Names My Sisters Call Me Read online

I remained outside in the thick summer evening. Verena forbade me to watch her act when it was, as she put it, in the vegetable-tossing stage. As she was still trying out new material, my job was to stand outside and tell her later if I could hear the crowd (such as it was, in Scruffy’s) respond to her few minutes at the mike.

  I stood there, with the traffic moving up and down the street in front of me, and let my confusion take full control of me.

  How could I have nearly kissed him? Or—to be more precise—stood there so passively while he nearly kissed me? How could I still be attracted to him when he’d hurt me so badly?

  Verena didn’t think it had ever been love, but I knew better. Didn’t I?

  And how could any of this be happening, when I was engaged to marry Lucas?

  Engaged, a little voice whispered inside me, but not exactly thrilled about it. Not unleashing your inner Bride-zilla and rolling with it. Avoiding trips to the bridal shop and freaking out about the very idea of setting a date. Not the most excited bride-to-be, are you?

  I felt like there were two of me, the way I’d felt ever since the day that Lucas had proposed. One of them was the ring-wearing, happy fiancée. Sometimes I accessed her on those venue-scouting missions with Mom. And she seemed to surface most when Lucas and I were alone. When I forgot about the things I hadn’t told him—of which there were now more, and worse—and simply basked in him.

  But there was still the old me in there, lurking around, and I was beginning to realize she was a serious problem. She didn’t like the word wife, for one thing. She wasn’t sure she wanted to become one. And she had twenty-eight years of mostly unrequited feelings for Matt Cheney to contend with.

  Calling it a problem seemed to dramatically understate the issue, I thought then, in a panic. Maybe there weren’t two of me, even in a metaphoric sense. Could it be that I didn’t really want to marry Lucas? Was that why Matt Cheney still had so much power over me?

  I hated even thinking it.

  “Hi,” said the tiny, murderous-looking bald man directly beneath my elbow.

  “Hi,” I said, startled. I hoped he hadn’t seen me jump. I couldn’t have been further away in my own head.

  “I believe in love,” he told me, every line on his face tense, his brows tight together. He reached over and held onto my wrist, as if in punctuation. “Love is pain. Your friend didn’t get that, but I do.”

  “Well,” I said. Still very politely. Because what else was there to say? And also, he was still holding my arm. “Thanks for your support.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Raine didn’t call me to let me know she’d received my message-via-Matt. Instead, she showed up at our door the next afternoon.

  “Surprise!” she singsonged, sashaying past me when I opened the door. She was wearing a selection of lightweight, bright and patterned scarves—several tied together in a complicated series of knots taking the place of a shirt, one as a headband, and another that sort of fluttered behind her like a mauve train. I followed her into my living room, inhaling the incense-y scent that she left in her wake. I had the uncharitable thought that she had shown up like this as payback. Had I known she was coming, I might have washed the dishes in the sink or made sure the litterbox was clean. I might even have taken a shower. Before she arrived, doing so had seemed like an unnecessary break from the guilt trip I was giving myself all morning.

  Raine looked around the living room. I remembered the way I’d looked for evidence of her in her living room in San Francisco, and looked around myself. Our apartment was a not-very-eclectic mix of IKEA, my mom’s attic, and some of Lucas’s mother’s shabby chic castoffs for good measure. There were various concert playbills that I’d framed to keep track of some of the shows I’d performed in that I found most memorable. There was a print of a theatrical production of Don Quixote we felt we had to buy to adorn our brand-new apartment—the one we were finally sharing, in defiance of Norah’s edict against premarital cohabitation.

  And now Raine was here to judge what I’d become.

  I was being silly, I told myself. Despite my hate-a-thon, she was only here to say hello. To hang out and have more sister time, the way we had in California.

  I would have found this easier to believe if she hadn’t had that strange, challenging look on her face.

  “This is a really cute place,” Raine said now. “I always forget these old East Coast apartments can have so many different nooks and crannies.”

