Pieces of My Sister's Life (13 page)

“Well sure it is.” I glanced at him. “Isn’t yours?”

“No, not anymore. I mean, I think about it.” He shrugged, a quick up and down. “But not in the same way.” Our eyes met briefly, and I saw a flicker of fear before his face tightened. “We should get back. Gillian’ll be home pretty soon.”

I kept my eyes on the dirt road as we started home. I didn’t want to see anything that would tunnel me back. So many places here on the island were just waiting for me to notice so they could snare my memories like fishhooks, draw them out of hiding.

Justin opened the door without speaking and started in. When he reached the stairs he finally turned to me. “We were kids, Kerry.” His tone seemed almost pleading.

But it was such an easy rationalization of something that shouldn’t be rationalized. All this time we’d never talked about it, and even now only sketchily:
that night; it; what we did.
Sitting in his car that night, Justin had told us to hold what we wished had happened in our minds until it became the truth. Was that what he’d done all these years?

I studied his face, trying to find some trace, some stain from the past, however faded. His face should at least show remnants of horror, if not guilt, but there was nothing. Just a plea for me to stop talking.

“Could I have some help here?” It was Eve, calling from the kitchen.

I held out the gift bags for him to take. “I’ll go.”

“You can’t live with this haunting you forever. It’ll kill you.”

“I’ve lived through worse,” I said, then turned away.

In the kitchen, Eve stood over a large mixing bowl. “Where’s Justin?”

“He’s gone upstairs. What’re you making?”

She looked at me, her eyes narrowed. “Tomorrow’s Gillian’s birthday.”

I smiled. “We were actually just out buying gifts.”

“Well, thank God. Whatever would I do without you.”

I blinked quickly, then shook my head. “Okay. Okay, I’m sick of this. Let’s call a truce.”

“I didn’t realize there was an actual war.”

I raised my eyebrows and Eve shrugged. “Whatever,” she said. “I’m too tired to care.”

“Oh, good. That was exactly the reaction I was looking for.”

Eve glanced at me, then away.

I cleared my throat. “So you’re baking a cake?”

“And cupcakes for school. Look, I just need you to add the mix. The smell of artificial chocolate makes me nauseous. It has these plasticky undertones that remind me of the hospital. Like latex, or adhesive bandages.”

I opened the bag of cake mix and poured it into the bowl of eggs and milk. Eve stood across the room, watching. “God, I can smell it from here. Once it starts baking I may die right then, I’m just warning you.”

“We’ll keep the kitchen door closed.”

She opened the window and leaned out to let the breeze hit her face. “We usually do this together, me and Gillian, make her cake. It’s this stupid, fantastic ritual, we each take a beater and toast to her birthday. But I didn’t want her to see this, me turning green.”

“We used to do that, you and me,” I said softly, “toast beaters on our birthday.”

Eve watched me for a minute, then gave a tight smile. “Right. I forgot.”

Back on the empty birthdays in my Boston apartment, I’d take out the one photograph I had of us and sit with it, sometimes for hours. I wanted to ask her how she’d celebrated birthdays since I’d left, if she’d treated them as something that belonged only to her. For me, it had been the one day I’d allowed myself to remember everything. “You want to lie down?” I said. “I can finish up here.”

Eve pulled out a cake pan. “She’ll be home any minute. I want her to see me cooking, that at least I tried to make an effort.”

As if in response, the front door opened. Gillian’s footsteps started down the hall, stopped at the den, then continued towards us. “Ma?”

“Give me that,” Eve whispered, pulling the bowl and spoon towards her. She held her breath and began to pour out batter.

“In here, Gillian,” I said.

Gillian came into the kitchen, dropped her knapsack and watched. “What’s that for?”

“What do you think it’s for?” Eve’s voice was strained, but she smiled widely.

Gillian’s face flushed pink. She didn’t speak.

“Did you think I wouldn’t remember?”

