knew you would come back,” she said, and then reached forward and put her arms around me.
I wanted to hold her in my arms, and now my wish had come true, although—following what would turn out to be the recurring pattern for my wishes in the years to come—it had come true ironically, the thing I had wished for delivered, but in circumstances completely unlike the ones I had desired. Yes, she loved me, and she missed me, and she wanted to kiss me. But only because she thought I was her own sister, returned to her from the dead.
I wasn’t who she thought.
* * *
A few weeks later, I came downstairs to find my mother and father by the fireplace, Sausage on the floor.
They’d found out what we’d been up to in their absence, of course, although my sister and I had tried nobly to hide some of the damage. We swept up the glass from the windshield of the car shattered by Moey when he threw the rock through it. We glued the arms back on the living room chairs. We dug the candle wax out of the ashtrays and returned the empty keg to the Bottle & Can. I painted over the unfinished mural that Lily had begun in my bedroom, wiped as much paint as I could off of the furniture. We tried to cover our tracks. But it was all in vain.
They weren’t angry, they said. They were just very, very disappointed.
I would think these words many years later as I stood before the statue of Abe Lincoln in his memorial in D.C., the Great Emancipator’s sad visage staring down at me. I wanted to apologize to Honest Abe for everything, starting with the assassination. But I just felt bad. That look in his eyes was both piercing and noble, and so wounded.
It was the same expression I now saw on my father’s face. I figured Dick and Hildegarde were going to review some of the atrocities that had gone down on my watch, maybe starting with that nearly topless chick who’d walked around serving people pats of butter on a tray. “Hey, Dad,” I said. “Are you okay?”
My father nodded. But he couldn’t talk.
“Is this about the cancer?” I said. They’d taken off the mole, grafted part of my father’s leg onto his back. “What’s going to happen?”
The living room was a kind of graveyard of stuff, filled with the baby grand piano on which one of my party guests had puked and some oil paintings of street scenes in Paris: the Place de la Concorde in the rain, a bridge near Notre-Dame cathedral. There was an off-white love seat and two green wing chairs gathered around a fireplace. On the mantel were small porcelain figures of American birds: a robin, a blue jay.
“The doctors aren’t sure,” my mother said, “if they got it all.”
* * *
I met Shannon at a coffeehouse at the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church. On Saturday nights people played coal-mining songs in the crypt. I gave Shannon and her friends Cynthia and Cynthia a ride from the crypt to someone’s house. Shannon and Cynthia were in the back seat of my parents’ Oldsmobile Omega, and Cynthia was up front. Shannon was an actress. As I drove through the farmland of Pennsylvania, she performed a monologue. The Cynthias and I laughed so hard I had to pull the car over because the tears in my eyes made it impossible to drive.
She recited Dorothy Parker poems. She did imitations. I told her I did imitations, too. She said hopefully, Do you?
I dropped Shannon off at her house, and then Cynthia off at hers, and then Cynthia off at hers, and then I got home and climbed the squeaking stairs to my room. Penny lifted her head. Well? she said.
I met someone, I told the dog.
Yeah well, said the dog. Don’t get your hopes up.
A few weeks later, I picked Shannon up at her school, and we went out for dinner at a place called Winstons, which was a restaurant in Bryn Mawr. Shannon ordered French onion soup. I sat on my side of the table and watched her lift strands of gooey melted cheese to her mouth. “It’s a mess,” she said.
A couple of times a week I would call Shannon on the phone, and we would talk for hours. She had trouble with her parents. Her mother was a colorful, larger-than-life woman who, on one occasion, came to Shannon’s school on