“Do you like it?” she asks. She bites her lip and wrinkles her nose, bug-eyed, an old familiar face.
“Dad texted. Asked me to check up on you.”
She smiles, then frowns. “What does that mean?”
“Check your vital signs, make sure you’re eating your vegetables.” He gestures to the Green Machine. “Looks like that isn’t a problem.”
It strikes him deeply how unknown her life is to him. How old they both are in person.Soon she’ll be Mom’s age, he thinks,when the cancer must have started. The worry hardens.
“Sorry I’ll have to work a bit this week. My course doesn’t really understand the concept of time off.”
“It’s cool,” he says. “We can still do stuff.”
“Definitely,” she says, lighting up. “My evenings are totally free.”
“Not shagging anyone then?” He says it in a Dick Van Dyke voice to make it clear it is a joke, but Viola doesn’t laugh. For a moment, she looks quite serious, as though she might say something important, but then a cloud crosses her face and she fixates intently on the empty bottom of her Green Machine. The café moves around them. How have they forgotten how to speak to each other? He should have remembered her sensitivity around these things. For a minute they search quietly for anything else to talk about until his food arrives sizzling and succulent and they can comment safely, idly, on the freshness, on the quality of the space.
Niamh’s room is dimly lit, and Sebastian can tell by the way that the mirrors are placed that she likes to watch herself during sex. He is running his fingers over the plastic keys of the portable keyboard that is certainly the most expensive item in the room. Unless she has some jewelry or something. She doesn’t seem like the type to own expensive jewelry.
“So what, are you the cool twin?”
He attempts but fails to pull off a grin, takes another hit of the joint he packed. “It’s legal in Colorado now,” he says, as though that is a sufficient answer. He has never enjoyed that type of comparative question.
They had been quiet on the walk home, and he had the sense that he had disappointed her somehow. Lola had gone straight to bed, and Sebastian and Niamh tiptoed around her huddled form on the livingroom couch.Strange question, he had asked.But can I smoke in your room?Lola has never liked the smell.
“Still, it’s a bold move, drug smuggler. What if I was, like, a cop or something?”
“You don’t look like a cop.”
“Well, that’s just prejudice, isn’t it?” Niamh reaches for the joint and takes a slow, meditative slurp. “I think I would make a fantastic cop.”
“Really?”
“Well, I rate my own judgment about people.”
“Okay,” he asks Niamh. “What do you think about me?”
“I think you care very much.”
“I do care.” The thoughts in his mind are beginning to separate, like Christmas lights strung together with long bits of wire. Like the Christmas lights hanging from Niamh’s ceiling. “Caring is my downfall.”
“Most artists are very caring,” she says. “That’s been my experience, anyway.”
“That’s good. I was under the impression that most artists were narcissists.”
“Sorry, I should say most good artists.”
“Thanks.”
Niamh adjusts her feet, and he notices for the first time that her toenails are painted blue. He plays another few notes on the keyboard.
Sebastian feels full of a story about a late summer’s day when, driving around looking for something to do, he and Lola had stumbled upon a nature reserve, spent the afternoon following a trail to an ostensible summit, scrambling over fallen oak branches and white birches. They had tired before they reached any sort of vista and, resting on a large, rotting pine log, decided to build a fortress. With great gusto they assembled a sort of wigwam, dragging broken branches across the leafy forest floor. Lola did the structural work while Sebastian focused on artisanal touches: a pine-cone chandelier, an arrangement of needles that read “No Bears,” which for some reason had been hysterical.We’ll come back, Lola had said with every intention, but they didn’t. Or perhapsmore accurately, they couldn’t. No matter how many times they tried to find the forest again, they could not remember what turn they had taken to get there.
“Brains are funny.”
“Well, that hit quick,” she laughs. “What do you mean?”
Sebastian strikes the bottom key, holds the note. “Humans are bad,” he says. “At giving other people space to be complicated.”
