Too Good to Be True

I sat back, swallowed and glanced out the window, taking a few deep breaths, trying not to hyperventilate. The cop gave me a moment, and I stroked Angus’s rough fur, making my doggy croon with joy. Now that I thought of it, perhaps whacking the burglar wasn’t quite…necessary. It occurred to me that he said “Hi.” I thought he did, anyway. He said hi. Do burglars usually greet their victims? Hi. I’d like to rob your house. Does that work for you?

“You okay?” the cop asked. I nodded. “Did he hurt you? Threaten you?” I shook my head. “Why did you open the door, miss? That wasn’t a smart thing to do.” He frowned disapprovingly.

“Uh, well, I thought it was you guys. I saw your car. And, no, he didn’t hurt me. He just…” said hi. “He looked, um …suspicious? Sort of? You know, he was creeping around that house, that’s all. Creeping and looking, sort of peeking? And no one lives there. No one’s lived over there since I’ve lived over here. And I didn’t actually mean to hit him.”

Well, didn’t I sound smart!

The cop gave me a dubious look and wrote a few things in his little black notebook. “Have you been drinking, ma’am?” he asked.

“A little bit,” I answered guiltily. “I didn’t drive, of course. I was at a wedding. My cousin. She’s not very nice.

Anyway, I had a cocktail. A gin and tonic. Well, really more like two and a half. Possibly three?”

The cop flipped his notebook closed and sighed.

“Butch?” The second officer stuck his head in the door. “We have a problem.”

“Did he run?” I blurted. “Did he escape?”

The second cop gave me a pitying look. “No, ma’am, he’s sitting on your steps. We’ve got him cuffed, nothing for you to worry about. Butch, could you come out here a second?”

Butch left, his gun catching the light. Clutching Angus to me, I tiptoed to the living room window and pushed back the curtain (blue raw silk, very pretty). There was the burglar, still sitting on my front steps, his back to me, as Officer Butch and his partner conferred.

Now that I wasn’t in mortal fear, I took a good look at him. Bed-heady brown hair, kind of appealing, really. Broad shoulders…it was a good thing I didn’t get into a scuffle with him. Well, into more of a scuffle, I supposed. Burly arms, from the look of the way the fabric strained against his biceps. Then again, it could just be the pose forced on him by having his hands cuffed behind his back.

As if sensing my presence, the burglar turned toward me. I leaped back from the window, wincing. His eye was already swollen shut. Dang it. I hadn’t planned on hurting him. I hadn’t planned anything, really…just acted in the moment, I guess.

Officer Butch came back inside.

“Does he need some ice?” I whispered.

“He’ll be fine, ma’am. He says he’s staying next door, but we’re gonna take him to the station and verify his story.

Can you give me your contact information?”

“Sure,” I answered, reciting my phone number. Then the cop’s words sank in. Staying next door.

Which meant I just clubbed my new neighbor.

CHAPTER THREE

THE FIRST THING I DID UPON awakening was roll out of bed and squint through my hangover at the house next door.

All was quiet. No sign of life. Guilt throbbed in time with my pounding head as I recalled the stunned look on the burglar’s—or the not-burglar’s—face. I’d have to call the police station and see what had happened. Maybe I should alert my dad, who was a lawyer. Granted, Dad handled tax law, but still. Margaret was a criminal defense lawyer. She might be a better bet.

Dang it. I wished I hadn’t hit the guy. Well. Accidents happen. He was skulking around a house at midnight, right?

What did he expect? That I’d invite him in for a coffee? Besides, maybe he was lying. Maybe “staying next door”

was just his cover story. Maybe I’d just done a community service. Still, clubbing people was new to me. I hoped the guy wasn’t too hurt. Or mad.

The sight of my dress, which I hadn’t hung up in my furor last night, reminded me of Kitty’s wedding. Of Andrew and Natalie, together. Of Wyatt, my new imaginary boyfriend. I smiled. Another fake boyfriend. I’d done it again.

You may have gotten the impression that Natalie was…well, not spoiled, but protected. You’d be right. She was universally adored by our parents, by Margs, who didn’t give her love easily and, yes, even by Mémé. But especially by me. In fact, my very first clear memory in life was of Natalie. It was my fourth birthday, and Mémé was smoking a ciggie in our kitchen, ostensibly watching us while my cake baked in the oven, the warm smell of vanilla mingling not unpleasantly with her Kool Lights.

The kitchen of my childhood seemed to be an enormous place full of wonderful, unexpected treasures, but my favorite spot was the pantry, a long, dark closet with floor-to-ceiling shelves. Often would I go in and close the door behind me, eating chocolate chips from the bag in delicious silence. It was like a little house unto itself, complete with bottles of seltzer water and dog food. Marny, our cocker spaniel, would come in with me, wagging her little stump of a tail as I fed her kibbles, eating one myself once in a while. Sometimes Mom would open the door and yelp, startled to find me there, curled up next to the mixer with the dog. It always felt so safe in there.

At any rate, on my fourth birthday, Mémé was smoking, I was lurking in the pantry with Marny, sharing a box of Cheerios, when I heard the back door open. In came Mom and Dad. There was a flurry of activity…Mommy had been away for a few days, and then I heard her call my name.

“Gracie, where are you! Happy birthday, honey! We have someone who wants to meet you!”

“Where’s the birthday girl?” boomed Dad. “Doesn’t she want her presents?”

