Pieces of My Sister's Life (17 page)

FOUR

Day Lily

April

2007

18

L
ET ME PUSH YOU NOW
, okay?” I said, my voice sounding desperate and childish, like I was pleading for a turn on the swings. Eve had gotten noticeably frailer over the past couple of weeks, her nausea returning, the trip from her bed to the bathroom enough to wind her. But still she insisted on doing everything herself.

She stopped her wheelchair in front of a store window, obviously working to catch her breath, but pretending to be interested in a set of spangled Barbie dolls arranged against each other in vaguely X-rated poses. Beside us, Gillian patted Eve’s shoulder. “You want a pill? I think you probably better give her a pill.”

I reached into my pocket but Eve batted my hand away. “I just hate this chair,” she said. “It’s this contraption that’s taking over my body like an iron lung, or that machine for mutes that makes your voice sound like a rusty computer. This thing’s too fucking shiny.”

“Mom!” Gillian said.

Eve glanced at Gillian, then shrugged. “Listen, let’s not kid each other, Gillian. I think the most useful words in the English language are
fuck
and
shit
and
asshole
. I might as well teach you to say them now, because you’ll find them extremely valuable throughout the rest of your life.”

Gillian widened her eyes at Eve, then gave a sideways smile.

I touched a wheel rim. “We could fix the chair up if you want. It’d be kinda fun, right, Gillian? We could run ribbons through the spokes.”

“It’d be…fucking fun,” Gillian said, her face pink. An old woman in a flowered straw hat stopped and stared at Gillian, her mouth pursed, and Gillian started laughing.

Eve made a face. “Shit. That’d be about as uplifting as painting polka dots on a fucking colostomy bag.” She gripped the armrests, still struggling for air. “Go ahead and push me. Let’s go back.” She glanced at Gillian, then turned to me. “Asshole,” she added.

I grinned and turned the chair around, walking us back through the streets. Already the mainlanders were here, mostly day-trippers who came to shop and wade in the cold May tide. A little girl with a bulbous belly was staring at us unabashedly, running a strand of wet hair across her lips. I thought at first her amazement must be because of our twinness, but then Gillian stuck out her tongue at the girl, and I realized what Gillian already knew, that she was actually staring at Eve. It was then I noticed the people around us pointedly avoiding our eyes, pretending to study their purses or cracks in the sidewalk. I glared at them, hoping they could feel my eyes like knuckles against their backs. The three of us against the world.

As we approached the marsh near home, Eve held out her arm. “Okay, stop. This is good.” She slipped from the chair onto her knees.

“Mom? Mommy!” Gillian grabbed for Eve’s shirt, tried to balance her so she wouldn’t fall forward, and I ran to help her back into the chair. But Eve laughed and pushed us both away. In her hands was a wad of mud.

“You’re not,” I said.

“Wanna bet?” She smeared her hands over the wheels.

“You’re not!”

Eve dug her hands into the ground and painted mud across the footrest. I watched her a minute, then bent to lob a fistful against the chair back. Gillian stared at us like we were completely insane, but then Eve held a wad of mud towards her. Gillian looked at it a minute, then reached for it and gave a tentative toss, and it landed on the ground a foot away.

“In the twelve years we’ve had you, has nobody ever taught you how to throw?” Eve said.

Gillian gave a panting laugh and grabbed another handful, then heaved it against the seat.

Eve slapped her on the back, making roaring-crowd sounds. And we all reached for more, our hands in the muck, fingers sliding together, mud to our elbows, filled with laughter that felt like anger, felt like tears.

“Wait!” I said, pulling at wheatgrass. I started to weave the strands through spokes when a chunk of mud clocked me on the forehead. I stared at Eve.

She narrowed her eyes and hurled another handful at my nose.

My eyes teared at the cold shock of it. I wiped the mud from my eyes and stared at her, then slowly reached to slime my fingers over her cheeks. Her eyes were wild as she pushed me away, flinging the mud with both hands. Gillian sucked in her breath. “Stop,” she said. “Stop it, okay? Aunt Kerry, stop!”

The mud was caking on my forehead, murky tears against my eyelashes. There was grit in my mouth and my belly hurt, really hurt, but I reached for more, then froze.

Eve was breathing heavy, hands flat on the ground. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

I shook my head.

“I’m sorry, okay?” She was watching me.

