Sisterly Love is a serialized novel. To savor the full narrative experience, start at the beginning and work through the chapters in order. You can find chapters on the Home page or in the Archive.
CHAPTER 31
The Rolls Royce engines pitched like a choir of angels, and the tube, with its human payload, began to roll along the runway. Inside the cabin, a furious vibration took hold then just as suddenly surrendered as the plane climbed heavenward. The pilot dipped then banked toward Kentucky. Summer glanced sideways at Jem, whose eyes, now open, were fixed on the seat back in front.
“Well, well, well,” Summer said, nudging Jem with her shoulder. “The Terrapins! You snake! Sitting here pretending to be ordinary when you’re practically rock ‘n roll royalty.”
Jem shrugged dismissively. “It was a long time ago.”
“Did you write all their songs?” Summer asked, not waiting for an answer. “I adore your early songs, Changing Fortunes, Perennial Love, Only a Girl... they spoke to me... if you know what I mean?”
Jem opened his mouth to reply but Summer continued to share her thoughts, which tumbled out in no particular order.
“... I’m a lyrics first, melody-second girl,” she admitted. “Good lyrics are like good novels, don’t you think? I mean, the narrative never leaves you—” she paused then and broke into a furtive grin. “I once dated a woman just because she could sing Only a Girl. It didn’t work out, the relationship, I mean...”
Jem nodded in quiet amusement and Summer realized she was raving. Her cheeks reddened. She tried to compose herself, dusting invisible crumbs from her pants as she silently admonished her silliness—thank god Frankie was not here to witness what a fool she was making of herself.
“Have you always been a lesbian?” Jem inquired.
“Yes,” Summer said, delighted to be asked.
“Is there a Mrs. Summer O’ Flynn?”
Summer laughed, “There’s my partner, Frankie. She’ll be my missus in December.”
“Congratulations!” said Jem. “Is Frankie a journalist too?”
Summer fell into a description of Frankie, starting with her culinary abilities then moving on to the opportunities her talent had attracted. She shared the backstory about Frankie’s family; their arrival in Australia as boat people and their struggle to settle into a country that could be intolerant of differences. Jem said he couldn’t think of any cultures that were truly welcoming of strangers, and that prompted Summer to confess her surprise at the apartheid-like self-selection she had observed in New York. Then she brought the conversation back to Frankie, listing her many “wonderful” traits: The way she approached every exchange with a listening ear; her absence of guile, and willingness to trust; and her “complete” disinterest in competition. The later had been a surprise, Summer admitted.
“There has never been even a hint of resentment out of her for the attention I attract.”
When she said this, Summer looked sideways at Jem, checking his reaction before lowering her voice and adding, “I’ve learned to fear the pedestal, you see...”—A veteran of the condemned, Summer knew there was only one way down and that the landing was always hard. Jem considered this with a slow nod. Summer thought she detected sympathy.
“So, I was wary of Frankie when we first started dating,” Summer continued. “I kept waiting for another Frankie to appear; the real Frankie. Then one day as she was telling me something important, I found myself watching her talk; noting how she paused to reach for the right word. That was when I became aware of her devotion. It was a defining moment; discovering the esteem she held me in. It made me feel beautiful in an unchained way. I’ve never felt that before.”
“Like attracts like,” Jem offered, as though stating a fact.
Summer was moved... Such a gentle man, she thought.
“That’s a bit my point,” she said. “I know I’m beautiful; I’ve heard it from others all my life. But real beauty; that resides in Frankie. How do I know this? Because every day I just want to be more like her.”
“It must be something to feel that about a person.”
“It is,” Summer replied, thoughtfully.
On the public address system, the pilot gave an update about the weather in Kentucky and their anticipated touchdown at Louisville International.
“Can I ask why The Terrapins broke up?” Summer said, turning back to Jem. “Was it the usual stuff we hear about with famous bands? Loss of inspiration; interpersonal tensions; life on the road?”
“That I couldn’t say,” Jem said. “I left the band long before they split—”
“Oh?—”
Jem paused, as though wrestling with a thought and Summer, worried she had overstepped a boundary, began to apologize—
“No, no!” Jem raised a hand. “That’s not it. I’m comfortable talking about The Terrapins with you... I—”
He ran his fingers through his hair.
“Only a Girl had been at number one for eleven weeks when The Terrapins set out on our world tour,” he said. “Our first stop was London. The plane touched down at Heathrow and we were whisked straight off to a meeting with Beat It.”
“Beat It?!” Summer repeated, sucking in air between her teeth—now there’s serious rock ‘n roll royalty.”
“We thought so too,” Jem said, his brows knitting together in what seemed to Summer like a contradiction. “They greeted us with an impromptu rendition of Only a Girl, all five of them, a cappella.”
“How did that feel? Your song covered by such greatness?”
“Glorious,” said Jem. “Their harmonies were sublime, as you can imagine—”
Jem pressed the button on his armrest and adjusted the tilt.
“Halfway through the song, Joel Henney, Beat It’s front man, made a slashing gesture at his throat and said: ‘Right then, that’s enough of that lads’. Everyone laughed; they were drunk and stoned and it was a little abrupt but we were just... well, happy together. Then Joel Henney started joking with us, but the joking quickly turned to mocking and out of nowhere he singled me out. I don’t know why, he just did: ‘Bad suit, son’ he said...”
Summer kept a straight face; she had had the exact same thought when Jem greeted her at breakfast earlier, wearing his scruffy brown suit. But she had dismissed his appearance as being consistent with musician types.
