The silver balloons were the first thing I saw when the elevator opened. They were bobbing over the mailboxes like a car dealership had come to visit.
Under them sat my twin sister, Aaliyah, on the biggest of six suitcases. She was wearing my navy peacoat, the one I’d asked Mom to send back three times since I left it at her place two winters ago.
Mom and Dad stood next to her in their good coats. The coats they wear to funerals and to ask for things.
Eleven months earlier, Mom had called me on speaker to read out a booking. They’d sold Grandma Thelma’s house for $368,000 and were spending all of it on all-inclusive resorts in Mexico and the Caribbean. Three names were on it: Judy, Gregory, Aaliyah. Mine wasn’t. Since then I’d watched the photos. Coconut drinks, the dock in Cozumel, Dad toasting a chef. Three pairs of feet in the sand, and my face on the twin who wasn’t me.
I paid Aaliyah’s storage unit while she snorkeled. I got the finance manager job nobody called to hear about. In mid-October the posts stopped. At two o’clock today, our thirty-seventh birthday, Mom had called and said, “Tonight.” Nobody said happy birthday.
Now Aaliyah told me the resorts were done with them, so they were moving into mine. Her boxes were coming out of storage Thursday, and she’d already given them my address.
Dad walked over with his palm up for my key card. “We’re not asking, Kayleigh,” he said.
Aaliyah went over to Chapman at the front desk and told him we had the same face. Mom told me not to make a scene in front of the staff.
So I called security from the number on the back of my card and had it logged that someone was telling the desk she was me. Then I texted Rajiv four words.
Go ahead. File tonight.
Dad read my screen twice, looked up at the red light over the mailboxes, and put his empty hand back in his pocket.
The Red Light Over the Mailboxes
“File what?” Mom said.
She said it to Dad, not to me. In our family, you ask the parent who’s closest to the right answer, and for thirty-seven years that’s never been me.
Dad didn’t answer her. He was still looking at the camera. Dad sells insurance, or did until he retired. He knows exactly what a recording is worth.
The stairwell door banged open and a security guard came through it. He was a big man in a gray uniform with MORIARTY stitched over the pocket, and he was brushing frosting off his fingers from one of the management office’s free birthday cupcakes. Somebody in this building was celebrating.
“Ms. Ricciardi?” he said.
“Yes,” Aaliyah and I said together.
We’ve been doing that since kindergarten. It was funny then.
Moriarty looked from her to me, then at the six suitcases, then at Chapman. Chapman pointed at me with two fingers, low, the way you’d point out a pickpocket on a train.
“1608,” Chapman said. “That’s her. Three years.”
“Thank you, Chapman,” I said.
Aaliyah turned on him. “Oh my God, you don’t even KNOW us.”
“I know which one of you says good morning,” Chapman said.
The maintenance man by the plants made a small noise into his mop.
My phone buzzed. Rajiv. He doesn’t text back, he calls, because he bills by the quarter hour and he’s honest about it.
I put him on speaker. I didn’t plan that. My hand did it, and once it was done I didn’t undo it.
“Kayleigh,” he said. “You’re sure? Once I send it, it’s with the detective and the bank tonight.”
“I’m sure.”
“And the building footage? You said you’d have the last piece.”
“She’s standing at the front desk right now,” I said, “telling the concierge she’s me.”
There was a pause on the line, the pause of a man writing something down.
“Okay,” Rajiv said. “Ask security to preserve the video from six-fifty on. I’ll send the affidavit and the October police report together. Happy birthday, by the way.”
He was the first one all day.
I hung up. Nobody in the lobby moved.
Mom’s face was doing arithmetic. “What police report?”
So I told her. I’d been holding it for a month like a hot pan, and I finally had somewhere to set it down.
“On October twelfth,” I said, “I got an alert on my phone. A new credit card, opened in my name. Kayleigh Ricciardi. My birthday, my Social. I’d never applied for it.”
Aaliyah went back and sat down on the biggest suitcase. The balloons bumped her head.
“It had twenty-three thousand eight hundred dollars on it,” I said. “Resort charges. A swim-up bar in Punta Cana. Spa packages. Something called a sunset catamaran, twice. A chef’s table in Montego Bay.”
I looked at Dad.
“You toasted the camera at that one,” I said. “In the linen shirt.”
Dad’s mouth opened and shut.
“On October thirteenth I froze it,” I said. “On October fourteenth you all stopped posting.”
Two days. I’d counted them on my fingers in my kitchen that night, standing over the sink, feeling like the dumbest smart woman in Nebraska.
Mom turned all the way around to look at my sister.
