March 14, 2012
The day after his meeting with Bayard, Sandy found himself walking down Thirty-sixth Street. The area appeared to be thriving after a few soft years. He stopped tallying up all the restaurants when he got to five. There was home-style stuff, a noodle place, Mexican and the Golden West, with its eclectic mix of Tex-Mex, Thai, and what Sandy thought of as Elvis-Southern. Deep fried, fatty, disgusting, great. A Cuban restaurant would have been a good addition to the current mix. Had he just been ahead of his time? He had used that excuse, but it felt hollow after hearing Bayard invoke it, a loser’s defense. “You’re an orphan,” Nabby would hiss when he disappointed her. “No one wants you and now I’m stuck with you and you’re good for nothing.”
The cost of picking at other people’s brains for a living was that Sandy was all too aware of the machinations of his own mind, where ideas pinged around like errant pinballs. He had known all along where he was headed when he went out for this walk today. Now he had reached his old building, currently an antiques store full of things he could never afford. Sandy turned his collar up and put his head down, although the wind wasn’t particularly cutting. He felt like a teenager, riding his bike past the home of a crush. Just passing by. See me. Love me.
Then he saw the kid, as he always thought of him, one of his few regulars, coming out of some weird bakery that was all muffins and cupcakes, not an honest roll or loaf of rye to be found. The kid was juggling packages while trying to keep a toddler in tow. Sandy had thought the kid had a baby, not a child who was already walking. Then he realized—this was the same baby. Must be two years since he had last seen this guy. Of course the baby had grown. That’s what babies do. Normal ones.
“Can I give you a hand?” Sandy offered, catching the bakery bag before it tumbled to the ground, even as the big satchel on the kid’s shoulder started to slide.
“Hey, Sandy!” He was impressed at the kid’s ability to pull up his name on the spot. For his part, Sandy couldn’t have said for the life of him what the kid’s name was. And the guy’s seeming joy at seeing Sandy, a marginal acquaintance at best, appeared genuine. Sandy couldn’t remember the last time someone had been that happy to see him. Only Mary. Never Bobby. That should have been a sign, right? A boy should be excited when his dad comes home.
“What’s going on, Sandy? What are you up to since the restaurant closed?”
The kid managed to make it sound positive, as if the restaurant was something Sandy had chosen to leave behind. “I’m a consultant. Doing cold case work for the police department.”
“Hey, that’s great—” He took a few steps, grabbed his daughter by the back of her coat. “This is Scout. Carla Scout, but we somehow ended up calling her Scout.”
“Scout?”
He made a face. “I know. It’s so hipster. But it’s from To Kill a Mockingbird and not the least ironic. Besides, I’ve gone through life being called Crow by most people, despite having the perfectly respectable name of Edgar, and I’m relatively unscathed.”
Now, see, the kid was classy that way. He had managed to remind Sandy of his name without putting it on Sandy. Sandy now remembered that he had never called him Crow but had made a joke out of his real name, dubbing him Fast Eddie. If Sandy were running a proper restaurant, a white tablecloth place, he would want this guy for the front of the house.
“Pupcake,” the girl said, looking up at Sandy with enormous blue eyes, but all kids had big eyes. Scout. That was just a crazy thing to do to any kid, but especially a girl. “More pupcake.”
“She’s pretty,” Sandy said, unsure if she really was, but how could you go wrong, telling a man his daughter was pretty. The girl did have amazing coloring—light eyes with dark hair, the black Irish thing. Like Mary. But her clothing was bizarre—shorts layered over heavy tights, beneath a sensible duffel coat. Sandy wasn’t exactly up-to-date on what the fashionable two-year-olds were wearing. Maybe this was—what did the kid call it?—hipster, too.
“She dresses herself,” offered his old customer. “So are you working on something good?”
Sandy realized he wanted to talk about his case. He suddenly wanted to talk, to have this human moment that so many people took for granted. How was work today, dear?
“It’s actually kinda interesting. Julie Saxony, the girlfriend of Felix Brewer.” No look of recognition. “He’s a guy who skipped town back in the ’70s rather than do the time on a federal gambling rap. Way before your time, I’m guessing.” Details were coming back to him. The kid had grown up somewhere else, but his wife was hard-core Baltimore, the kind of local who was said to be Baltimore born, bred and buttered. “Ten years later, almost to the day he ran, she disappeared. The cops were always pretty sure it was a murder, but the body didn’t surface until 2001.”
