Cassie’s mother, Bev, was a nurse, but not a regular nurse in a hospital. She worked in hospice care and every day she drove in her burgundy Civic full of files and equipment to the homes of the dying, to make sure they were comfortable, or as comfortable as they could be. My father, who isn’t religious—who won’t even go to church at Christmas with my mother and me—said that Bev did “God’s work.”
Bev was always cheerful—or almost always, except when she wasn’t—and matter-of-fact about her job. Devoutly Christian, she didn’t get teary about her clients dying—she always said “passing”—and she spoke as though she was helping them to prepare for a mysterious but possibly amazing trip, rather than helping them to prepare for a hole in the ground.
Bev had big, soft breasts and a broad behind. She wore long, flowy printed skirts that swirled when she walked. Only her delicate hands and feet reminded me of Cassie. Bev’s greatest vanity was her hands: her fingernails were always perfectly manicured, oval and filed and painted pretty colors like hard candies. That and her hair, a sweet-smelling honey-colored cloud. When you hugged Bev, you smelled her hair.
My mother was not at all like Bev, just as my house is not at all like Cassie’s. And I have a father, and in that sense we were always different. For a long time, Cassie liked being at our house because she could pretend that we really were secret sisters, that my family was her family too.
My parents settled in Royston not long after my father finished school, before I was born. When they moved into our house it must have seemed as vast as a castle: a ramshackle hundred-and-fifty-year-old Victorian with five bedrooms, a wraparound porch, and a building behind that used to be stables. Not fancy, just old. The kitchen is older than my mother—a 1950s kitchen, with white cupboards that don’t close all the way and black-and-white checkerboard lino—and when the furnace kicks in, it sounds like a cruise ship.
My father is a dentist, and he has his office in the stables. On the big lawn, a shield-shaped shingle announces DR. RICHARD ROBINSON, DENTIST, DDS, FACS in black capitals. It squeaks when it’s windy. When he goes to work, he walks a hundred feet out the back door. On the other hand, when someone has a toothache at ten o’clock at night, they know just where to find him. Tracy Mann, the hygienist, comes in on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and dad’s assistant, Anne Boudreaux, has been there every weekday since I can remember. She’s about the same age as my parents but seems older, maybe because she wears a lot of makeup. She has a dark mole on her upper lip like Marilyn Monroe, but on Anne it isn’t what you’d call sexy.
My mother is a freelance journalist, a vagueness that seems to mean she can be a journalist when it suits her. She writes restaurant and movie reviews for the Essex County Gazette, and for the past few years she’s written a literary blog that has a following, including an adult English class in Tokyo that writes very polite comments. The third floor of our house is her office—my friend Karen’s dad did the renovation when I was in first grade. Karen moved to Minneapolis when we were nine.
My room is next to the bathroom on the middle floor, facing to the side, with a view toward the Saghafis’ next door. They put in an aboveground pool a few summers ago, and I hear their kids splashing around all season long. As soon as it’s warm enough to keep my window wide open, they’re out there. The Saghafis said we should feel free to come over and use the pool anytime, but I don’t anymore, because their kids are an awkward amount younger than I am, and always in the water.
I did, though, the first summer they had it. My father called the pool “an eyesore,” but my mother said, “let people have their fun.” She said I should take them up on their open invitation, that we’d seem standoffish if we didn’t. I went almost every day with Cassie, that summer. I’d just turned twelve: the summer before seventh grade. The Saghafi kids, still too young to swim without their mom’s supervision, weren’t around nearly as much then, and Cassie and I spent entire afternoons swimming and tanning and talking, then swimming and tanning and talking some more, with great deliberation, as though we followed to the letter a complicated recipe.
If I could go back, I’d write it all down: the secrets we told each other and the plans we made. The songs we listened to, even, when we turned up her iPod so it sounded like a scratchy transistor radio: “California Gurls” by Katy Perry, and that hit Rihanna made with Eminem, so catchy but creepy when you actually listened to the words. “Stand there and watch me burn . . .” My mother changed the station when it came on in the car, shaking her head and saying “Girls, I’m sorry, but as a feminist, I object.”
It was the summer of my stars-and-stripes bikini—the top, stars; the bottom, stripes—and I was proud that when I lay flat on my back, the bottom stretched from hip bone to hip bone. In between there was a dip, my stomach was a dip, and if I lifted my head a little and looked down, I could glimpse the dark curling hair between my legs that was newly there. Cassie, so fair, had to wear a ton of sunblock, and even so, she’d burn wherever she missed a bit. I remember the night she slept over and the backs of her thighs, near her knees, were almost purple. My mother soaked cloths in vinegar and laid them on the burn to take away some of the heat. Cassie shrieked when the first cloth went on, but she didn’t cry. Cassie almost never cried.
That same summer, we volunteered at the animal shelter out of town on Route 29, and each adopted a kitten. The kittens were sisters, from the same litter, two tortoiseshells, small enough then to hold in your hand, with tiny white teeth and opalescent claws that dug pulsingly but painlessly into your jeans when you set the creatures on your lap. She named hers Electra. I called mine Xena, after the warrior princess, because it sounded good alongside Electra. Xena is now a plump and placid puff of fur on the cusp of middle age, whose warrior nature extends only to chasing birds and mice under cover of darkness—she brings us occasional mangled offerings and deposits them on the kitchen floor, as if we might fry them up for breakfast—but within a year, Electra, still small, had vanished in the night.