The Almost Sisters(10)
Now I stood in the wake of our old names, clutching my cake carrier to my chest and feeling an odd, bad tang in the air around me. He bent down to stuff spilled clothes back into the bag he’d dropped. It was one of Rachel’s reusable Whole Foods bags.
“Are you on a Goodwill run?” I asked him. Stupid, but it was the only thing that came into my head.
“No. What are you doing here?” He shoved his flop of blown-out blond hair off his forehead as he straightened up.
“It’s Sunday,” I said. “Where else would I possibly be?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Rachel canceled lunch. She sent you an e-mail.”
A khaki pants leg with a razor crease ironed into it was hanging out of the bag. I tucked it back in and saw a baby blue shirt with pinstripes and a button-down collar. This was practically Jake’s uniform. Then I realized that the gray knit wad of cloth on top was a pair of boxer briefs, and I flushed and made myself look back at his face. Really look.
He had dark circles under his eyes, and his face was puffy. For a moment it was like I could see the round, sad face of my old friend JJ. A ghost face, transparent and faint, superimposed over my brother-in-law’s chiseled features.
“What are you doing?” I asked him quietly, human to human.
His mouth turned down, fiercely unhappy, and he said, “Nothing. I have to go.”
He pushed past me and took the stairs, race-walking toward his red Nissan Armada.
“Go where?” I called after him.
He didn’t so much as glance over his shoulder. He threw the bag into the SUV and climbed in after it. I hovered on the porch, cake carrier in hand, my original mission shattered. Part of me wanted to slink home, but after Jake’s bizarre behavior I had to check on Rachel and Lavender. I tried the door, and it wasn’t locked.
I stepped into Rachel’s vaulted foyer, and immediately I heard her running toward me from the kitchen, shrieking, “I said get out, you motherffffuuuu—”
Rachel sputtered out mid-profanity when she came into the archway and saw that it was me. She skidded to a stop just inside the dining room. She was barefoot, which Rachel never was. With crazy, tangled hair, which Rachel never had. And two black eyes.
“Rachel!” I said, my heart rate jacking, horrified. I was still trying to process this sudden alternate dimension in which Rachel would shriek the F-word at her husband, and now I was in a completely impossible universe, one where JJ would hit my stepsister.
Rachel blinked and fluttered at me, and even though her eyes were swollen, I realized it was only mascara and liquid liner, wept off and rubbed into black raccoon rings. Then I could breathe again. Barely. Poor Digby got instadrunk on the panic chemicals that had been dumped into my bloodstream. He fizzed like a shot glass full of 7-Up at my core.
After a fraught pause, Rachel’s hands went to her hair, trying to smooth it, her chest heaving. It was funny in an awful way, because her hair was the least of it. Everywhere my eyes went, things were wrong, so many things that I couldn’t catalog them all. The huge mirror over the serving bar was shattered, shards of green glass and what looked like red wine splashed all over the mirrored slivers. One of the dining-room chairs lay on its side, the others catty-whompered. All eight were usually spaced with mathematical precision around the table.
Rachel gave up on her hair and stepped to me, taking the cake carrier in a parody of a gracious hostess. She turned and plopped it onto the table and took the lid off.
“Is this your grandmother’s recipe?” she said.
When I nodded, she reached out with one bare hand to tear a huge hunk off. I watched in disbelief as this strange, black-eyed creature who had replaced my stepsister started eating it, methodically, like it was a punishment.
That’s when I knew that Jake was cheating on her.
Unfathomable. Rachel was the prize, longed for, fought for, reached at last. Sixteen years of marriage, and as late as last week his eyes still tracked her, greedy, whenever she was in the room. He looked at Rachel as if at any second he would grab her willowy waist, swing her up, and set her on the mantelpiece—the finest piece of art placed at the room’s focal center. But he was cheating. I would have bet a million dollars on it.
Perhaps only because he’d called me Lay. In that single syllable, history had reared an ugly head so ancient it felt like mythology. My understanding rose from that sweaty, urgent, single incident of clasping that had passed between us, back when we were kids.
The day after his dad died, JJ came weeping down to find me in the basement. I took him in my arms, and he burrowed and clung, his hot face pressed into my neck, his tears scalding. He was a sad, soft animal, urgently snuffling and rooting at me, racked with shocked grief. I pulled him even closer, holding him so tight it was like I was trying to tuck all that desperation up inside my skin and soothe it. No matter how tight I squeezed my arms and legs around him, his unwieldy body squished out around my clamping, his sorrow much too large to be contained. Then we were kissing. It was sad and wet and frantic, his face slick with tears and snot, but I didn’t mind. I felt a huge, ballooning love.
We shoved bits of clothes up and aside, pressing close and closer until I was taking him in. It hurt, a little, but I felt calm and welcoming and something else. The only word for it was “powerful.” Powerful but not superior, not above him. It wasn’t like that.
It was like I’d stepped off a cliff and found myself standing on air in an effortless, surprising hover. I’d always had this secret power, and I used it without thinking, without knowing that I always could have. Used it for good, I’d thought, to help my wounded friend.