Our Little World Read online

  Dutton

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2022 by Karen Winn

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  DUTTON and the D colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Winn, Karen, author.

  Title: Our little world: a novel / Karen Winn.

  Description: New York: Dutton, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021015278 (print) | LCCN 2021015279 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593184493 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593184509 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Sisters—Fiction. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.I66315 O97 2022 (print) | LCC PS3623.I66315 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015278

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015279

  Jacket design by Steve Meditz; Image elements courtesy of Getty Images; (town) tokar / Shutterstock

  Title Page Photograph: Summer Landscape © Val Shevchenko / Shutterstock

  Book design by Elke Sigal, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_6.0_139875639_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Aimee and David

  Prologue

  I see whispers of my dead sister. I see her when I am driving, through the fogged-up window, her brown hair entangled in my windshield wipers. I am tempted to pull over and carefully remove each hair strand, as if untangling a knotted necklace—one, I suppose, that knotted due to my carelessness. I see my sister’s small hands clasped around the same passenger pole I am clinging to in the crowded subway. We are all packed in, our fingers curling around the pole one on top of another in a tree-ring formation, but I instantly recognize the creases in her knuckles and the way her right pinky sits at an odd crooked angle—the result of a bike accident when we were young. I see my sister in the pile of still dead leaves from the red oak tree in our parents’ backyard.

  Audrina is a lurker, which surprises me. She is always there, on the periphery. Sitting, thin ankles crossed, in the waiting room of my being. When she was alive, in her short life, she was vibrant.

  I can’t figure out if death has subdued her, or if it has given her some sort of calming, new age wisdom. There is also the very real possibility that she is just confused, trying to figure out what happened to her. What happened to us.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  My sister isn’t the only dead girl I’ve known, and not the first, either. Before Audrina, there was Sally. Little Sally Baker. My sister knew her, too. She knew her just as long as I did, which wasn’t very long—not even the length of a summer.

  It was June 1985 when the Baker family moved into the green-shuttered house across the street. I was twelve years old, the same age as Max, Sally’s older brother. Audrina, my sister, was a year younger than we were, though you wouldn’t have thought it. She was always acting older than she was, even back then: sneaking into our parents’ bathroom to use our mother’s makeup and perfume, pilfering her earrings and rings to stash away and try on later. My sister loved to get dolled up and gaze at herself in the mirror. “Pipiske,” Father called her, an old Hungarian term of endearment meaning “girly” or “sweet.”

  I was not a tomboy but felt I needed to act like one. Audrina had stolen the looks in our family—a belief I knew didn’t make sense but was convinced of nonetheless. She had Father’s green eyes, and her hair was a shiny light brown that turned gold in the summer. My hair and eyes were so brown I thought of them as brown-brown, and my hair didn’t change in the sun.

  So to balance the equation, I acted tough, boy-like—the exact opposite of Audrina. I couldn’t compete with someone who had managed to hoard all of the desirable genetics from our parents, so I cut my hair short even though I secretly wanted it long, and when I turned ten, I replaced my once-favorite faded pink unicorn shirt with a navy blue Cosmos one. The Cosmos were the New York professional soccer team that Father had taken us to see play at Giants Stadium, and I liked the way he smiled every time he saw me wear it.

  The summer that the Baker family moved in across the street was the same summer that the Cosmos last played, after the North American Soccer League folded and Father’s hopes for an American soccer craze were dashed. It was the summer Audrina and I befriended Max and Sally Baker, and it was the summer that Sally disappeared.

  Sally was four years old, and I used to think about how I was three times her age when it happened. For years afterward, come each birthday, I would divide my age by three, even though I was aware it didn’t actually work that way: I am thirteen, and Sally would be four years and three months. I am fifteen, and Sally would be—should be—five.

  When we heard that the Bakers had moved to our sleepy New Jersey town from Boston, I instantly felt like they were special. In our sixth-grade class we’d read about the famous historic events that had taken place in Boston, like the Boston Tea Party and Paul Revere’s midnight ride, and I envisioned that it was a bustling, exciting city, much like New York City, which we’d last visited the previous winter. The Baker family must have stories to tell, I decided, and I wanted to impress Max with my historical knowledge of his hometown.

  “ ‘One if by land, two if by sea,’ ” I’d uttered from atop my bike, the first evening we met. Our street dead-ended into a cul-de-sac, and we neighborhood kids would congregate there in the early evenings. Summer was in us and around us; we played kickball, tic-tac-toe, hopscotch, and sometimes even made a makeshift shuffleboard with chalk and a marble. Other times we just twirled around on our bikes until the sky began to darken and fireflies started to appear.

