Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

Heather had been looking for her sister’s diary, a miniature book of Moroccan leather with a real lock. But anyone could figure out how to jiggle it open without the key. She had found Sunny’s diary only once, more than six months before, and it had been sadly boring. Reading her sister’s diary, she had almost felt sorry for her. Heather’s life was much more interesting. Maybe that was how it was: People with interesting lives didn’t have time to write about them in diaries. But then Sunny had tricked her, drawing Heather into a conversation about one of the entries, only to point out that Heather couldn’t know of the incident on the bus unless she’d read Sunny’s diary. Heather had gotten into quite a bit of trouble for that, although she didn’t understand why. If the family was supposed to share everything, then why was Sunny allowed to lock up her thoughts?

“Heather just admires her big sister so,” their mother had told Sunny. “She wants to be like you, do everything you do. That’s how little sisters grow up.”

Wrong , Heather wanted to say. Sunny was the last person to whom she would look for guidance. Almost in high school, Sunny didn’t even have a boyfriend, while Heather sort of did. Jamie Altman sat next to her on field trips and paired up with her whenever the teacher made them go boy-girl. He also had given her a Whitman sampler on Valentine’s Day. It was the small one, only four chocolates, and none of them with nuts, but Heather was the only girl in all of sixth grade to receive chocolates from a boy other than her father, so it made quite the stir. Heather didn’t need Sunny to show her how to do anything.

She picked up the Accent section and read her horoscope. In just five days, there would be a horoscope especially for her. Well, for her and the other people born on April 3. She couldn’t wait to see what it said. And next week there would be a party, bowling at Westview Lanes and a bakery cake-devil’s food with white icing and blue roses. Maybe she should buy something new to wear. No, not yet. But she would take her new purse to the mall, an early birthday gift from her father’s store. It was actually multiple purses that buttoned to the same wooden handles, so you could match it to your outfit. She had chosen denim with red rickrack, a madras plaid, and one with a print of large orange flowers. Her father hadn’t planned to stock the purses, but her mother had noticed how Heather studied the samples and pressed him to include it in the orders he made back in February. They were by far the most successful new item in his store this spring, but that just seemed to make her father grumpier.

“Faddish,” he said. “You won’t want to carry it a year from now.”

Of course , Heather thought. Next year there would be another purse or top that was the thing to have, and her father should be glad for that. Even at eleven she had figured out that you couldn’t run a successful store if people didn’t keep buying things, year in and year out.

SUNNY, FRUSTRATED ALMOST to the point of tears, watched silently as her father left the kitchen. He had been so odd this morning-making pancakes, letting Heather listen to WCBM, singing along and even commenting on the songs.

“I like that one,” he said of each song. “The girl-”

“Minnie Riperton,” Heather said.

“Her voice sounds like birdsong, don’t you think?” He attempted to imitate the cascading notes, and Heather laughed at how poorly he did it, but Sunny simply felt uncomfortable. A father wasn’t supposed to know songs like “Lovin’ You,” much less sing along with them. Besides, her father was the biggest liar. He didn’t like any of these songs. The very fact that a song was Top 40-the very fact of popularity in anything, whether it was music or movies or television or fashion-disqualified it from serious consideration in her father’s life. On his headphones, in his study, he played jazz, Bob Dylan, and the Grateful Dead, which seemed as formless and pointless as jazz to Sunny. Listening to the radio with her father and sister made Sunny feel queer, as if they were reading her diary in front of her, as if they knew what she was thinking late at night when she went to bed with her transistor radio plugged into one ear. Her tastes were changing, but she still found certain love songs irresistible: “You Are So Beautiful.” “ Poetry Man. ” “My Eyes Adored You.” Twitching in her seat, cutting her pancakes into ever-smaller pieces, she had yearned to jump up and turn the radio off.

Then Ringo came on with the “No No Song” and her father did it for her, saying, “There’s only so much a man can take. When I think-”

“What, Daddy?” Heather asked, playing up to him.

“Nothing. What do my girls have planned today?”

And that’s when Heather said, “Sunny’s going to the mall.” She spoke with a lisping baby quality, a voice she had long outgrown, a voice she never really had to begin with. When Heather petitioned for a new freedom for herself-permission to ride her bike to the shopping district in Woodlawn, for example-she spoke in her regular voice. But when she was trying to show up Sunny, Heather used this little-girl tone. Even so, their mother was onto her. Sunny had heard her mother tell someone on the phone that Heather was eleven going on forty. Sunny had waited to hear what her relative age was, but it hadn’t come up.

Sunny added her dish to the stack her father had left on the drain board. She tried to come up with a rationalization not to do them now, but she knew that was unfair to her mother, who would be left with a pile of sticky dishes at the end of a long workday. It never even occurred to her father to wash them, Sunny knew, although he was liberated, compared to other fathers. The kids in the neighborhood called him the “hippie,” because of the shop, his hair, and his VW bus, which was a simple robin’s-egg blue, not anything remotely psychedelic. But although their father cooked-when he felt like it-and said he “supported” his wife’s decision to work as a real-estate agent, there were certain household chores he never attempted.

If he had to wash the dishes every day , Sunny thought, scraping the leftover pancakes into the trash, he wouldn’t have been so dead set against putting in a dishwasher . She had shown him the ads for the portable models, explaining how they could roll it from the sink to the covered back porch when it wasn’t in use, but her father had said the machines were wasteful, using too much water and energy. Meanwhile he was always upgrading his stereo. But his study was a place of contemplation, he reminded Sunny when she complained, the place where he conducted the sunrise and sunset rituals known as the Agnihotra, part of the Fivefold Path, which wasn’t a religion but something better, according to Sunny’s father.

“Have you been spying on me?” Sunny asked her sister, who was humming to herself and winding a lock of hair around her finger, lost in some secret joy. Their mother often said that their names should be switched, that Heather was always happy and bright, while Sunny was prickly as a thistle. “How did you know I planned to take the bus to the mall?”

“You left the schedule out on your desk, with the departure times underlined.”

“What were you doing in my room? You know you’re not supposed to go in there.”

“Looking for my hairbrush. You’re always taking it.”

“I am not.”

“Anyway”-Heather gave a blithe shrug-“I saw the schedule and I guessed.”

“When we get there, I go my way and you go yours. Don’t be hanging around me. Okay?”

“Like I want to follow you around. The only thing you do is go to the Singer store and flip through the pattern books, when you all but flunked out of home ec at Rock Glen last year.”