Pieces of My Sister's Life (18 page)

From the den I heard Eve’s hacking cough and her struggle to regain breath. She’d been getting winded more easily, had almost given up on walking. Our mother should know, Georgia had said, but if she saw Eve now what would she know? She’d see a shadow, not a daughter, not a person worth her time.

I closed my eyes until I heard Eve’s breath steady, then timed my own to match it, reassuringly rhythmic and slow as I dialed the number.

A click and a hiss, then a voice. “Hello, I can’t come to the phone right now—” I slammed down the phone and stood, staring at the receiver. That was her. That was my mother’s voice. I dialed again.

One, two, three rings, click-hiss. “Hello, I can’t come to the phone right now—” I hung up.

She had a thick Boston accent that made the hair prickle on my arms. She sounded harsh, citified, almost masculine, like a used-car salesman. Not what I’d expected. Really not at all.

I dialed again, tried to get used to the voice. “Mom,” I whispered, “Mother,” trying to ingrain it. Then the answering machine played a grating computerized song, the kind you might hear once after buying a machine and then realize you had to erase it. When the song ended, without thinking I whispered, “Hello.”

The phone slipped to clatter against the table. I grabbed at it and hung up, then sat gripping the receiver. She would listen to that message. My mother would listen to my voice and maybe even wonder if it could be me. I inhaled deeply. One last time.

One, two, three rings and then the voice. “Who the hell is this?”

Oh my God.

I slid down the wall onto my butt and focused on a thumbprint smudge against the yellow wallpaper. “I…” My voice was a hoarse croak. I cleared my throat. “Hi.” I shook my head. “Hi, this is me. This is Kerry.” I curled my toes inside my sneakers. “This is your daughter Kerry.”

I could hear her breath on the other end, every sound intensified. I heard everything, from the click of settling walls to the hiss of a radiator. I thought I heard her brain searching for words, pictured the shock on her face, the joy. I thought I heard the fluttering excitement in her heart and the tears filling her eyes.

“Oh,” she said softly. “Oh man, you made a mistake.”

I dug my nails into the skin of my knee. Damn her. Damn her to hell. “Damn you,” I said.

“No really, Kerry, I mean I’m not your mother. Diana you want, isn’t it? I’m a friend of hers, lived with her until she left five years back. She got married to this guy, a developer, Joey was his name except now they’re not together anymore.”

I pulled my knees up against my chest, tears drying tight on my skin. “Joey?”

“I got her number here if you want it. Well, of course you want it, I mean of course you do. I can’t believe you’re calling after all this time. Diana used to talk about you girls, talked my ears off.”

I wiped at my face, half expecting the skin to come off in my hands. “She did?”

“I got her address too, if you want it. I was just there last summer for a visit. Nice big condo place she got when she left Joey, oak library, tub with jets, all that. Moved down to Miami since it made sense for Joey’s job and never came back.”

I stared at the smudge on the wall until it blurred into nothing. “Okay,” I said. “So give me the number.”

The woman made an odd humming sound. “Maybe I should call her first and let her know I talked to you. I got the number here, but you best wait till I can give her a little warning. Big surprise you’re about to drop on her.”

I nodded as if the woman could see me, kept on nodding as if convincing myself to go on listening. When she continued, her voice was softer, strained. “Was it you that’s sick? Was that you or was it your sister?”

“What?”

“She wanted to come up there when she heard, I swear she did. But she didn’t want to get you all upset.”

I shook my head. “Who told her Eve’s sick?”

“Oh.” There was a beat of silence. “So I’ll tell her you called, okay? I bet she calls you back.”

“How did she know? Who told her?”

“So it was good to speak with you. Your voice sounds like hers, you know, deep like hers. I’ll tell her that.”

There was a click as she hung up. I held the receiver against my chest, held it through the dial tone, held it through the operator’s voice and the blaring alarm. It was only when the phone clunked to silence that I was able to rise.

19

I
MADE EXCUSES
all week not to leave the house. I jumped each time the phone rang. I practiced, like I was waiting for a boy to invite me to the prom, how to answer with the right degree of apathy.
Hello, Mother, I didn’t think you’d call.
But in the end she sent a package instead of calling, as if she didn’t care enough to hear my voice.

