It is astonishing how pale and thin her lips are when she isn’t wearing any lipstick. He isn’t used to seeing her like this, incomplete, or at least not for public consumption.
“No thanks,” he says. He can’t figure out how, but it’s a trap. Tillie shrugs. She doesn’t look hurt by it. She pours the hot water into an old pink mug with a faded flower pattern on it that his mother used to use.
In an episode ofLife and Timeslast week, they cast a woman to play his mother’s character in a flashback. She looked like her, or at least, they had done her hair in the same way. It was awful. Sadie had to turn it off.
“If you change your mind about staying,” Tillie says, “your bed is made up.”
He doesn’t answer. His phone buzzes against his leg. He slinks back into the hallway, and around the corner to Lola’s room.
Lola
You should be asleep
Perhaps she’s right. It’s late, it’s already tomorrow where she is. She sends a few photographs from England: ancient courtyards; long, lavish tables.
Sebastian
I’m raiding your room
How did she decide what to take and what to leave behind? Here are some of his T-shirts that she used to sleep in, the good nail clippers. A small, lacquered jewelry box full of baby teeth. He senses disturbance, Tillie’s meddling. A photo of Lola smiling at the pond by their grandmother’s house, the two of them, sitting in the open trunk of his car: he is looking at her and she is looking at the camera—or rather, their father standing behind it.
Maybe he has been too stubborn. Maybe truth is less important than keeping the peace. Were they ever as happy as this? Or did happiness just always look like fighting? He tucks the frame into his bag.
Lola
Criminal
Did I leave my chapstick next to the bed
Sebastian
Don’t they have chapstick in England
Lola
It’s Carmex
Heavy duty
The good shit
He finds it, pockets it.
Sebastian
Mine now
He has to move if he wants to salvage things. You never know what his father might get rid of, what Tillie might get her hands on. In her bedside table, right where she said, is the license. Tick. Underneath it is a folder marked SCIENCE. Odd, he thinks. An odd place for science. Inside, a parcel of photographs.
Their mother naked. Her familiar, unfamiliar body, its smell and sound, her laugh, her everything.
Holy shit.
A complicated feeling: she was beautiful.
A more complicated feeling: Lola hid these. And all this time, she acted like he was insane.
He doesn’t owe her shit.
