It was always more than an hour, sometimes several, before she appeared on the other side of the window, pushing it back up and tumbling in on top of me. All businesslike in the leaving, my sister was usually sloppy and sentimental, smelling of beer and sweet smoke, upon her return. She was often so sleepy she didn’t even want to go back to her own room, instead just pushing her way under my blankets, shoes still on, makeup smearing my pillowcases. Sometimes she was crying, but she would never tell me why. Instead she’d just fall asleep beside me, and I’d doze in fits and spells before shaking her awake as the sun was rising and pushing her back to her own room, so she wouldn’t be discovered. Then I’d crawl back into bed, smelling her all around me, and tell myself that next time, I would lock that window. But I never did.
By the time we moved to Wildflower Ridge, Caroline was in college. She was still going out all the time, sometimes way late, but my parents had given up trying to stop her. Instead, in exchange for her living at home while she attended the local university and waited tables at the country club, they required only that she keep her GPA above a 3.0 and make her entrances and exits as quietly as possible. She didn’t need to use my window, which was a good thing, because in the new house there was not a tree nearby and the drop was a lot farther.
After my dad died, she sometimes didn’t come home at all. My mind had raced with awful possibilities, picturing her dead on the highway, but the truth was actually much more innocuous. By then, she’d already fallen hard for Wally from Raleigh, the once-divorced up-and-coming lawyer ten years her senior she’d been seeing for awhile. She’d kept him, like so much else, secret from our parents, but after the funeral things got more serious, and before long, he asked her to marry him. All of this took longer than it sounds, summing it up. But at the time it seemed fast, really fast. One day Caroline was tumbling in my window; the next I was standing at the front of a church, all too aware of my uncle Mike walking her down the aisle toward Wally.
People made their comments, of course, about Caroline just needing a father figure, and how she was too young, getting married right after graduation. But she adored Wally, anyone could see that, and the quick nature of the wedding planning made it that much more of a happy distraction for all of us that spring. Plus, and best of all, their shared conviction that this had to be the Best Wedding Ever finally gave Caroline and my mother a solid common ground, and they’d gotten along pretty well ever since.
So after all that rebellion in her teens, my sister turned out to be surprisingly efficient, bagging a college diploma and a husband all within the same month. Now, as Mrs. Wally Thurber, she lived in Atlanta, in a big house on a cul-de-sac where you could hear a highway roaring twenty-four hours a day. It was climate controlled, with a top-of-the-line thermostat system. She never had to open a window for anything.
As for me, I wasn’t much for sneaking out, first because I was a jock and always had early practice, and then because Jason and I just didn’t do stuff like that. I could only imagine how he’d react if I asked him to pick me up at midnight at the stop sign. Why? he’d say. Nothing would be open, I have yoga in the morning, God, Macy, honestly. And so on. He’d be right, of course. The sneaking out, the partying, all those long nights doing God-knows-what, were Caroline things. She’d taken them with her when she left, and there was no place for them here now. At least in my mind.
“Macy,” she’d say whenever she called and found me home on a Friday night, “what are you doing? Why aren’t you out?” When I’d tell her I was studying, or doing some work for school, she’d exhale so loudly I’d have to hold the phone away from my ear. “You’re young! Go out and live, for God sakes! There’s time for all that later!”
My sister, unlike most of her new friends in the garden club and Junior League, did not gloss over her wild past, maintaining instead that it had been crucial to her development as a person. In her view, my own development in this area was entirely too slow-going, if not completely arrested.
“I’m fine,” I’d tell her, like I always did.
“I know you are, that’s the problem. You’re a teenager, Macy,” she’d say, as if I weren’t aware of this or something. “You’re supposed to be hormonal and crazy and emotional and wild. This is the best time of your life! You should be living it!”
So I’d swear that I was going out the next night, and she’d tell me she loved me, and then I’d hang up and go back to my SAT book, or my ironing, or the paper that wasn’t due for another two weeks. Or sometimes I’d crawl out onto the roof and remember her wild days and wonder if I really was missing something. Probably not.
But the roof was still a nice sitting spot, at any rate. Even if my adventures in the outside world, my God-knows-what, started and ended there.
Work, despite my mother’s assurances, did not improve. In fact, I’d come to realize that the cold treatment I’d received initially was actually Bethany and Amanda being nice. Now they hardly spoke to me at all, while keeping me as idle as possible.
By Friday, I’d had enough silence to last a lifetime. Which was too bad for me, because my mother was down at the coast for a weekend developer meet-and-greet conference. I had the entire house, every silent inch of it, to myself for two full days.
She’d invited me to come along, offering the opportunity to lie on the beach or by the pool, all that fun summer beach stuff. But we both knew I’d say no, and I did. It was just one more thing that reminded me of my dad.