Meet Your New Sister
1711 Words
~Olive~
I sit on the toilet for a long time.
The crab-shaped soap watches me. The crab-shaped soap has seen things tonight. The crab-shaped soap and I have an understanding.
I stand up. I look at myself in the mirror. There is a girl in the mirror with my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes and a very small smile starting at the corner of her lips and the girl in the mirror is not the girl who came in here ten minutes ago to fake an orgasm for her hometown boyfriend.
The girl in the mirror is eighteen years old and she has just been handed a knife.
“Babe?” Eric calls through the door. “Babe, you okay in there?”
“I’m great, Eric.”
“You want to — you wanna finish, or — “
I open the bathroom door.
Eric is on the bed in his boxers eating a granola bar. He looks at me — naked, dry-eyed, smiling — and his mouth opens and closes once.
“Babe?”
“Eric.” I pick up my dress. “I have to go.”
“Go where? It’s ten — “
“My mother’s getting married.” I pull the dress over my head. “Saturday.”
“What — to who?”
I find my shoes. I find my purse. I find my keys.
I look at Eric Levi Thompson, my high school boyfriend of eleven months, the boy I have just finished faking my last orgasm for, the boy I am never going to see again because some boys are the kind of love that ends when you cross a state line and Eric is one of them.
“Eric,” I say. “I think we should break up.”
“What?”
“It’s not you. It’s actually entirely not you. It’s that my mother is marrying the man who killed my father, and his sons go to my college, and I have three days to figure out how I’m going to ruin all of them, and I can’t do that and also remember to text you good morning every day, baby, I’m sorry, I’m a multitasker but I’m not a magician.”
Eric stares at me.
“Olive, what the f**k are you talking — “
“Bye, Eric.”
I close the door behind me.
I walk down the stairs of his mother’s house. I walk past the living room where his father is watching a basketball game. I walk out the front door. I get in my car. I sit in the driver’s seat.
I put my hands on the steering wheel.
I look at myself in the rearview mirror.
“Okay,” I say out loud, to nobody, to the dark, to the ghost of my father riding shotgun like he has every day for six years. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”
I start the car.
I drive home.
Three days later, I am in the back of a black town car with my mother and we are pulling through a wrought-iron gate that says HAYES in letters as tall as my whole goddamn body.
The driveway is half a mile long.
I am wearing red. Of course I am wearing red. I have been wearing red since I was sixteen and figured out it makes men look stupid and women look dangerous and I am about to be in a house full of both.
My mother is in cream. My mother is glowing. My mother has spent the last three days floating around our small yellow house like a girl, like a girl, like a woman with twelve years of widow grief finally cracking open, and every time she looks at me I have to swallow what I know and smile back.
I will tell her.
I will not tell her tonight.
I will not tell her until I have looked Richard Hayes in the eye and decided whether he knows who I am.
The car stops.
The driver opens the door.
The mansion in front of us is — okay. Okay, fine. Fine. It is a castle. It is a Gothic Revival nightmare with three wings and a fountain and ivy and twelve chimneys and somewhere in the back, I assume, a graveyard for the women who marry into this family. The front door is bigger than my entire bedroom in Connecticut. There are gargoyles. There are actual gargoyles on this house. I want to laugh.
I want to laugh and I want to throw up and I want to turn around and drive back to Eric’s house and crawl under his bed and never come out.
Instead I take my mother’s elbow.
“Mom.”
“Yes, baby?”
“You look beautiful.”
She looks at me. Her eyes go wet.
“Olive.”
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too, baby.”
We walk up the stone steps.
The front door opens before we reach it.
Richard Hayes is standing in the foyer.
He is — handsome. God help me, he is handsome, he is silver-haired and broad-shouldered and he has my mother’s smile pinned to his face like a brooch and when he sees her he does something with his mouth that I have not seen a man do at my mother in twelve years and I almost — almost — believe he loves her.
Almost.
“Diane.” He takes both her hands. He kisses her knuckles. “My God.”
“Richard.” My mother’s voice is air. My mother’s voice is a girl’s voice. My mother is gone on this man and I am going to have to take this house apart with my bare hands without her ever knowing I did it.
Richard turns to me.
His eyes go to mine.
I am eighteen years old, five-foot-six in heels, in red, with my father’s eyes set in my mother’s face, and Richard Hayes looks at me and for one second — one second — something flickers behind his expression that is not a stranger looking at his fiancée’s daughter.
He knows.
He knows exactly who I am.
The flicker passes. He smiles. He extends a hand.
“Olive. At last.”
I take his hand. His skin is dry and warm. There is a heavy gold ring on his pinky and I know — I do not know how I know but I know — that the ring belonged to a man my father interviewed in 2007 and that man has been missing since 2008.
“Mr. Hayes.”
“Richard, please.”
“Richard.”
“My boys are upstairs. They’re — “ he glances at the staircase, and there is something in his voice, a small private amusement, like he is about to enjoy a joke I haven’t heard yet. “They’re very much looking forward to meeting you.”
I smile.
I smile with my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes and a very small knife somewhere underneath my tongue.
“I’m sure we’ll get along like a house on fire, Richard.”
Behind me, on the staircase, footsteps.
Two sets.
Coming down in unison.
My mother turns toward the sound, beaming. Richard turns. I am the last to turn because I am eighteen years old and I have rehearsed this exact moment for three nights and I have promised myself I will not flinch and I will not blink and I will not give them the satisfaction —
I turn.
Halfway down the staircase, in matching black shirts, two boys are stopped mid-step. Tall. Dark-haired. Identical jaws. Identical mouths. Not identical eyes — one set is winter-grey and locked on my face like he is watching a bomb go off in slow motion, and the other set is summer-green and crinkling at the corners because the boy they belong to is starting to smile.
Cassius Hayes has gone the color of milk.
Crew Hayes is grinning like Christmas just came early.
“Boys,” Richard says behind me, warm as a fireplace. “Come down. Meet your new sister.”
The grin on Crew Hayes’s face widens.
He takes the next stair.
“Hi, sis.”
Two words.
Two words and I am, for the first time in eighteen years on planet Earth, considering committing a homicide on a marble staircase in front of my own mother.
Let me explain something to you about Crew Hayes. You don’t know him yet. You will. By the end of this story you are going to know him so well you will dream about him and hate yourself in the morning.
But right now, this second, on this staircase, in this foyer, what you need to understand about Crew Hayes is this:
He says things the way other people touch things.
Hi, sis is not a greeting. Hi, sis is a hand on the back of my neck. Hi, sis is a thumb pressed under my jaw. Hi, sis is a man twice my size leaning down to my ear in a crowded room and saying something that makes every muscle in my body lock up while everyone around me thinks he just asked me to pass the salt.
I have known him for four seconds.
I already know this about him.
That is the kind of boy Crew Hayes is.
“Crew.”
“Don’t tease. Come down properly.”
“Sorry, Dad.”
He is not sorry. He takes the rest of the staircase two stairs at a time, easy, loose-jointed, the way boys move when they know every room they walk into is going to make space for them. Black shirt. Black jeans. A gold chain at his throat that I bet — I bet — has a saint medallion on the end of it because boys like Crew Hayes always have saint medallions on the end of their chains, and the irony of that has never once occurred to them.
He stops three feet in front of me.
He is — okay. Okay, Olive. Breathe. He is six-foot-three of problem.
“Olive.” He says my name like he’s tasting it.
“Welcome to Hayes House.”
Asshole.
- Writer
