Chapter Five

LARA

I don’t know how much more of this I can deal with. I want to get out of the living room, I want to leave the house altogether, actually, but I know I have to be mature and handle the situation. I have to do what’s right.

“I can see if I can move my schedule around too,” Ethan says in a quiet voice, and I nod. At least, I think, we’re both trying to accommodate this incredible mess that Alexis’ death has made in our lives.

“I guess we can figure out a way to do things. Me taking a couple of days a week off, you having her maybe one day during the workweek and on weekends, something like that,” I say.

Dad comes into the living room and if I didn’t know better I would never have suspected that only about an hour before he’d been begging me to take the issue to family court and sue for full custody of my niece. He’s smiling as much as he’s capable of, telling us that he reheated some of the lasagna and the big, honey-glazed ham that the Jeffersons dropped off, along with the Giuseppes’ casserole, that there’s plenty to eat.

“It’ll be good to all be together another couple of days,” Dad says, sitting down with a beer he brought with him from the kitchen. More than anything I’d like to grab a glass or two of wine. I’m definitely feeling the strain of having to actually interact with Ethan, but I know I need to keep my mind sharp, even if it makes everything more painful.

We start talking about the next few days. I have to get through this, for Riley and for myself. I volunteer to help Ethan come up with child care options back in the town that he and Alexis moved to, and Dad suggests that he or Ethan’s parents can take Riley a couple of days during the week, if neither Ethan or I can cover things. I go along with it, but I feel like there’s some kind of risk in Dad having too much time watching Riley by himself. He has only been on his own for a few months and I am sure the death of Mom aged him.

After a while though, I just want to get a hot bath and forget about everything that’s happened in the past week. One thing I missed about my parents’ house in the time I was estranged was the bathtub my parents had had installed in the bathroom that Alexis and I shared growing up. It was huge, deep and wide, big enough, I used to imagine, for two people to enjoy it at the same time.

“I’m going to head up and take a bath, I think,” I say, getting up from the couch. I take my plate and Dad’s plate into the kitchen and rinse them off. I’m sure that by the time I get back downstairs, after my bath, Dad will have done his part of the old-fashioned kitchen chores, putting the leftovers away, and I’ll have the actual dishes to do. Fortunately, when Mom started getting sick, he had a dishwasher installed, so at least it won’t be that much trouble.

I carry my suitcase upstairs to my old room and look around. The few times I’ve been back in town, I’ve stayed in hotels. The idea of having to be under the same roof as my sister for any period of time longer than a few hours was just absolutely intolerable to me.

I grab a towel out of the linen closet and start to the bathroom, but I can’t help stopping just outside my sister’s room, listening intently for any sign that Riley might be awake. Almost against my will, even as I’m standing there, I find myself thinking about all the things that came up between Alexis and me that led to me cutting her out completely.

We’d been so close when we were growing up. According to my mom, Alexis had been so happy to have a little sister, so overjoyed to meet me, and then she’d been a good playmate as soon as I was able to walk. Apparently my first word was “Lex,” my baby nickname for her.

By the time we were both in school, we were different enough that there was never a real competition between us. I was the one teachers always considered serious and studious, and Alexis was the one who made friends wherever she went, who did well enough in class to hold a 3.0 average but was never really interested in doing better.

I should have known there would be an issue when Ethan and I were dating in high school. I still don’t know, to this day, why I was so attracted to him right from the start. In freshman year, he tried out for a play I was working on with the theater club as a joke, and then just kind of stuck around. While I helped the upperclassmen designing and building sets, he would bother the hell out of me, teasing me relentlessly. He should have been the last guy I ever chose to date. He skipped classes regularly, he’d been suspended from school more than once in freshman year alone.

But I had to admit he was fun. And when one of the upperclassmen in theater club tried to take credit for something I’d come up with, Ethan stuck up for me, proving to the teacher-sponsor that it had been my idea. So, when he’d asked me out to the homecoming dance, I’d said yes.

And when Alexis had met him the night of the dance, she’d flirted with him. At the time I just rolled my eyes and Ethan was polite to her. I never thought that I needed to keep an eye on either of them. If I remember correctly, the following week Alexis started hanging out with another boy, so she was just a born flirt.

I shake my head and step away from Alexis’ room, forcing myself to go to the bathroom, to take the bath I promised myself. Ethan never ever did anything to show that he was even remotely interested in Alexis while we dated all through high school. He practically ignored her. That was part of why it had come as such a shock that he’d hooked up with her years later.

I head into the bathroom, trying to push any thought of Ethan out of my mind. Seeing him again, without my sister at his side, had thrown me into a tailspin. I need to get my bearings. He’s actually looking really good, some quiet little voice in my head points out, but even thinking about him that way turns my stomach. How can I think the guy who broke my heart is looking good? Especially when he’s in mourning for my sister? It’s wrong, I’m obviously just under too much stress, reacting to the news that my sister wanted me to take care of her daughter if she died.

I turn on the water and close the door and start taking off my clothes, intent on putting Ethan, as well as the situation with raising Riley together, out of my mind for at least an hour.