I WAS DOZING ON my sofa when Gina and Zoey finally came in. A storm had blown in around nine and chased the crowd off the patio at Sandy’s. By then, the party was a huge success, if you didn’t factor in Zoey’s absence and the uneaten birthday cake . . . and the fact that I was seriously contemplating making myself an only child. The idea that Gina would take off with Zoey, without even asking, and then keep her out until after eleven o’clock on her birthday made me insane.
When I heard the cottage door unlocking, I whiplashed from drowsiness and anxiety to rage. Zoey appeared in the opening first. Gina probably planned it that way —using my daughter as a human shield.
“Where have you been?” The words were an angry hiss. I wanted to scream them, but J.T. had already gone to bed, exhausted after the big night at Sandy’s.
Zoey was all smiles, and so far there was no sign of Gina, other than a car door closing outside. Zoey had a shopping bag in each hand, and her hair was hanging in glitter-sprayed curls, pulled away from her face by a rhinestone-studded headband. She was wearing way too much makeup. Long, red fingernails clutched the handles of her shopping bags, and she was dressed in a black miniskirt and impossibly high silver platform shoes. She looked twenty-five.
“Come see what we got!” she said, then trotted across the room, wobbling in the heels as she grabbed my hand and pulled me off the sofa. She was so giddy that for a minute I was afraid she and Gina had been out drinking together, but Zoey was sober under all that makeup. “It’s, like, the cutest thing ever, and it’s four-wheel drive. Now we can go on the beach without getting stuck, and Aunt Gina says that next year when I get my license, I can have it, and she’ll get another car, and . . .”
Zoey didn’t stop until she had me out the door. In the driveway, Gina was lounging on the hood of a vintage ragtop Jeep. In tight jeans, shoes that matched Zoey’s, a silver tank top, and enough jewelry to choke a horse, she looked like an auto show model doing a night shot under the porch lights.
“Like it?” she asked. “I came out $6K ahead, too. That car dealer over in Norfolk didn’t even know what hit him, did he, Zoey bear? We’re gonna have some good times in this car, Baby Sister. I mean, does this say I live in paradise, or what?”
“Zoey, go inside.” She didn’t need to hear what I was about to say. Especially not on her birthday. Norfolk. Gina had dragged Zoey off to Norfolk to trade in the Acura. Between the three-hour drive over and rush-hour traffic later on, my sister had known full well that they would be gone all evening.
“Mama . . . ,” Zoey protested.
“Just go inside, okay? I’m not mad at you.”
“But, Mama . . .”
“Zoey, please.”
Zoey ducked her head and slipped into the cottage, muttering, “Great,” as the door closed behind her by itself. I felt the sting of instantly being made the bad guy, despite the fact that I hadn’t done anything wrong. Gina was the guilty one here.
“What?” Gina unfolded from her sultry pose and slid off the Jeep. “Oh, seriously? You’re mad. I do something to get some cash for us, and I take little Zoey bear birthday shopping, and you’re mad at me.”
“You didn’t even ask me, Gina. You checked my daughter out of school without making sure it was okay, and you just took off.”
“You knew I told her I’d take her out for her birthday.” My sister’s chin jutted out, her hair flying in moon-platinum strings. Her face was in shadow, but I knew the self-righteous expression that would go with that posture. “We had fun. I showed her a good time. I spoiled her a little. What’s so wrong with that? What? You don’t trust me now?”
No, you know what? I don’t. “I needed her to be here. Here, Gina. You never even thought about the fact that I wanted to spend my daughter’s birthday with her? That I might have plans? We had a surprise party all ready for her at the Seashell Shop, and we couldn’t even find her. She missed the whole thing.”
Gina was momentarily silenced, frozen in stop-motion before coming to life with a return volley. “Well . . . just do it tomorrow. It’ll be like double birthdays.”
