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On the landing stands Kit’s nineteen-year-old, Sienna. Behind her, like a smaller Matryoshka doll that could nest perfectly inside her older sister, stands sixteen-year-old Aurora. It’s only now that I remember my father said on the phone that the girls are staying here, too—even Sienna, who could technically escape to her dorm room. They are negative images of one another, Sienna fair and blond, Aurora with more olive skin, like her father, Martin, but they both have the same bright, upwardly sloped eyes, Cupid’s bow lips, and rounded faces. Aurora looks as ballerina-scrawny as ever, but Sienna wears a tight black dress that reveals curves. Shit. When didthathappen?
“Oh my God,” I say, rushing for them. “You guys.”
I’m assaulted by a mixture of smells: fruity bubble bath, sour bedding, sticky-sweet hair products. Their bodies feel frozen stiff, like they’ve turned to wood. Their skin is cold. Beneath my arms, Sienna is trembling.
There’s a cough a few risers up, and here is Kit. There are circles under her eyes, and she looks dazed. Despite the fact that she is wearing a thick oatmeal cardigan and wool pajama bottoms, she has her arms wrapped around her body like she’s spent the night in a snowdrift. She sees me and stops short, her eyes going wide. “Why areyouhere?”
Somewhere in the room, a gasp. Maybe it’s me. This isn’t exactly the welcome home from her I expected.
But then again, I also kind of deserve it.
9
KIT
FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 2017
I’m sorry,” I say to Willa. “I didn’t mean to say that. I’m just... surprised.”
“It’s okay,” Willa answers in a clipped voice, then turns. “Come on. Let’s get out of this drafty foyer, okay? Do you need coffee?”
She heads toward the kitchen, and I wilt against the banister.Willa.Just looking at her makes me well up. I so rarely see her. She only turns up at sad events—funerals, accidents, divorces—so of course I’m plunged into memories of the sad moments I saw her last. But more than that—Willa.The tie to my past. The tie to mymom.She has Mom’s eyes, and they’re looking back at me, but I don’t know what they’re thinking. Who’s at fault for the emotional chasm between us? Or maybe it’s no one’s fault. Maybe we are just normal sisters who don’t speak as much as we should. Yet that makes her being here now even more momentous. I know she didn’t want to come. I know it was a huge sacrifice to get on that plane. My chest feels tight with a mix of embarrassment for the charity I didn’t ask for as well as gratitude that she’s done the difficult, uncomfortable thing just for my sake.
Also, with Willa being here... it makes it allreal.Greg is dead.Someone murdered him. I don’t know why the murder happened, or what motivated it, or if the person plans to strike again. I don’t know how narrowly I escaped being murdered myself. I’ve become aware that until the cops find who actually did it, they’re going to suspect me—at least a little bit, anyway. With Willa here, the past few days suddenly aren’t a dream. It’s as real as it gets.
I’m not ready to deal with that.
Willa bustles around the kitchen, knowing where everything is kept by heart because my father hasn’t changed a thing. As usual, my sister’s small, angular face is makeup-free. Her reddish-brown hair, cut to the shoulders, has streaks of blond through it—from the sun, most likely, as Willa isn’t into the whole salon scene. Her body radiates with health and athleticism, and not just because she’s wearing leggings and a hoodie that shows off her taut waist. It astonishes me that she’s still single. I get that a lot of women in LA are size zeros and look like supermodels, but Willa is truly a catch.
After the coffee is made, she carries two mugs and walks down the hall. Without discussing it first, she heads to the back room of the house, our favorite place. It’s where my mother let her interior decorating freak flag fly: All of the furniture upholstery is busily patterned, and nothing matches. The shelves are crowded with bird’s nests, pine cones, wood carvings, old egg-crate artwork Willa and I did in preschool, an old Bakelite rotary telephone in sixties orange, and a framed diorama featuring two tiny train-model people trapped in two separate test tubes reaching out to touch one another but never quite connecting. Mom’s old sketchbooks are piled in a corner. A few unfinished paintings, both of them still lifes of junk on our kitchen table at the time, rest on easels along the wall. Time hasn’t touched this room. It is one hundred percent 1997, the year of her fatal car crash.
I sit down on the leopard-print couch. Willa perches on the slipper chair stamped with hallucinogenic poppies. Our usual spots. My gaze moves down the hall, where I notice Willa’s suitcase resting on the front mat. “Wanna take that upstairs?” I ask, gesturing to it.
“Oh.” Willa shifts awkwardly. “Actually, I got a room at the Marriott. I’ll take my stuff there later.”
I run my tongue over my cracked lips. What is it with her and that freaking Marriott? Every time Willa visits—at least since she’s had enough money to do so—she’s stayed there. She says it’s because she doesn’t want to get in our way... but it feels so impersonal, especially now.
I sit dumbly on the couch. My mind crawls. Finally, I pick up the Coffee mate creamer I grabbed from the kitchen and pour a hefty amount into my mug. Willa gives me a horrified look. “What?” I ask.
“Do you know how many chemicals are in that?”
I shrug, then dump the rest into my coffee. The liquid is vanilla-colored by now. I take a long sip, but now, of course, the creamer tastes like piss.Buzzkill.
“So are you still surfing?” I finally say, remembering that the last time I visited Willa in LA, I’d seen two surfboards leaning against her back deck. One of them, she said, belonged to a guy friend. I never did get to meet the guy.
My sister blinks. “Not in a while. I’ve been busy with work.”
“Oh.” I wrap my sweater tighter around me.
“I can’t wait to get back into it. It’s why I moved to Venice. Surfing... grounds me.”
I never know what people mean when they say somethinggroundsthem, but then, Willa and I have always been on different planets. We were closer when we were young, but that was only because we lived in the same house with the same rules and routines. Our personalities were nothing alike. Despite our shared last name, some teachers were surprised to learn that we were sisters. I was the friendly one who had so many friends there was hardly autograph space left in my yearbook by the end. A girly girl, I hated to get dirty in chemistry lab; I walked the track in gym instead of participating in sports. I had a head for math and history, but English boredme—much to my father’s chagrin, as he’d been in the English department before becoming an administrator.
Willa, on the other hand, was an English teacher’s dream. She also played every sport there was, including on boys’ teams when girls’ weren’t offered. She was one of those strong-looking, slightly scary girls who walked into a room and just dominated... but you didn’t exactly want to be friends with her.
After our mom’s death—I’d been a freshman at Aldrich University, and Willa a junior in high school—Willa got...weird.She dropped out of sports. She bought a pet tarantula, Stewie, and let him walk up and down her arm, hoping to freak people out. She started hanging out at the punk club downtown. She wrote angry poetry on her bedroom walls, and she regularly told people to fuck off. Though she didn’t toe the line, my dad never punished her—I guess he figured this was her version of grief. Besides, her grades were always great, which was what mattered most to our dad. He so wasn’t equipped for the emotional parts of having teenagers. It’s probably why I got married so quickly—I needed someone to rely on. And maybe it’s why Willa left.
The year after my mom’s death, I threw myself into my friends, activities, and my boyfriend, Martin. Martin was my everything: handsome, sweet, loyal, funny, empathetic. He was my nursemaid as I grieved, helping me get through the days. I was practically living in his dorm room when Willa made the announcement that she was reneging on her acceptance to Aldrich and going to California instead. Maybe I should have tried to connect with her about this sudden change of heart—Willa had always said that she was going to apply to Aldrich and nowhere else. Maybe Ididtry, but I don’t recall us having any meaningful conversations about it. Willa was resolute. She was leaving.
