The Final Act Read online

  “I wouldn’t do that, dear.” Norma Appleton pointed to the underside of her daughter’s arms.

  “Do what?”

  “Your ‘Hi, Helens,’ ” her mother said, grimacing.

  “My what?”

  “Your ‘Hi, Helens,’ ” her mother repeated with a point of her chin.

  “What are you talking about? What is she talking about?” Leigh demanded of Cindy.

  “Remember Auntie Molly?” Cindy asked reluctantly.

  “Of course I remember Auntie Molly.”

  “Remember she had this friend Helen, who lived across the street?”

  “I don’t remember any Helen.”

  “Anyway,” Cindy continued, bracing herself for the explosion she knew would follow, “whenever Auntie Molly saw Helen, she used to wave to her and say, ‘Hi, Helen. Hi, Helen.’ And the skin under her arms would jiggle, and so Mom started referring to that part of the arm as the ‘Hi, Helens.’ ”

  “What!”

  “Hi, Helen,” her mother said, waving to an invisible woman on the other side of the room. “Hi, Helen.”

  “You’re saying my arms jiggle?!”

  “Everybody’s arms jiggle,” Cindy offered.

  “Yours don’t,” her mother said.

  “No, Cindy’s arms are perfect,” Leigh agreed angrily, pacing back and forth in front of her mother and sister. “That’s because Cindy has time to go to the gym five times a week.”

  “I don’t go to the gym five times a week.”

  “Because Cindy only has to go to work when she feels like it. . .”

  “That’s not true. I work three afternoons a week.”

  “. . . so she has lots of time to do things like go to the gym and the film festival and. . .”

  “What’s this problem you have with the film festival?”

  “I don’t have any problem with it. In fact, I’d dearly love to spend ten days doing nothing but running from one movie to the next. I love movies as much as you do, you know.”

  “Then why don’t you go?”

  “Because I have responsibilities. Because I have four kids and a husband to look after.”

  “Your daughter’s getting married, your sons are in college, and your husband can take care of himself.”

  “As if you’d know anything about taking care of husbands,” Leigh said, then blanched visibly. “I didn’t mean that.”

  Cindy nodded, unable to find her voice.

  “This is all your fault,” Leigh accused her mother. “You and your damn ‘Hi, Helens.’ ”

  “You take things much too seriously,” her mother said. “You always did. Besides, that’s no excuse for being mean to your sister.”

  Leigh acknowledged her guilt with a bow of her head. “I’m really very sorry, Cindy. Please forgive me.”

  “You’re under a lot of stress,” Cindy acknowledged, trying to be generous.

  “Trust me, you have no idea.” Leigh hugged her arms to her sides, kept them absolutely still. “It’s been one disaster after another. The hotel double-booked the ballroom, which took days to get straightened out; the florist says lilacs are out of the question for October. . .”

  “Who has lilacs in October?” their mother asked.

  “My future in-laws haven’t offered to pay for a thing, and now Jason has decided he wants a reggae band instead of the trio we hired.”

  “He’s the groom,” Cindy reminded her sister.

  “He’s an idiot,” Leigh shot back as the front door opened.

  “Who’s an idiot?” Leigh’s daughter, Bianca, marched into the store, followed by Cindy’s daughter, Heather, two steps behind.

  Cindy smiled at the two denim-clad young women standing before her. Like Leigh, twenty-two-year-old Bianca was slightly overweight, the extra weight concentrated mostly in her hips, which made her appear shorter than she actually was. Also like her mother, Bianca’s eyes were hazel, her mouth full, her smile wide.

  (Snapshots: Six-year-old Cindy, dressed in a Wonder Woman costume on Halloween, smiling shyly at the camera, while three-year-old Leigh, naked except for an awkward black mask, mugs outrageously in the background; thirteen-year-old Cindy and ten-year-old Leigh standing on either side of their mother in front of their new house on Wembley Avenue, Leigh’s right hand stretched behind her mother, her fingers raised above Cindy’s head like donkey ears; mother and teenage daughters sitting on a large rock at the edge of Lake Joseph, Cindy squinting into the sun, Leigh’s face hidden in the shadows.)

