Pieces of My Sister's Life (31 page)

Wait!
I wanted to cry.
Come back! What were you going to say?
Instead I stood there staring at the door, then finally slipped the robe over my shoulders and sat on the bed to wait.

When Justin’s car finally pulled into the drive, I stood and let the robe drop to my feet. I was shivering as I watched him head towards the house. Partly because I was only wearing lingerie. And partly because I was terrified.

It seemed to take an eternity for him to walk past the potting shed, squint his eyes to peer at the door, step closer to see what might be there. All slow motion, moving frame by frame: raised eyebrows, lifted head, paper unfolding, slow frown.

He read my letter first, and when he’d finished he looked up at the window. I crouched down. So I didn’t see his reaction when he opened the next letter, or if he even had. When I peeked over the window ledge, all I saw was the top of his head hurrying forward, hurrying to me.

I arranged myself again on the bed, tossed my hair over one shoulder and hooded my eyes into a seductive gaze. His footsteps raced up the stairs, coming to me, and I couldn’t breathe. It was the last day of my virginity, the day I’d reunite with the person I loved most in the world, and I wanted to cry out with it but didn’t have the air. And just when I thought I might explode, the footsteps disappeared.

They disappeared.

I stood and pressed my ear to the door, covering my arms over my bare chest. Dimly I heard the click-shuffle-snap as Daddy’s door closed and locked.

33

I
WAS SURE
at first Justin had made a mistake. Of course he had. Feeling suddenly vulnerable, I pulled on a T-shirt and jeans. I sat on my bed, waiting for him to realize he was confused, believing it for far longer than I had a right to. And when the realization came of what he’d done, it was all at once, like I’d been hit with a massive sack of sand. I couldn’t move, just sat there feeling weighted, pinned to the bed. My ears were ringing. My breasts, still inside the bustier, felt separate from me, like they’d been pasted on.

And then I felt my body moving, gliding along the floor and down the hall. My ear was against their door, calm voices. Calm. Not a mistake.

“…how hard this was, Justin. It was hard for me, too.”

“But Kerry!”

“She said she’d accept it whatever you chose, you just have to tell her. Tell her how it’s not my fault, not anyone’s fault, but you just fell in love with me. She knows deep down how you feel.”

“I never wanted to hurt her.”

“She knows that too.”

My body was floating away and down the hall, its knees buckling, stumbling, losing its balance.

Justin had chosen Eve. Eve knew he would.

…I thought it was you at first, I swear I did….

…It was only that one time, twenty minutes, one mistake….

…You’re a part of me, one mistake can’t take that away….

But he chose Eve.

And what did I have now? I had the hurt and hate of what I’d done. I had this body which meant nothing, even to itself. Things were moving through my brain, scuttling like spiders, too fast to be focused on. And underneath a clear picture was forming. The picture was black and sharp and it directed me.

In the bedroom, I reached under my pillow for the bottle. The liquid inside tasted sweet and bitter and gagged me after only one gulp. I took another and another and my head began to spin until I didn’t know which was up and which was down. I crawled to my bed and waited.

Death took a long time coming. I felt it descend like a sodden blanket over my face.
Hello,
it said,
I know this doesn’t feel good, but soon it will. Just wait, I’m on my way!
This is how they would find me. Eve would think at first I was asleep, but tomorrow morning when I didn’t wake up she’d shake me and feel my cold hands and scream.

There was a tightness in my head that moved to my chest, and I could feel my heart slow and still.
I’m dead. I’m dead.
Justin would fall to his knees with anguish, hating himself and hating Eve and realizing what a mistake he’d made. Everyone I’d ever known would come for the funeral. They’d stand in the rain without umbrellas and cry for my lost life. And later passing tourists would read my headstone, subtract the dates and frown, wondering why I’d died so young.

The tightness spread from my heart down into my stomach, where it squeezed like a fist. Not so much nausea but a churning cramp that doubled me over. Oh God, oh God, I’m dying and how dying hurts! It curdles in your gut and presses your stomach up through your chest to your throat, oh God! and I barely made it to the trashcan.

When it was over I carried the can to the bathroom and cleaned it out, then brushed my teeth. Daddy’s door was still closed, and I knew what they were saying, poor Kerry, ignorant desperate Kerry, we’ll miss her when she’s gone.

There were two slips of paper outside the door. He must have dropped them when he’d run to her. I lifted them, their edges crawling against my palms like something alive, and then in a fit of blind anger, I tore them in half, in quarters, in eighths, into hundreds of meaningless tatters which fluttered to the hall floor.

