“Women,” he mused seriously. “They’re always too close or too far, eh?”
Bonnie tried to nod in an understanding manner. She had often felt the same about Pavel; but whether he was too close to see her clearly or too far away to notice her as anything other than a boxer, she wasn’t sure. But there were moments, however fleeting, when there was no distance between them at all. She thought of them shadowboxing together, flitting around the ring like twin flames, moving in a secret rhythm only they shared. When they were like that, there was no leader and no follower, no trainer and no student, only their shared breath, the soft shuffle of their feet on the canvas, the whisper of air around their swinging limbs, the feeling, unspoken but known by both, that they were a single body split in two, dancing around itself. Bonnie missed that feeling more than anything on earth, except her sister.
After her last fight, Bonnie had not spoken to Pavel again. She had changed her phone number and left for L.A. directly after the funeral. He had no way of reaching her; she didn’t even know if he’d tried. But as soon as she suggested returning to New York, it was Pavel she thought of, Pavel, she knew, she was really returning to. She looked up at Peachy, who was pacing around the room, clearly enjoying this slice of drama.
“A cheeky little hideout in New York and she forgets to mention it!” he mused to himself. “Are you secretly rich? You can tell me, babe, mum’s the word.”
Bonnie shook her head.
“It’s just where I grew up. My parents bought it cheap in the seventies. My sister and I used to live there and then…I don’t know, it’s just been empty for a while.”
“That settles it, then. You head to New York and if anyone comes ’round asking, I’ll say you no longer work with us.”
Peachy opened the front door and tossed his cigarette out over the landing. The shrieks of a passing flock of seagulls filled the air. He made to leave, then turned back.
“You want to get an ice cream before you go? I could murder a Twix ice cream bar right about now.”
Bonnie smiled. She hadn’t eaten ice cream in probably a decade or more.
“Sure,” she said.
She followed him out onto the landing, wincing as a bright bar of sunshine striped her face.
“And by the way, you’re wrong,” Peachy said.
“About what?”
He punched her softly in the arm.
“I’m your friend, Bonnie Blue.”
—
No New Yorker, no matter how cynical, is immune to the feeling of flying into JFK at night. Tired though she was, anxious though she’d been, some hidden hope alighted in Bonnie as soon as the plane touched down. She was back in New York. City of sirens, city of secrets, city of her sisters. She had dreaded returning, but it was surprisingly comforting to see the city lights wink in their bed of black below, each one a little life of its own. She was home, the only one she knew, not because she’d always lived in it, but because it always lived in her.
In the lobby of their building, Bonnie waved her keys at the new night doorman, who gave her a sleepy nod. Everything was exactly as before. The building had once been a hotel, and the foyer maintained a feeling of faded luxury with its scuffed marble floors and sun-bleached brocade seats. The gold dial above the elevator was still stuck, exactly as it had always been, at number eleven. Bonnie stood before it without pressing the button. She had told herself she would never enter that elevator again after what happened. But now that she was there, she felt strangely numb. Bonnie pressed the button and stepped through the sliding doors as if in a dream. It glided up to their floor. Bonnie exited and walked to the front door feeling mercifully blank. With her hand on the knob, she braced herself for whatever feeling would come.
The smell was what she noticed first. It didn’t smell like home at all, that familiar yet unnameable scent that only becomes known to you once you leave. The odor was strangely medicinal, as though someone had sprayed the place with antiseptic. But the rest was the same. The long hallway with the threadbare Moroccan runner, the far wall that was covered in pegs of various heights for all their coats. In the winter that wall would be so laden with puffers, peacoats, and vintage furs it was impossible to pass by without knocking at least one off, a fact that irritated their mother endlessly. Bonnie felt all the life in this home rushing just beneath the surface of the present moment, like running water trapped beneath a layer of ice. If only she could break through and return to the living moments beneath, her sisters in the kitchen making a race of peeling boiled eggs for egg salad sandwiches, her sisters pulling each other down the hallways on a towel they’d turned into a magic carpet, her sisters flopped on the couch watching TV after school, the ordinary, everyday miracle of being all together.
Bonnie wandered into the living room without turning on the lights. It was past midnight, and the city below was quiet, a thin trickle of traffic lighting its veins. The furniture was a mismatched mingling of their mother’s and father’s tastes. From their mother: a leather Noguchi knockoff chair, a huge dining table made from the door of a church, various found object sculptures by friends from her gallery days. From their father: some dark paintings of ships and storms, a dusty navy velvet sofa that doubled as a pullout, the complete works of Charles Dickens stacked proudly on the mantelpiece. Bonnie sank into the sofa, which released a familiar sigh, and listened. She could hear the city all around her, the absence of silence that was New York.
She didn’t want to remember, but everything was a reminder. Above the mantelpiece, the oil painting of the four of them stared back at her. Nicky was on Bonnie’s lap and Lucky was on Avery’s. In a strange twist of genetics, Avery and Nicky had dark chestnut hair and Bonnie’s and Lucky’s was blond, but they were all unmistakably sisters. The painting was by a friend of their mother’s, an Israeli artist with a gentle, mournful air who had the habit of dipping her paintbrush into her tea and absent-mindedly drinking the murky concoction.
