our faces. “We’re not going.”



“Absolutely, positively not. No way.”



“Our answer is no.”



“No, no, no.” Janie shook her head. “No.”



We hugged on it.



Within an hour I was contemplating a quick escape by cannon-balling into the river. Janie was curled up, rocking back and forth, chanting, “I am worthy of praise, not abuse. I am worthy of praise, not abuse.”



 



Cecilia shoved a chocolate doughnut into her mouth. “Momma wants you home to help.”



Janie wrung her hands, four wrings on one side, four on the other. “My therapist said going home was an antispiritual, regressive idea for me. It could set me back years on my personal development and social-psycho-ecstasy scale.”



“Years from what?” Cecilia demanded. “You sit alone in this pink and white houseboat, indulging all your weird habits and number counting and rituals and you write books about torture and murder. Honey.” She did not say the word
honey
nice and polite. “There’s nowhere for you to go but up.”



“I can’t go. I’m working.”



“You can kill people in Trillium River, Janie.”



Cecilia shook her head at Janie, then fixed me with those blue eyes. “You’re coming, Isabelle.”



I snorted. Leave my loft with the view of the river? Live somewhere else when I’m still fighting all the blackness lurking around the edges of my life? Live with
her
again? “I don’t think so. Nope. Can’t come. Won’t come.”



“You can keep the lingerie companies in business in Trillium River.” Tiny doughnut pieces flew from her mouth in her fury. “I need you there.”



“I’m working,” I lied.



“Give me a break, Isabelle. You’re not working. You’re too screwed up. You two mice are leaving the city and coming to the country. Hey, maybe you’ll learn there’s more to life than yourselves.”



“That is unfair,” Janie sputtered.



“That’s so like you, isn’t it?” I stood up and faced her. “You attack when you don’t get your way. You use fury to control anyone who pisses you off. You get mean and nasty and believe that
your victim
deserved your attack and you sit back and hate them, never considering for one second that you might be wrong, never considering that, gee, you might do things that tick people off—”



“
I
attack?” Cecilia pointed at her chest. “
I
attack?” She turned red, and I could tell her Mrs. Vesuvius–like temper had triggered.



“Yes, you attack. You hold grudges, you remember each tiny thing people did to offend you, you exaggerate to the point of lying—”



“Listen up, you braided mental case and you wacko, tea-slurping crime writer, I have spent years,
years
, handling her and Henry and Grandma while you two indulged your weirdness and forced me to handle everything.”



“That is not true.” I wanted to smash that mouth of hers shut. “When the house needed a new roof, I paid for it. Janie paid for a remodeled kitchen. I paid for Momma and Grandma and Henry to stay at a beach house last summer. Janie sent them to the mountains because she knows that Henry loves the snow—”



“You’ve sent
money.
Big deal. You’re both swimming in it. Janie, you’ve got so much money you could buy France. Neither one of you has hardly been home since you left for college and you live only an hour away. You know Momma reopened the bakery and you’ve done nothing to help!”



“Cecilia,” I snapped. “Janie and I paid for a live-in caregiver for Grandma and Henry. In fact, we interviewed a bunch of them, hired one, and sent her over.”



“It didn’t work, did it?” she shrieked, stomping her feet. “I told you it wouldn’t. I told you! Grandma thought she was an ancient tribesman she met on an island during her final trip around the world as Amelia Earhart.”



“Why did Grandma think the caregiver was a tribesman?” Janie asked. She tapped the tips of her fingers together. “There were no feather hats, no tribal war paint…”



“How the hell should I know?” Cecilia said, doughnut sugar spewing out of her mouth. “She’s got dementia. Henry didn’t like the caregiver because he said she resembled a gecko. He ran away and hid in the shed under a trash can and the police had to come. Momma said the woman smelled like mothballs and death.”



“She didn’t smell,” I protested. “She was a nice lady. She was from Maine.”



“Maine Schmaine. They hated her. Momma told her she reminded her of Jack the Ripper, only with boobs. The caregiver asked me if Momma was insane, too.” Cecilia flung her head back, stared at the ceiling, and threw her arms up as if asking for deliverance.



