Lucky offered a happy little shrug. Avery could see from the ease between them that they had already recovered from their part of the fight without her.
“We’re making up,” she said.
“Oh, thank god,” said Bonnie. “Can I get in on this?”
She launched toward them with a bear hug and the three of them held one another, swaying and laughing, squeezing one another tighter then laughing some more. After they’d disentangled, Bonnie went to the sink and started brushing her teeth.
“What’s that doing in here?” she asked, spotting the guitar propped against the toilet in the mirror.
Avery pointed at Lucky.
“She’s written a song.”
“That’s great, Lucky!” exclaimed Bonnie, toothbrush dangling from her mouth. “Can we hear it?”
Lucky grabbed the guitar and clutched it to her chest.
“No!”
“Come on, pleeeeease,” wheedled Avery.
“I can’t do it with you two watching me!”
“We’ll close our eyes,” said Bonnie.
“I don’t trust you. You’ll open them.”
“Here—” Avery pulled back the shower curtain and motioned toward the tub. “Get in there. We’ll close this so we can’t see you.”
With a little more cajoling, Avery and Bonnie managed to hustle Lucky into the bath and pull the curtain shut to conceal her.
“You good?” Avery called.
Lucky’s voice came tentatively from the other side.
“You promise you won’t laugh at me?”
Avery gave Bonnie a look to show her heart was melting, which Bonnie promptly returned.
“Promise!” they called.
Bonnie spat in the sink and rinsed her toothbrush, then they both settled down on the bathroom floor. Lucky plucked two notes over and over in plaintive succession. Then, very softly, she began to sing.
Soft, low, and just a little raspy, her voice was not what Avery had expected. It was caught somewhere between a growl and a purr, a sound made for expressing the pain hidden at the heart of pleasure. She was singing about Nicky, about loving someone without fully knowing them. If you had been my twin, intoned Lucky, could I have shared the pain you were in? Avery closed her eyes. She wished she could have taken a share too. Maybe then she could have protected her. But they were sisters, not twins. They came from the same place, but not the same time. And as close as she felt to each of her sisters, there would always be so much she didn’t know. Avery opened her eyes. No, they would never have that, but they had a choice to have something else. This song, it was like Lucky was finally offering them a key to her, and Avery could do the same; she could let them see her. Lucky finished singing, and Avery and Bonnie pulled back the shower curtain with a flurry of whoops and cheers, piling on top of her so all three were squished in the tub together. Lucky let out a yowl of protest, but they held on tight and, eventually, Lucky let herself be held.
A lot was written about romantic love, Avery thought, about the profundity of that embrace. But this, too, was deserving of rapture, of song. Before she ever knew a lover’s body, she knew her sisters’, could see herself in their long feet and light eyes, their sleek limbs and curled ears. And, before life became big and difficult, there were moments with them when it was simply good: an early morning, still dark out, their parents asleep. Her younger sisters arriving one by one at her bedside, hair tangled, exuding their sour and sweet morning musk. She’d lifted the covers for each of them, letting them crowd into her bottom bunk, bodies pressed tight against one another, and they’d fallen asleep again like that, dropping off like puppies curled around a mother’s warm belly. She’d slept, too, safe in the center of her sisters, not knowing or needing to know where she ended and the next began. Squeezed beside Bonnie and Lucky now, it was superfluous to describe what she felt for them as love. They were love, beautiful and unbearable and hers.
—
A week later, Avery got the call to come home.
“I’m ready to talk,” Chiti had said simply on the phone, and Avery booked her ticket for the next day.
Since her flight wasn’t until the afternoon, Bonnie came back early from the gym and Lucky stuck around uptown so they could have a final lunch together. They got bagels from the deli on the corner and took them to the park, sitting side by side on the benches near the playground under the shade of the elm trees. It was a bright summer day, and the sky between the crisscross of branches was swimming pool blue. The scent of caramelized peanuts drifted down the path from the Nuts 4 Nuts cart, mingling with that unique combination of mowed grass, garbage, horse manure, and car exhaust that could only be found in Central Park. Avery closed her eyes.
It had been a happy handful of days, packing up the last of Nicky’s stuff together and chatting for hours about their lives. Avery had told them about their father’s return to rehab and her time with their mother upstate. Lucky wasn’t ready to see either of them, which Avery understood, but Bonnie had offered to join their mother to visit their father that month. Lucky and Avery had watched Bonnie training at the gym with Pavel, marveling at her speed and power, and gone to AA meetings together. Since Bonnie was often training, the eldest and youngest sisters spent a surprising amount of time together and, miraculously, managed to only bicker what Avery considered a regular sibling amount. They all had dinner together every night and Avery felt the pleasure of being a sister among sisters again after so long. They were not four, and they never would be again, but they were starting to find the symmetry in three.
“It’s weird that in a few weeks it will be gone forever,” said Lucky, looking across the park to where their apartment was hidden. She wrapped her arm around Avery and rested her head on her shoulder. “I’m sad,” she said. “But I’m also relieved, you know?”
Bonnie and Avery both nodded. Somehow, Avery thought, in the process of disassembling their home, New York had finally begun to feel like one to them again.
“The real question is…” said Bonnie. “Who gets to keep the bunk beds?”
Avery laughed.
“I think it’s time to officially say goodbye. Only took thirty years. And anyway”—she nudged Bonnie with her shoulder—“I don’t see Pavel as a bunk bed man.”
She turned to her sister, who gazed back at her sanguinely. The sun had bathed her face in yellow and in that honeyed light she looked like something cast in gold. Avery waited for her to blush or change the subject, but she remained serene.
“I like his bed as it is,” said Bonnie.
She smiled widely. There was nothing more to say. Bonnie had informed them with characteristic equanimity that she would be moving in with Pavel after the apartment was sold and, while they had both grilled her mercilessly, Bonnie, true to form, had not offered much in the way of exciting details. She did tell them that it turned out Pavel had been in love with her for years too. Since this revelation Avery had never seen her sister look more at home in herself.
Avery took a bite of her bagel and turned her face to the sky. They were sitting near the playground, the sharp cries of the children lobbed like shining arrows toward the bench where they sat. Avery dropped the remainder of her bagel into its foil.
“Do you guys want kids?” she asked suddenly.
Bonnie wiped a glob of cream cheese from her lip and gave her a funny look.
