No One Knows Us Here(2)

On that smoky summer evening I came home late, and the whole apartment was dark except for the kitchen, where two figures sat across from each other at the kitchen table. One was Mira, her black hair released from its usual updo and flowing down across the back of the chair. She was dressed up, in a tight black cocktail dress, though her feet were bare. She was laughing and drinking wine.

The other person was laughing and drinking wine, too. A friend of Mira’s, I thought, though I’d never known Mira to invite a friend to our apartment. Not once in the year I’d lived there had she invited anyone over. I saw Mira only coming and going. She was the only person outside of TV doctors who looked sexy in scrubs. She wore them in jewel colors to set off her skin, her dark hair, and her almost black eyes. I’d often meant to ask her if she had them made for her by a tailor, sewn up to her exact measurements.

She would come back from dental school wearing scrubs and leave moments later in a fancy party dress. She had a rack of them—a genuine clothing rack on wheels. Sometimes, if our paths crossed, I would ask her where in Portland she was going in that satin ballgown, in those red-soled stilettos, and she would just laugh and say, “out and about” or “here and there.”

When I closed the apartment door behind me, the two of them looked up, the blonde one swooping a curtain of hair away from her face in a practiced gesture that was designed to appear casual and sexy at the same time. “Heyyy!” she said to me in a gravelly, California way. “Surprise!”

It wasn’t a friend of Mira’s after all. It was my sister. I hadn’t seen her since the funeral fifteen months ago. She’d been such a little kid then. She’d had braces. She’d worn a hair clip with a giant bow glued to it.

Now she was sitting across from my roommate, laughing and swishing her hair around. She smiled at me—a huge grin, her teeth smooth and straight and tinged dark from wine. Her eyes were sparkling and mischievous, like she’d pulled off some daring caper in a quirky crime comedy.

I didn’t smile back—I couldn’t smile back—because I was still taking it all in: my little sister, sitting in my apartment, miraculously all grown up. She was wearing an outfit I never would have dared to wear at her age—cutoff shorts and a white tank top over a black lacy bra. She had cleavage. When she jumped up to throw her arms around me, I could see that she had shot up in the months since I’d seen her last. She towered over me, pressed me against her new pillowy chest, making me feel like I was the younger one, a tiny scrap of a girl who could still wear clothes from the kids’ section if I really wanted to.

Wendy collapsed back onto her chair and picked up her glass of wine—some huge Beaujolais glass—from the table and started swirling it around and taking big throaty gulps like she knew what she was doing, like she’d done it before.

That’s when I marched up and took the glass from her. Wendy froze midlaugh.

I looked over at my roommate, the responsible adult in this situation. “She’s thirteen years old, Mira!”

Mira’s eyes went wide, taking Wendy in. She didn’t look thirteen. I will grant her that. “Oh, shit, sorry.”

Wendy narrowed her eyes at me. Even her eyes had matured. They were still big and gray-blue, but now they were rimmed with black eyeliner and mascara. It wasn’t just that, though. They were wiser, somehow. Calculating. “Fourteen,” she said. She plucked her glass out of my hands and raised her eyebrows.

I wanted to relent then, to sit down at the table and top off her glass of wine. Because until that moment I didn’t really have a stance on underage drinking at all. It’s legal in Europe, right? Children drink wine at dinner. It’s just that the last time I’d seen her she was still a kid, an innocent little kid whose parents had both just died on her, and now she was swishing hair and swilling wine, and the crazy thing was it all seemed like yesterday—the phone call, the funeral, everything.

“I thought you’d be happy to see me,” Wendy said. I couldn’t read her expression. I couldn’t read my own sister’s expressions anymore, not after all these years.

I sat down at the head of the table and sighed. Mira set one of those gigantic wineglasses in front of me, and I poured myself some wine from the bottle on the table. Wendy took a sip from her glass, and I didn’t stop her. Some role model I was. But really, after all she’d been through—we’d been through—a little wine wasn’t going to do any further damage.

“How did you even get here?” I asked.

Wendy flashed her smile again. “Followed in Cleo’s footsteps. Worked like a charm.”

“Who the hell is Cleo?”

“Cleo from The Island Keeper?” She downed the rest of her wine in a few glugs, and again I didn’t say anything. “Only our favorite book of all time?”

The way she said “our” broke my heart.

“My grandma signed me up for summer camp,” Wendy explained. “It’s like four hours from Sacramento, and she was going to drive me there herself, but then at the last minute she changed her mind—said it made more sense for me to fly there and have them pick me up. I made a few phone calls, Grandma dropped me off at the airport, and voilà! Here I am.”

“You couldn’t have just arranged a visit like a normal person.”

Wendy laughed and poured herself more wine. “Face it, Rosemary. You never would have agreed to that.”