My Sister's Keeper (24 page)

“Dan, man, what's going on?” Granted, the guy is nuts, but still.
I put my hand on his shoulder and you'd think, from his reaction, that a
scorpion just landed there. “You scared of the fire, Danny? You don't have
to be. We're far enough away. We're safe.” I give him what I hope is an
encouraging smile. What if he freaks out and starts screaming, calls down some
wandering cop?

“That shed,” Dan says.

“Yeah. No one's gonna miss it.”

“That's where the rat lives.”

“Not anymore,” I answer.

“But the rat…”

“Animals make their own way out of a fire. I'm telling you. The rat
will be totally cool. Chill.”

“But what about the newspapers? He has one with President Kennedy's
assassination…”

It occurs to me that the rat is most likely not a rodent, but another
homeless guy. One using this shed as a shelter. “Dan, are you saying
someone lives in there?”

He looks at the crowning flames and his eyes fill. Then he repeats my own
words. “Not anymore,” he says.

Like I said, I was eleven, so even to this day I can't tell you how I made
my way from our house in Upper Darby to the middle of downtown Providence. I
suppose it took me a few hours; I suppose I believed that with my new
superhero's cloak of invisibility, maybe I could just disappear and reappear
somewhere else entirely.

I tested myself. I walked through the business district, and sure enough,
people passed right by me, their eyes on the cracks of the pavement or staring
straight ahead like corporate zombies. I walked by a long wall of mirrored
glass on the side of a building, where I could see myself. But no matter how
many faces I made, no matter how long I stood there, none of the people
funneling around me had anything to say.

I wound up that day at the middle of an intersection, smack under the
traffic light, with taxis honking and a car swerving off to the left and a pair
of cops running to keep me from getting killed. At the police station, when my
dad came to get me, he asked what the hell I'd been thinking.

I hadn't been thinking, actually. I was just trying to get to a place where
I'd be noticed.

First I take off my shirt and dunk it into a puddle on the side of the road;
then wrap it around my head and face. The smoke is already billowing, angry
black clouds. In the hollow of my ear Is the sound of sirens. But I have made a
promise to Dan.

What hits me first is the heat, a wall that's way more solid than it looks.
The frame of the shed stands out, an orange X ray. Inside, I can't see a foot
in front of me.

“Rat,” I yell out, already regretting the smoke that leaves me
raw-throated and hoarse. “Rat!”

No answer. But the shed isn't all that big. I get down on my hands and knees
and begin to feel my way around.

I only have one really bad moment, when I put my hand down by accident on
something that was made of metal before it became a searing brand. My skin
sticks to it, blisters immediately. By the time I fall over a booted foot I'm
sobbing, sure I will never get out. I feel my way up Rat, haul his limp body
over my shoulder, stagger back the way I came.

Through some little joke of God, we make it outside. By now, the engines are
pulling up, charging their lines. Maybe my father is even here. I stay under
the screen of smoke; I dump Rat on the ground. With my heart racing, I run in
the other direction; leaving the rest of this rescue to people who actually
want to be heroes.

ANNA

Did you ever wonder how we all got here? On Earth, I mean. Forget the song
and dance about Adam and Eve, which I know is a load of crap. My father likes
the myth of the Pawnee Indians, who say that the star deities populated the
world: Evening Star and Morning Star hooked up and gave birth to the first
female. The first boy came from the Sun and the Moon. Humans rode in on the
back of a tornado.

Mr. Hume, my science teacher, taught us about this primordial soup full of
natural gases and muddy slop and carbon matter that somehow solidified into
one-celled organisms called choanoflagellates . . . which sound a lot more like
a sexually transmitted disease than the start of the evolutionary chain, in my
opinion. But even once you get there, it's a huge leap from an amoeba to a
monkey to a whole thinking person.

The really amazing thing about all this is no matter what you believe, it
took some doing to get from a point where there was nothing, to a point where
all the right neurons fire and pop so that we can make decisions.

More amazing is how even though that's become second nature, we all still
manage to screw it up.

On Saturday morning, I am at the hospital with Kate and my mother, all of us
doing our best to pretend that two days from now, my trial won't begin. You'd
think this is hard, but actually, it's much easier than the alternative. My
family is famous for lying to ourselves by omission: if we don't talk about it,
then—presto!—there's no more lawsuit, no more kidney failure, no
worries at all.

