Pieces of My Sister's Life (23 page)

“He’s dead,” Justin said. He touched a cut on his own chin, stared at the blood on his fingers. “He’s dead, isn’t he.”

Eve pulled away and stared down at Ryan Maclean, trembling. “No,” she whispered, then slowly slid against the wall, down onto the floor.

“We have to call the cops,” Justin said.

Eve stared at him, wide-eyed. “No!”

Justin sank to the bed. “We have to, Eve, we can’t just leave him here. Nobody can blame us for this, you know that, right?”

I crawled to sit on the bed, hid my face against Justin’s shoulder. “You kept hitting him,” I whispered. “He was down, he was down and you kept hitting!”

“They’ll blame me,” Eve said. “He’s married, famous, whatever the fuck that means, but to them it’ll mean it’s all my fault.” Her voice broke and she shook her head. “Don’t you know how it’ll be? The rest of my life that’s who I’ll be.”

We sat there, the three of us, watching the spreading blood as if waiting for something to happen. We sat there knowing who Eve and Justin both would be. We knew how it was on the island, how sins followed you everywhere and always, a sour-scented shadow.

“You kept hitting him,” I said again. “Even if he was the one who came here, whatever he did to Eve, look what you did to his head, Justin. Look at—”

“Stop it!” Eve’s voice was a shriek. She hugged her knees, rocked back and forth, back and forth.

Justin stared down at the blood spattered on his hands and his jacket. He wiped his hands against his jeans, then slowly rubbed his sleeve at the streaks they’d left behind.

“Please,” Eve whispered. “We have to get him out of here. If he just goes missing, if we buried him…”

I noticed suddenly that Eve’s feet were still encased in green satin pumps. I stood, pulled a robe from the closet and draped it over her shoulders. “The blood’s stopped,” I said, the words coming from someplace else, my head feeling drifty as if it hovered somewhere above my body, watching down.

Eve started to rock faster, crooning to herself, her hair limp in her face. Justin stood and threw a blanket over Ryan’s body, then knelt to pull the robe tight over her shoulders. “I’ll take care of you, okay?” he said. “Whatever happens, whatever we do, I promise I’ll take care of you.”

This is the good thing about growing up so near the water. You know where to take a boat so that the tourists out late can’t hear the noise of your engine. You know the framework beneath the waves even though you can’t see it, know where the craggy rocks can catch a body, hold it down, tear it to pieces in the squall so that if it ever finds the surface there will be no sign of what it once had been.

We hauled the steamer trunk that Daddy had used for his tools into Justin’s car, then carried the body, wrapped in my blanket. Justin held his shoulders and I held his legs, the dead weight of him reminding me of the ten-foot swordfish Daddy used to clean. We sat him upright inside the trunk and then folded his chest over his legs like he was stretching or doing sit-ups.

We drove in silence and parked at the ferry landing, then sat there in the car, waiting. Behind the hushing sound of the wind, we could hear the music from the bar, the pounding drumbeat so muffled it almost seemed like a heartbeat. On the dock a couple, holding hands, stood gazing at moonlight on water. We watched the man bend to kiss the woman, then wrap her in his arms and rest his chin on her head. We waited as they rocked foot to foot, a slow dance that seemed to last an eternity before they finally kissed again and walked back to the street, his arm around her shoulders. Justin nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

It took three of us to lift the trunk from Justin’s car, Eve’s fingers gripping the handle beside me. We carried it down to the harbor and hoisted it onto the deck. None of us spoke.

It was the first time I’d been on Daddy’s boat since the night I’d seen Eve in the hold with Ryan Maclean. And on this night I believed in fate, in rightful destiny.

I rowed from the dock with a loose plank, the gulp of the wood on water and the hollow thud as the plank hit the hull eerily magnified. A cold drizzle glazed my cheeks as we passed the breakwater and pulled into the vast blankness away from shore, the dark sky indistinguishable from the dark water, one yawning mouth. I started the engine.

Eve huddled in the corner, Justin beside her, enfolding her in his arms and staring out at the choppy waves. I began to steer, pressing the cold kiss of Daddy’s key necklace against my lips. The picture in my mind was the photograph of me and Eve in new pink bathing suits, the picture I’d found hidden with the Caines’ money in the bag under Eve’s bed. I thought now I could remember that day on the beach, holding Eve’s hand as Daddy grinned. “Such beauties,” he’d said, the camera at his eye. “Who woulda thought a guy like me could make such beautiful girls.”

