In their early twenties when their barely seventeen-year-old brother became a parent, neither of my sisters envied me the title. But Cassie volunteered to take Cara home overnight once a week, leaving me free to go out like a normal teenager, and she and our parents began taking turns watching her once I was getting film roles regularly.
University life at Columbia was immediately less intimate than my small preparatory high school, and I could easily lose myself amongst the undergrad population. Living uptown with my parents rather than on campus negated anyone’s expectation to go home with me for the night. Whenever Cassie had Cara, I stayed over in dorms or apartments of friends who knew little about me, or girls who never knew more than my name and major, and sometimes not even that much.
“What are you thinking about?” Emma asks, probably anxious over meeting my sister while I’m worrying too soon over whether or not she can deal with my parental status.
“Hmm? Oh. Nothing important.” I untangle my hand from hers and slide my arm behind her, pulling her to my side. “FYI, Cassie already likes you.” Her expression becomes more alarmed rather than less. Uh-oh. “Er, I talked to her about you while we were filming.” Better not to disclose that it was more than once, I think.
“What was there for her to like about me? Wouldn’t she have been outraged on your behalf?”
I laugh. She’ll understand when she meets Cassie. “No, she blamed ninety percent of the end result on me and the other ten percent on him.”
“Huh,” Emma says, and I can’t make any answer to that other than to lean down and kiss her.
“Here’s our stop,” I say once I break regretfully from her lips, having managed to distract her for a few minutes. There are reasons I’m usually not impetuous, and one of them has to do with sucking at it. The only thing I had in mind when we got on the subway was warmth and that amazing view—one that can only be topped by the view on the way back. Visiting Cassie was full-fledged spontaneity.
Now that I’m thinking more clearly, dragging Emma to meet my sister less than two hours after declaring ourselves might be well past spontaneous and well on the way to unreasonable. Shit.
*** *** ***
Emma
I can’t believe Graham is taking me to meet his sister this early on a Saturday morning. Within minutes of emerging onto the street, we’re standing in front of her building, and I reason that at least the anxiety didn’t have time to mount high enough to knock me flat.
Graham pushes a button on the speaker, and right away a woman’s teasing voice says, “Who the hell’s buzzing me at seven o’clock in the morning?”
“Hey, Cas,” Graham says, smiling.
“Graham, you’ve always been a pain in the butt. You know that, right?” The speaker buzzes as the lock clicks on the door.
“So you’ve been saying for twenty years or so,” he answers, pulling open the heavy metal door and ushering me inside a tiny lobby—one wall lined with mailboxes and the other housing a single elevator. When Graham pushes the button, the doors part sluggishly, as though someone is cranking them open by hand. “She’s on the third floor.”
His dark eyes tell me he has ideas in mind for the ascent, but when the doors close behind us, he merely takes my hand, his focus alternating between the ancient checkered floor and the very slowly shifting numbers above the door. As the claustrophobic car finally comes to a stop, he squeezes my hand and gives me one quick kiss.
We step into a five-by-five foot vestibule, and he knocks lightly on one of two doors. Multiple bolts slide, and my stomach drops to my knees just before the door opens to a smiling, female version of Graham, wearing sweats and holding a tiny baby. “Take this,” she says to Graham, handing the baby off in an effortless transfer. She sticks out her hand. “I’m Cassie. You must be Emma.” When I take her hand, she smoothly pulls me into the apartment behind Graham, who heads towards the living space in the center of the roomy loft, talking to the baby in his natural voice, as though it’s a very small man and not an infant.
“Yes,” I manage.
“Graham, I know you want coffee,” Cassie says, heading through the room to the open kitchen on the opposite end. “Emma? Coffee?”
“Sure,” I say, following her after a brief look back at Graham, who flashes me a smile. His dark eyes drink me in while I do the same to him. The sensation is surreal, that no part of him is off-limits to my imagination now—from his full lips to his wide shoulders to the hands cradling the baby in the crook of one arm.
Suddenly this is all moving too quickly, but before I can work up a good panic, my phone vibrates in my front pocket. At my twitch and yelp, Cassie glances back, one brow arched on her pretty, makeup-free face. When I pull the phone from my pocket, my father’s picture smiles up from the display.
“Hi Dad.” I left a note telling him I was meeting Graham in the café.
“Emma, where are you?” He’s not quite frantic, but not calm, either.
“Didn’t you find my note? Under your glasses?”
“Yes. And I’m in the café—where you, by the way, are not.”
Oh. “Um, Graham and I decided to take a walk, and then we got on the subway because it’s a little chilly out… and now we’re in Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn?” he yells, his voice piercing, and Graham and Cassie both glance at my phone and then at each other from opposite ends of the huge space.
“We’re at his sister’s loft,” I smile at her in what I hope is a reassuring manner, “having coffee.”