I walk upstairs and knock on Beth’s bedroom door. When no one answers, I slowly turn the doorknob and peer into the empty room. The sound of the shower comes through the en suite bathroom door. It’s only the second or third time I’ve set foot in Beth’s room. It feels a bit like entering the Pearly Gates. The walls are painted the palest blue. The king-size bed is a mass of cumulus comforters and Egyptian cotton linens. The air is redolent of honeysuckle and roses.
The sheets are still warm when I peel back the covers to make the bed. “C’mon, Hannah, what’s the point?” I imagine Sam complaining. “Maria’s just going to strip the bed and throw the sheets in the washing machine anyway.” But I can’t help myself. There’s something about an unmade bed that makes me uneasy.
Beth’s photo albums are scattered all over the bed and floor. I return them to their place on the built-in shelves on the other side of the bedroom. Conspicuous on Beth’s nightstand are two amber plastic prescription bottles. I peek at the labels and stuff them into my pants pocket. Beth can’t bring them where she’s going, and it never hurts to have an extra stash.
“Hannah, is it you?” Beth says. My sister-in-law emerges from the bathroom with a white towel wrapped around her head like a turban. She is otherwise completely naked. Beth betrays no self-consciousness, and I try not to stare at her supple skin and pert pink nipples. Beth picks up a frosted glass jar with an ornate golden lid. She unscrews the lid, scoops out a small handful of thick cream and slowly smooths the emollient over her arms, her shoulders, her breasts. The heady scent of tuberose nearly causes me to faint.
* * *
Everyone gathers in the great room getting ready to depart. They’re all lined up along the front wall, fair-haired and blue-eyed, reminding me of the Von Trapp children introducing themselves to Fräulein Maria. Despite their eagerness to get home, none of the Lindstroms want to leave—not yet, not until they’ve watched the pivotal scene of the Lifetime network family melodrama that is their new life.
“Are you ready to go, Claire and Ally?” Karen asks.
“Mommy, I don’t want to go with Auntie Karen,” Claire cries. “I want to go with you and Daddy.” Claire runs to Beth and holds tight to her legs. Little sister Ally follows suit, nodding in agreement, not understanding anything that’s going on.
“Girls, remember I told you,” Beth says gently. “Auntie Karen is going to drive you to our Princeton house, and Daddy and Auntie Hannah are going to drive Mommy to camp. Don’t you remember I told you?”
It was my idea to tell the girls that Mommy was going away to camp. I loved the fact that it was both true and misleading at the same time. Like a good law librarian, I made sure to do my research. In the US Bureau of Prisons hierarchy, the facilities with the least security are called federal prison camps, or camps for short. In contrast with the medium-security federal correctional institutions or high-security federal penitentiaries, camps like Alderson don’t have guard towers or barbed wire fences or even locked cells. If you squint hard enough at the grainy Google Maps image, Alderson looks like it could be one of the Seven Sisters all-women colleges, only with fewer lesbians and more dental problems.
Now I feel ashamed. I’ve been spending too much time with lawyers and gotten used to using precision with words as a way to avoid harsh truths. To what purpose? To trick a five-year-old into believing that her mother is going to sleepaway camp instead of prison?
“You’re going to miss my first day of kindergarten,” Claire says. As her eyes fill with tears, the adults avert their gazes.
We all know Beth will be missing much more than that.
three
Beth dozes in the passenger seat of the BMW SUV, unable to shake off her Ativan and Ambien cocktail from the night before. Sam has the music turned up loud to keep himself awake. The AC is cranked high, but the car interior still smells stale and slightly sour. Reaching between the smooth leather seats from the back, I offer Sam an Altoid before slipping one into my mouth.
“Does my breath smell that bad?” Sam jokes. I laugh along politely, but it does. It stinks of this morning’s coffee, day-old booze and the cheesy garlic bread and pasta puttanesca Beth had delivered last night as her “last meal.” We need to work on Sam’s oral hygiene.
Sam explores the channels on the Sirius XM system, having tired of the endless loop of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones on the classic rock station we’ve been listening to all day. He stops when he hears Madonna singing “Holiday.”
“Oh my God,” Sam says, “I almost forgot. Happy birthday, Hannah.”
At that moment, I’m glad to be sitting in the back seat. What would my face reveal? Disappointment that no one at the Lindstrom family reunion remembered? Resignation that, at the age of forty-nine, there’s unlikely to be anyone in my life for whom my birthday would be a special occasion? Or gratitude that my forty-one-year-old brother—the one person in the world who matters the most to me—always remembers, although sometimes a day or two late?
I lean back in my seat and look out the window at the rolling hills rushing past. I reach up to finger the diamond studs in my ears and think back to when Sam gave them to me. It was my fortieth birthday—my last milestone birthday.
Nine years ago, Beth and Sam had been dating for several years but weren’t married yet. They rented a gorgeous vacation home for a week in the Hamptons and invited a group of their equally gorgeous friends and family for an end-of-summer bacchanal, the precursor to the now-annual Lindstrom family reunion. Beth and Sam’s parties weren’t my cup of tea—their lavish lifestyle looked straight out of a Ralph Lauren ad—but I suffered through them. There weren’t many other chances to spend time with Sam.
It’s getting dark, and everyone is huddled around the outdoor fire pit sipping drinks when Sam starts tapping a spoon against his beer bottle and calls the crowd to attention.
“Friends, countrymen, lend me your ears,” he shouts, “because tonight is a very special night. It’s not only the end of summer, the end of our one-week bender, it’s also my older sister Hannah’s fortieth birthday.” Several people turn around to find me tucked near the back of the party. They encourage me to come closer to the fire pit and stand next to Sam. I’ve always hated being the center of attention, even on my birthday, but I take comfort in knowing Sam’s speech won’t be about me. It’ll be about him. It’s always about him.
“In honor of Hannah’s birthday,” Sam says, slurring his words slightly, “I want to tell you all the story of how I came to be conceived.” Chuckles ripple through the crowd.
“Everyone already knows the story, you drunk motherfucker!” a male voice heckles amiably. The group erupts in laughter. It’s true: Sam has a repertoire of stories, much as an actor has a repertoire of roles. “How Sam was conceived” is his Hamlet.