Last January had been terrible, like her parents were burning to death from the inside, their internal organs being liquefied while they pretended that everything was just fine.
“Hello there. It’s Zoe, isn’t it? We met earlier. I’m Frances.”
Zoe turned from the window. It was the blond lady with the bright red lipstick whom her dad had accosted on the stairs. She was adjusting an old-fashioned giant tortoiseshell clip in her hair and she looked flushed in the face.
“Hi,” said Zoe.
“I know we’re not meant to be speaking, but I feel like this has turned out to be an unplanned interlude in Masha’s noble silence.”
“What’s going on down there?”
“It’s all got very awkward,” said Frances. She sat down on one of the lavender couches. “Oh dear, this is one of those swallow-you-up couches.” She shoved two cushions behind her back. “Ow. My back. Ow.” She wriggled about. “No. I’m okay. That’s better. Well. You know the man, the grumpy-looking one with the hacking cough? Not that I can talk. Don’t come too close to me, I don’t want to infect you, although I feel like my germs are nicer than his germs. Anyway, he’s getting very worked up because apparently he smuggled in a whole minibar, by the sound of it, and, well, this is embarrassing, but they took some things from my bag too, and I kind of felt like I should have been supporting the grumpy man. You know, like, that is a breach of privacy, you can’t do that, we have rights!” She punched a fist in the air.
Zoe sat on the couch opposite her and smiled at the fist punch.
“But I got embarrassed because I didn’t want everyone to know I also brought in contraband that was confiscated, and I know this isn’t an episode of Survivor, but I didn’t want to form an alliance with that man, because he seems so … well … so I said I needed some air too, which I feel like was one of the bravest things I’ve ever done.”
“I brought in contraband too,” said Zoe.
“Did you?” Frances brightened. “Did they find it?”
“No, if they searched my bag they missed it. I wrapped it up like a present for my parents.”
“That’s genius. What is it?”
“It’s a bottle of wine,” said Zoe. “Really expensive wine. Oh, and a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I’m addicted.”
“Yum.” Frances sighed. “Congratulations. I like your ingenuity.”
“Thank you,” said Zoe.
Frances picked up a cushion and hugged it. “I’m perfectly capable of going for ten days without a glass of wine, I just … well, I don’t know, I was being wicked.”
“I don’t even like wine,” said Zoe.
“Oh. Did you just want to prove you could beat the system?”
“I brought the wine to toast my brother’s twenty-first birthday. It’s in a few days. He died three years ago.”
She saw Frances’s inevitably stricken face.
“It’s okay,” she told her quickly. “We weren’t close.”
People usually looked relieved when she told them that, but Frances’s face didn’t change at all.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“It’s fine. Like I said, we really … didn’t get on.” Zoe tried to clarify it for her. Don’t stress! You’re off the hook.
She remembered her friend Cara, the day after Zach’s funeral, saying, “At least you weren’t close.” Cara was really close to her sister.
“What was your brother’s name?” asked Frances, as if this was somehow important.
“Zach,” said Zoe, and the name sounded odd and painful in her mouth. She heard a roaring sound in her ears and felt for a moment as if she might faint. “Zoe and Zach. We were twins. Very cutesy names.”
“I think they’re lovely names,” said Frances. “But if you’re twins that means it’s your birthday in a few days too.”
Zoe took a sprig of lavender out of a vase and began to shred it. “Technically. But I don’t celebrate on that day anymore. I kind of changed my birthday.”
She’d officially moved her birthday to the eighteenth of March. It was a nicer date. A cooler, less tempestuous time of year. The eighteenth of March was Grandma Maria’s birthday, and Grandma Maria used to say it had never once rained on her birthday and maybe that was true; everyone said they should check the weather records in case it was some sort of phenomenon only Grandma Maria had noticed, but nobody ever got around to it.
Grandma Maria had always said she’d live to one hundred like her own mother, but she died one month after Zach of a broken