  I remember how Max and Sally had stood along the hickory-tree-lined edge of the cul-de-sac, waiting to be invited in. Max held Sally’s hand as she buried her blond hair into his side.

  He was cute, just about the cutest boy I’d ever seen. Long brown bangs that swept sideway
s across his blue-eyed face and a right-sided dimple when he smiled. Which he did, suddenly, at me. I remember how my hands grew wet on the clasp of my handlebar and how I wished I hadn’t chopped off my hair a few months earlier.

  “Paul Revere,” he’d replied, his dimple growing even more pronounced. Sally put her hands over her face and then parted her fingers slightly so she could see. “Borka, right?” Max asked.

  I flushed, surprised he knew my name, but then realized Mother had likely dropped off a welcome basket to their house on our behalf. “Yeah, but everyone calls me Bee,” I quickly replied, wanting to erase the word Borka from his vocabulary. How I hated my name.

  Audrina appeared next to me, and I wondered whether Max had actually been smiling at her instead of me. She wasn’t on a bike; she hadn’t been on one in a long time. Those days all she wanted to do was wear dresses and skirts and watch with a bored look while we horsed around. Nobody seemed to mind; in fact, I’d noticed how the Wiley brothers from up the street would glance over to see if Audrina noticed when they did wheelies and scored runs in kickball. I wanted to tell them they were wasting their time. Audrina noticed, but it didn’t mean anything. She was used to people vying for her attention, perhaps too used to it.

  “Hi there,” Audrina said, moving toward Max and Sally. She crouched down to Sally’s level, and Sally now removed her hands completely away from her face to look at my sister. Sally’s arms and hands were thick enough to make her wrist creases a little pronounced, and the curve of her belly protruded from her pale, flowered strappy dress. A set of tiny red heart studs rested on her pierced earlobes. I’d only gotten my ears pierced two years earlier.

  “Oooh,” Sally said, thrusting one of her arms forward to rub the charm bracelet Audrina was wearing on her left wrist. Then she suddenly stopped, as if realizing she should have asked before handling it. She glanced at her brother, who slowly nodded, and she then turned back to Audrina. “Tho pretty,” she said, with a lisp.

  Audrina laughed. “You like it? Which charm is your favorite?”

  Sally lifted her other arm up so both hands now encircled the bracelet. She leaned her face into the jewelry piece, as if she were smelling it. After a moment’s hesitation, she declared, “This one.”

  From my angle I couldn’t see which charm Sally meant, and I wondered if it was the jeweled box—the charm I had always coveted. Even in my self-appointed tomboy phase, I was enamored with it—with the entire bracelet, really. That particular charm was a shiny gold color and adorned with red, blue, and green stones. The box opened up to reveal a space so small it could barely hold the top of the pencil eraser that Audrina often put in it. Mother once called the bracelet “costume jewelry,” a phrase I wouldn’t know the true meaning of until later. At the time, costume jewelry conjured images of Halloween and other dress-up occasions, so I thought it sounded marvelous.

  While I couldn’t tell which charm Sally had identified as her favorite, I did clearly see how Audrina whispered something in Sally’s ear, and how Sally then wrapped her arms around my sister’s neck. The sun was starting to set, casting the sky with a warm dusky hue, and I remember being aware that Audrina had somehow just gained both Sally’s trust and Max’s admiration—as he looked on, smiling. It was supposed to be a feel-good moment, a happy one—like the ending of a Disney movie.

  But not for me. Instead, I felt as if I were a puzzle piece that had accidentally gotten tossed into the wrong box. Audrina had a way of doing that—making me feel like I didn’t belong.

  Borka, right? I would always be a Borka. I would always be the hideous namesake of Father’s Hungarian aunt who had died at age twenty-two from a brain aneurysm. I had never even seen a picture of her—Father had left everything behind in Hungary. I couldn’t care any less that she died young. In my mind she was just an ugly, faceless five-lettered name.

  And Audrina would always be an Audrina, always knowing what to do, how to act. Always belonging in beautiful moments. Creating them, really. Even now, it astounds me. We were so young, but everything came naturally to her. Mother had chosen Audrina’s name simply because she thought it was pretty, which is the way one rightfully ought to acquire a name.

  That day was the start of it all. Later I would decide it was somehow Audrina’s fault, that if she hadn’t captivated Sally, hadn’t shown her the charm bracelet, then things wouldn’t have happened the way they did.

  * * *

  Audrina and I slipped into our usual pattern that summer. Summer days in the Kocsis household of our youth often meant spending lazy, unstructured mornings in pajamas, eating cereal and French toast with powdered sugar, and watching episodes of Silver Spoons. At some point we’d change into our bathing suits while we waited to see whether our mother or another neighborhood mother would be taking us kids to the lake or “the club”—Hammend’s Tennis & Swim Club.

