“Shit,” Susannah says, her voice muffled. “I love that T-shirt.”
WHILE SUSANNAH TAKES a shower, I put the poker back in its place by the hearth, then strip my bed and stuff the sheets into my closet washing machine. I get new sheets and pillowcases, but I am brought up short by a black thong I see on the floor by the bed. Is it Susannah’s? Marisa’s? I look at the naked mattress, then at the closed bathroom door, behind which I can hear the shower running. I sigh and put down the stack of clean sheets, then pick up the thong and toss it into the washing machine along with the soiled sheets.
By the time Susannah finishes her shower and appears in my old plaid bathrobe with her hair wrapped in a towel, I’ve remade the bed and am spraying air freshener around my room. Susannah wrinkles her nose. “What’s with the lilac?” she says.
“Wilson had an accident,” I say. It’s a lie and we both know I’m not trying to cover up any scent of Wilson’s. Susannah doesn’t say anything, but I still feel like I’ve been caught cleaning up a crime scene.
“Might need to borrow another shirt,” Susannah says.
I pull open a drawer and look for a T-shirt. “How about underwear?” I ask.
She waits a moment before answering. “What did you find?”
“Black thong. I washed it.”
“It’s not mine.”
I pluck a plain navy T-shirt out of the drawer. “Well, I feel so much better now,” I say.
“How many times do you want me to say I’m sorry, Ethan? I’m sorry.”
I shut the drawer before I turn to face my sister. “I don’t want you to say you’re sorry. I want you to not do shit like this in the first place.”
Her incredulous look lasts only a moment, and then her face tightens, her mouth a cruel line. “What, like sleeping with your secret psycho girlfriend?”
“Wait,” I say. “Just wait a minute. How did you even meet her?”
She folds her arms across her chest. “In group.”
“In group?”
“Kinda thinking you don’t get to be Judgy McJudgy here.”
“Why was she in your group?”
“I don’t know, Ethan—because she had some issues to work out? Like everyone else who’s ever been in group therapy? Like you would fucking know.”
“What does that mean?”
“You think I’m the broken one? The same shit happened to you, Ethan. The same shit. And you just sail on like nothing happened.”
I’m twisting the navy T-shirt in my hands so hard my fingers are beginning to ache. “You think I just sailed on? You get shot and Mom and Dad die and I just shrugged it off like, ‘Oh, well,’ and my life is all fine? After you—” I stop abruptly, literally biting my lip. Ponytail surfaces in my memory, and then, at the back of my memory cave, that one night in the Bluff, in the abandoned house with Luco and Frankie and Susannah, stirs and starts to uncoil. I make a curt gesture with my hand as if to sweep away both memories.
“After I what?” Susannah’s voice drops a notch into a calmer register. “What did I do, Ethan?”
I shake my head, trying to stay focused. “I’m asking about how you met Marisa in group. You didn’t know who she was? You didn’t know she knew me?”
In a flat, disappointed voice, Susannah says, “No, Ethan, I didn’t know she knew you. Do you think I’d bring her here on purpose if I knew?”
“Fuck.” I sit down on the newly made bed and put my head in my hands. “Fuck.”
After a moment of hesitation, Susannah puts a hand on my shoulder. “I really am sorry.”
“No,” I say. “She knew.”
“What?”
I lift my head and look up at my sister. “This isn’t a coincidence,” I say. “She knew. Marisa knew you were my sister.”
Susannah’s mouth opens the slightest bit, a crack in her demeanor, and her hand falls from my shoulder. I can see her thinking, calculating, turning over in her mind everything she knows about Marisa.
“When did she join your group?” I ask.
“A month ago,” Susannah says. “Maybe a little more.”
Soon after she started working at Archer. “How long have you been—” I say, and then stop, not sure how to continue.
Susannah saves me the trouble. “Sleeping with Marisa? Today was the first time. But we’ve been flirting.”
“Did you tell her about me? Talk about me in group? About our family?”
“Not by name, no,” she says. When I continue to stare at her, she adds, “I mentioned Mom and Dad, okay? And the fact that I have a brother.”
I feel sick and light-headed and want to sit down, but I’m already sitting down. A few months before my parents died, Mom and I watched Casablanca, and I remember Humphrey Bogart’s hard, wounded despair in reaction to Ilsa’s return. Despair is a good way to describe how I feel right now. Of all the group therapy sessions in all the towns in all the world, yada yada yada. Marisa found my sister and then latched on to her like a lamprey. And today, the day after we broke up, she jumps in bed with my sister. But why? To fuck with me, to manipulate her way back into my house? To show me that she could?
I thought I knew Marisa, understood her as a smart, libidinal woman with a rebellious streak. Now I understand, with bone-chilling certainty, that I haven’t known her at all.
AT SOME POINT Susannah hands me a bottle and I drink from it—bourbon, a burnt liquid glow in the throat. We pass the bottle back and forth, sitting on the floor of my bedroom, not talking much, just looking at the wall in companionable silence. Occasionally we speak softly to Wilson, who crawled into my lap earlier and now gazes at both of us
