Sunday's on the Phone to Monday by Christine Reilly Read Free Book Online Page A

Cocoplum-eyed, she yawned, put her head on Claudio’s shoulder. He twirled his tie and told her how soft her skin was. Like oysters, he said.
    Is this our honeymoon? Mathilde asked.
    Are you kidding? asked Claudio. He told her he’d been saving up in the past year for a trip to Europe as a surprise. They were going to see Paris, Amsterdam, and Vienna. They were going to see the opera and the Musée d’Orsay and the canals. They were going to eat snails and schnitzel and hagelslag .
    Holy ghost, Mathilde said. I’m lucky.
    The end of A Streetcar Named Desire arrives with cruel and tragic irony. In the last scene, authorities escort Blanche to a mental institution because she is unable to deal with reality. But her sister, Stella, is doing the exact same thing by not believing that her husband raped Blanche.
    The morning after their wedding, Claudio called his parents to tell them the good news.
    He asked if there was any way he could reach his sister, having tried earlier to call her at Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services in Grand Rapids. Pine Rest was where Jane had been living since she was fifteen—first with juveniles and then shifting among wards like a twentysomething yuppie bouncing between studio apartments. Jane had initially been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Then, borderline personality disorder. And finally, schizophrenia. None of the conditions replaced the other; they veined in her all at once. Melody, harmony, and cacophony.
    The administrators had said that she wasn’t in the system. They couldn’t tell him any more information about her whereabouts, for legal reasons. We have to be confidential , they’d said.
    Alas, Claudio’s troubling sense of culpability. He had tried every year to go back and visit her, along with visiting his parents, but now had to start saving his money for Mathilde. She was his new family. - My wife, - Claudio thought. How sweet this nom de plume sounded. - My little bride. My baguette. My bluet. My coquette. -
    Your sister? She’s free. His mother let out a bloodcurdling giggle. Where were you these past six months?
    Huh? Claudio couldn’t picture Jane alone, with the daily choices of eating and sleeping. There was no way. For another moment, and for the countless time, he wished he had one ofthose regular sisters who’d go to college, who’d love Chekhov and hang mistletoe in her room and take electives in modern dance or architecture or anatomy and physiology. Just a normal girl who’d learn how to do laundry at eighteen and who’d like to get her hair blown out at a salon. Who’d now be working in a city and go on bad dates and pay for her own electric bill. A girl who’d call her father Daddy and her mother her best friend and her brother (sometimes) kiddo.
    They didn’t have the funding to keep her in. They tried to put her in a halfway house, but she left.
    Where is she?
    Not here. I begged her to come back, but she wanted nothing to do with us. Neither of my children want anything to do with me.
    Mom, I go back and visit you and Dad whenever I can. He went back during off-seasons, never during times like Christmas. It was selfish but for his own sake—and for Mathilde’s. They’d spent the autumn and winter holidays with Mathilde’s brother, Sawyer, exchanging earmuffs and cuff links and frames and eating at boutique restaurants with menu fonts in Garamond and the quaintest matchbooks.
    If you really loved us, you’d live here.
    Do you know anything about where to reach her? Do you know if she’s okay?
    His mother gave a number. But I never call her. All she asks for is money.
    Claudio said good-bye, jittered, dialed his sister. Jane answered on the fourth ring. What? She sounded winded, as though she’d been sprinting.
    Jane? It’s your brother. How are you? Claudio spoke kindly. He had to be chary with his phrasing or else Jane would hang up on him.