And with that, she went to Duncan, left her sister in the hall alone. A few hours later, when Lizzie awoke, Duncan was pressed against the wall, as far away as her twin bed would allow. The house was quiet. She got up, pulled on a T-shirt and underwear, feeling strangely alert. In the hall, a pile of earth-hued bottles and a shiny flattened bag of Doritos greeted her. She found a garbage bag, and began cleaning up.
When she first spotted her sister, it was Sarah’s foot that Lizzie noticed. Lizzie had gone into her dad’s bedroom, praying that it wasn’t a mess, when she remembered thinking matter-of-factly: That’s Sarah’s foot. It was a bare foot, peeking out through the frame of her father’s bathroom, not moving.
“Sarah?” Why was her sister lying there with her foot at that weird angle? How could she be sleeping, lying like that? Lizzie’s breathing sped up, her heart scuttled about. But she could remember thinking clearly: This does not make sense. “Sadie?”
Now Lizzie peered around the corner. Sarah was facedown on the bathroom tile, and there was something about the odd shape of her body—head slumped to the right, legs akimbo—that made Lizzie understand even before she could articulate it, even before she spotted the empty bottle of Valium by her sister’s outstretched hand. Lizzie touched her sister, lightly at first, then more aggressively. Sarah didn’t move.
The screaming that Lizzie heard—and it was an awful shriek, an inhumane rattling sound—it had come from her. By the time Duncan rushed in, she was cradling her sister’s unresponsive body, wiping the saliva that had dripped from her mouth, rocking her. “Please breathe, oh God, please please breathe,” she was saying.
It must have taken close to fifteen minutes to reach the ER at St. John’s in Duncan’s car, fifteen inexorable minutes in which lights must have turned red and cars had to be passed and several miles of Santa Monica streets needed to be traversed. But Lizzie didn’t remember any of it. She would remember the soury-sweet smell of vomit, she would remember using her fingers to prop and massage her sister’s mouth open, she would remember barely taking in air herself. She would remember the double-wide doors of the emergency room swinging open like a grinning mouth, easing Sarah inside. “I’m her sister, I’m her sister,” Lizzie kept saying, as if that would explain everything.
Hours later, after Lizzie had insisted that Duncan go home, a petite doctor in scrubs and orange clogs came out and said that they had talked to Joseph in Boston, pumped Sarah’s stomach, and were keeping her under watch. There was nothing more for Lizzie to do. She should go home, get some rest, and come back the next day.
Lizzie hurried out of the emergency room, freshly ashamed, and into a blazing Southern California day. She took a cab home, feeling haggard and more exhausted than she’d ever known. Lying on the couch, she remembered looking up and thinking: The walls are so dirty. How come I never noticed how dirty they are before?
That’s when it hit her. The Picasso sketch and The Bellhop, her Bellhop, were gone.
Two detectives responded to Lizzie’s phone call: a tall black man with a shadow of a mustache who quietly asked Lizzie about the artwork, and his partner, a ruddy-faced woman with a tight short perm. She was the one who asked Lizzie to make a list of the names of everyone who had been at the party. “It wasn’t all that many,” Lizzie said warily. “Uh-huh,” the female detective said, amused.
There were no signs of a break-in. No clues of any kind. “Whoever took them knew exactly what they were looking for,” the male detective said.
The party had provided the perfect cover. Lizzie was haunted by this thought. If she hadn’t thrown the party, if there hadn’t been so many people, they never would have come inside. It made her skin crawl to imagine someone inside the house, grabbing the painting that she loved, touching all of their things. She had left the door open, and the paintings were the least of it. If she hadn’t thrown the party, if she hadn’t left Sarah alone to be with Duncan (it disgusted her now, her desire for him; she avoided him at school, ignored the few messages he left on the answering machine), Sarah would have been fine. If Lizzie had only remained with her, done something as easy as sit with her, listened to her tape of The Queen Is Dead on repeat or convinced her to watch old episodes of Who’s the Boss? on VHS, a show that Lizzie thought was stupid but Sarah inexplicably loved; if she had just paid attention to her, taken care of her as she had done so many times in the past, if she hadn’t been so fucking stupid and selfish, then her sister wouldn’t have done what she did. Lizzie’s world would not have imploded.
And she wasn’t the only one who felt this way. “A party, Elizabeth, a fucking party?!” her father had screamed at her when he arrived back home from Boston hours after Lizzie had called him from the hospital. “You weren’t supposed to be here! Your sister—” He had shaken his head, opened and closed his hands as if he wanted to grip something, but came up empty.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Lizzie cried, over and over again that first hideous day. But nothing she said made a difference.
“I counted on you. You lied to me! I trusted you. And you lied.”
It didn’t matter what else she had done in her life, how good a kid she had always been. It was as if this was who she was, selfish and uncaring and a fuckup, every one of her numerous faults on display. She knew it and her father knew it too. The guilt pressed against her and became her most voluble companion. You were never a good sister, the voice told her. Your father knows it and your mother knew it too. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she said to little avail.
About a week later, her father apologized, telling her: “I had no right to say those things to you. I was out of my mind with worry.”
“I know,” Lizzie said. It was easier to acquiesce, to simply agree. But she could not stand being here, in her skin. His apology could never take away what they both knew to be the truth: she had been the one to set those awful events in motion.
“I don’t think you do,” he had said. “It wasn’t your fault.” She remembered him saying this. They were in the living room, the Lakers game on low. She stood there in agony, watching James Worthy tip the ball with enviable ease into the basket. “You didn’t steal the paintings. You didn’t take those pills. You need to know that I know that. Come here. Please.”
He looked so wretched, pleading. Her father was not a pleader. She moved closer. He squeezed her arm. “I’m so sorry you got caught up in this. It was like—a car accident,” he said. “And you were a passenger. You had nothing to do with it. Okay?”