Eternally teenage.

“LA is marvelous. Don’t know why you left. Please tell Al he’s a fucking arsehole. xF”

Fenn has been texting me from Los Angeles since she arrived last Saturday night, and this was one from late on the Sunday night that followed, after Alex had finally packed up and left my studio. It is times like these, crises like these, that I feel the distance between our homes most keenly. Both of us are united in our anger and confusion, and yet we are apart. It’s just a matter of time now, barely over a month, but… this past week we could have benefited from not having to say goodbye, from not having to break our physical connection.

I should start at the beginning, or at least start with what happened on the Thursday afternoon Alex’s sister appeared, unheralded, in Berkeley. It only took 28 hours for it all to unravel from when Fenn showed up in the bookshop, and, as she said, for Alex to figure it all out from there. (“Why couldn’t I have a sibling that is oblivious to how I really feel, like you do?” Fenn cried, holding her pretty head in her hands, as I took her to Buchanan Field to catch the private jet Julian had arranged for her. “I feel like he knows everything that’s in here.”)

Ben had started making increasingly noisy throat-clearing sounds, loud enough that Fenn fished in her purse and pulled out a crumpled hankie for him. Stomping (it’s in the Carr blood, clearly) up to him, she shoved it in his right palm, patting his hand closed. “You poor lamb, have you tried some nux vomica for that cough? Sounds awful.”

Ben glared at me from across the shop floor, tapping a pencil on the New Yorker still spread before him. “Mel, honey, you’re being too rude. Care to make the introductions?”

I rushed to join them, a smile cracking my face. Ben pulled me to his side and beamed down at me, whispering in my ear, “A new cast member!”

“Fenn, this is Benjamin. He runs this place, lets me work here and loves brown labs and strawberry jam. But he can’t have one of the former because he has allergies, and has far too much of the latter than is good for his girlish figure.” I stuck my tongue out at Ben; he returned the compliment. “And Ben, this is Fennella, Alex’s sister. She’s in town because…” I realized I didn’t really know the end of the sentence. Why was Fenn here instead of in SF?

Fenn grasped Ben’s large paw and pumped it firmly. (“What a grip!” he told me later.) “I’m here to see Mel. Oh, and Alex, him too.” Releasing his hand, she ran one tapered finger along the edge of the desk, then poked at the lump of modelling clay Ben keeps next to the calculator for nervous kneading. “Do you sculpt?” she asked him; I could see her tense slightly, a small tightness in her posture. The bell on the door jingled to signal the arrival of a customer, one of our least favorite (smells of sour milk, tries to haggle on the price of one dollar books, favors bellydancing scarves as head wraps).

“Lord, no. That’s for when I’m feeling particularly murderous, to knead out the hate.” He said this while looking straight at Sour Milk, and clapped a hand over his mouth. “I’m sorry, that popped out.”

Relaxing her shoulders, Fenn slipped him a sly grin. “Fabulous. My mother’s a sculptor and I’m sick of clay. And her.” Fenn leaned back a little to consider Ben, whose left arm was still tossed over my shoulder. She pursed her mouth a little and lowered her brows. “Tell me, are you two…”

I jumped away from Ben; for his part, Ben shivered in disgust and wiped his hands on his chinos. “Oh sweet Jesus, no,” he stage-whispered. “I don’t swing that way, if you know what I mean.” Sour Milk cast a poisonous glance at Ben from the True Crime section; Ben narrowed his eyes to return the favor and proclaimed loud enough for the guy looking in the shop window outside to hear: “NOT THAT WE DON’T LIKE STRAIGHT PEOPLE. STRAIGHTS ARE WELCOME.” The would-be browser stopped perusing my display on the French Riviera and beat a rapid retreat.

Fenn turned to me, Al’s sweet brown gaze returned to me through a woman’s eyes, though I sensed something far more mercenary behind them than I’d ever seen in Alex’s. “I just wanted to check you weren’t cheating on my brother like you cheated on Julian with Al,” she coolly intoned.

