Phoenix Rising

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Phoenix Rising

or, How to Survive Your Life

Cynthia D. Grant

For Jane, John W., Jody, John
,

Quinn
,

Brian
,

Paulette Kizzar
,

Katie
,

Hayyet
,

and, as always
,

for my sister, Princess Al

The earth is your mother,

She holds you.

The sky is your father,

He protects you.

Rainbow is your sister,

she loves you.

The winds are your brothers,

they sing to you.

Sleep,

sleep,

We are together always

We are together always

There never was a time

when this

was not so.

Navajo lullaby

1

We are in the country, Helen and I, in a beautiful, boundless field. The birds are making a joyous racket and it's autumn. The sky is so blue!

We're laughing. Helen's telling a funny story. I can't hear the words but I know her thoughts. She's more like my twin than my big sister.

But something's wrong. The world is tilting. It's hard to stand up. I say, “Helen, what's happening?” and she smiles and says, “Don't worry; it's only an earthquake.”

Earthquake! The ground beneath me buckles, roaring and ripping apart. I'm falling, falling.… Then everything changes; the field is smoothly seamed again, the sun is warm, the birds are singing—but Helen has disappeared. I run in wild circles, crying, “Helen, where are you?” realizing, my heart cracking open, that the earth has swallowed her. Helen is gone.

Dr. Shubert says, “You understand what this dream means, don't you, Jessie. Your sister has gone into the ground.”

Helen's ashes were scattered three months ago, in the grove at Foothill Park where we loved to go, just beyond that beautiful field.

Mom and Dad wanted Lucas and me to go with them, but as usual, Lucas disappeared. And I … just couldn't. I stayed at home in our—my—room.

Helen doesn't exist anymore, except in the past and in my mind. No matter how long I wait, I'll never see her again. It's a hard idea to get used to.

Oh, Helen. I can't get used to it.

People say I'm doing well, handling the situation beautifully; as if they'd thought, when she died five months ago, that I was going to die, too.

I thought I would. I wanted to.

But sadness doesn't kill you.

When people ask how you are, they want you to say fine. They think you're doing swell if you tell jokes. The worse things get, the funnier I am. It's like being a comedian on the
Titanic. Folks, do you ever get that sinking feeling? But seriously, doesn't the band sound terrific
?

You and Helen were so close, people say.

Hearing that past tense kills me.

Dr. Shubert says I have to get on with my life. Jessie, you must pick up the pieces.… Sometimes things break so badly, they shatter, and the pieces are too small to gather up again.

One week after Helen died, I woke up in the night. The room was luminous with moonlight spilling onto Helen's bed, the blankets flat, the pillow empty. The curtains were moving. Helen's dead, they whispered. She's dead and she's never coming back.

I felt my heart break, and the pain almost killed me. Then, for a long time, I didn't feel anything.

My best friend by default, Bambi Sue Bordtz, said I wasn't crying enough.

“Geez, Jess, you're acting so weird,” she said. “When my cousin died, I cried my eyes out and I didn't even like him. If I had a sister and she died, I couldn't stand it.”

Did anybody ask me if I could stand it? Did anyone give me a choice?

A lot of our friends have quit talking about Helen. They think they're being kind. They act as if she'd never existed, as if I'd imagined my eighteen-year-old sister. They erase her like that, again and again: Helen who?

It's worse with new people. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” they ask. When I have to tell them my sister's dead, they look scared, as if they're afraid I might cry; then apologize, as though it were their fault. She dies in their eyes and that's how they'll always see her.

Helen was the most alive person I knew.

My brother hates to talk about Helen. When I mention her, he changes the subject, or plays his guitar extra loud, or splits. Dad's almost as bad. When Mom talks about Helen, he gets all sad—as if Helen was a tragedy. As if her whole life was her death. He plays a lot of golf lately, when it's not raining, or even when it is. He quit asking Lucas to go with him a long time ago. Lucas can't see the game at all. Follow the bouncing ball, he says. Then Dad makes a crack about Lucas's music, and the next thing you know, they're yelling and screaming—

I go into my room and shut the door. Since Helen died, it seems like people are always leaving and doors are closing.

