The Sometime Sister Read online

  If I were being honest, though, I wasn’t sure I wanted her back. Her betrayal with Ben had undone me. For over three months I lost interest in the day-to-day operations of life. I had trouble falling asleep and could barely drag myself out of bed in the mornings. I forgot about life’s little niceties, such as maintaining personal hygiene or eating regular meals.

  Everyone tip-toed around the issue. Even Mom refrained from mentioning I exuded an aura of refugee from a war-torn country. Finally, Lesroy confronted me.

  “Grace, I hate to be the one to tell you, but you look like something the cat wouldn’t even drag in. Your eyes are vacant, like the lights are off and nobody’s home. And what’s worse, Cousin, is you stink.”

  I don’t know if it was his version of tough love or if I had exhausted my capacity for self-pity, but from that point on, I stopped letting myself go. I returned to a regular regimen of bathing and shampooing and eating, but I never regained my sense of me. For over a year after they left, I thought about my sister or Ben or both daily. A song would play on the radio, and I would remember dancing to it with Ben. I’d pick up the phone to tell Stella something funny and realize I had deleted her number. There was no escape from my humiliation.

  People promised me the pain would ease as time passed, and while it didn’t get much better, it became less intense. Instead of struggling under the crushing weight of my sorrow every day, I experienced lighter moments when I was depressed, not devastated. Lesroy suggested I see a therapist, but I refused to let go of my misery because it was all I had left of my previous life, all that remained of my relationship with Stella.

  Still, I was making progress. Or so I told myself, but who was I kidding? In a few days I would drop everything to travel to a country where I didn’t even speak the language in search of a sister I would be better off without. Once again, I had gotten sucked back into my sister’s drama.

  But this would be different. This time I wouldn’t return to being the adoring older sister. I would confront her and demand she grow up and accept responsibility for the pain she caused. Then I might forgive her and let go of my sibling loneliness.

  I spent the next hour returning client emails and proofing a guest blog post for a fellow copywriter on how to develop a freelance business. Then I fixed lunch and ate it while watching the local news.

  The weather forecast continued with dire predictions of the winter storm on the horizon. Outside, the sun cast its brittle light, making it hard to take the meteorologists seriously. But Atlantans have been fooled before and ended up being stuck overnight on freeways and in Waffle Houses. If I hurried, I could make a run to the store and avoid the hordes of people rushing the shelves for emergency supplies.

  I gave Scarlett a treat and promised to be back soon, certain she had no concept of time. Since I suspected she was still waiting for Stella to come take her home, I was glad she didn’t.

  . . . . .

  It seemed everyone else had the same idea as I had, and my quick trip became a marathon instead of a sprint. On the way to my car, a frigid gust of damp wind pummeled me.

  In the warmth of my kitchen, I put away my purchases: milk, eggs, coffee, bread, toilet paper, and wine. Then I rummaged through the pantry until I found the chocolate syrup.

  “I’m thinking about a little hot chocolate for me and, for you, one of those delicious chew-bones,” I said to Scarlett. At the mention of bones, she wagged her tail in approval.

  After we finished drinking and chewing, we crawled into bed. I hadn’t understood how draining having a missing sister could be.

  I awoke to the phone ringing. It was Mike, most likely calling with my flight plan.

  “I was just getting ready to pack,” I improvised. “It won’t take me long.”

  “There’s no hurry, Grace. They found Stella.”

  Chapter 8

  I sat on the bed tracing the floral pattern on my comforter, hoping Mike would call back and tell me he’d misunderstood what the officials had told him. Yes, some girl’s body had been found battered and bruised on the beach. But it wasn’t Stella. Yes, it was her sailboat capsized a few miles from the coastline, but she hadn’t been thrown from it. She’d been picked up by a passing fisherman and would soon be posting news about her adventure on Facebook.

