Pieces of My Sister's Life (12 page)

Eve spoke into the pillow. “With Brad Carrera.”

I gaped at her. “Brad Carrera? Officer Carrera? He’s like thirty years old!” Officer Carrera had been one of Daddy’s drinking buddies: deep blue eyes, jet-black hair and a perpetual glossy tan, like he’d been dipped in a vat of wood stain and then shellacked.

“Thirty-two,” Eve said. “God, can he ever kiss, Kerry. Like this wind rushing through you.”

“He’s twice your age!”

She turned to face me. “Stop it, Kerry.” Her voice was slurred,
Shtop it.
“You’re just jealous ’cause I got the hottest man on the island. Hell, the hottest man in the world!” She slapped my arm loosely, then let her hand drop to the bed. “Oh, Ker, it’s just so sweet how he looks at me, his eyes all wild like he wants to eat me alive.”

I felt sick to my stomach. “Eve…”

She sat up and flung her arms around me, then fell heavily against my chest. “Whoa.”

“God, Eve, what’s going on with you? What were you drinking?”

Eve shook her head, kept shaking it, slowly lowering herself back onto the bed. “You don’t get it, Ker. We were there, we were there at the bar and how it was, all the people were happy and together. They all want you there ’cause they know you’re just the freshest thing they ever saw. Best thing they ever seen by far.”

She closed her eyes and let out a long sigh, content or rueful, I couldn’t tell which. I curled behind her, buried my head in her neck. Her smell of beer and smoke was remotely like Daddy’s smell, and so I was obscurely comforted. Until I wrapped my arm around her and felt her ribs, even through her top so prominent that I could’ve slotted my fingers between them. So like Daddy, this vulnerability in the guise of something strong. And I knew that if she started to love Brad Carrera all it would take was a wrong word from him, a pinch in a sensitive spot, for this shell she’d built around herself to shatter.

THREE

Pulling and Planting

March

2007

12

I
STOOD
by the bedroom mirror waiting for Eve and Justin to come back from their walk, trying to work out dance moves that could be performed by women with bad knees. I did a sort of modified
échappé,
rising onto the balls of my feet instead of my toes. It seemed to me it might be good for their arches and reduce the likelihood of hip fractures. I stretched into an arabesque, then bent my raised knee. But the whole thing felt stupid with no music, so I stopped and dropped to the bed, then picked up a magazine. It was an old issue of
Highlights
. I opened to the middle and tried to see how many hidden objects I could find that started with the letter
T
.

I was staying in what had once been the left side of Daddy’s bedroom, now crammed with a bed and Justin’s desk, leaving barely space enough to walk. The room had been divided in two, this half Justin’s office and the other Gillian’s room. The change was disorienting, and sleeping here seriously bothered me. Because even when things had gotten really bad between me and Eve, still we’d shared the same bedroom because we always had, and because to move Daddy’s things would’ve felt like a betrayal.

So I hated hanging out here, but it seemed like there was no place besides my bed to sit, no communal area now that the living room held the cold metal of Eve’s bed and wheelchair. So I spent my days either in the kitchen or on this bed, waiting for Eve to come home or to wake, to call out, to talk to me, authenticate that I wasn’t just a figment of my own imagination.

The front door opened and I walked to the head of the stairs. Gillian emerged from her room and brushed past me, down the stairs, without acknowledging my presence. This had been the routine over the past two weeks, Gillian pretending I didn’t exist. She’d come home from school and I’d greet her. If I was lucky, she might grunt back, but most often she didn’t even bother. I was ostensibly supposed to be babysitting while Eve and Justin were out, but really I was mostly just sitting.

“Shit,” Eve said. She was leaning on Justin, limping perceptibly. “I don’t know why you make me do this anyway. When they say exercise adds ten years to your life, they’re not really talking about people with terminal cancer.”

Gillian jumped down the last two steps. “Hi, I’m home.”

“So I see,” Justin said, guiding Eve towards the den. “How was school?”

“Not so bad. I got this thing for you, Ma.” She held out a sheet of blue paper.

“Not now, sweetie, please? I’m in total pain.”

Gillian pulled her arm back. “You okay?”

“She just twisted her ankle,” Justin said. “It’ll probably be better by tomorrow.”

“You want some ice? I’ll get you some ice, okay?” Gillian ran to the kitchen.

I started downstairs. “Anything I can do?”

“At least I deserve extra morphine now, don’t you think? Let me sleep through the agony you inflicted on me?”

