The Good Sister Read online

  “Franny isn’t in the family.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Isn’t Aunt Roxanne part of our family anymore?”

  “You can’t tell anyone, Merell.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know the answer as well as I do.”

  Or maybe she didn’t. It was easy to forget how young Merell was. Despite her intelligence, her powers of observation, and the wonders of the Internet, she was only nine years old. “Come here and let me tell you something.”

  Merell did as she was told, dragging her feet.

  Ellen took hold of Merell’s hands, a gesture that felt awkward and unnatural to her, but seemed necessary to underscore the importance of her words. “What you did yesterday, the 911 call, I know you think it was the right thing to do. But whatever you believe you saw, you were wrong, Merell.”

  “Mommy tried to hurt Olivia.”

  “Don’t keep saying that.”

  Merell snatched her hands away and stuck them up under her arms.

  “You’re a child and there are things you don’t understand. People are complicated and sometimes things seem to be one way when they are really another. Your mother loves her girls, all of you. But what happened… happened. And you’ll understand what I mean when you grow up.”

  Merell stared at her bare feet, curling the toes under.

  “If those policemen hadn’t been so nice and if they hadn’t listened to what Franny and I told them, your mother might have been arrested.”

  At this point, another child would have begun to cry, Ellen thought. But not Merell. This girl had the same proud-hearted reserve as Ellen’s mother.

  “Imagine what it would have been like if she’d been taken to the police station and put behind bars.” Exactly how much would it take to make this child show decent remorse, a little healthy shame? “And if your mother was arrested, it’s even possible you girls would have been taken away from her and put into foster care.”

  “Daddy wouldn’t let that happen.”

  Probably not. But there would have been the kind of public and legal trouble even a rich and well-connected man like Johnny Duran would have a hard time managing.

  Ellen had been awake most of the night worrying if she should tell him the whole truth. On the one hand, he had a right to know what had really happened. But he was most comfortable dealing with concrete things: bricks and boards, permits and easements and contracts. If he knew the full story, there was no predicting how he would handle it. Johnny had a temper, he could be mean, and none of them wanted that.

  Ellen would never have chosen to live with her daughter’s family but three years earlier BJ Vadis had fallen dead before her eyes at a broker’s and agent’s meeting, and that changed everything. BJ had been the great love of her life, late to appear but no less wonderful for the delay. After he was gone the empty rooms and silent meals, the sleepless nights and long, idle days unhinged her. She couldn’t work, so she sold the business; and with that last link to BJ gone, she was even more miserable. Johnny had offered to build her an elegant granny flat over the new garage built for his vintage cars. He never said it aloud, but she understood the bargain. In return for a home with them, Ellen would help to keep his household running smoothly.

  She could have declined the offer. Despite the economic downturn and the real estate slump she had plenty of money. Theoretically she could live anywhere in the world that suited her. But it had taken only one trip on her own—a miserable cruise to the Galápagos—to teach her that geography was no escape. Wherever she went she would be alone.

  The night before, Ellen told Johnny the story she and Franny had agreed upon; and Simone had no choice but to go along with it. Simone had been in the water with Baby Olivia, who squirmed out of her embrace. Seeing her sister underwater for the few seconds before Nanny Franny scooped her out of the pool gave Merell all the reason she needed to try out the 911 system. It wasn’t quite a prank, more like an experiment.

  Johnny hadn’t thrown a fit. Instead he growled, threatened to “deal with” Merell “later,” and then called the police chief at home. They played tennis together and apparently the chief didn’t mind taking a call from Johnny Duran during dinner. Ellen overheard some conversation about “smart-ass little girls.” The chief had promised to lose the paperwork, but before he could get to it someone at the police station told a man who wrote a police blog. Now it was all over the news and the phone had been ringing since seven a.m. Johnny had been adamant before he left for work. No one was to answer the phone unless his voice came through on the answering machine. That didn’t mean Ellen couldn’t monitor messages left by reporters. She’d heard enough to feel confident they didn’t know anything. They were just fishing and the gossip would wear itself out. In a city the size of San Diego there was always a new story to distract the public.