  Both as a child and an adult, I’d never been a big crier. When I fell off my bike and broke my arm, I howled on the way to the hospital but never shed a tear. After discovering my fiancé was gone, I remained dry-eyed as I raged and smashed his favorite mug. I ripped his face from every picture I had. Every now and then, I woke to find my pillowcase damp, but in my waking hours I remained stoic.

  I always considered my inability to release my pain in a stream of tears more of a blessing than a curse. But not today. From the moment Mike had delivered his terrible news, my unshed tears became a cruel sneeze that teased then disappeared, leaving me desperate for relief. The pressure threatened to explode and tear me apart. Still, I couldn’t cry.

  I put off going to my mother’s, knowing it would make the horror real. Her face would be etched with grief, and none of us would ever be the same.

  Aunt Rita had parked her old Buick in the drive. I pulled in behind her but couldn’t make myself step out of the car.

  My grandmother told me that Mom’s younger sister had been beautiful before she married Lesroy’s daddy, but to me she had always been washed out, like the faded pictures in our old family album. Her eyes were a pale grayish blue, her hair a dull brown. For special occasions, she dyed it a coppery shade of red that made my eyes hurt. She was thin—too thin, both my mother and grandmother agreed—and rarely spoke above a whisper unless she and Uncle Roy rolled into one of their screaming matches. Then she shrieked to high heaven.

  When I was a kid, we saw Rita almost every day. Sometimes she and Lesroy stayed with us at Gran’s for weeks while Roy was on a bender. My mother would beg my aunt to leave him for good, but Rita always returned to my uncle.

  I had a hazy memory of a violent phase before Stella was born. The only reason I remember it at all is because Roy kept showing up at the front door drunk as a skunk, cursing and crying.

  Over six feet tall and beefy with a big barrel chest, my uncle favored wife-beater T-shirts that exposed thick patches of curly black hair. On his right forearm he had a tattoo of a grinning chimpanzee. After a few beers, he’d flex his bicep and make the monkey dance. That stupid dancing chimp never failed to get a laugh from my daddy, but Lesroy and I hated it. It looked ready to take a bite out of you if you got too close.

  When Roy was in a good mood, he would catch one of us up in his arms, fling us high in the air, and whirl around and around until the blood pounded in our heads. Then he hurled us onto the nearest piece of furniture and laughed if we fell off. Luckily, he was seldom in a good mood, and my grandmother kept him out of the house when he was in a bad one.

  I realized early Gran was the only person Roy feared. When I asked Mom about it, she laughed and said I’d have to take it up with my grandmother. Years later, I found out Gran had once broken a broom on Roy’s head. He’d come over to drag Rita home after an explosive episode that left my aunt with a black eye. Gran came up behind him and cracked him on the side of the head hard enough to addle him and break the broom. She continued to whack him across the face with the stick end until he ran bleeding from the house. My cousin insisted he’d been there when it happened, but my mother said he’d only been about six months old, and there was no way he could remember.

  Although he was handy with his fists, physical violence wasn’t Uncle Roy’s strongest suit. He specialized in a kind of emotional cruelty we children could feel if not understand. One summer night we were sitting on the front porch with neighbors. Well into the second six-pack,
one of them asked Roy where he’d gotten the name for his only son. Was it his full name? A family name? Lesroy stood by his daddy at the time, looking at his shoes.

  “Hell, no!” Roy bellowed, grabbing his son and rubbing his knuckles over the boy’s newly shaved head. “The first time I saw this little squirt I knew he’d never measure up to the Dupree men. I mean, look at him.” He grabbed my cousin’s shoulder and squeezed. “No way he was gonna be a Roy, Jr., but he might be able to carry a lesser name.” Roy slapped his son on the back and cackled. “So, I named him Lesroy! Get it? Less Roy.”

  I was only five at the time and didn’t get it. But Lesroy did. Maybe not the joke, but definitely the meanness. After that, it got real quiet for a minute. Then my grandmother spoke.

  “Well, I think the world could do with a little less Roy, myself. Less of good old Roy and more ice cream. What do you kids think?”