It wasn’t a flattering portrait, or rather it wasn’t intended to highlight the girls’ childish beauty. The artist had given their faces a caprine quality; huge, fearful eyes set above narrow noses and pointed chins. Their pupils were eerily large, so black they were almost violet, and fixed in tense, watchful expressions. Each of their heads was tilted slightly toward the others, as though pulling away from whatever was beyond the painting. The four of them were like a little herd of goats back then, Bonnie thought. She pictured them picking their way across the craggy mountain range of their childhood, that rocky, inhospitable landscape; Avery and Bonnie the strong, agile does leading the way, Nicky and Lucky the fluffy kids capering behind.
It is good you have each other, the artist had said, regarding them seriously as she worked. You never have to explain yourself to sisters.
It was true. Being one of four sisters always felt like being part of something magic. Once Bonnie noticed it, she saw the world was made up of fours. The seasons. The elements. The points on a compass. Four suits in a pack of cards. Four chambers of a human heart. Bonnie loved being a part of this mystical number, this perfect symmetry of two sets of two. Until you know my sisters, she used to say to Pavel, you don’t know me.
But it wasn’t all harmonious. Around the time the painting was made, Nicky reached an age where all she wanted was her older sisters’ attention. She and Lucky were still a pair, but she wanted admittance into the realm of the big girls too. Nicky followed Avery and Bonnie from room to room peppering them with questions, attempting to impress them with whatever skill she’d recently learned, a card trick, or flipping backward onto her palms. One evening, Bonnie and Avery had barricaded themselves in their bedroom and laughed, closer, then, for having someone to exclude, as Nicky pled for entry on the other side. They could feel the door shudder as Nicky grew frenzied with frustration, smashing herself against the barricade again and again wordlessly. Any pleasure was drained from their game as Bonnie and Avery listened to the stoic thud, thud, thud of their sister throwing her body against the door until, in a hasty anticlimax, they opened it and let her tumble in. Stop it, you freak, you’re hurting yourself. Bonnie knew it was normal childhood stuff, the inevitable pairing of siblings against one another, but now that Nicky was gone, the memory was unbearable. What would Bonnie give to go back now and hurl that door open? To never have closed it in the first place?
She wandered through the apartment and let the memories come, the best and the worst ones. It was a Friday afternoon in summer. Their father had come home early from work full of bluster and joy, bringing the sunshine inside with him. He maintained a boyish, playful streak well into adulthood; eventually the alcoholism would decay this, too, but for years it remained. He could make anything a game. That day, it was catch with their mother’s favorite teacup, the one painted with wildflowers and nettles from the countryside she grew up in. Beckoning for the girls to spread across the living room, he tossed the cup to each of them as they shrieked with delight and dread, the fragile china sailing toward their trembling hands. Bonnie could still feel the jubilance of the catch, the pleasurable fright of the throw. Lucky, not yet nine, fumbled her turn, but the cup plonked onto the carpet unharmed. They all yelped with relief, then kept playing. Their mother was there, too, standing in the kitchen doorway, feigning outrage but in on the game. It was the good kind of fear, a fun made more thrilling for its proximity to danger. The cup survived unscathed, and Bonnie had felt it then, a fact as simple as a sugar cube, and just as easily dissolved: She loved her parents.
A few months later, their father would smash that cup, along with her parents’ entire collection of wedding china, in a blackout. Afterward, he had sobbed, inconsolable as a child, as he gathered the shards of porcelain to his chest. He did not remember breaking them. Avery had hidden the sisters in her and Bonnie’s bedroom, her arms around them, murmuring nonsense poems and rhymes from their childhood, trying to drown out the sound of shattering china beyond the door. Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace…
The last year they all lived together, he had stormed through the house flinging open all the closet doors. They had too much stuff, he thundered, and they needed to make space. To his credit, he only destroyed his own clothes. That powerful anger that raged inside him—ceaseless, directionless, relentless—she saw how, even drunk, he tried with all his might to direct it inward. Bonnie had that anger within her, too, but unlike him she had found an outlet in boxing. With his bare hands, he tore apart his silk shirts, beautiful items chosen by their mother in her gallery days, dusty pinks, cornflower blues, and mint greens, the kind of shirts he could never wear to the bank. The next morning, he attempted to make a game of picking up the silk-covered buttons that lay scattered across the hallway floor. For the first time ever, Bonnie refused to play.
She sat back on the sofa, staring at the painting of the four of them until her eyelids became heavy. She could have gone to her old bedroom, but she wasn’t ready. She closed her eyes and drifted off right there on the couch. She was home, but not any home she knew anymore.
—
The next morning, she was eating her usual deli order of egg and cheese on a roll on one of the benches lining Central Park West, when Avery called.
“I’ve been trying to reach you! Where have you been?”
Bonnie placed the last few bites in the scrunched silver foil and cleared her throat.
“I’m in New York.”
She heard Avery inhale.
“You are? What on earth are you doing there?”
“I thought about it and…I wanted to say goodbye to the apartment.”
“You did?”
“And go through Nicky’s stuff. One of us has to, and I’m the closest.”