“Any particular reason you’re working it?”
“No.” You couldn’t tell a guy like this about a sexy photo, the way a dead woman’s eyes had pulled you in.
“You know, my wife is a private detective.”
“I don’t think I did know that.” Was Sandy so incurious off the job that he had failed to ask one of his few regular customers what his wife did? Or was he just the kind of man who didn’t think about women working in a meaningful way? He had to cop to being both. But the thing about being a murder police is that you spend so much time absorbing other people’s lives that you don’t solicit people’s life stories in your off-hours.
“Anyway, she says money is the thing that drives people. Money and pride.”
Sandy wanted to be polite, but he was getting awfully tired of other people telling him his business. A PI wouldn’t know that much about homicide. Divorce work, maybe. Where, come to think of it, everything was driven by money and pride.
“Most murders,” Sandy said, “come down to stupidity, impulse, and opportunity.”
“Sure, most. But those are—what do you call it? The dunkers?”
Lord, how Sandy wished people would just stop watching cop shows. Only cops should watch cop shows.
The kid continued: “I’m thinking about the cases that go unsolved, which is what cold cases are. The ones where people have done something deliberately, then taken care to cover their tracks.”
“Motives,” Sandy said, not bothering to suppress his sigh. “Well, no one benefited financially from this lady’s death.”
Lady. Would he have called her that a week ago? Maybe not. But the more he knew about her, the more he liked Julie Saxony. She was a go-getter.
“I’ve always been curious—do the police have a lot of access to financial information in a murder? Can you get people’s accounts, do a kind of credit report? I mean, my wife—” He suddenly busied himself, wiping “pupcake” from his daughter’s face, which hadn’t bothered him at all a minute ago. Sandy suspected the kid was about to incriminate his wife, reveal that she had sources that got her information through not exactly legal methods. Must be nice, but she didn’t have to stand behind her work in court, delineate every piece of evidence and how it was obtained. Divorce work was like going to war, and all was fair in love and war.
All was fair in love and war. His brain replayed his own thought, telling him to pay attention, not to let go of what might seem like just another cliché passing through.
“Sure, with the proper paperwork I can get what I need. I mean, it’s not like the movies where I go click, click, click, and some amazing document opens on the computer. But there’s no money to follow here. She had a nice business. Her disappearance didn’t benefit anyone, and it screwed up a lot of people—her employees, her sister. In her absence, they couldn’t work it out. Business went bust.”
“Ah, so what do you think happened? I mean, where do you start?”
“With the original witnesses, every single name in the file—and this file runs to almost eight hundred pages. Of course, I can only get to those who are still around. Twenty-five years, things happen.” He considered the youth of the man in front of him, the sunny disposition. “People die.”
The kid nodded. “Or disappear, or don’t remember. Or they think they remember, which is even worse. Did you know the more we tell a story, the more degraded it becomes? Factually, I mean. It’s like taking a beloved but fragile object out of a box and turning it over in your hands. You damage it every time.”
“That’s interesting.” Sandy wasn’t being polite in this instance. He had begun to pay careful attention to the subject of memory, key in cold cases. He worried that there would be a day when defense attorneys could jettison all testimony based on memory. He really thought the United States ought to go the way of the UK, put cameras up everywhere. Oh, all the ACLU types would howl, but if you’re not a criminal, why would you care? All was fair in love and war.
Love, he thought. Love. It didn’t rule out stupidity or impulse. In fact, love tended to run with that crowd.
“Gotta go,” he said abruptly, aware he was being rude, unable to stop himself. “She’s a cutie.”
He went into a diner, an honest one that dated back to the Avenue’s pre-chic days, and ordered a cup of coffee. He got out a notepad and began doodling. Sometimes, it was better not to have the file in front of you, just your head and some paper.
He re-created the shapes in his head—the major triangle of Julie, Felix, and his wife, who didn’t even show up until the murder file was opened in 2001, and she had been eliminated pretty definitively. Everyone had fixated on Felix when Julie disappeared, but what good does it do to kill your husband’s girlfriend ten years after he’s gone, having left both of you? But there were other triangles. Felix–Julie–the sister. Julie had kind of dumped Andrea for her boyfriend, hadn’t she? Moved out, moved up. He drew another triangle: Felix-Julie-Tubby. The former fat man had met her first, brought her to Felix. Tribute? Or had he wanted her for himself and been surprised when she chose Felix?
