Rentre à la Maison: "Come Home"
The lamplight was watery and yellow, bright enough to just barely illuminate our table. Across from me, Anya pursed her cherry-glossed lips. Once, when I was six or seven, I had taken the brightest, most garish tube of lipstick she owned from her make-up bag, and used it to write “meanie-pants” in sprawling chicken-scratch on her bathroom mirror. It cost me a week of TV privileges. I don’t remember why I was angry at her.
Now, I squinted at the menu in front of me, trying to focus as the letters swam around on the page. “This isn’t even in English,” I accused.
Anya shrugged and bent over, her hair falling in front of her face in strawberry-golden waves. “It’s French. This is a fancy restaurant. Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. How are we supposed to order if we can’t read the menu?”
“I think having a menu written in French is terribly poetic.” She shut the folder. “Even if we can’t read a word of it. Just pick whichever dish looks the most impressive. How about this? Escargot. That sounds wonderful, don’t you think?”
I almost smiled. “Nice try. You just want to trick me into ordering snails. And it’s pronounced ‘es-car-go’.”
“Ah, forgive me,” she said, smirking. “My genius little sister corrects me yet again.”
The words made my stomach twist into a knot; I pushed the menu away—perhaps a bit more violently than was necessary—and muttered something about not being hungry. She didn’t deserve to call herself my sister anymore. She had forfeited the right by leaving. She wasn’t anything to me now—and people who weren’t anything couldn’t hurt you.
Anya stirred her water, the spoon clinking against the inside of the glass, and then raised it to her mouth. Her lips left a pink stamp where she had taken a sip.
“How’s school?” she asked. “Are you still, uh—” she swallowed. “How’re your flute lessons going?”
“Fine.”
“That’s good.”
“Mm.”
She didn’t quite meet my gaze. “Is Chloe in any of your classes this year? I know you two had, um, math and history together last year.”
I bit my lip and turned to watch as a waiter struggled between tables, a tray of food in each hand. “Chloe went to a different high school. We see each other around, sometimes. We both have new friends now.”
Anya’s cheeks flooded with pink. “Oh. I’m sorry. You guys were so close. I know it must have been hard to have to say—”
She stopped, realizing what she was saying, and busied herself by delicately refolding her napkin in her lap. In my head, I heard her finish her sentence. I know it must have been hard to have to say goodbye. “It was hard,” I said coldly. “But at least we got to say goodbye.”
Now Anya put her elbows on the table—our mother would have had a heart attack, her daughter ignoring one of the most important rules of etiquette—and let her head fall into her hands for a moment. When she looked up again, I couldn’t turn away in time to avoid meeting her eyes. They flashed, unreadable and dark.
“I wanted to have a nice evening with you. It’s been so long.” She seemed to be begging.
“And whose fault is that?”
She threw her hands into the air. “Mine. It’s my fault. Should I not have come? I just wanted to see you, Vera. I feel terrible, but I had to see you.”
“What do you want me to do?” I demanded. “Pretend everything is okay? Pretend that I’m not extremely pissed off at you? Because I am.”
She sat back in her chair, hard. “I don’t blame you.”
“Why are we even here?”
“I thought you’d like it. I actually can read the menu, some, and they have really good food, and I thought—”
“No, not here, here,” I gestured at the table, at the restaurant. As if on cue, the couple behind us burst into a fit of champagne-soaked giggles. “Why are you back? What do you want?”
She brought her thumbnail up to her mouth and bit, suddenly dropping it in disgust a second later. She had quit doing that in eighth grade, when she paid me a quarter to swat her hand away from her mouth every time I saw her biting her nail. I had too much fun helping her with that—eventually, once she had firmly and successfully broken the habit, she had to pay me quarters to stop swatting her. “Okay, it was stupid. I know. I just needed to see you. See that you were alright.”
“Well, here I am, just dandy. Are you going to run along now? You clearly have no problem with leaving on a moment’s notice.”
“Vera, please—”
“Don’t,” I hissed. “I’m not going to leave. I want to hear what you have to say for yourself. But I’m not going to sit here and pretend that everything’s okay. We both know damn well that it’s not.”
Anya reached out to me, stopping before she actually touched my hands. “You never used to cuss.”
“Things change.”
