The Sister Season (12 page)

“Have a Merry Christmas,” Carla said.

“You too. Enjoy your world peace. And your cookies.”

“Especially the cookies.”

Maya launched right into wrapping the presents after hanging up. She pulled toy after toy out of the bags at her feet, expertly scissoring off swatches of paper and folding them around the gifts. Each line was perfectly straight, each crease razor-sharp. She only wished she had a hot glue gun rather than tape to hold the edges down. It made for a much cleaner end product. But what she had would have to do. Life wasn’t always clean and perfect, and besides, the gifts back home were practically works of art; people would cluck their tongues sadly over having to rip open such beauty, and . . .

Maya stopped, laid the scissors on the worktable in front of her. And . . . what? And what exactly would all that fucking perfection do for her?

She remembered the day that her perfect little world had come crashing down on her once again. The weather had really begun to turn, and so had Carla’s health. The chemo had been making Carla so sick they’d taken to chatting in her bedroom, Maya sitting in a hard-backed wooden chair by Carla’s bedside, her whole body filling with dread, not just at the idea of losing her friend but at the idea of losing herself. Even though she knew her prognosis was good—they didn’t even expect to have to do chemo—it was hard to be rational about mortality when you had cancer in your body, and sometimes she felt like she was visiting Carla’s deathbed and at the same time looking at her own short future. Sometimes it was more than she could bear. Yet she did it because she so loved her friend, and because she knew that Carla would never leave her side no matter what, and because she needed to do it. She needed to face that horribly ugly thing that visited her whenever she visited Carla.

Some of the visits went longer than usual. She’d had to call Molly and Will’s babysitter and beg her to stay later just as Carla begged Maya to stay by her side until she slept. When Maya called, she would sometimes ask about Bradley, but he was always “at the office” or “at the gym” or somewhere other than at home with his children worrying about his sick wife.

At times Maya wondered what would happen if she did die. Would her children be raised by babysitters and nannies? Would they ever even see their father? Would they remember what it was like to have a mom? The thoughts agitated her so that she often had to take sleeping pills at night just to get away from them.

It was a rough period for Carla, and Maya had been by her side all the way through, but Carla had rallied and suddenly become more herself again, and Maya was glad that she’d spent that extra time with her friend. She’d come to know her almost as a sister.

Then she ran into Mrs. Winsloop at the grocery store. The old lady lived across the street from Maya’s family, and Maya had always been fond of her. She quite often brought leftovers or desserts or breads that she’d baked to Mrs. Winsloop, and before Maya’s diagnosis they’d often had coffee together.

“Well, there you are,” Mrs. Winsloop called to her from across the produce aisle, clutching an avocado in one hand. “I haven’t seen you in so long.”

Maya smiled and rushed to her old friend’s side. “I’ve been so busy,” she said. “I’m so sorry I haven’t been by lately.”

Mrs. Winsloop patted her shoulder with one wrinkled, unsteady hand. “Of course you’re busy. You’re young.” She said it in a positive way, not the way Maya had repeated it to herself on a loop ever since the diagnosis (
How could this be happening to me? I’m young!
). “I thought maybe you’d gotten a job and Bradley’s sister was sitting with the kids. She seems so helpful for Bradley.”

It was as if everything around them had stopped. Bradley’s sister? Bradley didn’t have a sister. Maya found herself answering on autopilot, her mouth moving around the words. “No, I’ve just had a few appointments to take care of.” But the questions pushed forward around those words. “You talked to Bradley’s sister?” she asked, her smile feeling frozen against her teeth.

Mrs. Winsloop nodded as she shook open a plastic bag to put the avocado in. “Oh, yes, I saw them together at the pharmacy, of all places. It’s so wonderful to see how close they are. I’ve seen her a couple of times during the day, over there helping out. So nice.”

Maya was stunned into silence. She honestly didn’t know what to say. She realized, numbly, that she was still smiling and was even nodding, as if Mrs. Winsloop’s words made total sense and she hadn’t, instead, been hearing what she was pretty sure she’d been hearing.

