Page 2 of Thicker Than Water
“My brother is an impeccable human being.”
“What about Tom Hanks? Is he trash?”
Sienna waves a dismissive hand. “Tom’s fine.”
“And your nephew?”
“Hmm,” Sienna considers. “I don’t know.” She mutes the TV and shouts toward the ceiling. “Aiden!” We listen for movement upstairs before she tries again. “Aiden! Help! Your mom got bit by a rat!”
I swat at Sienna, and then we hear it: the creak of Aiden’s door, the thud of his footsteps. He hasn’t spoken to me all day, which is not so different from other days lately. When he got home at 2:45, I asked him how school was, and his response was to trudge up the stairs.
Now, appearing on the threshold between the family room and front hall, he’s dressed in Jason’s old Wilco shirt, strumming a guitar pick against his thigh, as if unable to stop practicing for even amoment. Sienna once told me that Jason used to be the same way. In high school, he’d play an invisible trumpet at dinner, working on his “marching band muscle memory”—and I find it sweet, this echo of Jason in Aiden, who would echo everything about his father if he could.
“Aiden,” Sienna says, “are you trash?”
“What? I thought you said something about a rat.”
Sienna and I share a glance. We haven’t gotten used to his deeper, decidedly teenage voice.
“Forget about that. Are you trash?” she repeats. “Do you do things that would make someone sew your lips together?” She gestures toward the TV.
“You mean, like, Dad’s boss?” Aiden asks, straightening. “Why, what’d he do?”
“Nothing. Well—something, I’m sure, but I’m just saying: You better not be trash.”
Aiden chuckles. “I’m not trash, Auntsy,” he says, the name a holdover from his childhood, when his toddler mouth couldn’t handleAunt Sienna. “I’m writing a paper on toxic masculinity inLord of the Flies.”
“You are?” I ask, and the way Aiden stiffens at my voice is so noticeable that I can tell it embarrasses us all. I lower my gaze to the coffee table, where there’s a stack of travel magazines I haven’t touched in months.
I feel Sienna watching me. She wants me to address it, whateveritis—teenage aloofness or a shift in hormones or some grudge Aiden’s holding against me. But my mouth won’t open, my throat won’t speak, and in a few seconds, Sienna speaks instead.
“That doesn’t impress me,” she says, inspecting her nails. “I’m sure the teacher assigned you that topic.”
Aiden shrugs.
She cocks her eyes toward him. “Do you cheat on your girlfriend?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Your boyfriend, then?”
Aiden rolls his eyes.
“Do you leer at girls in gym class, with your greasy little eyeballs?”
“My eyeballs are greasy?”
“I don’t know,” Sienna teases, making her thumb and finger into a circle, then peering through it like a monocle. “Are they?”
Aiden shakes his head. “I have no idea what’s going on right now.”
“Sure you don’t. Just don’t come crying to either of us when you get…” She mimics sewing up her lips. Aiden’s eyes go wide.
“Sienna!” I scold, and she looks at me—almost proudly—before backtracking.
“I’m kidding. It’s terrible what happened to Gavin Reed.” She nods solemnly before adding, “Unless he deserved it.”
I lob a pillow at her. Sienna’s been rabid about injustices for as long as I’ve known her—cussing at her computer when our clients are late with payments, yelling at drivers who cut her off, starting fights with internet strangers in response to sexist tweets—so I know the news struck a chord with her tonight; as soon as someone theorized a woman might have done it, Sienna’s sympathy switched from the victim to the perpetrator. Never mind that Jason’s never said anything bad about his boss at Integrity Plus. All Sienna needed was the suggestion that a woman had an ax to grind with Gavin, and the tenor of the story changed. I can practically see the images in her eyes: Gavin forcing a secretary’s head toward his unzipped pants; Gavin, out at happy hour, slipping a pill into an unattended cup. The signs Sienna made for the first Women’s March said, “Believe Women.” Even hypothetical ones, apparently.