How did I answer that? It wasn’t even worthy of an answer. “I’ve been calling you all evening. Why didn’t you pick up the phone?” But I knew why. Gina wanted to do what she wanted to do, and she wasn’t going to let me get in the way. If she didn’t pick up the phone, she didn’t have to answer to anyone.
She glanced at the Jeep as if it might hold the answers. “Oh, I think I left my phone. I didn’t realize it until we were on the road. . . .” She started toward the cottage, indicating that I’d reminded her of the loss of her cell, and now she needed to conduct an emergency search. When she got in there, she would magically come up with it under the bed or someplace and pretend it’d been there all along. She probably had it in her pocket or her purse right now.
“It’s not here, Gina. There’s no cell phone in here. I should know. I’ve been calling it enough.”
“Off, I mean,” she finished smoothly. “I wondered why I hadn’t had any calls all afternoon.” She burrowed in her purse, pulled out the phone, checked it, and added, “Yep. Turned off. Sorry about that. This stupid smartphone —half the time it’s —”
“Stop it!” The echo reverberated across the yard, stealing through the trees and the climbing roses and bouncing off Iola’s house. “Just stop it, Gina. Don’t you ever, ever take my kids anywhere again, do you hear me? You ruined everything tonight.”
Disappointment, pain, bitterness welled in my throat. Why did it always have to be this way? Why couldn’t we be like sisters were supposed to be? Why couldn’t we have what Iola and Isabelle had? Why did anything we felt for each other, any interaction we had, have to be crisscrossed by scabs of pain and misunderstanding? Couldn’t the wounds ever heal?
I went into the cottage without waiting for her to answer the spoken question or the unspoken ones. What was the point? Closing the door hard, I let my forehead rest against it. Outside, the Jeep rumbled to life and backed out of the drive, then sped away.
“Mama?” Zoey’s voice was a thin ribbon in the storm of anger and disappointment. When I turned around, she was standing by the kitchen table next to the pile of gifts and the remodeled wedding cake that still read:
Happy Birthday Zoey
From the Seashell Shop Gang!
In her hands, Zoey was holding the driftwood box, the folded note open against her thumb, wrapping paper lying at her feet. “I’m sorry, Mama.” A tear spilled from the deep-blue ocean of one eye and trailed down her cheek as I crossed the room, opening my arms to her.
“I love you, baby,” I whispered, taking in the scents of hair spray and perfume at first, but beneath those, the scents of the little girl who had come from the body of a lost, lonely, terrified nineteen-year-old. “Happy birthday, Zoey.”
We held each other and rocked back and forth, swaying to a rhythm the two of us were only now beginning to understand. The dance of mother and daughter.
The birthday celebration was just Zoey and me, the recycled cake, and a tub of ice cream. Zoey kicked off her platform shoes and opened her gifts from the Shell Shop crowd, and before she went to bed, I hung the blue mermaid’s tear necklace around her neck.
When I finally turned out the cottage lights, there was still no sign of Gina, and I wasn’t sorry. She would show up when she figured things had cooled off, and unless I brought it up, she would act like the whole thing had never happened. Gina had always been that way. She didn’t apologize; she just moved on.
We needed to have a talk about boundaries, if she was going to stay here on Hatteras. But I wondered if talking would do any good.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I took a pad of paper from the night table and wrote down my hopes, then put them in my prayer box and tucked it in the drawer beside my bed. The vision of a future with my sister was still murky and uncertain, but one thing I’d learned from Iola’s letters was that miraculous answers to prayer were possible. The other thing I’d learned was that prayers aren’t always answered the way you expect.
On Saturday morning, Zoey was up early on her own and waiting to go to work with me. She wanted to tell everyone at the Seashell Shop that she was sorry she’d missed the party. She’d showered off the makeup and washed the glitter from her hair, and she looked fifteen again. J.T. had plans to go fishing with Paul. Gina hadn’t reappeared during the night, and maybe I should have been worried, but I wasn’t. I knew Gina too well.