Sandy paid for his coffee. A buck twenty-five and this place was cheap by today’s standards. Had he really once lived in a world where a cup of coffee cost a quarter, candy bars were a nickel, hamburgers could be had for less than fifty cents? He never flinched at the gas station, no matter how high the prices got, because it made sense to him that something like gas kept going up, up, up, controlled by all those sheiks. It was the small items of his youth that he remembered. And they had seemed expensive then, coming from Cuba. Expensive and bountiful. The first time he had walked into the pharmacy on Twenty-ninth Street, the one with the soda fountain, he had been overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of his new life. It had taken him forty minutes to choose a candy bar. He told that story to Mary, told her it was a Marathon bar. Mary pointed out that Marathons weren’t around when he was fourteen.
So the kid, Crow, was right. The things Sandy thought he remembered best were the things he was getting wrong. In which case—what did that say about his memories of Mary? Were they wrong? As long as they were loving, did it matter if they were wrong? He wished, as he wished every day, for her company. True, she could drive him mad with her endless analysis of every single personal interaction, but that was what women did.
He doodled a name on his pad: Lorraine Gelman. Indirectly brought the chef and Julie together. Knew Bambi and Felix, probably knew Tubman through her husband, the criminal attorney. She would be protective of her old friends. Wives side with wives. But she might know stuff, might have spotted the dynamic he suspected. The only worry in Sandy’s mind was that a woman married to one of the best criminal attorneys in the city wouldn’t talk to him without lawyering up.
Lawyering up. She might even say that. I’ll have to lawyer up. Jesus. Sometimes, Sandy felt like a magician in a room where even the youngest kid yelled out: “It’s a trick box! She’s pulled her knees up to her chest!”
June 18, 1991
Michelle was aware of the impression she made as she walked out to the pool in high-heeled sandals and a pink bikini. She strolled the full length slowly, toward the deep end where the adults—her mother, Bert, Lorraine—were seated. She then had to go back and procure one of the chaises at the other end. Again, she made a show of it, letting the wheels clatter, refusing the help of the all-but-panting teenage boys who offered to do it for her. How could her mother possibly think that Michelle—eighteen, a high school graduate—should attend a party of sixteen-year-olds. It had been bad enough, having Sydney’s company pushed on her all these years, but to attend a Sweet Sixteen on the first beautiful Saturday in June—torture. Especially when her boyfriend had wanted to take her to Philadelphia for dinner, to Le Bec Fin. But her mother couldn’t possibly know that, right? She didn’t even know about the boyfriend.
Michelle had come up with such a good plan to get away, too. She told her mother that she was going to Philadelphia for the day to visit an art museum with a girl she had met on the College Park visit, a girl who might be her roommate if she proved, on this outing, as collegial as she seemed. This should have been a no-brainer for Bambi—art, a girl, Michelle trying to be sensible and optimistic about the whole College Park thing, which had been a bitter pill to swallow. Not because she was a brainiac like Rachel, or a grind like Linda, but because she had wanted to go someplace fun. ASU, Tulane, University of Miami. Only she hadn’t got into any of them. Bambi said Maryland was a bargain and if Michelle wanted to go out of state, she should have put more effort into high school, as Linda and Rachel had.
“You might also want to consider if the number of tanning days belongs on a list of things you need in a college,” she had added.
Tanning days. Michelle flipped on her stomach, reached behind her and unsnapped her halter top, then slid the top beneath her and onto the table where her Diet Coke was sweating. Her mother and the Gelmans were enjoying Bellinis, although the kids—the kids!—had been promised sips of champagne when the cake came out. Michelle’s own sisters—well, Linda at least—had been able to drink at eighteen, but the law had changed. Just another entry on Michelle’s List of Everything Unfair.