Justin studied her face, then nodded slowly. “You’re faking, aren’t you. This is a ploy.”

“If that makes you feel better about yourself.” Eve lay on the bed and pulled off her shoes, then buried her head in the pillows.

Justin watched her a minute, then nodded at me. “She’s faking. I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”

Gillian strode past me, an ice pack in one hand, the blue paper in the other. “Which ankle, Mom?”

Eve didn’t answer, either asleep or pretending. It amazed me how quickly she could now transition between consciousness and sleep. Although I was starting to suspect it was all pretend, a way to get away from the world when she didn’t want to deal.

Gillian studied Eve’s feet, then positioned her ice pack to touch both. “I used two Ziplocs so it wouldn’t leak,” she said. She stood there with her shoulders hunched, her face expressionless. She clutched the blue paper in her hand, clutched it tighter, then stuffed it into her pocket. “Okay, so I’m going upstairs.” She patted the blanket over Eve’s legs, stood a minute longer and then turned away.

“Your mom’s just tired is all,” I said as she walked past me. Gillian shrugged and started to the kitchen. I watched as she pulled the paper from her pocket, tossed it into the trash and then walked upstairs.

Eve sat up, pulled the ice pack from between her ankles and held it on her palm. Finally she set it on the night table and settled back on the bed.

I felt a sudden spike of anger. “Do you have any idea how hurt she looked just now?”

Eve turned to me, her eyes filled with such anguish I could feel it in my bones. “Fuck you, Kerry. You just try being me. See if you do any better.”

You have everything,
I wanted to say.
You idiot. You just try being me.
What I really said was, “Let me know if you need anything.” And then I turned away. Very gracious of me, I thought.

In the kitchen I retrieved the slip of paper Gillian had stuffed into the trash, smoothed it on the table.

Hello parents!

We’re writing to let you know about this year’s 1st through 6th grade production! This year we’ve decided on
Charlotte’s Web,
the charming story of a spider who teaches a pig about life. We’ll need your help in the following areas:

• Rehearse your child’s lines if he or she has a spoken part. Make this a family activity!

• The Book Nook is offering a special 25% discount on
Charlotte’s Web
! We urge you to purchase the book for your child to read, or for you to read aloud.

• We will need you to sew your child’s costume.

Gillian
has been given the part of
Wilbur the Pig
. Children and teachers will be working together on set and props, but we are also looking for parents with carpentry skills. Call Virginia Brent if you’d like to volunteer.

Thanks for your help, and we look forward to seeing you all at the performance on June 12!

Theodore Allen
Vice Principal, BIS

I folded the memo carefully and walked up to Gillian’s room. I knocked on her door, but she didn’t answer. “Gillian?” I knocked again, then opened the door a crack. “Gillian?”

She was lying on her bed, wearing headphones and staring at the ceiling. I sat beside her and set the memo on her lap. She looked back at me, unblinking.

“This is great,” I said. “I mean, Wilbur’s the lead role in the whole play.”

She pulled off the headphones with a look of pure annoyance. “Charlotte’s the lead role. Besides, the only reason I got the part is because there’s only seven sixth-graders and I’m the best reader.”

“Well whatever the reason, it’s pretty cool.”

“Not really. Anyway, I already decided I’m not doing it.”

“What?”

She shrugged. “It’s just a stupid school play. Every year the little kids mess up their lines or they forget they’re on stage and stand there picking their nose. Last year we did Charlie Brown? And Tim Jennings who was Schroeder threw up right on Allie Connor’s foot.”

I looked down at her bitten fingernails, then glanced at the memo. “I could do your costume if you want. I haven’t used a sewing machine for years, but I bet I could figure it out.”

She lifted the headphones, started to slip them back over her ears but then stopped. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to pretend you and me and Dad are a family.”

I blinked, shook my head. “What do you mean?”

“I know you used to be in love with him, Mom told me. But you can’t just show up here and go back into his life just because she’s sick.” She was crying now, her voice breaking, the quivering, shoulders-tensed tears of childhood. “You look like her, but you’re not her. Maybe you used to live here but you don’t belong here anymore.”

I reached to touch her arm but she slapped me away. “I’m here for your mom, Gillian,” I said, “to help take care of her. And I’m here for you, too, to do whatever I can to make things easier.”

“It’s worse having you here, not easier.” She shook her head against the pillow, wiped the back of her hand against her nose. “When I dream about her? She’s normal again, and she has normal hair, and she plays Frisbee with me and Dad and she throws better than anyone.”

