What I need is a night off. Just one night where I don’t curl up with my laptop and color correct until my eyes burn. A few solid hours in which I pretend deadlines don’t exist, where I can forget about the group show in August, and the look of concern that flashed across Elyse’s face when she saw me. I need an evening where I definitely, one hundred percent willnotthink about Trevor, and that night is tonight. I’m going out with my big sister.
Eventually I peel myself off the floor. I’m locking up when my phone vibrates with a string of texts. I know it’s her before I check the messages. Heather almost exclusively sends texts in multiples.
PUT ON YOUR PARTY SHOES! I just scored us a table at Jaybird.
Wait, do you even own party shoes?
I’ll buy you a pair on my way to pick you up.
I’m typing out a reply when another message lands. But this time it’s not my sister.
2
It’s a message to the Everly family group chat from my father.
Nan is in an ambulance.
My grandmother Nanette Everly—Nan to all, not just her grandchildren—has always been my biggest champion. I was a toddler when she identified my creative streak, and she nurtured it like one of her peony plants. When I was six, she took me to the Art Gallery of Ontario for drawing lessons. We sat among the Henry Moore sculptures, sketch pads on our laps, experimenting with shadows and shapes and lines. She taught me how to use a sewing machine when I was eleven. She gave me my first camera in high school. I’ve always tried to emulate her poise, the way she makes everyone around her feel seen. Nan’s more practical than a road map and has a knack for making the best out of a bad situation. I admire her as much as I love her.
So when she falls in dance class and shatters her hip, drinks with my sister turn into a sleepover at Sunnybrook Hospital. As Nan undergoes an emergency hip replacement, I wipe my schedule clean so I can help her recover. I’m the best option. My father is in the middle of jury selection, and Heather has even less sparetime. She’s a lawyer like Dadanda single parent. Our younger twin siblings, Luca and Lavinia, are…well, they’re Luca and Lavinia. I love them endlessly, but they’re twenty-four and still take being the babies of the family seriously.
The morning Nan’s released from the hospital, Heather comes with me to help take her home.
“You girls have other things to do than dote on me,” Nan says as we guide her into the house with her new walker. For an eighty-year-old who had surgery thirty-six hours ago, she looks good. She gets her short white hair set once a week, is always smartly dressed, and has stayed active. Her posture is immaculate. I find myself pulling my shoulders back whenever I’m in her presence, even now.
“Not at this moment,” Heather says. “But I’m due in court this afternoon.”
“I, on the other hand, will be at your beck and call,” I tell her.
Nan frowns. “I hate to think of you stuck here with me, Alice. You should be out living your life.”
“What life?” Heather mutters under her breath.
“I’m happy to stay here,” I say, ignoring my sister. “You know I love this house.”
Nan lives in Leaside, a leafy neighborhood in midtown Toronto. During those first hectic years after the twins were born, Heather and I slept at Nan and Grandpa’s on the weekends more often than we did in our own beds. Our home was a few streets over, but I loved this house best. The plump peonies that line the walkway. The homemade paisley curtains over the leaded glass windows. The doorbell that tolls as if announcing a newlywed couple. You can hear its thunderous ring in every corner of the redbrick Georgian, but to me, it’s the sound of calm and quiet. No screaming babies. No overwhelmed mother. A bedroom of my own.
“Let me do the stairs by myself,” Nan says sharply when Heather takes her elbow.
It’s not like Nan to be snippy, but I get it. She’s been living on her own since Grandpa died twenty years ago, and she guards her independence like a dragon. Plus, she was supposed to leave for an Alaskan cruise next week. I’d be prickly if I were in her shoes, too.
“Poor Nan,” I whisper as she navigates her walker over the threshold.
Heather shakes her head. “Poor you.”
“We’ll be fine.”
After a good night’s sleep, Nan will be back to her optimistic, high-spirited self.
But three days pass, and Nan grows even crankier. I’ve never seen her so low. On the morning the cruise sets sail without her on board, her silence is as brooding as the clouds that darken the western sky. She hasn’t even touched her crossword puzzle. When rain pelts the windowpane, I glance at her. Nan loves a good, “bracing” storm, but not a glimmer of interest brightens her face. I’m caught off guard by how old she looks. It sneaks up on me sometimes—that her hair is white and not gray anymore. And then I remember the peonies.
I run out of the house in my pajamas with a pair of scissors, but the flowers are already bent over, dozens of pink and white heads kissing the mulch, beads of water clinging to their ruffled petals. Under normal circumstances, Nan would be out here in her housecoat before the first drops fell—she prefers the flowers in a vase to seeing them droop like this. I snip quickly, but when I return to the house, my arms full of fragrant blossoms, wet hair plastered to my cheeks, she looks at me vacantly and says, “I didn’t realize it was raining.”
I need to fix this.
When Nan lies down for a nap after lunch, I sit in the same spot I used to as a kid: at the top of the staircase, staring at the wall of family photos opposite the banister. My niece’s first step. Luca and Lavinia’s high school graduation dinner. Nan and Grandpa at their best friends’ cottage in Barry’s Bay. They used to visit John and Joyce there every year. It’s Nan’s favorite place in the world. I spent just two months at the lake, but it left a mark on me, too.
I turned seventeen that summer. For my birthday, Nan gave me a camera—a very good SLR. I shot frame after frame, teaching myself, trying to get better. I put the best photos in an album that I gave to Nan on our last day at the cottage. I find it now on the basement shelves, and sit on the red carpet, legs crossed beneath me.
