Pieces of My Sister's Life (3 page)

“Like what God would see,” I’d said.

And Justin had nodded seriously. “To God we’re like atoms and to the atoms we’re like their God.”

“Every time he looks at me?” Eve said now. “I get the feeling that’s what he’s thinking about. How my legs looked, and my boobs.”

I swatted her. “You didn’t have boobs.”

“The stuff he said back then, it was pretty deep for a kid, you know? Pretty damn intense.”

“So,” I said, glancing at her. “So, you in love with him too?”

“No! Jeez, no.” Eve held her up her fingers and inspected her peeling nail polish. “I’m planning never to fall in love with anybody except maybe Antonio Banderas.”

“Good luck with that,” I said, and then I smiled. “Eve Banderas. It sounds like a drag queen.”

“Whatever, he’s probably a pig anyway. I’m not falling in love with anybody; I’ll just have affairs.”

I managed, with much self-restraint, not to roll my eyes. The truth was, Eve had fallen in love with basically every boy in our school at one time or another, except Mattie Burns, who had pink freckles and seemed to be prematurely balding. She’d flirt with them until they started to get interested, and then she’d decide they were losers and fall right out of love again. “Much healthier,” I said. “All men are pigs except for Daddy.”

“Especially Daddy, talk about pigs. I can’t believe Mom even stayed with him as long as she did.”

“Eve!”

“I’m serious. I bet she was so fed up having a husband like that, waking up in bed next to that sweaty, hairy drunk every morning, that she just up and left.”

“My guess is she got sick of you,” I said, knowing even as it came out of my mouth how stupid this would sound.

Eve’s face tightened and she gave me a look so disparaging it didn’t need words, like I’d done something kindergarten-ish, stuck out my tongue and waggled my fingers. I spun away, annoyed.

I walked into the kitchen and opened a cabinet, needing something I couldn’t name, staring blindly at cans of tomato soup and bottles of Heinz 57 Sauce. And then I went outside and stood on the porch and watched a pickup rumble past, carrying lumber for one of the new houses on the south end.

After we’d come back from our parasail I’d seen Daddy at his desk, head in his hands, surrounded by a monthly accumulation of mail, arranged into three precise rows. He’d been looking down at the floor, fingers kneading his temples, shoulders hunched. Even from the hallway I could smell the bite of cheap wine shimmering from his pores.

First I thought it might be the bills that got him hunched like that, but then I realized it must be something more. I’d watched the top of his head, the graying strands in his curly hair, and I’d wanted to say something but had no idea what that something should be. So I’d stood a minute longer, feeling helpless, then turned and left the room.

He’d gone out on the boat after dinner, which he only did on the nights he was sad, when two teenage daughters and a never-ending supply of drinking buddies just wasn’t enough. He’d stand there on the deck and look out at the dark water, thinking about everything he’d lost. The ocean was like that at night; it could pull you down with it so the only things you saw were the things you couldn’t have.

Now I watched a yellowed leaf dance towards the porch, the first I’d seen that year. When it hit, I crunched my sneaker against it, ground it against the cement into yellowed-leaf dust. And then, without letting myself think, I started towards Justin’s house.

For the past year Justin had worked in his dad’s repair shop, fixing cars and renting out the bone-rattling mopeds that the tourists loved but everyone else despised. I hadn’t seen him much that summer. Along with his new job, Justin had gotten a driver’s license and bought a used car that clanked when he started the engine. He’d also gotten a new girlfriend named Leslie. She was a senior, blonde and giggly and sweet. Eve and I hated her.

Passing the tree between our houses, I knocked four times on the trunk, discreetly in case anyone was looking. Four was my lucky number, seeing as I was born on the fourth day of the fourth month, and I used it whenever I needed to get ahold of myself. I had these quirks somewhere on the normal side of the continuum of obsessive compulsion, things like knocking on trees, avoiding numbers divisible by three, and leaving the bathroom before the toilet stopped flushing. Not big quirks, nothing that got in the way of my life, but they were close enough to crazy that I hid them even from Eve.

I knocked four times on the Caines’ front door and Mrs. Caine answered, thick waist wrapped in one of her loose sarongs, blonde hair mussed into tufts around her face like a dandelion cloud. “Well, Kerry,” she said. “We hardly see you anymore now you’re all grown up, but suddenly both of you one right after the other! We’ve missed you.”

I blinked. “Eve was here?”

“I keep meaning to invite the three of you to dinner. I’m so terrible about these things. Writing letters, phoning friends, I always mean to but I never get up enough momentum to actually do it.”

“She was here to see Justin?”

