Sinner

It made me feel tired just looking at this neighborhood. It reminded me of my parents and Phoenix, New York.

We stepped into the center hallway, which smelled like air freshener. The decor was endlessly nice, and I forgot what it looked like the moment I moved my eyes. Isabel was out of place here: an exotic. She pursed her bubblegum paradise lips and then we heard her mother call, “Isabel?”

Isabel had warned me that her mother would be home and that she would take care of it.

But then there was a lower rumble: a male voice.

Isabel’s eyes narrowed at exactly the same moment that Sofia appeared on the carpeted landing above us, looking equally out of place here — a drowsy-eyed transport from a silent black-and-white movie, complete with one of those sidecurl hairdos and words printed in fancy font on the bottom of the screen. Her white hand gripped the stair rail.

She mouthed words. They would have been printed on the bottom of the screen like so: Your dad!

Tom Culpeper.

I’d last seen him over Victor’s dead body, two thousand miles away and a million years ago. Culpeper hadn’t known it was a guy in wolf’s clothing, though. He had just been trying to kill things with sharp teeth. So Victor’s death wasn’t really his fault. It was mine. Always mine.

I should have gone back to the apartment.

“Isabel? That was you, right? Sofia, is that Isabel?”

Both girls looked at me. Sofia silently scooted down the final stairs and started to touch my arm. Then she thought better of it and made a little hand-wheeling gesture. Words on the screen: Follow me! Isabel put a finger to her lips — Shhh (air kisses, baby/air kisses/follow my breath) — and stepped into another room.

As Sofia whisked me down the hall and straight through a fine, nice, forgettable kitchen toward an open patio door, I heard Isabel say coldly, “Oh, how wonderful. All of my DNA is here together again.”

Sofia didn’t stop until she’d led me two steps across a small deck and directly into a tiny wooden playhouse that butted up against it. It was the sort of playhouse with a green plastic slide and a climbing wall, and usually a wasp’s nest inside. The interior was about four feet square, and was dimly lit by the porch light. Sofia crawled into the far corner and curled her arms around her knees, and I sat in the other corner. I realized that we could still hear the Culpepers, especially when they came into the open-windowed kitchen a moment later. The small, green-shuttered window even gave us a view of the festivities — Sofia and I weren’t visible to them, but they were lit like a television screen.

“I see you picked up the dry cleaning,” Isabel said, voice still cool. She got herself a glass of water. She didn’t say anything to her father.

Isabel’s mother smoothed a hand over her hips. She wore a pair of meticulous white pants and a low-cut black blouse. She was one of those glorious women who was put together but not constructed. Usually mother-daughter pairings felt like before/

after shots, but in this case, the two of them together just left the room in collective awe over the excellence of the genetics involved.

“Your father would like to know if we’d like to spend the weekend with him,” Isabel’s mother said.

Beside me, Sofia made herself into a smaller ball. All I could see over her knees were her enormous eyes as they gazed at the kitchen. They had a sheen as if she was crying, but she was not crying. I wondered how old Sofia was. Fifteen? Sixteen? She seemed younger. She still had that mysterious thing young kids had that made people want to take care of her instead of date her.

“Here?” Isabel said in the kitchen. “Or in San Diego?”

“Home,” Tom Culpeper said. He leaned in the doorway with his arms crossed, looking lawyerly. “Of course.”

Isabel smiled nastily at her glass. “Of course.”

Sofia whispered, “I wish I were like Isabel.”

I brought my focus back into the playhouse. “How do you figure?”

“She always knows what to say,” Sofia said earnestly. “When my parents fought, I just blubbered and looked stupid. Isabel never gets upset.”

I didn’t know about that. I thought Isabel was always upset.

“There’s nothing wrong with blubbering,” I said, and added untruthfully, “I blubber all the time.”

Sofia raised an eyebrow and smiled at me behind her knees.

I saw just the corner of it, shy and disbelieving. She liked that I’d said it anyway. I pulled out my tiny notepad and wrote down the air kisses lyric before I forgot about it.

“Are your parents divorced?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Was your dad a dick lawyer, too?”

She shook her head. Her sheen-y eyes were a little sheenier.

“Not a lawyer, and not a dick.” She couldn’t even say dick in a hateful way. She said it very carefully, like she was talking about anatomy, and she didn’t want anyone to hear her.

In the kitchen, I heard Isabel say, still very chilly, “Driving two hours doesn’t give you a particular claim on my time. I have plans. If you and my mother would like to enjoy a weekend of adult activities and flotation devices, however, I’m fine with that. You’re big people.”

“Being eighteen doesn’t give you a free pass to be rude, Isabel,” Tom said. I closed my eyes and thought about the different ways I would like to hurt him, starting with the easiest and working toward the cruelest: with my fist, with my words, with my smile. “Do you speak to your mother like this?”

“Yes,” said Isabel.

I opened my eyes and asked Sofia, “How long have your parents been divorced?”

Sofia shrugged and rubbed her finger on the interior of the playhouse. In the dim light, I saw that she was touching the words Sofia was here, written with a spidery font. She was sad in a way that didn’t ask me to do anything about it, which made me want to do something about it. I felt in the pocket of my cargo pants until I found a marker, and then I leaned past her and wrote Cole was here. I signed it. I’m good at my own signature.

Her teeth made a tiny crescent in the darkness.

I heard Teresa’s voice rise, and both Sofia and I leaned to listen again. I missed the end of her sentence, but Tom’s reply was unmistakable through the open windows and door.

“You and I both know that love is for children,” he said.

“We’re adults. Compatibility is for adults.”

“Compatibility is for my Bluetooth and my car,” Teresa replied. “Only they get along just fine, and my car never makes my Bluetooth feel like shit.”