“How come you used a spoon instead of beaters?” She looked at the packaged mix, then back to Eve. “How come you used Duncan Hines instead of from scratch? How come you didn’t wait till I got home?”

“It was a surprise. I wanted to surprise you.”

“It’s not a surprise, it’s stupid.”

“Here, let’s toast.” Eve handed Gillian the spoon, then pulled out a beater from the drawer and dipped it into the batter. “Another year older, smarter, prettier, here’s to turning twelve.” She clicked her beater against Gillian’s spoon, hesitated a minute and then brought it to her mouth. She chewed at the batter a long while without swallowing, a strange smile on her face. “Excuse me a minute.” She dropped the beater onto the table and strode down the hall.

Gillian put her spoon back into the bowl, stared down at it, then turned away and started out the door. I reached out a hand to stop her. “Gillian?”

“Everything’s different now.” Her voice was tight. “Even my birthday.”

“Some things have to be different, I guess. But the important things are the same.” The words sounded so stupid, so fake, like I was telling her everything would be better soon. I tried to smile. “Wait’ll you see what we got you, Gillian. Real grownup gifts.”

“I don’t want gifts, and especially I don’t want a cake. Or a party either, I thought about it and I decided.”

“It’ll be worse that way. You were just saying how everything’s different, so now it’s important to make things as much the same as we can.”

“What do I wish for?”

“Wish for?”

“On my candles. I know it’s dumb and it doesn’t really work, but you have to do it anyway. Last year I wished for her to get better because maybe she might’ve, but this year there isn’t even a chance. It’s the only thing I want, and if I wish for anything else it’ll feel like giving up, so what do I wish for?”

I stirred slowly at the cake mix, trying to think how to answer. What was left to wish? “There’s lots of things,” I said finally. “You could wish that however long she has with us is happy.”

“I could maybe wish she’s still here for the birthday when I turn thirteen,” Gillian said, then gave a strangled laugh. “Which is dumb since that’s impossible.”

“It’s not impossible,” I said without thinking, then shook my head. “I mean, anything’s possible.”

“This isn’t,” she said, then lifted her head to look at me. “Is it? I mean, is there even like a small chance she could be okay that long?”

“She’s a really strong person,” I said, then smiled. “If anyone could do it, your mom could. We’ll tell your dad and we’ll all wish for it, okay? If there’s a chance wishes work, we’ll do whatever we can to make this one come true.”

We sat on the lawn watching Gillian open her presents, Justin, Eve and the Caines, with four of Gillian’s friends from school. Gillian hugged and clapped at all her gifts, just the way she was supposed to. I couldn’t see any trace of her bitterness from the day before.

I reached to stuff the latest round of discarded wrapping into a paper bag, then turned to watch Eve on her Adirondack chair, a blanket wrapped over her shoulders. What had it meant to us, turning twelve? The last year of real childhood, the first year our gifts leaned more toward clothes and music than toys, the year we began wearing bras, the year we got our periods, the year we started feeling the first stirrings of sex. It meant, Eve had said back then, that we’d lived as many years without our mother as with her. And we’d seen that as a sort of victory, like it proved we didn’t need a mother anymore.

But this is who we’d been, this little girl with flushed cheeks, now opening the earrings I’d bought for her, her understanding of loss exponentially deeper at twelve than ours had been. And on the cusp of life’s biggest changes, needing a mother at least as much.

“They’re great,” she said, glancing at me shyly. “Really great.” Her finger stroked the hoop of tiny pearls, and then she stood to fold her arms briefly around my neck.

I patted her hand, her pink nail polish applied this morning and already bitten away. Across from us Justin watched intently, his thoughts so naked, so exposed I thanked God that Eve couldn’t see. He obviously knew what was out there, the ghost of possibility. And like me, he was trying so hard not to want it.