  By this, I was almost positive, she meant that our place was small, with numerous dark corners. I tried to remind myself that I would not exactly be comfortable in Raine’s rundown, collegiate-feeling community house out in California, so why should I expect her to be comfortable in my house here? It wasn’t as if I thought we were the same person.

  But, “We like it” was all I said.

  I wished Lucas wasn’t so busy, that he hadn’t gotten that new client last week, which meant he was lost somewhere in his office, designing logic trees and mapping out code for a brand-new security job. And then I felt incredibly guilty that I thought I deserved to be rescued by Lucas when I repaid him by almost kissing Matt Cheney.

  I was, I realized, a gigantic asshole.

  “I’m sorry I missed you yesterday,” Raine said, settling herself in the middle of the couch. Her scarves fluttered about her and then came to rest against her sides, undulating slightly as she breathed. She looked as boneless as one of the cats—both of whom had disappeared the moment Raine crossed the threshold.

  “It was pointed out to me that I should have called first,” I said, waving her apology away. “And it’s really an easy train ride, anyway.” I deliberately chose not to think of Verena as I said that, and her disbelief that I had traveled so far for so little reason.

  “Matt said you seemed mad that he was there,” Raine said. I felt the back of my neck tingle, and realized I recognized the edge in her voice. She usually used it on Norah. “I thought I told you he was coming. I thought you were okay with it. He thought everything was cool between you two.”

  Which, of course, meant that he and Raine had discussed it.

  “Oh, well, sure,” I stammered, because my mind was racing. What had he told her? Did she know? About what had happened six years ago? About what had happened yesterday? “I mean, of course it’s—”

  I broke off and forced myself to take a breath before continuing.

  “I wasn’t mad that he was there,” I told her.

  “I didn’t think you would be,” she said. “Matt can be such a drama queen.” She crooked a brow at me, daring me to disagree.

  “Yeah,” I agreed on cue, more because I wanted to agree with Raine than because I had ever given thought to Matt Cheney’s drama queeniness.

  I had the oddest sensation that Raine had confused me with Norah. This is who Norah sees, I thought. This prickly, challenging, upsetting person. But that didn’t make any sense.

  Raine looked over, and I watched her study my cello and music stand. They stood together in the bay window, with my music spread out across the window seat only the cats used, all of it arranged like a perfect picture. I had often taken that picture, in fact, when, like now, sunshine poured in the window and lit up my practice space. It looked like the perfect place to create music. I felt my hand twitch, as if reaching for a note.

  “So do you really practice each day?” Raine asked. “Like when you were a kid?”

  Naturally, this question made me look down at my hands, neither of which had touched the cello in weeks. Except for today, and that was to dust it. Some kind of professional I was this summer.

  “Normally I do,” I said, but then felt compelled to be honest. “During the season, definitely. I have to practice. They expect us to come to rehearsal with the piece already learned.”

  Raine shook her head as if I were a foreign, alien creature.

  “I really don’t know how you do it,” she said, laughing slightly.

  “Want me to give you a cello le
sson?” It came to me out of nowhere, and I thought it was maybe the best idea I’d ever had. I could share the cello with Raine, and finally someone in my family would understand why it had taken over my whole life. I didn’t know why it had never occurred to me before. Raine, obviously, was the most likely person to understand why it moved me so much—she was an artist, too.

  “I couldn’t,” Raine said after a moment, looking from me to the cello and then back. She made a sad face. “I’m tone deaf.”

  “Oh.” It kind of hurt that she hadn’t jumped at the offer. Or even pretended to be interested. “You don’t actually have to play anything hard. It would be fun!”

  “Maybe some other time,” Raine said. She sat forward. “I want to know about you, Courtney. Not your cello.”

  It was my turn to laugh. Raine gave me a quizzical look.

  “They’re kind of the same thing,” I pointed out. “Two great tastes that taste great together. You can’t have one without the other, you know?”

