Pieces of My Sister's Life (14 page)

“Oh I’m sure it’s gorgeous, and besides, mistakes don’t matter. They give the scenery character, I think. So you ready for another project? I’ve been saving it for you, Gillian, it’s the most important project of the bunch. Center stage.”

I finished threading screws into the barn supports, while Mrs. Brent showed Gillian how to string white yarn into a web. When she’d left, Gillian came to stand beside me, watching. After a minute she spoke. “I figured it out. Why I got to play Wilbur, and why Mrs. Brent let me do the web, it’s because everybody feels sorry for me.”

“Oh sweetie, that’s not true.”

“That’s why she said it was okay we messed up on the painting. In art class she just about goes ballistic if someone colors outside the lines.” She shrugged. “It’s okay. I mean, I don’t really care. Can I try the screwdriver?”

I handed it to her, watched her struggle to tighten a screw. She spoke without turning to face me. “I wanted to ask you something.”

“Okay?”

“It’s maybe a stupid question but I just thought I should ask. Are you staying with us after? I mean after Mom’s not here?”

It took me a minute to answer. Finally I turned back to the barn. “I don’t know, Gillian, maybe for a little while.”

“Because you could, you know. You could stay even forever, I wouldn’t mind. I know I said you shouldn’t be here, but I just wanted to tell you I don’t think that anymore.”

I reached for her, a deep ache in my chest of sadness and sweetness. And then I saw Eve. She was standing behind Gillian, trying to look like she wasn’t listening, her grin stretched narrow and false. “Eve?” I said.

Gillian spun around, her face pale like she understood the full depth of what Eve had heard and what it would mean to her.

“Well I’m getting tired of this,” Eve said. “Think I’ll pull up my chaps and wheel on home.”

“I’ll go with you,” Gillian said hurriedly, then glanced at me. “Tell Mrs. Brent it’s okay with me if somebody else finishes the web.”

I nodded and raised my hand good-bye as Gillian walked her mother to the wheelchair. I leaned against the plywood barn and watched their retreating backs. I wanted to go after them, to say something, explain. But of course I knew there was really nothing that could be said.

I woke that night to a sound echoing through the radiator pipes. I squinted at the bedside clock. Nearly midnight.

It was a moan I’d heard, barely perceptible. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, reached for Eve’s pill bottle and padded downstairs. I turned the corner heading for the den, then stopped short.

Their bodies rocked slowly, silhouetted under the sheets, a tender smoothing of his form on hers like they were spreading butter on something soft. The love hung over them like an aura, a hovering perfume. I stared for a minute, frozen, then spun away.

Back upstairs I reached under my bed for the envelope I’d brought, holding the torn letters we’d written the day I’d left. I pressed the envelope between my palms. All these years I’d known these letters might hold the answer I’d been looking for, the answer to who had owned Justin first.

I lay on my back, my eyes squeezed shut. I hadn’t seen their faces, but in my mind their faces were those of children, Eve and Justin the way I’d pictured them so many times, the seducer and the seduced. In those pictures I’d imagined myself standing by their bed and watching. And then when things got hot and heavy, throwing in a live grenade.

But now it was all so different, because I’d seen the love between them. Somehow I’d never let myself think that love might be real.

There was a tight cry from downstairs and I crumpled the envelope and pulled the pillow over my head, every muscle in me tensed. I curled against the wall and imagined Eve’s legs around Justin’s waist, both thinking of me maybe for one second before they forgot to think. The three of us together there in that one second, a husband and a wife and a woman they thought of only in that glancing moment of shame. While my resentment was still here in the deepest parts of me, hanging over them like foam on the sea, with the sea flowing on unperturbed as if it didn’t even know.

14

I
T ALL CAME BACK
to us like retribution, a stranger’s glimpse into our past and our future. It was a May afternoon that felt like August with its airless oven heat. The sea breezes were like night breath, moist and fishy stale.

We walked to the Java Café, Eve holding my arm for support. This was our first time out alone together. It wasn’t like she’d suggested it; I’d asked if she’d mind coming to help me pick out some clothes and she’d shrugged her agreement, but still. It was something.

As we turned down the road to the café, Audrey Mullin, the town librarian, emerged from Town Hall. She was wearing a bright green sun hat, an orange sweater and orange sweatpants, like a misshapen carrot. She beamed at us. “You’re looking good today, Eve!” she said. “Have to say we were all getting worried for a while there.”

“Yeah, I had cancer but I’m over it.”

I kicked Eve’s ankle. Audrey Mullin stared at her a moment, deciding how to react. “Oh, Eve, you’re always such a kidder,” is what she came up with. She flushed and cleared her throat. “What I mean is, I’m glad to see you looking better.”

Eve gave her a bright smile. “It’s only because I’m so thrilled to see you,” she said.

Approaching the café, Eve turned to me. “I hate how they pretend they don’t know I’m dying. They all do it, like they’re trying to keep a secret from me, as if I don’t know.”