But now that her top was off, no one would dare approach her. It actually hurt a little, pressing her bare breasts into the Japanese-inspired lounge chair—Lorraine always had the most beautiful things, but she didn’t always have the most comfortable things—and it would probably leave marks, but who cared? She wasn’t going to see her boyfriend tonight. Her perfect plan had been torpedoed by Bambi, who had blandly told Michelle that she wouldn’t cover the cost of the train ticket because Michelle was overdrawn on her allowance by six weeks. And Michelle couldn’t have the car because Bambi needed it to go to this party, which Michelle was going to attend, too.
“If it kills you,” Bambi had added.
“It just might.”
Michelle glanced over her shoulder at the kids in the pool. A few years ago, she might have amused herself by making all the boys focus on her, but it was too easy, not enough of a challenge. The Philadelphia man, as she thought of him, was another story. The Philadelphia Story. That’s the kind of joke that Rachel would have made, if Michelle had confided in her, but she wasn’t like everyone else, telling Rachel her secrets. The Philadelphia Story was twenty-four, in his second year at Wharton, and Michelle was cock-teasing him within an inch of his life. She loved that men tried to use that term as an insult. She was proud of her technique, as formal and balletic as a matador’s. So far, she had slept with him only literally, stripping down to a T-shirt and her underwear, then ordering him out of the bed when she awoke in the middle of the night to find him trying to undress her.
Her mother had thought Michelle was on a school trip to New York City that time. There was a Park trip to New York in May. Bambi had given Michelle the money to attend and she had signed up, then gone sorrowfully to the head of school seventy-two hours before departure and explained that there were the “usual issues” at home and she needed a full refund. The head had counted the money out of petty cash and asked Michelle how her senior project was coming along. (Park students did not attend classes in their final semester, but worked on projects that they presented at year’s end.) “As well as can be expected,” she said, using her brave voice, the voice of The Girl Who Had Seen Too Much, the girl who had been asked to be an adult before her time. The Philadelphia Story, whom she had met in a bar Preakness weekend, was waiting for her outside the school. He drove her straight to a beautiful inn on the Eastern Shore, one that had been in some movie a few years back, and she had tortured him all weekend. She was a virgin, she told him. True. She wasn’t ready yet. Also true, although Michelle’s not-readiness had nothing to do with fear. Oh, she helped him out, she wasn’t heartless. Well, maybe a little heartless, when she crawled into that beautiful bed with him in her panties and T-shirt and told him he could take care of himself while he watched her touch herself. “But use a towel,” she added.
They had hit Saks in D.C. before he took her back home. She then hid her purchases at her friend Devorah’s, who briefed her on the New York trip so Michelle could provide Bambi with plausible details. The only possible pitfall was that someone would mention to Bambi what a shame it was that Michelle had been forced to cancel, but Michelle was pretty sure that the head would remind everyone to be sensitive about the Poor Brewers. Everyone was so goddamn careful around Michelle. People at school, her mother, her sisters. Just because she used it to her advantage didn’t mean it didn’t bother her.
Jesus, this chaise was like some kinky bondage chair. She couldn’t find a comfortable position on it and she sure as shit couldn’t flip over. Lorraine might not know what it was like to try and lie facedown when one had breasts, but Sydney certainly did. Lorraine probably didn’t spend much time by the pool, being the kind of woman who never tanned. A shame. The pool was gorgeous. Michelle loved everything about the Gelmans’ house, couldn’t understand her mother’s private disdain for it. When she was younger, she had assumed her mother was pretending to dislike it because she was embarrassed by their own house, but, no, Bambi really seemed to think their old wreck of a place was preferable to this shiny house where everything was so very up to the minute. If this was tacky, then Michelle could only hope to live in such tackiness.
She felt a shadow fall across her back, assumed it was a cloud passing over the sun. When the shadow didn’t move, she said: “I’m fine, I don’t need anything.”
“You need,” a man’s voice growled, “to put your top on.”
Oh, Bert, sent to do Mother’s dirty work. Again.
“You have your top off,” she said. Bert was very proud of his physique, and Michelle had to admit it was quite good. Slender yet muscled, the right amount of hair. And, like her, he tanned beautifully, quite the opposite of Lorraine with her big hats and moles everywhere.
“You’re embarrassing your mother.”
