Chapter Seven Rory

The clock glows 2:24 when I finally toss the book aside and switch off the bedside lamp. I’m still in my dress but too exhausted to change into pajamas, to wash my face, any of it. Instead I slip under the cool, silky covers, everything in a whirl.

Shocking to see myself in ink. On a page. Reduced to a limited number of words that are supposed to convey who I am, what I care about. Whom I care about.

I read it fast—skimmed a lot, especially the second half, as exhaustion began to descend, but I certainly got the gist. In some ways, Ginevra was kind—to me, at least. My alter ego, Laci Starling (leaving the porn-star name aside for now), is bighearted, endearing. As a child, she’s putting on performances, commandeering her older brother to participate in her shows. He, Benedict Starling, is shyer. Brilliant, always embroiled in a science project, bullied by the neighborhood kids. They plucked off his eyeglasses and shoved him into water fountains. They started a rumor that he’d been born with both a vagina and a penis and had to undergo reconstructive surgery. They drew penis signs all over his locker in permanent marker, over which they wrote in huge script Benedick.

Maxie’sTinyOne—the clear real-life inspiration.

In the book, Laci goes to school and locates the bullies, four years older than her, and tells them that if they ever fuck with her brother again, they will have to fuck with her. And to drive the threat home, she pulls out a butcher knife and holds it menacingly an inch from the head bully’s cheek.

The bully says, “I’ll tell the principal.”

And Laci just replaces the knife in the pocket of her overalls, so it’s no longer visible, and says, “Who will believe you? I’m only a puny fourth grader.”

Crazy to think now that I was that steely fourth grader, defending Max’s honor. Actually threatening kids so much older with a knife.

I wonder how I got to be so brave. I suspect it was that we were a unit, the three of us: Max, Papa, and me. Max wasn’t just my brother but like an extension of myself, my arm, my leg. He was always needy, so sensitive. And I was stronger, braver. That’s what Papa told me, like he was confiding a secret, and I wanted to live up to it, to make sure he’d never retract those words. The one time Max confided in Papa a snippet of how the kids were bullying him, and that the principal wasn’t cracking down, Papa lost it. He told us this story about how when he was a kid, ten or eleven, a gang of kids on horses came to attack him with iron bars, screaming at him that he was a dirty Jew. Papa told us how he made a whip out of rabbit skin; how he kept a blade in his bag to defend himself. I remember Max staring at the peeling yellow wallpaper in the kitchen, his body rigid, saying that those Soviet Union–type defenses probably wouldn’t go over well at Ely Middle School.

And I remember how Papa half smiled and said, “No, probably not. We’ll solve this.” But he didn’t say how. Not a single idea. It struck me then that Papa was resigned, a different Papa than the one he described in his youth. When had he given up the fight? When had he realized he couldn’t take on the world? When his mother died? When our mother did? Or maybe when he realized the life he’d fought for was a quiet one, without riches, without even security? Parenting two small children, alone?

I think I understood then that Papa wasn’t going to be able to fix things for Max. A plan formed in my head. And, indeed, those kids had never fucked with Max again. At least not as blatantly as with Maxie’sTinyOne, although they still bullied him in all the soft but pointed ways I was incapable of preventing: picking him last for any team, making him the butt of all their inside jokes.

Anyway, I never told Max or Papa what I’d done.

Now, when Max reads The Cabin on the Lake, he’ll know. I wonder if Max thought it was Papa who’d protected him. Who’d gotten rid of the bullies. No way did he think it was me—his scrawny little sister.

Max always underestimated me.

The book percolates through my mind. The descriptions of Michigan, like they were pulled from my memories, which I suppose they were. But still, Ginevra described the summer morning dew like she’d dug it out of my soul.

I’m still processing all the characters, figuring out who’s who. Most resemblances are obvious. There’s Misha, the brilliant Soviet immigrant dad with Alzheimer’s, who worked long hours as the chef at the local Russian diner, who aspired to greatness, to being a famous violinist, but never quite made it like he hoped. Laci: the actress who returns from LA to the ashes of her old life in Michigan after a scandal torpedoes her career. Her arrival back in Detroit sets off a series of events that leads to a body plunging face down into an icy lake. That’s the opening image of the novel, and the second chapter flashes back a few months prior. The prodigal daughter, Laci, fresh off the plane, running into her old childhood love, Eddie (Nate), at the Russian diner, and reuniting with the brother who has catapulted from a bullied kid into the CEO darling of the biotech world, plastered on the cover of every major magazine. And then there’s the former best friend, Candace, who wants what Laci has. Every last thing.

