That’s why I’m out here, avoiding that room like the plague, hoping an email comes through from the care center or a text or call comes through from Mom or Drew. Anything to distract my mind from my current state, the seven-year gap in my memory that might last forever now, and the permanent memory loss Dad is suffering through. The disease that means he may never know me fully again.
Imay never know me fully again.
The sliding glass door whooshes open behind me, sending a chill of air-conditioning out into the slightly muggy spring air.CeeCee joins me. She’s wearing sleep shorts and her hair is up in a messy bun. A mug with our old high school mascot—the badger—on it is in her left hand.
“A little hot tonight for tea,” I say.
“I put ice cubes in it,” she says. I raise an eyebrow at her in the hazy glow of the only light that’s affixed beside the door. “What? We didn’t have any iced tea, and it would be wine, but.” She sips, almost as if she’s said something she shouldn’t have.
Which leads me to the only logical conclusion: “You’re pregnant again.” I don’t know where the assumption comes from. Maybe a nugget of our sibling telepathy is still intact. “Wait, does Mom know?”
“Yeah, great idea for me to spring that on her in the same call where she tells me Dad’s fallen and probably needs surgery. She’d be in the hospital right now too if I did that. I was planning to tell her the night of your special taping, to counteract whatever… You know what? Never mind. That’s not why I came out here.”
I wonder about that. How she planned to tell Mom and Dad on the night of my taping, but I can tell she has something more important on her mind. This is the first time we’ve been alone together since she arrived, and I don’t want to risk her running away by asking the wrong question.
“Why’d you come out here then?” I ask instead, nervous about her answer.
She takes a long sip. “Because I saw your live stream. Then I found your emails, and I read them.”
“From your tone, I take it you don’t believe me.” Just like Drew, she has every reason to assume I’m pulling a fast one on her for a laugh. I wish that wasn’t my reputation, but it is. I know now I can’t just edit that. Every person is a calculated amalgamation of their past, present, and future. You can’t lop one off because you don’t like it.
Her head falls to the left, hair swishing slightly in her face. “Not true. I don’t have a choice but to believe you.”
“Because you’re my sister,” I fill in for her, half-joking, half-surprised.
“No, dumbass,” she retorts with an offhanded laugh that’s not as mean as I assumed it’d be. “Because I had an inkling everything was fishy when Doop immediately agreed to use my wedding as a marketing campaign.”
“How did that even come about?” I ask, realizing that instead of having a conversation with her at the time, I simply wrote it off as another blessing for the always-perfect firstborn. Mom and Dad didn’t have to foot the bill. It piggybacked off a promotion. The golden girl became even shinier with a gold band on her finger.
CeeCee sets her cup down on the table between us, hugs one knee to her chest, and sighs. “I was drowning when I got that marketing position. The rapid expansion of the company mixed with the heavy pressure to perform started to mess with me.” It’s eerie how much this sounds like what I was going through with my comedy dreams. “James surprised me with a weekend getaway to upstate New York where he proposed at this beautiful winery. I was so swept up in excitement that I forgot I had a major presentation to give on Monday. It wasn’t until I was in the meeting room, sweating my makeup off, that I remembered. As soon as my boss, Kerry, asked me to start, I looked down at my engagement ring and offered them the first idea that came to mind.”
“Shit,” I mutter.
“They loved the angle of selling the fairy tale. That if you used Doop products and subscribed to the Doop lifestyle, you too could find love and have a lavish wedding,” she says. “James was…less than thrilled.”
“I didn’t know any of that.” My heart lurches as it dawns on me that perhaps I didn’twantto know any of that.
“Maybe because you never asked.” Her eyebrows raise accusatorily. “We made it work, but the closer we got to the day, the more secretive the Doop team became. Everything was being run by me at first, and then suddenly, the flower arrangements had changed, then the signature drink and the bridesmaid dresses, and I realized I’d effectively given over my wedding in exchange for a raise that was making me pull my hair out. Thank God for extensions,” she says. I thought her wedding hairstyle was a choice, but maybe it was thrust upon her by the Doop team.
“Why didn’t you stop it or say no?” I ask. High school CeeCee was outspoken, dance team cocaptain, and a real go-getter. She wasn’t the kind of person who would let a business walk all over her. What changed for her in college that led her to be amenable in the face of dissatisfaction?
“Because my job was hanging in the balance and, uh, you’ve met our parents,” she says with a shake of her head that saysduh.
“Yeah,” I snort out. “The parents who harp on me and treat you like you’re the winner of the womb. The perfect first try while I came out the half-baked second act.” My cheeks burn with that admission.
CeeCee’s stunned eyes peek over the top of her mug, which has paused halfway to her lips. “Is that seriously what you think?”
“It’s been obvious for forever, yeah.” I wish I didn’t sound so bratty about it, but I’ve been holding on to the feeling since high school. It’s like the memory of my teenage self supersedes the twenty-three-year-old inside, contorting the voice of the thirty-year-old me, until I’m trembling and confused.
She slowly shakes her head at me. “You think Mom and Dad’s helicopter parenting was exclusive to you? That’s cute. I was the trailblazer kid, the trial-and-error baby.”
“That seems like an exaggeration.”
“Oh, yeah?” She folds her arm across her chest. “Then why is it when I went through the guest room and shimmied down the storm pipe into the back garden to sneak out to see my high school boyfriend, I got grounded on the third try and banned from going to Jessica Miller’s sweet sixteen, but when you did the same thing two years later to meet Drew, Mom and Dad fully knew and said nothing?”
“Oh, come on…” I say, losing a bit of my fight.
“Or how about when I told Mom and Dad I wanted to go to college to study dance, and I was met with an immediate no?” she says. Of course I remember her being the cocaptain of the dance team in high school, but I always thought it was a hobby she only picked up because her friends were doing it.
