The Good Sister (30 page)
Authors: Drusilla Campbell
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #General
“She trusts you. There is no one in the world she loves more than you. You can help her, Roxanne. If you’re willing.”
Lennox knew too much about Roxanne: she’d been too candid, giving him an advantage. Over her thirty-three visits to St. Anne’s
she had talked about the house in Logan Hills, the Royal Flush, and the reason for her deafness, going to Gran’s, and coming
back. Now she regretted every honest word she had ever spoken to him.
“Why are you doing this to me? What gives you the right to use me? Haven’t I been used enough?”
Dr. Lennox dipped his head, as if in agreement. “When you were brought back from Daneville, how did you feel about being put
in charge of your sister?”
How do you think I felt?
“It didn’t matter.” Ellen had abandoned her once and she would do it again if Roxanne did not do as she was told.
“Why didn’t it matter?”
She wanted to stand up and walk away, drive back to San Diego and to hell with St. Anne’s and Lennox and her sister.
“How do you feel now? This minute?”
“I want her to get better, of course.”
“That isn’t a feeling.”
All right: I hate her and I hate you. Are those feelings? I want this sister off my back! And I want to go home to my husband
and boy and never come back to this place. Is that enough feeling for you?
“Roxanne, what would happen if you were to tell your sister how you felt back then, how you still feel? How you’ve felt all
along?”
“She knows I love her, Dr. Lennox.”
“I am not talking about love.”
Outside the window, against the background of blue sky, a boldly marked yellow bird bent its head at the bird feeder hanging
from the eaves.
After her visit with Dr. Lennox, Roxanne stood in the lobby at St. Anne’s and watched Simone come toward her wearing blue
jeans and a tank top. Her tender prettiness was entirely gone. She had lost more than twenty pounds, and in the flimsy top
her clavicles protruded like a necklace of bones. Over the years her eyes seemed to have grown larger and darker. They dominated
her face in a way that was raw and unattractive. Her hair—she still hated washing it herself—hung lank and drab. Dr. Lennox
believed that somewhere in the labyrinth of Simone’s history there must be an explanation for her aversion to fresh water.
“Shall we walk?” Roxanne asked, linking her arm with Simone’s.
St. Anne’s was a sprawling hacienda-style building with thick cement walls and a tile roof and grounds landscaped with desert
plants. In the summer the temperature was often one hundred degrees or more; most patients, visitors, and staff preferred
to be indoors, where air-conditioning kept every room a mild eighty degrees. Simone and Roxanne preferred to be outdoors and
truly private. They walked the gravel path through the beavertail cactus and ocotillo to the top of Anne’s Hill. At the crest
there was often a breeze and a square of shade under a ramada. The view was across the arid mountains and up to the ridge
where a Native American tribe had erected hundreds of windmills.
The wind blew Simone’s hair off the nape of her neck, revealing a collar of freckles from a long-ago sunburn.
Simone said, “Remember those pinwheel things we had when we were kids?”
One day before Roxanne started school, the babysitter, Mrs. Edison, took her around the block to a fair at Logan Hills Elementary
where she met Mrs. Enos, the brown-skinned, orange-haired first grade teacher who gave her a silver pinwheel. On the way to
Gran’s she held it out the window of the Buick and watched it spin like the windmills.
She could have told this to Simone, described the teacher she had liked so much and how frightened she was to be taken away
from her home and abandoned to the care of a grandmother she hadn’t known she had. Instead, she talked about their mother.
“How is she?” Simone asked.
Roxanne tipped her head from side to side, and they smiled. Dr. Lennox once said that having a sister was what made having
a mother bearable.
“She’s happy these days,” Roxanne said. “The business is going like gangbusters. Big bucks.”
“I guess she’s over missing BJ.”
She had never told Simone that BJ gave her money in appreciation when Simone became engaged to Johnny. She had kept the inside
and the outside of her life a secret from her sister because a good sister must protect, must not be angry or unhappy or confused,
never resentful or rebellious or reluctant. A good sister was orderly in her thinking and knew how to take charge of any situation.