It was our thirtieth birthday. The Caines had invited us all for dinner, and Eve dressed up for the occasion, the first time that I’d seen her in anything but sweats or cotton nightgowns. She wore a dark pantsuit, seventies-style, and she had a wig, shoulder length, in an odd burgundy color that at first made me wince. But with deep red lipstick, her hollowed cheeks and pale skin, the final effect was strikingly exotic.

Eve eyed herself in the bathroom mirror. “Anorexic chic,” she said.

“I think you look great. You could be the diva in a James Bond film.”

“Or an alien invader. She can cut steel with her cheekbones and see the sky reflected off her head.” Eve sighed and fingered the rust stains in the sink. “I hate birthdays.”

“You hate bunnies, too? And world peace?”

“Since you left I hated them. But now it’s my last birthday, and I’m suddenly realizing how much I love birthday cake, the fluffy white kind with jam filling. Isn’t it stupid? I want fucking birthday cake every day for the rest of my life.”

“We could do that,” I said. “We could celebrate the days.”

Eve laughed. “Like now each day of life is a gift? Man, that’s pathetic.” She looked down at the bathroom tiles. “I made a deal with God, you know, back last winter when they stopped treatment, if I could just make it to thirty, just make it to real adulthood, I’d try my hardest to be accepting about this all. I wouldn’t get mad.”

“And you made it,” I whispered.

“It was a stupid bet.” She closed her eyes and weaved slightly. “You better get me back to bed.”

I gathered her in my arms and carried her down the stairs. She was surprisingly heavy, and by the time we made it to her bed, we were both exhausted.

“My bones hurt,” she said. “Shit.”

I began to rub her shoulders but she winced. “Pills?” I asked.

Eve grimaced. “I’d rather not fall asleep at dinner.” She lay back and smiled weakly, then reached under her pillow to pull out a small wrapped box. “Just distract me. Happy birthday.”

I raised my eyebrows and took the box. She shrugged, then wrinkled her nose and slid her hand beneath her back.

I pulled at the childish birthday wrap and found a gift box lined with velvet. Inside was a tiny gold leaf. “For the birthday bracelet,” I said softly. Ever since we were little, on birthdays we’d exchanged tiny charms for the bracelet chain our mother had given us. And then the year we’d turned seventeen, I’d thrown my chain over a cliff.

“I got that for your birthday the year you left,” she said, her teeth still gritted against the pain. She winced as she leaned back onto the bed. “We weren’t doing so great, I guess, barely speaking, but I bought a charm. I thought if you had one for me, I’d be prepared.”

I felt a notch of pain in my chest. “I did get you a charm. But I was waiting to see if you’d get something for me.”

Eve exhaled a short laugh. “Son of a bitch.”

The front door opened, and Justin walked into the room, a package in his arms. He watched us a moment, then held it forward.

“Gee, you remembered,” Eve said, grinning at him.

He shook his head, stepped forward and placed the package in my arms. I stood with it, reading the return address.

“For your birthday, I guess,” he said.

I looked down at Eve, then set the package on her bed. Eve stared at it and then up into my eyes. “You found Mom?” she whispered.

“Bert and Georgia gave me the number. I called a couple weeks back, talked to a friend of hers, that’s all.”

“A friend of Mom’s?” Eve huddled against her pillows. “What did she tell you?”

“Not much. Just that she was married and divorced again and now she lives in Miami. And also that she used to talk about us.”

“How would she talk about us? What would she say?”

I shrugged. “Her friend said she used to talk her ears off. I can’t see how six years with us could’ve given her enough material.”

“Did you say anything about me? Say how I was dying?”

I tried to read Eve’s expression, the creases deep at her eyes. “Her friend said she knew already. Somehow she knew.”

“Is she coming to see me?”

I watched her for a minute, then reached for the package, but she pulled it back. She traced her finger over the return address, back and forth, back and forth. “Bitch,” she whispered.

“You okay?”

“Let me tell you.” Eve smiled crookedly. “You know what it was like when I went for my last CAT scan? The doctor’s sitting there, holding up pictures of my lungs, my liver, my brain, with these white blotches everywhere, like cultures on a petri dish. And he says it’s gone too far, says it’s in too many places and there’s nothing he can do. And all I’m thinking about is Justin and Gillian. I didn’t think of myself, like how unfair and I’m so young. What I thought is, if there really is a God, how dare he do this to my daughter?” Eve’s eyes fogged over. “We were six years old, Kerry.”