“Yesterday afternoon, but he was working late. Work long hours now while you’re young and have the strength, his father says. But me, I think work wastes the best years of your life, don’t you?” She shrugged. “He’s out in his office if you want him.”

“Thanks.” I turned back outside. My heart was pounding and I felt like I was racing. First one to the finish wins the prize.

I walked out to the shed between the Caines’ house and ours. Justin was on the floor, leaning against two bed pillows, scribbling on a notepad, his sandy hair messy and falling in his eyes. His office, which had once been a potting shed, was littered with papers covering the floor and taped to walls. Years ago he’d painted the inside walls hunter green and set rows of ocean-tumbled stones on each of the potting shelves and window ledges, along with things in shapes he’d found interesting: gnarled sticks and batiked scarves, a honeycomb and a half-burned candle. The yellowish light against the dark walls made the room seem like a cave, silent and intimate and maybe or maybe not hiding something dangerous.

Justin smiled distractedly as I entered, then turned back to mutter at his paper. “Morwyn sat at the mirror pool and lit her lantern, and in the light reflected from the flame she saw him. Or in the light reflected from the moon? If she sees the moon, she can think about what time it is.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Because she has this sense she’s going to meet him at dawn,” he said.

I sat beside him, my fists tucked under my thighs. I thought I could feel the warmth from his body. “She’ll meet him?”

“Mmmm.” He leaned back on his hands. “Sorry. Leslie hates it when I do that, how it takes so long for me to leave that world and get back to this one. Come back to
earth,
she says.”

“I like it.” I felt my face flush. “I mean, it’s a great world in your head. I’d rather hang out with you there than here.” Our eyes met for a brief second, and in that second I felt a lifetime flow between us. Justin’s eyes always drew me in, full of unexplored paths and hiding places. Ever since we first met they’d been this way, the dusty blue of a man who’d traveled far and seen worlds beyond worlds. Sitting there with him, I could feel our whole past, all those days when we’d shared everything, had known our place in the way little kids do and been joined by that knowing.

I bent to look at his notebook, and with my face beneath his I could taste his breath, vaguely peppery like he’d just bitten into a taco. I closed my eyes and drank it in.

And then I felt him touch my hair, a brief glancing whisper of a touch. He flinched back immediately, like he could feel the tingles radiating from my scalp and down my spine, prickling out to the tips of my toes. Eyes still closed, I leaned towards him, fingers and chest and lips aching.

“Ick,” he said. “Don’t get freaked out, but it’s a baby bug.”

I pulled back and made myself breathe, looking down at his hand where a tiny red spider was scuttling across his palm.

“Probably fell into your hair from the ceiling, this place is full of them. It’s actually kind of cute, though, hunh?”

We bent our heads and watched the spider scurry up his arm, trying to hide in a fold of his shirtsleeve. And suddenly the picture came back to me, our bodies side by side in the bathtub, his naked ten-year-old chest. “Do you like Eve?” I said it before I knew what I was about to say, and instantly wished I could swallow the words back from the air.

Justin shook his head. “Do I what? Course I like her.”

“No, I mean…” I inhaled deeply. “I mean do you
like
her like her.”

Justin flashed a sideways smile. “Are you asking what I think you’re asking? I have a girlfriend, remember?”

“It’s just she was telling me today she thinks maybe you have a crush on her. She said something about the way you look at her, I don’t know.”

“You serious? Guess I’ll have to stop looking at her then.”

I grinned. “Or maybe just act grossed out next time you see her. Tell her she has a booger on her nose and she could use a shower.”

Justin studied my face. “She’s been coming by the garage every day for the past couple weeks. And last night she showed up there pretty late and found me with Leslie. Don’t know how long she was watching before we saw her.”

I watched the little red spider emerge from his shirtsleeve, scurry down his arm and drop to the floor. “Were you guys kissing?” I said.

Justin raised his eyebrows and I shook my head. “I can’t believe Eve would sneak around like that.”

“You think she’s jealous?” He started to laugh, then suddenly cut short and looked into my face. He watched me a long while and when he spoke his voice was deep and gentle. “You remember when we were kids and I used to tell my stories? Eve, she’d be laughing when she wasn’t supposed to laugh, sitting there munching on snacks and slurping pop like she was sitting at some movie.”

I rolled my eyes. “One time she compared your stories to
Lost in Space
.”

He kept his eyes on my face like he was searching for something. “But you, you’d close your eyes and everything about you would get so perfectly still.” He smiled quickly and turned away. “Which was actually one of the reasons I thought I had to write these stories down someday.”

“Well I’m glad,” I said, because I couldn’t think what else to say.

“When I get published I’ll write you in my acknowledgments: To Kerry, who was my inspiration.”

