Bonnie rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, I got that, Avery. You don’t need to talk down to me. I’m not one of your clients.”
“And who the hell are you to accuse me of giving up?” continued Avery. “You dedicated your entire life to boxing and quit after one loss. One!”
Bonnie looked down at her feet.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know that you’re letting your feelings for Pavel get in the way of a career you were born to have. So you love him? Big whoop! Grow some balls and tell him!”
“I have balls!” yelled Bonnie.
Avery would have laughed if it wasn’t all so terrible.
“You are thirty-one years old,” she said. “Your peak is now.”
“Don’t lecture me, Avery.”
But she was not going to stop. She didn’t care anymore. If Bonnie hated her as well as Lucky, so be it. All that mattered was that she did what she needed to do to get Bonnie out of this dynamic with Lucky, out of the quicksand of their family dysfunction, out of this moment of defeat for good.
“You want to throw that away to help Lucky?” she said. “Fine. But don’t be surprised if all you end up with is another dead body on your hands.”
Bonnie’s face contorted with pain. She opened her mouth, then shut it again. How could she respond to that? Avery had now said the cruelest thing she could think of to both her sisters. But there was relief in it too. She could be free. The thought arrived like an electric jolt. Avery could be free of the responsibility of their love. They stood like that, each resolute in their silence, as below them the city offered its litany of noises. A garbage truck groaned down the street. In the place of birdsong, cars communicated with a flurry of horns. On a floor below, a dog released a long howl. Eventually, Bonnie dropped her sister’s gaze. She walked to the door.
“Sometimes I think you forget that I’m the one who found her. Right there.” She pointed to a spot on the bedroom floor. Her voice was quiet but there was a hardness to it Avery didn’t often hear. “You’re right that Nicky’s death didn’t only happen to Lucky. But it also didn’t only happen to you.”
Chapter Ten Lucky
Lucky stormed out of the apartment and made it to the corner of the park before letting herself stop to think. She was breathing hard. Other than her phone in her pocket, she had nothing on her, not even her cigarettes. She gritted her teeth and dug her nails into her palms. She was not going to let Avery make her cry. She paced up and down near the park’s entrance, watching for someone she could bum a smoke off, until she eventually clocked a businessman strolling past puffing on what looked like an American Spirit. He offered her one as soon as she asked, smiling at her as she leaned over the flame of his silver lighter.
“You look really familiar,” he said.
“I’m not,” she said, taking a deep inhale.
“Any chance I could get your—”
“Nope,” Lucky said and turned on her heel, speed-walking away down the avenue.
Once she was a safe distance away, she stood under the awning of a quiet doorman building and took a deep drag, inhaling until her lungs crackled. She hated Avery. She exhaled. She hated Avery so much. She inhaled again, too quickly this time, and ended up sputtering up smoke and spit. She hated Avery so much she was choking on it. After a few more minutes of furious puffing, the doorman came out and stood beside her, wordlessly shepherding her along. She was done anyway. Lucky threw the butt into the gutter, instantly wishing for another, and headed south.
At the corner of Eighty-first Street, she stopped, lingering at the top of the subway entrance stairs. She felt a vague pull to be downtown, back in the neighborhoods where she felt most like herself, where there were fewer reminders of her sisters. She ducked into the entrance, made sure there were no transit employees around, then hopped the turnstile with a practiced swing, catching the C train just in time. She wished she had headphones so she could listen to music; instead, she stared at the various passengers and tried to pick one item of clothing from each of them to make an outfit of her own. An older Asian woman holding a potted plant on her lap, whose woven sandals Lucky had mentally decided to pair with the Dickies of the man next to her, looked up and smiled as she caught her eye. Shyly, Lucky smiled back. After spending the entirety of last week by Bonnie’s side, it was strange to be in the city alone again, untethered by work, plans, or people to see. She had not lived in New York full-time for years, but when she did come back, she had always had Nicky to hang out with.
