Pieces of My Sister's Life (5 page)

5

I
SLAND WEATHER IS FICKLE.
Especially in the fall, the wind can come from nowhere, taking air that feels like summer and turning it into winter. The ferries stopped on days like this, banked on the protected mainland, isolating us completely from the outside world. The island’s only twelve miles from the coast of Rhode Island, but on a stormy night it might as well be a thousand.

Eve and I sat together on the living room couch, watching the windows rattle and sheet with water. The fury of it was both frightening and fascinating, like something huge and shrieking with pain.

I remembered suddenly a long-ago winter with this same howling wind, Eve and I waking with simultaneous screams, Daddy’s face a white moon appearing at our door. He’d taken us down here and we’d huddled in the warmth of cocoa and cuddles, listening to the ice pelting against the windows and wondering if the glass might crack.

“Remember Daddy reading out loud,” I said now, “us sitting here like this? He used to say, ‘I have two girls because I have two knees,’ remember that?”

Outside there was a crash of thunder. The lights flickered. “Amelia Bedelia,” Eve said. “You loved those books.”

“How come he stopped reading to us?”

Eve raised her eyebrows. “We stopped fitting on his knees?”

A fierce blast of wind gusted through the window seals to flutter at the curtains. There was a sudden pop and the lights flickered out. “Damn,” Eve said.

I slid away from her. After a minute I stood and walked to the window, pulled the drapes and stood there a long while without turning. “How come I never thought about how hard it was for him till after it was too late? I keep thinking about that, if I had one more day with him.”

“You’d do what, tell him you’re sorry? You understood? It wasn’t our job to take care of him.”

There was a knock on the front door, and it opened before we could answer. “You guys here? Jesus, I feel like I just went swimming.” Justin bent to rub the wet from his hair, leaving it rumpled and spiky. “I didn’t know if you’d have candles.”

He set a bag down on the floor and took out three pillar candles and a book of matches, all dripping wet. He stared at the matches, then shrugged. “Oops.”

“I’ll find some.” I went to the kitchen and searched through drawers, finally found the lighter Daddy had used for his pipe. When I got back to the living room Eve was laughing.

“Well, at least the buckets work,” Justin said, sitting on the sofa next to her. “But all I can tell you is I’ll be totally useless as a husband. I mean if you want your bike fixed, fine. If you want to hear a bedtime story, I can probably do that too, but you need someone to look at your roof, forget it.”

“There’s more important things than fixing leaks,” Eve said. “We were just talking about bedtime stories, how Daddy used to read out loud. I was saying it’s one of the best things he did for us.”

I raised my eyebrows at her, but she didn’t notice.

“You wouldn’t think it was so important if he let the rain drench your bed,” Justin said.

“I still would’ve thought it. Like you were saying, buckets work well enough.”

“Yeah, long as I have an understanding wife.”

“I got a lighter,” I said, setting the candles on the coffee table. I lit them and sat on the other side of Justin.

Justin sighed and slid an arm around my back. I stiffened.

“This picture just popped into my head,” he said. “Maybe fifty years from now and here we are, old bags, there’s a fire going and the three of us are in the living room listening to the rain, with you guys doing knitting and me doing a crossword.”

“Knitting?” Eve said. “Are you kidding?”

“Sorry, Eve. Okay, you’re planning some exotic trip, or plotting to rule the world.” He squeezed my shoulder. “But Kerry’s knitting.”

Eve snickered but I didn’t care. All that mattered right then was his arm around me, a honey-thickness sinking from my shoulders down through my chest. I blurred my eyes and watched the candles dance in unison right and left. “What’ll we be thinking?” I said.

“Guess it depends what we’ve done with our lives so far. By then if we haven’t done all the important stuff, we’ll probably just be waiting for life to end. But if we’ve done everything we wanted, we’ll be reminiscing.”

“That’s the problem,” Eve said. “These days that’s how I feel, like the important stuff ’s never going to happen.”

Justin pulled his arm away from me, leaned back to look at Eve. “You don’t mean that.”

“I just keep waiting for something to start,” she said. “Even though I know it won’t start on its own, all I can do is wait. Like everything’ll be a blur until it happens, whatever it is, graduating, moving to the mainland, falling in love.”

