Afterparty(67)

I race after Dylan with a skewered jumbo shrimp kebab in one hand and his sleeve in the other. I am trying to slow him down without actually tearing his jacket, to stop him before we reach the pool house, before we reach the point of complete hopelessness and relationship doom.

But we are there.

They are not in the pool house. They are laughing their way down the stairs from the upper patio toward us, Aiden still wrapped around her, Siobhan with huge pupils, and barefoot, and wearing a tiny red dress, hanging off his side.

Even though anyone with half a brain would know in advance that this was going to be a disaster of immense proportion, the actual unfurling of the immense disaster is just as surprising as if I hadn’t imagined it so many times, with ever-changing details and a lot of imaginary screaming.

I say, “Dylan, before—”

Aiden says, “Hey, Amélie!”

Even when he’s lurching, he’s got swagger. Swagger that says, Hello, see this girl under my arm? I own her. I own this night, and this party, and the Western Hemisphere, and you. Or, in the alternative, I’m a completely ridiculous macho drunk guy that you never should have touched, because now you’re toast.

My mouth. Dry, bitter burnt toast.

Dylan says, “Shit, Aiden. Do they all blend into each other? This is one” (by which he means me) “you haven’t wrecked yet.”

Siobhan shakes herself loose of Aiden and gapes at me. I scream at her, “What are you doing here? What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you tell me?”

She says, “You stupid bitch, you didn’t tell him, did you?”

Aiden says, “Amélie. Where’s your Bert-and-Ernie slippers?”

“Her name is Emma and you’ve never seen her slippers,” Dylan says. Then he gestures at Siobhan, and shakes his head. “Drop the girl and get on a plane. I had her and now you’ve got her. You’ve made your point with her, now fly away.”

Siobhan yells, “I’m not anybody’s point!”

I say, “Dylan, we need to leave.”

“A-mé-lie,” Aiden crooks his finger at me. “C’mere. Sibby doesn’t mind. She didn’t mind before.”

People coming down the staircase from the upper deck have to forge a path around us at the foot of the stairs. Make spectacle of self at big, glam party: check.

Dylan turns to me. “Please tell me you don’t know what he’s talking about.”

I don’t say anything.

Dylan turns and walks back toward the dark side yard.

Aiden shouts, “D.K.! Don’t go over there.”

Dylan raises his arm in a one-fingered salute, but doesn’t turn around.

I am on his heels, clamoring for attention, like Mutt chasing a macaroon.

“It’s my French name. I don’t use it. It wasn’t anything.”

He stops short. “Then what was it?”

God, it’s no wonder I haven’t been telling the truth all along—beyond my more obvious moral failings and complete tumble off the Emma the Good horse—because it’s hard, it’s just so hard, and also painful.

“Dylan, it was one random kiss before I even knew you. It was anonymous. It was nothing.”

“Is this supposed to make me feel better?”

“I didn’t even know it was your brother. You don’t look that much alike. Your eyes aren’t even the same color, and he’s taller—” This is not going well. “And then when I saw him again—”

“When?”

“You have to believe me—”

“No. I don’t have to believe you. I don’t believe you. When??” Followed by a second so long and so painful, it feels as if it’s being stretched out on a medieval instrument of torture.

“Yesterday, I’m so sorry!”

“Yesterday.” He is shaking his head, as if marveling at how horrible and unexpected this is. “Is there anything I know about you that’s true? I don’t even know your name.”

I grope for a list of true things, hard facts with no spin or shading, but as I’m trying to compile it, he is pulling me along by the arm as we traverse the dark lawn, weaving around plants and the occasional couple, in a shoe-wrecking shortcut to the valet parkers off the circular driveway.

He says, “Hot damn.”

We are facing a decades older, exact model of Dylan, presumably his dad, jumping to get his hand off Dylan’s mother’s ass. And I wonder, in the middle of all this, if his mom is the second wife, because she looks decades younger, as if either she’s had the best cosmetic surgery on earth or she had Dylan when she was twelve.

In his I’m-actually-not-here-and-would-rather-eat-dirt-than-speak voice, Dylan says, “And here we have my father.”

I stick out my hand, dutiful girlfriend, even though that’s going to last for maybe five more seconds. I go, “Hello, Mr. Kahane. Hello, Mrs. Kahane,” followed by stone silence.

Dylan’s deadpan, it turns out, did not fall from the sky; it was inbred. He and his dad stand there looking at each other without any discernible facial expression between them, essentially without blinking.

“This is not Mrs. Kahane,” Dylan says. “This would be . . . Who are you?”

And I realize, of course I realize, that as horrible as this evening has been up to now, this is the main event.