SHE DROVE VERY FAST WHILE I stared out the window and occasionally convulsed in pain. I was trying not to look at her. I was trying to be perfect. I was about to have a child and yet I was mostly thinking of not scaring Alice away. She brought one hand to my leg and left it there and I was filled with tremendous gratitude.
At the base of the canyon I asked her if she knew we were sisters.
She told me that, at her mother’s funeral, one of her mother’s casual ex-lovers had insinuated something. Alice had asked around, but nobody really knew for sure. Her mother was very private.
—Have you always known? she asked me.
—For a long time, yes.
When Gosia died, I didn’t hear about it for over a week. Even in her death she was uncomplicated. She’d been skiing in Courchevel with someone who wasn’t my uncle. She had a stroke coming down a black. She was rushed to the hospital but gave out in the ambulance. She was sixty-three and well kept. Her platinum hair lush, her neck smooth and mostly unwrinkled. There was no funeral because she hadn’t wanted one, and there was no one stronger than her left standing so nobody went against her wishes. In the end she knew nobody wanted to make a fuss about anything. When someone was gone, there was nothing left to do. The carrying on was exhausting. The attending to tradition when you could be drinking wine and grieving in the sun.
In addition to several trust documents and her own jewelry collection, Gosia had left me one other item. A slip of paper in a sealed envelope. It was an airmail envelope, but I don’t think that meant anything. The slip of paper was crude, cut off of something larger. It was unlike Gosia, because all of her gifts, all of her gestures, were grand. She didn’t skimp or try to save money. The information on the slip was meant for a rainy day of sorts and I think it was the only thing in my life that I went after at just the right time. On the outside of the envelope she’d written, Wait until you need.
And inside the fold it had Alice’s full name. It didn’t say sister, but of course I knew. As for Alice, she knew she was conceived illegitimately. She knew her father had an affair with her mother. But at first she didn’t know there was another child already. Her mother told her that her lover and his wife were childless, that the wife couldn’t have children. But, in addition to the ex-lover’s insinuation, Alice found some letters that alluded to a child. She said that the first time I went to her yoga class, she felt a strange tug. It was like magic, and it frightened her.
We looked out the windows as we passed the low buildings, the Home Depot I’d gone to several times looking for new flowers for the rusted bathtub. Looking for a thick board to slide underneath the wobbling chairs on my “patio.” Always I left with nothing. I had no money to spend. It was just nice to drive, to waste the gas, to smell the pine in the place.
Another contraction. A bright scream of pain. I clutched my stomach and bit my lips. She pressed down on my thigh until the pain subsided.
—Why did you leave me? I asked.
—I was very upset. You fucked someone to hurt me.
—I mean the first time.
—I don’t know.
—I was too needy.
—No, she said.
—But what then?
—I don’t know. Something. When the girl came and stayed with you, something changed. I felt something I didn’t want to know.
And then it clicked for me. Eleanor’s presence had kicked up a scent. Alice smelled the past on me. I’d planned on telling her in a way that wouldn’t be off-putting. But when Eleanor arrived, Alice could sense it, the way I was just like the girl. I always knew the right way to deliver information. Everybody else did not.
—I think I know the reason, I said.
—What reason is that?
—I came to California to tell you.
—What? she asked.
—I just want to say. I felt so bad when you left. I loved. I love you.
I worried she wouldn’t say it back.
—I would have come back. But then you fucked him.
—That was disgusting of me.
—I thought I loved him, she said.
—But he’s very stupid.
We laughed. She took my hand and held it tight. She drove with her right hand on my left knee.
—Joan, I love you, too.
We looked at each other; the car almost went off the road. Another contraction split me down the back. We had so much to talk about that we didn’t pay much heed to the fact that I was in labor.
—Do you want to know something crazy? I asked after it passed. She nodded and said of course she did and I started with how Vic had cheated with someone before me. And she laughed for a long time. She said, Now do you see how I was right?
Then I told her I killed Lenny. I asked her please not to leave me again, because of that. I told her how I did it, that it was practically an accident. After the shock wore off, she told me it sounded like a true accident and that I should think of it as such. Then she said, It’s all right, Joan. Honestly, sometimes I think it’s the only recourse. Killing men in times like these.
She said it destroyed her that she’d never met our father and she wanted me to tell her all about him. Her mother had told her some, they would sit and drink PG Tips and look at the cows in the pasture across the road and talk about his swagger, how he saved lives. Her mother told her how once he’d brought her soup when she was sick with a cold, he’d brought