I took Gillian’s hand, sandwiched it between mine. This time she didn’t flinch. “That’s what I dream, too,” I said. “I know I’m not your mom, and I’m really not trying to be her. I’m just me, just her sister, and I’m trying to get through this too.”

She looked up at me, then pulled her hand away. “Do you know it’s my birthday next week? It’s my birthday, but I don’t care anymore. It’s just a day, and they’ll pretend like it’s important but really they’re just pretending.”

“Of course it’s important.” I tried to remember turning twelve, how a birthday seemed like the most monumental thing. How I’d gone to sleep the night before thinking,
This is the last night I’ll be eleven,
and then woke up the next morning and lay there with my eyes closed, trying to see how different it felt.

Gillian lifted the blue memo from her lap. “It’s like there’s two worlds,” she said. “There’s the world with me and Mom and Dad, and then there’s everybody else who’s just out there and they think it’s such a big deal that they’re having this play.” She crumpled the memo and threw it off the bed, then turned to watch it fall to the floor. “How come some people get to have normal families?”

I shook my head, wishing I could find an answer that would help even a little, coming up only with the inadequate life-isn’t-fair type of answers used by annoyed parents. I’d learned this long before, that things could go from horrible to wonderful and back to horrible again without reason or entitlement. How even with perspective there was no way to understand it, no matter how closely you looked. “I’m on the inside of your world, too, Gillian,” I said. “I know you don’t see that now, but I’m there like you, wishing I could get back to where the little things counted.”

Gillian stared at me, then slipped the earphones back over her head. She turned up the volume on her Walkman loud enough that I could hear the pounding drums, then spun the tuning wheel up and then back down, the radio voices singing a jumbled, unintelligible blur.

I’d forgotten the quality of the air on the island, how after a rain it would fill with dusty light. I’d forgotten how the sun shot arrows through branches and clouds, shining spotlights across your path. The rain had turned things muggy, and as we walked the streets holding birthday gifts we’d bought for Gillian, both Justin and I shed jackets and sweaters, our talk growing easy and familiar.

“One of my first memories of you was on the Powells’ roof,” Justin said, nodding at a yellow-shingled house with a trellis climbing the porch. “You were dressed in this long skirt.”

“I was playing a farmer’s wife for some skit in school. I had this impression that skirt made me look at least sixteen.”

Justin smiled. “And that trellis was like a magnet. I climbed up and you stood here watching, and when you couldn’t stand it anymore you stripped off your skirt and climbed up with me.”

I remembered sitting beside him, bare legged and triumphant, overlooking an umbrella of trees. A plane had passed overhead and he’d grabbed my hand to keep me steady, hadn’t let go until we stood to clamber back to the ground.

“I thought that was so amazing,” he said. “If you wanted something, you just went for it. Not too many six-year-old girls you could call brave.”

“And plus I had nice legs,” I said, feeling unexpectedly buoyant. I had a sudden longing to lean my head on his shoulder, but instead I squeezed fists so hard I knew there must be dents in my palms. I’d been flirting, I knew that.

We walked for a while in silence. He pulled in front of me as a car passed and I forced my eyes to the road so I wouldn’t have to look at the line of his shoulders, the pull of his blue-jeaned legs. But after a minute, my eyes forced themselves back to his legs. How vile was I? Completely vile.

When we reached the edge of the bluffs, we stood watching the parade of waves below, each row of crests lined up behind the others, waiting its turn to slip and spread onto the shore.

“Beautiful as ever, hunh?” he said.

But that wasn’t what I was thinking, not at all. I was wondering how this spot could be so calm, organized as rolls of folded socks. Only the jagged rocks were the same, visible under the swells, rocks we’d wrongly thought could tear a body to pieces, obliterate. I turned away quickly. “You ever have nightmares?” I said.

He eyed me a second, then turned back to the surf. “Eve does. She doesn’t say what it is that keeps her awake, but I guess I know.”

“I have nightmares. I mean, sometimes it’s enough to literally make me puke. It’s scary how you can go about your days and not think about it until something happens to remind you, or until you’re asleep and your defenses are down. Which shows it must always be there weighing on you, and the rest of you’s just kind of skating above it and trying not to look down.”

“Eve says it’s like this animal with claws that keeps poking at her belly whenever she tries to sleep. She closes her eyes and this claw pokes at her and says,
Hey, not so fast
. She’s so sick and her mind’s still holding on to this.”