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In the morning, he was gone. I had stuck to my guns and sent him to his own hotel room before two a.m., which was an uncharacteristically responsible choice on my part, but it made sense for him, too: he had a six a.m. pickup for the drive to the airport and had yet to pack. Still, our two hours together were aces.
I took a long morning bubble bath, which is pretty standard fare for a Las Vegas quasi-diva, but I brought my tablet into the tub—which was black, like my toilet—and learned all I could about cryptocurrency and Futurium, my sister’s new employer. The main thing I took away from all that googling was that Futurium was actually the name of the cryptocurrency and the company behind it. The enterprise had offices in Grand Cayman, Phnom Penh, and Las Vegas, though it was unclear whether six or six hundred people worked at each of them. According to one article, a few years ago they’d picked Vegas over Miami, one of the other cities that wanted them, because energy was cheap in Nevada, and the blockchain servers used massive amounts of electricity. The Las Vegas office was west of the strip. I knew the BP didn’t yet accept crypto, but I’d heard other casinos were starting down that path.
The whole thing left me baffled, and so my mind wandered to my sister’s other big news: the fact she was now a mother.
I didn’t speak to many thirteen-year-olds—any, to be precise. When I met my niece, I would be completely out to sea. Not only was she thirteen, she was a thirteen-year-old whose life story would leave most people gutted. So, Marisa, how many places have you lived? Any idea where the wankers are who first deserted you? How did you wind up adopted by a social worker who was banging the father of one of her clients? How does it feel to have been uprooted like a forest fern and dropped into the stultifying heat of Las Vegas?
Or I could just ask her about her choice in lipstick. Or go with the obligatory Cool trainers: where did you get them? Isn’t that what every adult says to every young adult?
I hadn’t visited Betsy’s Facebook and Instagram pages in months because it made me too sad to have her inside my head, but I went there now, and sure enough, there were photos of her and the girl. There were none of her and the guy she was dating, which made sense since he was in the process of divorcing someone else. But there were Betsy and Marisa eating Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream cones in Burlington, mugging for the camera, and there they were at the general store in the village where Betsy and I had grown up. It seemed that Betsy had shown the girl our old house, no doubt regaling her with tales of our childhood and how hard our mother had worked to raise us after her second husband, our stepfather, had died, and all the wonderful things this poor kid had been denied. I think the picture that troubled me the most was one of them from the week before at one of the county fairs that dotted a Vermont August: the child—and she was a child—was wearing a crop top that showed more tummy than a tankini, and blue-jean shorts that I feared if she turned around would be cheeky in the worst sense of the word. I’m no royal prude, but this was just plain slatternly. And, of course, the kid had that choker and the black eyeliner and looked every bit a pedophile’s wet dream. At every turn, men with dead hearts left girls like that transmogrified—either silenced and benumbed or forever changed into someone else.
Also, she was wearing flip-flops, and the fair was in a field. I shuddered when I thought of how filthy the kid’s feet were.
But didn’t that mean that my sister was perfect for her? Another disaster in Daisy Dukes? My sister had never been arrested, never charged with a crime, but that was only because she seemed to have a preternatural ability to duck the bullets from the firing ranges she had walked into willingly when we were younger. Our stepfather had died when I was eleven and Betsy was ten, and our mother spent the next seven years trying desperately to prevent Betsy from sabotaging her life. I didn’t start purging into toilets until after college, and I had started auditioning in New York, and so I was always the good daughter, the good sister, the good lass. I wasn’t the one leaving half-smoked joints in the ashtray of the car, doing mushrooms the night before the SATs, or crashing the car into the back of a manure spreader because I was texting. (Only I knew that Betsy had been texting that moment on a brand-new BlackBerry. And there was no dope in the car that day. And no one was hurt.) And yet she did go to college, and afterwards she did get a master’s in social work. There were some dodgy moments, but, in all fairness, she had wound up a largely functional adult.
