Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin

Author:Alix Ohlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

2.

Not all the revelations were easy to take. Just before we outgrew the yellow farmhouse and moved forty miles over to Briar Neck, I found out who the other occupant of the garden shed had been. We were packing boxes—or I was packing boxes, while Wheelock was doing something upstairs—on a bald, lusterless day in late March. Spring was slow that year; the trees had yet to bud and the yard was still glazed with the last dirty remnants of ice. I heard an engine rumble down the gravel driveway and I assumed it was UPS; nobody else ever came to the house. But some movement out the window caught my eye, and I saw a slender, dark-haired girl in a motorcycle jacket emerge from a black SUV, cross the yard, and open the door of the shed. For a second, my heart plummeting and then rising, I thought it was Robin. I wrote to her every few months, first by mail at the Tunnel and then at an email address she seemed to check only sporadically. I confined myself to brief and concrete particulars about my life. In return I received occasional postcards and, once, a clipping from a gossip item in an Italian newspaper with a picture of a marginally famous American actress sitting at a fancy party next to a man in a silk scarf. The man was Boris Dawidoff. Robin had drawn on the photo, giving him devil horns.

Outside, the shed door slammed. Wheelock came running down the stairs, blitzing past me without a word, faster than I’d ever seen him move. In the windy yard he talked with the girl, who was now facing the house. It was not my sister. She looked quite young, maybe college-age, wearing dark lipstick and a leather choker rimmed with silver spikes, and she was beautiful. Wheelock was speaking to her animatedly, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying, or tell whether his hand gestures were angry or pleading. I wasn’t surprised to see how he occupied myself when I wasn’t around; some part of me even expected it. I did feel uncomfortable at how young she was, and how tiny; she barely came up to his collarbone. Wheelock threw an arm around her and kissed her black, shiny hair, guiding her into the house. She was crying, burying her head in his armpit. An unlovely gob of snot hung from her nose, and she wiped it on his sweater.

When they came into the living room their cheeks were livid from cold.

“This is my daughter,” Wheelock said. “Min.”

“I hear you’ve been sleeping in my bed,” she said. “Like fucking Goldilocks.” Her accent was obscurely foreign, hints of British melded with something else.

“I’m Lark,” I said. “The—assistant.”

“Jesus, I know. Your presence has been explicated.”

“Easy, Min,” Wheelock said.

“Easy,” she repeated, mocking him. “Is there any booze in this shithole?”

“If I’d known you were coming I would’ve laid in some grain alcohol and barbiturates.”

“Ha ha,” she said. “You’re the only dad in the world who thinks rehab jokes are funny.

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