The boat weaved in the storm. Though the rain had stopped, the wind was fierce and biting once we left the shelter of the harbor. I kept my eyes on the land, trying to avoid my qualmishness while Eve was sick over the edge, Justin holding back her hair.

This was the northeast side of the island, an isolated stretch accessible only by boat or long walks on the Clay Head Trail above the shoreline. Isolated enough that you might imagine it an ideal place to stroll while composing a congressional address. The ocean close enough to the low hanging bluffs that a man might climb down to watch the evening surf. Might lean too far. In a drunken fog might fall. I cut the engine.

The boat pitched even more violently and I had to fight to keep my feet. I watched Justin’s face, wet with sweat or rain, and he watched mine, wearing no expression that I could read. Finally he nodded sharply and the two of us opened the trunk. We unwrapped the body from the blanket and it hit the deck with the thunk of flanks on a butcher block. We lifted the body and heaved it over the stern.

Eve stumbled to stand beside me and watched as the body hit the water: head, then torso and legs. I knew her thoughts were the same as mine, knew she, like I, saw another man lean over that same stern, either too drunk or much too sober to stop his knees from climbing, his body from hitting the water and floating there without a fight. He bobbed above the water as we watched him, knowing there was no hope, no saving. We watched as the water judged and claimed him; we fought to keep from lunging to pull him back. We watched his pant legs billow and his mouth fill, watched his arms float towards us as if with the pain of leaving. We fed the ocean this one last piece, and wondered what we had left.

FIVE

Bloodroot

June

2007

26

I
’D BEEN PLAYING
with the torn letters I’d brought, shuffling them on the bed, piecing fragments with fragments. It was a difficult process because Eve and I had written our letters in similar blue pen on plain white paper, like those annoying thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles of popcorn kernels or baskets of golf balls. But our handwriting was different enough to identify, her print straight and blocky, mine slanted and slim. We’d once read a
Cosmo
article on handwriting analysis, and it basically said that Eve was headstrong and I looked towards the past rather than embracing the present. Surprisingly accurate considering the article was probably written by a twenty-year-old communications major, hoping for a reference on her resumé and five hundred bucks towards her tuition at Podunk State.

I began with Eve’s scrawled signature and worked my way up, joining lines into letters into words. So many mangled, furious pieces. This was a mindless task that was not at all mindless; my hands were still but my insides were shaking. This in itself could bring a sort of answer, the words Eve had used, the lies to take him away from me. But playing with the scraps, all I could think was how incredibly young and stupid we both had been.

When I finished the bottom two rows of Eve’s words, I stared at them, trying to figure out what they meant.
up now for the first time. I’m in my Dad’s room if you want to talk it out
.

I laid a strip of Scotch tape over the line to hold the pieces in place, then slipped it all back into the envelope. There was no point in this. It wouldn’t change anything.

I glanced at the clock. Two-thirty. Usually by two Eve would have woken, asked for her bedpan or for the pills she knew I couldn’t give her yet. I slipped the envelope under my pillow and started downstairs.

Eve was propped in bed, looking unusually alert. Her eyes were quick and nervous, and for a minute I wondered if she might somehow know what I’d been doing.

“Kerry,” she said.

“You want some water?”

“Sure. Yeah sure, that’d be great.”

When I returned with the water, her eyes were closed. I set the water on the night table next to a pair of nail scissors, then sat on the bed and lifted the scissors, cradled them in my palm. How pointless that her body would waste its energy on growing nails when it had already given up on everything else. “You want me to do your right hand?”

“Really what I want is just to sleep.” Her eyes were still closed. “Please.”

I nodded and bent to tuck the blanket under her chin. It was then I saw the blood. I screeched and jumped away.

Eve’s eyes snapped open.

“You’re bleeding! Eve, oh God…” The blood was spreading, seeping across her sheet. I yanked at the sheet with a strangled cry, expecting to see some sort of monstrous, oozing growth, her cancer saying,
Hello there! Here I am!
But what I saw beneath the mire of blood was a deep slash at her wrist.

“Oh…oh…oh…” I pressed the blanket over her wrist. Tourniquet, I needed a tourniquet. I stripped the scarf from Eve’s head and tied it around her emaciated upper arm. So much blood. If she weighed a hundred pounds, at least half of them must have leaked onto these sheets. “Oh God, help!”

Eve’s face was calm, her shoulders hunched as she looked down at her wrist. “It’s not deep enough.”

“I have to call. I’ll call an ambulance.”

“Five more minutes, maybe I could’ve done something.”

