Pieces of My Sister's Life (10 page)

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “nonstop I’ve been thinking, and going over it and over it and I still don’t know what to do.”

His fingers on the steering wheel were white from gripping so hard. I felt like pushing, pushing, but could only sit and listen and wait.

“It felt right,” he said softly. “I mean more right than I’ve ever felt, like something I’ve been waiting for, but the thing is, I know you too well.” He shook his head briskly, then leaned back to stare at the car roof. “That didn’t come out right. I swear I don’t know what the hell I’m trying to say.”

Without letting myself think what I was doing, I slid to kneel on the seat beside him, put my hands on his cheeks and guided him to my lips. Justin stiffened and inhaled sharply, then like a rubber band stretched tight and suddenly released, he loosened, enfolded me, his hands on my neck, up in my hair. His lips pressed at my teeth, the breath heavy through his nose. He made a choked, pleading sound and then sliced his face away. “I can’t!”

I tried to catch my breath. “Justin, please, you…You can’t why?”

“I can’t tell you why, it’s too complicated. Because you’re sixteen, because…I don’t know.”

“Because I’m like your little sister,” I whispered.

Justin turned to look out the fogged window. I slid back to my seat, huddled against the door. “That night—” He pressed his fist against the window, making a knuckle-shaped smudge in the steam. “That night I kissed you I don’t know what happened. It was like my head started spinning around in circles and circles and I couldn’t see straight, I couldn’t walk straight or think straight and I don’t know what that means.” He shook his head. “Because you should feel like my little sister, and you don’t.”

I began to shake then, maybe from cold, from fear or want or all three. I trembled in waves that shivered up and down my spine, but somehow I managed to take his hand. We sat like that for I don’t know how long—minutes, hours, days, years—and the snow enveloped the car and folded us in, so all we could see was the white and our joined hands.

10

F
OR DAYS
I was disoriented, didn’t know where I was, didn’t care. Even when I was finally able to look around at where I’d landed, still I felt like I had no feet, like I was a pair of bodiless eyes staring out at the world, trying to figure out how they’d gotten this way and what to do with themselves. It was too much.

It’s funny when a dream you’ve had forever finally comes true. You’d think it should feel like coming home, but instead it’s unsettling, kind of the same way it would be if you went for a walk and suddenly realized you’d ended up at the Emerald City or on Sunnybrook Farm. You no longer know if it’s safe to trust your own eyes.

Daytimes we kept our distance, even when we were alone, as if a glance, a secret touch would brand us and give us away. Afternoons when I sat at the front desk at the Caines’ shop, I’d try (mostly unsuccessfully) to calculate hours and parts, try (always unsuccessfully) to ignore the fact that Justin was there in the workroom behind me, like a hot wave of water pushing at my back.

But then after dinner, I’d join him in the potting shed and we’d devour each other, starving, like we’d been apart for weeks rather than just hours. And when it got so I could hardly breathe, when I would have done anything, anything he asked, he’d pull away with soft butterfly kisses, we’d lie side by side, hands interlaced, eyes closed, until I could breathe again.

“I think my parents are starting to suspect,” he said one night, his cheeks still flushed. “They’re trying to coax it out of me. ‘You look
happy
these days,’ my dad keeps saying. He’s pretty much the least subtle person I ever met.”

“Are you happy?” I said.

“You’re fishing, aren’t you.” He grinned and lifted our interlocked hands to kiss my fingers. “Of course I’m happy.”

“Me too. I mean, obviously.”

He laughed. “Obviously, yes.”

I told Eve everything, of course. She was Eve, after all. I’d never kept a secret from her. And sometimes I almost felt like she was there while Justin and I talked, while we kissed. Which sounds a little perverted, but it wasn’t like that, it was comforting. Justin would ask a question and I’d think what Eve might say. He’d touch me, and half my pleasure came from knowing I’d tell her later. I know it sounds so naive, but it was like by sharing these intimacies I could keep myself from choosing one over the other. I could fill this empty part of me without giving up the other parts that made me whole. This was how I lived with the shadow I saw in Eve’s eyes when I came home. By pretending I could balance it out with my own joy.

And in the end, it was really Eve who left me first.

We lay on my bed, our feet against the wall. We were in one of our trippy moods, rocking back and forth together, humming Billie Holiday. We got in these weird moods sometimes, where we’d fall into giggles and not be able to stop, or spin until we collapsed, dizzy and nauseous on the floor. It was a way of decompressing our heads.

Suddenly she stopped and played her foot over the loose rubber of my sneaker tread. “Hey, listen, I got an idea.” She raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been thinking for a while how our hair’s a mess. Let’s change it, something radical.”

