past the lashes. That, too, just like a cat. Not a housecat though. One of the little wild ones.
She roused herself enough to hand me a twenty as we reached the parking kiosks, and then we hit the highway, where the hum of the wheels put her back under. Ever the doting friend, I stuffed a Taco Time napkin under her chin to catch her drool.
HER HOUSE DIDN’T smell as fusty and dead as I would have assumed, but then this wasn’t her first rodeo; she’d probably had a service in to housesit. The jungle at the front entrance looked springy and green. Johnny staggered in and started slapping random panels on the wall, opening blinds that let in flecked planks of sunlight.
“Go sleep,” I said. “Stop fucking with that stuff. You can turn on all the lights later.”
“I had an idea, on the plane. A big one. A big one.”
Oh no. I knew that tone of voice; insomnia, late-night phone calls, and probably several chemical burns were on the way. “Sleep!”
“I have to get it down first, because there’s a—”
“I said sleep!”
“You’re not the boss of me!”
“Jetlag is the boss of you,” I said. “Call me when you’re up, if you ever get up.”
“Oh my God. If I don’t get up, do you still want me to call you?”
“Nope.”
“Zombie.”
“Correct. Night of the Living Dork.”
“Thanks for the ride,” she said, already halfway up the stairs, dragging her bag. “There’s snacks in the freezer if you want anything. I owe you!”
“Everybody knows that.”
Still yelling at each other after all these years. That aura around us both, cursed by our meeting, the smell of blood following us. Or was it? How cursed were we now?
WHEN I GOT home from work, the noisy house stank of burnt toast, so that for just a second I tried to remember if that was caused by having a seizure or a stroke, but maybe one of the kids had set something on fire in the toaster oven again, which happened so often that the glass was smoked black, like a drug dealer’s back windshield. Moreover, they weren’t supposed to use it without a grownup around, so the system had failed somewhere.
My sister Carla tiptoed into the kitchen, pale, baggy-eyed. Her Mickey Mouse nightgown was faded into transparency; I looked away. Skinny for eleven. You’d expect her to still have some baby fat, but I think she burned it all off worrying. Funny to see that skinniness and know it’s nerves, when you consider how fat some of our family is. Me, I’m turning into a perfect copy of Dad: pencil legs under a slowly developing gut, like a ping-pong ball on toothpicks, even though I know—we all know, we’re too polite to say it—I’m not eating enough. All my uncles on both sides back in the Caribbean looked like Dad, and so they looked like me too, or I looked like them. Genetics is powerful, Johnny always says. It’s powerful. It fights you—whatever you eat, whatever you do, wherever you live, your genes fight you.
Carla stooped to pop the cabinet lock, digging for something under the sink.
“Hey,” I said. “You all right?”
She jumped a foot. “Oh my God! Nicky, you scared me. I didn’t see you. I can’t sleep. My tummy hurts.”
“I think there’s some Pepto-Bismol above the sink,” I said. When it became clear that she was just going to stand there rubbing her eyes, I forced myself out of the kitchen chair.
She headed back to the kids’ room still absentmindedly carrying the pink-smeared spoon, the noise clearly identifiable now as music, broken by the gabble of a radio DJ. God knows it can’t be easy for the twins to share a room with their sister, but it’s not easy on any of us and the rest of us generally manage not to be shits about it. I mean, what’s the first commandment of two adults and three kids in an eight-hundred square foot duplex? That’s right: Don’t Be A Shit. Oughta be our family motto. Matching tattoos.
I shoved at the bedroom door, which moved slowly: Chris and Brent had wedged it with a chair and a couple of phonebooks. They turned drowsy, round, identical faces to mine from the bunkbed, dark hair fluffed straight up.
“Off. Now,” I said, pointing to the radio, blasting No Doubt.
“Can we turn it down instead?” said Brent, reaching for the volume knob. Oh, so it was going to be one of those nights.