I'll Be You(15)

The face vanished from the window. A moment later, the woman appeared in her backyard and waddled over to the fence, stepping through her own flower plantings in order to get a better look at me. She was a young brunette, and so pregnant that the silk bathrobe around her waist wouldn’t stay tied over the mound of her belly. Underneath it she wore a T-shirt with an arrow that pointed to her stomach and read Spoiler Alert: I’m Pregnant.

She leaned on the fence and watched as I tried to wrestle Charlotte away from the toys, with little success.

“So you’re the twin sister,” she said, glee flavoring her words. She looked me up and down, hunting for the details that would differentiate me from my sister. “I’m Alice. I’ve heard all about you.”

“I’m not going to pretend that means good things,” I said. “You don’t have to be polite.”

She laughed. “She said you were fearless and way more obnoxious than her. She also said you weren’t talking. So you made up? She’s letting you babysit?”

“It’s kind of complicated.” Charlotte had broken from my grip and was back at the water table, up to her elbows in stagnant water. “Hey, do you happen to have a spare key? I got locked out and I need to get some of Charlotte’s swim stuff.”

Alice pointed at an outdoor kitchen right behind me, with a sink and an enormous barbecue. “There’s a hide-a-key inside the barbecue cabinet,” she said. She leaned over the fence, watching me with a look of naked curiosity. “So where’s Elli? I was wondering if we could use her pool, but she hasn’t been answering any of my texts and I noticed her lights weren’t on.”

I fished around inside the barbecue, a dark space that smelled of grease and charcoal. “She’s been at some spa in Ojai all week,” I said.

A wail went up from inside Alice’s house. “Shoot, that one’s mine. Gotta run.” She turned toward the house, hurrying back across the grass and bracing her belly with one hand. It wasn’t until she got to her own back door that she hesitated and turned around to look at me. She called across the garden, “The spa—it’s not related to that group she’s in, is it? GenFem?”

“GenFem?” I looked at her blankly. The word in my mouth felt ungainly, unfamiliar, vaguely vaginal. It rang no bells at all.

Alice nodded. “She took me to a meeting a few months ago. Something about it…it was weird. Culty.”

“Culty?” Inside the barbecue my hands had closed around a small metal box and I fished it out, forearms streaked with black. I stood up straight, a faint alarm bell ringing in my mind. “I’m sorry, what are you talking about? What’s this group?”

Alice hesitated. She seemed about to say something further, but then her child wailed again and she blinked and swallowed. I could tell she was measuring the time it would take to fill me in with the amount of time she had left before her baby had a complete meltdown. The baby won.

“Nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said. She flashed me a tight smile and disappeared inside, leaving me ashy and unsettled in my sister’s abandoned yard.



* * *



—

Inside, my sister’s house smelled like sweet soft rot, as if something was festering in the garbage cans. On the console by the front door, an arrangement of lilies had disintegrated into green goo, desiccated petals scattered beneath it on the parquet floor. The air in the house felt perfectly still, like a stopped clock waiting to be wound again.

Charlotte ran straight through the living room and toward the kitchen. “Mama!” she called. In the empty kitchen, she turned to look at me, her face contorting with confusion. “Mama here?” she asked, her voice tremulous.

I suddenly realized my mistake. “Sorry, baby. She’s not here.”

A low wail began in her throat. What had I been thinking? Of course she thought we’d find her mother at the house; I had been setting her up for disappointment. She collapsed to the floor of the kitchen, grinding her fists in the floor, shrieking at a decibel so loud that I could feel it in my teeth. Snot dripped down her face, dirt trapped in the translucent rivulets. I tried to spatula her off the floor and into my arms, but she went limp and slipped out of my grasp.

I threw open cupboards, looking for a treat to distract her, and found a tube of what looked like strawberry-flavored Cheerios. Puffs, the label said. I crouched by Charlotte and rattled the tube by her ear, so that she could hear it over her own screams. “I found puffs,” I announced.

The screams stopped. She sat up and shoved a fistful of the puffs in her mouth, her mood instantly improved. It felt like a miracle. I wished that adults could forgive that easily, that wounds could be so easily healed with sugared cereal.

The kitchen looked like it had been hastily abandoned mid-breakfast. A cup of milky coffee was growing mold near the sink; and a crusted plate of dried eggs still sat on the tray of a high chair pulled up to the table. Someone had spilled pretzels all over the floor. I put dishes in the dishwasher, hesitated, and then grabbed a broom to sweep up the floor. Then I scrubbed the counters with a damp sponge, for good measure. My sister had always been compulsively neat—it was one trait we both shared—and it bothered me that she would leave her kitchen like this. Maybe motherhood had made her more tolerant of a mess, but to leave for vacation like this? It felt discordant.