Silence descended on the table. With the end of the story the dark tide of sadness that threatened each moment to pull her under returned. She didn’t want to think about her parents, about Nicky, about anything outside this small café table, but her family was always there, ready to push themselves to the front of her mind.
Her sisters were more forgiving, but Lucky knew they had a bad dad. They certainly weren’t the only ones. In her whole life, she’d probably only met a handful of people who had good dads. All of them were weird. Kids who grew up with loving fathers had the same starry-eyed softness as kids raised in places like Malibu, those homes of eternal sunshine. They never had to toughen up. Lucky had this theory that having a bad dad was like growing up in a place with a long, rough winter. It hardens you. It also prepares you for reality, which is that summer is a season, not a lifestyle, and most men will hurt you if they get the chance. Or maybe it was only the people who grew up with bad dads who believed that.
The funny thing about their father was that he wasn’t cold, or at least not always. Mercurial was how she would describe him. Changeable as the weather. And like the weather, he had to be regularly checked to work out what kind of day they were going to have. Lucky and her sisters could tell his mood by the way he closed the front door. Just like you wouldn’t have a picnic in a hailstorm, you couldn’t do certain things around an angry dad. No bickering over the remote, no chatting loudly with friends on the phone, no crying over a bad grade, no laughing over a silly joke, no whining to their mom that they were hungry. He was the only man in the house, but he also was the house. They lived inside his moods.
Lucky inherited his blue eyes and light hair, though she liked to believe their similarities ended there. He was a third-generation Scottish American with the kind of Catholic nun–riddled childhood that, as he put it, would make a good atheist out of anyone. He loved to read, maintaining a book-a-week habit well into his drinking years, but his real religion was sports. Football, boxing, golf, cycling—he’d watch anything. Like Bonnie, he was more at home in his body than in his mind. He should have been a professional athlete, and he even went to college on a football scholarship, but a torn hamstring meant he ended up taking a job at a regional bank after graduation, which he worked at for the rest of his life. No matter how drunk he got, or how often, he always went to work on time. That was why their mother could never admit he had a problem. What kind of alcoholic keeps his job all those years? Theirs, it turned out.
It was easy for Lucky to say they had a bad father. Harder for her to admit was that their mother wasn’t all that great either. She grew up in a crumbling estate in Sussex, the only daughter of a depressive mother and vicious drunk of a father, who were that peculiarly British combination of upper class and totally broke, “posh but not flush” as their mother put it. Her father squandered most of his inheritance by the time their mother reached adolescence. Even after meeting and marrying their dad, their mother maintained a deep and abiding contempt for the British class system she had escaped from.
There was a lot about their mom’s life she didn’t know, but what Lucky did know was that her mother hightailed it out of that unhappy house she grew up in, that whole wretched country, as she called it, as soon as she could. She landed in New York and started working at a gallery downtown. At that time, she had silky auburn hair down to her waist and a beautiful, tulip-shaped face. She claims she was hired primarily to stand in the window in a miniskirt and lure rich men into the gallery, but she had a canny eye for young artists too, convincing her superiors to buy a number of early pieces of painters who were world-famous today.
If her mother hadn’t had kids, Lucky was sure she could have become a gallery director or a celebrated curator, but she left the gallery after Avery was born. Then, when Avery was fifteen and Lucky was eight, their mother went back to working as a museum docent, charging her eldest to look after the rest of them. She claimed they needed the money, which was true, but she probably earned less an hour than one of them could babysitting. Mostly, she was just done being a mom, a mantle Avery stoically took up in her place. Lucky hated to admit it, but Avery was a better mom than most people ever got, which still didn’t mean she had any plans to call her back that day.
She flicked the ash of her cigarette into the scalloped tray and exhaled. She wanted to find a trapdoor in her mind and disappear down it, to the place where memories couldn’t reach her anymore, and there was only one way she knew to do that. She pushed her empty pint glass away and shot her wolflike grin toward her friends.
“Shall we get something stronger?”
—
Lucky wove her way back to the atelier through dove-gray streets smearing like impressionist paintings before her eyes. She had vaguely considered fucking Riley in the bathroom, but he seemed the type to get attached, so she made the extremely responsible decision to head to the fitting on time instead. She sidestepped a dog and stumbled, her fingertips stroking the sidewalk, then righted herself. She was only a tiny bit drunk. She could hold her alcohol better than any man, she thought with satisfaction. Certainly better than Cliff, who she had left singing an emotional a capella rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine” to a bemused Sabina.
When Lucky opened the blue wooden door, the previously quiet courtyard was a flurry of activity. A long white runway had been erected through the center of the cobblestone patio, around which workers were busy unstacking chairs, laying down cables, and setting up the photographers’ pit. Lucky felt the odd collision of worlds that combined to create the fashion business; this industrious crowd of stagehands would perform Herculean feats in the next hours, then melt into the background, as if they had never been there at all, so silk-clad Lucky and her ilk could float above a sea of spectators on their handiwork.