“I’ve been in love,” Justin said. “Or at least I’ve thought I was in love. And it’s great in its own way, but it’s not everything. Not enough by itself to make you feel like you’ve lived.”

“For me it will be,” I said.

Justin slid his arm back around me, rested his damp head against my shoulder. “Yeah, you’re a romantic,” he said. “For you it probably will be.”

I bit back a smile. There was something primal in it, the sound of the rain, the tickle of his hair against my neck. This stillness, this is how I imagined it would be if Justin and I had just made love.

But then he spoke. “I think there’s two kinds of people,” he said, “contented souls and restless souls. That’s us, Eve, the restless souls, always looking.”

Eve smiled. “And Kerry’ll do her knitting, and she’ll be happy with her sitting-knitting life.”

“But at least she’ll be happy. Whereas us, I’ll be waiting to finish my story and you’ll be trying to conquer the world. And either it won’t happen or it will and we’ll find out it’s not enough. How many people live their lives just waiting?”

Eve touched her finger to a candle drip, lifted it to study the wax-covered print. “If you look more, you find more,” she said. “So maybe we’ll never be complacent. But at least you and me, when we look back on it all, we’ll know we really lived. I’d rather have passion than peace any day.”

Justin was quiet a minute, then said, “Passion’s riskier, but I guess I’m with you. I’d rather have passion than peace.”

I sat in the kitchen, helping Mrs. Caine with dinner. She was the kind of woman who was always smiling faintly, even when she was doing things that did not warrant a smile, like inspecting bread for mold or unclogging the toilet. I watched now how she hummed as she sponged the counters, her hands stubby in their worn rubber gloves, and my heart swelled with longing for what I’d never have.

“I’m pretty much done here,” she said, then swiped her wet rubber finger across my nose. “You don’t have to come over to help every night, you know. I’m pretty much self-sufficient.”

“I like it here,” I said. “Remember when you used to babysit? You did these cool crafty things with us, made us Fluffernutter sandwiches, let us try on your shoes. It reminds me of that.”

And it was more than that. Not only did I love Mr. and Mrs. Caine, I loved their parent-ness, their husband-and wife-ness. They were more of a family than my own family had ever been, and I thought it might be useful for the future, seeing how it was all supposed to work. Most importantly I felt Justin’s presence here like a fog. Oh, I knew it was totally sappy; if I’d seen anybody else acting this way, I would’ve laughed out loud, but I didn’t care. That Justin fog was the only thing that made life bearable. I imagined his hair on my fingers when my hand brushed against a wall, smelled the warmth of his breath in steam when I washed his dinner plate.
I’d rather have passion than peace,
Justin had said, but I knew we could have both. Being in this house was both to me, haloes of the peace cast by the Caines’ happy marriage, sharpened by Justin’s glances across the table, a brush of fingers as we passed the salt. I could sense in those evenings how it would feel to be a wife. “It kind of feels like home,” I said.

Mrs. Caine watched me, her face flushed, maybe with pleasure or maybe with sadness, or maybe just with counter-washing exertion. “Well, it
is
home,” she said softly, “and we love having you here. You know you’re like family.” She looked down like she was embarrassed, then smiled. “Anyway, speaking of family, let’s see if we can gather up the rest of them. Why don’t you go tell your sister we’re almost ready?”

“Will do.” I smiled back and pulled her into a quick hug, then walked outside and started across the lawn. But passing Justin’s office, I stopped to peer in the window. After a minute I opened the door.

At first I just wanted to sit in the center of the room and absorb the aura of it. But once I was there I had a losing battle with my brain, one side of which was trying to preach morality, while the desperate and ultimately stronger side decided that, since they just happened to be in reach, I might as well read through the papers on his floor. What I was looking for was a secret, some kind of clue about how I might tunnel my way into his soul. But what I found instead was pure magic.

The stories were short, some only one page, but together they shaped a world I hadn’t seen for years, the world we’d traveled, me and Justin, hand in hand. I was Morwyn, the orphaned girl who (despite her blue face and occasional crabbiness) was irresistibly alluring. And Justin was the boy, Gaelin, who spent his time saving their world and other nearby planets, and who was fated to be Morwyn’s one true love. As I read, the stories sloughed off the weight of the real world, leaving behind the simplicity of those days on the front porch, a time when the three of us were the only thing that mattered.

