“I have a flip phone now,” she said, wiping her mouth. “No email. What does it say?”
“Oh, well, buckle up,” said Avery. “Let me just find it, hold on…Here it is…Dear girls, Hard to believe it’s already been one year without our beloved Nicky. I am writing to you because, as you know, the flat has lain empty these past twelve months and your father and I have made the difficult decision to sell it. If you would like to collect any of Nicky’s things, please do so by the end of the month. The movers will clear out the rest. I remain, with love, your mother.”
Bonnie exhaled involuntarily. She had not expected that. Their six-person family had lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a prewar building on the Upper West Side that their parents bought below market value decades ago. Avery had shared one bedroom with Bonnie, with Lucky and Nicky in the smaller one. Their parents slept in what would have been a small dining area, partitioned off from the living room by a painted screen.
Bonnie had once heard that a shark in a tank will grow eight inches, while a shark in the wild will grow eight feet. But their childhood home seemed to have had the opposite effect. Bonnie and her sisters grew and grew until they could not be contained by that apartment. She moved out shortly before her seventeenth birthday to start her amateur career, a few years later Nicky left for college out of state, and Lucky, scouted at fifteen, started modeling all over the world around the same time. Finally, once they were all gone, Avery ran away, reappearing a year later newly clean and determined to go to law school. After their father retired, their parents moved upstate, ostensibly because the city was bad for his health, which really meant it was bad for his drinking. She and Nicky moved back in and did their part to cover the mortgage while Nicky taught English at a high school nearby and Bonnie continued honing her skills at Pavel’s gym, dipping in and out of the apartment between tours and training camps. It had been a happy arrangement, while it lasted.
“What does she mean I remain your mother?” asked Avery, her voice rising. “Like there was some question of her not remaining our mom?”
“It’s cold,” agreed Bonnie. “Even for her.”
Immediately, she felt guilty. She tried never to bad-mouth their mom, but the truth was, they weren’t close. Avery and Nicky had always been the ones to bridge the gap between the sisters and their mother. It was Nicky their mother took the most interest in, though she didn’t share much of herself with any of her children. Since their mother hated sports and, unlike Nicky, Bonnie had not shown much appreciation for the arts, they maintained a respectful distance from each other. Avery, meanwhile, took on the role of dutiful daughter in adulthood, ostensibly as a living amends for her absence during her addiction, visiting their parents upstate every few years and calling on major holidays and birthdays. But Bonnie could feel the hot fury Avery secretly harbored toward them roiling like magma beneath the surface of her solicitousness. Both Lucky and Bonnie had essentially outsourced their parental needs since adolescence, Lucky with a rotating team of bookers and agents, and Bonnie with her boxing trainer, Pavel Petrovich. And for what little maternal advice and encouragement they needed, they had Avery. Who Avery had to turn to before she met Chiti, Bonnie still did not know.
“Do you think we should call her?” asked Bonnie, already dreading it.
“Oh, I did,” said Avery briskly. “Immediately upon receipt.”
Bonnie suppressed a smile. Avery was such a lawyer.
“And?” she asked.
“And they’re selling it all right. They already have an interested buyer.”
“Wow,” Bonnie mustered. She didn’t know what else to say. Avery seemed indignant enough for the both of them.
“Then she spent the remainder of the call telling me about the new fertilizer she’s using in the garden,” said Avery, her voice rising even higher with annoyance. “It was so typical. We barely speak and when we do, she literally wants to talk about shit.”
Their mother always fed them, and she never hit them—Bonnie always liked to remind herself of that. But she was overwhelmed by them. She wasn’t the kind of mom who derived satisfaction from cooking or domestic work, but she never asked for help. Each evening, she launched herself at the task of feeding the four of them like an explorer on a particularly grueling leg of a solo mission she regretted starting but had resigned herself to completing. In Bonnie’s opinion, their mother was afraid of Avery, baffled by Bonnie, intermittently charmed by Nicky, and oblivious to Lucky. None of which, obviously, were ideal.
Bonnie’s feelings about their father were more complicated. To both her pride and embarrassment, he had shown more interest in her than in any of his other daughters, often joking that she was the son he never had. Growing up, he took her to Central Park in the evenings, the two of them wordlessly pitching a ball back and forth across the Great Lawn as the last light receded across the grass, the only sound the soft slap of leather against their palms and the occasional murmur of acknowledgment after a particularly good catch. On the walk home, he would place his heavy hand on the back of her neck, urging her forward, and she would feel the competing sensations of pleasure and claustrophobia, the desire to keep his attention coupled with an equally powerful desire to escape it, escape him, and run, free and unencumbered, back to the safety of her sisters. By the time Bonnie turned fifteen and discovered boxing, his drinking, previously relegated to outside the house or after they went to bed, had seeped into the early evening hours when they used to play together. Though she worried about him, it was the sense of relief at no longer having that hand on her neck she remembered most clearly.
“So what do you think?” prompted Avery. “Should we try to stop them?”
Bonnie didn’t know what she thought. That apartment was the only home she’d ever known, both an albatross around her neck and an anchor. For the past year, Avery had been covering the mortgage and monthly maintenance fee, thereby allowing the place to remain empty, but they all knew that arrangement couldn’t last forever. The best approach with her family, she’d found, was neutrality.
“Do you think we should?” she asked.
“I do,” said Avery decisively. “It’s our home, too, and they have no right.”
“Except for the fact they own it,” mumbled Bonnie.
“Whatever!” Avery replied, exasperated. She sounded just like when they were teenagers. “You seriously don’t care if they sell it?”
Bonnie had loved that apartment, but after what happened there, she knew she couldn’t step foot in it again.
“I guess it’s their apartment and I…I can respect their wishes,” she offered.
“God, I would kill to be as imperturbable as you,” said Avery.
Bonnie laughed shyly.
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means you, unlike me, aren’t destined to die of a stress-induced heart attack.”
“But what about all of Nicky’s stuff?” asked Bonnie.
That she was not imperturbable about. Avery made a low hum down the phone.
“I know,” she said. “One of us is going to have to go back and claim it all.”
“I know I’m the closest…” began Bonnie, her heart sinking.
“It’s okay,” said Avery quickly. “No one would expect you to go back in there. I’ll figure something out.”
Bonnie exhaled with relief. She hated that Avery was the one who always had to fix everything in their family and relieved by it in equal measure.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“I can’t believe it’s already been a year,” said Avery, her voice low.
“I know…” Bonnie smiled sadly to herself. “Time’s a trip, man.”
“You sound so L.A. How is it out there?”
Bonnie padded across the living room and let herself out onto the landing, wincing slightly at the sunshine.
“Great. I’m looking at the ocean right now.”
