The Good Sister Read online

  “Merell would love to spend more time with you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, it’d be nice. I’d like it too, only I’m going flat out right now. We’re building a hotel in Vegas and it’s taking all my time.” He gestured toward his untidy desk. “I’m not sure I woulda gone for the contract if I’d known how demanding it was gonna be. These clients, these Chinese guys—fucking billionaires, let me tell you—they wanted me to work over Labor Day weekend but I told them I was going to the lake with my family. No argument, no negotiation.” He grinned suddenly. “You should come with us, Rox.”

  Johnny dropped into the leather chair behind his desk and finished his drink in a long swallow. “How’s Ty?’

  Roxanne would do almost anything before she let Johnny Duran in on her personal problems. “We’ll celebrate a year in October.”

  “Wedded bliss, huh?”

  “Pretty much.” Her smile, the tone of her voice: it was all phony but she wasn’t worried that Johnny Duran would notice. He saw and heard only what suited him.

  “Hey, let’s have an anniversary party here. This house hasn’t seen a real shindig since your wedding.” He sat forward. “I’ll swing for the catering and we’ll get a little band. Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Roxanne.”

  His eagerness engulfed her and in a corner of her heart she wanted to say yes just to give him pleasure.

  “I think we’ll probably sneak away somewhere, but thank you for the offer.”

  “You change your mind, just say so.” He sat back again. “What’s he working on now?”

  “Same as a year ago, some kind of super antibiotic. He says the flu bugs’ll never know what hit them.”

  “You understand that shit?”

  She laughed. “Only enough to ask halfway intelligent questions.”

  “Got him fooled, huh?” Johnny poured himself a second shot. “You females. We don’t stand a chance around you.”

  Johnny was never insulting to women, the opposite. But under his chivalry, his flattery and affectionate teasing, she sensed a profound condescension, as if he wanted her to know he didn’t respect her at the same time he coerced her into going along with the pretense that he did.

  It was time to go, but before she did there was something she had to say and if it made him angry to hear it…

  “Simone is skin and bones, Johnny. She shouldn’t be pregnant so soon after Olivia.” She might also have added that Simone was depressed, disoriented, and unable to parent the children she had. “I think it confuses the girls to see their mother doing nothing, handing them off to Nanny Franny.”

  A fraction of a second passed. “You know about these things, do you? Had a lot of experience?”

  Before she could think how to respond, he went on talking. “You think of all the stuff Simone’s been through and you can appreciate… She’s tough. Those miscarriages? Most women would have quit a long time back.”

  “She did it for you, Johnny. If it were up to Simone I don’t think she’d have any kids.”

  “She knows how much I want a son, Rox. Men need sons. It’s how we’re made.”

  That afternoon Simone had told Roxanne she was sure that this new baby was a boy. In another week she would be far enough along for ultrasound to confirm her conviction.

  “A woman’s happy when her husband’s happy. That’s the way marriage works, Roxanne.”

  His comment stung with what appeared at first glance to be the truth. If she had gone to Chicago, if she had made a stellar impression on the gathered scientific dignitaries: she didn’t want to think that in the end this described a happy marriage, a woman keeping a man happy by being agreeable. She was not so angry with Ty that she would accuse him of believing this.

  Johnny was saying, “Simone’s young and it looks like we got years ahead and maybe we do. But maybe not. No one can say, right? She might carry this new baby to term or she might not. There’s just no guarantee. Olivia might be our last. That’s why we have to keep trying.

  “You met my dad. When he came to this country he was just a boy, never even drove a car until he was almost seventeen. Went from carrying concrete blocks on his back to owning his own business. He was my hero, you know? Sure you know, Roxanne. You’ve heard this before.”

  And you’re going to tell me again. And she was going to be agreeable and listen.

  “Dad always wanted a son, to carry on for him, and my mom made sure he got one.”

  Seven girls and at last a boy.

