The Language of Sisters (22 page)

“We encourage music therapy with movement,” Ms. Navarro said as we came to a halt next to the front door. “Art therapy, too. There is a reading hour every day as well.” She stepped over to the resident on the couch and adjusted the pillows around her lolling head to be of better support, then kissed the top of the girl’s head.

“Where’s the other resident right now?” Star asked, her hand resting on Jenny’s shoulder.

“Outside for physical therapy,” Ms. Navarro replied. “We try to get the girls out for at least a couple of hours a day if it’s not raining.”

We followed her down a narrow hallway out the back door, then down another ramp to a covered patio. A small grass area edged the cement, and a high wooden fence lined the entire yard. There were several thickly padded mats on the ground, one of
which had a resident on it. A nurse worked the range of motion for the girl’s legs. Her touch seemed efficient but gentle.

Jenny looked at the girl with awe. She had clawed hands similar to Jenny’s and a head that drooped forward to her chest while the rest of her body looked like a tightly bound pile of rubber bands. “What do you think, Jen?” I asked nervously.

“Ahhh,” she groaned, perhaps with a touch of apprehension.

“It’s not quite what I expected,” I said.

“I’d imagine not,” Ms. Navarro concurred. “I know the flaws of most other homes; we aspire to a much higher standard of care. Residents are always supervised here, never left alone except when they are sleeping.”

“What about male nurses? Or visitors?” Nova asked the question she knew I wanted to.

“We can’t exclude male nurses from applying to work here, but so far, none have. My staff is very happy, and I don’t expect to replace anyone anytime soon. As for visitors, no man is allowed to be alone with any resident except the one he is related to.” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Would you like to join us for lunch?”

We agreed to stay, though I spent less time eating and more reading Jenny’s reaction to her surroundings. She seemed to relax around the table, emitting short, happy yelps along with one of the other girls. It was almost as though they were holding a conversation. By the time we left, I was emotionally exhausted but fairly settled on placing her there. I told Ms. Navarro to let me know when a room became available, and she assured me, sadly, that it looked like it might be soon.

We were a quiet bunch as Nova drove along until Star spoke up. “It wasn’t exactly a beautiful place, but I don’t think you could do much better. The staff seems very caring.”

“I know,” I sighed. “It’s just so hard, imagining leaving her again.”

“You’re not leaving her,” Nova observed. “You’re moving her to a place where she’ll get the kind of care she needs and you can continue with your life. You can go see her whenever you want.”

“I’m going to have to,” I said, something rising up in me, filling me with resolve. “I’m going to have to take the baby to visit her.”

Nova shot me a stunned look before wrenching her attention back to the road. “Excuse me?” she exclaimed, hands gripping the steering wheel.

“I’m going to adopt her baby.” My eyes filled with tears, my heart bursting with the knowledge of doing the right thing. “I’m going to be a mother.” I looked back at my sister as I said this, but she was already asleep, tired from the unusual exertion of the day’s outing.

“Nicole!” Star exclaimed. “That’s wonderful! How long have you been thinking about this?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged shakily. “I guess some part of me knew I’d do it since the day I got here.” I looked at Nova, who was darting probing looks at me while negotiating traffic. She was smiling deliriously even as a hint of apprehension danced in her eyes. “I promise,” I went on, “I’ve thought about it long and hard and I’m not doing this out of guilt. I want to be this baby’s mother. I think I just needed to know that Jenny would be okay before I could decide for sure, you know? I knew I couldn’t take care of them
both.
” I laughed a little before continuing, a slightly hysterical edge to the sound. “It’s so strange, but I feel like I already know this kid. Like she chose Jenny to carry her so I could be the one to raise her. She’s been talking to me.” I told them about my dream, then swallowed to push down the tight knot in my throat. “Is that the craziest thing you’ve ever heard?”

Nova changed lanes and pulled over on the shoulder of the highway. “No, it’s the most
beautiful
thing I’ve ever heard! Oh, sweetie! I’m so happy you decided to do it. I knew you would.” After shifting the van into park, she unbuckled her seat belt and threw her arms around me. “You are
such
an amazing woman.” She turned teary eyes to Jenny in the backseat. “Do you know what an amazing sister you have, Jen?”

