Sister (11 page)

“Don't do that,” I shouted, “I hate it when you do that,” and then I started to cry.

“Did you hurt her, Gordon?” my mother said.

“Who's the victim here?” my father said. “Christ, look what she did to my thumb,” and he held it out, already swelling; I could see it under the dim light of the moon. But nobody was listening to him. Instead, my mother was rubbing my hand, my grandmother was patting my shoulder, Harv and Uncle Olaf were searching their pockets for Kleenex, and Monica was saying in her affected way, “Why does
every
thing have to
be
so
melodramatic
?” I cried all the way home and into the bright warm light of the kitchen, where the cats climbed into my lap and my grandmother fed me whiskey tea. I cried while my grandmother fixed an ice
pack for my father's thumb, and later while Uncle Olaf secured it with tape from the first-aid kit, teasing him about the dangers of thumb wrestling with a daughter. It was clear to me now that I belonged in this world. There was nowhere else for me to go.

On New Year's Day, I told my grandmother I wanted to go back to school in January. She surprised me by giving me Elise's piano; Uncle Olaf had agreed to haul it in his truck. “For your lessons,” she said. “It will fit nice in your mother's living room, and I'm sure Elise would want you to have it.”

“Thank you,” I said. I couldn't believe it. “Are you sure?”

My grandmother took my hand, rubbed her thumb across the top of my knuckles the way she did when she was pleased with me. “When God shuts a door, He opens a window,” she said, “or, in your case, perhaps, another door.” I'd told her about how much I'd wanted a vocation, how hard it was not to envy Harv. “Keep the piano and practice your lessons and remember Elise in your thoughts,” she said. “If God wills it, you'll have the lifetime of music she always wanted.”

Sam's fourteenth birthday was coming up on Saturday, the sixth of January, and we decided I would move back home then. My father hadn't spoken to me since Christmas Eve; I'd sprained his thumb badly, and for the next six weeks he would have to wear an embarrassing white splint. He told people he'd slammed his finger in the car door, but there was something about the way he said it that made them ask more questions. Eventually, someone heard the story from someone who knew my uncle, and my father was teased without mercy. Sam told me about it the next time I called. “Serves him right,” he said bitterly.

The night of the fifth was bingo night, and for the first time, I won twenty dollars. Auntie Thil won next, then, amazingly, my grandmother. People were laughing and rubbing our sleeves for luck, and we drove home happy and warm with our good fortune. As we walked into the house, the squat, old-fashioned phone was ringing, and I knew by the way my grandmother reached for the
receiver that she also sensed something was wrong. It was my mother; Sam had been hurt in a car accident that involved two other underage drivers. She'd thought he was at a friend's house, doing homework, and when the police called, she was so certain they had the wrong number that she told them so and hung up. They called her back. She called us. The car, an old Pontiac, had spun out of control on Highway J, bounced through a ditch, and hit a tin shed. My father was already on his way to the hospital. Would we meet her there?

My grandmother phoned Auntie Thil, and within minutes we were on the road to Saint Nicholas Hospital, our twenty-dollar bills still crisp in our pockets, our coats giving off the festive smell of the KC hall. Auntie Thil dropped us off at Emergency, and for the first time I was scared. The receptionist knew my grandmother; she smiled kindly and gave us the number of my brother's room.

“Quit,” my grandmother said when she noticed me sniffling. We stepped into the elevator, and she punched the floor button. “Abigail, use your head. If it was serious, they wouldn't have him in a room so quick.”

There was my mother at the end of the hallway, talking with two police officers in their stiff uniforms. I knew the younger one. His daughter was my age. I went to her birthday parties when we were in grade school, and her father always helped us play Pin the Tail on the Teacher. Officer Holtz. He recognized me and smiled, but his uniform made me shy, and I did not smile back. The other officer had a pen and a pad. He seemed eager to finish and go.

“He has a broken collarbone, some stitches,” my mother told us. “The other boys were sent home already.”

“So you've never noticed any sign before this that he'd been consuming alcohol?” the impatient officer said. My mother looked at my grandmother, and her face darkened with shame. “No,” she whispered. “I've already told you.”

“We'll give a holler if we need any more information,” Officer Holtz said quickly, and the two of them left in a jingle of keys.

“The other boys were older,” my mother said, as if she were speaking to herself. “They gave him the beer. It was their car he was driving.”

“Can we see him?” I asked, and my mother nodded. My grandmother took her by the arm.

