The next day we got our tattoos. We stole a handful of Mother’s painkillers to make it hurt less. Neither of us was promising to stop getting high. That would have been too much to ask—and we would only have lied to each other. We were promising that we would never fight like that again. And we never did. We never have.
Mother always thought the argument was about a boy. But no boy would have been worth it.
What was happening to my sister began to seem like something I’d done wrong. A mistake I’d made. When we left home—Evelyn for the West Coast, me for the East—and I outgrew the drugs and she didn’t, distance made it easier to believe that her problems weren’t my fault. I missed her—and I made myself stop missing her.
We can control how we think and feel.
I was good at not missing people. Mother, for example. The last time I saw Mother was at Dad’s funeral. Evelyn didn’t make it home. Mother got extremely drunk (even for her) and blew up at me, saying that my sister’s problem was the result of my heartless, selfish dominance. I said it wasn’t fair to blame me for something that started before I was born. It was a fight I could never win. I stopped speaking to Mother. I didn’t need to hear her say what I feared.
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried to help Evelyn—to save her. I happen to know a great deal about the pros and cons of various rehab facilities. Working at Dennis Nylon has been an education. I’ve lost count of how many times I flew out west, faking some business trip to fool Sean, faking some family emergency to deceive the people at work. It was a family emergency.
I’d find Evelyn wherever she was. Luckily, she always wanted to be found—that’s why she’d called me, in the middle of the night, always scared. Those plane trips lasted forever. I’d find her in some crappy motel, usually shacked up with a halfway-hot guy she hardly knew. I’d check her into rehab. Mother paid for that. It was the least she could do. After Evelyn got out, she’d call regularly. She’d tell me how amazing it felt to be sober, how much better food tasted, how she could enjoy a sunny day without her eyes hurting.
Then the calls would stop.
Everyone who has ever loved an addict or had one in the family knows how it goes, the hopes and disappointments, the plot turns always circling back to the same story. People get tired.
The last I heard from Evelyn was a postcard from Seattle with nothing written on it but my Connecticut address and, on the front, a brightly colored tourist photo of fish, beautifully arranged on ice in the Pike Place market. Dead fish: Evelyn’s sense of humor.
“Are you still there?” I asked, unnecessarily. I could hear my sister sniffling on the other end of the phone.
“More or less,” she said.
“Don’t hang up,” I said. “Please.”
“I won’t,” she said.
“Are you high?”
“Does it sound like I’m high?”
It did.
“Where are you going?” I said. “In Mother’s car?”
“I thought I’d go to the cabin. Up to the lake.”
My spirits lifted slightly. Maybe Evelyn was going to try and get clean. Leave her old life, make a fresh start. The lake house was our retreat, our place of safety. Our own private mental asylum.
“You going there to chill?” I said.
“You could say that.” She laughed bitterly. “I’m going there to kill myself.”
“Are you joking?”
“No,” she said. “I’m dead serious.” I could tell she meant it.
“Please, no,” I said. “Wait for me. Don’t do anything crazy. I’ll meet you there. I’ll get there as soon as I can. Promise me. No, swear to me.”
“I promise,” she said. “I promise I won’t do anything till you get here. But I’m going to do it. I’ve made up my mind.”
“Wait for me,” I repeated.
“Okay,” she said. “But make it fast.”
I stayed awake all night. By morning I knew what I was going to do and what was going to happen. I knew, and I didn’t know.
My sister possessed the key that unlocked the door to the prison, the magic spell that would slay our dragons. She was the secret player with the power to help Sean and me win our little game. I didn’t want my sister to die. I wasn’t going to help or encourage her to kill herself. I loved her. But I was going to do what she needed me to do, even if it meant losing her. Even if it meant admitting that I already had.
I had no time to lose. The next morning I got up early and packed. I booked a flight to San Francisco, which I had no intention of taking but which I hoped might briefly throw anyone who was looking for me off my trail.
I called Stephanie and asked if she’d do me a favor. A simple favor. Could Nicky spend the evening at her house? I’d pick him up when I got back from work. Of course I could have told her that I was planning to be away for a few days. But I wanted her to go into full panic mode as soon as possible. It would make my disappearance seem more credible, more alarming, more urgent. And when the insurance company looked into the case, there would have been a police investigation.
Perhaps there would be a body. A woman who had looked just like me and who had my DNA.
That morning I dropped Nicky off at school five minutes late so I wouldn’t run into Stephanie, who was always early. I didn’t want nosy Stephanie wondering why I was crying when I kissed Nicky goodbye.
I knew that I wouldn’t be seeing him for a long time, and my heart was breaking. I hugged him so hard he said, “Careful, Mom, that hurts!”
“Sorry,” I said. “I love you.”
“Love you too,” he said, not even looking back as he ran into school.
“See you later,” I said, so the last thing I said to him (for a while) wouldn’t be a lie.
I kept telling myself that Nicky would thank us later. Who wouldn’t want a childhood in the most beautiful spots in Europe? He would have a better childhood than his parents, who’d grown up in the boring suburbs of Detroit and the bleak north of England. Connecticut should have been good enough; I don’t know why it wasn’t. I guess it’s never enough.
I wanted to do something exciting. I wanted to feel alive.
I drove home and picked up Sean. We drove to the Metro-North station and took the train into the city. Then we took a taxi from Grand Central to the airport. We needed him to be on the plane to London before I went missing. I made a big production of standing on the sidewalk in front of the international departure entrance and kissing him goodbye in case the police located the driver who took us to JFK. But they never even tried—more proof that they weren’t looking for me all that hard. I asked the cab to wait while we said our loving goodbyes. We’d be on CCTV: a devoted couple, sorry to be leaving each other, even for a few days.
“This is it,” I whispered to Sean. “You know what to do.” In London, he would set up a few meetings with clients with whom he’d failed to get something going before, the ones who liked him and were genuinely sorry they couldn’t invest millions of their company’s money in Sean’s company’s real estate projects. They’d agree to have a drink with him—and give him an alibi.
“Where are you going?” he said. “What if I need to get in touch with you? What if there’s an emergency?” He sounded scared, like a kid. It was embarrassing.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “This is the emergency. No matter what you hear . . . I’m not dead. I’ll be back. Trust me. I won’t be dead.” I needed him to believe that.
“Okay,” he said dubiously.
“See you soon,” I said, very loudly in case anyone was listening. No one was.
“See you soon, darling,” he said.
I got back in the cab and went to the rental car agency.
I was on my way. I had that heady, bad-girl, wind-in-my-hair feeling about a scheme that might work, a plan that seemed like more fun than my current life, more fun than a job that many people would have seen as fun enough. I wanted something else.