“What, are you looking for sympathy? You want them getting all red in the face and telling you how life is unfair and they’ve got the whole church praying for you?”

“I could use a whole church praying for me. Do you think they are?” She pulled at the café door, then stopped to read a sign in the window, yellow poster board with letters in tempera paint. “Look at that,” she said. “Madame Rosa, palmistry, tarot, answers to every question guaranteed.”

“Guaranteed? What’s that mean, that she guarantees she’ll come up with some kind of answer, or that the answers are right?”

“And she lives over the café. I didn’t know we had a psychic. Guess she comes in for the summer.”

“A little hokey for the island, God. Soon we’ll have neon signs and kids on street corners who want to soap your windshield.”

“Let’s go check her out.”

“Yeah, maybe she’ll look at you and tell us you’re sick.”

“I’m serious. We could ask her how much longer I have. I’m sick of not knowing.” She smiled crookedly. “Even if what she tells me is bullshit, at least I’ll have something to aim for.”

We climbed the side steps to the apartment over the café. Eve knocked on the faded blue door. There was no answer. After a minute she knocked again harder, and after another minute she turned to me. “I predict a reading’s not in our future,” she said.

At this, the door swung open. A tiny woman peered out at us, bright red hair, a long scarf draped around her shoulders and a face younger than I’d expected. “You here to see Madame Rosa,” she said, her accent thick.

“You must be psychic!” Eve said, then gave an apologetic smile. “Sorry, that was crass. So how much is it? I mean for your basic-reading kind of stuff.”

The woman nodded slowly and turned back inside. Eve and I glanced at each other, then followed.

We entered a dimly lit room, purple shag bathmats draped over the sofa cushions and a large abstract painting on the wall. A television was on, tuned to a talk show. “He told me what you done,” a woman said. “How you
beep
ed him and then gave him your panties and said he could wear them, and that’s how he started buying
beep
ing heels and tryin’ to fit into my dresses. Which he busted my favorite skirt and now I say you owe me fifty bucks.”

We entered the kitchen. Madame Rosa gestured at the chairs encircling a round table, then began to shuffle through a drawer. I sat, feeling slightly stupid. After a second Eve sat beside me.

“You pay what you think is worth for you. You choose.” Madame Rosa swung the drawer shut and held up a pack of cards and a stick tied at one end with a leather tassel. “But first you choose palm or tarot.”

Eve held out her hands. “Palm,” she said.

I watched as the woman traced the leather tassel across Eve’s hands, amazed that Eve actually seemed to be treating this seriously, her jaw set, watching the woman’s face.

“This your life line,” the woman said. “Not so long, this line. You don’t have much time here left.”

“I’m astonished by your brilliance,” I said, figuring I needed to do something to break Eve out of her strange stillness.

The woman glanced at me, spoke to my face. “Not so much time as you think you have. It all come much sooner, so is time to do what need to be done to get ready. Not just outside but also inside.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. Whether or not she really believed she saw something, her words seemed unbelievably cruel.

“You been through a difficult childhood, done things you ashamed of, many things, and now you playing it out through your body.” She closed her eyes and nodded slowly. “But he forgive you. He say it is time to move on.”

“I don’t believe in God,” Eve said.

“Not God, I speak of the man from long ago. The man in your head now, I don’t need tarot to see it. He not thinking about you, so why you waste the time you have left still fighting to keep him in your head?”

Eve and I looked at each other silently, and then Eve pulled a bill out from her wallet. “Thanks.” She slapped it on the table, a fifty, then stood from her chair.

The woman’s eyes snapped open and she stared pointedly at Eve, then shifted her eyes to the money and then to me. “And you? I read your palm?”

I gave her a sharp smile. “That’s okay, no thanks.”

“You think I am full of shit, yes?” She nodded and pulled back from the table. “S’okay, I don’t need your palm to see. You, you have the same childhood, but you living it out through your soul, not your body. It is healthier through your body though, because when your body gone, the shame also gone. And oh…” She lifted the tail end of her scarf and flipped it over her shoulder. “There something else I tell because I like you. You don’t have to pay, but if someone ask you for advice, you tell them about Madame Rosa, yes? And for that I tell you someone return to you soon, you have a visit. Someone who been gone a long time, and that person help you heal. That’s all I have for you.”

“And I’ll meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger,” I said, standing.

The woman smiled. “Oh no, you already know your stranger,” she said.

Back on the street, Eve walked a ways before speaking. “So what did you think?” she said finally.

“About her? What do you bet she gives everyone the same lines about how you need to heal your insides before you die?”

“How about that man-from-long-ago stuff?”

I couldn’t turn to her, couldn’t let her see my face. All this time I’d been here we hadn’t talked about it, a promise we’d made to ourselves thirteen years ago and were still keeping. Still needed to keep. “I bet she gives that line, too. Everybody needs forgiveness from someone.”