13

J
USTIN’S OFFICE SEEMED
to me completely dysfunctional. It was as cluttered as his potting shed had been, papers scattered on every possible surface. Every night before I could sleep I’d have to collect the papers he’d strewn on my bed and arrange them into piles on the rolltop desk, and then the next night I’d find them back on the bed again in the same exact state of disarray. It was funny, in an annoying kind of way.

Justin was at the desk now, hunched over his notepad. Final drafts he typed into the computer downstairs, but first drafts were always written by hand. I watched from the doorway as he wrote in a broad sweeping script, seemingly working simultaneously on three pieces of paper. It was like Mozart composing a symphony, half drunk and half deranged.

I squinted, studying the pen he was using, gold and ribbed, the thickness of a thumb. Could it possibly be the pen I’d given him for Christmas the year I left? I felt a kind of burrowing in my stomach, remembering the thrill I’d felt picking it out, seeing it arrive in the mail, watching him open it and try it for the first time on a scrap of Christmas wrapping:
I LOVE KERRY BARNARD
. Maybe every time he used it over the years I’d been gone, he’d thought of me as he’d held it between his fingers. Or, maybe not. Maybe he just liked the pen.

I smiled with another memory, lying beside Justin on the bed while he wrote. For some reason, needing attention maybe, I’d rested my hand over his notepad. He’d pretended not to notice, had written right across my hand to the other side of the paper.
Across the tree line,
the words had said. And all the next day at school I’d looked down at those words with total and complete happiness, feeling like in a way I’d become a part of his writing.

Now, watching him, I felt a weight on my chest, cramming against my lungs. And I couldn’t help myself. My hand had a mind of its own. It reached over his arm and laid itself across the scrawled script.

Justin stopped for a minute, unmoving, then laid down his pen. Without looking up he traced his finger in a faltering S around and between my knuckles. I closed my eyes, angry at my hand but helpless against it. The mind inside my hand held total control.

Downstairs, the doorbell chimed.

I spun back, thrust my fists under my arms. “What’re you doing?”

“I’ll get it!” Gillian called.

Justin didn’t move; he kept his eyes on his desk. “What are
you
doing?”

“I wasn’t doing anything.” I sank to the bed, forced my fists to loosen. “Dammit, Justin, why the hell did you call me here?”

“You know why I called you. You think it was for me?”

My tongue wanted to say
Yes,
so I bit down on it. Hard.

He turned then, his eyes fierce, his jaw set. “You have a scent, did you know that? Like lavender kind of, but deeper, not quite as sweet. And every time I come into this room to work I can smell it.”

“Justin, don’t.”

“So my brain gets stuck there and everything I’m writing sounds robotic, like a history textbook.” He lifted the scrawled papers in his fist. “I can’t use any of this, it’s total crap.”

“Stop it!” I gripped the blanket as if the swatch of woven cotton could steady me. “I have to go back to Boston.”

“You can’t go.”

“Are you kidding? You tell me you’re obsessed with how I smell and what do you expect me to do? Eve already thinks she knows why I’m here. She thinks the minute she’s gone I’ll just slide right in to take her place.”

“Which is exactly why you can’t leave.” Justin pushed back his chair and strode to the window. “You really think you’re irresistible? You really think I’m that weak?”

Oh. Well this wasn’t what he was supposed to say. The weight on my chest lifted. I started hating myself.

“I love Eve, Kerry. She’s my wife and the mother of my kid and I’m not about to let anything hurt her, not now and not after she’s dead. But if you leave now, she’ll know everything she suspects is true, that you couldn’t stay because you were scared of what one of us would do.”

“Hey, Jussy?” Eve called from downstairs.

I hunched over my knees.

“So I’m going to keep writing crap because I don’t have any choice. And I won’t think about you because I don’t want to think about you, and we’ll both be here for Eve.” He crumpled his papers and threw them at the wastebasket. “I have to go to my wife,” he said, then turned and strode from the room.

