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“Good luck, kid,” the driver said to me. “My parents are a nightmare too.”
I didn’t want to walk into the middle of whatever battle they were having, but it was freezing out, so I knocked tentatively. There was no way they could hear me over the yelling, so I tried the door and, finding it unlocked, went inside. The house was spotless, and there was very little in it. Furniture and basic necessities but no décor, no art, no clutter. Nothing that suggested three people lived here.
I followed the noise and found Will in the kitchen, facing off with one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, and now that I’d been in New York for a while, I’d seen a lot. She looked like Will—the clean line of jaw and nose, the high cheekbones and clear brow. But where his beauty could be remote and otherworldly, hers was warm and inviting. She was curvy where he was spare. Her eyes were a darker, brighter blue, and her mouth naturally turned up at the corners. She had dimples and her two front teeth overlapped charmingly, making her seem approachable. Her blonde hair was a shade darker than Will’s—a warm honey color that made me want to run my fingers through its smooth thickness.
If Will was the untouchable statue, Claire was vibrant and alive. The girl you were desperate to talk to, desperate to have smile at you. Even like this, her face twisted in anger and her eyes blazing, I immediately wanted her to like me.
When she saw me, she jerked backward, hand to her chest.
“Jesus Christ, you almost gave me a fucking heart attack,” she said. Even her voice was attractive, smooth and low.
“Sorry! Sorry, I knocked, but….”
When Will turned to me, I was shocked. He looked utterly exhausted. But when I smiled at him and he smiled back, there was some kind of, like, light in his face. And I’d put it there.
“Hey,” he said. “Claire, Leo. Leo, Claire.”
“Ah,” Claire said, her eyes narrowing in a gaze startlingly like Will’s. “Skater boy.”
“Sis,” Will said in a tone I could tell was used between them often.
Wait. She knew who I was. That meant Will had totally talked about me to her! I wondered what he had said, and I was about to ask Claire but bit my tongue since it was clearly not the time.
Before I had a chance to say anything anyway, they were at it again. I didn’t have the background to make sense of all the details, but the gist of it seemed to be that Will was insisting that Claire see a certain doctor and Claire was refusing. There were a lot of references to past incidents, and a lot more yelling. Finally, Will grabbed Claire’s shoulders and stuck his face in hers.
“You’re going, and that’s final!”
“You’re not fucking in charge of me!”
“I am, actually. Or did you forget about that too, the way you forgot about your kids for days?”
That stopped Claire dead. Her glare turned her face cold, and she and Will could’ve been twins.
“I really hate you sometimes,” she said, low and serious.
I saw her words land, and I saw Will absorb them, taking the hit with a barely perceptible jump in the muscle of his jaw and a clench of his fists where they hung at his sides.
“Yeah,” he said, voice thick. “I know. But you’re still going.”
Claire slumped a bit, her spine softening.
Will clearly saw an opening and took it, grabbing his bag from the kitchen table and shrugging into his coat.
“Okay, we’re taking off, then.” He hesitated, chin down. “You sure you don’t want us to stay here?”
“I told you I was, Willy,” Claire said in a singsong voice that sounded almost eerie after her anger of a moment before, like cheery carnival music played over an ominous scene in a scary movie.
“Do not fucking call me that, Claire Bear,” Will retorted.
She just raised her eyebrows at him mockingly.
“That’s Clairevoyant to you, Willful,” she said, pinching his cheek.
“I’m too tired to even mock you properly right now. Your children are a fucking handful.”
Claire’s smile faded away. “What, you’d rather they were not seen and not heard the way we were?”
Will stared at his feet. I’d never seen him look like that before. Defeated and ashamed. “No, of course not. Okay, well. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Claire walked us to the door and pulled Will down into a fierce hug, twining her arms around his neck and jumping up to wrap her legs around his waist.
“Thanks, little bro. You’re always the white hat,” she said.
“Your sister’s….” I started to say as we got into Will’s rental car, but I couldn’t think how to finish the sentence so I just let it drop. Will didn’t seem much in the mood to make conversation anyway.