Ben looked at the floor. “Well, this conversation is taking a decidedly odd turn,” he murmured, reaching down to pick up a paperclip that had fallen off the desk where Fenn had been stroking it earlier. “Shall I leave you two sisters-to-be to it?”

Fenn clapped her hands and let out a peep of delight, her black curls bouncing on her shoulders as she made a tiny leap. “HA! That was a joke.” Her mouth turned downwards at the corners, a caricature of a frown, casting her high cheekbones into even greater relief. “Well, I thought it was funny. Ben, did you know Melissa and my brother had a torrid affair while she was still married? It was all on the phone, too. Alex hid it from our mother for ages too, because Mummy loves Julian.”

Ben looked to me nervously, his cheeks pinking at the embarrassment of getting involved in a family squabble. “Melissa told me that she has loved your brother for a very long time, but only recently gave herself permission to acknowledge that truth.” (Nicely done, Ben. As a reward, I will knit you a much better scarf than the green one your ex-boyfriend made you.)

Fenn looked Ben up and down, from his sandy Ivy League crew cut down to his Topsiders. “He’s a good egg, Mel. Nice to know someone has your back,” she told me. “Not that I have a good egg of my own. Alex refuses to speak to Mummy about letting me move out. I’m thirty-fucking-four years old. Anyway, I’m here, let’s do something.”

It was just past 4pm. Happy hour at Tupper & Reed sounded just about right to me, but we’d have to wait until 5, so I proposed going for a walk around campus until then.

“It would be good to stretch my legs,” Fenn mused, as she stretched up up up on her toes, bringing her arms above her head before extending them behind her back. “I had to fly from Edinburgh to London, and then to San Francisco. Eleven hours, Mel. That’s not including having to get to Edinburgh for a 6am flight. Horrendous. Even in business class.”

“Business class? How did you afford that?” Despite her earlier protestations of having paid for the flight herself with “a wee bit of help from Charles,” this sounded distinctly not right to me. I know how much business class from London is, especially at the last minute, which I sensed had been the timing of Fenn’s trip.

“Oh, did I say business? What’s that other one, the one just above steerage? Premium economy? That’s the one. Just a few hundred quid more, almost human.” Fenn turned away from us to look over at Sour Milk, who’d been inching closer and closer to our little clutch to hear us a bit better. By this point she was in Cookbooks and Dining, a mere five feet away. Looking down the same long nose she shares with her brother, Fenn made a little brushing movement towards Sour Milk. “Shoo!” she hissed. “This is family talk.”

Sour Milk stood her ground, and pointed at Ben; I noticed she was wearing blue leather bicycle half-gloves to match her blue boilersuit. “Benjamin,” she hissed back. “Are you going to let this Limey speak to me, a paying customer, this way?”

“LIMEY?” Fenn yelled. “I am Scottish, you hag. And you smell of spoilt yoghurt. Now fuck off.” Fenn turned her back on Sour Milk and smiled at me, a cat-like expression of deep satisfaction emerging slowly on her face, like a old-school photo print developing in a chemical bath. “Mel, a walk and some drinks sounds lovely. May we, Benjamin?”

Ben clasped Fenn’s hand in his as he looked over at Sour Milk. “You heard her. Shoo! This is family talk.” Sour Milk harrumphed her disgust and shuffled over to ephemera, where I could see her pointedly messing the Hogarth prints up again. “Of course, Fennella,” he continued. “You may take Melissa wherever you wish; I’ll join you after at the bar. But do yourself a favor — call your brother. I know enough of him to understand that every minute you two are flapping your jaws and daydreaming about alcohol is a minute that he won’t understand why you haven’t told him you’re here.” (This is 100% accurate, very astute, Ben. You might even get a second scarf at this rate.)

Fenn scuffed her right sandal on the filthy old green-grey industrial carpeting. She looked like a grown-up version of Lucy, petulant and cranky from lack of sleep. “I know you’re right,” she huffed. “Please don’t mistake me — I can’t wait to see Al, I do miss him tremendously. It’s just… he’ll ask me all these questions about whether Mummy knows I’m here, and of course she doesn’t. She thinks I’m in Edinburgh with my cousin Frances and Uncle B. Which I was, before I flew here.” Another black curl had untucked itself from behind her ear, and she blew it out of her line of sight. “I want to have my adventure without having to explain myself.”