  “Merell, what happened was a mistake but fortunately no great damage was done. Now you must give your word that you won’t talk about it to anyone. Not your father, not your aunt.”

  “On the History Channel they said that God told Moses lying was a sin.”

  “We’re not lying. We’re just not telling all the details.”

  “I told the police I only called to see what would happen. That’s a lie.”

  “Swear, Merell. God will understand.”

  Chapter 4

  Roxanne called Ty to let him know she’d be staying awhile at her sister’s, not to worry, she’d be home in time to make their flight. She lured Simone into a cloud of bubble bath and then she washed her hair and blew it dry for her. Afterward, wearing shorts and a tank top, Simone got back into bed and pulled a blanket over herself.

  “You wear me out, Roxanne.”

  “Everything wears you out, but you’ll feel better once you’re up and moving. I’m going to turn off the air-conditioning and open the windows.”

  “I don’t like drafts.”

  “What do you mean? Why don’t you like giraffes?”

  Simone giggled and pulled the covers up to cover her face, all but her huge brown eyes. “Rox, you’re the only person who can make me laugh.”

  “So get up and I’ll tell you all the jokes I’ve read off the Internet. Good Lord, you’re skinny. Have you eaten today?”

  “I had some soup.”

  “For breakfast? What kind of soup?”

  “I don’t know. Franny brought it up. I didn’t like it.”

  Roxanne’s thumb and forefinger easily encircled her sister’s wrist. “You’re way too thin, kiddo.”

  “The little monster’s a cannibal.”

  Roxanne stared at her sister. “You’re pregnant? Again? It’s too soon. How old is Olivia anyway?”

  Simone yawned, not covering her mouth.

  “You sound like a hippo.”

  “Giraffes. Hippos. Is today zoo day?”

  “I’m not laughing, Simone. Just answer my question. How old is Olivia?”

  “I don’t even remember.”

  Roxanne didn’t have words to say how deeply this casual dismissal troubled and saddened her.

  “How far along are you?”

  “A couple of months, maybe three.”

  Roxanne sucked in her breath. “Your poor body.”

  “It’s not my fault I have good eggs.”

  “Which is great if you live in a henhouse. You’ve heard of birth control? The pill?”

  “Don’t preach at me, Rox. You know how Johnny is. He’s going to keep me pregnant until he gets his son. Period. No discussion.”

  “But it’s your body. You get to say what happens to it.”

  Simone laid her palms across her stomach, fingertips touching. “I think this one’s a boy, it feels a little different than the others.”

  “You’ve seen a doctor?”

  “It’s too soon. Anyway, I knew when it happened. I felt it, like a pinch.”

  “When were you going to tell me?”

  “Maybe if you came around a little more.
”

  To avoid Simone’s accusations of neglect Roxanne would have to move in with her and keep her company seven days a week, as she had when they were children. “You didn’t tell me because you knew how I’d react.”

  “I miss you when you stay away.”

  “I wasn’t staying away. I’m married, Simone, remember?” Roxanne sucked back her impatience. Being angry with Simone was pointless unless Roxanne wanted to make her more confused and unhappy than she already was. “We went up to the Bay Area to see Ty’s family, we spent a weekend in Vegas…” There were not enough reasons in a lifetime to satisfy Simone when she was feeling sorry for herself. “Stop being a baby. If you won’t go for a walk, at least come outside for a while. You look like you live under a rock.”

  Downstairs Roxanne made her sister a glass of iced coffee with milk and sugar and, like a nurse administering medication, watched her drink it. Nanny Franny, the twins, and Olivia burst in from the park, rosy-cheeked and starving. The twins were four years old, slender and dark-eyed like their mother, and identical to each other except for a wave of freckles that broke across the bridge of Valli’s nose and Victoria’s almost constant whining. Victoria and Valli threw themselves on their mother as if they hadn’t seen her in months.

  It was decided they would all eat an early lunch on the side lawn.