“We’re very lucky,” she felt herself saying, and then felt herself saying other words to Mrs. Winsloop too, but the buzzing in her head made it impossible for her to hear herself. She was pretty sure she was saying something about needing to get home to the kids and exchanging promises to get together for coffee soon, very soon, and my how it was so lovely to run into each other and she hoped she stayed warm in the cold front that was on its way and all the shit people say to one another when they really just want to end a conversation and move on.

Maya stumbled away, pushing her cart in front of her, leaning on it. She felt her heels sliding on the floor behind her, and leaned harder into the cart, willing herself to stay steady. But everything felt so far away . . . the sounds, the food, the other shoppers. She felt like she was wading through someone else’s life, through a nightmare-life.

Bradley didn’t have a sister.

Bradley didn’t have a sister.

Bradley didn’t have a fucking sister.

The bastard was bringing some bitch into her house while she was out fighting for her life. He was probably screwing her in their bed. Mrs. Winsloop had seen them together at the pharmacy, for God’s sake, most likely buying birth control or lubricant or some such disgusting shit. Out in the open like that! The humiliation was maybe worse than the heartache.

Halfway down the pasta aisle, Maya stopped cold. Her knees felt as though they might buckle, and she could feel bile rising in her throat. She was going to be sick or pass out or both. Her brain felt full, like it might explode from betrayal, and without giving it another thought, she kicked out of her new two-hundred-dollar wedge heels, turned, and sprinted for the parking lot, leaving her cart and shoes in the middle of the aisle, as if she’d simply evaporated on the spot.

Cutting the Christmas paper now, she remembered these things. She remembered how she’d told Bradley she was going to visit Carla and how, for a week, she’d sat in her car down the street from her own house and waited. How she’d followed him to his office and away from his office and all the places in between. How she’d seen him with her—his “sister”—and how she’d been shocked to find that it was Molly’s dance teacher, Amberlee, and how Amberlee’s shoulder-length, curly blond hair, tan legs, and bohemian style so reminded her of someone she knew. Bradley didn’t have a sister, but Maya sure as hell did. Claire. And if her husband had admitted to being in love with Claire ten years ago, he certainly hadn’t gotten past it like he’d promised he would. He was still in love with her. He was fucking another version of her while his wife was off getting cancer treatment. Amberlee looked just like Claire.

She noticed that her hands were shaking, her fingertips red and sore-looking. Chapped. She put down the scissors and closed her eyes and, as usual, she could practically see the cancer eating at her. Could feel it running through her veins, ugly and sinister. The lump was out, but the cancer didn’t feel out. As long as she still had radiation treatments on the calendar—three more to go—it still felt as much a part of her as her broken heart. She wanted it gone. She wanted to kill it, as Carla had said. But, God, she felt so powerless. Without the doctors, without the lumpectomy or whatever you wanted to call it, without the radiation and the oncologist, would she have had a prayer of beating it? No, she guessed not. The feeling was so helpless it brought tears to her eyes. She couldn’t kill this cancer. She couldn’t do anything but beg and cry and pray and, of course, pay someone else to try their best to kill it.

But the other cancer that was eating her life . . . that one she had power over. That one she could unceremoniously remove. The real cancer was her marriage to an unfaithful man, and that was the one she had to let go of so she could concentrate on living.

Carla didn’t understand. She didn’t understand how Maya had shaped herself into everything Bradley could possibly want in life. She didn’t understand how hard Maya had worked to forgive him, to believe in him, to be perfect for him. Perfect, goddamn it!
Think
there’s no such thing as a perfect Christmas
? she wanted to scream.
Try a perfect life! I used to think it was possible, but now . . .

Well, now . . . what, exactly? What would she do?

Slowly she picked up her scissors and went back to work, ignoring the shaking in her hands. Carefully, she wrapped the toys, her brow furrowing as she ran her finger along each fold.