And upstaging your daughter, she thought. Michelle actually liked Sydney, who was extremely good-natured about being the overweight redhead in a family of dark-haired, good-looking people. Her twin brothers, Adam and Alec, born less than two years after Sydney was adopted, had the kind of eyes and lips that people said were wasted on boys. They were certainly wasted on those two. Nasty jocks, very competitive. They would have been asked to leave Park School if Lorraine wasn’t such a big deal there.
“Okay, I’ll just sit up and put my top on,” she bluffed.
“You will cover yourself with a towel and go into the house to make sure you’re decent.”
She started to argue, but something in Bert’s tone would not be denied. She did as instructed, thinking about the alternate reality of Philadelphia, the place she should be right now. They might have gone to an art museum for real. Then Le Bec Fin—not that Michelle could eat that much and still wear bikinis, but she liked the idea of expensive restaurants and wine and champagne. She still wasn’t ready to have sex with him, though. She might never be. She wanted to be in love the first time and she hadn’t been, not even close. She barely liked most of the boys and men she knew. She assumed the Philadelphia Story would get mad with her eventually, really mad. That was part of the thrill, testing how far she could push men. No, she did not want to be raped, and she felt she had excellent instincts for picking men who would not go that far. Look at Philadelphia Story, making his stealth move in the middle of the night, then skulking off to sleep in a chair when she called him out. No, she was very clear that she wasn’t caught up in some moral dilemma, as Rachel would probably have it, in which she wanted a man to take her virginity because she was too guilt-ridden to give it away freely.
It was just so exciting, knowing that she had something men wanted, that anyone wanted. Not only did her boyfriends not take advantage of her, they allowed her to boss them around, demand favors. She supposed she would still be able to do that after she lost her virginity, but she wasn’t in a rush to find out. Her mother, as far as Michelle knew, hadn’t had sex for fifteen years and men were crazy for her. Look at Bert, doing whatever she wanted, without Bambi even having to ask. Yet her sisters had fallen crazy in love and where had that gotten them? Linda was always yelling at Henry, and Marc had divorced Rachel before their second anniversary, leaving her without a penny. Rachel had signed a postnup, the sap. You’d never catch Michelle making that kind of mistake.
Michelle had first discovered her power while working with her Hebrew tutor, a young man who had bought her clothes. Shoplifted them, actually, although she didn’t know that at the time. She could imagine Rachel saying, “Do the math, stupe. He was helping you with Hebrew for ten bucks an hour. Do you think he could afford those things he gave you?” But it never occurred to Michelle to worry about how he afforded the items until he was arrested, a month after her bat mitzvah. He was picked up at the Woodies in Columbia with a pair of Guess jeans. Michelle’s first thought was: Wait—he steals for other girls, too? She had assumed she was special and was irritated to learn that he had made similar arrangements with other female students.
He had been a little pervy. It was funny, how the ones who touched you the least were often pervier than the ones who really did stuff. But weak, so weak. Once, when he tried to get her to model one of the outfits, she had looked at him and said: “It’s not really my style. But thank you.” Bambi had been out of the house that day. Who wouldn’t trust her twelve-year-old daughter with her Hebrew tutor? He had tried to kiss her once, only once. Michelle had drawn a hand across her mouth and said: “No, thank you.” The next week, he brought her three dresses, better ones.
Towel wrapped to ensure modesty, she walked back the length of the pool, still aware of the boys’ glances. She did not use the bathroom in the cabana/changing room at poolside, nor did she use the powder room off the kitchen. Michelle, who knew the Gelmans’ home as well as her own, climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, where the enormous en suite marble bath had lighted mirrors, heated towel racks, a bidet, even a heated floor, not that it was turned on in June.
The bathroom opened into a dressing room the size of Michelle’s oh-so-stingy bedroom. Even as Linda and Rachel decamped, Bambi would not allow Michelle to move into their rooms. Michelle suspected this was because she would then want to redecorate, make the new room hers. Why shouldn’t she? Her room was childish. Sophisticated for a thirteen-year-old—she had been allowed to use her bat mitzvah money to redo it. But now the color palette, peach and pale green, bored her. So fussy, so Laura Ashley, which it happened to be.