“Have you changed?”
“I had to toughen up when you left. I had to pick Mom and Dad off of the ground for weeks when you didn’t call.”
She winced. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. God. You should have seen me in the car, when I was driving away. I was a mess.”
“So now you’re the victim? What, am I supposed to feel sorry for you?”
“No! I didn’t mean it like that. This is all coming out wrong.” She squeezed her eyes shut, and then clasped her hands together. “Thomas and I aren’t getting married.”
For a second, my world stopped revolving. I felt the last year of waiting—waiting for a call, waiting for a letter—disappear. I heard the screaming and yelling and the doors slamming at Thanksgiving all over again, felt the salty tears on my cheeks like it was all happening again. And then I waited for the punch line.
I stared at her, and then looked for her left hand. The ring—the cheap, fake diamond that had sent Mom and Dad off the edge—was gone. “You’re not getting married? He’s gone?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“When?”
“Three months ago.”
I felt another wave of hysteria building, and it took all of my self-control not to jump out of my seat then and there, go over to Anya, and shake her like I’d been wanting to for a year. “Three months ago? And you didn’t come back?”
“I—”
She stopped again, and we both looked up, surprised to see a waiter standing above us with a notepad in his hand. He had a murky red splotch on his apron that was either blood or ketchup—I hoped for the latter—and sported an oddly-shaped mustache that looked like some kid had drawn a wobbly brown line across his face with magic marker.
I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times, trying to gather my thoughts enough to order something. Anya was more composed. She smoothed back a lock of her hair and handed the waiter our menus, flashing him a quick smile. She was good, I had to admit. It looked almost genuine.
“Give us a bowl of the Soupe aux Chataignes,” she said in a perfect French accent; the waiter nodded politely and disappeared into the back of the restaurant, which was relatively empty. We had arrived before the Friday-night rush—it was barely six o’clock—because I had to get home before my parents got back from their “Supper Club” and found me missing.
I reached into my pocket and fingered the note-card that I had found in our mailbox this afternoon when I came home from school. Anya knew I’d be the one to see it first; Dad would be at work, and Mom never bothered to check the mail. The note-card gave one address—a quaint French restaurant just down the street—and said to be there at 5:45. It had no stamp or address, so she had obviously just walked up to our house and left it in the mailbox.
There was no signature, but it didn’t need one. I knew it was my sister, and not even because of the tell-tale loopy handwriting. I had been waiting for Anya to come crawling back. It was inevitable. She had been stupid and rash, but she wasn’t emotionally capable of entirely severing off contact with her family, no matter what arguments she had gotten into with us. And I knew she would try to talk to me first, because I hadn’t been the one to yell on that Thanksgiving night.
Now, she fiddled with the bread plate, drawing circles around it with her finger. “I was so embarrassed. Everyone else was right—I don’t know what I was thinking, running away with him!” She dug her nail into a miniature tub of butter, puncturing the peel-off lid. “Did you know that, before I left for school last spring, Dad took me aside and told me not to get involved with Thomas again?”
“It doesn’t surprise me,” I said bluntly.
“He was so right, Vera. About everything. He told me then that Thomas might seem mysterious and intriguing, and he might be an amazing artist, but that the second he got bored, he’d bail on me.”
I watched her close her eyes briefly. “He broke off the engagement,” I said. “He ran out on you.”
She nodded, once.
“The same way you ran out on Mom and Dad and me, after he insisted you marry him.”
Another nod, this one more hesitant.
“What a—”
“Don’t cuss.”
“—jerk. I was going to say jerk.”
“Sure you were,” she said, grinning.
“So you’re coming home now.” I ran a hand through my hair, trying to think coherently. “Thomas is gone—you can come home, and I can tell Mom and Dad that you’re here.”
Anya shook her head, her expression thoughtful and faraway. “Not yet, Vera. I’m still away at art school. I still have a job out there. Not much has changed.”
This didn’t make any sense. “Everything has changed!” I cried. “Thomas was the problem. Mom and Dad didn’t want you to marry him, because you’re too young and he’s a jerk, so you ran away. Now, you’re not marrying him, so you can come back. For holidays. And you can call us.”