His inspiration. My face was hot. I looked down into my lap, then back up.

Justin grinned. “Even though when she talks to me her face turns so red I get scared of explosions.”

I felt a stabbing mortification and erupted into a fit of uncontrollable giggles. I grabbed a pillow from under his arm and aimed it at his head. He hooted, wrenched the pillow from my hands and pressed it over my face.

I fell back against the floor, hands grasping at him, fingers brushing at hair and cotton shirt, at the same time pulling him closer and pushing away. Words streamed through my head like an insane mantra,
Now, now, now.
He pulled back the pillow and looked into my eyes; the words stopped, time stopped, he leaned close. I could feel his breath on my face.

The door opened. “Kerry?” Mrs. Caine called.

Justin pulled away. I lay there in the burning glow, stunned.

“Kerry, honey, you have to go home now. Justin, why don’t you bring her home.”

Justin jumped to his feet, sounding winded. “You okay, Ma?”

She shook her head. “There’s people waiting for you, Kerry. There’s people who can explain.”

Was she crying? I sat up and stared at her, sure I’d had this dream before. A fantasy turned nightmare at the last second before I woke.

But her clutch felt real as she pulled me into her arms, the crush of her hands against my head. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “I promise everything’ll be okay.”

These same words have, I’m sure, been said many, many times in many different situations. But I can tell you that always, they are a lie.

3

I
T WOULD’VE BEEN EASIER,
I think, if we’d had an older sister to lean on, or a younger one to take care of. But as it was, there was only Eve and me, and we were no more comfort to each other than we were to our own selves. We held each other wordlessly, slept in one bed like we had years ago. Each morning before I opened my eyes I expected to hear Daddy clattering in the kitchen, hear him whistle “Sweet Molly Malone,” fuzzy through his beard. I lay in bed disoriented, like you feel when you wake in an unexpected place. And my head would swirl and slowly rearrange.

People came and went around us. All of them came, from Ginger Dean’s six-week-old daughter to Emmeline Sugar, locally believed to be the oldest woman on earth. I imagined them standing in a line that stretched from our door down the street, all dressed in black and carrying umbrellas like the nannies in
Mary Poppins.

Justin came and sat with us, not asking questions or offering meaningless platitudes. He just sat with his arms around our shoulders, and we stared at the wall and thought of nothing, diluting the pain between three.

Letters came, first sympathy cards and then money left by our doormat in mystifying, unmarked brown envelopes. Twenty dollars here, ten dollars there; we pictured a neighbor, one of the older women with watery-pale eyes, scuttling up our front steps, full of pity and self-pride.

Our grandparents came from West Virginia, our grandparents who hadn’t approved of Daddy’s marriage or later of his divorce, who hadn’t seen us for nearly ten years, who wanted us to call them Bert and Georgia. Without asking our consent they’d determined we’d return with them to West Virginia, once the shock wore off and things settled down. Perhaps as much as anything, this kept us clinging to each other, as if it could hold us in place.

We heard them talking, Bert and Georgia, heard their whispers and this was how we learned the truth about Daddy’s death. The words they used were
reckless
and
carousing
. He’d been in his boat. He’d been drinking. And they blamed it all on us, we knew they did, saw it in their appraising eyes and heard it in their voice.

They also told us they’d hired a PI, that they were searching for our mother. And for weeks, until time erased illusion, Eve and I clung to the certainty that now, when we really needed her, she’d come back.

The day after the funeral, the First Warden came with a manila envelope holding Daddy’s belongings. Eve stared at it, eyes wide with fear; these things had touched our father after he was dead! But I opened the envelope and pulled out Daddy’s Timex, held it against my cheek and slipped it loosely over my wrist. Then his wallet, leather bleached by ocean water, holding two crumpled bills (one printed mysteriously in a child’s handwriting with the words
Wheat Noodle
) and his boating license. At the bottom of the envelope was a thick silver chain strung with a small key, cylindrical with carved notches. I fingered the grooves, rough against my skin. This was Daddy’s but I’d never seen it before.

I slipped the chain over my head and felt it slide cold between my breasts. From that time on I wore the necklace day and night, tried it on every keyhole from the front door to the rolltop desk. Every step I took, it swung heavy on my chest, like a question. I knew there was something, a locked journal or jewel box that held some kind of answer to Daddy’s sadness and maybe his death. All the time I wore it, until the day we discovered what it meant, I never told Eve.

Eve and I didn’t talk much about Daddy. I guess we thought that by not talking about it we could keep from blaming him or blaming ourselves. But of course his death and the accountability were always there behind it all, like the coppery smell of winter or damp in the air.