Caro, obviously. And she got a bit of a smear job. Although I can see how the embezzling allegations might have colored Ginevra’s creativity.

In the end, Candace holds Laci captive in her childhood home in a wintry storm. Fresh drifts smothered branches and the whole world spun into a snow globe, with Laci in its center. One good shake, and it would all be over. No one would miss Laci. No one would find her. The ice consumes.

Ultimately, Candance forces Laci to walk down to the lake, down the dock, like in a pirate movie, threatening to chop, chop, chop Laci into timber with an axe. A clear allusion to my childhood game with Papa—warped. It’s early in the winter; the lake isn’t yet thickly frozen. But Benedict figures out the plan and there’s a struggle atop the dock. In the end, he rescues his sister by plunging the axe into Candace, whereupon she falls face-first into the lake. Then the fragile lake cracks and the icy water engulfs her.

And the villain is, ultimately, the murdered.

Candace. Caro. Whatever.

There’s a lot I’m thinking about now, in the dark, in the train lurching along. So many tidbits for my mind to chew on, to decipher what is moldy truth and what is truth spun off into something different, far enough removed from the kernels I provided so as not to nudge against an old pain point or a treasured memory. The line between truth and fiction seems flimsy and precarious, like walking on a tightrope, with easy slips into the abyss.

Truth: Caro is extravagant; she likes rare, beautiful things.

Truth: Papa is the most optimistic person ever, the most grateful—probably put down to the hardships and traumas he overcame in his youth. When we were kids, he’d spend eons extolling the brilliance of the sunrise, admiring the maple tree out back as its leaves transitioned through the spectrum of crisp to faded orange. Anytime someone asked Papa how he was doing, he’d declare, “Near perfect!” I once asked him why he always used near as a modifier, and he smiled and said because it was good to leave yourself a little gap to reach for.

Truth: Nate has an older brother with Down syndrome.

Truth: Nate isn’t very good with illness or failures or being unhappy—even being around unhappy people. That’s not to say Nate can’t spearhead the fight and assuage the troops and give rousing speeches; he can—anything in the aim of a win. But in the end, if things don’t successfully resolve, all of that exertion will have consumed the last of Nate’s energy reservoirs. In the novel, Eddie broke up with Laci after he bombed the law school entrance exams. Although that’s not a truth—Nate went the international diplomacy route and has aced anything he ever attempted—it does mirror the way Nate broke up with me, in the doldrums of a professional failure, when I was down in the dumps, too.

Truth: When I threw a party in high school and discovered Papa was coming home early, Max declared it Operation Kazuka and helped me gather up the hundreds of red Solo cups and other party detritus so that Papa wouldn’t find out. I don’t even remember telling Ginevra that story, and I don’t think Max would have—we pinkie swore on keeping the terminology secret forever. Anyhow, the full story didn’t make it in, just the resulting phrase. Operation Kazuka, what we said to each other anytime we needed to run a little cover-up. Interesting how Ginevra twisted our reality, made it suit her ends.…

Truth: Both Max and Papa can go from zero to one-eighty in anger. Sometimes the strangest things provoke them—Papa once lost it when a customer criticized his borscht. (It was his mother’s recipe, so his borscht had milk-of-God’s status in our household. I absolutely despise the taste and texture of beets; however I’ve always kept that fact to myself and forced Papa’s borscht down with a radiant smile on my face.)

Lie: I crave the attention. Lie: I try to be the star of every show, sucking the light from everyone else.

Or maybe those are truths—that I am a moth to the limelight. Am I?

Max has accused me of such my whole life, usually in good humor, but ringing of resentment. He’s claimed I divert Papa’s attention, have the tendency of monopolizing all of it.

But something more is bothering me, something I read that doesn’t feel right. I sift my mind, but only grapple at fumes.

What is it? What? Something odd… something that disturbs me… What?

Maybe it’s just that my whole life is bleeding in ink, and I can’t see in the dark, to discern what I’m supposed to do next.

Well, I thrive under pressure—that’s what Papa always used to say proudly. I wonder, though, did he say it because I actually naturally do, or because he needed me to? Because, in our family, one of us three had to be the get-shit-done type. The take-care-of-things person. But Papa was more the let-bills-expire-on-the-counter, let-life-happen-and-it-will-likely-work-out type.

So I became the take-care-of-things one.

What do I do next? What?

Sleep. I could go to sleep. I’ll read it all over again tomorrow in the light of day, and piece together what’s nagging me.

The dark obliges and swallows me whole.