I understood her completely. Having spent years having to account for my comings and goings to Julian, I am familiar with having another person pass judgment on my movements as being acceptable or not. “I think he’ll just be too happy to see you to start interrogating you, Fenn,” I told her. I took my phone out of my pocket, opened the camera for a selfie. “Come close. You too, Ben.”

Ben was chuffed to be included as I snapped a pic of the three of us grinning into the camera. I texted it immediately to Alex, with the message: look what just blew in!

Two minutes later, Alex’s ringtone — “Eternally Teenage” by Tomorrows Tulips — rang out from my iPhone, disturbing Sour Milk enough in her quest to interleave the sheet music with the postcards that she cast another truculent glance towards us.

“HOW?” Al yelled down the line by way of greeting. “Melissa, how is she… can you put her on? Is she fine? What is — god, just put her on!”

“Yes, Fenn’s here. I’m as surprised as you and she’s fine. Come to Berkeley, Al. Whatever you’re doing –“

“Oh hush, Mel, of course I’m coming, but bloody well put her on NOW.” Al could barely contain the delight in his voice.

I passed the phone over to Fenn, who, in spite of her earlier expressed wariness of speaking to her brother, was now half-hopping up and down in anticipation. “Surprise! I’m here!” she bellowed to Alex.

Ben settled her in the faded green director’s chair behind the register — our presence was not needed for this conversation. With her legs already propped up on the desk, crossed at the ankles, Fenn looked like she was settled in for a long chat. We wouldn’t have a problem being early for happy hour at this rate.

***

Alex joined the three of us at Tupper & Reed about an hour later, having essentially run out of his office building in the Financial District and jumped in a Lyft he booked as he spoke with his sister. By then Fenn had downed two Last Word cocktails and was surprisingly still compos mentis despite the sheer amount of gin and Chartreuse coursing through her system.

“Mummy makes sure there’s always enough in the budget for gin,” she told us as she tipped the last sip of her second cocktail in her mouth. “Usually it’s Co-op own-brand, though. Nothing nearly as gorgeous as this.” Waggling her empty glass at Ben, she cast her face into a particularly doleful expression, opening her eyes wide enough she looked like a Margaret Keane “Big Eyes” painting. “Would you be so kind to fetch me another? I’d be ever so grateful.” Ben hopped to it, asking me if I needed another Mr. Pink as he raised himself off the banquette, but I was taking it slowly. I needed to be in control of myself for when Alex arrived and the pointed questions really began.

I wanted to start drilling Fenn immediately — why are you really here? who really paid for this? why are you leaving for LA so quickly? — but I didn’t want to spook her into bolting. At the same time, I didn’t want to treat her as so many others do: frail, dainty, frangible. And while Alex as her brother, her twin, had the greater right to ask the difficult questions, I know the nature of their love — consuming and combustible. It was either adulation and complete allegiance, or fury and spleen directed towards each other, profanities ricocheting off the walls.

“So, Fenn, before Alex gets here, can I ask you something?” I thought I could ask a few things around the edges, nothing too threatening.

Fenn’s head was tipped back in exhaustion, her eyes half-closed and her mouth a little slack, the lack of sleep starting to catch her, if her light (and beginning to crescendo) snore was anything to go by. At my voice, she abruptly snapped to attention. “Hm? Oh, hi Mel. Sorry about that, a bit shattered from the travel. What question?” She dusted some non-existent fluff off her sundress.

“Are you really okay with Alex and me? I mean, with us planning on getting married some day?” I figured this was the kind of question that while fairly substantial, wasn’t truly about her, and certainly wasn’t about the “why” of her presence in California.