What would she do?

She would kill the cancer. The one she could kill.

H
e wasn’t sure if he could do it on Christmas Eve. His mom ignored him half the time and pissed him off the other half, but he still loved her. And it’s not like she would probably think any day would be a good day for her son to die, but Christmas Eve just seemed like a really shitty day. Colossally shitty, in fact.

The clock ticked. That thing was so loud. If he had to live in this place permanently, he would take a hammer to that clock.

Seemed like his aunt took forever putting out the Santa crap for his cousins. He could hear papers and plastic bags rustling for so long he came close to falling asleep twice. Both times he woke with a start, feeling as if he were rolling over the side of his cot and down a thirty-foot cliff. Both times he clutched his sheet between his knees and breathed deeply, trying to tamp down the anger that he felt toward his aunt for taking so long. He wanted to rush out to the den, fling the gifts under the tree, and tell her to go to bed. Who still believed in Santa anyway? He’d known the truth before he was five.

He’d figured it out at his dad’s house. He’d arrived on Christmas morning, fresh and excited, clutching the new stuffed toy Santa had brought him at home. Some dog or elephant or something. He couldn’t quite remember anymore. He’d turned the corner into his dad’s living room and found gifts from Santa there too.

“Why did Santa come here, Dad?” he’d asked, genuinely perplexed.

“Because you were on the nice list. He always leaves gifts for kids on the nice list,” his dad had said, sipping a cup of coffee and rubbing the five o’clock shadow on his chin.

“But he left me gifts at home. How come I get more?”

His dad had shrugged and said Santa was mysterious, but even at five he noticed the pointed look his stepmom had given his dad. Something that looked like irritation.

Later he’d heard his stepmom’s voice in the kitchen, whispering, “I thought she said you could be Santa this year, since she got him that stupid bike last year.”

“She did. She probably forgot. The woman never remembers anything that doesn’t directly benefit her,” his dad had said. The pieces had clicked into place in his little five-year-old mind. They were talking about his mom. They always whispered when they talked about her. But his mom hadn’t gotten him a bike the year before; Santa had. And all at once it was clear: Santa wasn’t real. He was just one more piece of Eli’s life that was wrapped up in the custody agreement. The realization changed him in his own mind. He would never be anything but a Child of Divorce, in capital letters like a label.

His mom had tried to talk to him again tonight. Asked him all these lame questions about what he wanted for Christmas. As usual, she’d put no forethought into anything. Asking someone what they want for Christmas on Christmas Eve was basically the same as getting someone gift cards from a gas station on Christmas Day. It was the same message: You are not important enough to think about until I have to.

“I think you know what I want,” he’d said as glumly as he could, and she’d flinched, folding her lips inward. She stayed silent for a while after that, sliding between the stiff, starchy sheets on her bed and turning out the lamp.

“You don’t mean that,” she finally said. “Tai said—”

He cut her off by making a noise in the back of his throat. Like he gave a rat’s ass what Tai had to say about anything. If his mom was in love with work, Tai was married to it, honeymooning with it, sleeping with it on a regular basis. Getting his rocks off on it.

He liked his stepdad enough, but it was sort of like liking the fern that hung behind the kitchen table. Tai was there, but not really there. Part of him was always lingering in his briefcase, in a stack of notes, in the creases of an impossibly thick book. They never hung out together. They never joked or played games. Basically, when his mom chose his “dad replacement,” she chose another one of her: a paycheck that occasionally yelled at him.

“Well, if I had a Christmas wish,” she’d said after a while, her voice floating through the dark, “it would be for you to feel better, Eli. To be happy.”

“You might as well wish for something that could actually happen,” he said, his tone thick with surliness, and then when she didn’t answer he lay there feeling guilty but unsure what to say. Eventually he heard her breathing grow long and steady and he was stuck listening to his aunt’s infernal rustling in the den.

Come on come on come on,
he thought, almost like a prayer.
Be finished so I can . . .