  Raine clasped her hands together in front of her knees. Naturally, this made her scarves tremble.

  “Do you still play your own music?” she asked.

  “My own?” I echoed. I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “You wrote a whole musical number for your senior year, I thought,” Raine said. She frowned. “Am I making that up?”

  I remembered that part of my senior project at the conservatory then, and laughed again.

  “My God,” I said. I shook my head. “I haven’t thought about that piece in years. Which is a good thing. It was horrible.”

  “I remember being impressed,” Raine said sternly, as if she’d caught me putting myself down.

  “I’m sure it was fine for what it was,” I said with a shrug.

  “Courtney.” She looked at me. “It was good.”

  Clearly, she thought I was being unnecessarily humble. I didn’t know how to handle that, because I was speaking the simple truth. After all, I played good music all the time. I could tell the difference.

  “I’m glad you thought so,” I said, although what I really was, if I thought about it, was surprised she could even remember it. “But really, it was very amateurish. I’d be embarrassed if anyone at the Symphony got a hold of it.”

  Raine watched me. Closely enough that I began to feel vaguely uncomfortable. And, for some reason, overly aware of my naked feet on the smooth wood floor. I clenched my toes, then relaxed them.

  “So you like it there,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said warily. There was something in her tone that made me feel I shouldn’t admit that. “It’s an honor to be a part of an orchestra with such a great history. And I like the fact that I get to give back to the arts community here in Philly. It was what saved me when I was a kid.”

  I immediately wished I hadn’t said that out loud, to someone who might not realize that I’d needed to be saved back when I was a kid. But she didn’t seem to have any kind of emotional reaction. She just studied my face for a moment before speaking.

  “Don’t you get bored?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s all the same old music, isn’t it?” Raine asked. Her voice was sweet. The way it was when she told Norah that she was controlling. “Mozart, Bach, Beethoven. Doesn’t it get old? All those dead white guys.”

  I stared at her for a long moment. The noontime sun was flooding in through the bay window, illuminating her breathtakingly pretty face and the mild curiosity written across it. I felt as if she’d punched me hard enough to steal my breath.

  “The thing is,” Lucas said from behind Raine, walking across the living room, “those dead white guys wrote some fucking amazing music. There’s a reason we have whole radio stations dedicated to them centuries later. They were geniuses.”

  I hadn’t even seen him back there, I’d been too focused on Raine.

  “Plus,” I said, because some part of me recognized that I didn’t deserve his White Knight routine at the moment, “it’s all about interpreting the music. Every time you play a note, it’s different. The way you play it changes the interpretation. And of course, what the conductor wants changes things, too. Some conductors want to be more interpretive, some want to be traditional, it all depends.”

  I looked over at Lucas, who smiled at me. Which made me feel like the worst person who had ever lived. Then I looked back at Raine, who was nodding.

  “That sounds great,” she said, but I got the same feeling I had back in Berkeley. That she wanted more for me than interpreting the work of long dead men. That she thought my doing so was disappointing, somehow, and meant that I wasn’t living up to my potential. I looked down.

  “I just poked my head out to say hello,” Lucas said then, widening his stance as he stood there looking down at us. “I’m sorry I can’t hang out, Raine, but I have way too much work to do. I had a couple of projects explode over the past few days.”

  “That’s no problem,” Raine said, rising to her feet. She seemed to move upward from her hips, without involving any other body part. It made her scarves writhe about her body like she was some kind of snake charmer.

  Then she smiled at Lucas as she stood there.

  “Everybody loves a working man,” she drawled at him, and gave him a look I could only describe as saucy.

  Lucas and I watched her as she swayed her way out of the room and then down the hall toward the bathroom. The bathroom door shut behind her, and Lucas turned slowly around to look at me.

  “Are you okay?” he asked me, his voice soft. It was that softness, that caring, that I couldn’t bear.