She played back Dr. Lennox’s words.
In Simone’s world the only feelings that matter are her own. That makes her a child. That keeps her a child. Tell her the
story of your life. Let her know what it felt like to be Roxanne. Let her grow up.
She had never told Simone about the house in Logan Hills and the night she almost burned it down. She hadn’t described standing
on a stool to wash dishes or covering their mother with a blanket when she passed out drunk on the couch. Simone didn’t know
that their mother beat her ear with a rubber sandal until it bled. And she didn’t know that Roxanne was brought back from
Gran’s because Ellen feared she would hurt Simone too.
This is what Dr. Lennox asked her: “You gave up your childhood to protect your sister. How does that make you feel?”
Blood rushed in and out of her heart, the valves opened and closed and her pulse kept time.
I will be abandoned. I will be beaten.
Her heart would cramp and then explode; blood and bones would fly out in all directions.
Someone will hold my little sister’s head beneath the bathwater to stop her crying or grab her by the heel and throw her in
the swimming pool.
This is what Dr. Lennox told her:
“Simone was brought up to be helpless and you were brought up to be afraid, to be on guard and watch for threat. But there
is nothing to fear anymore.”
Her heart beat against the prison of her ribs.
Roxanne asked Simone if she had remembered to put on sunscreen.
Roxanne told her she was too thin.
Caretaker and charge, helper and helpless. Both of them frightened by life. Roxanne was as much trapped in her roles as Simone
was in hers.
Along the ridge, the windmills turned; somewhere a yellow bird took to the air, sailing the sky like a ketch in blue water.
Roxanne was sitting on Anne’s Hill with her sister. The only sister she would ever have. She held the key to their past; it
would open the door to their futures.
“When I was younger than the twins, there was a place across the street from where we lived, a bar called the Royal Flush.
Mom and my dad would go there at night and leave me alone.” She pulled Simone down on the bench beside her and forced herself
to speak. “One day I almost set the house on fire.”
The wind was up, tearing through their hair. There was lightness in Roxanne. Another puff of wind and she would fly, she and
her sister would both set sail.
“That was the night Mom beat me with a rubber sandal. That’s why I’m deaf in my left ear.”
She spoke and Simone listened.
Roxanne left her grandmother and the ranch when she was nine years old. From then until Gran died seven years later, she and
Roxanne exchanged regular letters. Sometime after the events of the story, Ellen Vadis came upon a cache of old letters and
among them, apparently overlooked and still sealed, was a letter to Roxanne from Gran, written near the time of her death
when Roxanne was a teenager.
My dear girl,
First time I saw you, I couldn’t believe there was so much determination in one little kid. Such a small, waifish package,
long legs and bony knees and with something hopeful about you, despite your sad eyes, as if from early on you had decided
to view life from the sunny side no matter what. At the time, all I could think was that you looked like an orphan in rubber
go-aheads, your hair a rat’s nest of brown tangles. Neglect
was written all over you and it almost broke my heart, though it’s true, I didn’t want you and I was angry that your mother
had the gall to drop you on my porch with just a couple of days’ notice. I put you in her old room and for the first week
you left off watching from one window or another only when I called you to meals.
You must have been with me a month or so when I fixed a roast chicken supper with mashed potatoes and gravy and gave you the
job of shelling peas. Before then, the only peas you’d ever seen came out of a plastic bag. You couldn’t get over how wonderful
it was that they came packaged in their own green shells. I told you what I thought, that God takes care of the good things
on earth. You asked me what God looked like and that was the start of it, three years of you asking questions and me trying
to figure out the answers. One thing for sure and it gratified me, a child who asks questions is a bright child. The more
questions, the better.