I shook my head again and stared down at the fringes of dried grass. And I saw it.

Bert and Georgia’s house. How old were we? Not old, not at all. Still young enough to make mud pies. Still young enough to have a mother.

She sat on the porch step, an unread
Vogue
on her knees. We brought her mud cookies in a custard dish and she dug in her fingers and pretended to munch, her eyes so bright they hardly seemed like Mommy’s eyes.

“My favorite!” she said, laughing as she scampered out to the overgrown lawn. She fell to her knees by a puddle and filled her hands with sludge. “Some chocolate mousse, Eve?” she said, then jumped up to plaster the muck onto Eve’s hair.

Eve squawked and hid behind me, and Mommy rose and pitched underhand, hitting my chest. I threw, they threw, mud everywhere, plastering our bodies, splattered on Mommy’s cutoff shorts. I ran to her and she swung me, then held me against her chest. And then dropped me. She was staring into the distance, towards Bert and Georgia’s house. I turned.

“You,” Georgia said.

Eve sidled towards me.

“He just told me,” Georgia said.

Mommy stepped towards her and then stepped back, gave a strange, snorting laugh.

“You murderer.” Georgia’s hands were trembling. “I knew you were no good. From the first time I met you I saw it. You’re no good.”

I’d glanced at Eve. She was watching our mother, her lips pale. And our mother smiled at Georgia, eyes narrowed with disgust, and she filled her hands with mud and threw.

Now I stood and leaned against the back handles of the wheelchair, and pictures started flashing one by one through my head clear and flat as a series of still lifes. The frenzy in my mother’s eyes, a hand slapped across my father’s face and then the bloodstained sheets, their diluted pinkish rust smearing on countertops and spiraling down the kitchen drain. I pushed the wheelchair to Eve. “We’re going home,” I said.

“Look, I told you I’m sorry,” Eve said.

I shook my head. “It’s okay.”

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you or anything.”

“I said it’s okay.” I glanced at Gillian, who’d backed away from us like we were contagious, then turned back to Eve. “Can I ask you something? What do you remember about Mom? I mean about anything specific she might’ve done wrong?”

Eve combed mud out of her hair and tossed it on the ground. “Where’d that come from?”

“I just had this memory of her and Georgia. I just remembered that Georgia hated her and I’m trying to think why.”

“From the few things we know about both of them? I’d have to say that is not a surprise.” She gave a narrow smile and shrugged. “Look, what I remember most is her leaving. That’s what’s important.”

“But why did she leave?”

“Does it matter? Look, Kerry, you know the way most of my life’s been? I had parents who left and grandparents I left, I lost you and now I’m losing everything else. She’s just first in a long line of failures.” She lowered herself back into the chair.

Gillian and I stared at each other, and then Gillian started to clean off the wheelchair arms with her shirt.

“Stop that, Gillian,” Eve said. “You’re too clean. Real kids are not that clean.”

Gillian frowned at this, then said, “You didn’t fail, Mom.”

Eve flashed her an overly wide smile, then said, “Let’s go home. I think we could all use a shower.”

Back in the kitchen I washed my arms and face in the kitchen sink, listening to the hiss of the water from Eve’s shower. My hands still wet, I stared at the phone, suddenly realizing what I should do. What I had to do. “Okay,” I whispered, reaching for the receiver. “Okay.”

I had no idea what I was going to say. What did you say to grandparents you hadn’t bothered to call in a decade? “Still alive, hunh?” or “You may not remember me, but…”

“Hello?” Georgia’s voice sounded impossibly old.

“Georgia?” The word came out high-pitched, anxious. I concentrated on the pipe squeal as Eve shut off the water. “It’s been a long time. This is Kerry.”

Silence. I clutched the phone harder. “Barnard. Kerry Barnard.”

“My goodness,” she said finally, “it
has
been a long time.”

“I’m just calling because there’s things I need to know. Things you can tell me.” It sounded awful when I said it. Here I was, calling not to apologize for avoiding them or to ask about their lives, but to extract whatever pieces of information they might have about someone who didn’t give a rat’s ass about us.

“Excuse me?” Georgia said.

“About my mother. There’s something bad she did, and you know at least some of it. Daddy told you some of it.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you’re asking about.” She sounded so far away and so weak. I imagined her with jowls and pale, plucked-turkey skin, hair gone a linty gray.

