Closer Than Blood

about her foiled delivery. He texted back right away.

I WISH! THAT WAS LANDLADY! NEIGHBOR ABOVE HAD LEAKY SHOWER. LOL. MY LIFE SUX.

With Parker’s eighteenth birthday only days away, Laura Connelly fretted about what she might do to celebrate the milestone. Every time she broached the subject, her son just dismissed it. He said that he didn’t want any fuss.

“Drew and I will go out and do something, Mom. I’m not a kid anymore.”

“I wasn’t suggesting Chuck E. Cheese, Parker.”

“Whatever,” he said.

“What do you mean, whatever? What do you want to do? Maybe I could meet this girlfriend of yours.”

“I highly doubt that, Mom.” Later, Laura would beat herself up over how blind she’d been to what was going on in her son’s life. How she’d missed all the signs that he was slipping away. He’d been more remote than ever and she had no idea what he’d gotten himself into. Or what that pouch of money from the church meant. Part of her didn’t want to know.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Tacoma

The cab ride from Seattle to Tacoma was a bleary-eyed mess. Lainie O’Neal had sold her Ford Focus for cash, thinking that she’d be able to get by on Seattle’s overhyped bus and light rail, Sounder Transit. The money helped in the short term. But not right then. She had expected to get to the hospital in an hour, but a recent miscalculation by the engineers working for the Washington State Department of Transportation had turned the primary link between the two cities into a parking lot as five lanes merged to one. It had been three days since Tori called, telling Lainie that she needed her to come, “but not right now.” Everything, even an emergency, was ruled by the whims of her twin sister. As the yellow cab waited behind a minivan with two children watching a DVD, Lainie thought once more of the last time she’d seen her sister. It had been years. So many, in fact, that she’d stopped thinking of Tori every day as she had when she first made it clear that she had no room in her life for any family member. It was a dark time, seared in her memory like a hot blade against her cheek. Unforgettable. Unstoppable. She fought the memory as the traffic in the so-called fast lane crawled southward to Tacoma. Maybe this is a new start, she thought. She needs me. As traffic centipeded past the Tacoma Dome, a message envelope appeared on the screen of Lainie’s cell phone. It was from Tori. If anyone had asked Lainie a week ago if her sister had ever called, Facebooked, MySpaced, or texted her, she would have laughed out loud. She might even have asked, “What sister?” But not right then. Tori had, indeed, called and texted. She was making up for lost time and using whatever means were available to reel in a sister she’d ignored for years.

IVE BEEN DISCHARGED. MEET ME AT 222 N.JUNETT.

Lainie gave the driver the address.

“Nice part of town,” he said, glancing in the rearview mirror. Lainie looked out the window.

“Figures,” she said. Tori always knew how to get what she wanted.

When Lainie thought of her sister and how she became the way she did, she was transported back to the times and places of their childhood in Port Orchard. In her mind’s eye, Lainie saw Tori as she saw herself. As twins, they’d come into the world as a matched set. They’d been dressed alike. Voices were often mistaken for each other, particularly when answering the telephone. For the longest time, when they were elementary-school age, Lainie thought they were the same person—replicas of each other. Lainie assumed that their feelings mirrored each other’s, too. Why wouldn’t they? A few things stood out that she could pull from her memory and revisit. They were ten. Their father, who literally couldn’t kill a fly, had the misfortune to back over the O’Neals’ ancient, bag-of-bones Siamese cat, Ling-Ling. It was a Sunday morning and they had been on their way to church when the bump and crunch occurred. Their dad sprang from the driver’s side as if he’d been jolted by a hot wire. Their mom followed. Tori and Lainie were in the backseat, at first unaware. Lainie caught the look of anguish on her parents’ faces and watched her father bend down to pick up the cat. She was limp, bloodied, lifeless. It was apparent only then what had transpired—what the bump had been.