  He seemed to sink into himself. “Dad told me how he felt on the day I was born, the first time he held me. He said he finally understood why he’d been born.” His voice trembled with emotion.

  She watched him blink back tears and drag his hand across his eyes. She saw the color of embarrassment rise in his cheeks, and realized that her feelings for her brother-in-law didn’t swing between love and dislike. She felt both at the same time. This capacity of the human heart to hold such opposite emotions simultaneously perplexed and troubled her, offending as it did her need for order in the world.

  “I should go.”

  “No. Wait.” He grinned, and with the flash of his smile the mood in the room changed, and Johnny was the charming bulldozer again. “We go to the lake on Friday and I want you to come with us. No argument. It’s the last long weekend of the summer and you and Ty need a vacation.”

  He was doing more than simply offering a holiday. After revealing himself to her, this was another way of asking for approval. If she accepted the invitation she would be telling him she didn’t think he was weak for speaking candidly and that she understood his love for his father and need for a son.

  “We’ll come home Monday morning early. You’ll have all day to get ready for school on Tuesday. Please, Rox. It would mean a lot to me. To all of us.”

  “Chowder—”

  “The dog. No problem. We’re taking the plane and he can come with us.”

  “You own a plane now?”

  “The company leases it. I spend so much time in Vegas, it makes sense.”

  “And you fly it?”

  “Jesus, no, when would I have time to learn? We hire a guy.”

  The granite-boned Sierras, the forest, and a quiet lake.

  “Actually, it’d be just me,” she said. “Ty’s supervising an experiment all weekend.”

  This experiment marked the end of a second stage series, and he had told her he would be sleeping in his office for a couple of nights. He’d never done this before and at the time she had thought that he was making an excuse to be away from her, but now she thought the separation would be a relief for both of them. if he could get away, why couldn’t she? A lake weekend would give her extra time with Merell. Simone would be happy and Chowder would be delirious.

  Johnny said, “This’ll make Simone so happy, having you right in the house. It’ll be just like the old days.”

  The old days…

  Roxanne stayed at her grandmother’s ranch in Daneville until she was nine, and in that time all that had been strange came to feel comfortable and homey. During those years, her mother never paid a visit; but sunny-faced greeting cards signed Be good. Love, Mom appeared in the mailbox once or twice a month. Sometimes there was a note about what she was doing, but more often there were the same four words: Be good. Love, Mom. Saturday night phone calls from San Diego became shorter and more awkward as the weeks and months passed. No matter how eagerly Roxanne anticipated these calls, she could never share her thoughts and feelings with her mother. Ellen would say something like, “How’re you doing up there, Roxanne? Is she keeping you busy? I’ll bet she is.” And Roxanne rarely knew how to respond or if a reply was even called for. During the long wordless stretches she heard her mother’s breath singing on the phone line, a note of melancholy and discontent that lodged in Roxanne’s heart and ached there for days after.

  And then, when Roxanne was nine years old, like a freak tornado blowing up out of the south, Ellen called on a Thursday to say she w
ould arrive on Saturday and take her daughter back to San Diego. She had no time to hang around the ranch. She had to be in class on Monday morning.

  That same day Gran drove into Daneville and came back with a red canvas suitcase to carry all that Roxanne had accumulated during her years at the ranch—the blue jeans and school clothes, a pair of patent leather shoes for best, a book of dog stories, and a box of small treasures and souvenirs. On Saturday morning the suitcase lay open on Roxanne’s bed, a gaping mouth waiting to swallow her life in Daneville and spit it out in San Diego. Gran’s warm, rough hand pushed gently on the small of her back, urging her to hurry up.

  “She’ll be here before dinner.” Gran’s voice was brusque. She cleared her throat. “I’ll make a supper you can eat in the car. Your mother will want to get back on the road right away.”

  “But I don’t want to go.” Roxanne wrapped her arms around Gran’s solid body, pressing her face against her grandmother’s flannel shirt. “I want to stay here with you.”