Suddenly aware of how much I missed my mother, I bolted from the cabinet, past Mémé’s skinny, vein-bumpy legs, and charged toward my mother, who was sitting at the kitchen table, still in her coat. She was holding a baby wrapped in a soft pink blanket.

“My birthday present!” I cried in delight.

Eventually, the grown-ups explained to me that the baby wasn’t just for me, but for Margaret and everyone else, too. My present was, in fact, a stuffed animal, a dog. (Later that day, according to family lore, I put the stuffed dog in the baby’s crib, delighting my parents with my generosity.) But I never got over the feeling that Natalie Rose was mine, certainly much more than she was Margaret’s, a feeling that Margaret, who was seven at the time and horribly sophisticated, nurtured in order to get out of her sisterly responsibilities. “Grace, your baby needs you,”

she’d call when Mom asked for help spooning yogurt into Nat’s mouth or changing a poopy diaper. I didn’t mind. I loved being the special sister, the big sister after four long years of being bossed around or ignored by Margaret. My birthday became more about Natalie and me, our beginning, than the day I was born. No, now my birthday was much more important. The day I got Natalie.

Natalie did not fail to delight. A stunning baby, she became more beautiful as she grew, her hair silky and blond, her eyes a startling sky-blue, cheeks as soft as tulip petals, eyelashes so long they touched her silken eyebrows.

Her first word was Gissy, which we all knew was her attempt to say my name.

As she grew, she looked up to me. Margaret, for all her gruffness and disdain, was a good sister, but more of the type to take you aside and explain how to get out of trouble or why you should leave her stuff alone. For playing, for cuddling, for company, Nat turned to me, and I was more than willing. At age four, she spent hours putting barrettes in my kinky curls, wishing aloud that her own blond waterfall of smoothness was, in her words “a beautiful brown cloud.” In kindergarten, she brought me in for show-and-tell, and on Special Person’s Day, you know who was at her side. When she needed help in spelling, I took over for Mom or Dad, making up silly sentences to keep things fun. During her ballet recitals, her eyes sought me out in the audience, where I’d be beaming back at her. I called her Nattie Bumppo after the hero of The Deerslayer, pointing to her name in the book to show her how famous she was.

Thus went our childhood—Natalie perfect, me adoring, Margs gruff and a little above it all. Then, when Natalie was seventeen and I was in my junior year at William & Mary, I got a call from home. Natalie had been feeling crummy for a day or so. She was not one to complain, so when she finally admitted that her stomach hurt pretty badly, Mom called the doctor. Before they could get to the office, Nat’s appendix ruptured. The resulting appendectomy was messy, since infected fluid had spread throughout her abdomen, and she came down with peritonitis. She spiked a fever. It didn’t come down.

I was in my dorm room when Mom called me, nine hours away by car. “Get home as fast as you can, Grace,” she ordered tightly. Nat had been moved to the ICU, and things weren’t looking good.

My memories of that trip back home alternated between horribly vivid and completely blank. A professor drove me to Richmond International Airport. I don’t remember which professor, but I can see the dusty dashboard of his car as clearly as if I were sitting in that hot vinyl front seat right now, the crack in the windshield that flowed lazily down from its source like the Mississippi bisecting the United States. I remember weeping in the plastic seat in front of my gate, my fists clenched as the airplane crept with agonizing slowness toward the terminal. I remember my friend Julian’s face at the airport, his eyes wide with fear and compassion. My mother, swaying on her feet outside Natalie’s cubicle in the hospital, my father, gray-faced and silent, Margaret tight and hunched in the corner near the curtain that separated Natalie from the next patient.

And I remember Natalie, lying in a bed, obscured by tubes and blankets, looking so small and alone that my heart cracked in half. I took her hand and kissed it, my tears falling on the hospital sheets. “I’m here, Nattie Bumppo,” I whispered. “I’m here.” She was too weak to answer, too sick even to open her eyes.

Outside, the doctor spoke in a somber murmur to my parents. “…Abscess…bacteria…kidney function…white count…not good.”

“Jesus God in heaven,” Margaret whispered in the corner. “Oh, shit, Grace.” Our eyes met in bleak horror at the possibility we couldn’t imagine. Our golden Natalie, the sweetest, kindest, loveliest girl in the world, dying.

The hours ticked past. Coffee cups came and went, Natalie’s IVs were changed, her wound checked. A day crawled by. She didn’t wake up. A night. Another day. She got worse. We were only allowed in for a few minutes at a time, sent off to a grim waiting room full of old magazines and bland, nubby furniture, the fluorescent lights sparing no detail of the fear on our faces.

On day four, a nurse burst into the room. “Natalie Emerson’s family, come now!” she ordered.

“Oh, Jesus,” my mother said, her face white as chalk. She staggered, my father caught her and half dragged her down the hall. Terrified that our sister was slipping away, Margaret and I ran ahead of our parents. It seemed to take a year to get down that hall—every step, every slap of my sneakers, every breath was punctuated with my desperate prayer. Please. Please. Not Natalie. Please.

I got there first. My baby sister, my birthday present, was awake, looking at us for the first time in days, smiling weakly. Margaret careened in behind me.

“Natalie!” she exploded in typical fashion. “Jesus Christ hanging on the cross, we thought you were dead!” She wheeled around and charged out to smite the nurse who’d taken a decade off of each our lives.

“Nattie,” I whispered. She held out her hand to me, and you can bet that I promised then and there to make sure God knew how grateful I was to have her back.