  Roxanne wondered aloud if they should invite Ellen to join them.

  “She’s not here,” Merell said. “She had a date. For coffee.”

  “A date? Your grandmother? Who with?”

  “Who knows?” Simone said. “She’s meeting men online.”

  “I’ve heard her talking on the phone to them,” Merell said. “And she goes online late at night.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Merell tugged on her ragged bangs.

  Nanny Franny said, “You know you’re not supposed to go outside at night, Merell.”

  “I like to look at the stars. It’s interesting. Anyway, it’s safe. I just go in the backyard. Once she was sitting on her balcony. I heard her talking and she said she was wearing a satin nightgown.”

  Roxanne, Simone, and Franny looked at one another.

  “What about BJ?” Roxanne had been very attached to her stepfather.

  Simone said, “He’d understand.”

  Maybe he would, Roxanne thought. Probably. Whatever made Ellen happy, BJ Vadis was almost always in favor of it.

  Nanny Franny brought out badminton rackets and birdies and assorted balls for throwing and kicking. She and Roxanne lugged several wheeled vehicles and a full picnic basket around the side of the house to a spacious rectangle of lawn secluded from the street by a dense Eugenia hedge. Simone followed with an old quilt in her arms. Franny went back for a couple more.

  “So we can sprawl,” she said, spreading them in and out of the shade of a wide-branched old pepper tree.

  Watching her enlist the children in the picnic arrangements, Roxanne thought that everything seemed to be fun for Frances Biddle. This pretty, take-charge girl, short and stocky with a stubbornly square Yankee jaw and a radiant smile, seemed up to any challenge.

  After a lunch of peanut-butter-and-potato-chip sandwiches—“Bad for us, but delicious,” Franny whispered to Roxanne—Simone read aloud from a chapter book the twins knew so well they could repeat sections from memory. Merell called it a baby story, but she seemed happy to lie with her head in her mother’s lap and listen. When the girls’ interest flagged, Franny enrolled them in a hybrid version of kickball and keep-away while Roxanne and Simone stretched out with Olivia between them.

  The baby sucked on her binky, watching overhead as a soft breeze stirred the long, narrow leaves of the pepper tree and the festoons of green corns hanging like grapes. She was a scrawny infant, not plump and rosy as she should be at eight months. Her bony little fingers had nails the size of baby aspirin tabs.

  Simone lay back, resting her head on one hand. Beneath her thin, white wrist the purple veins branched and pulsed with life; and despite the circles around them, her dark eyes were beautiful. Roxanne saw tears.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I wish—” She shut her eyes. “Never mind what I wish.”

  “If wishes were fishes our nets would be full.”

  “And if cats were canaries the clouds would meow.”

  “Imagine the size of the cat boxes,” Roxanne said.

  Simone laughed. “Imagine the rain.”

  Later Franny brought out a Frisbee and offered to teach Merell how to throw it while the twins pulled a wagon, gathering leaves and stones for some purpose Roxanne couldn’t guess. Beside her, Simone was half-asleep. The humid August heat heightened the peppery fragrance of the tree; in the blue beyond its branches, a fresh contrail zippered the sky. Roxanne watched the pinked line spread and blur and disappear. A muscle car turboed up Fort Stockton Boulevard, disturbing the quiet.

  Without opening her eyes, Simone asked, “If you were a bird, what kind would you be?”

  “Crows are smart and the black feathers are very chic. Plus they know everything that’s going on.”

  “Sounds like Merell’s kind of bird.”

  Roxanne mentioned the iridescent hummingbird she’d seen powering around the blossoms of the scarlet trumpet vine.

  Simone said, “They seem fierce, don’t you think? And brave.” She rolled over on her stomach and rested her cheek on her folded arms. “In my next life, I get to be brave and fierce.”

  Victoria and Valli lost interest in leaves and stones and picked a few red hibiscuses for their mother. Simone showed them how to split the stems and link them together to make a lei.