  “Hi, Aunt Cindy.”

  “Hi, sweetheart.”

  “Who’s an idiot?” Bianca asked again.

  Leigh shrugged off her daughter’s question, pretended to be busy with the folds of her gown.

  “Hi, Mom.” Heather greeted Cindy with a kiss on the cheek.

  “Hi, darling. I hear you’re a knockout in your dress. Sorry I missed it.”

  “I’m sure there’ll be other opportunities,” Heather said with a wink. “Julia here yet?”

  “Of course she isn’t here,” Leigh answered before Cindy had the chance.

  “You look nice,” Heather told her aunt.

  Leigh raised one hand to her head, fiddled girlishly with her hair, before dropping her arm self-consciously back to her side, massaging the flesh above her elbow.

  “Is your arm hurt?” Heather asked.

  “Let me try Julia one more time.” Again Cindy retrieved her phone from her purse, quickly punching in Julia’s cell phone number. Again she heard the breathy voice, the fake regret. I’m so sorry I can’t answer your call at the moment. Where are you, Julia? she wondered, feeling her sister’s angry eyes burning holes in the back of her blue blouse. “Julia, it’s almost five o’clock,” Cindy said evenly. “Where the hell are you?”

  FOUR

  THE first time Julia disappeared, she was four years old. Cindy had taken the girls to a nearby park and was busy pushing Heather on a swing when she realized that Julia was no longer among the children playing in the sandbox. She’d spent the next twenty minutes running around in increasingly frantic circles, accosting strangers, and shouting at hapless passersby: “I’ve lost my little girl. Please, has anyone seen my daughter?”

  Cindy had run home to call the police, Heather slung across her shoulder like an old purse, only to find Julia sitting on the front steps. “What took you so long?” the child demanded. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Was Julia somewhere waiting for her now? Cindy wondered, entering her bedroom and walking past her younger daughter, who lay sprawled across Cindy’s king-size bed, watching television, Elvis beside her. “What on earth are you watching?” Cindy asked, mesmerized by the sight of a staggeringly well-endowed young woman with big hair and a tiny white bikini rubbing great gobs of green fingerpaint over the expansive chest of a muscular young man. The young man was grinning so hard, his face looked as if it might explode. Cindy inched back, picturing white teeth spraying toward the pale blue walls of her bedroom, like confetti.

  “It’s called Blind Date.”

  How appropriate, Cindy thought, sitting down on the end of her bed, trying not to think of the night ahead. “What are they doing?”

  “Getting to know each other,” Heather deadpanned.

  “I guess some people will do anything to get on TV.” Cindy found herself thinking of Julia despite her best efforts not to. She was still angry that her older daughter hadn’t shown up for her fitting, that she hadn’t so much as called to offer an excuse. “Get down, Elvis,” Cindy said sharply, transferring her anger at her daughter to her daughter’s dog. Elvis looked at her with sleepy brown eyes, sighed deeply, and rolled over on his side.

  The second time Julia had disappeared was less than a year after the first. This time Cindy had put Heather in bed for her afternoon nap and come downstairs to find the front door open and Julia gone. Cindy had torn the house apart looking for her, then raced up and down the block, screaming out her daughter’s name. Wh
en she’d returned to the house, her phone was ringing. It was Tom. “Julia’s here,” he’d said simply, a smile lurking behind his words. Apparently, Julia had grown impatient with her mother, and walked the twelve blocks to her father’s office. “You took too long with Heather,” Julia scolded her mother when Tom brought her home.

  Had Julia grown impatient with her mother yet again? Cindy wondered, pushing herself to her feet and walking toward her closet.

  “You see, the premise of this show,” Heather was explaining, “is that they fix two people up and then send them off to the beach, or rock climbing, or something like that, for the afternoon, and then later, they go out for an intimate dinner. . .”

  Where was Julia? Why hadn’t she phoned?

  “. . . and at the end of the date,” Heather continued, “they each tell the camera whether or not they’d go out with that person a second time.”

