“I don’t think I want to hear about Kennedy’s dreams.”
Carter was seven years older than he was, and her body showed it. She was attractive when dressed, but when naked her torso and hips showed a quilt of weight wars won and lost—lovely but also loose in places. So why did he feel overwhelmed every time he looked at her? He adored her to the point where even her faults fascinated him. The shiny, pale white stretch marks on her outer thighs seemed more like mermaid scales.
Everett remembered when she and Haley were friends, just glimpses: the way they used to walk past him playing in the yard and head up to Haley’s room, or the times Kennedy was there too and the Wynn twins would bet him ten bucks that he couldn’t tell them apart. He always could—their voices, their hair, their different-colored tiny backpacks were all giveaways, though they never paid him for his discerning eye. That was kid stuff, forever ago. At the time, Carter had had dyed black hair and pimples along her temples, a rebelling sterling silver ring in her nose where now there was only a freckle.
He remembered too that there had been a choreography to their interactions. The girls would finish each other’s sentences in a way that he and Haley couldn’t. He’d watched the twins speak for each other, and although they were infinitely different they were also the same: gleaming, confident, righteous.
Carter zipped up the jeans. She always wore jeans when she was around him, tight low-rises that hardly covered the hip, as though it could close their age gap. The difference was that even her jeans were 7 For All Mankind and cost $300. He’d tried to step up his game in the months they’d been seeing each other—to spend more, dress better—though he still felt like a redneck kid from Longwood, the poor relation to Blueheart Woods. This city, he decided, was where all kinds of Americans came together to politely dislike one another. Everett sat down on the bed beside her and almost asked if she ever dreamed about Haley. Since they’d begun sleeping with each other they had avoided the names of their respective sisters.
“What if I don’t let you go back to them?” Everett said. He didn’t like to think about her away from him, becoming a family with the people he hated most. And then, although he knew he shouldn’t, he grabbed Carter by her wrists and pushed her backward onto the bed. He gripped her hard but kissed her softly, feeling the moment her lips parted. He loved her teeth, so straight and white. Expensive teeth. He ran his tongue over them, which he knew drove her crazy.
“You weren’t supposed to happen,” Carter said into his face. Her lips curled up on one side, like she didn’t trust the words even as she spoke them.
Everett didn’t answer her because it was an argument they’d been having for a long time, ever since he ran into her at the bistro around the corner, Heritage. She’d gone and broken things off with her live-in, Alex, but Everett knew she still wasn’t his. He didn’t feel it, not yet, and maybe never would—not with either of their families.
Everett kissed her again and unbuttoned the jeans she’d just done up. He licked her smooth belly, downward. He knew she wouldn’t say no.
* * *
—
Afterward, they lay again on the bed, Carter with a soft look on her face as she gazed up and out into the sky, the sunlight brightening into afternoon. She had asked him to stay inside, which they didn’t usually do.
He rolled on his side. “Did I tell you I tried reading Jane Eyre?”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. I am. I use Google for the weird words.”
“You’re using Google to read Jane Eyre?”
“Trying.”
He had been so young during the preliminary trials, it was hard to recall all the details. He’d never been brave enough to go digging into them as an adult until he started sleeping with Carter. What Everett remembered was his father turning to stone, his mother into a pile of sand.
The one thing he remembered was the stuff about Jane Eyre. Because it was more like a story they were telling and less about his sister’s being gone. The prosecutor kept insisting the girls were embroiled in an elaborate fantasy, a day-to-day kind of game that had led to Kennedy’s obsession with Haley.
When the prosecutor had to admit to the judge that they had not found the murder weapon, Everett saw his parents shake with disappointment. Despite assurances from the lawyer that people could testify Haley carried a pocketknife with her at the time, and likely her own knife had been used against her, Everett began to sense the case was getting weaker and weaker as the preliminary hearing went on.
* * *
—
Carter sat up. She breathed deep. She stopped talking and pulled hard on her hair, twisting it around her hand. “My sister was dropping acid every week. She wasn’t sane. She was sick.”
“My pa was a drunk. Yours too. And I can’t stop you from talking about your coke days when you get going about them.”
“What are you saying?”
“A hit of acid didn’t kill Haley. You’re making excuses.”
Carter let go of her hair and it fell around her face. “I can’t make it better, what happened.”
“You’re not her.” He sat up with her. “I know that’s simple, but it’s true.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“You should check your phone,” Everett told her as he shrugged on some clothes and checked his own cell, though no one had called him. “Didn’t you hear it?”
Carter found the phone in her purse. There was only one number, but it had called three times. “Gerry. Shit.”
She’d known her father would call, Everett pointed out, and she said she had but that she just couldn’t stand him—his nervousness and his controlling nature, which canceled each other out, leaving behind an inertia. In their youth he’d been a partner in a small law firm, but after years now of working from home, Gerry Wynn had acquired the habit of running dialogue, she said. Like a toy car that had been wound up and let go, he possessed a tight energy that came from the tiniest mechanism inside him. She didn’t think he knew when he was doing it or what he was saying. She got up off the bed and went into the shower.
“You’ve made a mess of me,” she said as Everett got in with her.
The shower was covered in tiny chocolate-colored tiles and was the same size as the entire bathroom at his mom’s place. Before he stepped into the shower with her, Everett glanced into the mirror and saw, for a second, a shadow of his sister in his own face, something about the way they both held their mouths. As Everett joined Carter he said to her soapy shoulders, “I think I miss her but then I think I barely knew her.”
Haley had had hazel eyes like his, almost green, but he’d turned out dark haired and olive in complexion like their father and she’d always been pink, with their mother’s kinky auburn hair. Occasionally Everett caught himself making a certain face—he didn’t need to see it, would just feel it forming—and he knew it was an expression he’d picked up from his older sister. Other times, the memories seemed to be getting further and further away, in part because he was older now than she’d ever be, yet in his mind she was still somehow older and more knowledgeable. Everett wondered if she would dress like Carter now, the way she’d always tried to when she was a teenager.