“You go on ahead,” she said. “Your mother and I need to have a private talk.”

There were two beds in the room. The one closest to the door was empty. The second one was hidden behind a loose white curtain, but I knew it was Sam's because I recognized my father's shoes. I hoped that my father wasn't scolding Sam, but as I listened, I didn't hear either my father or Sam saying much of anything. What I heard were ragged gasps, like the sound of someone in pain, and for a moment I wondered if Sam was hurt worse than my mother had said. But when I peered around the curtain I saw that Sam was asleep, his face a white ghost mask except for his lashes and brows and the faint gold hairs that lined his upper lip. His shoulder was covered in plaster; he had stitches in one ear, black and spiky-looking, like a row of ants feeding there. My father was sitting beside the bed, one long arm thrown over Sam's chest, and the splint on his thumb seemed huge and glowing. His shoulders moved, and I heard that gasp again.

When he looked up, I recognized the man from my dreams, and as I stared at the shine of tears on his face, I understood why God had refused me. I had run with all my strength, as fast and far as my selfish legs would take me. The man had caught my brother instead. Now he'd never let go.

I
'm not ready for fall: the long, chilly evenings, the morning frost shining on the last of the peppers and tomatoes, the yellowing squash, the tattered pea vines still clutching their stakes. Despite its late planting, the garden has flourished; my cupboards look as full as my mother's ever did, and I'm proud of the rows of canned vegetables, the neat labels: pole beans, pickles, salsa. Yesterday I dug up the lavender potatoes Adam ordered on a whim from a catalog. I figured they'd be bitter, but they were light and sweet, and we ate a small mountain of them, boiled, with butter and salt. This is why we left Baltimore, where we shared an apartment for over five years, eager to exchange the city for small pleasures like these. “A good fall taste,” Adam said, and I wondered how I could have dug onions and beets, caulked the north windows, walked beneath maples filled with leaves the color of fire, and all without realizing summer had tapered to a brief warmth somewhere in the afternoon, dried up, blown away. Too late, I'm wishing I'd savored it more, our last summer alone. Next fall, we'll have a nine-month-old child. I remind myself of this every day, trying to make the idea seem real.

How will we find time to plant another garden? How will
we keep up with the house, the yard, oil changes and dental appointments and regular exercise, the day-to-day maintenance that already demands so much room in our lives? It seems as if we are already as busy as we possibly can be, Adam with his carpentry work, me with my job at the Turkey Hill Nature Preserve, no parents close by to help out in a pinch. “There's Pat,” Adam reminds me—another reason we moved to New York State. And already she's volunteered baby-sitting, but her house is a disaster, her little girls wild, and I'm not reassured when she tells me, “When you've got three, what's one more?” Of course, my mother would love to stay with us for a while after the baby is born, but she'd mine the house with green scapulars, prayer cards, and bottles of holy water, the way she did the time she came to visit just after Adam and I were married. It had been a long week for all of us. On Sunday, she went to Mass with a neighbor—I'd arranged that in advance. Afterward, over the brunch I'd made, my mother spoke of nothing but the graffitied state of my soul—one black mark for each missed Mass—while Adam ate in silence.

“What will you do when you have children?” she said. “Certainly you'll want them to have a moral upbringing.”

“
I
am a moral person,” Adam said, “and I never went to any church when I was a kid.”

He picked up his plate and left the room, leaving my mother and me to glare at each other.

Now she wants to know if we're making plans for a baptism. “I've never been a godmother before,” she hints. “Maybe Adam could get baptized at the same time. A two-for-one special.”

I match her tone. “It's only a bargain if it's something you need.”

I'm tired of my mother's hints. Today at Turkey Hill, watching lines of geese scarring the horizon, I have the urge to jump in my car and drive…where? Anywhere. Away. But it's autumn that's making me feel this way, the restless wind, the skittering leaves, and I realize it's the perfect time to open Uncle Olaf's
wine. He called it Autumn Tonic, and though he's been dead for several years now, Auntie Thil still sends me a bottle each fall from what's left of his well-stocked cellar: dandelion or mulberry or plum. The names themselves are sweet to the tongue. Usually, Adam is amused by that sweetness—he prefers beer to sugary wine—but when this year's bottle arrived in the mail, he said,
You shouldn't be drinking; you should be taking care of yourself
. All summer, he's been busy with what he calls
the preparations
, finishing household projects, taking on extra carpentry work. He waxes the truck, vacuums out my car. He joined a shoppers club in Binghamton and comes home with boxes of bulk toilet paper, pasta, rice. When I tell him it feels like we're anticipating war, he reminds me of what I already know, what everyone with children has been telling us almost gleefully: Four months from now, there will be little time for anything other than the baby's needs.