Momma wasn’t crazy. She was, however, a nutcase.



“Jack the Ripper?” Janie moaned. “There is no correlation, none. Jack the Ripper was a killer in England who tore out—”



“We know who Jack the Ripper was,” Cecilia fumed. She picked up another doughnut. “Let me lay it on the line, you two. I’m exhausted. I’ve had it. I’m not sleeping at night.” Tears filled her blueberry eyes, then started soaking her red face. “I go from teaching kindergarteners, to the girls—they both have problems I haven’t told you about—I help
her
out, handle Henry and Grandma…”



She put her hands over her face and started making these choking, gasping, snorting sounds as great gobs of tears rolled down. It about ripped my heart in two. “I can’t take it anymore. The lawyers are fighting, and Parker and that…that…
slut
…”



Janie started crying, too. She always cries when one of us cries. Gentle, innocent heart. Killer on the keyboard, but she hates to see anyone in pain. I got up and put an arm around Cecilia.



“I can’t take her anymore.” She sniffled and coughed and snorted again and I pulled her in close for a hug. “And I can’t…I can’t…”



“You can’t what?” we asked.



“I can’t…”



She waved the doughnut. “I can’t stop eating.” She mumbled. “I hate myself for it. I’m getting so fat, I can hardly walk. I can’t tie my shoes. My blood pressure is as high as Venus and my cholesterol reading shows I have butter in my veins. The other day I was in my car and a boy oinked at me.”



I wanted to tie the boy up by his heels, attach him to a boom on a crane, and swing him around until his intestines slid out.



“Oh, oh! Bommarito hug!” Janie weeped out.



We did a three-way hug, our foreheads together. Cecilia smelled like doughnut. Janie smelled like fear. I smelled like a person who had too many regrets.



“Okay,” I whispered, feeling myself spiraling into a deep chasm of doom. “Okay. I’ll come.”



Janie leaned against me and whimpered, “Me, too, Cecilia.”



Cecilia abruptly snapped her head up, away from our forehead powwow; wiped the tears from her face; and left our warm, snuggly, sisterly hug. Her face entirely composed, she grabbed her purse on her way out, waddling quite quickly.



“Good. Glad to hear it. See you two at the house,” she ordered, no sign of the tears or unhappiness in her voice at all. She grabbed another doughnut. “I’ll let her know you’re coming. She’ll be frickin’ delighted.”



The door slammed behind her.



I sank to the ground. So did Janie. She put her head on my stomach.



“She duped us again, didn’t she?” I asked.
“Duped us.”





“She manipulated our vulnerability. Our compassion and our womanhood. And we rehearsed this, Isabelle,” Janie whimpered. “Our answer was no.”



“No, no, no—that was our answer.”



“I need my embroidery,” Janie whined, “I need my embroidery.”



Shit.
Double shit.





 



On the way home I got stuck in a traffic jam. Since I was on my motorcycle, I was happy it had stopped raining. When we were near the accident, we came to a complete halt to let the oncoming traffic go by. There were a couple of police cars, a fire truck, and an ambulance. An old blue truck had smashed into a light post and the beat-up camper trailer the driver was hauling was on its side. The light post now resembled the Leaning Tower of Pisa.



“What happened?” I asked a police officer who wandered over to chat about what a great motorcycle I had.



“The driver was high. Probably meth. He’s going to court next week for distributing the stuff. His truck flew through the air with the greatest of ease. Like a bird. Like a torpedo. Like an idiot.” He shook his head. “What an idiot.”



The driver was not strapped in, so he went through his windshield. Because he was high as a kite and relaxed, he would live, which was somewhat unfortunate considering the long criminal record he had. He was the oldest son of an old, snobby family in the city.



“Spoiled brat,” the police officer muttered. “Grow kids up rich and they never turn out. Make ’em work, and you’ll teach ’em how to live and respect other people.”



As the tow trucks came, I stared at that trailer and shuddered.



I. . .