I'm watching Happy Days on the TVLand channel. Those Cunninghams,
they're not so different from us. All they ever seem to worry about is whether
Richie's band will be hired at Al's place, or if Fonzie will win the kissing
contest, when even I know that in the '50s Joanie should have been having air
raid drills at school and Marion was probably popping Valium and Howard would
have been freaking out about commie attacks. Maybe if you spend your life
pretending you're on a movie set, you don't ever have to admit that the walls
are made out of paper and the food is plastic and the words in your mouth
aren't really yours.

Kate is trying to do a crossword puzzle. “What's a four-letter word for
vessel?” she asks.

Today is a good day. By this I mean she feels up to yelling at me for
borrowing two of her CDs without asking (for God's sake, she was practically
comatose; it isn't like she would have been able to give her permission); she
feels up to trying this crossword.

“Vat,” I suggest. “Urn.”

“Four letters.”

“Ship,” my mother offers. “Maybe they're thinking of that
kind.”

“Blood,” Dr. Chance says, coming into the room.

“That's five letters,” Kate replies, in a tone that's much more
pleasant than the one she used with me, I might add.

We all like Dr. Chance; by now, he might as well be the sixth member of our
family.

“Give me a number.” He means on the pain scale. “Five?”

“Three.”

Dr. Chance sits down on the edge of her bed. “It may be a five in an
hour,” he cautions. “It may be a nine.”

My mother's face has gone the color of an eggplant. “But Kate's feeling
great right now!” she cheerleads.

“I know. But the lucid moments, they're going to get briefer and
further apart,” Dr. Chance explains. “This isn't the APL. This is
renal failure.”

“But after a transplant—” my mother says.

All the air in the room, I swear, turns into a sponge. You'd be able to hear
a hummingbird's wings, that's how quiet it gets. I want to slink out of the
room like mist; I don't want this to be my fault.

Dr. Chance is the only one brave enough to look at me. “As I understand
it, Sara, the availability of an organ is under debate.”

“But—”

“Mom,” Kate interrupts. She turns to Dr. Chance. “How long
are we talking about?”

“A week, maybe.”

“Wow,” she says softly. “Wow.” She touches the edge of
the newspaper, rubs her thumb over the point at its edge. “Will it
hurt?”

“No,” Dr. Chance promises. “I will make sure of that.”

Kate lays the paper in her lap and touches his arm. “Thanks. For the
truth, I mean.”

When Dr. Chance looks up, his eyes are red-rimmed. “Don't thank
me.” He gets up so heavily that I think he must be made of stone, and
leaves the room without speaking another word.

My mother, she folds into herself, that's the only way to explain it. Like
paper, when you put it deep into the fireplace, and instead of burning, it
simply seems to vanish.

Kate looks at me, and then down at all the tubes that anchor her to the bed.
So I get up and walk toward my mother. I put a hand on her shoulder.
“Mom,” I say. “Stop.”

She lifts her head and looks at me with haunted eyes. “No, Anna. You
stop.”

It takes me a little while, but I break away. “Anna,” I
murmur.

My mother turns. “What?”

“A four-letter word for vessel,” I say, and I walk out of Kate's
room.

Later that afternoon, I'm turning in circles on the swivel chair in my dad's
office at the fire station, with Julia sitting across from me. On the desk are
a half-dozen pictures of my family. There's one with Kate as a baby, wearing a
knit hat that looks like a strawberry. Another with Jesse and me, grinning just
as wide as the bluefish balanced between our hands. I used to wonder about the
fake pictures that came in frames you buy at the store—ladies with smooth brown
hair and show-me smiles, grapefruit-headed babies on their sibling's
knees—people who in real life probably were strangers brought together by a
talent scout to be a phony family.

Maybe it's not so different from real photos, after all.

I pick up one picture that shows my mother and father looking tanned and
younger than I can ever remember them being. “Do you have a
boyfriend?” I ask Julia.

“No!” she says, way too fast. When I glance up, she just sort of
shrugs. “Do you?”

