The Orphan Sister (25 page)

“No, I just got my butt wet.” Odette giggled. “I now have your sweater, this corny cap, and a wet ass! I’m utterly gorgeous.” She started laughing, and I laughed, too, dropping one of the oars into the water.

“Shit!” I yelled, realizing I sounded exactly like my sister.

“I got it!” Odette leaned over and dropped her cap into the water, but retrieved the oar. She put it back in the oarlock and tried in vain to row with one while I used the other.

“You girls okay?” yelled the boat attendant through an old-fashioned cone-megaphone.

“Fine!” Odette howled with laughter. “I can row!” she said to me, standing up.

“Never stand up in a rowboat,” I said, laughing harder.

We managed to switch places, and I slid back on the bench, immediately dunking my own jean-clad bottom into the puddle.

“We wet our pants,” I said, now semihysterical.

“What will Mom say?” howled Odette.

It was freeing to only speak aloud.

By the time we were on the bus home, having given the buffalo enclosure only a perfunctory look because we were freezing our asses off, we were both uncomfortable and happy. I felt young, I remembered how when we went into town in Vermont, Odette would scan the big posting wall just outside the Willey’s store with me, looking at
WOOD FOR SALE
signs and
HORSEBACK RIDING LESSONS
and
SHEEP
(two ewes, one sound ram). We’d discovered the barn dances that way; we’d once ridden our bikes, the three of us, to visit some puppies for sale, even though we knew our mother would never let us have a shepherd-Lab mix that was good with goats.

“Wow!” said the guy whom I saw almost every time I was on the bus. He wore striped pants, suspenders, a fake beard, and an
UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU
! high hat.

“You two must be twins!” he said to Odette. She startled, shivered, and held my hand.

“Yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact, we are.”

It took me another month to break up with Marston. I was thinking about what it would be like to bring him home, as we walked through the park, and he laughed when I told him the names of the flowers. He made up his own names for them, monkey-butt, bad-breath, mushroomy thing. It was wonderful, watching him. His face was youthful, the eyes bright and innocent, and I knew we would never really love each other, because as funny as his jokes were, I couldn’t help thinking he was joking about the flowers because he didn’t actually want to learn their names. I couldn’t help thinking how embarrassing it would be when he met my father, who would instantly notice, as Odette had, that he was not an intellectual match. I remembered when Dad met Cameron, when he’d told us to remember we weren’t the only two people in the world. Cameron had made my father fidgety with his ease and quietude. Unlike Marston, unlike anyone else I knew, Cameron could stand quiet, throbbing long minutes of quiet, which other people would interrupt with chatter for fear of the silence.

“I think this is my stop,” I said to Marston, as the bus pulled up to Twenty-Fourth Street.

I had been thinking about how I’d stopped seeing San Francisco—or maybe, when I arrived, I hadn’t been ready to see it, the foreign, extravagant landscape. The hills shaped my vision, foreshortening the ocean, cutting up the world into blue sky, white buildings, and sea rising up into the horizon like a glassful
of blue. I hadn’t noticed how those foreign flowers—and all their real names—filled space between the succulents and green smears of grass. How everything was sharper in the sun, how the fog, when it came in, was like an eraser smudging the edges. My edges were smudged. I needed the clean lines of the East, hills that took their time, buildings that rose from stacked foundations instead of the sharp cheekbones of sudden hills. It was like a glorious experiment, the city in the hills, an experiment or a beautiful mistake.

“I was going to come over,” said Marston, pouting.

“I think we’re done,” I said, looking at my shoe.

“You’re tired? You’d rather crash at my place?”

“No, I mean, I really like you, but I think we should break up.”

“Really?” Marston looked shocked. His eyes were almost turquoise in the blue and yellow light of California afternoon. I hugged him, but he stood limp.

“I’m sorry,” I said, climbing down from the bus. The last step was always longer from bus to ground than I expected, and as I stepped down, my ankle twisted, so I looked up at the bus from a heap on the curb, as Marston waved good-bye, slow and sad and even, like the queen.

