Page 98 of The Starfish Sisters

CURRENT DAY

Chapter Twenty-Two

Suze

After Joel leaves, I skim through the scripts again but soon move away from them in frustration. Restless, I wander through the house picking things up and putting them down, looking for something I can’t name. Maui tries to follow for a while, but at some point, he stops in the middle of the foyer with a huff and settles his head on his paws, watching me. I’m glad of his company, though, and bend over to scratch his ears. “You’ll protect me, right?” I ask.

His eyebrows move in agreement.

I still haven’t told Phoebe everything. About Joel. About the baby. About all of it. Now that Joel and I have reconnected, it’s all the more urgent that I confess our history to Phoebe and try to explain why I’ve lied about it for so long. The idea fills me with dread, because things are really healing now.

But really, how did she not figure it out? Why didn’t she ever ask me more about Victor, who I told her was the father?

How did I actually think those lies would work, anyway? Joel burned down my father’s church! That’s not exactly the act of a good friend.

Is it possible shedoesknow? Isn’t it more possible that she always has known?

I rub the spot between my eyebrows. How many times have we broken apart, come back together? At times I’ve hated her—namely, when I was banished to the Magdalene Home—and at times I was despairing over her choices, like when she married Derek and left her art lying in a forgotten pile at the side of her life.

A rumble of memory rises, the fight we had at the funeral. It poked me on the beach earlier, but in the space of quiet here now, it rolls itself out in spectacular detail.

We were sitting in the living room, big mugs of tea in our hands. Everyone else had gone to bed or gone home. A fire flickered in the fireplace. The mess of the wake was still scattered over the counters, the dining room table, the coffee table in front of us. I’d started to clean it up a little while before, but Phoebe said, “Leave it. We can tackle it all in the morning. Who cares?”

Exhausted, we sat curled on the two couches, watching the flames. Outside, rain fell, and it gave the room a damp chill. Beryl had been quite frail for two years, but to the end she kept her clear mind. The vacuum she left seemed impossible to fill, and it suddenly caught me in the gut.

I would never talk to her again.

A swell of grief roared through me, as impossible to halt as a train. Everything about the past three years, from the onset of the pandemic, then Dmitri’s death, and now Beryl’s, filled me to the brim. I heard a noise escape my throat that could only be called keening, and I bent over with it, rocking, letting it pour out, tears and pain and that piercing noise. I thought I should try to stop so I wouldn’t wake anyone up, but it kept moving, rhythmic and towering, a wave of purest loss. I would never see her again. Never look into her eyes. Never hold her hand.

I was aware of Phoebe, but I didn’t look at her. I just let it go, knowing she would understand, that her loss and mine were the ones that mattered. Finally, I got up and found a kitchen towel to sop up my tears and came back to sit down. “I can’t even imagine the world without her. My heart is completely broken.”

“Oh, of course,” Phoebe said in a cold voice. “You’rethe one suffering, even though she was my grandmother.”

I jerked my head up. “What? It’s not a contest. And she wasn’t my blood grandmother, but she was the only mother I really ever had.”

“Really? So why weren’t you here with me, taking care of her these past few years?”

I blinked in both astonishment and fury. “Are you really going there? You didn’twantme here!”

“Because it’s a three-ring circus with you, all the time, and I didn’t think that would be good for her.”

“I wouldn’t have been in this house. I would have been in mine. I offered so many times.” Some evil thing made me say, “And I notice you were quite happy to take whatever money you needed from me.”

“There it is! The grand lady doling out her largesse!”

“You know that’s not fair. Why are you always so fucking jealous?”

“Jealous?” She stood up, her face bright red. “You’ve always been the jealous one. You were jealous of the Portland house, jealous of my parents, and it wasn’t enough to be jealous of my grandmother, you had to move in here to steal her.”

“I didn’t have to steal her. She loved me! And you know I had to come here to live. There was no other place to go.” Her words were so sharp and painful that I instinctively struck back. I narrowed my eyes. “You’ve always been such a whiner! Poor Phoebe in her big house on the hill, with two parents and a grandmother and a fucking swimming pool.”

“Material things are not the only things, Suze. You’ve never got that.”

“It wasn’t about the material part. It was about you having love and people who wanted the best for you. So what, your parents got divorced. Mine tried to kill me, in case you’ve forgotten, and at the worst time in my life, when I was only a few miles away from you in that horrible unwed mothers’ home, you only came to see me one time. Once! Do you have any idea how awful that time was? How much I needed you? And you just deserted me.”

“I did go see you. You were a bitch to me.”

“Oh, sorry. I wasn’t cheerful enough for you?”