Leaning across the table, Fenn patted my cheek. “I have no idea why you’d want to marry Alex — he’s a crashing bore, bossy, ratty and a gloomy ol’ bampot. Minty never had any luck curing him of his black moods, so best of luck there. But he does seem to love you more than anyone else, and that’s been the case for a long, long time. I remember him calling me at home to tell me he’d met the worst caricature of an American girl, all sunny smiles and hugs and optimism, and he couldn’t help but want to stuff you in the pocket of his old man trousers and keep you there, as appalling as it seemed to him to be attracted to someone so happy.”

I wanted to say something in Alex’s defense — that he wasn’t quite so dour any longer, how brave he’d been for me over the years. How he tried so many times to break me free, to show me how to find the keys to all the little rooms in my head that kept me trapped in my marriage to Julian, that the only ghosts in those rooms were memories I’d secreted away. I did, but Fenn’s feelings about Julian are… let’s just say they aren’t the same as mine. He snatched her heart at 16 and has been careless ever since about where he kept it stashed.

Well after Jules and I were a couple, well after we were married, I observed him toy with her unwavering tendre for him on our annual visit to the Carr home. He’d sit next to her at meals (such as they were from that kitchen), draw her out in conversation, touch her hand or her shoulder when she’d amuse him, compare her favorably to me. (“Melissa, you really should pin your hair up like Fenn’s, though I suspect it looks more lovely on dark hair than it would on yours.” “Liss, you really should ask Fenn for some tips on improving your accent in French. Hers is practically native, even though you’ve had far more years of lessons. Some people just have an ear.”) After dinner, he’d ask to see her studio, and the two of them would disappear for an hour to the semi-dilapidated greenhouse stuck on the back of the house like a half-formed and particularly ugly thought of some Victorian ancestor. That they might have been fooling around never crossed my mind; Julian’s thoughts on infidelity had always been clear to me. But leading her on, blowing oxygen over the embers always incandescent for him, that was possible. I believe he knew in Fenn he’d always have an ally, and feeding the crush on a regular basis might eventually pay dividends.

I opened my mouth to ask if we had her blessing, but was cut short when Alex appeared in the doorway, looking a little lost, his moss green silk tie loosened and askew, the early evening sun catching the blue undertone in his hair and casting the rest of him in a honeyed hue. As beautiful, more beautiful, than that very first night, Alexander. I watched him spot Ben at the bar and slap his back in greeting. After the briefest of bro-y handshakes and manly embraces, Ben pointed the way back to where Fenn and I were tucked in the corner, behind the pool table. I gave a little wave.

“Hey,” I hissed. “Alex is here.”

Fenn shook out her curls and straightened her back. “Does he look happy or angry?”

I didn’t have enough time to tell her before her brother bounded over to our table and grabbed her out of the banquette by the middle, tossing her over his shoulder. It looked so much like they were going to wrestle, but I had seen this sort of roughhousing between the two before so it didn’t raise anyone’s eyebrows but Ben’s and the bartender’s.

Fenn beat Alex’s back ineffectually before poking him in the side with one of her bony fingers. “Let me down, you foul beast!” she protested.

Ben gingerly tiptoed around this display to set the drinks down on the table and take the chair across from me. “This seems… normal,” he observed wryly, picking up the gin martini he’d been working his way through earlier.

Alex let his sister slide out of his grip back onto the floor before she punched him in the arm; he winced in pain (it looked like a real punch, too). “That’s for leaving me alone with Mummy,” she grunted before bursting into tears and grinning at him. “I miss you, you daft bastard.”

Alex bundled her up in one great embrace before setting her back down in the banquette next to me. “My two best girls, here in Berkeley!” he crowed as he slid in beside his twin. For my part, I moved seats so I could be on Al’s other side, but also so I could be closer to Ben. The twins might spend much of the evening in close conversation that could exclude us interlopers, and Ben would want real time explanations of any inside jokes or history.

Ben passed over the pint he’d ordered for Alex; we wished each other cheers and drank as one. The resemblance between the twins is eerie — not just the superficialities of hair and eye and skin color, but the way they move their bodies, how they hold their drinks, rake their hands through their hair when puzzled, mirror each other when they stretch their long limbs. Both twins raise a corner of their mouth when mildly amused, but for Alex it’s the right and Fenn the left, reflections of each other.