One day I came home to find Eve on the front step, her smile still and unnatural as a wound. I stood watching her, uncertain. “You know what happened?” I said. “I’m walking downtown and there’s Ellen Harte, she sees me and she gets all teary, and just like that she wraps her arms around me. So I’m standing there with my head in her boobs and what am I supposed to do?”

Without speaking, Eve reached into her back pocket and handed me an envelope. It was made out to our mother with an address in New York, which had been crossed out and labeled
Address Unknown.
It was postmarked three days before Daddy’s death.

“It was in his desk,” Eve said. “He couldn’t find her. He died because of her.”

Something shivered in my chest. I dropped the letter.

“Open it.”

I shook my head.

“Open it!” She snatched the envelope from the step, pulled out a card and threw it at me, its corner smarting against my cheek.

I caught the card against my neck, examined it. It was sketched with a cake and poetry: a birthday card. Inside, it was lettered in Daddy’s flat script.

Diana,

Well I guess I don’t have much new to say to you this year. Except the girls are fine and growing up to be women so fast you wouldn’t hardly believe it. They’ll go off in a couple years, I’m sure of it, and it’ll be just me again. Hasn’t been just me for so long, I can’t hardly imagine what it’ll be like. You know how it feels, how they’re part of you under separate skin and then where does it all go? Out in the world with them maybe, even if that’s not something I can see. I know they’ve turned out good, and that’s what matters. But it doesn’t mean we still don’t wish you were here all this time.

As always,
Thomas

I reread the card without wanting to, and then again until the words blurred in my head.

“‘This year,’” Eve said. “Nothing new to say to her ‘this year.’”

“He was writing to her the whole time. The whole time?”

“Fucking liar.” Eve’s voice was dark, hollow, coming from somewhere deep inside her. “She’s sailing around the world, he says. She’d be here if she could, he says. And yeah, we knew that was bullshit.”

“But she knew where we were.”

“The whole time we were waiting she knew. We’re like these imbecilic pet dogs or something, thinking any day now she’ll come home and walk us.”

“We could find her, Eve. I’m sure we could get a forwarding address.”

“Are you kidding? How pathetic would that be, having to chase after our own mother?”

“Maybe if she knew about Daddy…”

“She’d what, decide she really does give a damn? To tell you the truth I’d rather stay with Bert and Georgia. At least they’re pretending to be grandparents. At least they came.”

I watched Eve for a minute, then sat on the step beside her. I looked out over the gravel drive, spinning inside like a child who’s stared too long at the sun, hurting, burning from it but still not willing to let go. I took Eve’s hand and made the hope flicker out again. “You’re right,” I said without turning to face her. “Okay.”

I knelt in LoraLee’s front yard, helping her pull the pansies that had been bitten by last night’s frost. LoraLee had been my confidante since a time before I’d needed a confidante. She lived near the junkyard in a two-room cabin with no plumbing, decorated with odd findings from the trash heap. The islanders said she was a witch.

I remember watching before we’d ever met as she sat in her garden, brown skin and thick black braid beneath her wide straw hat, hands resting over unopened flower buds. I’d stood there listening to the clink of wind chimes made out of soup can lids, bent forks and green sea glass that hung from the roof and tree branches. LoraLee’s eyes were closed, lips moving in a silent chant, and I thought I could see the buds brighten and swell. I was six at the time and in love with fairy tales, and standing there I’d remembered how Seth Morgan said he saw her sitting on a broomstick one night looking up at the full moon. Janie Cross told me that LoraLee gave her dog the evil eye for peeing on the lawn, and the next week her dog came down with liver disease and died. I remembered, and I watched her flowers grow, and I knew for sure I was witnessing true magic.

One day I hid behind LoraLee’s stone fence, watching her spray cabbage with an antique perfume bottle. Straightening, she’d looked my way as if she could see (witchlike!) through brambles and stone. She didn’t seem at all surprised, just smiled and waved me over. I’d peered back at her, thinking about Hansel and Gretel, but then I’d steeled my shoulders and let her invite me inside for tea.

Her cabin was a warm kind of dark, the color of cedar wood. One wall was hung with an orange blanket she told me was woven in Kenya; the tiny figurines she carved and sold watched from broken tables and ladder-back chairs missing their ladders. She whittled a new figurine that day, a little girl wearing a daisy chain who I thought was too brown and wood-veined to look like me but was maybe more like the girl I wished I could be, strong and rough-edged, perhaps of African descent. LoraLee explained to me about flowers, about roots and buds and blooms, growth and destiny, and seeds planted in my soul. They were concepts a little beyond me at the time, but I liked the sound of them all the same.