For the next three days he'll be traveling across the state, scavenging for antiques he'll restore and sell at Pat's shop in Cobblestone. It's a lucrative sideline, something to do when construction work drops off for the winter. He left yesterday, one suitcase filled with clothes rolled into tidy logs, and when I come home from work, the dark windows remind me he's gone. At least there's the cat for company, but the moment I open the door, she weaves between my legs and runs to the edge of the lawn, where she rolls happily in the dead grasses. I think about getting back in the car, driving to Pat's house for supper with the girls. Pat wouldn't mind, especially if I picked up some ice cream for desert. Right now I'd choose even my nieces' messy clamor over this silent house.

It's then that I remember Uncle Olaf's wine. I remember the low cedar barrels where he aged it, under the cellar stairs beside crates of yeasty pilsners, stouts, and ales, and his own potent invention, Raspberry Glog, which he stored in glass jelly jars. At Christmas, we kids got a taste on the tip of a teaspoon, perhaps the last sip that someone didn't want. But every now and then
throughout the year, we'd sneak down the steps—me and Sam, Monica and Harv—to steal another swallow or two. The glog looked as harmless as Auntie Thil's canned fruits, plums and peaches and spiced brown pears, which occupied identical jars. I took a long, dizzying swallow, hiccupped the exquisite taste of raspberry, and experienced the light-headed chill of knowing I had done something I could not undo. The alcohol ferreted through my veins, tickled the hard-to-reach places in my mind. When I passed the jar along to Sam, it seemed as if it were taking an awfully long time for my hands to obey my wish:
Let go, Let go, Let go
.

The glog was eighty proof; I know that now, the way I know each sip of wine means death to a handful of brain cells. As I sit in the kitchen rocking chair with my glass, pushing the floor away with my toes, I imagine those cells—the baby's and mine—like frogs' eggs: clear, clumping jelly, thick with information. There is no way to know if it is information we might someday need. There is no way to know if it is information we might someday need. There is no way to know if it's information we are better off without. But this I do know: one glass of wine can't be any worse than these past few months of stifling caution—low-salt diets, doctor visits, vitamins that leave my mouth tasting strange, eight glasses of water every day, eight hours of sleep every night. Adam believes in these rules the way my mother believes in the Ten Commandments, as if they are a magic formula, an infallible recipe.

Beyond the French doors, I can see clouds of migrating birds rising and falling, dust devils blown by a hundred wings. Our house is the last on a dead-end street, perched on the edge of a ravine. We bought it when we got married, liking the back porch, which juts out like an impulse, and the side yard, with enough space for Adam's sculptures. Deer pick their way up from the ravine to strip bark from the apple trees we planted along the lot line, standing on their hind legs to nibble beyond the wire protectors. In Horton, the deer drifted in herds of fifty and sixty, like cattle. They came at dusk and grazed until darkness, finally in
visible except for their eyes, which trapped light from passing cars and glowed like floating spheres. First frost always made them bold. Even the yearlings were anticipating winter, the long, gray days of bitter bark and tough, dead grasses, and they ate steadily, fiercely, as Sam and I watched from my bedroom window, wrapped in a quilt, our feet dangling off the edge of my bed to catch the heat that rose from the vent on the floor. I told him the deer were really souls of the dead. If we went outside, we'd instantly die too. During the day, they transformed into other animals—bears and fish and even dogs and cats—so you never should approach a strange animal, in case it wasn't what it appeared to be. My mother overheard our murmurings one evening and put an end to it by stomping outside, my father's jacket thrown over her nightgown, and startling the herd into white-tailed flight with an exasperated flick of her hands.

Where you got your ideas
, she still likes to say,
Heaven only knows
! But looking back, I don't see them as any stranger than the things we were taught to believe. Once, when Sam and I were quarreling over some small thing, she told us that each time we raised our voices in anger, it was the same as holding a burning match against the flesh of Jesus, which made all the angels weep. I was filled with remorse, imagining the hot sizzle of Jesus' skin, the agony in His eyes, the wailing of thousands of white-winged creatures. But Sam ignored the kitchen match my mother had lit to emphasize her point. Undaunted, he looked around the room.

