“It is a soap opera,” Giovanni reasoned.
Moments later, Sarah’s roaring laugh at Noele’s impression of Giovanni in the show began to compete with Elise’s stress as the cause of a deep, sense-dulling headache. Her joy got louder, and it was infectious. Their glee made Elise mad, and she started nibbling on her right middle finger, a long-standing nervous habit that prompted Sarah to scold her to stop.
Elise listened, but only because at that same moment, Sarah, reminded of something, left the room.
She returned with what had to be her favorite dessert: a lemon cake, punctured with lighted candles and bearing the words WELCOME HOME etched in white icing. Sarah awaited praise for her thoughtfulness. The table obliged as expected, and for Elise, the sentiment was genuine. Lemon cake had been Kitty’s favorite too.
“To Kitty,” she said, raising her glass.
James threw her a warning look, but she continued. “Remember she made all those cakes and pastries for our production of Alice in Wonderland?”
Her sisters’ eyes lit up with the memory, only to be extinguished by their mother’s fury.
“Yeah, and all of my cake platters got broken.” Sarah’s resentment bounced off the rainbowed walls. “Kitty had you all marching through that damned thicket with all my good china, like little servants.”
CHAPTER 2
Elise
Saturday afternoon, October 28, 2017
Built over the kitchen and accessible only by a door that most mistook as belonging to a hallway closet, the south wing was the four-bedroom apartment where the sisters had spent their childhood.
After naps and showers, Giovanni and Noele found Elise in the apartment’s den. The site of numerous slumber parties and fights, the living room in its varied shades of pink was an expression of innocence, from a time before the sisters discovered boys.
Noele settled in the armchair in front of the room’s only window, an octagonal stained glass pane of a red rose. Giovanni followed, with a mint julep mask smeared on her face. “Plane air makes me break out.” She sat on the floor and leaned against the couch next to Elise.
“Why did you wear makeup, then?”
Giovanni folded her hands in her lap in the same way she collapsed her legs underneath her on the carpet. “I don’t go anywhere naked.”
Elise rolled her eyes. “You’re prettier without it.”
“We can’t all be as naturally gorgeous as you, sister.”
They both knew it wasn’t true, but playing along, Elise imitated Dolly Parton from her favorite eighties film, Steel Magnolias. “It takes effort to look like this.”
“Shut up.”
Noele’s eyes widened. “Can we talk about Kitty now?”
“I got worried after your toast,” Giovanni said.
“Mom was forcing cake down our throats!”
Noele and Giovanni picked fun at the memory of how Sarah had cut them huge chunks of cake, portion sizes wholly uncharacteristic of her usual food philosophy. “Five minutes into me being here,” Noele continued, “she’s railing at me about my weight, and then she gets mad when I refuse a giant piece of cake.”
“It wasn’t about your weight; you look fine,” Elise said. “She was probing to see how serious things are with you and whatever his name is.” Noele had been photographed with a long-haired White guy a few times, and the entire family was curious.
“Makes sense. She asked if I was pregnant! Inspected me.” Noele demonstrated how Sarah had lifted her shirt above her bra to examine her belly, then shrugged. “I’m not used to her being so … nosey.” She was a talented evader.
“Mom’s secretly jealous.” Elise knew because she was too. Noele had a freedom that none of the other St. John women had.
“Is she eating?” Stress had always taken their mother’s appetite, but in someone who treated food discipline like a military exercise, any decrease in intake was always cause for concern.
“Seems so.”
“Are she and Dad okay?” Noele asked.
“I guess, but I don’t live here.”
For decades, their parents’ union had been protected from the normal celebrity pitfalls by nearly parallel career positioning; they had steadily grown together to build an empire. But when James, now almost sixty, hit a creative slump five years ago, he pushed for Sarah to retire. She refused at first, but after almost a year of dissension, she quit a major film in the middle of production to save her marriage, and they went to Paris—where James’s creativity soared.
He began working on his first album in decades, flying other producers and musicians out to work with him. When they returned home, James went on tour, leaving Sarah alone to face being blackballed from the industry, ignoring the fact that his ultimatums had caused irreparable damage to her career. Planning the upcoming Halloween party was the only thing that had consistently gotten her out of bed over the past year.
Giovanni and Noele exchanged a glance that seemed to reference a prior conversation between them.
“Sorry we couldn’t get here sooner,” Noele said.
“We know how hard this has been for you. How close you were to Kitty.” They had been too young to bond with Kitty when they were kids, as Elise had.
“Honestly, there’s not much you could have done. Kitty left the work to me. One of her many dying wishes.” Elise made the little joke so as to avoid other details.
“Can you think of any reason she would leave her estate to us?” Giovanni asked.
Elise shrugged. “We’re the closest thing she had to family.”
“You don’t just give that kind of money to people who aren’t blood,” Noele said.
“She said she was going to give it to charity…”
“We should still,” Noele surmised. “That would get people off our backs.”
“Or, if we keep it, we could buy Noele a law firm!” Giovanni joked.
“Are you going to stop acting to run said law firm?” Elise asked.
“I would run it!” Noele said.
“You don’t even have a law degree yet.”
Giovanni spoke over them. “Kitty never said anything to you about it? In all this time?”
“No.” Despite the months spent at her bedside, Elise had sat in Kitty’s lawyer’s office with her parents, her sisters on speakerphone, and heard Kitty’s last wishes for the first time. Sarah was so upset by it, she left.
“The studio hopes announcing wedding plans can overshadow interest in her, and us,” Elise confessed.
“That’s ridiculous,” Noele said.
“I understand the need to lighten the air around you. You reminded people that you’re a real person, not an avatar. You obliterated the fantasy.”
After Colin Kaepernick was blackballed from the NFL for taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality against Blacks, Elise had posted to her Instagram in solidarity. People were having trouble understanding why he was taking a knee, and Elise wanted to show them. She’d edited together footage of police brutality against Blacks across a span of fifty years, using newsreels, documentaries, and American films, and set it to music by Black artists from each decade whose lyrics also referenced the problem.
The well-worn American social fabric was hanging by a thread, ripping at the seams, and it had felt inappropriate to Elise to ignore it and continue posting self-gratifying content for likes. The video’s run time was less than a minute, but it went viral. The incident had doubled her follower count, split evenly between supporters and hateful trolls.
“Now people from Montana to Rhode Island know you’re Black.” Giovanni winked at her.
Elise was grateful for Giovanni’s rare but continued display of kinship. Forever the devil’s advocate, Giovanni’s comments about Elise’s appearance danced on the edge of appropriateness which sometimes sounded like jealousy. Elise had expected her to be the first one to admonish her post and statements, but she’d been the first to reach out when Elise went viral with a simple DM: FUCK ’EM.
“Much to Aaron’s dismay.”