  The three of us put the mystery of adult cruelty behind us, went inside, and ate ice cream until our stomachs hurt.

  . . . . .

  Like my own daddy, who abandoned us shortly after Stella’s first birthday, Uncle Roy was no longer in the picture.

  “Voila!” Lesroy would say and mimic waving a magic wand. “Gone, just like that.”

  I asked him once if he was glad his daddy was gone. I knew I didn’t miss mine much.

  “Not really,” he replied. “I mean, we can’t be sure he’s not coming back.”

  But Uncle Roy didn’t come back. A year later they found his truck with him in it at the bottom of a small lake about ten miles from our home. I remember Aunt Rita had “a spell,” as Gran called it. Now I suppose it would be termed a nervous breakdown. It made me happy because Lesroy got to stay with us for almost two months while his mother was recovering.

  My aunt was never quite the same after they released her. The biggest difference was the way she acted around Gran and Mom, like she was afraid of them. And she stopped visiting. Oh, she would come for holidays and birthdays, but she didn’t stay long.

  The sound of a dog barking down the street brought me back to the present. I sighed, realizing I couldn’t stall forever, and stepped from the car. Lesroy opened the door before I knocked. He grabbed me and held on tight. “It’s going to be okay, Grace,” he said before releasing me.

  Behind him, Aunt Rita leaned against the stair rail. She was smaller than I remembered. Her poofy red hair overwhelmed her thin pale face. Rita’s mascara trailed down her cheeks, cracking her face like a porcelain doll dropped one too many times. When she saw me, she began to cry in deep, shuddering gulps. She collapsed onto the bottom step with her head on her knees. Lesroy sat and put his arm around his mother. I knew I should join them, but I couldn’t remember why they were so upset.

  I was standing there staring at them when Mike appeared. “Let me get your coat, Gracie.” He helped me out of my jacket and guided me to the den.

  My mother wasn’t the sad, broken woman from the day before. Today, she was a mad lady straight from a Greek tragedy. Medusa-style strands of hair snaked around face, bobbing when she strode toward me. Instead of offering me comfort, she grabbed me by the shoulders and leaned in close enough for me to detect the faint odor of vodka.

  “Your baby sister is dead, Grace. Murdered by that sick son of a bitch she married. You know that, right?” She didn’t give me a chance to respond. “Well, he won’t get away with it. He’s going to pay. We’re going to make him pay. Aren’t we, Grace?”

  She stared at me with fierce eyes, and when I didn’t fill the terrible silence, she shook my shoulders, not hard, but with purpose. She spoke like a drunk determined to appear sober, but she wasn’t drunk. “You are going to help me make him pay.”

  The rest of the evening was a blur for me. Rita talked Mom into taking a Xanax and lying down. Mike contacted the minister of the church he and my mother attended sporadically to discuss funeral arrangements. Everything was in the air since Stella’s body hadn’t been released yet. And, of course, there was Ben. Although he’d never been charged in connection with the drug ring’s operations, he’d represented most of the members at one time or another and was suspected of concealing information. That meant attending a stateside funeral would be a bad idea, assuming he let us bring Stella home.

  Mike’s friend in Ecuador promised to check in with the authorities to see how they were classifying Stella’s death. He warned us not to get our hopes up. There were enough unsolved murders to tax the somewhat limited police force already. They would not be eager to send men to investigate the tragic, but most likely accidental death of a rich American.

  Lesroy and I sat on the sofa watching people we didn’t know or remember stop by with casseroles, cakes, and pies. The kitchen counter was stacked two deep, and the freezer was packed.

  “Are you okay?” Lesroy asked for the third time.

  “I’m fine.” I’d been trying to think of something I could do, something to make things better. Only things weren’t going to get better. My sister was dead, my ex-fiancé was holding her body hostage, and my mother was acting like a character in The Godfather.

