Look Closer(53)

That’s how Vicky comes in when she visits. She doesn’t walk up to the front door, stand under a light, buzz, and take the stairs up. No, she enters in the shadows, through the garage, without having to ever see a neighbor.

What are you doing tonight, Christian, with Vicky away? Are you and your buddy Gavin out drinking and carousing?

Mind if I take a look around your condo?

Nah. Not tonight, at least. Maybe later.





49

Vicky

“It’s good you’re here. They like it when you’re here.” Adam hands me a glass of pinot, as we watch his daughters, my nieces, Mariah and Macy, the M&Ms, finish up a game of one-on-one basketball in the driveway.

“I like it, too.” I zip up my coat to my chin. I just wish it wasn’t so cold.

“Still okay with moving in with us?”

“Still okay if you’re okay,” I say. “November. Maybe Thanksgiving-ish.” I look at Adam. He’s just hitting forty, with a hint of gray creeping in at the temples. Adam Tremont is the all-American boy, the thick head of hair and big smile, full of good cheer, someone who grew up with money and basically seemed to have life right where he wanted it. He and my sister, Monica, were the Perfect Couple, Barbie and Ken, handsome and charismatic, bubbling with energy and positive vibes. It was enough to make me puke most of the time, when I wasn’t busy resenting Monica for her good fortune.

Adam met Monica in college, at Madison, and swept her off her feet. In a good way. Adam is the real deal.

“Last night,” he says, “Macy asked me if she looked like Mommy.”

“She does,” I say. “Mariah more so. When Mariah was younger, she looked like you. But now that she’s growing up, that face? That’s Monica.”

“I know. It kinda freaks me out.”

Me, too. It can be shocking sometimes, to see the face of my sister again in her daughters, to be reminded of the woman I didn’t do enough to help.

I elbow him. “You getting out there at all?”

“Hm.” He finishes a sip of his wine and shakes his head. “You mean like dating?”

“I mean ‘like dating.’”

“Oh . . . a grand total of two dates. Nothing serious.”

Mariah, the elder at age thirteen, swats away a shot from Macy, three years younger. Macy claims that’s “no fair” because Mariah is older and taller.

“They’ll understand, y’know,” I tell him. “It might be a little weird or awkward, but they can handle it.”

“I’m not sure I can,” he says. “This online dating stuff? It’s freakin’ nuts. It’s not for me. If I ever do it, it’s gonna be the old-fashioned way.”

“A handsome, successful guy like you? I think you’ll be fine.”

“Not so sure about either of those things.”

I catch on that, take a swallow of wine. The Tremont family started a chain of microbreweries that did quite well. Adam, the only child, took over the business, more or less, about a decade ago, and things ran smoothly until the last few years, when COVID-19 hit and struck a massive blow to the business.

“The restaurant side is just now coming back,” he says. “Good thing for us we had the retail sales. One thing people didn’t stop doing during the pandemic was drink alcohol.”

“Money’s still tight?” I ask, as if I’m only moving along the conversation and not probing.

“Pretty tight, yeah. We closed another brewery last week.”

“I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

He lets out a bitter chuckle. “If Monica were here, she’d be telling me to look forward, not back.”

Yep, that sounds like her. I’m glad he remembers her that way, because that was the Monica he met in college, the Monica with whom he fell in love, the Monica who was the mother to his children. Not the Monica who injured her back and started on oxycontin, who didn’t realize when she crossed that line from needing oxy for the pain to just needing oxy, period, who eventually did the unthinkable—unthinkable for Monica, at least—and walked away from her family for a man who was more than happy to keep supplying her with pain-killing opioids.

I, of all people, was Monica’s confidant, to the extent she let any of us know that she was falling into the grips of that poison, that it was slowly predominating over everything else in her life. Maybe it was because I’d been such a fuckup myself, the black sheep of the family, that she felt more comfortable sharing with me than Adam. I was three hundred miles away, so it was mostly by phone. I didn’t realize how warped her reality had become because I wasn’t there in person.

Or that’s what I try to tell myself, at least. I was the younger, screwup sister, talking and texting with her from a distance. She was the belle of our high school, the prom queen who went to college and married a handsome, wealthy guy and had two beautiful children. How seriously could she take advice from the high-school dropout who’d never made a good decision in her life?

But I knew she was faltering. I could tell those drugs were messing with her judgment. I knew she needed someone to shake some sense into her.

Did I really help as much as I could have? Or was there a part of me that drew some satisfaction from seeing Ms. Perfect stumble from her perch?