As I’d anticipated, the evening sped by in a flurry of questions from Alex about how and why Fenn had arrived in the East Bay, and what her plans were in Los Angeles next week. With a little more gin in her, and her twin nearby, Fenn decoded her mysteries for us.

The past six months had been dreadful, with Cora bouncing off the walls in nervous energy, full of the wildness of a new relationship with a man, a newcomer to Pitlochry, whom their mother had met at the post office. Alex was astonished — their mother had never mentioned this man, a solicitor named Andrew “Kil-something-or-other,” as Fenn put it. Fenn detested Andrew, even if he did get Cora out of the house. “Nasty and common,” she sneered dismissively. “Drives a fucking Lambo, like he’s a Russian mobster. Too vulgar for Mummy.” Fenn guzzled the last of her cocktail. “Joke’s on him though — took him forever to figure out we’re completely skint, and now the bastard thinks he’s in love with her. Might marry her for all I know, not that Daddy would have approved.”

Al shot me a look, which I instantly read: pray that Andrew Kil-whatever proposes, Mel, so it’s his Lambo money paying for the roof. I replied with a stiff nod in agreement.

Fenn channelled her anger at the sudden appearance of a trespasser on the grounds of their mouldering estate into a flurry of work — pen and ink drawings of pastoral vistas marred with implicit or explicit menace. She passed around a photo of one on her phone, a fantasia on the trope of the Peaceable Kingdom where instead of living in perfect harmony, animals of every stripe had set upon each other in a frenzy of death, as a placid lake rippled in a Highland landscape behind the carnage. It was simultaneously terrifying and alluring, and like nothing I’d seen before. (“Christ,” Ben whispered as he inspected it, and crossed himself after handing back the phone, even though he’s decidedly not Catholic. “It’s like Satan and Julie Andrews worked on a crossover project,” he told Fenn, who looked deeply pleased.)

And as she produced, she posted — on her personal website and on Instagram (I didn’t even know she had one), where she had already built up a steady following over time, taking care to follow and follow back, comment and like. She had reconnected with her former classmates at GSA, many of whom had never forgotten the fey girl who’d blown in and out of the studios fifteen years before.

Charles was one of these, according to Fenn. He hadn’t been a friend, really a friend of a friend. “I was quite peripheral to his existence,” she explained, “though I knew exactly who he was when he reached out.” Charles had landed in LA nearly 10 years ago on a holiday and ended up making himself indispensable to a small gallery owner looking for a young artist who didn’t mind working for almost nothing (totally illegally, of course). On his independent income, Charles fit the bill — his working class English accent (a total put on, according to Fenn — “far more smart than Al and I are, I think his cousin is a Countess or something equally ridiculous”), his own artistic pedigree and above all his ambition to make the gallery a success. He married the owner a few years later, expanded the gallery and now looks for new or underappreciated talent. Like Fenn, who’d exhibited pretty much only in the area surrounding Perth for years.

So when Charles expressed interest in bringing her to Los Angeles to meet his wife and a couple of agents, Fenn grabbed the chance to further her career and get out of Scotland for a couple of weeks. “The way I saw it,” Fenn explained, in between sips of a very dry martini, “Mummy was distracted by Andrew Kil-fuckface, who has been shagging her senseless most every night for months.”

Alex had turned decidedly green in response to this revelation, but Fenn just glared at him. “Don’t make that face at me, Alexander, it’s true and you didn’t have to be there. And you probably aren’t aware but Mummy hasn’t fully gone through the change yet, so do you know how mortifying it is to have to remind her to use protection?” Fenn and Alex shivered in unison.

“Anyway,” Fenn continued, “she wasn’t paying as much attention to me for a change, which isn’t to say she wasn’t subjecting me to the usual level of smother-love. I thought I could sell it as a trip to Edinburgh to see Frances — which it was, for the first night — that she could use for carnal embrace without me being around to shoot them dirty looks at breakfast the morning after. Having to look at Andrew cracking open a runny soft-boiled egg — he cooks them, of course, since it’s not like our mother has any clue how to do that — and then dipping soldiers in it after listening to him plough our batty mother? The worst.” Alex actually gagged at the thought of this intimate scene.

