Chapter 1
“So, I hired a private investigator,” Alison said as she sat down on next to me on the couch. “To find Mom.”
I sat down my phone and turned toward her, my ponytail flipping over my shoulder. “Why would you waste your money looking for her? She knows where we are and she’s not here.”
“Lex,” she said sternly without looking at me. “I’m not saying I’ll actually speak to her and I’m not saying you have to. I just want to know where our sister is.”
Alison is good at that. The guilt trip thing. She likes to bring up the fact that our mother is missing every few months. The thing is, she never actually follows up on it. Neither one of us have spoken to our estranged mother in over five years. It’s been even longer since we’ve actually seen her.
My older sister and I were both adults when our parents finally got a divorce. Alison had gone away for college and once she graduated, she decided to spend an extra year in Seattle in an exclusive internship for a career that never came to fruition. I had opted to live at home for my first year of college but by the following summer I had saved up enough money to move out with a close friend of mine.
Adeline, our youngest sister, was only nine years old and while she must have grown accustomed to nights spent lying awake listening to our parent arguing through closed doors, it still came as somewhat of a shock. She would call me sometimes at four o’clock in the morning just to get her mind off things.
“He came home late again,” she said to me one night, not even bothering to whisper—they were too loud to even hear her. “Mommy’s been just sitting in the kitchen. She cooked dinner.”
“She cooked dinner?” My mother was never one for household duties. I tried to lighten the mood, “Maybe she’s trying to kill him.”
“She said I can come stay with you this weekend. If that’s okay. I just have to do my homework,” Addy yawned into the phone. It was a school night and she had been having trouble making it on time all week. I stared at the clock as the second hand made its way around one more time. It had always been like this. My entire life I spent every good moment just happy my parents weren’t arguing. Graduation, prom, even moving out on my own was always overshadowed by some unspoken argument they were having. I never brought it up, I was just thankful for the silence even when it was loaded. But now I had left my little sister to bear the brunt of it alone.
Adeline came as a surprise to all of us. At the time that my mother announced her latest pregnancy it seemed like my parents weren’t even together. My father’s business trips got longer, and my mother’s wine glasses got fuller and Alison and I had finally gotten into a routine of taking care of ourselves. I was almost ten and my sister was fourteen so she would wake me up in the morning and make sure I wore matching socks and ate breakfast before dropping me off at school and walking herself across the street to the middle school. After school she would come back and meet me to walk me home and give me a snack before going back to school for soccer practice. We did it every day and I was so used to it just being the two of us that I wondered how a baby would even fit into our routine. Who would watch it? Who would feed it if Alison was at school all day?
My father was the happiest I have ever seen him when my mother told us all as a family. He had actually made it home at the time he said he would, and my mother ordered Chinese food which was our favorite. He had just eaten a big forkful of noodles when my mother made her big announcement: we were having a baby. He stood up so abruptly that I flinched back, not sure what was happening. Before I knew it, he had enveloped her into his big, hairy arms and they cried for a long while as my sister watched uncomfortably next to me.
Right now, Alison is sitting in front of me with one long leg crossed over the other gracefully. She has just finished her first glass of wine and is reaching for the bottle situated on the table between us. I watch as she effortlessly refills her glass then leans forward to set the bottle back down. She missed the table entirely and drops the whole thing onto the floor. It lands with a loud thud and I jump up to grab it before it spills onto my new rug.
“Thank God it didn’t break,” I say as walk to the kitchen. “Please be careful. I just bought this rug and I love it.”
“Nothing even spilled,” she says as she takes a long sip. “Plus, it’s a white wine, it would have been fine.”
“Have you met with the wedding planner?” I asked as I pulled my feet underneath me and curled up in the opposite corner of the couch.
My sister was recently engaged –well, if you count six months as recent. She and her fiancé had been dating all through her twenties. He was a nice guy, a few years older than her and ready to settle down long before she would even allow the subject to come up. She finally conceded shortly after she turned thirty. She never admitted it, but I knew the idea of a wedding with neither of our parents there was too painful to think about. Shortly after our parents’ divorce our father met and married a much younger woman who wanted nothing to do with any of us. Ali and I adjusted very quickly to it all. She moved to be closer to me and we became much closer since we could only rely on each other for emotional support.
When she introduced me to Aaron I was actually shocked. He was nothing like the guys she had dated before. Alison was six feet tall and pretty in the kind of way that intimidates anyone who doesn’t take the time to get to know her. I couldn’t imagine how she could end up with someone like him. He was much shorter than her –probably by about four or five inches—and he was in his thirties when she was just twenty-five. While my older sister supported herself by being a food blogger and travelling around the country taking pictures of her plate with her cell phone Aaron was a financial advisor. And not even a rich one. He was frail and thin with wide shoulders that looked like bird wings. I truly believed that at any given moment he could catch a strong wind and take flight. But Ali loved him, and he made her happy, so that means I liked him as well.
“We have an appointment on Wednesday,” Ali takes a long sip of her wine. “I’ve also gotten some offers from local photographers who want to shoot my engagement pictures for some exposure. Aaron picked a date,” she waited to meet my eyes before continuing. “August.”
I looked up at her through my eyelashes, I knew this wasn’t the time to give my opinion. The two of them have been going back and forth about this for almost two years. Alison had turned down two of his previous engagements before finally conceding. She managed to put off wedding planning for half a year before finally being faced with and ultimatum. Aaron really was a nice guy, but he finally put his foot down when it came to my sister’s flighty behavior. She really did want to be with him, but she never really knew how to explain that the idea of being in a room with a hundred of his closest friends and family when she only had me and the few friends, she had kept from college was not appealing to her. The nature of her job meant that she didn’t have colleagues that she interacted with on a regular basis. She was alone. We both were.
“That’s soon,” I said, measuredly.
“It’s eight months. But he says he’s going to help with the planning.”
“You mean his mother is going to help,” I quipped back, not meaning it to sound as bad as it did.
“Well, yeah, Lex. Moms like to help planning weddings. And they like to be around. It’s not his fault that his mom loves him. And it’s not their fault ours is nowhere to be found.”
I cringed at that. Sometimes I can’t help but take things too far. But the topic of our parents was sensitive. We danced around it most of the time. Alison and I had done a good job being each other’s support system, but as much as we dance around the topic, she knew that I was all she had and vice versa. While part of me was happy for her now that she was getting married, the growing distance between us was palpable. Eventually she wouldn’t need me as much.