She emerged out of the Eighth Street exit by the one-dollar pizza slice place and, for no particular reason, turned west along Christopher Street. She stopped outside a boutique pet shop and stared at a cockapoo puppy galivanting in the window like a small cloud trapped in glass. At the sight of her, it hopped onto its back legs and fumbled eagerly at the partition dividing them, its fluffy paws slipping like feather dusters across the window. Lucky smiled and raised her hand to the glass. Should she get a dog? It would certainly be more loyal to her than either of her sisters. Maybe the dog she chose would, by some cosmic twist, have the soul of Nicky reborn inside it, a puppy with her exact temperament and spirit. Lucky kneeled, so she and the dog were eye level. She tried to stare into its bright black eyes, but it was now busy chasing its own tail, performing acrobatic tumbles on the shredded paper floor of its enclosure. Its fur was the color of warm ginger biscuits. She was still trying to catch its gaze—Are you my sister?—when a couple in matching college tees stopped beside her to coo at the puppy through the glass.
Lucky turned away and kept walking. Of course the cockapoo wasn’t Nicky. That puppy had a crowd-pleasing, teddy-bear quality that might appear to be like Nicky to an outsider, but the people who truly knew her understood that wasn’t the real her at all. If Nicky was a dog, she would be a breed both noble and fiercely loyal, like a saluki, those mythic creatures beloved by Egyptian royalty, not the kind of affable fluffball fawned over by any white couple in the West Village. But it would be a kind of magic, she thought longingly, to have Nicky by her side again, draping her silky form across her lap, streaking out ahead of her to chase off unwanted visitors (or sisters), a mute but knowing witness to her days and nights. She wished she believed in heaven like the Catholics or life after death like the Muslims or reincarnation like the Buddhists. She wished she believed in anything at all.
Nicky’s funeral was held at the Church of Saint Ignatius Loyola on the Upper East Side, a decision their parents made without the input of the sisters. Lucky would have voted to put her ashes into a firework and shoot them into the night sky, Hunter S. Thompson style, but their parents insisted on a funeral mass and, if Lucky was honest, she thought Nicky would have liked the pomp and pageantry of the Park Avenue address. Lucky, Bonnie, and Avery had hidden out in the sacristy at the back of the church, sitting side by side in glum silence next to the rack of cassocks as, outside, the guests filed in. It was probably for the best that Bonnie stayed out of sight for as long as possible; she’d lost her fight the weekend before and her bruises were in the ugly stage of healing, sickly yellows, greens, and browns streaking across her cheekbone and under her eyes. Their mother poked her head through the door and gave them a daggered look.
There you girls are! What are you doing back here? You’re being rude.
It’s our sister’s funeral, Mom, said Avery. No one’s expecting us to put on a show.
Who even are these people? asked Lucky.
They’re people who knew Nicky, said their mother. Obviously.
They peered past her through the door at the black-clad mourners jostling down the aisle to their seats. Their father, looking vacant and ready for a drink, stood making conversation with the priest. Two women, likely Nicky’s sorority sisters, had obviously used the occasion to get dressed up, arriving in teetering high heels and plunging minidresses. One was wearing an elaborate feather-trimmed fascinator.
I always said she had too many friends, said Avery.
Seriously, said Lucky. Like, who the hell is that?
She pointed to an older man with oiled-back hair wearing an expensive-looking linen suit.
That’s Nicky’s friend Carter Beaumont’s father, I think, said their mother. Yes, see, there’s Carter.
Carter-Fucking-Beaumont! Lucky shook her head. What are they doing here?
The Beaumonts always liked Nicky, said their mother wistfully. She turned back to them sharply. And you girls need to adjust your attitudes. It was nice of him to come. He’s a very important man.
Avery gave a snort of disgust.
Why? Because he’s rich?
Their mother gave a distracted wave.
He’s helped a lot of people. He invented baby harmonicas or something.