I was so entranced by the stories that I didn’t hear Eve until her feet were right in front of my face. “Everybody’s been looking for you,” she said. Her voice sounded stilted and strange.

I dropped the page I was reading and jumped to my feet.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell.” Her gaze was level and appraising. “He’s planning to marry Leslie, you know.”

I bent to scatter the papers in some semblance of the disarray they’d been in before. “I doubt it.”

“He’s getting a ring and everything.”

I looked up. “A what?”

“An engagement ring. He asked my opinion on styles. He’s taking the ferry out next week. I told him I like oval marquise.”

I tried to decipher her expression, but it was smooth, completely unreadable, like she was reciting the periodic table or Latin verbs.

She tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear and smiled sympathetically. “He’s planning to ask her when she graduates next spring, to keep her from going off to college. Don’t let him know I told you, because I swore I wouldn’t. It’s just you’ve been so swoony lately, and I didn’t want you getting your hopes up or anything.”

“I don’t have hopes,” I said quickly. “I mean hell, if he’d marry Leslie, then I’m too good for him.” How could he marry Leslie? Was she his passion? Had he even thought about me? “Do you think she’ll say yes?”

Eve swirled her hair into a twist, tied it in a graceful knot. “All I can tell you is I’ve seen the way they look in each other’s eyes. It’s like magic. My guess is by this time next year she’ll wear a ring on her finger and be knocked up.” Eve waggled her eyebrows and grinned. “Bet you anything they’ve already done it.”

I could see a change in her expression then, an expectation that pissed me off. She wanted something from me, although I wasn’t sure what. “Well, they’re awful young,” I said, my voice tight. “I’d give them three years, tops.”

At this, something like satisfaction flickered in Eve’s eyes, but I smiled and pretended I didn’t see it. Because there were times, in dealing with Eve, that you were happier if you didn’t look too far.

I walked to LoraLee’s that night. The air was cold, but thick with the aroma of wood-burning stoves sharpened by the ocean salt, a layering known only to people who stayed on the island year-round. I stood by her fence and watched through her window as she lit a candle and gazed into the flame. I’d seen her pray before, how the calm would wash over her face, smoothing off the lines and curves so she looked kind of unfinished, like one of the raw carvings to which she’d given a profile but no character.

LoraLee was never angry, never afraid. She owned less than anyone I’d ever known, but still she never seemed to long for the things she couldn’t have. Even after time smoothed the edges, when Justin was long married and long gone, it was a kind of peace I doubted I’d ever have.

LoraLee stood to blow out the candle, then saw me. She opened her window, beaming. “Kerry, chile!”

I walked to her entryway, not wanting to talk, just to stand there in the doorway breathing in the honey scent of beeswax and candle smoke.

“Been days now since I seen you,” she said.

I shrugged. “There’s been school and all.”

LoraLee looked at me for a long while, then finally raised her thick eyebrows. “You needs some tea.”

“I’m okay.”

She nodded and went to her bookshelf, reached for a thick book with stiff pages. I tried to peer over her shoulder, but she harrumphed and waved me away. She ran her finger down a page, mouthing words, then closed the book and slipped it back onto the shelf. “I got jus’ the ress-pee. You bes’ wait here.”

It was The Book. I’d always known she must have one, couldn’t hold the answers all in her head. And she’d left it there for me: serendipity. I stepped closer, listening to her kitchen sounds: cupboard doors, the swish snap of scissors. At the grind of the pestle she used for tea, I reached for it. The yellowed pages were filled with recipes, lists of strange herbs in sweeping calligraphic script. LoraLee went outside to pump water, and I flipped through the pages, delighting in their rich scent of dust and time. The crackle of the binding and scrollwork round the edges spoke of ancient truths, and I imagined the book was watching me read and conveying silent wisdom, filling me with a root of strength that reached down my back and through the floor.

The pages held mysterious titles like “Binding,” “Polarity,” and “Protection.” Then a section on poisonous herbs that I flipped through quickly, like the paper itself might be leaching death. And then the section I wanted. I hugged myself and scanned the raised script.