  “Tell Franny to take you around the other side of the house. Those bushes are in bloom and you can pick them all. Your aunt and I are telling secrets, none of your business.”

  “What kind of secrets?” Valli asked.

  “I like secrets,” Victoria said.

  “And I like you,” Simone said, kissing her round cheek, flushed with sun. “But scram anyway.”

  As soon as they turned their backs, Simone fell back again, groaning. “Was I like that, Roxanne? Was I that useless?”

  Roxanne thought the twins could be irritating but were funny and sweet as well. She said so.

  “You don’t have to live with them.” Simone brushed the pollen-laden stamen of a hibiscus blossom against her lip. “A hummingbird spends the whole day with its nose in flowers, sucking up pollen and nectar. Sexy, huh?”

  “No wonder you’re pregnant all the time.”

  Simone looked at Roxanne with a wicked little smile. “Do you remember Shawn Hutton?”

  Roxanne had a vague memory of a skinny boy with a peeling, sunburned nose who sometimes worked at his parents’ boat shop on the Shelter Island marina.

  “They had the most beautiful sailboat.” Simone rubbed a spray of peppercorns between her hands like a gambler warming the dice. “The Oriole had berths for eight or ten people, and Shawn and I had sex on every one of them. More than once.”

  “You’re lying. You’re making this up.”

  “Scout’s honor.” Simone held up her hand and the pungent fragrance of pepper filled the air between them.

  * * *

  Until Simone met Johnny, she had never been happier than during those summer days when she sailed on the Oriole, a fifty-foot ketch painted black and yellow like the bird it was named for. Even now, ten years later, she imagined she could feel the heat of the sun on her skin and smell the fresh varnish.

  “The summer before I was a senior BJ decided that I needed more exercise.”

  Without consulting Ellen he had enrolled Simone in a sailing day camp and every morning he drove her to Shelter Island himself and in the evening he picked her up. It had come as an astonishment to everyone that she enjoyed sailing.

  “What I really loved was the reckless feeling you get when you’re flying over the water.”

  “Maybe you should try skydiving.”

  �
�Shawn was a junior instructor at the camp. He’d been around boats all his life so there was nothing he didn’t know.

  “But he sure was funny-looking,” Simone said, remembering. “A scarecrow with turquoise eyes and a killer suntan.” She had been his first girlfriend and he could not believe his luck. “The first time he put his hand under my blouse, I thought he’d go off right then, he was so excited.”

  “You were virgins together.”

  Simone giggled.

  She had been feeling miserable after yesterday’s scene at the swimming pool but telling the story of Shawn Hutton and seeing Roxanne’s openmouthed amazement cheered her up a little. It was good to remember that once upon a time she’d been a wild girl, that for one whole summer she had awakened every morning tingling with anticipation of the day ahead. Even her first months as Johnny’s wife did not have the thrill of that summer.

  “You weren’t a virgin?”

  “Please.” Simone rolled her eyes. “Let me tell you, Rox, I didn’t waste any time once I figured out what those shiny-hair vitamins you gave me really were—”

  “You knew?”

  “Shiny-hair vitamins?” Just saying it made Simone laugh. “I may be slow, but I’m not a complete idiot.”

  Roxanne said, “Elizabeth got the prescription from her brother. The boys wouldn’t leave you alone. I was sure you’d get in trouble. Does Johnny know?”

  “You think he would have married me if he knew?”

  “But how…?”

  “Roxanne, it’s not that hard to fool a man who wants to be fooled.”

  So there, Simone thought with satisfaction. Roxanne, you might be smarter’n me, but there’s still things you don’t know.

  “What about STDs? You could have gotten AIDS.”

  “Honest to God, Rox, I’m pretty sure the danger’s past.”

  “I can’t even think about it…”

  Simone wished she could stand up and dance in and around Roxanne’s appalled expression.

  “Listen,” she said. “I was dumb as dirt back then. I thought STD was something you put in the gas tank to make a car run better.”

  Roxanne didn’t believe her and then she did. They fell against each other laughing.