  Soon after the Bakers’ arrival, Mrs. Baker entered into the carpool mix, and because of their proximity to us—right across the street—she or Mother would often cart us around for the day. My sister and I quickly became close with the Baker kids, our friendships accelerated in the way that young summers and unstructured time allow.

  If we woke up early enough and cajoled Max and Sally to join us, Father would drop us off at the club on his way to work. He owned his own roofing and siding business, and its storefront was located about thirty miles away from Hammend, in the city of East Orange. I always looked forward to breakfast at the club—they had a Taylor ham, egg, and cheese sandwich that came with a side of crispy fries, no matter the hour. Audrina equally enjoyed their toasted bagel drenched in butter and grape jelly. Max and Sally, who seemed to eat whatever kind of food they desired at their house, were less than enthusiastic about the early hour but usually acquiesced.

  Father would get annoyed if we pulled up to the Bakers’ house and they weren’t ready—which happened often. One morning we waited for a good ten minutes on their circular driveway, and Father began muttering under his breath, his shoulders drawn sharply together. When the front door finally swung open, Mrs. Baker emerged in a pink satin robe, holding a robin’s-egg-blue coffee mug, Max and Sally trailing behind her. As they climbed into the back seat alongside Audrina, Mrs. Baker leisurely strolled up to Father’s rolled-down window like she had all the time in the world. She was a large woman with light brown wavy hair that she wore loose around her shoulders. As she leaned down to peer inside Father’s window, her breasts pushed together and forward, creating a bumpy shelf. I was sitting in the front passenger seat, in full view, and averted my eyes in embarrassment. The other kids didn’t seem to notice; I heard Sally giggling from the back seat while Max relayed a story to Audrina about some cereal mishap.

  “Sorry,” Mrs. Baker simply said to Father, who at first didn’t respond; I think he was waiting for the explanation to follow, but none did. She just took a sip from her mug as she pushed herself up from the window, and Father stiffened, as if he’d just become aware of something unpleasant.

  Mrs. Baker secretly fascinated me; she was so different from the other Hammend mothers, especially my own. I couldn’t imagine Mother wearing her bathrobe anywhere other than inside our house, and she certainly didn’t own a satin one. Mother’s choice of dress was classic and tailored, her bathrobe safely muted, her skirts and high-waisted pants always paired with monochromatic shirts and blouses. At first it wasn’t clear why the Bakers had decided to move to Hammend. There seemed to be an air of mystery surrounding their appearance in our town, even among the adults. One morning I’d overheard Mother whispering something on the phone to our neighbor Mrs. Wiley about “Fran”—Mrs. Baker—but before I could hear more, Mother had spotted me lurking outside the kitchen.

  Dr. Baker was a big-time trauma surgeon, we learned, yet his new place of employment, our hospital, twenty miles away, was just a small community one.

  “We lived in the city, right in the city, so my paren
ts, er, dad could walk to work,” Max once told us. “He was in charge of the trauma department, and his hospital was where all the really hurt people would go, like if you were in a car crash or something.”

  Max didn’t share that his mother was a nurse—we would find that out later through the neighborhood gossip.

  I’d assumed, because of Dr. Baker’s career and since they came from Boston (which seemed fancy in itself), that Max and Sally—once she was old enough—would be going the private school route, like many of the kids on our street did: Mrs. Wiley’s two sons, Andrew and Patrick, and the two older girls, Diane and Courtney, who lived at the very top of Hickory Place, around the bend. So I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Max would be joining me at Hammend’s own junior high, Hillside, come fall.

  Perhaps Mother was right about our good public school system. She often touted its qualities, like the number of high school graduates who went on to attend four-year colleges. Mother had grown up in Paterson, a nearby New Jersey city, and the only way to leave home in her neighborhood, she’d once told Audrina and me, was to get married.

  I knew this was the reason why we lived in Hammend: Mother hoped for more for us. I also knew that even if we could have afforded private school, our parents still wouldn’t have sent us. We didn’t function in quite the same way as some of the other families in the neighborhood. There was a paucity of things in our house that didn’t exist in other homes. It was evident in our cupboards that held just enough pasta boxes and cans, in the backpacks that Audrina and I were expected to use year after year, until the zippers broke or the material wore thin. Father was always repurposing furniture he picked up at yard sales; the now-forgotten playhouse in our backyard had come from such scavenging. Mother, meanwhile, nurtured our house like another child—cleaning it regularly, excessively even. “A place for everything, and everything in its place,” she often said. She believed in orderliness, Father believed in practicality, and the combination ensured a stringent childhood upbringing.