Her top back on, she sat on the long, upholstered stool in the center of Lorraine’s closet and considered its perfection. The problem, as Michelle saw it, was that money came too late. You had to be old, in your forties, before you had the money to have the best clothes, furnishings, jewels. Even if Lorraine had been as beautiful as Bambi, these things would still be wasted on her. Michelle wished she had known her mother in her twenties, when the money flowed and no expense was spared. The photos of this time, in black and white, looked fake to her, props from a film. And by the time Michelle was born in 1973, the clothing was horribly tacky. Thank God Bambi had made them dress like the preppies they weren’t.
She barely remembered her father and worried sometimes that the memories she did have weren’t even hers, just stories planted by her mother and sisters. But there was a smell, a couple of them. Cigar stores, anything leathery. And a certain aftershave that she sometimes picked up in department stores. No one could have made her remember smells that weren’t hers to remember.
If her father had served his sentence, he would be free by now. Would it really have been that hard? She once overheard Linda telling Rachel that he might have been out in ten years, according to Henry. Ten years. He would be here and this would be their house and she would be allowed to borrow her mother’s clothes and jewels. Because, yes, Bambi was the same size as Michelle. When Michelle was younger, the boys who came to the house had gotten crushes on her.
Maybe that was part of the reason that Michelle now preferred men, men she never allowed to come to her house.
But even if her father had returned, would they have been rich again? Michelle could never work out that part of the fantasy, and Michelle was very pragmatic about her fantasies. What would he do? Could he earn as much in a legal enterprise as he had in his old business? These were not questions she could put to Bambi, or even her sisters. So much of what she knew about her father had been learned from eavesdropping. Michelle was less resentful than the others thought about being cut off from the family’s days of ease and money. But she hated not being privy to the secrets that her sisters shared. The stories about the mistress. Did they really think that Michelle, incurious as she was at thirteen, hadn’t seen the article in the Star when Julie Saxony disappeared almost ten years to the day after her father did? It had been only a matter of time before someone at school had told her that everyone believed that her father had finally sent for Julie Saxony—and all the money he had put away, money that was supposed to go to Bambi.
Much to her surprise, Michelle started to cry. And everything around her was so beautiful, silken and pristine, that she wasn’t sure where to dry her tears, which were clotted with mascara. She padded back to the bathroom, picked up the towel she had left on the floor.
“What are you doing here?”
It was Sydney, the birthday girl, the girl to whom all this belonged, not that she would ever fit into skinny Lorraine’s dresses, no matter how her mother tried to starve her. Sydney was wearing a two-piece, which Michelle found absolutely shocking. She would live in a caftan if she had a body like Sydney’s.
“Your father told me to go put my top back on. I was lying on my stomach, just trying to avoid tan lines. But, you know.”
“His ideas about femininity basically align with Sir Walter Scott. He’s a prude, my dad.” A shrug.
Michelle envied Sydney those casual words even more than she envied her these beautiful things. To be able to say that one’s father was this or that.
To be able to say: “My dad.” My dad, my dad, my dad.
“Anyway, we’re about to have cake. Don’t you want cake?”
Sydney’s tone implied that everyone must want cake all the time. Michelle wished she did, that the pleasures of chocolate and frosting could still be meaningful to her. Then again, what did she find pleasurable? She enjoyed things mainly in the planning. If she had gone to Philadelphia today, the thrill would have been in the subterfuge and the escape. And then the night, the hours of denying someone else pleasure. That was what made her happiest, or at least close to something that others might recognize as happiness.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”
“I guess that’s why you have the body you have,” said Sydney. Cheerful, not begrudging. “Mom tries to make me live on lettuce and carrots, hoping I’ll look like you—or at least like her. But it’s just never going to happen.”
Michelle couldn’t help being impressed by Sydney’s matter-of-fact acceptance of herself. “How do you manage that?”
“Manage what?”
This was tricky to word. “Not minding. I mean, you know, being cool with how things are.”
Sydney smiled. Half smiled, really, using only the left corner of her mouth. “I’ve got my stuff. Believe me, I’ve got stuff that bugs me. Stuff that’s bigger than my weight.”
“Like what?” Michelle really could not imagine what could bother someone if she had money and didn’t care about her appearance.
“I was asked to leave camp last summer.”
“That’s it? You got kicked out of sleep-away camp?”
Sydney studied her, as if judging Michelle’s worthiness as a confidante. “Yes, that’s it. But it bugs me. I loved that camp. I loved—well, I wish I could go back. I would have been a junior counselor this year. But I can’t go back. They made that clear.”