Still asleep, Jenny appeared unimpressed.

I laughed. “Well, we’ll see how amazing I am.”

“What do you mean?” Nova asked, wiping at her eyes.

“I still have to tell Shane.” I sighed, leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the window, and pictured giving him the news. And try as I might, the only vision that filled my head was of his back as he walked away, leaving me for good.

•  •  •

I was sixteen the first time my father left us. I came home from school one Friday afternoon to find my mother bent over the kitchen table, her long dark hair hanging around her face like a shroud. Her shoulders shook silently. The cheerful sounds of
Sesame Street
sang loudly from the living room, where Jenny usually sat this time of day.

“Mom?” I said hesitantly. I set my backpack on the floor and moved over to place my hand on her back. “Mom?”

She looked up to me, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen with tears. The corners of her lips dug deep into the flesh of her chin as she tried to speak. “He … he’s … ”

My insides rattled against each other. “He’s what, Mom?”

She tried again. “He’s leaving.”

“Who’s leaving?” She shook her head and gestured to the hall connecting their bedroom to the kitchen. I stepped slowly, deliberately, to their doorway, saw the closet open and half
empty; a stray red-striped tie lingered alone on a hanger. It was the tie I had given him for Father’s Day when I was eight and didn’t know yet that most redheads couldn’t wear red. My father stood next to the bed, stuffing a suitcase with fistfuls of underwear. He stopped when he saw me, his expression wild and scared.

“What are you doing, Dad?”

“Packing.” He directed his attention back to his task, scanning the dresser for anything he might have missed.

Oddly, panic, instead of elation, danced in my belly. “Do you have a work trip?” He sometimes traveled to other cities to work on housing developments.

“No.” He looked at me again, his pale skin flushing bright pink.

“What, then?”

“Ask your mother.”

“But—”

“I
told
you to ask your mother.”

I went back to the kitchen, my heart rolling over in my chest. I stood by the sink, tapping my foot on the worn linoleum. “What happened, Mom?”

She shook her head again, face in her hands. It felt as though a huge purple elephant was sitting in the middle of our house, crushing the rafters, knocking over walls, tearing down the very foundation of my family’s home, and still she was silent. I wanted to yank the words from her throat, to be given some sort of explanation. I thought I deserved at least that.

When Dad came into the kitchen a moment later, he carried two suitcases and a duffel bag was slung over his shoulder. He set the luggage down next to my mother, stood tall beside her, staring at a spot above the refrigerator, not at his wife. “You’re sure, Joyce? This is what you want?”

She shot him a look brimming with anger and pleading. “It certainly is not what I want. It’s what you want. It’s always been what you want. I want you to stay. I want us to be a normal family.”

“That’s not possible. There’s nothing more we can do for her.”

My mother grabbed his hands. “We can be her parents. We can love her. You love her, Mark. I know you do.”

My father’s intensely blue eyes—the eyes that he had passed on to the daughter he could not stand to call his own—were blank. His silence said more than any words ever could. It wrapped up his resolve and handed it to my mother like a broken gift. He gently extricated his fingers from her grasp and picked up his luggage. He didn’t even look at me as he walked out the back door.

My mind bubbled with questions. What would we do? Where would we get money? Would my mom get a job? Would I have to quit school and stay home with Jenny? I looked to my mother for answers.

“What are we going to do, Mom?” I felt a strange mixture of excitement and terror at my father’s departure: the child in me curled into a dark corner, whimpering for her daddy, the adult who had only begun to blossom in my being shouting a thankful hallelujah. I was not sure to whom I should listen.

My mother stared at me, wiped at her wet cheeks with the back of her hand. “We’re going to do what we always do. We’re going to make dinner.” She stood, tucked her hair defiantly behind her ears. “Could you please go get your sister?”

And so I did. We made dinner, ate it, cleaned up, and went to bed. Life went on as usual for weeks. But for however much I despised my father, our house felt empty without him in it. I hated the part of me that missed him, the part that loved him despite
everything I knew him to be. Or maybe it was everything I knew him
not
to be. I hated the searching look Jenny gave to his favorite chair, the murmur of
Daddy?
that flowed through my blood every day he was gone. How could she possibly miss him? I knew my mother did. She was unusually quiet, caring for Jenny and the house in her typical way, but seemingly disjointed, uneven, uncomfortable in her skin.