It used to rile me that Ellen went off and left you, never looking back, but you still thought she was someone special. She
was always selfish, your mother. She put her own pleasure ahead of whatever anyone else wanted. I blame your grandfather’s
leaving for that. She loved her daddy like crazy. There was jealousy between us on that account though I’m ashamed to admit
it now. He just turned his back on her and went off to live a life that suited him better, and she blamed me. I can’t speak
to whether it was me who drove him
away; too much time’s gone by. All I know for sure is, he hated the ranch, the never-ending work, and I can’t blame him for
that. We were just kids when we got married, and being young, it’s hard to see the value of land and trees and fruit compared
to parties and dancing and all that glittery business. But after he was gone, I gradually learned there’s comfort in work,
a kind of peace and a gratification there’s not a man on earth can give you.
You were a hard worker, Roxanne; you knew how to listen and follow directions and you always seemed to take some pleasure
from a job well done. You had my orderly ways bred into you, I suspect, and that’s not a bad thing. First grade, spelling
was your favorite subject, probably because there was a clear right and wrong about which letters went where. Plus you liked
to memorize: the states of the union, presidents of the United States, the names of every flower in the garden. You knew them
all.
Summer mornings you’d come downstairs in your shorts and T-shirt and the big shoes I made you wear to protect your feet from
the pointed stuff that’s always lying around a ranch, even a well-tended one like mine. You never wanted me to make you breakfast.
Come to find out, no one had ever fixed pancakes or even fried an egg for you before I did. After eating you’d clear the table
without being asked and then you’d write out your daily list, sounding out the words
you couldn’t spell. You said the list was your plan for the day. Back then your biggest chores were gathering the eggs and
feeding the hens, and I had a kid-size rake so you could keep the big coop tidy. You enjoyed that work, I know you did; and
you liked drawing a line through the items on your list.
You even played in an orderly kind of way. In your bedroom there were a half dozen old dolls from your mother’s time. You
set them up on chairs and played school, teaching those dolls everything you were learning. And then you’d read them stories,
sitting up on your bed with them all nestled around you like the family you wished you had. You were the dearest thing.
For me, the years you lived at the ranch were the happiest of my life. I felt like God had given me a second chance to be
a mother. See, I know I failed Ellen; and maybe I should have told her that. Maybe it would have made a difference between
us. But all my life I’ve been too full of pride for my own good. Never could say I was sorry or ask forgiveness. When your
grandfather came to see me the last time, I should have right out told him I loved him and wanted him to stay. But I could
see in his eyes that he was already far away and I wouldn’t humiliate myself. Didn’t even cry. He wanted to say good-bye to
Ellen, but I told him he had no right and he begged me with tears in his eyes. It
shames me to say it but I took satisfaction from those tears.
With you, there was only one thing that worried me. Right from day one, I saw that you were accustomed to put yourself second,
to give yourself away taking care of whoever needed you most and made the most noise about it. Your mother saw to that, I
suppose. When she came back for you, I knew she had another baby girl back in San Diego and she couldn’t manage her any better
than she could you. I wanted you to stay with me, but she had her plans and as always Ellen came first.
You’re a big girl now, practically a woman, and every day I wonder what kind of young lady you’ve turned out to be and if
you ever think about the good times we had here on the ranch. Remember Pablo Salazar and his family? They still pick for me
every August. And the boy, Raul, who taught you to swim in the irrigation canal, he’s an accountant over in San Jose now.
Your dolls are all lined up on the bed, still waiting for you to read them a bedtime story. I kept your pony until he died.
Just fell asleep one afternoon in the sun and never woke up. I hope to go as peacefully. It won’t be long now. The doctors
have me on plenty of painkillers but seems like I can still feel the cancer growing in me. One day it’ll get so big it’ll
drive the soul right out of my body.
Think of me sometimes, Roxanne. Be good to yourself and grow up strong. Find someone who loves you for all you’re worth, which
is a whole lot. And always remember you were my girl, Roxanne, and in all my life, I never loved anyone more than you.