Some boring kid spat, Michelle decided. She wouldn’t press further. She tried to ignore the fact that Sydney clearly wasn’t allowing her to press further.
“Look, even if you don’t want cake, won’t you please come back to the party? I know you don’t want to be here, with my friends, but I’m so happy you came.”
“You are?”
“I am. I don’t have any real cousins. You and Linda and Rachel are the closest thing I have. And my brothers are such a*sholes.”
“Sydney!” Michelle didn’t disagree. She was just shocked that Sydney was so candid.
“Everyone knows. Except Mom, which I guess is how it’s supposed to be. Look, I don’t mind that I was adopted, I really don’t, and that my brothers were born eighteen months later and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, that’s what happens when people adopt, they relax and have their own children.’ My parents have never made me feel second-rate. We’re all three spoiled, but the twins are extra spoiled. Did you notice they’re not here today? They’re out with Uncle Tubby playing miniature golf because I knew they would ruin everything. I asked Dad to get rid of them. They’re psychopaths.”
“Do you ever think about your natural parents?”
“Mom and Dad are my natural parents,” Sydney said. Then, after a pause: “I do wonder about my biological parents, though. I mean, I’m curious. How could I not be? And my folks won’t tell me much about my adoption. They say it was done through the Associated.”
“That makes sense.”
“Yes, but there should be a story, right? And the only thing I know is that it happened really fast, that they got a call and they picked me up and they didn’t have anything ready. Twenty-four hours after I was born. I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense.”
Michelle thought it made as much sense as anything did. She also realized she better start thinking about birth control. Eventually. The women in her family were fertile. Linda had four kids and was talking about getting her tubes tied. Michelle had been not quite an accident, a by-product of too much revelry, her father trying one more time for a boy, although her mother insisted he had preferred being the only man in a household of women. “He liked women,” she said, oh so dryly.
“Anyway,” Sydney said, “I want cake. And it’s my birthday. For one day I get to call the shots around here. Then it will be Heckle and Jeckle’s world all over again. Sometimes, I feel like Ferris Bueller’s sister. You know, there’s probably a reason she was such a freaking bitch.”
“Well, if you’re Jennifer Grey, you get to end up dancing with Patrick Swayze, so it’s not all bad.”
Sydney’s face was a study. “Yeah, no one puts Baby in the corner, right? Only I spend a lot of time in corners. Well, maybe not so many corners, but watching stupid TV, like Blossom. Everyone else in this family is so jocky. Even Mom plays golf.” She shuddered.
“So why did you want a pool party for your Sweet Sixteen?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t even want a party. I wanted to go to a nice restaurant, just Mom and Dad and me. They didn’t think that was special enough.”
“I’m sorry,” Michelle said. She wasn’t. It angered her that Sydney had parents who worried about what was special enough for her. Her family was always trying to knock down Michelle’s ideas about what she deserved, said she was grandiose.
“That’s okay. In two years, I’ll go away to college. My mom thinks I should go to one of the Seven Sisters, but I want to live in New York. Columbia, Barnard, NYU—whatever it takes, I’ll get into at least one of them, I think.”
“I wish I were going away to school. I’m just going to College Park.”
“College Park is away.”
“Not really.”
“Well, then kick ass your freshman year and transfer somewhere you’d rather be.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“Not easy,” said Sydney. “But possible. You’re smart, Michelle. You’re just lazy.”
The words were specific—thrillingly, awfully specific. Michelle knew they had been snatched from some adult conversation. Lorraine and Bert, most likely, but maybe her own mother. “Smart”—a flicker of warmth because no one ever said Michelle was smart. But “lazy” and this brought a more familiar slap of shame because she knew she was exactly that. Michelle, who didn’t panic when she awoke in a strange bed as a man tried to undress her, felt nervous and ashamed that Sydney should have heard grown-ups say these things about her.
“You don’t know what it’s like to be me.”
“No one,” Sydney said, “knows what it’s like to be anyone. Let’s go have cake. Happy birthday to me.”
Michelle followed her, wondering how this plump sixteen-year-old had gotten so wise. No one knows what it’s like to be anyone. Oh, she wasn’t so smart. She had probably overheard that, too. A line from a movie or a sitcom, maybe even Blossom.