“Of course it is.” Sarah said it so gently Lizzie started to cry. “He tried, you know. It couldn’t have been easy, but he tried.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“I wonder sometimes. And it’s always been about the painting for you. I don’t know why you’re so hung up on the painting. Why does it matter? He loved you. He loved you, no matter what.”
“I know,” Lizzie whispered.
“No, he really loved you. Can you imagine?” Sarah said with a volley of insistence. “A single parent of two little girls? His ex-wife dead? He tried his best.”
“I know,” Lizzie said, and now she was pleading, out into the night, the tiny white lights that necklaced the patio. “But you know, he didn’t always try.” She looked back at her sister, her pretty face striking even in the low light, a face she knew almost as well as her own. “You were so young when they were still married. But things were tense; he was never around.”
“I remember,” Sarah said. “I remember more than you think.”
“She wanted—I don’t know—she wanted more.”
“Please.” Even in the fuzzy light, Lizzie could see that Sarah’s mouth was firm. “Yeah, she wanted more.”
“What does that mean?”
Sarah shook her head. “Nothing,” she muttered.
A rudimentary fear rose inside of Lizzie. “Come on. What did you mean?”
“Why do you think you know their relationship? How could you possibly know what happened?”
“I was eight years old; I saw things.”
“Yeah, well.” Sarah reached for her wine. “I remember that time before their divorce pretty well. And I know you think he was the one who had an affair, but he wasn’t. It was Mom.”
What? No. Lizzie was shaking her head, warding Sarah off. “That’s absurd. You were five, six years old. How would you know?”
“I just do.” Sarah said it with such finality that for a heart-stopping moment, Lizzie believed her. “I saw something. Someone. There was this guy: tall, bearded. He came by a bunch. You must have been in school. He called me Sarah Sue. One time Mom was supposed to take me to ice-skating lessons and instead we took a drive to his house; it was on a kind of farm, or at least, there were chickens there, and some turkeys too. I remember this drafty, messy kitchen, lots of dirty dishes and pots, a big sink. I asked for something to drink, and Mom made him clean the glass twice before giving it to me. I remember her laughing. And then he filled it up with chocolate milk and it was really good.”
Lizzie studied her sister, her disbelief morphing and twisting. “That’s it? You had chocolate milk from some hippie and now Mom had an affair?”
“I know what I saw,” Sarah said. “My therapist,” she said, and stopped. “What?”
“Nothing,” Lizzie muttered. Of course this came out in therapy.
“And anyway, that doesn’t even matter. I asked Dad.”
“You asked Dad?” Lizzie said with unvarnished surprise.
“Yeah. He confirmed it. He said he didn’t blame Mom, and I shouldn’t either. He said people make mistakes. He said they both had been at fault, that he hadn’t been home, and when he was around, he wasn’t really around.”
Lizzie stared at her sister, who was gazing out into the cool desert night. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
Sarah exhaled. “I thought about it; I wanted to. But, I don’t know. So then you could think worse of Mom too? She wasn’t around to defend herself or explain. It didn’t seem right.”
Lizzie shook her head. She was thinking of her mother, her beautiful mother, her warm eyes and her crooked half smile and that laugh that had made Lizzie feel more loved than anything else in the world. She was thinking about those afternoons when they would go alone into the city for what Lynn called L time (just the two of us) to lunch in Little Italy, where the food wasn’t much better than the pizza place in town, but they called Lizzie signorina and they had chocolate chip cannolis and it was only two blocks away from the arcade in Chinatown where you could put in a dime and watch a live chicken dance in a cage. Lizzie had always thought of those afternoons as their time, together, but maybe they were an escape for her mother, to get out of Westchester, if only for the afternoon. She saw Lynn in her jeans and boots and her suede coat with the big buttons, her hair frizzing this way and that, just a touch of lipstick, astonishingly beautiful and alive, walking in the city she loved, and Lizzie thought: Of course someone fell for her.
But when Lizzie thought of how vibrant her mother looked on those afternoons, striding down Canal holding her hand, another, less pleasant memory forced its way in: the errand they ran after their Little Italy lunches. The storefront in Chinatown had windows lined with rows of dusty unmarked glass jars filled with dried purple and blackened herbs. The store smelled something awful, but her mother took no notice. Lynn handed a slip of paper to a short woman at the counter who measured out the herbs, gave them to Lynn in a series of clear-faced envelopes with no explanation. Lynn swiftly paid, deposited them in her purse, and took her daughter’s hand. “Youth potion,” she said, and outside Lizzie gulped down the exhaust-tinged air of Chinatown as if it were the freshest she had ever tasted, too afraid to ask any questions.
Lizzie told herself she didn’t want to remember stopping in that shop—it was awful to contemplate; what were those herbs exactly? Had they done more harm than good?—but it wasn’t wholly true. Lizzie longed to remember it all.
“It’s hard for me to picture her face,” she confessed to Sarah. “I mean, I know what she looks like, but I can’t see it anymore in my mind.”
“I don’t know if I ever could.”
Lizzie grabbed her sister’s hand. Neither spoke for a long time. “It’s going to happen with Dad too,” Lizzie said.
“Yeah, it will.” Now Sarah was the one tightening, holding on. “But we’ll be okay.”
“I don’t know about that,” Lizzie said. She could barely get the words out. “I loved them both—so much.” How could it be that she would never see them again? How was that possible?
“I know, I know,” Sarah murmured. “But you’ve got me.”
“Thank fucking God.” Lizzie let out a weird hiccup of a laugh. When had Sarah become such a stalwart, so steady and calm? With one hand, Lizzie wiped away snot and tears, sniffling, unseemly; with the other she gave Sarah’s hand a little squeeze.
“I’ll tell you what I need,” Sarah said, rising. “Food. I bet you this place has everything.” She took Lizzie’s glass and filled it up, took a swig. “Maybe we need another one of these bottles too.”
“Hey,” Lizzie said, for it just dawned on her. “You’re drinking.”
“I am.” Sarah met her gaze. “It didn’t happen this month.”
“Oh,” Lizzie said. She had truly thought it would. “Sadie, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. The doctor says we just need to be patient. But I’m not exactly the patient type. We Goldstein girls aren’t.”
“‘We’? I’m so patient and laid-back.”
“Ha.” Sarah said, and she swatted at Lizzie. “Ha, ha. Ha. What did Max say?”
“Max? About what?”