  “Based on a deep spiritual connection, no doubt,” Cindy said, snapping back into the present, her eyes scanning the line of wooden hangers in her closet for something that could conceivably pass for stylish and sexy. “There isn’t a damn thing.” Julia would be able to put together something, she thought.

  “What?”

  “I said I have nothing to wear.”

  “Me neither. Can we go shopping tomorrow?”

  Cindy rifled through her pantsuits, dismissing one as too heavy, one as too lightweight, another as too formal for a first date, although it looked like something an accountant might like. She finally settled on a pair of gray linen slacks and a loose-fitting white blouse. At least they were clean.

  “Oh, wow. You won’t believe what they’re doing now,” Heather cried, her voice a mixture of shock and delight. “Mom, you’ve got to get out here and see this.”

  Cindy bolted from the closet in time to see the toothy muscleman aim a flowing water hose down the bottom half of his companion’s minuscule bikini, while the big-haired, big-breasted bimbo squealed with delight. “How can you watch this garbage?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s great.” Then, noticing the clothes in her mother’s hands, “What are you doing? Are you going out?” The latter question carried just a trace of indignation.

  “I won’t be late.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just out for dinner. I won’t be late.”

  “So you said. Who are you going to dinner with?”

  “No one special.”

  “What does that mean?” Heather sat up on the bed, crossed her legs, balanced her chin in the palms of her hands, her radar on full alert.

  “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You’re being very evasive.”

  “You’re being very nosy.”

  You’re being obstinate, she’d told Julia this morning.

  You’re being anal.

  “I’m just curious,” Heather was saying. “You always ask me where I’m going.”

  “That’s because I’m your mother.”

  “Do you have a date?” Heather pressed. “You do, don’t you? With who?”

  “With whom,” Cindy corrected. “I thought you were majoring in English.”

  “With whom are you going out, Mother?” Heather asked in Julia’s voice, the word “mother” snapping at Cindy like an elastic band.

  Cindy shook her head in defeat. “His name is Neil Macfarlane. He’s Trish’s accountant.”

  “Is he cute?”

  Cindy shrugged. “Trish says he is.”

  “You’ve never seen him?”

  Cindy blushed.

  “So this is like a . . . Blind Date?” Heather asked with exaggerated flourish, vocally capitalizing the last two words, and pointing toward the TV screen with both hands.

  “You ever been part of a threesome?” the grinning Romeo was asking his giggling Juliet while hand-feeding her lobster, then licking at the butter that dripped from her chin.

  “Oh my,” Cindy said.

  “Is that what you’re going to wear?” Heather indicated the clothes in her mother’s hands.

  Cindy held the blouse up under her chin. “What do you think?”

  “You might want to go with something a little more low-cut. You know, make more of an impression.”

  “I think this is exactly the impression I want to make. Where’s Duncan?” Cindy asked, suddenly realizing she hadn’t seen Duncan since they got home.

  Heather feigned indifference, shrugged, leaned back on her elbows. “Don’t know.”

  “You don’t? That’s unusual.”

  Heather shot her mother a look. “No, it’s not. We’re not joined at the hip, you know.”

  “You two have a fight?”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  Cindy could tell from her daughter’s tone that it was a subject best not pursued. Besides, if Heather and Duncan were fighting, she really didn’t want to know the details. In truth, she already knew way too much about their relationship. That was the problem with sleeping down the hall from your daughter and her live-in boyfriend. You heard every whisper, every playful sigh, every enthusiastic squeak of the bed. “Could you do me a favor?” Cindy said with a smile, waiting for her daughter to ask what, then continuing when she didn’t. “Could you call your father for me?”

  “Why?”

  “Find out if Julia’s having dinner over there.”

  “Why don’t you call?”

  “I don’t want to,” Cindy admitted.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m asking you to call.”

  Heather groaned. “What kind of answer is that?”

  “Heather, please. . .”

  “I’ll call when the show is over.”

  “When is that?”

  “Another fifteen minutes.”

  “We connected on an intellectual level,” the bimbo was telling the camera.