I slipped onto the floor. “I know.” I brought my knees to my chin and hugged them, looking up into her face.

“Go on,” she said, nodding. I stared at the package a minute, then pulled at the brown wrapping.

Inside was a shoebox. I lifted it, studied the outside as if it could tell me something: Nike cross-trainers, size seven, white and teal. Just like me she kept important things in shoeboxes. I lifted the lid.

The box was filled with cards and letters, all sizes and colors. They were placed in chronological order, the top card dated the summer after my mother left, the bottom postmarked the year before Daddy’s death. I lifted the top letter, unsettled at seeing Daddy’s handwriting, so instantly recognizable, sweeping capital letters flattening into scrawled script. I gripped Daddy’s key necklace as I read.

Diana,

Just so as you know, I’m not writing on account of me, I’m writing on account of your two little girls, in case you forgot you had them. Of course I can’t forget because I hear them every night crying for their momma, and what am I supposed to say? So I tell them you’re off sailing around the world, you’re having a big adventure and you’ll be back soon as you do what it is you have to do. I hope to God I’m telling them right.

You said you weren’t meant to be tied down to a family. Well fine, I get that, and it’s not like I would have chose this life either to tell the God’s honest truth. But I’m not about to turn my back on our kids who never asked to be born. Because the way I see it, we made our choices a long time ago, and we just don’t have the right not to stick by them at this point.

I tried hard to make a good life for you. We weren’t rich maybe, but we had enough to get by. If you ever wanted for anything you should have said it. So maybe you were right, it wouldn’t have worked to have another, but if that’s why you left, you know I never would’ve forced you into anything. I didn’t yell at you so much for what you did, Diana, just how you didn’t think enough of me to tell me about it beforehand. I would have forgave you even if it tore my heart out to kill one of God’s most helpless souls.

But anyway, it’s too late for that now, so I’ll just tell you that when you come back we’ll start again from scratch. Because what you have here is pretty damn good, even if you don’t see it.

I have to go because one of them is crying. You have the new address, our house is right close to the water the way you always said you dreamed. It’s a good house and we have good neighbors and I found a good job cleaning fish which makes decent money, enough that I’ll be looking to buy my own boat someday soon, maybe start up my own business. There’s a real nice neighbor lady, Mrs. Abi Caine, who’s kind enough to watch over them when I’m working, but children do need their real momma. If you’d stop looking only at yourself for one minute, you’d see that was the truth.

As always,
Thomas

I read the letter again, then handed it to Eve, sat in silence until she turned to me. “There was a baby.”

I wrapped my arms around my shoulders.

Eve smiled shallowly. “I remember him telling us she was going on an adventure. And we waited for her to come back, a day, a week, a month, and then we stopped waiting.”

I looked down at the shoebox, the litter of cards and envelopes. “Actually, I guess I never stopped waiting.” I shook my head. “Why would she send these? I mean, what’s the point?”

“We were right all along,” Eve said softly. “It was our fault. She left because she was trying to get away from us.”

Justin brushed back the hair at her temple. “She left because she was selfish and a shitty mother.”

“We could’ve had a sister or brother,” I said. “Part of me felt like there should be someone else, especially when things started going bad, somebody else to turn to who could pull us away from it.” I blindly stuffed the letter back into the shoebox.

Eve’s face twisted. She batted the box away. “I had this idiotic fantasy about it, you know? A while back when I found out I was dying, I had this fantasy about her up there waiting, I’d drift out of my body and find her and Daddy both. Like it would mean all this time she wanted to come back, but just couldn’t.”

I gazed blindly at the floor for a minute, then lay on the bed beside her. Justin rested his hands on both of us, stood a minute unmoving and then squeezed our shoulders and backed away. And pressing my face against the scratchy tickle of Eve’s wig, I realized that for all these years when I’d thought we’d lost everything that we’d once shared, this is what, in a twisted way, had always bound us together. Not our childhood. Not our twinness. Just the vacuous ache of everything we’d lost.

April

1994