So he could what? He wasn’t going to kill himself tonight. He’d already decided that. But he knew he’d never get to sleep if he didn’t at least go out there, at least sit in the chair and fantasize about it.

It had snowed all day, just like a Bing-freaking-Crosby song, and it continued to snow through the evening. When he was a kid, he used to pray for white Christmases like this. He loved the way the snow fell all peaceful past his bedroom window back in Kansas City, how it covered the ground, a little bit at a time, how the snow made the streetlamps outside look like they were crowned with halos. But it rarely snowed on Christmas. It was a waste of time to wish for it.

Somehow he found it fitting that it had snowed this Christmas. Sort of like it was a sign that this should be his last Christmas. Somehow he knew it would be.

As the night wore on, the wind picked up, and he could hear the staticky sound of snow being blown up against the window next to his mom’s bed.
Shusssh, shusssh, shusssh.
The sound mingled with his aunt’s movements. But after a while he realized it had been a long time since he’d heard her movements at all. He’d been so hypnotized by the shushing wind.

He sat up on his cot, the sheet pooling around his waist, and listened. All was quiet in the den. All was quiet everywhere. The house was asleep.

Slowly, carefully, he lifted one leg over the side of his cot, and then the other, then bent and retrieved his pocketknife, shivering, and tiptoed out the door and down the hall.

There it was. Big and brown and stately. It had seemed to grow since he first sat in it, had seemed to get bigger to hold his grandfather’s memory. It almost seemed big enough to engulf him, to eat him up. He closed his eyes and imagined it growing foot-long fangs and, with a growl, biting him in half, blood spurting over the armrests, soaking into the seat of the chair, it all happening too fast for him to even scream.

When he opened his eyes he was embarrassed. That was something he might have imagined when he was seven, a chair growing teeth and eating him like a cartoon villain. He’d daydreamed about those kinds of things all the time when he was younger—inanimate objects coming alive and destroying him or buses losing control and smashing him flat and bloodless like he was made of clay or a truck full of knives stopping short in front of his mom’s SUV and all the knives spilling out into his body—back when he was too young to put a label to his depression. Thinking those thoughts then just felt like imagination. Like stories. Now they felt childish. He could define his depression now. He could embrace it. His fantasies should be much more refined now.

He leaned his head back against the chair and thought about his dad.

He liked his dad. He’d often wished he lived with his dad. In fact, he’d asked his dad more than once if he could live there. Dusty always sighed deeply, shook his head, and answered, “Not right now, buddy. Your mom . . .” And he always just kind of trailed off that way. But he didn’t need to finish. He’d said enough. His mom. His mom would have fought it. She would have been hurt. She would have made his dad’s life miserable, and he definitely didn’t want that to happen. His dad was a good guy.

So it was an ironic kick in the crotch that now his dad wanted him. Now, of all times. Now he was willing to make a stink, to face the shrew, to brave a court battle. Now, when it was too late. He would’ve gone to live with his dad, but it all seemed like a bunch of work for no reason now. He was too tired to contemplate moving out just to check out permanently. It seemed stupid.

For the first time, though, he was forced to think about his dad in the context of what he was about to do. The man would be devastated. And something about that felt like a bigger guilt blow than the thought of his mom being devastated. His dad had worked so hard to create a good life. He’d married Sharon, had been dad to his stepchildren, had blended everyone together seamlessly as if they were all real siblings. If he did this, he would be leaving his dad alone with only stepchildren. They would become his only kids. That hurt.

He sat up straighter, shook it off, squeezed the folded knife in his palm. But it wouldn’t hurt for long. After he was dead, all the hurt would stop. None of it would matter anymore. Let his dad have his stepkids for real kids. What difference would it make? It might help him get over the pain a little.