Sometimes I get so sick of the arguments I wish Lucas would move out, but he can't afford his own place. The record store where he works pays minimum wage and his music gigs aren't steady. Then I worry: When Lucas moves out, will we see him anymore? Will he disappear like Helen?

It's stupid to worry so much. Nothing I can do about it, anyway.

Bloomfield called me today; this jerk that Helen went out with for a while. Then he found out she had cancer (thanks to Bambi Sue Bigmouth) and he told Helen he couldn't see her anymore; she was getting “too intense”; he “needed space.”

“As if I cared!” Helen said. But I know she did, though she pretended it didn't matter. He dumped her like a ton of bricks, then had the gall to call me up. I said I wouldn't go out with him if he was the last jerk on the face of the earth, and was going to say a lot more but he hung up on me.

When I told Bambi about it, she said, “No wonder you don't have any boyfriends, Jess! Beggars can't be choosers.” If Bambi's not here, driving me crazy in person, she's phoning to announce that nothing's new. At least she doesn't call me from the john anymore. Don't ever do that again, I said. You have to be direct with Bambi. A right cross to the jaw would only be a subtle hint.

She wants me to go shopping with her tomorrow. If shopping were an Olympic event, Bambi would be a gold medalist. In third grade, when we got our library cards, she thought we were charging the books. She has credit cards at Bullocks, Macy's, the Emporium, Saks, and Neiman Marcus. Her dad just gave her a convertible for her birthday. I couldn't believe it; he doesn't even like her. “They wanted me, so they have to give me what I want,” Bambi says. “I didn't ask to be born.”

It wasn't so bad when Helen was here. We spread Bambi around. We shared her. Now I'm supposed to cheer her up all the time and I can't even save myself. I'm sinking. But I can't tell the folks; they're treading water themselves, and Lucas is never here. Even if he were, I couldn't tell him what I'm thinking.

If only I could talk to Helen. That's how I felt when she died; I could survive it if I could talk to Helen.

That was the catch.

I'm supposed to be able to talk to Dr. Shubert, but she was my age in 1938. Dad wanted Lucas to see her, too, but he refused. Nobody can make Lucas do anything. When he was six he got lost; the cops turned out and half the city was looking for him. When they found him in a tree, five miles from home, he wasn't scared, he wasn't relieved. He said, “I knew where I was all the time.”

Dr. Shubert's trying to help me get rid of the dreams. It's gotten so bad I can't stand to fall asleep. The lids go down but my eyes stay open, and on the thin, pink screens I see Helen.

Last night the two of us were in the car, Helen driving. The radio was loud, the way she liked it, playing something hard and fast. We were going to the ocean. We were almost there. I smelled seaweed baking in the sun.

Then no one was driving. Helen was gone. I turned around and she was standing by the side of the road. The brakes wouldn't work; I couldn't stop the car. It carried me far away. In the distance, Helen got tinier and tinier.

I didn't mean to leave her behind.

I don't want to dream. I want to fall asleep and wake up ten years from now. I'll be twenty-seven and Lucas will be thirty—and Helen will still be eighteen.

Helen. All those years; all that learning, changing, growing. She had to have braces on her teeth. Why? What was the point? This was always going to happen; it was lying ahead and we didn't even know it. We went right on living, laughing, hoping. We were so stupid.

Someone's touching my knee. Someone's talking to me. “Jessie,” Dr. Shubert says, “I can't help if you won't tell me what you're thinking.”

“There really isn't much to say,” I answer.

No one can help me. No one is my sister.

2

Bambi says, “At least it wasn't a big shock. You knew she was going to die.”

Everybody knows they're going to die, but nobody believes it. Death is always a big shock. And Bambi is always a birdbrain.

They found the first tumor when Helen was fourteen. Sometimes she was better, sometimes worse. The cancer just became part of her life. We never admitted that it might kill her. Once you let an idea like that into your mind, it's as if you're agreeing, as if you're saying yes, and we had to keep saying no, no, no—

Right after she died I was scared I'd turn on the TV one night and see scientists hugging each other and screaming: “Eureka! We've found the cure!”

It would be too late—too late for Helen. What difference would it make if all those strangers got saved?