“No. I said he wasn’t.”
“Right, but you didn’t correct me before. That was a test.” His voice is still easy, coaxing, but I can tell by his posture that he’s homing in on a familiar big brother routine. Almost like a switch has been flipped, I clam up. I want to make a clever quip, something about how I was distracted by the weird salmon-colored linen pants he’s wearing, but instead I roll my fork between my fingers, tucking my lower lip in as I stare at my plate. “He’s a little old for you, Greens,” Cary says.
You’re not the boss of me,I want to say, exactly like Cathy had this morning.
“Lay off, Cary,” says Humphrey. “She said he’s nother boyfriend.”
I slide my eyes over to him, feeling betrayed in spite of what seems like a defense. Like me, Humph was always a little quieter, his fretfulness over me more patient, less bossy, but he’s still got protective instincts that chafe. “What would it matter if he was?”
Humphrey blinks back at me. “Oh, I mean. It wouldn’t. How much older is he?”
I roll my eyes. “He’s thirty-four. Not that it matters.”
“Travels a lot,” says Cary. “How would that work?”
I set my fork down on my plate, push it away, and lean forward to rest my forearms on the table, clasping my hands on the rickety table in a posture that exactly mimics the stance I’d taken today in that dreary conference room. I wish I had a blouse from Chico’s, but even so I feel like I’m the burner on a gas stove, like his words have turned the knob and right now I’m clicking my way to light. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Cary slants a look at Humphrey before he looks back at me, something surprised in his expression. “Nothing,” he says, and the uncertainty in his voice sends a little thrill through me. I don’t know if I’ve ever caught Cary off guard. He was twelve years old when I was born, fully a teenager in my earliest memories. He was well out of the house the first time I was admitted into the hospital. In practical terms, he was affected the least by the realities of my sickness, but in some ways that’s always made him the most uncomplicated about it. He’s never been jealous of the attention I required of our parents; he’s never felt slighted or resentful about having to miss a school event or a slumber party or a family vacation. It’s simple in his mind: I’m his baby sister, the one who had all thehealth trouble.
“Do you think I can’t travel, Cary?” I ask, and even as I’m leaning into it, I know I’m being unfair. I’m purposely misinterpreting his words, shoving off other irritations onto him. If I was clicking before, I’ve been ignited now, a big blue flame in my middle.
“No, of course not,” Cary says, his eyes soft. “Greens, that’s not what I—”
“Because Ican. Anytime I want.” A whole bunch ofcansbubble up inside me.I can go for days without doing my PT stretches. I can stay up too late and have one too many drinks with my friends. I can have sex—lots of it—with Alex.
“Okay,” says Cary.“I only meant—”
I stand, cutting him off before he can say what I know he did mean—howwouldit work, long distance, between me and Alex—but that’s not what I feel like talking about. It’s a nonissue—for as long as I’m here—and anyway, I want to savor the tiny moment of victory I’ve had in standing up to them. I grab my camera from the center of the table and march off, feeling both of them watching me.
I set myself beneath the big silver maple at the corner of the yard, turning on my camera. It’s nearly dark now, so I set my ISO higher, change my aperture. I hold the camera near my sternum at first, looking around the yard, tracking the pockets of people who are talking, laughing, eating, drinking. I feel strangely powerful out here, thatwatchingishelpingfeeling, and without thinking too much about it, I raise the camera to my eye, pivot so I’m pointing it toward the deck, where Felipe and Alex’s conversation has expanded to include my parents and two of my dad’s golfing buddies. I put Alex in the center of the shot, and for a few seconds I hold there, appreciating that power I feel looking out at the night this way, looking out athimthis way.
But as I’m about to take the shot, about to freeze them all in time, a flash of red enters the viewfinder, and I lower the camera with a dull feeling of foreboding settling at the base of my spine.
There’s a new guest here, and already I know the night’s about to changefor the worse.
Chapter 12
Alex
I hadn’t expected thingsto go so well.
On the way here, I could see Greer was nervous, regretting her spontaneous invitation. I’d hidden it well, but I’d kicked my own ass the whole way here, thinking I’d backed her into it. Twice I’d opened my mouth to ask if she wanted to drop me off somewhere, maybe at one of the three Starbucks we’d passed once we’d gotten onto the suburban surface streets off the highway. I’d sit and drink coffee, damn Patricia’s advice about caffeine and anxiety. I’d check news feeds, click through some slideshows Hiltunen’s upper-level students have sent me for consideration for the showcase. But—but shit, she was pretty. Her smooth, bare leg felt good under my palm. That hair-thin wrinkle between her eyebrows made me want to press my lips to her forehead. I didn’t want to leave her, not for all the suburban Starbucks and photo slideshows in the world.
When we’d pulled up to her parents’ place, though, some of that desperate need I’d felt to stay close to her had dissipated, and the full weight of what I’d agreed to had started to sink in.
Growing up, Kit and I missed out on a lot of what seemed like rites of passage for other people our age, including heading over to a friend’s house for dinner, getting that little-kid sneak peek into how other families operated. Once, when we’d been able to stay in one place for all of Kit’s eighth-grade year, she’d had a friend from the math team invite her over on a Thursday night, and when I’d walked to pick her up at a split-level a mile away from our apartment building, she hadn’t been able to stop talking about their fireplace. “Well it’s really ahearth,” she’d said, emphasizing the word, like she was speaking in some language she’d never heard. “It’s got pictures all over the top of it, on this wood shelf. Family pictures and this snow globe they got inAlaska. They went to Alaska. Can youbelieve that?”
I could believe that. By that point, I’d become acutely aware of all the things other kids were getting that Kit wasn’t.
In my job, of course, I visit all kinds of homes. When I first got to New York, barely a year after Kit had left for college, I took most of my pictures on the streets, but I did one series on an abandoned hospital in east Williamsburg, where squatters—“urban homesteaders,” they’d preferred—had moved in and taken over, cooking over Sterno burners and leaning against rolled-up sleeping bags, conditions that had made my reporter colleague grimace in disgust and that had left me feeling humiliatingly homesick.
Once I left New York and started shooting internationally, I got even more of an education. I visited homes that were sometimes warm and welcoming and other times cold and forbidding; homes full of food I’d never eaten, clothes like I’d never seen, languages and traditions I was desperate to understand. Homes half-destroyed and stripped of comforts, homes dripping in ill-gotten gains, homes where people laughed at me and spoke to me in broken English, homes where people treated me with cool suspicion, barely enduring the lens of my camera.
But I’ve never really been to visit a house like this: suburban America, middle class. Wide, tree-lined streets. A mailbox with a little red flag and anHstenciled on the side, a lawn that’s almost disconcertingly green. Brick with black shutters, a door painted colonial blue, big ceramic planters stuffed full of sweet potato vine and petunias all over the back deck where I’ve spent most of the party. It looks like a house on a sitcom, a half-hour comedy where even “very special episodes” get resolved before the credits roll.
And yet somehow, I’ve managed to enjoy myself. Maybe not to fit in, not exactly, since it’s clear I’m an object of curiosity around here, almost as though Greer’s never brought anyone around, but her family’s a trip and basically no one lets you stand still for five seconds without offering you food or a drink or an opinion about the weather, your T-shirt, how young Greer’s mother looks, whatever.
“Alex,” Susan says now, one hand on my elbow and the other sweeping a gesture to two new guests I haven’t yet met. “This is Gary and Bob. They play golf with Michael. Doyou play golf?”