  Roxanne knew that argument would be a waste of breath. Not because Gran was stubborn (which she was), and not because she wanted to get rid of Roxanne (which they both knew she didn’t). Gran had come right out and said she wished Roxanne could stay on the ranch. But her mother was in charge of her because that was the law. Gran said your heart could break and the law didn’t care.

  After the years in Gran’s big house, the apartment in San Diego felt cramped and smelled dirty no matter how much Roxanne scrubbed it. And scrub she did, the way Gran had taught her, getting into the corners and up under things where the spiders went to die. She tried to be happy and she became so good at pretending that she could even fool herself. But when she went to bed at night, or in the morning if she woke up early, the thoughts that came to her were of Gran, who called her my girl.

  It meant everything to be someone’s girl the way she said it.

  Once, when she had been back in San Diego about a week, Roxanne asked where Simone’s father was. Ellen’s reply put an end to that conversation and any in the future. “I don’t know and I don’t care and neither should you if you know what’s good for you.”

  The old days.

  Roxanne had quickly learned how to care for her sister. At dinnertime Ellen came home from real estate school and changed into the clothes she wore to tend bar at Captain Jack’s in Mission Beach. Simone was often irritable at night and to settle her down Roxanne took her into bed with her. Simone’s skin was soft and as warm as if a bonfire burned within her.

  She was a tiny nervous creature who smiled all the time but couldn’t do anything but lie on her back and jerk her limbs like a turtle overturned. Her eyes were large and of a darker, deeper brown than Roxanne’s. In certain lights Roxanne couldn’t tell where her pupils ended and the irises began. When she was asleep, her lashes lay like tiny brushes on her cheekbones.

  Sleeping was one of the ways in which Simone was different from the babies Roxanne read about in the book Ellen gave her about infant and child care. She didn’t roll over or sit up according to the schedule in the book. Ellen said not to worry about it. “She’s lazy, that’s all. Not everyone’s a whiz-bang like you.”

  For most of that first autumn, Ellen had kept Roxanne out of school.

  “What if someone sees me? I’ll get in trouble for ditching.”

  “Stay inside.” Ellen had an answer for everything. “No one’ll know you’re here.”

  “I might forget how to divide.” And there were interesting things called fractions that Gran had just started to explain. Finally and worst, “What if I get held back?”

  Ellen laughed. “When pigs fly.”

  But as if she had taken some of Roxanne’s fears to heart, Ellen bought her a stack of math practice books with pages and pages of arithmetic problems printed on soft gray paper with the answers at the back so she could check herself, books of crossword puzzles for kids, big drawing tablets made of the same gray paper that was almost like cloth, and a giant box of Crayola crayons. She pleaded poor to the woman at the thrift store next to the real estate school and got a carton of old National Geographic magazines for free.

  “These’ll keep you busy,” Ellen said, dropping the box on Roxanne’s bed.

  Roxanne had kept track of Simone’s development on the pages of a calendar; and she decided that while lazy was an accurate description of Simone, it still did not explain what was odd about her. At an age when the books said she should be walking, running, and exploring the world, Simone was happy to sit and play alone, taking toys out of their plastic bin and putting them back in, over and over. She whined when Roxanne wouldn’t carry her, threw tantrums when she was taken from the stroller and told to walk: Ellen couldn’t study with all the noise! She told Roxanne to pick her up or push her or find her pacifier.

  Ellen promised Roxanne, “This is worth it, believe me. Someday I’m gonna make big commissions. We’ll be rich.”

  Roxanne had learned not to trust most of what her mother said, but this promise did come true. Ellen could read home buyers; and it was like a game to her, connecting people to the properties that suited them. Five months after she went to work for the Vadis Group, they moved to a town house in Point Loma that had two bedrooms and a balcony from which a tiny triangle of blue bay was visible.