  Mike came from the bedroom and sat beside me. “Your mother’s finally out. Rita’s sitting with her.” He ran his hand across his buzz cut. “I’ve never seen her like this. She’s determined to fly to Ecuador and confront Ben. Demand he give us your sister’s body to bring home. And if the police don’t charge him with something, God knows what she might do.”

  “Well, we don’t have to worry about Aunt Marilyn going because she doesn’t have a passport,” Lesroy said. “She talked about getting one to visit Stella but had trouble finding her birth certificate and said to hell with it.”

  I didn’t know Mom had considered visiting Stella. I had accepted the fact that our mother favored my little sister, but I thought she’d been on my side when Stella stole Ben. Yes, she wanted me to forgive, but she had to understand I would never forget.

  The muffled hum in the room reminded me of summers spent at the community pool with Stella. We pushed ourselves to the bottom to see who could hold her breath the longest. Even though she was smaller, Stella usually won. She was at home in the water, like a sleek little otter. Although I wasn’t much bigger, I was plagued by a heaviness, terrified that at any minute I might be pulled under by an unseen force. Now, instead of childlike fear, memories of my sister dragged me down like concrete blocks.

  I wondered if Stella heard a murmur before she died, like when you’re a kid trying to fall asleep while the adults keep talking in the next room. You want to let go and drift into another state of consciousness, but you want to stay connected, too. Had my sister struggled to stay attached, to hold on to the sound until the very last moment?

  My phone vibrated from inside my pants pocket. “Unknown caller.” Normally, I would have ignored it, but I felt compelled to answer. I excused myself and walked to the spare bedroom.

  It was Ben.

  “Grace! It’s so good to hear your voice. God, it’s been so long, and it’s been…” He gurgled. “It’s been so awful. I mean, it’s been bad for such a long time, but now with Stella gone. I just don’t know.”

  Know what, I thought. Whether you’re going to get away with murdering my sister? Because at that moment, I knew he’d done it. Somehow, he was responsible for Stella’s death.

  “What do you want?”

  “Want? I don’t want anything, Babe, except to say how sorry I am about Stella and everything.” His words slurred together. “I was so stupid. It should have been me and you. If only—”

  “Stop. If you’re really sorry, you’ll help us find out what happened. And help us bring her home.”

  There was a long pause. “Sure, Grace. I’ll help, but it has to be you.
You have to come to me.”

  I started to tell him to go straight to hell because I knew what he wanted. He wanted to play. He’d always loved games: cards, videos, relationships. The higher the stakes, the better. To him, Stella’s death was just another game. With Ben the risk was the best part, almost better than winning. But he always expected to win. Could using his arrogance against him be the key to finding out what had happened to Stella?

  I agreed to go to him. I told myself it was only to get my sister back and achieve closure for our family. But when I heard Ben’s voice, there had been something, not the same intense desire I’d had when we were together. Something darker, possibly the opposite of desire.

  Chapter 9

  I expected a fight when I relayed my conversation with Ben and announced my decision to go to Ecuador alone. But my mother surprised me.

  “Grace is right. Ben knows how the rest of the family feels about him.” She took my hand and held it to her lips. “If anyone can reason with him, it’s you.” She gave Mike a look I couldn’t quite interpret, and he shrugged his massive shoulders.

  Mike insisted on setting up my travel plans, and I headed for home, troubled at the ease with which my mother was sending me off on a potentially dangerous mission. Settling the cosmic score for Stella was more important to her than preserving the safety of her remaining daughter. Even in death, Stella remained the favorite sister.

  I didn’t get home until after midnight. Either I had annoyed her by leaving her alone so long, or she sensed Stella’s death and was depressed, but I had to coax her into a walk. The temperature had dropped, and the wind had risen, carrying with it the promise of snow. My neighbor’s Christmas lights blinked manically from the small, leafless hardwood in his front yard. The decorations were wrapped tightly around the base of the tree, strangling it with seasonal joy. Scarlett and I were both shivering when we returned home.