“No, no,” she muttered, “it wasn’t just Thomas. Mom and Dad don’t approve of anything I do anymore. They want me to be in college, learning something practical, not an art institute. They want me to have a stable job. They want me to be closer to home. I have to have some time to think, to separate myself a little.”
“A year of no correspondence whatsoever isn’t enough time for you?” I demanded. "Did I not mention that Mom became bitter and angry after you left, and Dad sank into clinical depression on Christmas, when we found out you changed all your phone numbers? Not to mention me. You’re my sister. Do you just not get that you can’t cut off your family like that?”
She wore the same hard, resolved expression now that she used to use on Mom and Dad when they argued over her grades, or parties, or curfew. “I’m so sorry, and I’ve apologized. It was a terrible decision to make, but in some ways it’s helped me sort things out, being on my own. I have to figure how to deal with Mom and Dad before I come back.”
“What’s to figure out? They love you and miss you.” I changed tactics. “Please. Anya. For them. For me. Just give me your new number, so they can call you. An address. Anything!”
“I have to be able to prove to them that I know what I’m doing with myself before I talk to them. And I can’t do that now.”
I gritted my teeth together and stared at her, eyes watering in fury. “You don’t have to prove anything to them. Is that what this is about? You’re too proud to come back unless you can show you were right? Because you weren’t right. Thomas left you. We were right.”
“Please, don’t be angry.”
“Why shouldn’t I be angry?”
“Because I came here, to see you,” she insisted. Now, she actually crossed the table to touch my wrist. It came as such a shock to my system that I didn’t even think to pull away—I just stared at her warm, pale hand on top of mine.
“Why did you even come, if you’re just going to disappear again?” My voice broke, like the icicles shattering against the pavement from years ago, when we’d run around and jump up to try to whack them off the side of the roof.
“To tell you I’m okay. To see that you’re okay.”
“I’m not okay. And you’re crazy.”
She looked away, because it was true.
I swallowed. “Do what you want. I don’t care.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do, Anya,” I lied. I was good, too. It came out sounding genuinely cold and harsh. “You already do whatever you want. You already hurt whoever you want to. Who am I to stop you?”
We sat in silence for a moment; I felt like crying, but Anya hadn’t shed a tear, so I wasn’t going to either. A different waiter arrived with our soup, babbling cheerfully about how good it was and how we were such cute sisters, how we looked so very alike. She didn’t seem to notice that we were glaring at each other. I think she was still blabbering on as she walked away.
Anya gently pulled her hand away from mine, and my heart sank.
“Am I going to have to go like this, with you mad at me?”
I stared at the place where her hand and been. She was always the one to pull away. Everything was always her fault—it was the rule of sisterhood, to blame the other. “You don’t have to go at all.” I curled my fingers into a fist, but didn’t move it off of the table.
She shook her head. “I love you, little sis’. Just give me time.”
I had given her a year.
“Have the soup—Chataignes means chestnuts. It’s really good. I know you’ll like it.”
It smelled divine, but I wasn’t going to have a bit of it. I didn’t bring money, anyway.
“I already paid for it,” Anya said, and stood up, grabbing her purse. She missed the handle a couple of times due to how violently her hand was shaking. “It’ll make you feel better, I promise.”
She was the reason I was feeling terrible in the first place.
“Vera,” she begged, grabbing my chin and jerking it up so that I had to face her and look into those dark, traitor eyes. They were on the brink of tears—good. “Say something.”
I had already said everything, and she had already ignored everything. I let her walk away—for the second time—and wondered how she could do it. I guess it didn’t hurt her anymore. She stopped at the door, and looked as if she was about to turn back and change her mind. But then she slinked outside in one fluid motion, the chime echoing as she went. Someone dimmed the lamps at that moment. It added to the effect that all the light in the restaurant had bled out of that door and into the night, following my sister. She was like a leaky faucet—no matter what I said or did, I couldn’t do anything to keep her from running.
I drank the soup anyway, because Anya knew me better than anyone. And she was right. It was damn good soup. I’d be sure to tell her that, the next time she came crawling back. And there would be a next time; I knew Anya better than anyone, too.
*
Exactly one month later, I found a note-card in our mailbox. It gave one address—a quaint French restaurant just down the street—and said to be there at 5:45.
There was no signature, but it didn’t need one.