  Roxanne attended school in Point Loma, and after a couple of weeks she caught up to the rest of the boys and girls in her class. She was surprised to discover that most of them had never heard of fractions, and when the subject finally came up, she soared ahead. She wrote long letters to Gran about what she was learning; and until she died, her grandmother wrote back every week.

  A babysitter was found for Simone, a woman who tried to drive Ellen into the poorhouse. Every day after school Roxanne walked three blocks to the babysitter’s house, where Simone waited for her. From the end of the path Roxanne saw her little sister teetering behind the screen door and heard the bang of her small hands against the aluminum frame. Simone cried out, not quite Roxanne’s name but something close, and banged harder. Roxanne had never felt so loved by anyone as she did when she heard that wordless celebration of reunion.

  Thinking back on those days as she waited for the electronic gate across the Durans’ driveway to swing back, Roxanne could admit that the relationship between herself and her sister had been too close to allow either of them to develop fully independent lives. At the same time, she resented Ty’s insistence that she turn her back on Simone’s love so generously given, especially now when he was brooding and uncommunicative.

  Chapter 7

  Huntington Lake, August 2009

  On the flight up to the lake house Merell was so excited, she couldn’t stop talking even though she knew she sounded like an encyclopedia. As the plane flew above the road that wound up from the San Joaquin Valley through the foothills and into the gray stone coolness of the rocks and pines, she told Aunt Roxanne that Huntington was the oldest of the Edison Power lakes, a man-made oblong of icy cobalt-blue water built in the 1930s to capture the runoff from the snows in the Sierras. She was explaining how the water was piped from Lake Edison to Huntington to Shaver Lake when Daddy told her to give it a rest, put a plug in it. But not in a mean way. Merell knew that he loved the lake too.

  Chowder was first out of the plane when it landed, making clear his preference for solid ground. He eyed with suspicion the white Range Rover driven by Aldo, the lake house caretaker, and was reluctant to get in until Aunt Roxanne told him he could ride on her lap, all eighty pounds of him.

  Besides the mountains and the lake and the house, Merell liked the road around the lake. That’s all there was, just that one road and a lot of private driveways—most of them not even paved. Through the woods she pointed out the stilted mountain cabins built hard against the steep mountainsides, many of them already boarded up as if expecting an early winter.

  The road seemed old-fashioned—she liked that too—narrow and twisty with mostly deep forest on either side. There wer
e a few hotels but Mommy said she’d rather sleep outside than in one of them. No fast food anywhere. Daddy said that to find a Jack in the Box they would have to drive all the way to Fresno, over a hundred miles away. There wasn’t any downtown at the lake, no Costco or drugstore or supermarket; but near the airstrip there was a marina with a hundred boats and a place to buy sailing, fishing, and camping gear. Aldo told Daddy that the gas station across from the marina got rich off motorists who didn’t have the sense to fill up down in the valley. In one hotel a ranger gave wildlife talks in the evening for the people who put up their tents in the campground that was only half-full even though Labor Day was the last big weekend of the summer.

  “It hardly ever gets full,” she told Aunt Roxanne, “ ’cuz big boats don’t work really good up here. They can’t go fast because it’s too high.”

  “Keeps development down,” Johnny said. “Kinda quiet.”

  “We like it that way,” Merell said.

  * * *

  Johnny called the lake house a cottage and Roxanne had expected something rustic with a porch where mice danced across the backs of shrouded furniture in the off-season. In fact it was a graceful two-story residence shingled in dark brown with a steep roof and rows of windows with Mediterranean-blue shutters.

  “Johnny never should have spent so much money,” Simone said as they drove through the gated entrance. “But I’m so glad we have it. Nobody ever sells their property up here, especially not a big spread like this. Johnny says it’s more valuable than gold.”

  Leaving the men to unload the car, the sisters and children walked around the side of the house toward the water. They could hear Baby Olivia behind them, crying.

  “Franny’ll take care of her,” Simone said, and grabbed her sister’s hand. “I’m on vacation, I don’t want to talk about Olivia.”