“Then he started in on my hair: ‘Did you ask your barber to give you a Beat It hair cut?” Jem mimicked Joel Henney and Summer heard bitterness. ‘Man, you give rhythm players a bad name.’ He went on and on like that; he wouldn’t let up,” Jem said.
Summer felt an urge to laugh. The whole thing sounded infantile. She looked to see if maybe Jem was joking but his suffering seemed real. Then a thought came to her; she spoke it before she could stop herself.
“You adored him, didn’t you?” she said.
Jem told Summer that Joel Henney had been his hero. He described how the humiliation that day had been unbearable and how, unable to take a moment more of it, he had made for the door of the little English pub and no one had noticed; not Beat It, not The Terrapins, not their manager.
“What did you do then after you walked out?” Summer asked.
“I checked into a hotel and got drunk. Then the next day I returned to the United States. I never drank again, and I never played with The Terrapins again.”
“Crikey!” Summer exclaimed, trying to understand how Joel Henney’s childish narcissism had ended a promising career. She waited for more but Jem was finished, and in the silence that followed, Summer understood that the memory remained as painful today. Just then the cart rolled into the aisle, clanging and clattering. Summer and Jem lowered their tray tables.
“Does Rose know you were The Terrapin’s rhythm guitarist?” she asked, chewing on her tuna and salad sandwich. “Only, she’s never mentioned it.”
“Fer shur,” Jem murmured in his Californian drawl. “But she was not a fan of The Terrapins.”
Jem said this with slight bemusement, and Summer saw in his forgiveness a fondness for her sister. She felt at once relieved and grateful that Rose had a friend in Jem, because her sister did not seem to have any other friends to speak of.
“That figures! Rose can be so fixed in her views,” Summer laughed. “When we were growing up, she used to complain that rock ‘n roll music was ungodly.”
Jem smirked.
“Do we owe your influence for her change of heart?”
Jem laughed out loud.
“She can be black and white at times,” he admitted. “We all can.”
“Point taken,” said Summer.
“She can also be very hard on herself,’ Jem added, carefully. “It would be good to see her to believe in her talent more... she struggles with that.”
This information surprised Summer.
“What’s standing in her way do you think?”
Jem considered the question.
“It might be that she’s at odds with what she should be and what she could be,” he offered.
Summer suddenly had the idea to enlist Jem’s help in saving Rose from what she was certain would be a disastrous marriage to Alan; a union where Rose would be trading one kind of abuse for another. But almost immediately, she saw that even if she could appeal to his empathy, Jem would not subvert the taboos of manhood, even for the talent he had correctly identified in her sister, and she abandoned the idea.
“You’re right about her genius,” Summer said. “Rose has only to hear a tune once to be able to flawlessly recreate it. She did that when we were children. Once she did it with a particularly sophisticated movement.”
“Which one?” Asked Jem.
Summer giggled. “Actually, it was the theme to The Little Mermaid, which I used to listen to on the radio. I was mad about it.”
“Grieg’s Piano Concerto, right?”
Summer nodded. “I would beg Rose to play it for me, and Rose would complain that it was long and complicated. But I’d persist, and finally she’d give me a look of exasperation and say, ‘I’m only doing this because you’re my sister and I love you.’”
Jem smiled.
“I loved Rose too... ” said Summer. “...but there were times when I truly felt that I loved The Little Mermaid more.”
“Hans Christian Andersen probably did too... back then.” Jem said, shaking his head. “I don’t know what he’d make of his story nowadays.”
“Back then,” said Summer, succumbing to nostalgia and missing a truth in Jem’s insight, “the music and the story were one, and I was so consumed by the combination that when Rose capitulated, I’d be in heaven.” When she said this, Summer held up her hands and spoke with restrained passion. “I’d throw open the bay windows in the family room where Rose was at the piano, then climb out and fling myself onto the lawn; every nerve in my little body alert for Rose’s call. ‘Ready?’ she’d yell, signaling the start of my journey to the bottom of the sea. And I’d begin tapping out the timpani roll—”
Jem raised his hands in the air and beat the rhythm with pretend drum mallets.
“In my imagination I’d hear the rumble; low and deep, hollow and urgent and, as if on cue, Rose’s hands would come down on the ivory keys with the double-octave flourish.”
Jem hummed it.
Summer became somber then.
“The Little Mermaid was my hero,” she admitted. “Courageous to a fault; she defied the Sea Witch, she traded her voice for legs, and she possessed a quality that my imaginary enemy said was stupidity, but that I later learned was compassion.”
“You had an imaginary enemy?!”
Summer ignored Jem’s quizzical look.
“I knew that story inside out,” she sighed. “While Rose commanded the melody, I’d mime the character’s lines. Grandma: kind, sage, perplexed at The Little Mermaid’s obsession with human beings. The Sisters: imperious, distant; not at all like The Little Mermaid. The Sea Witch: mistress of the dark depths; her beguiling charm made my arms crawl with goose bumps. Then would come the woodwind solos and muted strings closing in on the certainty of my mermaid’s predicament. And I’d lay there in the grass, paralyzed with grief because in my eight-year-old heart, I knew my mermaid had been set up to fail and I could not reconcile such a sacrifice for someone else’s happiness.”
“Sacrifice,” Jem repeated, in a whisper.
“Yes,” Summer said. “It does seem to be a woman’s lot, don’t you think?”
Jem didn’t respond.
Summer looked over at him. She felt the plane begin to descend; an intense sadness came over her: He’s given up on love, she said to herself, laying a pale hand over his elegant fingers.