I thought back to the day Mom had summoned Winnie and me to inform us that she needed a kidney, two years into her incurable illness. It was right before her birthday. “I don’t want you to buy me anything this year,” she’d said. “You can give me something you already have.”
I’ll never forget how Winnie and I huddled in the driveway that night, afraid to talk inside the house because we knew the walls had eyes. “There’s no way I’m letting you do this,” I’d told my sister. “You’re way too young.” And she’d responded in kind. “You have a new baby, it’s too risky,” she’d said. Neither of us let on that we knew the other had a different insurmountable impediment to doing the surgery: a drinking problem, a wife problem. And so we never talked about it. I don’t know if not talking about Mom’s impossible ask made it difficult to talk about anything else, but our relationship definitely chilled after that.
“Remember the time we got drunk on champagne at Mom’s Academy Awards party?” Winnie asked, and I smiled a little.
“You threw up in the fountain.”
“You’d think I’d have learned my lesson.” And I thought about the woman I married.
“I guess we both sought out companions who would bring us pain,” I said. “Because, after growing up with Mom, that’s what we thought we deserved.”
“What a legacy,” Winnie said. “Inspired all who loved her to self-destruct. Too bad we can’t put it on her tombstone.”
Winnie sighed and leaned back in her chair. And right behind her head, something moved on the monitor. I leaned in for a better look.
“Someone’s here!” I pointed to the driveway camera, where a car had just appeared.
“It’s Nathan!”
“Did you ever tell him about this place?” I asked, knowing it was unlikely but still daring to hope.
“We pinkie promised,” she reminded me. And my heart swelled with love.
“We are not going to die here today,” I said. My sister and I had been to hell and back together—I refused to accept that our journey was going to end like this.
“From your lips,” she said, looking up toward God. We had never been churchgoing people, but I think my sister and I both believed, if not in an all-powerful God, at least in the existence of karma. Our mother dying while trying to torment us certainly seemed to corroborate the notion.
We watched as Nathan jogged up the front steps and disappeared into the house. I toggled to the interior grid showing the parlor and front hall. He was standing just inside the doorway now. A moment later, Marcela appeared on the stairs. They exchanged a few words. Then Nathan took out his phone, typed something, and headed for the kitchen.
“Go to the kitchen camera!”
I toggled to the next screen to see Nathan picking up Winnie’s phone off the counter.
“That’s my phone!” Winnie said. “He must have texted me and heard it go off!”
Marcela appeared in the kitchen. Nathan was looking at her while waving Winnie’s phone.
“Why is he waving my phone?” Winnie asked. “Do you think he’s asking her where we are?” She sounded hopeful. And I wanted to be hopeful, too. But that door hadn’t closed by itself.
Marcela moved in close to him. And then she reached for him. Not for his hand to reassure or comfort. For his belt buckle.
“What the fuck?” Winnie said, then looked at me. And I didn’t have to offer an explanation, because what was happening was painfully obvious.
“Oh my God. Charlie, I’m so sorry.”
In retrospect I’m not sure what was more shocking: that my wife was sleeping with my cousin, or that I hadn’t realized it until just now.
I should have known something was off after that Mammoth trip. She hadn’t wanted to go—“Why would I want to go on a ski vacation when I don’t even ski?” she’d whined. “There will be nothing for me to do there!” But I told her it was family, we weren’t blowing it off, and that she would have to, I think the words I used were, “suck it up.” Winnie had gone to great lengths to plan that trip, and we hadn’t done one since we were teenagers. My sister hoped, as I did, that it would revive the connection between our families—and apparently it had, but in the worst way possible.
Marcela had sulked the entire six-hour drive from Santa Barbara to the Sierras. She wanted to make it “crystal clear” that just because she wasn’t skiing didn’t mean there would be a hot meal on the table for the rest of us at the end of the day. She hated the cold, she’d said. She loathed my “drunk-ass” sister, she’d said. My uncle Roy was “the most boring person on the planet,” she’d said.