Part 21 (2/2)

Lily's clothes felt thick and luxurious between my fingers. She had given me a black turtleneck sweater and a longish black skirt, both made of the same smooth wool. I put them on and looked at myself in the mirror. The dark material made my skin look pale and greenish. Even my hair looked sick. It was falling out of the ponytail I'd yanked it into that morning, and bits stood out from my head like straw.

I look like an overdressed scarecrow, I thought, and sighed. Then I picked up Lily's hairbrush and went to work.

The water shut off and I heard Lily laugh. She came into the bedroom, wrapped in a towel and a cloud of sweet-scented steam.

”Where's Jack?” I asked, working the brush through the split and ragged ends of my hair in front of her mirror.

”He went to have a smoke,” she said, watching me. Her wet hair fell in thick, healthy chunks over her eyes.

My own hair felt like a wig in my hands. Lily's mirror was wide and clear and honest. When Jack and I had lived with Raeburn, my hair had always been thick and s.h.i.+ny. Jack used to beg me to let him brush it, or at least let him watch as I did. Now it was Lily who watched me, wrapped in a towel and dripping on the white-on-white lilies woven into her imported French rug.

At least it still grows, I thought of my hair. At least it's long.

”Hold on,” Lily said suddenly and disappeared.

She was back in a second, carrying a plastic spray bottle and a small jar. Tucking the towel more firmly around herself, she took the hairbrush away from me, lifted my hair, and sprayed it with water until it was soaked through. Then she opened the jar, scooped out two fingerfuls of the pale yellow cream inside, and rubbed it between her hands. She ran her fingers through my hair, over and over again, and a sweet, rich smell, like caramel, surrounded me. I watched in the mirror, fascinated.

Finally she stopped and wiped her hands on her towel. The little beads of moisture on her shoulders had dried. ”There,” she said. ”That'll help. Go dry it. My hair dryer is under the sink.”

”Thanks.” I didn't know what else to say.

She waved dismissively. ”You'd have pretty hair if you bothered to take care of it.”

I stood where I was a moment more, awkwardly, staring at her.

”Can I get dressed now?” she asked finally.

”Sorry,” I said and fled to the bathroom.

The cream made my hair silky again. I twisted it into two long braids and tied them with bits of black ribbon that I'd found in a drawer in the bathroom. When Lily came out of her bedroom, wearing the blue boots and a matching dress, she handed me a pair of clunky Mary Janes and said I looked cute. We went to a restaurant that served delicate Italian food, completely unlike the heavy pasta in red sauce I was used to eating. Then Lily led us to a bar downtown where the only light came from spotlights that shone on single roses in bud vases. She bought us cosmopolitans. We got very, very drunk.

At 4 A.M., when they turned on the lights in the bar, we stumbled our way out to the street and into a cab. Jack sat in the middle and said that he was surrounded by beautiful women. ”How am I supposed to choose?” he said, touching my hair and kissing Lily.

”Well, one of us is your sister,” she said pointedly.

He pulled me close on one side, kissed her again on the other. ”True, very true. Now if I can only remember which one.”

”Here's a hint,” Lily said. ”She's the one that doesn't have her tongue in your ear.”

He laughed and bent to kiss her neck while the hand at my shoulder found one of my braids and stroked it. The cab swerved and dodged in and out of the traffic on Broadway, and silver light from the bars and restaurants and streetlights moved through the windows as we pa.s.sed.

Back in the apartment, Lily said, ”This way a sec, darling?” and pulled Jack into their bedroom. The door closed behind them and for a moment I sat on the couch where I'd fallen. There were noises from behind the door: Lily's squealing, Jack's laughter, low and rich and teasing.

I forced myself up and made my way unsteadily to my room. Lily's turtleneck went carefully back on its hanger. There was a mirror hanging over the low dresser, and I stood in front of it in my bra and pulled the black ribbons from the ends of my braids. Lily's cream had done miracles, I thought as I started to work through the braids with my fingers. I let myself take a small drunken pleasure in the soft feel of the hair in my hands: satiny, gentle, mine.

I heard Lily's door open and the bathroom door shut. Then I felt somebody watching me. I turned around.

Jack stood in the doorway. His expression was intent.

”Hey.” I turned back to the mirror.

He moved behind me and then his arms were around my shoulders and his hands were on top of mine on my braid.

I let my hands fall.

His fingers began to move on the rope of hair, stroking it, his fingers probing into the twisted strands and unweaving them. In the mirror, his fierce green eyes were fixed on me and I couldn't look away. The locks of hair that he'd freed brushed against my bare skin, moving gently with the motion of his hands. There was a rus.h.i.+ng in my ears, from the alcohol in my blood and the music in the bar and the warmth of him next to my naked back. He lifted my hair, running his fingers through the length of it and letting it fall like water onto my shoulders.

I s.h.i.+vered.

The toilet flushed; the bathroom door opened; Lily's voice, confused, called, ”Jack?”

His hands lingered on my hair and then slid around my waist. He kissed the back of my neck.

”Coming,” he called to her and left me.

I went to bed with my skin singing. When I closed my eyes I saw the two science-fiction lilies next to her bed like two red flags, and between them her white satin sheets were like the golden pale of his skin and the pink pale of hers.