From that time on she was the one I turned to when I had nowhere else to turn. I’d come to her door and she’d be waiting with spice cookies and tea. She’d sit in her rocker with her whittling and listen, and then she’d tell me the truth about the world, her voice smooth as molasses. I usually left with answers. I always left feeling better.

That day, three weeks after Daddy’s death, I knelt in her garden and eyed the fading flowers. It hurt my heart to kneel there among the endings, and so after a while I brushed off my hands and sat on the front step. LoraLee nodded without looking up, and after a minute came to sit beside me.

I lifted the stained hem of her skirt and held it as if it could give me comfort. “If my father could see us, he’d die all over again,” I said. “He’d want to come down and make things right.”

“Well I’m sure he wish he could,” LoraLee said.

“Do you think he can? See us, I mean.”

“Why yes, I do. I think he see you in his heart jus’ like you sees him.”

“Daddy didn’t believe in heaven. He believed in God, but he didn’t believe in heaven.”

“That right?” LoraLee looked out across the yard, didn’t speak for such a long time that I dropped her skirt, embarrassed. Immediately she took my hand and squeezed. “Your daddy were a very smart man,” she said.

“What?” This was worrisome. Of course she couldn’t really know for sure one way or another if there was a heaven, but when LoraLee said something it was usually true.

“If you believes in that sort of heaven, you gots to also believe in hell, and I think there ain’t nothin’ so bad a body could do to deserve an eternity shovelin’ and burnin’.”

I stared down at the chipped concrete of the front step. LoraLee looked at me a long while, then squeezed my shoulder and lifted the pail of dead flowers we’d pulled. She led me to the back of the house, where she emptied the pail on the compost heap and stirred the rich soil over it.

“See this?” she said. “Everything go back to the earth in time. All this here were alive and now it dead, and now it goes back to the earth. And comes spring I takes that earth which is full up with goodness, and out of the goodness come new life. That’s how it works.”

Looking into the pile of weeds and rotting vegetables, it molded, changed, became my father’s face. I suddenly remembered the dull shiver of earth I’d sifted onto his casket. I flinched away.

LoraLee made a hushing sound and pulled me against her bosom. “Oh, chile, don’t you unnerstan’? S’like when you lays on your back on a summer’s eve, and the stars so bright they reach down to you and you reaches up to them. They pulls you inside till you is them and they is you. That’s what happen, Kerry, what I thinks. You don’t go to heaven, you becomes it.”

I pulled away and looked down at her hands, that strange wooden ring she always wore. The pads of her fingers were wrinkled, like they’d been soaking in water for hours. LoraLee touched the tear snaking down my cheek and shook her head.

“The troubles is bad, Kerry, but it’s the sadness what take away your life. You needs to put your heart at rest and feel the hope of what come to be.”

“I know,” I said, but what I really knew was that there was no hope. There was the darkness of a West Virginia cabin that smelled like old age. There was the bleakness of no ocean and no tourists and a winter that lasted well into spring. And there was the loneliness of grandparents we hardly knew, who didn’t have the faintest idea how to love us.

Back home I could tell immediately that something was wrong. Tension hung over the house like a yellow oil, seeping through walls and bones.

I could hear their mumbling in the kitchen, the spitting
S
’s of anger. Hurrying past on my way upstairs, I saw my grandmother at the table, face red, and my grandfather appeasing her with a nod that seemed more fear than agreement.

I ran up to the bedroom. It looked empty but I knew Eve was under the bed.

She liked it down there. I understood this, and I’d tried it a few times, but even though it did feel safe lying there in the dark, it also felt too dusty and claustrophobic for my taste.

I lifted the bed skirt and crawled in beside her. She was pulling the threads edging a mouth-sized tear in her jeans, and she barely turned to acknowledge my presence. “I’m leaving,” she said.

I turned onto my side so I could see her.

“I’m packed and everything. I was waiting till you got home.” She examined a tuft of thread in her palm, squeezed it into a fist. “I can’t take this anymore, Kerry. Did you know Georgia chews her ice cream? That’s what kind of people they are.”

I shook my head. “You’re not making sense.”

“She was eating Daddy’s pistachio. Just took it out from the fridge without even asking, like it belonged to her. So I said it would maybe do her some good to go on a diet.”

“Eve!”

“And she turns real pale, and says what was wrong with Daddy that he never taught me any respect. So I’m leaving.”

“You can’t really leave, not for good.” But I knew what she meant. Eating Daddy’s ice cream was like shrugging at the fact it wouldn’t ever be eaten otherwise. “But maybe you could stay with LoraLee, at least for a little while. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”