“Was Saint Sebastian still a tennis player then?”
Emily looks at me.
“Go ahead,” I say.
“He was done,” Emily tells her sisters. She never stops picking cherries, her hands on autopilot. “He’d made the National Sixteen and Under in Kalamazoo. He played the Future Challenger circuit, but he didn’t make the pros. Tennis costs a lot of money and their family didn’t have it. But he was still coaching then. Duke used to say Sebastian couldn’t have been much of a coach if he couldn’t even make a decent tennis player out of his own brother, but Duke was pretty good, wasn’t he?”
“Duke was a great tennis player,” I say. “He just wasn’t as great as his brother. And Sebastian was a very good coach. He taught me how to play.”
“You can play tennis?” Emily looks at me, surprised. They’re all surprised.
“I played that summer. Pallace and I both played. Sometimes we played doubles with the boys but that was a joke.” What Pallace and I never did was play each other because what would have been the point in that?
“It was just the two of them, right?” Nell asks. “Just the two boys?”
Emily shakes her head. “They had a younger sister.”
“There wasn’t a sister.” Only Duke and Sebastian, raised by wolves, but even as I’m saying it, my mind is scrolling backwards: late nights, rehearsal breaks, floating in the water holding hands. What did Duke ever tell me? That he was hungry, that he wanted me to take my swimsuit off in the lake, that he needed a drink? For as much as the feel of Peter Duke’s hair slipping between my fingers is mine, the facts of his life more accurately belong to my daughter.
“Sarah was the youngest,” Emily says. “She died of Ewing’s sarcoma when she was four.”
Was it possible? Duke was always saying he’d take me home with him, back to East Detroit, so he could show me where he came from. Surely the little girl’s photograph would have been on the mantel in their parents’ house. I would have asked who she was.
“Sarah Duke,” Emily says.
“I didn’t know.”
“He never talked about her.”
“But you knew,” Maisie says, because it was starting to feel like Emily had gotten Duke’s number after all, that she had somehow called him from her bedroom when she was fourteen.
“Some journalist went through every piece of information in the public record about his family. I think it was forVanity Fair. Anyway, he found the death certificate and then he sprung it on him in the interview, just to see how he’d react. Apparently Duke walked out. He wouldn’t finish the interview, wouldn’t sit for photos.”
Good for you, I want to say to him. I who knew nothing and have nothing to say. I can remember very clearly when Emily was eight and Maisie was six and Nell was four, the big girls were in school all day and Nell came home from preschool after lunch. The sweetness of those hours when it was just the two of us never left. What would life have been without Nell? Who would Emilyand Maisie have confided in once they were grown?We had a younger sister.
Nell puts her hand on my shoulder, Nell who reads my mind. “Go back to the lake,” she says to me. “Tell us about Sebastian.”
I didn’t know Duke had a brother, and while later I could see some resemblance, it wasn’t immediately evident. When I was close enough to really see him I didn’t think, he must be my boyfriend’s brother; I thought, this guy’s not a drug dealer. He was talking to Pallace, making her laugh, and Duke had on his biggest possible Duke smile. My swimsuit was seersucker, blue and white, with a tiny, heart-shaped button sewn between the cups with red thread, a lovely, unnecessary detail that spoke to how much the stupid thing must have cost. I shivered slightly when I walked out of the water even though the day was so hot. Pallace had to get to herCabaretrehearsal and it was late but she waited for me. She took the towel from around her waist and draped it over my shoulders, like she knew I’d forgotten my towel. Maybe she did know. We were so naked, the two of us.
Duke put his arm around me. “This is the one!” he said. “This is Emily. Emily, this is my brother, Sebastian.”
“Lara.” I shook his hand.
Sebastian smiled. “He forgets.”
Sebastian was a man, that was the thing. Sebastian, scarcely a year his senior, was a man and Duke was a boy and Pallace and I were girls.
Everyone else had already left. Pallace tugged her sundress over her head and I was trying to pull up my shorts, suddenly envying Mother Gibbs her dry underwear. I rubbed quickly at my torso, my hair, so I could give Pallace her towel back.
“Maybe I could have come at a worse time?” Sebastian asked.
“Are you kidding me? It’s the perfect time!” Duke said, hisvoice exalted. “We’re working on the third act after lunch. It’s all Emily. You won’t believe how great she is.”
“Are you in the third act?” Sebastian asked Pallace.
“Not the third act you’re talking about. I’m in a different third act and I’m going to be obscenely late if I don’t leave right this second.”
I gave back the stripey beach towel. “Go.”