He closed his eyes again, clearing his mind of all thoughts about his parents, and took a deep breath. Even deeper than the night before. He held it, held it, held it, feeling his eyes bulge against their lids, feeling tingling in his toes, aching in his chest. He pressed his lips together, hard, so not a single sip of air could slip out, and pressed his back harder against the back of the chair. His head started to feel buzzy and he knew he would pass out soon, and while he knew that his body would involuntarily take a breath once he did so, he felt excitement well up inside him at the thought of coming so close to death that his body would go on autopilot. For a few moments it would be like he was actually gone. He would be free.

But just as he began to have to fight the convulsing of his lungs begging for air, a door shut somewhere in the hallway where all the bedrooms were. He let out his breath as quietly as he could, inwardly cursing at having been interrupted when things were getting so good, and then held it again, this time straining to hear.

He heard feet padding down the hallway again, and fumbling by the kitchen coat hook. He heard the back door open and swing shut with a very soft click, and the faint sound of footsteps scuffing down the sunporch steps.

He held his breath some more, knowing what would follow, and it did. Another door clicking shut, heavier bumps and thumps coming down the hallway, and the kitchen door opening and shutting once again. Uncle Bradley, no doubt.

He grimaced. He didn’t like the guy. There was something about him that just oozed houndishness, like he couldn’t control himself, panting around that waitress, practically stroking off right there at the table. It was disgusting. Worse. It was wrong.

And when it came down to it, that’s exactly what he was looking to escape right there. Not just his mom, who didn’t care about anything that didn’t come with a dollar sign attached to it . . . not just Mitch Munde and the idiots who called him names and punched him when he walked by . . . not just his stepdad who all but ignored that he existed. But all of it. Everyone and everything that stripped away his faith in humanity, his faith that it would get better. It wouldn’t. Not as long as douche bags like his uncle wobbled around after big tits and tight asses with their dicks in their hands, not even caring who might get hurt in the process.

He knew that Aunt Claire and Uncle Bradley would be gone for a while. He was safe to try again. He pushed himself back against the chair, pulled open the pocketknife and held the blade dramatically against his throat, and then closed his eyes, gulping in a huge breath of air—maybe even bigger than before—and settling into his practice death once again.

But no sooner had he taken the breath than he heard a door open again and more footsteps pad down the hall. He let out the breath, feeling exasperated, and flicked the knife shut. It was like nobody ever slept in this godforsaken place.

But this time the padding had other sounds to it. A wet whimpering. Someone was crying.

The sound moved into the kitchen and seemed to stall for a long time at where he imagined the back door to be. But the back door never opened.

Probably he should leave. Sneak back to his cot. Slip in, go to sleep, try to get some rest before his cousins woke up screaming about Santa. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He was still hoping for that breath. That fix. He wanted to pass out in his grandfather’s death chair. If he couldn’t smash through the ice and slip into a numb death, he could at least do that much, couldn’t he?

So he stayed. And he listened. He listened as the crying got harder, as the whimpering turned into muffled little sobs. He listened as the paper towel holder rattled and then a nose was blown. As a chair scooted out and the sobs took on an echoey sound, as if the crier were facedown at the kitchen table. He listened and he let the sound of someone else’s pain lull him, and he almost fell asleep to it, his head feeling too heavy for his neck, the buzzy feeling back in his mind. He pulled one leg up into the chair with him, and then the other.

He got so comfortable, in fact, he was still curled up in that position when the sobbing came into the room with him.

He sat up, startled, dropping his pocketknife down the front of his pajama bottoms, his heart racing.

Aunt Maya was looking right at him, a balled-up paper towel in midair in front of her face.

“Eli?” she asked, her voice husky and nasal. She peered at him through the darkness. “What are you doing in here?”

He wanted nothing more than for the chair to grow those teeth and swallow him up now. Now, of all times! Before it’s too late! Just eat me in half, blood, guts, popping tendons, and breaking bones! Just do it!

But the chair remained a chair, and his aunt remained as still as furniture in front of him, her face shadowy and unrecognizable in the dark, and he said the only thing that came into his mind.