“This is important, Georgia, please. If there’s something she did, some reason she left us, I have a right to know.”

Georgia was quiet a minute. I could hear her breath in my ear. “Your mother wasn’t a good woman, Kerry,” she said finally. “That’s all you need to know. She was very beautiful, stunning actually, but she wasn’t a good person.”

I lowered myself into a chair and waited.

“Look, Kerry, there’s nothing about her that you really need to hear. Just know that she destroyed your father. She chewed him up and spat him out. The man you remember wasn’t the man I raised.”

What was I supposed to do with this? How was I supposed to feel? “Okay,” I said. I didn’t have to believe her. Probably I shouldn’t. A son dies of suicide or stupidity, and his mother needs someone to blame.

“So how are things with you?” she said.

I nodded. “Fine, I’m fine.”

“We do think about you, dear, you know.” Her voice trailed off and she coughed, then continued, louder. “We were in touch with Abigail Caine, of course, even after you left the island, and then I tried to call Eve several times, left messages on the machine, but I never heard back. So Bert thought you’d both probably rather if I stopped calling.”

She sounded so kind, so grandmotherly. How had I built her up in my head to be someone heartless? “I’m sorry. I wish things had been better between us all.” My voice broke as I suddenly realized she must not know. I inhaled deeply, then released the words in a rush of air. “Eve’s sick.”

“Oh? Well, that’s a shame.”

“No, I mean she’s very sick, Georgia. She’s dying.”

There was a shuffling sound from across the phone lines, the sound of something settling. “My God.”

“She has cancer, ovarian cancer. She stopped treatment a couple months back and she’s not doing so great. I just thought you should know.”

“Oh Kerry, God, so young? We have to do something, Bert and I, come up and be there for her.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe but not yet, not now. Let me talk to Eve first.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “I promise I’ll be in touch.”

Georgia didn’t respond. Had I hurt her? But then she cleared her throat. “She should know.”

I sat a minute, waiting. Had I missed something? “Excuse me?”

“Your mother. Your mother should know.”

“There’s a lot she should know.”

“I’ve got her number.”

I blinked. “You what?”

“Somewhere, I’ve written it somewhere. Bert! Just a minute…”

The receiver clicked against my ear and my mind raced. What did she say? She had a phone number? How could she have a number?

Georgia came back on. “Bert is wonderful. I swear without him I’d lose my own nose.”

“How could you have her number? Did you talk to her? Why the hell didn’t you tell us?”

“I’m sorry. Oh Lord, Kerry, I know, but we thought we were doing the right thing, we really did. We called her years ago when your father died—”

“You said you couldn’t reach her!”

“She didn’t want to see you, Kerry. She knew she couldn’t be a good mother, I guess, and truth is I agreed with her. How could I tell you that your mother had refused to even come visit? It would’ve broken your hearts.”

My back and arms went weak.
She hadn’t wanted to see me
. We were silent for a minute and then Georgia spoke. “Will you call her?”

“I don’t know. You can give me the number, and then I don’t know.”

Georgia began to read off the number and I grabbed for a pen, copied it down on a napkin. I stared at it, barely comprehending. “Six-one-seven area code. She’s in Boston.”

“I think so. Or at least she was when we talked to her. That was years ago, but it’s the last I heard.”

It had to be a joke, God up there belly-laughing. Could it be that all this time I’d held the question, a constant pressure like a kneading fist behind everything, all this time she’d been just minutes away? Why hadn’t I felt it? How hadn’t I known? “Thank you,” I said softly. “Thanks, Georgia, and I’ll be in touch.”

I dropped the phone back on its cradle and lifted the napkin with my mother’s number, folded it and tucked it into my jeans pocket. I knew that of course I’d call her. And I knew I couldn’t tell Eve.

I waited until Justin left for the mail, then sat in the kitchen, stomach churning, one hand on the phone, the other holding my mother’s phone number. I tapped my foot four times, lifted the receiver and listened to the dial tone. I tapped my foot four more times and dropped it again. I rose and paced to the window. Such a beautiful day outside, and I was reverting back into a froot loop.

Without letting myself think, I lifted the receiver again and dialed the number. I let the phone ring once, twice. Heart stuttering, I slammed it down. What would I say? What would I call her even? Mom? Mrs. Barnard? Did she use that name anymore? Diana. Hello, Diana, this is Kerry Barnard. Oh God.