The Identicals(109)

“Hi, Grammie,” Ainsley says. She senses that her grandmother can’t stand up to greet her, so she bends over to kiss Eleanor’s powdered cheek. She smells Evening in Paris. She wonders if Grammie has heard about the pilfered Bombay Sapphire and her in-school suspension. But the girl Ainsley was back then isn’t the girl Ainsley is now.

Eleanor pats the divan. “Sit, sweetie,” she says. “I’ve missed you.”

Ainsley sits. The view over Nantucket Sound is pretty, and Ainsley tries to relax. Her grandmother doesn’t sound at all angry—but then why the formal summons? “Where’s Aunt Flossie?” Ainsley asks.

“She’s out for the night,” Eleanor says. “She has a date with Chet, my taxi driver.”

“She does?” Ainsley says. “I thought she was married.”

“She is,” Eleanor says. “Her husband is eighty-five years old, however. She wanted to enjoy the company of a younger man tonight. It’s perfectly harmless, I assure you. Besides, I needed Flossie out of the house. We’re having an intervention.”

Suddenly Ainsley wants to puke. An intervention? She hasn’t had a drink all summer, hasn’t smoked any dope, not one cigarette. Doesn’t her grandmother know this? Ainsley needs to explain. Just when things are finally straightening out for her, she’s getting shipped off to rehab? Well, she won’t go. She won’t! “Grammie, I don’t think an intervention is necessary.”

“But it is,” Eleanor says. “I’ve let this feud between your mother and your aunt go on for too long. I should have set things straight fourteen years ago.”

“What?” Ainsley says.

“Julian’s death was my fault,” Eleanor says. “I’m the one your mother should be blaming, not your aunt.”

“What?” Ainsley says. She has never once heard her grandmother speak Julian’s name. But the shock of this is overridden by her relief that the intervention is not meant for her.

Eleanor says, “I want you to know, my darling, that there are many things in my life I regret. I have made horrible mistakes. I’ve treated the people I love most in abominable ways. Billy, for one. I loved him, but I shat all over the man. At some point I decided I had outgrown him or that he had never been good enough for me in the first place. That wasn’t true, of course. Your grandfather was the most handsome, gracious man in the city of Boston. But I made him feel small. I insulted him, I called him names, I drove him away. He hated me for years. And your mother! I can’t even begin to enumerate my transgressions against your mother.” Eleanor’s voice wavers, and Ainsley shifts uncomfortably. On the cigar table next to the divan, her grandmother has a drink, probably her usual Mount Gay and tonic. She brings the glass to her mouth, but her hand is shaking.

“Grammie,” Ainsley says. She would like to say something comforting to Eleanor, but what can one say to a seventy-one-year-old woman that won’t sound patronizing? Her grandmother has been awful to the people closest to her. She’s a battle-ax, a dragon lady. She prefers that people fear her rather than love her. And yet Ainsley is impressed that her grandmother has reached this moment of self-awareness. Probably it’s a result of breaking her hip. Ainsley supposes that being so incapacitated is humbling and painful and reminds one of one’s own mortality.

Ainsley is saved from having to speak because a second later the doorbell rings, and shortly thereafter Harper walks in. She smiles sympathetically at Ainsley. “Did Mommy fill you in, then?”

“Kind of,” Ainsley says. But not really. Eleanor brought up Julian but never finished the thought.

There is no time to pursue this idea, because the doorbell rings again, and Ainsley thinks, FedEx? Or Flossie? Would Eleanor make Flossie use the doorbell while she was staying here? Quite possibly.

“What’s the big emergency?” a voice says.

Ainsley’s head swivels. Her mother walks onto the porch.

“Sit down, Tabitha,” Eleanor says.

Tabitha takes a head count. She stares hard at Harper, then her eyes rest on Ainsley, and there’s a glimmer of a smile. “Hello, darling,” she says. She holds out her arms, and Ainsley can’t help herself—she rushes into them. It’s her mother.

“Mama,” Ainsley says.

Tabitha squeezes her, kisses the top of her head. Ainsley inhales, hoping for the familiar Mom scent, but her mother smells like she has been living with a litter of feral cats at the bottom of a laundry hamper.

“I need you girls to sit,” Eleanor says.

Ainsley reclaims her place on the divan. Harper perches on the arm of an overstuffed chair, and Tabitha dutifully sinks into the matching chair. Ainsley looks back and forth between her mother and her aunt. After spending so much time with Harper, Ainsley thought she would be able to easily distinguish between the two, but they are eerily identical. If Ainsley closed her eyes, and they switched places or didn’t, changed clothes or didn’t, would she be able to tell them apart?

“What is it, Mother?” Tabitha says.

“She wants to broker a peace treaty,” Harper says. “I’ll help her out. I’m sorry, Tabitha. I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry about the party at the boutique, I’m sorry I hired Caylee, and… I’m sorry about Julian.”

“Julian!” Tabitha says. She casts an eye at Ainsley. “We aren’t talking about this in front of my daughter.”