“A pillowcase with horses,” she said.
“Wallpaper,” I said. “Pineapples on the wallpaper by our playpen.”
“What about me?” my sister said. “Do you remember me?”
“I remember that my name was your first word.”
“Typical,” she said. She refilled her glass and took another pill.
She said, “I have a pretty high tolerance.”
I said, “I used to. As you know.”
“Good for you,” my sister said, with a little toasting gesture and the angry head twitch she got from Mother. “Here’s to my sister, the cheap date.”
“I love you,” I said. I needed to get that information across to her, the sooner the better.
She didn’t say she loved me. She shut her eyes. She sat there at the kitchen table with her eyes shut for a very long time.
Then she said, “Can I change my mind again? I actually do want to die.”
I could have said, “It’s the alcohol and the pills talking. Wait until you come down.” Would my sister have believed me?
But what I said was “Sometimes you have to follow your heart. You know what’s best for you. Do what you need to. Don’t worry about me. I’ll miss you, but I’ll survive.”
My sister’s pale little face blanched with shock. She stared at me. Was I giving her permission? Did I want her to die? I wasn’t telling her to live. I wasn’t offering to protect her.
She buried her face in her hands. Then she turned away from me and looked toward the porch and said, “You know what? I think I’ll go for a little swim . . . The cold water will wake me up . . . I’ll be back in five minutes.”
“Don’t go,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” my sister said.
Was I supposed to tackle her and keep her in the room?
I wanted to believe that the shock of the water would sober her up and make her realize she didn’t want to die. She’d come back inside and ask me for help. I’d wrap her in towels and hug her and we’d start over. There was time to get her somewhere where they would pump her stomach. All I had to do was get her in dry clothes and into the car.
Forget the insurance money. I’d live a better life. I’d make my sister live with us. She and Nicky would love each other. Sean would get used to it. I’d get her a job at Dennis Nylon. We’d commute to work. Dennis could be her sponsor. He would love how crazy that was.
Evelyn took another pill and drained another shot.
She stood and stumbled once before she reached the door.
“Wait,” I said. “There’s something I want you to have.”
I took off Sean’s mother’s diamond and sapphire ring and put it on her finger. Her hand was swollen from drink, so it took some doing.
“Ouch,” she said. “What’s this?”
“I want you to have it.”
What I really meant was that I wanted someone to find it. Later. Evelyn knew it too. Mind reading up until the end. The very end.
“Brilliant,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Take care,” I said, as my sister went out to die, and I didn’t stop her.
I really believed she’d come back. Or maybe I half believed it. Or wanted to believe it. Meanwhile I was sleepy. I’d drunk more than I realized, keeping up. I’d hardly slept. I hadn’t eaten. I’d gotten out of practice. I’d forgotten how to maintain my old bad habits.
I lay down on the couch and passed out for half an hour.
When I awoke, I went outside and looked for Evelyn. I ran along the edge of the water. I shouted her name. There was no one around. There was nothing I could do.
I went back into the cabin. I took two of my sister’s pills and washed them down with mezcal and slept for thirty-six hours.
I woke up sober, knowing that I had killed my sister, still trying to convince myself that I hadn’t. She wanted to die. To force her to live would have been selfish. Maybe for the first time, I had helped her—really helped her—get what she wanted.
I’d lost all my fear of being alone in the cabin—maybe because the worst had happened. I was glad to have time alone there, time to get used to Evelyn’s death. Time to remember our lives. Time to think about who I was and who she’d been and who I was without her. I should have called the police right away, but I told myself that my sister wouldn’t have wanted that. She would have wanted me to stay at the cabin and clear my head and let some time pass.
I lived on bologna sandwiches on white bread with mayonnaise. The diet of a ten-year-old. I wouldn’t let Nicky live that way, but it was what I wanted. I wanted to pretend, while I was eating, that Evelyn and I were ten and spending the summer at the lake house.
I paced the cabin. I was afraid to go out to the lake, afraid of what I might see. Early in the evenings I fell exhausted onto the bed and slept until morning. I’d been something of an insomniac when I lived with Sean and took care of Nicky and worked for Dennis, but now I fell asleep at once.
A week passed, then another. I lost track of time.
I straightened up the cabin, cleaned up Evelyn’s mess one last time. Or some of it. I left the pill and alcohol bottles. I left the rental car in the woods, hiked back to the cabin, and drove off in Mother’s car.
I drove to the Adirondacks and stayed there awhile.
Maybe that wasn’t the best place for me to be. I didn’t have enough to do. I wanted to sleep in my own bed. I couldn’t stop thinking about Nicky. I longed to hear his voice, his beautiful silly conversation. I wanted to smell the milky smell of his hair. I wanted to walk down the street holding his hand. I wanted to see his face when he spotted me waiting for him after school. Soon I was missing him so much that I felt frantic. And grief stricken, as if it were Nicky and not my sister who was dead.
I left the mountains and went to Danbury, which seemed safe, like a city where no one knew anyone else. I checked into a motel. That’s when I plugged back in, reconnected. That’s when I went on the internet and found out that Stephanie had helped herself to my husband.
I’d honored my sister’s wish to die. But now I wondered if I would have fought harder to keep her if I’d known that Sean was a weakling and a traitor and that our plan was a joke. He was living with Stephanie. And I was alone.
Now Stephanie was harassing my mother, involving everyone I knew in her sick plan to become me. What Stephanie edited out of her blog is what she saw when she sat on that pink-and-white-striped couch and looked at Mother’s pictures of me as a child.
At two of me. At Emily times two.
Big surprise: I was a twin!
I can imagine her dismay at this heinous violation of her best-girlfriend faith that we told each other everything. How could I forget to mention that detail about myself?
Sean believed I was dead. But that only meant he hadn’t believed me when I said goodbye at the airport. I needed to talk to Sean, to see him, to find out what was in his mind. As if his mind was the part of him that had decided to sleep with Stephanie.
I called Stephanie one more time. As usual, I waited till she was alone.
I said, “If you tell Sean what you found out from my mother, I will kill you. I’ll kill you and Miles both. Or maybe I’ll kill Miles and let you live.”
“I swear I won’t.” She sounded terrified. “I swear it.”
That’s how stupid Stephanie was. Even knowing how often I’d lied to her, she believed me.
Sean and I had agreed on code words we’d use in an emergency, and I texted them to him, and he texted me back.
The code words were “Peeping Tom.”
I told him to meet me for dinner at a restaurant where we used to go when we first got together, an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village where you paid to have space between you and the next table. You didn’t go for the food but for the quiet. People went there to make business deals, to get engaged—and to break up.
Sean was there when I arrived. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel when I saw him again. Now I knew. He had an open, stupid face. I felt annoyance, then rage. Whatever love I’d had for him was dead—colder than my sister.