“Aaliyah,” she said. “You told us the money lasted till October because you found a deal.”
Aaliyah didn’t look up from her phone. Her thumb was moving, though nothing on the screen was changing.
“I did find a deal,” she said.
“It was MY deal,” I said. “I just wasn’t invited.”
Six Suitcases
Moriarty cleared his throat, the way large men do when they’d rather be anywhere else.
“Folks,” he said. “Nobody’s going up to 1608 unless the owner takes them. Ms. Ricciardi, the owner, do you want them up?”
Every face in that lobby turned to me. Even the maintenance man’s.
It’s a strange thing, being asked. I wasn’t used to it, and I stood there long enough that Mom thought she still had a chance.
“Honey,” she said. She came toward me with her arms half out, the hug she does at airports. “We didn’t know. Did we, Greg? We didn’t know a thing about a card. You can’t put your father on the street over something your sister did.”
“I’m not putting anyone anywhere,” I said. “You had a house.”
“We had to sell it.”
“You had to go to Cozumel.”
Dad finally found his voice. It came out at the same volume he uses with waiters.
“That was your grandmother’s money,” he said. “Ours to spend. You don’t get to stand there and audit your parents.”
“I’m a finance manager,” I said. “It’s literally my job. You’d know that if anyone had called in May.”
That landed somewhere. He took his hands out of his pockets and didn’t know what to do with them.
Aaliyah stood up. The peacoat was too long on her. It’s not too long on me. We are the same height, but she slouches, and she always has, because she knows somebody else will stand up straight for her.
“You know what, fine,” she said. “FINE. I used your name. Big deal. It’s practically my name. We’ve had the same name since the hospital, Kayleigh. Mom literally couldn’t tell us apart until we were four.”
“I could,” Mom said quietly.
Nobody paid that any attention but me.
“You have a two-bedroom with a TREADMILL in it,” Aaliyah said. “You have a salary. You have a lawyer, for God’s sake, who even has a lawyer? You’ve always had everything, and you sit up there in your little tower being smug about your mortgage. Somebody in this family should get to have fun once.”
“You had ten months of fun,” I said.
“With MY parents.”
“They’re mine too,” I said. “They just forgot.”
She laughed, the high giggle she does for flight attendants, and it cracked halfway through like a cheap plate.
Mom reached past me, took Aaliyah’s phone right out of her hand, and looked at it. I don’t know what she expected to find. Maybe the card. Maybe a different daughter.
“You told me you were paying your own drinks,” she said.
“I was,” Aaliyah said. “With a card.”
I should not have laughed. I did, once, through my nose, the way you do at a funeral when the organ squeaks.
Then Dad said the thing.
I think he’d decided it on the walk across the lobby, the way he’d decided everything else, somewhere over the Gulf.
“Withdraw it,” he said to me. “Text the man back. Tell him you made a mistake. Family handles family, Kayleigh. You do this, and you’re not a part of it.”
Six suitcases. Two parents. One twin in my coat.
I want to tell you I didn’t hesitate. I did. I thought about Christmas Eve, which I host every year, the ham I buy and the green bean thing Dad likes with the onions on top. I thought about five hip appointments and the way he squeezed my wrist in the waiting room at the third one, when it hurt. I thought about the empty chair at a chef’s table in Montego Bay.
“Moriarty,” I said. “Can you hold the video from six-fifty on? My lawyer needs it.”
“Already pulling it,” Moriarty said.
Dad looked at me like I was a stranger who’d taken his parking spot.
“That’s it, then,” he said.
“That was it in December,” I said. “I just read the booking late.”
Thursday
Nobody slept in 1608 that night but me.
Moriarty said they could sit in the lobby until nine, when the doors went to key card only. They sat. Mom made calls on the bench by the plants. Aaliyah lay across three suitcases with her arm over her eyes like a Victorian on a fainting couch. Dad stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, looking at the headlights going past.
I went upstairs. I want to be honest: I sat on my kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher and cried for a while. Thirty-seven, a finance manager, on the tile in my work slacks, eating cheese straight off the block like a mouse in a cartoon.
At 9:20 my phone buzzed. Chapman, from the desk line.
“They got a ride,” he said. “Motel out on Dodge Street. The Prairie Rest. Your dad asked me the name of a cab company. I gave him three.”
“Thank you, Chapman.”
“Ms. Ricciardi,” he said. “Your sister left the balloons.”
On Wednesday morning, Rajiv called while I was making coffee.
“Detective took it,” he said. “The affidavit, the October report, the statements from the card company, and the lobby footage. She said the footage was very clear. Your sister says, quote, ‘I’m a Ricciardi too’ right to the camera. It’s like a commercial.”