“I don't see any angels,” he said, crossing his arms on his chest. “Prove it.” My mother doesn't remember this. Her Sam was a boy who volunteered to lead Grace before meals. Her Sam sat up straight at Mass, hands folded just so, like in a First Communion picture. With age, she's becoming as religious as my grandmother ever was, and it's hard for me to remember there was a time when she urged me to rely on myself—not God alone—for answers. She recently joined a women's prayer group; they meet twice a month to pray. One woman has cancer of the
liver, and when the group joins hands, they ask God to shrink the tumor. They pray for each other's children, for people in the community; they pray for news about Sam. They believe that if a person has faith the size of a mustard seed, anything is possible. “Why do you always look for negative things?” she asks me. “Or is that just what happens when a person stops going to church?”

Even now, she'll call with news, real or imagined, of Sam: a dream, an anonymous phone call, a hopeful letter from a missing persons organization, an insight from a psychic, saying,
Sam is thinking about us or Sam is ill or Sam is coming home soon
. Prove it, I want to say. There have been too many disappointments, too many trips across the country to discover yet another stranger, someone else's lost son. But since my grandmother's death, I'm eager to hear my mother's voice, as lonely for her company as she is for mine. When she talks about Sam, I keep the silence she believes means we agree.

Growing up, my house rang with many of these silences; the things you did not say because to say them would be wrong; the things you did not feel because they were sins. The things you wanted to do but couldn't because you were a girl, or a boy. The questions you could not ask because you might be acting
too big for your britches
or else
talking nonsense
, in which case my father would tell you to
simmer down. If you can't say something nice
, my mother told me again and again,
don't say anything at all
. And perhaps what I remember are things that should not be remembered, should not be spoken.
Simmer down. Simmer down
.

 

For my thirteenth birthday, my father gave me matches and a pack of Camels, wrapped up in pink tissue paper. I was in the backyard, where I'd been idly throwing rocks at a stump. It had been, until that moment, a normal kind of birthday. We'd had an early supper of meat loaf, my favorite, and a store-bought cake I'd picked out myself at the bakery downtown, a chocolate cake
with green frosting and lavender sugar flowers and
Happy Birthday Abby
written in cursive across the top. My mother had given me a diary with a key and a glass horse tethered to two glass foals. Sam had saved his money to buy me a king-size box of Milk Duds and a key chain that was a flashlight too. Now my father was giving me a pack of cigarettes.

“Thank you,” I said.

My father looked pleased. He played with the zipper on his
Fountain Ford
windbreaker. “Have one,” he said politely, as if he were offering me a cookie, a stick of gum, some unexpected little treat.

I studied the Camels uneasily. My mother usually bought our gifts, and I figured my father just didn't know any better than to give me cigarettes. He'd given things to Sam that I'd considered strange; a Baggie of smashed butterfly wings from the grille of his car; his broken watch; chewed-up pens with the names of car dealerships trailing down their sides; a large inflatable spark plug from a gas-station window display. The Camels were just one more mistake, only this time the mistake was aimed at me. Or was it some kind of trick?
No makeup
, he had warned me.
No high heels, no nail polish
. He'd never said specifically that I wasn't allowed to smoke, but I knew it was something I wasn't supposed to do.

“I don't smoke,” I told him.

His expression did not change. He took the cigarettes, put them in his pocket, and said, “C'mon, let's go for a walk.”

The red and gold of the turning leaves glowed eerily in the twilight. I watched the faint crescent moon move with us, slipping from tree to tree as we walked down the driveway to the highway, and I tried to keep up with my father. He was a fast walker, a businesslike walker, head down, shoulders forward, hands jammed into the pockets of his windbreaker. Sam and I had once imitated his walk for amusement, stretching our legs like wading birds, tucking our chins to our chests. But lately, Sam tried to throw an extra inch into his own stride, my father's broken watch sliding
up and down his arm the way the high school boys' class rings slid on the slender fingers of their girlfriends.

At the highway, my father turned right toward Oneisha, and I wondered if he was leading me there, if I would be expected to walk the ten miles behind him in silence. But when we came to the end of our land, he stepped off the road and followed the gully to the stand of hickory trees that belonged to the Luchterhands. There I paused, catching my breath. The hickory trees had a reputation: Older kids biked out from town to hold secret meetings here, to drink Southern Comfort from Dr Pepper cans, and to beat up younger kids like me. “C'mon,” my father said when he realized I had stopped.