I came home for two weeks after my first San Francisco summer. My father sent me a plane ticket a month in advance in a FedEx envelope delivered to my job at an upscale restaurant near the Castro. I hadn’t put in for vacation, but I also hadn’t decided anything—how long I was staying, whether I even liked my roommate, whether I wanted to live in San Francisco, whether I should
have broken up with Marston, which shoes to wear. One morning I wore one loafer and one ballet flat, just to see if anyone would notice, which they did not, until I came home and Liz answered the door as I turned the key in the lock. She was kind, and welcoming, and I was a wreck.

“Eli called!” she said, smiling. “Why are you wearing two different shoes? Want to come to cooking class with me tonight? It’s chicken in a phyllo crust with pomegranate reduction. Which sounds very complicated to me.”

“What did he say?” I asked, because I couldn’t bear all that welcoming. I missed my sisters.

“He asked if you were going to Princeton this summer. What’s Princeton like—is it all ivy on columns and preppy coeds?”

“Not where my parents live. It’s big houses with big lawns. And horses.”

“We’ve lived together for eleven months and you’ve never told me what Princeton’s like,” said Liz, a little plaintive. I was a jerk.

Sorry
, I thought, but of course she’d never hear me. “I’m sorry,” I started. The phone rang, and I was relieved of making a real apology.

C
learly too many things were happening at once, so I decided to go with the most important: I went to visit Odette and baby Adam. Adam was out of the NICU, and Odette was lying on her side in her hospital bed, watching him as he slept in a little translucent bassinet, which looked like a produce drawer.

I wanted to be furious with Dad, I was, but I was also tangled in the strange net this baby cast, making me soft, making me dream I was producing milk, that I was pregnant, that Eli was my twin. Maybe Dad thought I felt sorry for him now—maybe I did; but it all felt unreal, the hatching of this other wife, her brief life in his words, her death.

I sat on the guest chair and watched Odette watching Adam for a while. Neither of us spoke, and I didn’t really know what she was thinking or feeling, but I could tell it was a big, suck-you-under, wavelike feeling. I could tell without speaking that she was as close to laughter as tears.

I could feel it, a tearing, a stitch-by-stitch division of our seams. It was as though Dad’s secret had sewn us together, three girls, and Mom, a tight fabric of family. And all along we’d been peopled by these others we didn’t know—this other wife, her daughter. All along the seams had been so tight to keep us from
wandering off, to keep us from wandering off into the world that held other people—Other Women.

I thought about this woman, about how her days were filled. Did she tear her salad from the head, the way we did, or did she slice through romaine, making too neat pieces? Of course, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because she was dead, and it didn’t matter because it wasn’t anything we could change.

Babies, I thought, meant separation for my sisters—but it was a chance for me to provide a catalyst. Finally I could be between them, in a way, not just because of my own needs and woes, but as a bit of family glue. Lord knows Charles Lord wasn’t great as family glue. Or maybe his fingers were too sticky to keep but one family.

Finally Odette whispered to me, “Sit here.” She patted her bed, and I sat, though she winced.

“What hurts?” I whispered back.

“Everything.” She laughed. “Especially when I laugh, smile, pee, hold the baby, nurse him, or cry.”

I felt a thin thread of her pain. “But there’s nothing to cry about,” I said, knowing otherwise. All of this was too intense, too out of control for my sister. She liked knowing what was going to happen next. She liked being the one in charge, the doctor, the orchestrator of events and lecturer. I thought of my father’s awkward way of taking over a room with his ponderous, informative speeches and realized Odette was more like him than I’d noticed before. Though just now she was clearly of the body, not the mind.

“Where’s O?” I asked, not to make a point, but really wondering. “Where’s everyone?”

“Olivia’s at work. Evan’s at work. He gets two days when I come home and wants to save them. Mom’s at home, sleeping. She stayed last night—I convinced them to let her.”

This felt bad. I should’ve been here, instead of, well, sleeping with Eli. I rubbed my hands together, thinking about his fingers on my collarbone, his sweet mouth.

“How long have you been sleeping with Eli?” she asked, grinning, but still reclining. “Ow.” Obviously the grin was enough to hurt.

“So sorry I made you hurt yourself,” I said. “And how did you know? I didn’t think out loud. One night.”

“You know I know these things.”

“So, Dad’s home.”

“Honestly,” said Odette, raising her eyebrows at my avoidance tactic, “I care a lot less about what Dad’s doing than I did, say, yesterday.”