I did not know if my parents spoke during this time. I only knew that a month later, I came home one morning from spending the night at Nova’s house to find him back in his chair, reading the paper as though he had never left. He crunched the paper down into his lap, smiled at me, and I felt the urge to growl like an angry dog, protecting her turf.

No matter how much I pressed her, my mother would not tell me why he had come back or, for that matter, why, knowing what he was doing to Jenny, she had let him. And I hated her for it. The wall around my heart grew thicker.

For a while, everything remained calm in the family. My father worked, came home early, joked, and smiled with us, even got down on his knees to dance cheek to cheek with Jenny each night before she went to bed. The joy on her face as our father held her was a radiant beam, warming the air around her.

“‘You made me love you,’” my father sang to her, his hands on her shoulders. “ ‘I didn’t want to do it … I didn’t want to do it!’”

Jenny grinned ferociously, and I sat on the couch, arms crossed, watching their exchange with equal measures of disgust and envy. He was trying; I had to give him credit for that. But later that night, when Jenny’s screams pulled me from my room and I watched his frustration return in a lightning flash of anger and fist, I was glad that credit was all I had given him. I was glad I had not found it in my heart to forgive him, as my
mother and sister seemed to have done. Whatever part of me had rejoiced at my father’s return was smothered by the enormous weight of once again seeing his back move into her room, the sound of her bed drowning out the silent screams that filled my blood like an aching disease—a disease that, like my sister’s, had no cure.

•  •  •

The house was dark when Jenny and I returned from our trip to La Conner; I figured Mom must have gone out for a movie, thinking we wouldn’t be home until late. Although we had worked out a sort of schedule with Jenny—taking turns going to her in the night and switching off caring for her on the weekend days—Mom still didn’t seem entirely comfortable being around us on a regular basis, spending time together as a family. I supposed that after eight years of living a fairly private, solitary life, having both your daughters back in your house wouldn’t be the easiest thing to get used to, even without all the complications of our particular situation. So even though part of me was bothered by her absence, I tried to be content that my face no longer tightened with anger each time she entered a room. We had come further than I ever imagined we would.

Once I got Jenny settled in the living room on the couch, I sat down next to her. After her nap in the car on the way home, she was alert but quiet. The room was lit in a dim yellow mist from the fireplace; the radio played softly in the background. I put my arm around Jenny’s shoulders, my cheek resting on her soft hair, and took a deep breath. I had thought that telling Shane about my decision to adopt the baby would be my biggest challenge, but as we drove home, it dawned on me that the true challenge lay in
finding out if my choice was okay with Jenny. She was, after all, the baby’s mother.

Still unsure of exactly what she understood about what had happened to her, I didn’t want to adopt the baby only to have it remind her of the rape. I lifted my head and pulled my arm out from behind her, shifting to the floor and kneeling before her so I could see her eyes. “Jen,” I began haltingly, tucking my springy curls behind my ears. I was strangely nervous about what her reaction might be. “I have a question to ask you.”

Her angel eyes stayed open, not blinking, her hands patted together softly just above her swelling belly. She was quiet, waiting for me to go on.

“You know the baby inside you? The one you told Lucy was jumpy?” I smiled fondly, remembering this moment at the barbecue. “Well, when she comes out of you, she’s going to need someone to take care of her. I know you’d do it if you could…. ”

“Ehhhh,” Jenny groaned in agreement, and her hands stopped their gentle dance and rested on her stomach. The baby kicked, lifting Jenny’s arm just the slightest bit, and my sister’s mouth blossomed into a wondrous smile.

Baby.

My heart jumped at the word. “That’s right—that
was
the baby.” I inhaled before continuing, searching her eyes for any hint of what she was feeling. “I want to be the person who takes care of your baby, but only if it’s okay with you.” I searched her eyes. “Is it okay for me to adopt her, Jen? I need you to tell me.”