“So what happens?”
“Your sister is named in the report as the person who opened the account. The bank closes the debt against your name. Twenty-three thousand eight hundred dollars comes off your credit, every cent of it. What the bank and the county do to her is up to them now. You don’t have to do another thing.”
“I have to do one more thing,” I said.
The reminder emails for Aaliyah’s storage unit still came to me. They’d come to me since April. I’d never unsubscribed, because I’m the kind of person who keeps the paper bag the receipt came in.
On Wednesday at lunch I called the storage company. A woman named Paulina answered and asked how she could help.
“There’s a delivery scheduled out of unit 214 for Thursday,” I said. “To my address. I need it canceled.”
“Are you the account holder?”
“No. My sister is. But I’m the one who paid three months of it in April, and she gave you my address without asking. I don’t consent to delivery. I’m also happy to pay one more month so it all stays put.”
Paulina was quiet for a second. “That’s… a first,” she said. “Okay. I’ll cancel the delivery and put a note on it. Two hundred thirteen dollars.”
“I know,” I said. “Two hundred thirteen dollars and thirty-three cents. I paid it in April.”
She laughed. I liked her.
Six hundred forty dollars in April, two hundred thirteen more in November. It was the last thing I’d ever pay for my sister. I wrote it on a sticky note and stuck it on my fridge like a recipe.
On Thursday at four, my father came back.
Chapman called up. “Your dad’s here. Alone. He says he’ll wait outside if you want.”
I came down. I didn’t bring my coat, because I didn’t have one. Aaliyah was wearing it at the Prairie Rest.
Dad was in the lobby by the mailboxes, right where the suitcases had been. He wasn’t in his good coat. He had on a windbreaker from a 2014 golf tournament, and he looked like a man who’d slept two nights on a motel mattress that sagged in the middle.
“Your mother didn’t want to come,” he said. “She’s afraid of what you’ll say.”
“I haven’t said anything yet.”
“I know.” He took a breath. “The motel’s seventy-nine a night. We have about nine nights left in us. Your sister’s at a friend’s place in Council Bluffs. She took the peacoat.”
“Of course she did.”
He looked at the floor. The same spot the maintenance man had found so fascinating.
“I didn’t know about the card,” he said. “That’s the truth. But I want to say the other thing, because your mother says I won’t. I didn’t put your name on that booking because I figured you’d be fine. You’re always fine. You were fine when you were six. Your sister cried, and you were fine.” He swallowed. “That’s not a reason. I thought about it at the chef’s table. I thought, Kayleigh would like this. And I didn’t call.”
I didn’t say anything. He’d come to talk, so I let him.
“I’m not asking to move in,” he said. “I’m asking if Christmas Eve’s still on.”
The camera over the mailboxes still had its small red light. He looked up at it, then at me.
“It’s still on,” I said. “You bring the green beans this year. With the onions.”
He nodded, and his face did something I hadn’t seen it do since the third hip appointment.
“I don’t know how to make those,” he said.
“There’s a recipe on the can.”
Silver
He left at four-thirty. I watched him walk to the bus stop on the corner, because that’s what you do with the people you still love even when they’ve been awful. You watch them all the way to the bus.
When I turned around, Chapman was holding something under the desk.
It was the balloons. Two days old, gone soft, hanging off their ribbons at about the height of his shoulder. He’d tied them to a chair in the back office so they wouldn’t drift up to the lobby ceiling and become a building maintenance problem.
“I didn’t know if you wanted them,” he said. “They’re technically yours. Half of them.”
I laughed. A real one.
“Which half?”
“The ones that still float,” he said, and handed me the ribbons.
Three of them were still trying. I took those and left him the rest.
Up on sixteen, the hallway smelled like someone’s curry. My key card beeped green and the lock gave its little click.
Nobody’s old sofa. No spare key in someone else’s kitchen. One name on the mortgage. The treadmill in the second bedroom, which I have used exactly four times, and which I am keeping forever out of spite.
I tied the three balloons to the back of a kitchen chair and sat down across from them with a fork and the last cupcake from the management office. Moriarty had saved it for me. He’d written MS. RICCIARDI (THE REAL ONE) on the box in Sharpie.
I lit it with a long match from the junk drawer.
“Happy birthday to us,” I said, and blew it out.
If this one got to you, send it to the sister in your family who’s always fine.
Family money and favoritism have a way of resurfacing – see what happened when a mother raised her daughter’s rent after Grandma moved out and when another mom sidelined her granddaughter at a party. For another family conflict that spilled into the open, read how an ex-husband shared a late-night text with six relatives.