“And about someone returning to you? To help you heal? Don’t you think she means me?”

“She said returning soon. Which means future tense.” I tried to smile. “Besides, you haven’t even come close to helping me heal.”

Eve walked on a minute without speaking, then turned to me. “I want to go up on Beacon Hill.”

“Beacon Hill? That’s private property.”

“Do I care? Won’t be the first time we broke a law.” She focused on the road again, then shook her head. “She said I was going to die sooner than I think.”

“I can’t believe you bought that crap.”

“I want to go up there. You can see the whole island from the top. I mean, I’ve never really lived anywhere else, this is where everything happened. I need to see it all together, all at one time, get my arms around it.”

I knew what she meant. It was the same feeling I’d had returning on the ferry, how all of it, everything that had made me who I was, was balanced so precariously in one place. “Okay,” I said.

We drove as far as we could up Beacon Hill and parked. I struggled to push Eve’s wheelchair to the top and then stood with her, looking down over the island. Views like this were why humanity had once thought the world was flat; this land at center and the blue cloth of water on all sides, a universe with no edges and no ends.

“Makes you realize how small the island is,” I said.

“Getting smaller every year because of the surf. They had to move the Southeast Lighthouse a few years back so it didn’t fall off the bluffs.”

I sank onto the ground, hugged my knees against my chest. “Remember the studies when we were kids? How in another few hundred years the island’ll disappear altogether? That seemed so scary, the same kind of fear I got when I learned about how a giant asteroid could hit and wipe out the human race.”

“Made me picture how we’d all have to move our houses to the middle of the island. I saw Daddy lifting the house onto a truck and carting it out.”

“And then the water gets closer and closer, and then it’s at our doorstep and we have to decide if we should leave or just drown.”

Eve gave me a vague smile. When I smiled back, her face hardened. “God, I feel sick.”

“You want to get home?”

“Not that kind of sick. You know what I was thinking? I keep thinking, what would we have thought back then if we could see us now? Christ, I would’ve killed myself, saved myself a lot of trouble.”

“Stop it, Eve.” I eyed the wheelchair behind her. What would I have done if I’d seen all this? “Look what you’ve accomplished. Look at Gillian.”

“Yeah, I’ve been a hell of a mother.”

“Look how great she is. You’ve been an amazing mother.”

Eve reached into her pocket for a bottle of pills, her face white with pain. “I heard you rehearsing lines yesterday.”

“She’s not bad, you know, says her lines with lots of inflection. And did you see her in the pig costume I made, with the ears and the twirly tail? You might be raising a movie star.”

“God, I hope not.” She shuffled backwards and sank into the wheelchair. “I sewed her a cat costume for Halloween last year, she tell you that?”

Shit, what was the right thing to say? “Well, I’m sure your cat was better than my pig. The only pink fabric I could find at the quilt shop had pictures of cupcakes, so I bought her a leotard and made her ears out of sparkly paper.”

“I heard what she said last week, while we were working on the set. About wanting you to stay.”

I shook my head. “She was trying to be nice. To be polite.”

“Right.” She gazed out over the horizon. “Know why I never come to the dinner table?” Her words were slow and steady. “I hear you all. She tells you how Karen’s her new best friend. She asks if she can stay up to watch the Sunday night movie, and then she comes to me. She stares with these weirdly big eyes and gives me this shy hug like she thinks I’m going to break.” Eve’s breath was ragged. She closed her eyes and fought for a minute, trying to get enough air.

I watched her, not sure what to say. “I’m not trying to take your place.”

“If you stay after I’m dead,” she said, “if you’re here when she’s fifteen, when she’s thirty so she knows you more years than she’s known me, don’t you think she’ll forget she ever used to tell me anything? Or even worse, it’ll all run together in her mind. When she tries to remember me she’ll think of you.”

I watched Eve, not sure what to say, if there was a right thing.

“That’s not true. We won’t let her forget.”

“But it’s more than that. More than forgetting. She’ll remember she had a mother, but inside she’ll replace me.” Eve’s voice cracked and she swallowed quickly. “I hated Mom for leaving us, and Daddy I hated too. Anything I ever used to feel about them got swallowed up by the hate.”

“That’s different,” I said.

“If you stay after I die…” She closed her eyes. “If you stay, they’ll eventually think my death was a good thing. They’ll miss me for a while maybe, but they’ll remember how I was in the end, and then they’ll look at you.” She made a disgusted face. “Boobs and all, the vision of the woman I should’ve been, and they’ll think it was a good thing. So you have to promise me.”

“Eve—” The word sounded like something scraped against gravel.

“Promise me you’ll leave.” She spoke in a hoarse whisper. “You won’t stay with him, will you?”

I looked out over the hillside, my island, a knot of pain in my chest. “I promise,” I said. “I won’t stay, I promise you.”

February

1994