  “What? Of course,” I said. A tad aggressively. “I’m great.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Not everybody gets classical music,” I told him with some heat. “It just doesn’t speak to everybody. It’s not a big deal.”

  “Okay,” he said. He leaned over and kissed me. But I couldn’t look at him. For so many reasons. “I’ll be in my office if you need me.”

  It was evening by the time I left Raine in the hubbub of 30th Street Station, where she planned to wander in and out of the shops for a while as she waited for her train back out to Mom’s house. I took a Blue Line train to 13th and Market and then walked the rest of the way back home, feeling lower with every step I took. Raine and I had had a tense lunch, during which she had psychoanalyzed Norah to such a degree that it felt a good deal more like a character assassination. She had been dismissive of our mother and talked at length about how much she hated our hometown and everyone in it. And she’d done it all while watching me with that hard gleam in her eyes, like I was a part of the problem.

  I would have been more upset about it, but I was too busy being preoccupied with what had happened in my living room. What she’d said. The fact was, it had never occurred to me, at age ten, to do anything other than play what I was taught. I’d loved the mellow beauty of the notes the cello sung; the way the melodies sounded threaded through with melancholy when played on a cello. I hadn’t been capable of articulating that then, of course. I’d simply known that the cello spoke to me. I poured all my love and attention into the instrument, and it had never occurred to me to step back and critically assess the kind of music I played. I was just happy to be playing.

  As time went on, I’d experimented here and there with other forms of musical expression. I’d played for a while with a few friends at the conservatory in a kind of jazz group. I loved the cello-based rock of Rasputina, and I listened to Zoe Keating’s mysterious and breathtaking solo cello albums as often as I listened to Yo-Yo Ma or Pablo Casals play Bach. I’d learned how to play the theme song to the TV show Angel because I thought it was so pretty and so mournful, and because whenever I played it in the middle of my practice sessions, it would bring Lucas out of his office and make us both laugh.

  But the bulk of the music I played was, as Raine had pointed out, dead white men. Whatever I might try on the side, I always returned to
the same basic repertoire. And after all these years of playing the same pieces again and again, I still loved them. I loved moving through musical eras, from the splendor of Baroque to the clarity of Classicism, and then into the imagination of Romanticism. Vivaldi to Mozart to Debussy. There were newer composers I suspected Raine had never heard of, like Samuel Barber or Béla Bartók. Living composers like Philip Glass. Making me and my cello a part of an ongoing musical conversation, one that never ended, but played again and again across the ages.

  Was this failing, somehow, to live up to my potential? I turned this question over and over in my head as I turned onto our street. Classical music certainly wasn’t the hippest or coolest thing in the world. It was about as traditional as it was possible to get. I didn’t think of myself as traditional—I couldn’t even bring myself to plan my own wedding.

  Why was it, I wondered, that I felt so ordinary and unfulfilled whenever I was around Raine? Was this what Norah had warned me about? That she would judge my life and find it wanting? The trouble was, I wasn’t sure whether or not Raine was judging me, but I sure was.

  Was it so wrong that deep down, I’d wanted Raine to be impressed with what I’d become in her absence? That I’d wanted her to see me as more of an equal and less of a child?

  The fact that she didn’t seem to notice any change in me made me worry that I hadn’t made any changes at all. It was as if I were still twenty-two as far as Raine was concerned. It made me think that maybe she was right, and I still was.

  I let myself into the apartment and found Lucas stretched out on the couch, with a cat curled up under each arm. He was watching his favorite channel: the channel guide. He liked to know the sheer number of programs he could, at any moment, be watching.

  I dropped my keys in the bowl near the phone, and then wandered over to collapse next to him. The little girl cat meowed a protest or a greeting; it sounded very much the same either way.

  “Did you have fun?” Lucas asked.

  “It was okay,” I said, kicking off my shoes. I slumped back against the couch. Not used to having distance between us, it didn’t occur to me to keep myself from confiding in him. “Did it ever occur to you that I might not be living up to my potential?”