  “Then you’ll call your dad?”

  “Julia’s fine, you know. She told you she wasn’t coming to the fitting. I don’t know what you’re so worried about.”

  “I’m not worried.” Then, “You don’t think she could have gotten lost, do you?”

  “Lost?” Heather demanded in her aunt’s voice.

  The last time Julia disappeared, Cindy remembered, she was thirteen years old. Cindy was still reeling from her father’s sudden death from a heart attack two months earlier, Tom was away on a “business trip” with his latest paramour, and Heather was singing a solo with her school choir that night. Julia was supposed to be home in time to accompany her mother to the concert, but by seven o’clock, she still wasn’t back. Cindy spent the next hour calling all Julia’s friends, checking with neighbors, driving up and down the rain-soaked streets. She’d tried reaching Tom in Montreal, but he wasn’t at his hotel. Finally, at nine o’clock, distraught and unsure what to do next, she’d driven to the school to pick up Heather, only to find a defiant Julia comforting her sister. “I told you I’d meet you in the auditorium,” Julia chastised her mother. “Don’t you listen?”

  Had Julia told her of her plans this morning? Cindy wondered now, throwing her clothes on the bed and walking into the bathroom. Was this mix-up all her fault? Had she not been listening?

  “Look at me,” she moaned. “I look awful.”

  “You don’t look awful,” Heather called from the bedroom.

  “I’m short.”

  “Five six isn’t short.”

  “My hair’s a mess.” Cindy pulled at her loose brown curls.

  “Your hair is not a mess.” Heather appeared in the bathroom doorway. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

  “Wrong?”

  “Aren’t I the one who’s supposed to be whining about her appearance and you the one reassuring me with quaint, motherly platitudes?”

  Cindy smiled. Heather was right. When had their roles suddenly reversed?

  “You’re probably just nervous about your date.”

  “It’s not a date,” Cindy corrected. “And I’m not nervous.” She
turned on the tap, began rigorously scrubbing her face.

  “Shouldn’t use soap,” her daughter advised, stilling her mother’s hand and reaching into the medicine cabinet for a jar of moisturizing cleanser. “I mean, you buy all this stuff. Why don’t you use it?”

  “It’s too much work. I can’t be bothered.”

  “Try this,” Heather instructed. “Then this.” She pulled an assortment of bottles off the shelf of the crowded cabinet and spread them across the cherrywood counter. “Then I’ll do your makeup. And speaking of makeup, what’s with Auntie Leigh and the Tammy Faye Baker eyes?”

  “I’m hoping it’s a phase.”

  “Let’s hope it’s over by the wedding.”

  The phone rang.

  “It’s about time.” Cindy marched back into her bedroom, grabbed for the phone. “Hello,” she said eagerly, waiting for Julia’s voice.

  “Cindy, it’s Leigh,” her sister announced, as if she knew they’d been speaking about her. “I just want to apologize again for what I said earlier—about you spending all your time at the movies, and not knowing how to take care of a husband.”

  “Oh,” Cindy said flatly. “That.”

  “I was out of line.”

  “Yeah,” Cindy agreed. “You were.”

  “Anyway, I’m sorry.”

  “Apology accepted.”

  “It’s just this wedding. And Mom, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “The pressure is nonstop. Sometimes I get a little overwhelmed.”

  Cindy nodded into the receiver.

  Her sister sighed. “I wish I had your life,” she said.

  Cindy laughed as she hung up the phone.

  “What’s funny?” Heather asked.

  “My sister’s idea of an apology.” Cindy stared at the TV. A second young woman, whose dark bikini matched her ebony skin, was climbing into a hot tub with a bald-headed, tattoo-covered man who looked like a black Mr. Clean.

  “What’s she sorry for?” Heather asked.

  “That’s just the point. She isn’t.” Cindy shook her head, trying to remember the last time she’d felt close to her younger sister.

  (Memory: Eight-year-old Leigh shadowing Cindy’s every move, following her from room to room, as if glued to her side. “Why does she have to do everything the same as me?” Cindy protests, pushing Leigh aside.