I pulled away from the wall and swept the hair over my forehead. “How ’bout bangs?”

Eve watched me for a long while, then nodded. “Bangs it is. Justin’ll love it.” And she flashed me a grin, crooked, like she was holding something large and unpleasant on her tongue.

Our straight, dark hair had always been cut exactly the same, all one length well past our shoulders. Usually we got our hair cut by Gary the barber, who took the ferry in weekly to pay house calls. But Gary’s idea of the word
radical
was more along the lines of using a scrunchy to hold your ponytail, so we decided to splurge and go to Aztec, the salon where cuts were thirty dollars a pop even without blow-drying or shampoo.
Hair Design,
the sign said, as if they could take a paintbrush, scissors and glue and
presto,
design you into someone else.

We started down the hill on High Street, the pitch so steep our walk quickly became a run. As we rounded the hill to the harbor, we almost ran head-on into Ryan Maclean, who was carrying a steaming styrofoam cup to his car. We knew Congressman Maclean only through the stories we’d read in the local papers about the first islander voted into higher office. He was one of those semi-residents who lived in the large houses on the north side of the island and moved to the mainland in the winter when the island was not such a pleasant place.

He sidestepped away from us and gave a wide grin, his teeth so toothpaste-commercial white they seemed fluorescent. “You almost got a coffee bath!”

I smiled, then noticed his eyes were on Eve. Luminous eyes he had, the kind of eyes you saw on actors. Were you born with those eyes, like a genetic marker, before you realized what you’d grow up to be? Or did the eyes come out of a career in public speaking and lies?

Eve gave him a slim smile. “I can just see it in the papers, ‘Congressman Accused of Scalding Two Teenage Girls.’ Might hurt your chances of reelection.”

“Or I could make myself into a hero, rush you off to the medical center and stay by your side even when I’m s’posed to be campaigning. That’s good press.” He rolled his eyes in a weird, giddy circle. “So you’re both voting next week, right? Being good citizens, all that?”

Eve threw back her head and laughed for no apparent reason, maybe just to show him the line of her neck.

“I guess we’d vote for you if we were old enough to vote,” I said.

Eve kicked my ankle. “Sure we’ll vote for you. You’re a shoo-in anyway.”

“From your lips to God’s ears,” he said. “And with lips like yours, God’s bound to listen.”

She laughed again and kissed her fingers, touched them to his arm. “Seeya in the news.”

“Eve!” I whispered loudly as his car disappeared around the corner.

“Oh, he loves it,” she said. “You saw how he looked at me. All men are the same, even married ones. Maybe especially married ones, because they know their days of fun are over. Just wait’ll we get bangs, we’ll be invincible.”

The hairdressers smiled when we entered, sat us on high pink swivel chairs. We sat on opposite sides of the salon, looking in the globe-lit mirrors at the backs of each other’s heads. My stylist was a man named Jean-Paul who spoke with a faint accent that made him seem trustworthy. I squeezed my eyes shut as he sprayed water with his spritzer and held his fingers against my forehead. I tensed at the cold of metal against my skin, heard the snip of scissors and felt the plop of wet hair at my feet. I held my breath and opened my eyes.

It was an improvement, I decided, made my eyes look wider and defined my cheekbones. I thought we should probably go all the way, pay a little extra for them to curl our bangs with a round brush and spray. But when I turned to tell Eve, I saw the sharp scissors angled perilously close to her ears. I cried out to warn her but it was too late. The six-inch-long section of hair that looked just like my hair fell to the floor. Oh God, poor Eve.

I went to her, stood by her side and watched, feeling empty and afraid. Like me she was keeping her eyes closed until the end. Couldn’t she feel the scissors and the falling hair, hear the razor cleaning the fuzz at the nape of her neck? I wanted to shake her, cry for her, but instead I just stood mutely, cringing as she opened her eyes.

She studied herself in the mirror, then smiled. “Oh, Ker, d’you like it?”

I hated it. It looked good, kind of tousled and sexy, and I wanted to pull it long again or cut mine just the same. But it was too late. To copy would be to admit that she was better. “I thought we were just getting bangs,” I said.

“I know, I guess I just decided I needed a change.” She held up a page torn from a magazine, a lanky model with the same short tousled cut.

Something in my chest dropped, shifted my center of balance so I felt floaty, weightless. Eve had brought a picture. She’d known what she was going to do even before she’d left the house. She’d known and she hadn’t told me, which meant that Eve not only wanted a change, she wanted a separation.