I began to run to the kitchen, then stopped and gathered her in my arms. In the kitchen I reached for the phone but Eve batted me with her head. “Don’t.”

“I’m getting the doctor. You need stitches.”

“No I don’t, Kerry, stop overreacting. I’m fine and I’m not leaving this house. I’m not letting anybody see me like this.”

I lowered us into a chair and looked under the blanket. The cut was already beginning to heal, blood curling slowly over its edges. I awkwardly cradled the skeletal length of her, rocking back and forth.

“Shit, that stings,” she said.

“What are you doing, Eve? What did you do?”

“Look, you’re hurting me, okay? I don’t fit in your lap, and this—” She tugged at the headscarf tourniquet. “What’re you trying to be, Clara Barton? Just get me back.”

“You think this is okay, you can just do this, no big deal?”

Eve made a face, sarcasm or pain, I couldn’t tell. “Get me back,” she said. “Before I puke all over this impeccably dressed wound.”

I held her eyes a moment longer, then carried her on shaking legs back to the den. The sheets were wet with blood, and so I set her on the wheelchair and began to change them. She stopped me with a hand on my arm. “You won’t tell Justin.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“I’ll tell you what you’ll do. You’ll throw away the sheets, help me change my clothes, and then you’ll just forget this ever happened.”

I reached again for the sheets, heaped them in a pile on the floor.

“What?” Eve said. “I won’t do it again if that’s what you’re scared of. I was just hurting so bad, and for a few minutes it was like a release, a way to stop hurting. But this, this is worse. Feels like someone’s trying to press wrinkles out of my arm with a curling iron.”

I sat on the bare mattress. “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I don’t know what to do for you.”

“I don’t want to die, Kerry, not really, not yet. It just helps me sometimes to think about it ending, that it could end when I want it to.”

I looked down at my scarred wrists, the memories running through me like slivers of glass, my blood and Ryan Maclean’s, and then another kind of blood that had stained my hands so persistently I’d found it even a week later under my nails. It was more orange than red and as bitter as bile, and although I’d meant for Eve to drink it, I would later end up drinking it myself. So much blood; too much for one lifetime. “I’ve thought about it too,” I said. “I mean, not seriously maybe, but yeah I’ve thought about it. More than once.”

“Then you’re a fool.” She raised her chin. “Look, let me tell you something, Kerry. Since last winter, what I keep thinking all the time is all the things I’ll never do again. Some of it’s stupid, last President’s Day, last spring we’ll put up window screens. But then there was my last snowfall, last daffodils, Gillian’s last birthday.”

I lay down on the mattress, curled up and closed my eyes.

“It’s not like I’m a big fan of Christmas, but when I realized I’d never see it again, all I kept thinking of was all the Christmases I’m missing. I could’ve given Gillian and her kids and her kids’ kids these incredible Christmases if I’d just got the chance. And then there’s other things, too. I’ll never have another kid, I’ll never have a career, I’ll never…see Italy.”

“You want to see Italy?”

“I want you to see it.”

I shook my head and she grabbed my hand. “Since you came, that’s the only thing that made it easier, realizing that you’ll be here to do all the things I never got to do.”

I pulled away. “I can’t.”

“Because you’re weak and you’re used to being weak.”

“You want more than me, Eve, you always did. I don’t need anything more than what I have.”

“That’s bullshit. You’re like me, Kerry, you haven’t given yourself a chance to live because you feel like you don’t deserve it. You just crawled into your hole and waited to die, and I’m holing up here and dying.”

“Maybe I don’t deserve it. Maybe neither of us does.”

Eve narrowed her eyes, her voice tight. “You think I don’t feel guilty every day of my life for what we did? Every single fucking day? So maybe I won’t live long enough to get past it, but I’ve lived long enough to at least help you see past it. It’s been thirteen years, Kerry. That’s long enough to hate yourself.”

I fingered my scars, once raised white ridges, now only visible when I tanned, hard to feel against the veins in my wrist. She could forgive herself, but I had more in me to hate.

“I’m sorry,” I said, then turned away, strode out into the hall. I gripped the stair rail, pulled at it as if I could bring the roof, the house into shambles around me. I listened to the sounds, the humming fan, the clack-clack of settling walls, and my mind ran with dry laughter like a little dead voice, trilling with all the things I’d once had inside me, the pictures of a husband, a child, a home, and hopes and colors and dreams. It was gone, all of it, and I didn’t know how to get it back. It had been so long, I’d forgotten that I’d ever wanted it.