I sat there, head on my knees. He loved Eve, of course he did. Maybe part of me had held out a twisted kind of hope. But that hope was a tidal wave, maybe exhilarating on the outside but treacherous in reality. We’d played a game, the three of us, and I had lost, and it wasn’t the kind of game you could ever play again.

“Firs’ the pullin’, then the plantin’.” The voice came from outside.

I stood to look out the window. LoraLee, Eve, Justin and Gillian were kneeling by the flowerbed, surrounded on all sides by pots of multicolored petunias, fat and round as puckered lips.

“It’s gonna look like confetti,” Gillian said.

“It’s going to look like a funeral home,” Eve said, but she was smiling.

“Pssshht,” LoraLee said, waving the root end of a weed at her. “I figure you could mebbe use gettin’ your fingers in some dirt.”

“Pity petunias,” Eve said.

“No pity, I don’t got pity. Me and the petunias don’t know nothin’ ’bout pity, we just smile and goes on smilin’ till our time is done.” She nodded at Gillian. “That there is a none too subtle metaphor for life, part of what I come here to say to your mama. My thinkin’ is, these flower smile and you can’t help but smile back.”

“Well, I’m smiling,” Eve said. “Whatever your reasons for bringing them I’m smiling, and you’re right about this hands-in-the-dirt thing. It feels kind of fundamental, like it grounds you.”

I thought back on the day after I’d come back to the island, the first time I’d seen LoraLee. “I wanted to tell you ’bout it all, Kerry,” she’d said. “I’s so sorry. You got no idea how my head were bustin’ from keepin’ it inside. But she made me swear. I tole her it were a mistake and I knows you shoulda been here sooner.”

“I don’t know if I should even be here now,” I’d said. “She doesn’t want me here.”

“You’s wrong ’bout that. I seen her these past years, seen what’s missin’ in her. And deep down she see it, too. How what’s missin’ is her one biggest tie to the worl’.”

“Not anymore. She has her own life now, which has nothing to do with me at all. And honestly, I don’t feel it anymore either, that tie.” I shook my head quickly. “I realize I should just spend time with her, give her my forgiveness. It sounds so straightforward, I should be able to just give her what she needs.”

“What you mean, straightforward? You been to hell and back and now you say you’s wrong to be feelin’ the burns? Let me tell you, I know it’s a hard thing, but it’s harder ’cos you thinks it s’posed to be simple. You thinks there’s one singular right way to feel.”

She’d turned to sit on the front steps. I’d watched her for a minute, thick-ribbed stockings and pink high-top sneakers, then sat beside her, fingering the ivy-strangled lattice.

“Since far back as I ’members,” she said, “you been tryin’ to be your sister, like you don’t feel there enough of you inside to bother with bein’ you own self.”

I’d looked out at the dusty road, and it had come back to me like a dark wink, the grays of my apartment, the city smells of oil and sour milk. What was left of me?

“When you lef ’, you was at the age most peoples is tryin’ to find theyself. But you, Kerry, you muffle your insides with pile on pile of cotton so it don’t ever have a chance of seein’ the light.”

“She took my life away,” I said. “It was mine.”

“It’s hers, Kerry, not yours. Everything happen the way it s’posed to happen, even if it don’t seem that way at first. Soon’s you unnerstan’ that, you be able to go on livin’ and learn what you’s meant to learn, but till then you jus’ be waitin’ for time to go backwards. I tell you, you be waitin’ forever.”

Now, as if she’d sensed my thoughts, LoraLee turned towards the window. “Your sister could use some smilin’ too, prob’ly much as you. Where she at?”

“She’s not feeling good,” Justin said quickly. Eve raised her eyebrows at him and he shrugged. “Some kind of headache thing.”

I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around my waist.

“She’d be better at this planting stuff,” Eve said. “She used to help you in your garden, right? But I’ve never owned a plant that hasn’t died within a week.”

“Remember the Venus flytrap?” Gillian said.

Eve laughed. “You were what, six?”

“Seven,” Justin said. His voice was light now, no sign of distraction. No sign of me. “We suffocated it.”

