She laughed. “She said you were fearless and way more obnoxious than her. She also said you weren’t talking. So you made up? She’s letting you babysit?”
“It’s kind of complicated.” Charlotte had broken from my grip and was back at the water table, up to her elbows in stagnant water. “Hey, do you happen to have a spare key? I got locked out and I need to get some of Charlotte’s swim stuff.”
Alice pointed at an outdoor kitchen right behind me, with a sink and an enormous barbecue. “There’s a hide-a-key inside the barbecue cabinet,” she said. She leaned over the fence, watching me with a look of naked curiosity. “So where’s Elli? I was wondering if we could use her pool, but she hasn’t been answering any of my texts and I noticed her lights weren’t on.”
I fished around inside the barbecue, a dark space that smelled of grease and charcoal. “She’s been at some spa in Ojai all week,” I said.
A wail went up from inside Alice’s house. “Shoot, that one’s mine. Gotta run.” She turned toward the house, hurrying back across the grass and bracing her belly with one hand. It wasn’t until she got to her own back door that she hesitated and turned around to look at me. She called across the garden, “The spa—it’s not related to that group she’s in, is it? GenFem?”
“GenFem?” I looked at her blankly. The word in my mouth felt ungainly, unfamiliar, vaguely vaginal. It rang no bells at all.
Alice nodded. “She took me to a meeting a few months ago. Something about it…it was weird. Culty.”
“Culty?” Inside the barbecue my hands had closed around a small metal box and I fished it out, forearms streaked with black. I stood up straight, a faint alarm bell ringing in my mind. “I’m sorry, what are you talking about? What’s this group?”
Alice hesitated. She seemed about to say something further, but then her child wailed again and she blinked and swallowed. I could tell she was measuring the time it would take to fill me in with the amount of time she had left before her baby had a complete meltdown. The baby won.
“Nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said. She flashed me a tight smile and disappeared inside, leaving me ashy and unsettled in my sister’s abandoned yard.
* * *
—
Inside, my sister’s house smelled like sweet soft rot, as if something was festering in the garbage cans. On the console by the front door, an arrangement of lilies had disintegrated into green goo, desiccated petals scattered beneath it on the parquet floor. The air in the house felt perfectly still, like a stopped clock waiting to be wound again.
Charlotte ran straight through the living room and toward the kitchen. “Mama!” she called. In the empty kitchen, she turned to look at me, her face contorting with confusion. “Mama here?” she asked, her voice tremulous.
I suddenly realized my mistake. “Sorry, baby. She’s not here.”
A low wail began in her throat. What had I been thinking? Of course she thought we’d find her mother at the house; I had been setting her up for disappointment. She collapsed to the floor of the kitchen, grinding her fists in the floor, shrieking at a decibel so loud that I could feel it in my teeth. Snot dripped down her face, dirt trapped in the translucent rivulets. I tried to spatula her off the floor and into my arms, but she went limp and slipped out of my grasp.
I threw open cupboards, looking for a treat to distract her, and found a tube of what looked like strawberry-flavored Cheerios. Puffs, the label said. I crouched by Charlotte and rattled the tube by her ear, so that she could hear it over her own screams. “I found puffs,” I announced.
The screams stopped. She sat up and shoved a fistful of the puffs in her mouth, her mood instantly improved. It felt like a miracle. I wished that adults could forgive that easily, that wounds could be so easily healed with sugared cereal.
The kitchen looked like it had been hastily abandoned mid-breakfast. A cup of milky coffee was growing mold near the sink; and a crusted plate of dried eggs still sat on the tray of a high chair pulled up to the table. Someone had spilled pretzels all over the floor. I put dishes in the dishwasher, hesitated, and then grabbed a broom to sweep up the floor. Then I scrubbed the counters with a damp sponge, for good measure. My sister had always been compulsively neat—it was one trait we both shared—and it bothered me that she would leave her kitchen like this. Maybe motherhood had made her more tolerant of a mess, but to leave for vacation like this? It felt discordant.
I kept thinking about what Alice had said—the word culty clutching at my brain like a sock with static cling. Culty? What did that mean? I’d heard people say that AA was “culty.” So was Esalen, where my mother annually went on a solo trip to meditate and soak naked in hot tubs. You could use the word to describe anyone from red-hat-wearing MAGA types to rabid Kanye West fans to the people you’d find in a hot yoga class. The world fetishizes intense devotion and charismatic celebrity; it’s almost impossible to live in the twenty-first century and entirely avoid doing anything cultlike, I told myself.
Culty: It could mean anything. It could mean nothing at all.
Other than the dirty kitchen, nothing else about Elli’s house looked remotely out of the ordinary. The catchall dish by the back door was still full of seashells and spare keys; the notes on the fridge were just shopping lists and grocery receipts; the mail on the counter was still shelter magazines and solicitations from liberal nonprofits. Over a year had passed since I’d been here last, but it might as well have been a day. On a cursory glance, I didn’t even see any evidence that Chuck had moved out, except maybe the lack of Gatorade in the fridge. Though that just showed how little his presence had registered on the house in the first place: This had always been my sister’s domain.
A neat stack of invoices sat on the kitchen table, each with my sister’s business logo stamped on the top: Eleanor Hart Floral Design. In her mid-twenties, Elli had reinvented herself as an event florist who specialized in weddings and baby showers, giant sprays of flowers in elegantly pale colors. “It’s really the perfect job for me,” she’d once told me. “I work with beautiful things all day and I get to be a part of people’s happiest days.” Eleanor Hart Floral Design was a one-woman show, its focus far more heavily on arrangements than profitability. I riffled through the invoices. Most were stamped past due, but she hadn’t bothered to mail them.
Once the kitchen was clean, I headed upstairs to Charlotte’s room. Last time I was here—just a little more than a year ago—it had been a guest bedroom, done in cerulean and yellow; it was the room where I’d slept off my last rehab recovery. Now it was a pink and white temple of female toddlerdom, all frills and lace. It was Elli’s dream childhood bedroom, I realized, the one she’d painstakingly designed for our dollhouse back when we were nine, now re-created in full size. One wall was covered with shelves of collectible dolls that Charlotte was still too young to play with; the other contained a crib that was tented in a lace canopy. A shag carpet in pale pink was littered with pristine stuffed animals.