Until, of course, she killed our mum—though, in truth, she continued to function even after that. How the guilt didn’t destroy her was beyond my ken. It would have devastated a normal person.
And still Congresswoman Erika Schweiker hadn’t called back. I wondered if I should tell Artie.
By the time I emerged from the tub, it was nearly eleven thirty and Yevgeny had landed at JFK, where it was almost two thirty. He texted me from the car service that was bringing him into the city that he’d slept on the plane and felt great, and reiterated how much he’d enjoyed the show and meeting me. It was rather chivalrous.
I texted him back something far less charming:
Okay, Mr. Ethics. What do you know about a crypto company called Futurium?
He texted that the town car was approaching the tunnel and he’d call me when he got to his apartment. So, I climbed into a swimsuit and cover-up, and went to my cabana. I couldn’t decide which was stranger: my sister being a mother and working for a company whose business I found utterly unfathomable, or two estranged siblings from Vermont winding up in Las Vegas.
When math geeks get number tattoos, they get things like pi—the symbol or the number. And that’s cool, because it’s like infinity.
When people who aren’t math geeks get tattoos with numbers, they get creepy things like 13 or 88 for “Heil Hitler” or 666. (The number 666 isn’t as bad as some people think. It’s not always the devil. I googled it. There’s a whole crowd out there who give it all sorts of angel meanings.)
If I got a tattoo with a number, it would be 5, because I love the commercials for that perfume with 5 in the name. I’ve never smelled it, but I know it smells awesome. I just know it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Betsy
She was going to sell her car. (She was going to sell most of her things, which wasn’t hard because she hadn’t amassed much of value.) And so the last weeks in July and those first weeks in August, now that she had adopted Marisa and made it clear to her that the two of them were in this thing together, they drove all over Vermont. They visited places where Betsy had never been in her life, even though she’d been raised in the Green Mountains. They went to three different county fairs, and eventually, Betsy brought the girl to the village where she had grown up.
The town no longer had an elementary school, and property values had plummeted after it closed. But the older couple who had bought her mother’s house were resourceful. (Betsy was her mother’s executor, despite her checkered history as an adolescent, because she still lived in Vermont and Crissy had decamped to Las Vegas. Their mother thought it would be simpler to leave her younger child in charge, and it was. Betsy handled it all just fine, though Crissy witnessed her sister’s competence mostly through the lawyers.) The new owners had told Betsy at the closing that they were handy, and, clearly, they were. The place looked better to Betsy than it ever had after her stepfather had died, which meant it looked better than it had in a quarter century. (Despite the shadows that lurked in the man’s soul, he was house proud.) They had repainted it a beautiful shade of gray: the sky before a thunderstorm. They had had the slate roof repaired and rebricked the top of the chimney. The screens were clean and new on the wraparound the porch, and the flower gardens along the front walkway once more were manicured.
“It was just the four of you in that place?” Marisa asked her, awed by its size.
“Yes. And it was just the three of us after my stepfather died.”
“You were ten?”
“Yup. And Crissy was eleven,” she said, and she thought (as she did often) about the year and a half that separated them, and how it might have saved her. No, she wouldn’t have needed to be saved. Ten was likely old enough to know better. Eleven sure as hell was.
Or should have been.
“How many rooms does it have?”
She counted them in her head. “Twelve,” she answered.
“Twelve. For four people. Wow.”
Betsy considered knocking on the door and asking the couple who lived there now if the two of them could take a walk through the place. She doubted they would have minded. But it was Saturday. They deserved their privacy. Besides, she wasn’t sure she wanted to see the way they had erased her childhood memories or papered over what had been her mother’s world. And so she walked Marisa to the general store, which had grown tonier over the years and now sold good wines and high-end craft beers, but still offered homemade brownies and cookies, and she bought snickerdoodles, which they ate by the river across the street. They took photos, which they posted on both of their Facebook pages.