Lying in bed, I remembered sitting at the kitchen table while Raeburn explained atomic bonds to me. On a subatomic level, electrons are drawn to the atoms that need them. If an atom is unbalanced, with more protons in the nucleus than electrons in orbit around it or vice versa, it will seek out another atom with the opposite condition, and thus find balance. My brother was like those electrons, filling an infinitesimal void that people like Lily and Becka didn't even know existed. It was a talent that I wished was genetic, as I tried to fall asleep in that wide, unfamiliar bed. There was always someone who needed Jack. He was never alone.

When I woke up the next morning, the sun was streaming through my window. It was a beautiful fall day, warm and friendly and relaxed. The three of us bought coffee on the corner and sat in the park until late afternoon, Jack and Lily twined together on a blanket, me next to them. Separate, but not alone. In all of my time in New York, that was my favorite day.

Being with Lily felt like being with a movie star. Everything in her world glittered fabulously. Neither of us had the kind of clothes she wanted us to wear, so she took us shopping. It turned out that she was right about Jack; he had the instinct for it, which surprised me because back on the Hill, Jack had never given a d.a.m.n about clothes. Lily figured out pretty quickly that I couldn't be trusted to choose my own clothes, and I suspect that she liked dressing me up. The things she bought me were completely different from those she bought for herself. All of my clothes were black.

She bought Jack a new leather jacket-”And let's burn the old one, shall we?”-and then spent an extravagant amount of money on a pair of high black leather boots for me. ”You can more or less get away with only one pair of shoes in New York, as long as they're fabulous drop-f.u.c.king-dead boots,” she said, but when we returned to the apartment she also gave me the black Mary Janes that she'd loaned me that first night, and a long black skirt that she said she was tired of. She made me try it on right then, watching me turn in front of the mirror with a small satisfied gleam in her eyes.

She said, ”You and your brother. It's unfair.”

”What is?”

”Your G.o.dd.a.m.ned cheekbones.” She smiled. ”What I wouldn't give.”

Jack wore the new jacket as often as he could get away with it. It was black and beautifully cut and the soft leather gleamed. Between the new clothes and the way his hair was always artfully swept back from his face, he was indistinguishable from one of her crowd. Late one night, I took his battered old jacket, the one with the sheepskin lining that I'd worn to the bonfire so long ago, and hung it in the closet in my room, behind Lily's spring dresses. He never asked about it. Our old clothes, the ones we'd worn when we left the Hill and the ones Becka had bought for me, were stuffed into plastic bags on the closet floor. For some reason I was reluctant to get rid of them.

Lily had high standards. She smoked only French cigarettes; she wore only designer clothes; she drank only cosmopolitans, and she drank them only in bars where they cost ten dollars or more. She liked to have her hairdresser dye little colored streaks into her blond hair, frosty blue or frosty pink, to let people know what a free spirit she was. She and her inner circle (a nebulous social body with a rotating members.h.i.+p, where the faces weren't always the same but might as well have been) spent all their days planning their nights. Every day was a whirlwind of phone calls about who was going to be where and when and for how long, and whether a certain bar was worth going to after midnight or if all the truly trendy people would already be at the truly trendy clubs. Every night there was a planned itinerary that was set in stone until it was changed with the flip of a cell phone.

In the beginning, Jack and I went everywhere with her.

All her friends loved him. Being pulled aside by one or another of Lily's drunken girlfriends and hearing a confession of her secret pa.s.sion for my brother-always with the stern exhortation that I was not to tell Lily-was the rule rather than the exception for me. The next day, I would mimic the girl's voice and gestures for Jack, which he found hilarious.

Before long Lily decided that she didn't like our being a threesome. ”It throws off the dynamic,” she said, and thus began a parade of her male friends, showing up dutifully at bars and parties and parties in bars. Each of them was highly polished, skillfully groomed, and more beautiful than the last, and I had nothing to say to any of them. Afterward she would extol the virtues of the various Davids and Andrews and Jasons at great length, telling me how much this one or that one had liked me and what complimentary things they had said about me. I didn't think any of them could hold a candle to Jack, which was undoubtedly why Lily was on his arm and not theirs. Finally, when she figured out that I really couldn't be bothered, she paired me off with her ”very best college friend,” Carmichael. He was very tall, very thin, and very gay-or so Jack claimed. It was all the same to me. I didn't care and neither, apparently, did Carmichael. I can't say that we ever had a conversation-he rarely tried to talk to me-but he seemed content to sit next to me in bars and stand next to me at parties whenever it was required.

One night he came up to the apartment for drinks, and after Jack and Lily had disappeared into her bedroom, as was inevitable, he asked me dispa.s.sionately if I wanted to f.u.c.k.

”I don't think so, thanks,” I said.

He shrugged. ”Suit yourself,” he said, and we continued sipping our drinks as if the subject had never come up. I wondered why he would want to have s.e.x with someone he wasn't even interested in talking to, and the more I thought about it, the more absurd it became. Meanwhile, Jack and Lily were clearly trying to be quiet in the next room, but occasional moans and thumps still reached us. By the time Carmichael left, I was shaking with suppressed laughter. Neither of us ever brought up s.e.x again.

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