“There's this one guy, Kyle McFee, that I thought I liked but now I'm
not sure.” I pick up a pen and start to unscrew the whole thing, pull out
the skinny little tube of blue ink. It would be so cool to have one of these
built inside you, like a squid; you could point your finger and leave your mark
on anything you wanted.

“What happened?”

“I went to a movie with him, like on a date, and when it was over and
we stood up he was—” I turn bright red. “Well, you know.” I wave
in the general vicinity of my lap.

“Ah,” Julia says.

“He asked me whether I'd ever taken wood shop at school—I mean, God, wood
shop?—and I go to tell him no and bam, I'm staring right there.”
I put the decapitated pen down on my dad's blotter. “When I see him now
around town it's all I can think about.” I stare up at her, a thought
coming at me. “Am I a pervert?”

“No, you're thirteen. And for the record, so is Kyle. He couldn't help
it happening any more than you can help thinking about it when you see him. My
brother Anthony used to say there were only two times a guy could get excited:
during the day, and during the night.”

“Your brother used to talk to you about stuff like that?”

She laughs. “I guess so. Why, wouldn't Jesse?”

I snort. “If I asked Jesse a question about sex, he'd laugh so hard
he'd bust a rib, and then he'd give me a stash of Playboys and tell me to do
research.”

“How about your parents?”

I shake my head. My dad is out of the question—because he's my dad. My mom's
too distracted. And Kate is in the same clueless boat I'm in. “Did you and
your sister ever fight over the same guy?”

“Actually, we don't go for the same type.”

“What's your type?"

She thinks about it. “I don't know. Tall. Dark-haired. Breathing.”

“Do you think Campbell's cute?”

Julia nearly falls out of her chair. “What?”

“Well, I mean, for an older guy.”

“I could see where some women… might find him attractive,” she
says.

“He looks like a character on one of the soaps that Kate likes.” I
run my thumbnail into the groove of wood on the desk. “It's weird. That I
get to grow up and kiss someone and get married.”

And Kate doesn't.

Julia leans forward. “What's going to happen if your sister dies,
Anna?”

One of the pictures on the desk is of me and Kate. We are little—maybe five
and two. It is before her first relapse, but after her hair grew back. We're
standing on the edge of a beach, wearing matching bathing suits, playing
patty-cake. You could fold this picture in half and think it was a mirror
image—Kate small for her age and me tall; Kate's hair a different color but
with the same natural part and flip at the bottom; Kate's hands pressed up
against mine. Until now, I don't think I've really realized how much alike we
are.

The phone rings just before ten o'clock that night, and to my surprise it's
my name that's paged throughout the firehouse. I pick up the extension in the
kitchen area, which has been cleaned and mopped for the night.
“Hello?”

“Anna,” my mother says.

Immediately, I assume she's calling about Kate. There isn't much else for
her to say to me, given the way we left things earlier at the hospital.
“Is everything okay?”

“Kate's asleep.”

“That's good,” I reply, and then wonder if it really is.

“I called for two reasons. The first is to say that I'm sorry about
this morning.”

I feel very small. “Me too,” I admit. In that minute, I remember
how she used to tuck me in at night. She'd go to Kate's bed first, and lean
down, and announce that she was kissing Anna. And then she'd come to my bed and
say she'd come to hug Kate. Every time, it cracked us up. She'd turn off the
light, and for long moments after she left, the room still smelled of the
lotion she used on her skin to keep it as soft as the inside of a flannel
pillowcase.

“The second reason I called,” my mother says, “was just to
say good night.”

“That's all?”

In her voice, I can hear a smile. “Isn't that enough?”

“Sure,” I tell her, although it isn't.

Because I can't fall asleep, I slip out of my bed at the fire station, past
my father, who's snoring. I steal the Guinness Book of World Records
from the men's room and lie down on the roof of the station to read by
moonlight. An eighteen-month-old baby named Alejandro fell 65 feet 7 inches
from the window of his parents' apartment in Murcia, Spain, and became the
infant to survive the longest fall. Roy Sullivan, of Virginia, survived seven
lightning strikes, only to commit suicide after being spurned by a lover. A cat
was found in rubble eighty days after a Taiwanese earthquake that killed 2,000,
and made a full recovery. I find myself reading and rereading the section
called “Survivors and Lifesavers,” adding listings in my head. Longest
surviving APL patient, it would read. Most ecstatic sister.