“Well then,” Sarah said coolly. “Fine.”
“I’m sorry,” Lizzie said. “But I have an idea.” She tried to lift her voice enthusiastically. “We’re so rushed; what about postponing and getting a storage space? Then we’d have time to go through everything when we can.” She had been thinking of the time she and Ben had gone to his parents’ storage space on the Upper East Side. Lizzie and Ben had visited it to collect his tent for a July weekend in the Catskills (camping, Ben’s idea). But camping seemed steadfastly beside the point once she stepped into Manhattan Mini Storage. So clean, so quiet, such a blessed rush of air-conditioning. Forget about North-South Lake or wherever they were headed, Lizzie had said, they should spend the night here, watching movies in the unit among the bank boxes of tax returns, ski equipment, Ben’s clarinet from junior high, a Pack ’n Play that his sister’s baby had used: all of it safe, untouched, waiting, for the future, for life to begin again.
“That’s ridiculous,” Sarah said. “Perkins is already on board. He’s started getting the word out—”
“I’ll pay for it,” Lizzie said. “I don’t mind.”
“What? No. It’s not about the money. I don’t want the stuff in storage. I want to get it over with. I want it finished.”
“Okay, then, okay,” Lizzie said, regretting that she had ever brought up the idea. But when she actually forced herself to picture emptying out the house, getting rid of all her father’s things—the thought made her break into a sweat. How could anything to do with their father be finished?
Lizzie went to Philly, where, during court breaks, she would call Sarah back, steel herself to answer her questions. (Yes, let’s sell the side tables. No, hold on to his medical textbooks. “You know, I could answer much faster if you could text me,” Lizzie said. “It takes me forever to text,” Sarah said, “all that up and down with my thumbs. Why can’t I just call?”) From Philly, Lizzie flew Denver to L.A. By the time she made it to Sarah’s house in Los Feliz, Sarah and Angela were long asleep. Her sister had left the kitchen light on and a note on the counter. “Welcome,” it said. “There’s pasta if you’re hungry.”
Lizzie was. For the first time in a great while, she was ravenous. She opened the fridge. Inside were yogurts and bright juices and fresh berries nestled in bowls; two kinds of water (seltzer and flat) and two kinds of milk (almond and regular), and yes, pasta too, some olive, tomatoey thing. Lizzie, cowed by the bounty, ate standing—delicious, even cold. She should have put it in a bowl and heated it up, eaten like the grown-up she was. But she couldn’t be bothered.
Wine, on the other hand, she could use. She opened cabinets, searching. Sarah and Angela had renovated this Craftsman house high in the hills when they moved in about a year and a half ago. For months, it was all Sarah could talk about: her sister, a social worker at a halfway house for girls, who used to rail against skyrocketing recidivism rates and people’s idiotic notions of mental illness and psychopharmacology, now all she could talk about was baseboards and backsplashes.
Lizzie had taken to grousing to Claudia about Sarah’s endless renovation talk, pointing out that this was a house Sarah never could have afforded on her own social-worker salary. “Being with a doctor must be pretty nice,” she had said.
“You could have a nicer place,” Claudia said.
“What’s wrong with my place?” Lizzie said. She loved her apartment, even though it was tiny, with the kitchen the size of a TV, as Ben used to say, and only one true closet. But it was rent-stabilized and had been her home since law school. Why should she spend more? “You have no idea how crazy real estate is in New York.”
“Uh-huh,” Claudia said. And then: “Maybe Sarah’s house will be annoyingly Architectural Digest.”
Her friend looked at Architectural Digest? Did she know anyone anymore? “No, it’s going to be beautiful,” Lizzie said with uncontained wistfulness.
And it was. As she opened the white cabinets that only looked expensive (“IKEA!” Sarah had crowed), Lizzie admired and felt envious of it all: the dark-stained floorboards, the brushed-nickel pulls on the drawers that opened so smoothly, even the poured-concrete countertop, which Lizzie had secretly thought (hoped?) might be sterile, but turned out chic.
Behind the slim bottles of oil (olive and walnut and almond too) she finally spotted wine. She pulled out a Malbec. After she filled a glass, she kept opening cabinets in her sister’s indisputably lovely kitchen, no longer sure what she was looking for. On a shelf above the sink, she saw squat bottles of medication and vitamins. There was the lithium that Sarah had been taking for nearly twenty years—“I’m a goddamn poster child for it,” she’d say, sounding like their father—there was red yeast rice and folic acid and a prescription bottle for Clomid. Made out in her sister’s name.
Lizzie stared at the label for the Clomid as if it would transform itself. She knew what it was. Claudia had been taking it for months (“popping it like candy,” she had said) since she married Ian last spring. What would Sarah be doing with it?
She turned back to the Malbec and downed two more glasses in quick succession. Sarah didn’t want a baby; Lizzie was the one who was supposed to have a baby. She climbed into the bed in her sister’s guest room, unnerved and exhausted, trying not to dwell on it, wishing she did not feel like crying.
The sunlight in the kitchen hurt her eyes when Lizzie padded in, wearing a worn T-shirt of Ben’s and sweats she’d cut off at the knees. Sarah was washing strawberries; Angela, pouring coffee into a travel mug. Angela was already dressed in heels and high-waist trousers. She looked taller, more imperious, than usual. Lizzie was suddenly aware of her ratty T-shirt. She wished she had put on a bra.
“You got in okay?” Angela asked. There was a touch of bristle to her voice, as if she suspected Lizzie were about to complain.
“Just fine, thanks,” Lizzie said with caution. She turned to her sister. “Hello, you,” she said, brushing her cheek with a kiss, trying to be casual about her studied glance. Did her face look rounder? Was she hiding anything beneath her loose, striped T?
“I see you made yourself right at home,” Sarah said, nodding at the not-quite-finished bottle of wine, perched alone on the gleaming counter. Someone had cleaned around it, Lizzie realized, and decided to leave it there.
Lizzie blushed. “I’m sorry. I meant to clean up.”
“It’s fine,” Sarah said, and her clipped tone only confirmed her annoyance. “Perkins called me yesterday and told me to leave the cookbooks behind. Apparently there’s even a market for those old microwave ones.”
“Thanks so much for taking care of it all, Sarah, seriously.”