She circumnavigated a man carrying a wobbling tower of chairs so tall it could have been a circus act and climbed back up the dizzying coil of the spiral staircase. Everything was spinning as she entered the stuffy atelier. A hot wave of human perspiration hit her nostrils. Overhead, a wooden ceiling fan turned ineffectually, swirling, but not disbanding, the heat of the room. A woman pushing an overflowing rack of sherbet-colored taffeta dresses trundled past without looking over.
Lucky felt her head whooshing in time with the fan. She went over to the window and leaned out, breathing deeply. The atelier looked onto the courtyard below and Lucky focused her attention on the bald spot of the man polishing the gleaming white runway beneath her. She tried to still her rushing head as she stared at his.
“Does it appear to rain?”
Lucky turned to find the stylist from earlier with the tight bun and the tape measure bustling over.
“We are all very worried for rain,” the stylist clarified, removing a silver pin from her mouth.
Lucky stuck her head back out the window to inspect the sky. It was gray to her left and pale blue to her right.
“Fifty-fifty,” she said.
The words felt like fuzzy pieces of fruit in her mouth. The stylist gave a tiny frown.
“Alors, come this way, please.”
Lucky was ushered to an even hotter corner of the room, where her outfit was suspended on a velvet hanger with a Polaroid of her taped to the hook. It was a halter-neck ball gown with a flared skirt the shape of an upside-down martini glass. The fabric was the palest confectionary pink, like the underside of a kitten’s paw. Across the artfully draped bodice, a network of silver beaded branches sprang heavy with sparkling cherry blossoms. The stylist looked at Lucky expectantly.
“The appliqué alone took three hundred hours,” she said.
But Lucky was too busy trying to strip her jeans off without keeling over to respond. She succeeded in removing them and her T-shirt, then stood swaying in her underwear with the unselfconsciousness drilled into her early in her modeling years. Whatever reaction of cooing delight the stylist was hoping to get from Lucky, it wasn’t going to happen. Still wearing her dirty socks, she stepped into the stiff gown. She felt herself being hooked in from behind, the bodice crunching her ribs and pinching her waist.
“Beautiful, no?” a seamstress at her workstation said with a sigh. “Just like a princess.”
Lucky emitted a soft belch.
“The designers will be here soon to look it over,” said the stylist. “But first, let me check the fit.”
“Could I have some water?” Lucky croaked.
With a puzzled look, the stylist produced a sparkling strawberry-flavored Volvic. Lucky took a tentative sip. She hated strawberries. As soon as the saccharine bubbles hit her stomach, she knew she was in trouble. She ran to the open window as a brown flume of beer and vodka erupted out of her, the bodice acting as a kind of stomach pump. Foul liquid gushed forth in waves. Lucky stared down at the fluid and bile that had just evacuated her, splattered like a Rorschach test against the white runway below. The man with the bald spot she had observed just minutes before was staring up at her in horror, having narrowly missed the deluge. Behind her, she could hear the shrieks of the seamstress and stylist begging her not to get vomit on the dress. Lucky was half inside and half outside the room, her torso dangling over the window ledge. She thought briefly how good it would be to stay like this, in between, neither here nor there, forever, then wiped a sour tendril of saliva from her lips. In front of her, the slanting Paris rooftops shimmered in the light. The sun, at least, was coming out.
Chapter Two Bonnie
Bonnie woke before dawn to the sound of invasion. Someone was rattling her front door, trying to get in. Within seconds, she had grabbed the baseball bat she kept by her bed and launched herself into the small living room. The room was dark and still, empty but for a stack of cardboard boxes in the corner and a foldout beach chair. Sulfur-yellow patches of light from the streetlamps outside streaked the bare floor. She stood still, listening. Once again, the door rattled in its frame. Bonnie held her breath and padded stealthily across the space until she was close enough to unlock the latch with a soft click. In one swift movement, she yanked the door open and slashed the bat through the air in front of her. It struck the ground at her feet with a metallic thud. She looked out onto the empty landing, lined with the wet towels her neighbor’s kids left hanging on the railings overnight to dry, and shook her head. She was fighting with herself again.
These days, Bonnie usually slept until noon. Her job as the bouncer for Peachy’s, a nearby bar, meant she often didn’t return home until three or four in the morning. It was the exact opposite of her schedule the years prior, during which she rose before sunrise each day to begin training, completing more vigorous physical activity by the time most people woke for breakfast than they could hope to achieve in a week. She still worked out, but with nowhere near the intensity of a prefight program, in which it would be more accurate to call training simply living, as there was nothing else to her life in those periods.
Bonnie went back to bed and slipped into shallow, feverish sleep. She was awoken by the sound of her phone ringing somewhere in the apartment. She used it so infrequently, often leaving it on top of the fridge or the lip of the tub for days at a time, that she could not immediately remember where she’d left it. She staggered from the bed and found it perched on one of the unopened boxes in the living room, Avery’s name flashing on the screen. It was early afternoon, a late wake-up, even for her.
“Aves,” she rasped.
She heard her sister exhale.
“Bon Bon, finally. Can you believe this fucking email from Mom?”
Bonnie frowned.
“What email?”
“You haven’t seen it yet? Have you just gotten up?”
Bonnie walked to the kitchen and turned on the tap, leaning to drink straight from the faucet.