“Daddy ran over Ling-Ling,” Lainie said, starting to cry. She unbuckled her seat belt and swung open the door, dropped her feet onto the pavement of the driveway. She swiveled and looked in the direction of sister.

“Are you coming?” Tori didn’t bother to look up. She had a Sweet Valley Twins book in her lap, her eyes fixed on a page, as she continued to read.

“Tori, Daddy ran over Ling-Ling!”

“He didn’t mean to and the cat was old,” she said. The cat was old, and their father hadn’t meant to kill it. Lainie understood that. Everyone understood. But Tori’s observation came with a disturbingly cool demeanor. Snow on ice. That afternoon when they buried Ling-Ling under a pear tree that never fruited, Lainie let the tears flow. Her father held her hand and squeezed. His eyes had moistened, as had their mother’s. Tori’s eyes had puddled, too. Lainie thought that the wave of emotion that swept around them as they placed an avalanche of pink and white dahlia blossoms on the tiny grave was genuine.

“I thought that you didn’t care about Ling-Ling,” Lainie said later when the twins tucked themselves into their beds that night.

“You cried. I saw you.” Tori rolled onto her side and her blond hair tumbled onto the pale blue pillowcase. She looked at Lainie.

“A cat is a cat,” she said.

“I know she meant a lot to you, Mom, Dad. We’ll have other cats, other pets. She’s an animal and she was going to die soon anyway.” Lainie didn’t know her sister. Later, she’d play the scene over and wonder if she ever had. Tori’s matter-of-fact take on things seemed clear and emotionless. She was right about Ling-Ling. The O’Neals did have other cats. What resonated with Lainie was not about the cat at all. It was about how devastated their father had been by killing Ling-Ling. The cat was a pet, for sure. She was, in fact, very old. But none of that mattered. Their father was so sorry for what he’d accidentally done. Lainie’s tears were really for him. She didn’t think Tori ever got that part of it.

“She never understood how other people really felt,” Lainie confided to a friend many years after the incident.

“It wasn’t in her to really, really look into the heart of another person to see their suffering. Or even their joy.”

Pewter-colored Commencement Bay faded from view as the taxi headed up the hill from downtown toward the Stadium District, then on to North Junett. Lainie hadn’t spent much time in Tacoma, having fallen victim to the prejudice that came from thinking that Seattle was the Northwest’s only real city. Tacoma had been the butt of jokes since she’d been a child. The “aroma of Tacoma” was a favorite derision of those who didn’t live there, as it evoked the stinky smell of the old pulp mills and copper smelter that no longer spewed any stink. The jokes, like a residual smell, still lingered. It never occurred to her that her sister lived there. In fact, it never crossed her mind that she might bump into her in some random way like that. They’d been apart so long, the ties felt irrevocably severed. The phone call from the hospital changed all of that. She nodded off in the deep dark of the taxi’s backseat, only to awaken as the car slowed in front of the gargantuan Victorian. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and looked out through the fingerprint-marred window. A swirl of apricot blossoms clung to the large turret that overlooked the street. It was a gingerbread house with sugar. It was Candy Land. Chutes and Ladders. The house was a girl’s fantasy of the most charming home ever imagined. And her sister lived there.

“I guess she married well,” Lainie said to the driver as she swung open the taxi’s door. A blast of cool air smacked her in the face and she pulled back a bit. The driver nodded.

“Oh yeah, that she did. She had it good. Real good. You know, until the end.” He must have read the news paper or saw the story on TV, she thought. She noticed a fluttering remnant of yellow crime-scene tape on a walkway lamppost. That also might have tipped him off. She reached for her purse and started to rummage for her wallet, full of maxed-out credit cards and four twenties. She paid the man and, with suitcase trailing like a dog on a leash, Lainie trudged up the brick herringbone-patterned walkway to the front door, which was already parted to let her inside. Ten steps away, her heart pounded as she braced herself. Immediately, she saw her face. Her face. The door opened wider.