Cora jumped at the opportunity and even gave Fenn the money to buy tickets to Edinburgh. And with Charles’ monetary assistance, earlier this month she booked herself on a plane to California. “Charles wanted me to go straight to LA, but I told him you’d kill me if I came all this way and didn’t see you. But I know how busy you are — Mummy never lets me forget — so I thought I’d come to Berkeley and be near Mel, who Ju-” Fenn stopped herself and gulped down a large part of the martini, while her eyes got very large. “– who I thought might have more flexibility in her schedule. And Mel said she has tomorrow off anyway so I thought correctly. Get me another drink, Al?”

Alex caught my eye in a sideways glance. I heard it too, Al. “I’ll get you a water, Fenn. Take a break, let your liver breathe,” he replied, favoring his sister with a warm smile but his tension pulsed in the twitch beneath his right eye.

His sister’s mouth turned down in a sulk. “You’re such a poo, Al. Fine. Mel, you stay here with me and tell me again why you want this miserable cunt to marry you.”

Ben walked towards the bar with Alex, and I was left alone with Fenn, whose earlier sleepiness had been washed away by a flood of gin. After they had reached a respectable distance, I reached across the table for her hand and decided to ask the question that had started to buzz about my head like a particularly bothersome gnat. “Fenn, you’d tell me if Julian was involved in any of this, right? It can just be between us, I wouldn’t tell Alex.” Like hell I wouldn’t.

Her black eyebrows shot up in alarm. “Whyever would you think that? I thought might see him in Los Angeles, but I haven’t reached out to him or anything yet.”

Anxiety began its steady and predictable crawl through my system once more, the creep of the tingle radiating from my neck to my stomach. Though determined to stay calm, I knew the plunge into losing control of my emotions was only a few inches away. “Do not finalize anything with him, Fenn. I know you’re fond of him. I know you think I broke his heart. But,” I paused, tipping my head down a little, “he is playing a dangerous game with your brother right now. He is trying to use me as a pawn in whatever fucked up struggle they’ve never settled over the years. I don’t want you involved in this.”

She rolled her eyes at me. “Julian always told me you were so fanciful. I know what you and Al have told me about him over the years, but I know what I have seen of him. I only know my own experience. He has only ever been a friend to me.” Braiding her curls over her shoulder, Fenn favored me with another of her icy scowls. “And no, I am not here to see Julian. I am here to see Charles. You can even call him if you doubt me.”

Ben broke the tension by setting a peachy pink cocktail in front of me. “It’s a Cheshire Smile,” he explained, “something from the new menu.” He looked from me to Fenn and back. “You two look… intense. Anything you care to tell me before Alex reappears?”

Fenn plastered a counterfeit smile on her face. “Oh, nothing. I’m just tired.” (Hey, that’s my “I don’t want to talk about it” line!) “Maybe after this round I’ll go back to the hotel.”

Alex joined us, a bottle of Allagash White in his hand. He slung an arm around his sister and drew her closer as he took a sip of beer. “This the last round? Fair enough, you look knackered, Fenn. But tomorrow night, my place. Dinner — Mel, not your responsibility. I’ll order in.” He looked so cheery, so blithe, so satisfied to have his strange and wonderful sister with him again. Whatever fantasies Fenn had about seeing Julian in LA needed to be ended before she put her brother’s love for her on the line. I didn’t know if his love for her outstripped his enmity for Julian these days, and I really didn’t want to discover the truth.

***

I’m breaking this post here — I have so much more I’ve written on this strange and fleeting time Fenn was with us, and I’m still typing it out. It’s been taking me days and days, and still there are echoes of what occurred more than a week later. Fenn is still here, for another couple of days. I’ve spoken to Julian, something I dreaded, but needed to do to quell my worries. (It didn’t work, though.) Enough to know there will be more to follow, and shortly.