“That good, huh?”

“I guess his big mistake, his big secret, is less important to me than this little guy being born. I guess I’m tired of always putting Dad in front of everything, of worrying about how he’ll react to things, worrying about how much he likes Evan, whether he thinks I’m as good a doctor as he is.”

This particular professional jealousy hadn’t occurred to me. It always seemed they were so satisfactory, so fulfilling as daughters, they didn’t have much to worry about. No, of course that wasn’t true. Evan tolerated my father, but I knew from his body language—and from Odette—that Evan thought my father was pompous. Of course, he was. Of course, when she’d told me,
several years ago, I’d felt loyal to Dad and irritated that Evan pretended to be deferential. Now I was proud of Evan for pointing out a truth. I wouldn’t want to be Dad’s son-in-law.

I had been so occupied by feeling sorry for myself I hadn’t bothered to live up to my triplet part of the bargain—worrying for them, feeling sympathy from time to time, not for myself, but for those other objects of my shadow.

“It wasn’t really a competition, was it?”

“Sort of.” She reached over the bassinet and touched the tuft of hair on Adam’s head. It looked like a single pinfeather, the tiniest fluff. I could smell him, and I wanted to pick him up, wanted to hold my nephew, wanted to feel his weight against my arms, but I wouldn’t ask, not yet.

“I can’t lift him,” said Odette, still stroking her son with exquisite gentleness.

“Yes.” I grinned, leaning in to pick him up for her without hearing the question aloud.

I lifted my nephew from the bassinet and breathed in his smell, milk and new skin, like nothing else, animal and impossible not to breathe in, deeper, more. I held him close and his tiny hand gripped my hair. The giant gray eyes opened, and I inspected the little white bumps on his nose, the tiny pink bow of lips. Maybe someday I would have my own. Maybe I should skip vet school and just get pregnant—sacrilege and biology made me think this. Eli and I could have lovely babies—I allowed myself to conjure a tiny house on the outskirts of Princeton, matching cradles made by hand, and Eli preparing a feast of biryani and Moroccan chicken, putting raisins in my mouth—then I stopped. This was not in the plan. I was going to vet school.

“Can you help me get him into position to nurse?” Odette asked. I cradled Adam as she opened a non-hospital-issue nursing gown and shifted, making involuntary sounds of agony.

“You’re not on pain medications?” I asked, because she wasn’t groggy and looked as if she felt every bruise, stitch, and battered internal organ.

“No. Just ibuprofen, or I can’t nurse him.”

“You’re kidding. There must be something.”

“There is, but it all goes into the milk, and I can’t risk doping him up, he’s too small, not quite five pounds is—ow!” she said as the baby latched onto her nipple. I realized my hand was up against her shoulder, the other holding the baby to her.

“Stay like that. Sorry, I can’t do it myself.”

“Don’t be sorry.” This was more important than anything, than Eli, than vet school, than our idiotic father, though I couldn’t stop imagining him with some other woman, with his first wife, his first child.

“He was always holding back,” said Odette. I thought she meant Dad. “Now that he’s a father, he’s a big wobbly mess of feeling.” She grinned. She meant Evan. I wanted that. I wanted other people to be so much more important that I wouldn’t be bothered by my father’s thirty-year betrayal of his family. Of Mom.

“Who, me?” asked Evan, standing by the door with a giant bouquet of balloons and a bag from Gymboree.

“Who, me?” echoed Odette.
See?
she told me.

I took the cue and left the room to check my cell phone for messages from Eli. Nothing from Eli, but there was a message from the shelter, telling me I hadn’t gotten the administrative job, and could I come in for an extra shift or two on the weekend?
Thank you very much
, I thought. I didn’t mind bleaching down the cages—I did mind loving and letting go. Plus, I needed money. Everything was always about money. It would be Starbucks for the summer, or waitressing. There was actually competition for Starbucks jobs. Friendly’s, I thought, feeling unfriendly. I imagined what it would feel like to wear brown polyester, a little apron, to fish pathetic tips out of the bottom of sundae glasses, and I sighed.

“Hi,” said someone, touching my hip. I leaped and brushed the hand off—autonomic response. I knew who it was.