I looked at us standing side by side in the large salon mirror. I blurred my eyes until all I could see were two like patches of peach haze. Eve touched the ends of her hair and her voice was hazy, vaporous with awe. “We hardly even look like twins anymore,” she said.

The next day I went to LoraLee, hardly sure what I was looking for. She sat by the window rocking, whittling a gnarled stick with her pocketknife. Sunlight flecked shadows through tree branches onto her face, making her seem wrinkled and wise.

I sat on the floor across from her. “I feel funny,” I said.

LoraLee raised her eyebrows, still focused on her whittling, wood curls floating to her feet.

I shook my head. “It’s like when we were little, Daddy would get a card for our birthday, just one, that said
Happy Birthday Twins.
And it would piss Eve off every time. It’s like we’re one person, she’d say, like he thinks we don’t deserve our own.” I pulled my knees up to my chest, rested my head on them. “But me, I’d love it how we shared one birthday. I loved how when kids sang at our party, half of them would sing ‘Happy Birthday Eve and Kerry’ and the other half sang ‘Happy Birthday Kerry and Eve,’ so it all blurred together into one name.” I looked out the window at the bare branches. “How come I’m always the one pulling at her?”

“You don’t need to pull so hard. You stop pullin’ and she miss that, see she gotta try harder.”

“Sometimes I think she wishes I was ugly.”

LoraLee smiled. “If you was ugly, then she’d be ugly too. You’s identical.”

“That’s not what I mean. Not that she wants me to be ugly, but that she wants me to be less than her somehow. Because there’s things happening for me lately, really good things, and I think she maybe wishes they were happening to her instead. And then yesterday, yesterday she got her hair cut short.” I swallowed sharply. “The older we get, the less she’s like me.”

LoraLee raised her eyebrows. “I ever tell you the story ’bout my grandaddy’s babies?”

I shook my head and she smiled. “See, my grandaddy, his name were Mr. Mason Mays, he have four girl and he name them after the season, first Summer, then Autumn—that’s my momma—then Winter and then Spring. And then he have another girl and he don’t know what to name her so he go back and start with Summer again. Now Summer Number One, she a beautiful chile. She haves skin like cocoa and a high proud nose. But Summer Number Two, she nothin’ to look at, ashy and thick and born with a split lip they never quite puts back together right. So one day my grandaddy, he sittin’ with them at the dinner table and he say, ‘So you sees what happen when you gives one name to two chile unner one roof?’ He say, ‘Summer One gone and took all the beauty and nothin’ lef ’ for Summer Two ’cept the parts nobody wants, and them parts don’t fits together right besides.’”

LoraLee looked up from her carving, dark eyes flashing with humor. “And that night when Summer One asleep, Summer Two sneak up behind her, grab a handful of braids and cut them with a pair of prunin’ shear. Next mornin’ Summer One see the hole in her hair, see the braids peekin’ out from unner Summer Two pillow. So that night while Summer Two asleep, Summer One sneak up and scissor all the hair from her head. Now not only she ugly, she ugly and bald. Look like she put a finger in a plug socket.”

I waited for more, but LoraLee just raised her eyebrows and smiled.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Don’t mean nothin’ really. It’s jus’ a funny story you brung to my mind.”

I frowned, imagining poor Summer Two, thick face and lip sewn together wrong. I tucked my fists under my arms and looked outside at the garden, now withered and grubby gray with slush. “LoraLee,” I said, “how do you know if something’s gonna last?”

She nodded. “Mebbe the story got a message after all. My two Aunt Summers, they’s buried side by side.”

“What?”

“Troubles only last long as you let ’em.”

“That’s not what I mean.” I lifted the figurine she’d been whittling, a man’s head like a grotesque growth out the top of a branch. “What if you finally got this one thing you wanted all your life, something you knew all that time you were meant to have? But you also knew there was someone else who thought that thing was meant for her instead. You can’t both be right.”

“But you can, chile, yes, you can. Mebbe this thing meant for you both, or mebbe meant for you now and meant for Eve when her time come.”

“It’s not! It’s not a sharing kind of thing.”

“But it ain’t an ownin’ kind of thing neither. Ownin’ is for God, for fate, not for peoples to decide. Bes’ thing you can do is not hold on too tight.”

“It’s Justin,” I said. “Me and Justin.”

LoraLee stared at me. “Oh, chile,” she said.

I saw then how tired she looked, how suddenly old. Everything on her seemed strangely vertical, from the folds in her neck to the pouchiness under her eyes. I shook my head. “You probably think I’m betraying Eve, or love causes pain, something. The way you live, alone like this, there’s nobody can hurt you and nobody you can hurt. It’s so much easier.”