The Sister Season by Jennifer Scott

sisters stood by the garage door and laughed. Julia’s fingers absently rubbed her coat pocket, feeling the bump of the cigarette pack inside, feeling an urgency that didn’t really register anywhere else. Distantly she recalled the phone conversation with Dusty, and felt a pang in her gut that stripped away her smile.
    Another squall of wind shrieked past them, almost through them, and they both tucked their chins down into the collars of their coats, squinting against the assault. Claire cussed and pushed away from the garage door and headed back up the steps toward the house, and Julia silently cursed the wind that had ruined whatever it was she and Claire had been experiencing just then. Eight years with no communication—surely there was something that would keep them talking. Hell, she’d talked to Dusty (and, in the background, Shurn) for thirty full minutes. Surely she could communicate with her sister for longer than the amount of time it took to burn one cigarette.
    Desperate, without even thinking, she blurted, “Eli tried to commit suicide.”
    Claire stopped abruptly and turned. She flipped down the hood of her coat and Julia could see the shocked expression on her face. She suddenly felt embarrassed, exposed. She was the together sister. The brain. The professor. Admitting Eli’s suicide attempt was like admitting failure. Up to this point, she’d barely admitted it to herself.
    “Well, he didn’t actually
try
try. But he was going to. I found . . . I found pills. He’d apparently been stealing and stockpiling from . . . God knows where.”
    “Oh, my God, Julia. Does Mom know this?”
    Julia shook her head, simultaneously letting her now shaking hand snake back into her pocket and fish out the cigarettes again. She tapped one out and popped it into her mouth, then offered another one to Claire, who took it. “I haven’t told anyone yet. Not even Tai. Just today I called Dusty. That’s why I’m out here smoking these damn things. I needed . . . I don’t know. To think. To relax.”
    “What did Dusty say?”
    Julia shrugged. “He said a lot.” Mainly that Julia was a horrible mother who was more worried about her career than her one and only son and how did she possibly think that the kid was going to grow up with no emotional problems the way she practically stole him from his father and tried to make the kid think that some . . . in his oh-so-eloquent Dusty-words . . .
some slant-eye science nerd
was his real daddy when he knew it wasn’t the truth. Also that she was probably . . . how did he put it? . . .
one of them high-society rich suburban drug addicts who thinks prescription pills make them sexy and in style
and that was where Eli got the idea. Oh, and when she’d told him this had happened two months ago (it truly had taken her that long to get over the shock and the grief and work up the nerve to call him) and she hadn’t taken Eli to a psychologist (Yet! Yet. She was going to. She was.), he’d really lit into her. She took a drag off her cigarette and blew the smoke out in a breathy burst. “He said he’ll see me in court. He wants custody.”
    Claire’s blue eyes swam over Julia’s face. “No fucking way,” she said, letting her cigarette burn down to the filter without bothering to drag on it at all. “Well, he can’t. Surely he can’t. I mean, the kid . . . Eli . . . is, like, fourteen. Dusty can’t just rip him away from his mom after all these years.”
    Julia shrugged again, feeling shaky all over. The truth was, she wasn’t sure Dusty didn’t have a point about her. She wasn’t sure she hadn’t screwed Eli up. She wasn’t sure Dusty wouldn’t be successful in ripping Eli away. And she wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be best for her son if he did.
    The numbing buzz of the nicotine combined with the horror of having revealed Eli’s secret—to Claire, of all people! Not to her mom, her best friend, not even her husband, but to the sister