The Almost Sisters(47)

“The girl doll was named Lavender?” I asked.

“No, the baby,” Rachel said. “The tiny baby doll. The little girl was Madeline. Ugh, just forget it. This is the least of my life’s problems. So fine, draw me again. It doesn’t matter, because let’s be real. No one I know is going to read it. So whatever. Do whatever. Make a supervillain named the Rachenator, give it six or seven evil heads. I forgive you.”

She plopped back down and picked up the top magazine, as if she were finished with the conversation, but it didn’t play. Her hands were trembling. I heard the rustle in the pages.

“You forgive me?” I said, incredulous.

“You heard me.” She sniffed, turned a page. “Oh, look, aqua is coming back for summer. How lucky for you. You look good in aqua. Not that you’ll wear it.”

“I didn’t steal your baby name,” I said again.

“If you say so,” Rachel said. She lifted the Vogue to eye level, until it was a literal wall between us. But she couldn’t leave it. She spoke behind the shield of the emaciated teenager on the cover. “I’m just saying. Dad built that dollhouse right after I was born, long before you ever moved in. Before Dad and I knew you existed. I had it my whole life, and the baby was always named Lavender.”

Then I finally clued in. This wasn’t about dolls. This was about our parents. Somehow we were preschoolers again, and this was about who owned Keith. Had I chosen the color purple to stake a claim on something that she thought of as hers? It was territorial and weird; purple, in all its shades, belonged to anyone with eyes and color vision. It belonged to both of us. So did Keith, to some extent.

“It wasn’t conscious,” I said. She said nothing, eyes steady on her magazine. “What do you want me to say? What will fix this?” I asked. When she still didn’t answer, I went right into the meat of the matter. “If we were both on fire, Keith would put you out first. We both know it. It’s fine.”

Which was not to say that Keith didn’t love me. He did. He just loved Rachel more. He was the first man that Rachel and I had both belonged to, but she was his in ways I wasn’t.

Rachel looked up, finally, and said, “Well, your mom would put you out first if you were on fire. That’s just biology.”

“I’m not sure that’s true,” I said, and I wasn’t. “Mom would probably try to put us both out and catch fire, and we’d all three burn up together.”

“Oh, so Mom is so much better than my dad?” she snapped.

“That’s not what I meant at—” I began, but she talked over me.

“Why are we discussing this? What’s wrong with your brain? We are not on fire. We will never be simultaneously set on fire in our parents’ living room, so that they have to pick exactly who to put out in what order.”

Well, we’re both on fire now, and neither one of us will tell them, I thought, and out loud I told her, “I call him Keith, you call her Mom. You do the math.”

“And whose choice was that?” she said.

I boggled at her. “Yours!” I said. “You bit me!”

“I’m sure that I did no such thing,” she said, and she was serious.

“Rachel!” I said. She shrugged, shaking her head faintly, as if I’d just assured her that she’d once picked up Thor’s hammer. “I did try calling him Dad, and you bit me.”

We were talking about her now, and she didn’t like it. She forced her lips into a wry smile, and her eyes cooled. It was as though she’d flipped off her fury switch. Just like that, her wall was all the way up again. All the way up, and fortified. Maybe there were pots of oil, ready and already boiling, all around the top, but I wouldn’t know. Not from where I sat. I was far away, outside them.

“If you say so. We’re in your house now, and Lavender and I have no place else to go. You’re Sun and I’m Sky here. So have it your way,” she said.

It took me off my guard. Were we fighting because Rachel was out of her home territory? Worse, her home territory had a For Sale sign on the lawn, and her husband was MIA. She wasn’t ready to tell Mom and Keith how bad things were at her place—maybe because she wasn’t ready to believe it yet. Or she wasn’t braced for the pity and the worry, and with that I could empathize. She’d come to me because I already knew. I was the only one who already knew.

“I hope you know you’re welcome here,” I said, but it came out stilted and way too formal.

“Thanks,” she said, so short it was a mere snip of a word.

Before I could say anything else, Birchie materialized with a home-knit afghan and a cup of rose-hip tea. She went right to Rachel and wrapped the afghan around her. Rachel set her magazine aside to snuggle in. She even took the tea, smiling up at Birchie. She was usually impatient with coddling, but now she looked inclined to sink down into it and bask. So she would take sympathy, as long as it was not from me. Fine.

I snatched my sketchbook and stalked upstairs to my room, and it took a lot to keep me from slamming the door with such a righteous bang it would wake up Lavender. Hell, wake up the rest of the town, even. I wanted to bang it so hard that Martina Mack would sit bolt upright, clutching the covers, thinking Satan had come for her at last.

But it wasn’t my room anymore. Not mine alone. Rachel might be mad, but she was not mad enough to leave. Her suitcases lay open on the floor by mine, loaded with silky tank tops and lacy underthings and pairs of summer shoes.