“It was supposed to be a learning experience,” Eve said, “like a PBS nature show. But Gillian got a little carried away.”

“We wanted it to catch the houseflies,” Justin said. “But after Gillian saw a couple bugs disappear down its throat, she fell in love with it. She treated it like a pet goldfish.”

“It looked hungry,” Gillian said.

Justin laughed. I opened my eyes in time to watch him slip his arm around Eve’s shoulders.

“So I’m passing by the hall table,” Eve said, “and there I see this poor Venus flytrap brimming to the roof with bugs. Like some obscene modern sculpture. And little by little it turns yellow and wilts, and there’s all these bugs dropping out from the petals. And of all things, Gillian decides to bring it to school for show-and-tell.”

“It was totally gross,” Gillian said.

“Maybe that could be another metaphor,” Eve said. “Too much love can kill.”

“Don’t like that one,” LoraLee said, “but I guess it’s maybe true in a sense.”

Did Eve realize what she’d said? Had she thought behind it to the people in our lives who love had killed?

Justin wrapped his other arm around her and kissed her cheek. “So let it kill me,” he said.

Eve’s face flushed with pleasure. Gillian beamed up at them, then rested her head on Eve’s shoulder. And as I watched them I realized the reason for the tightness in my throat, that part of me had imagined their life together had been a sham, something invented. That all this time, I’d managed to pretend their real life had only started on the day that I’d returned.

The gymnasium echoed with children’s voices, pounding nails and the clank of paint cans. On the far side of the gym, Gillian and Eve were mastering the art of stenciling, dabbing brushes against a panel of grass blades. Gillian was talking animatedly, stopping now and again to focus on her painting. And Eve was smiling. Beaming. The first real happiness I’d seen in weeks. She was eating more now that the effects of the chemo had worn off and was starting to put on weight in her face. A deceptive, almost cruel, mask of health, the climb before the inevitable crash.

I tried to concentrate, screwing a support beam to the back of a plywood barn, while on the other side Virginia Brent tried to keep it from toppling. Mrs. Brent had been our teacher in sixth and seventh grade, and now taught K-through-twelve art. She’d seemed ancient to us back then, so by all rights by now she should be mummified. But really today she was acting decades younger than I was, flitting from project to project, clasping her hands to her chest with pleasure and chattering away nonstop.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said to me now, “you have no idea.”

“I don’t know how much use I’ll be. I can’t draw a straight line, and the most carpentry I’ve ever done is banging picture hangers into a wall.”

“No, no, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is I’m glad you’re here with your sister. I’ve always thought it wasn’t right with her so sick and you off somewhere else.”

I pressed the drill lever, its vibration traveling up my arms, drilled another hole and another. If this conversation kept up, the barn would look like Swiss cheese. “I wish I had been here.”

“Oh, we all knew what had happened between you, and I’m sure no one took a dim view of you for leaving, not back then. But after Eve got sick, well folks started to talk is all. About how you were her only family. We’re just so thrilled you’re back.”

How much did they know? I was glad she was hidden on the other side of the barn, that I couldn’t see her face. Since I’d gotten here I’d wondered what the townspeople were thinking, wondered what their eyes were saying when they passed me in the street without acknowledgment. The few people who’d come to the house had greeted me with a hug, but then turned all their attention to Eve. So did they think I’d known she was sick? That I’d just chosen to shut my eyes to it? Most likely it didn’t matter that I hadn’t known. To the islanders, family was everything, even distant family like second cousins or uncles three times removed. My absence must have seemed to them like the ultimate selfishness.

“Heck, I’m sorry,” Mrs. Brent said. “I know I’ve become an old busybody, sticking my nose in your business. I hate that about myself, but maybe it’s a natural part of getting older, like losing your neck.”

“Hey, Mrs. Brent?” Gillian called from behind me. “We’re almost finished here but we messed up a few times. We weren’t very good at it.”