I pulled the bulb from a bathroom sconce, wrapped it in a towel and stomped it with my foot. I took the base with its jagged glass edge, curled up on my bed, cradled it between my palms and closed my eyes. My mind felt like wet cotton, my body felt like fresh, uncooked liver. I ran the broken bulb against my wrist and felt the cold tongue-lick of glass against my skin. I sliced harder, then stared down at the beaded blood. And then again, a widening red crevice of hurt; so hard that the glass fell from my shaking hand, my eyes blind from the pain.

I brought my wrist to my mouth and bit my teeth against it, but as my teeth dug deeper my heart seemed to beat even harder. I could kill, so why couldn’t I die? There were so many people out there who wanted to live but were dying, so why couldn’t God just make some kind of trade? It would be so easy to just let go, just slip into dreamless, painless, blameless sleep. But God didn’t seem to care what people deserved. He was stubborn. He had His own set of rules.

I stared down at the torn pictures still on the floor: a severed leg and two clasped hands, an amputated head with a grape-purple face. And I suddenly got it. I suddenly understood God. Because to live would mean not only that I’d lost, but most of all that I’d look again and again at everything I’d lost. It would writhe and root inside my gut, would slash at my wrists day after day, reminding me of what I’d done. Of me.

I tore off the bedcovers, pressed them against the wound, felt my wrist throbbing and pulsing with streams of blood. I waited for the blackish red to seep and puddle warm, but when I pulled off the covers and inspected the stain, all I saw were dishearteningly insignificant spots and smears, already almost dry. I stared down at my wrist for a minute, then stood.

I didn’t pack, only pulled the plastic bag out from under Eve’s bed. I took a handful of bills, the money Justin had given to Eve, and then lifted the picture in Eve’s bag, two girls at the beach in their new pink bathing suits. I pressed it between my palms, hands at my face like in prayer, then slipped it into my knapsack along with the bottle of Kahlua, reminders.

Daddy’s door was still closed. All was silent behind it. I gathered the shredded notes I’d scattered and jammed them into my pocket. More reminders.

I turned down the hall and started for the stairs, and then Daddy’s door opened. I froze.

Eve stood there, barefoot, her shirt rumpled. She watched me for a long while without speaking, then nodded slowly.

She knew.

She saw my face and saw the knapsack and knew. And I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell her something that would slap her, enfold her, slow things down enough to give myself a chance to change my mind. But as I opened my mouth to speak, my thoughts racing but my mind blank, she smiled, a slow, slim smile that didn’t touch her eyes. She smiled at me and there was nothing more that could be said. I turned away and started down the stairs, imagining Eve standing there with her hands in fists, looking victorious and yet defeated, both.

It was several hours before the first morning ferry, and so I walked the streets. I walked on feet that felt numb, staring in muted shock at the red flame of morning on the horizon, its wide veins scarring the sky. I walked past the cemetery without stopping. I walked past the entrance to Rodman’s Hollow, and I walked past the Macleans’. I walked along the bluffs, looking out over the jagged peaks, and when I was done saying good-bye to my past, I started up the hill to LoraLee’s. She was the only one who’d give a damn that I was gone.

I opened her door without knocking. Her house was dark and warm, like a womb. She lay in bed, her chest rising heavily with each breath. I watched for a minute, then sat beside her on the thin mattress. “I’m leaving,” I said.

LoraLee’s head jolted forward. She rubbed at her eyes. “Kerry? That you?” Her voice was hoarse. She raised up on her elbows and watched me without speaking. After a moment I shook my head. “I’ve done things, things you don’t know about, and I can’t stand it here anymore.”

She raised her eyebrows at me and I turned away. “Because I thought he was mine and I tried to keep him, but truth was, none of it was really mine at all.” My voice broke. “And truth was, in the end it was all my fault, because I was the one who was stealing.”

“Girl?” LoraLee sat up and pressed my hands between hers.

The warmth of her fingers made my eyes fill. “So I’m leaving.”

She watched me carefully, then shook her head. “Who gonna take care of you?”

“I’ll take care of myself, I can do it now. I don’t know where I’m going but maybe Boston to start, and then I’ll find a great job and a great place to live, and I’ll forget about all of this.”

“Forget?” She brought one of my hands to her pouchy cheek and held it there. “You leave now you won’t forget, ’cos there still too much battlin’ inside you. You leave and that’s okay ’cos mebbe the feelin’ here is too hard to face now, but ’fore long you come back ’cos you has to. You ’member that when the time come. You ’member why you’s feelin’ empty and strange and then you come back when you’s ready to move on.”

I sat for a long while, watching her, one hand still on her cheek, the other cradled in her palm. Finally I buried my head against her chest and let her hold me. We rocked. We rocked until there was nothing else.

SIX

Canopies on the Soul

June

2007

34

I
T WAS AN HOUR
after our mother had left, and Eve and I sat with LoraLee on Eve’s bed. LoraLee handed back the letters I’d given her, and I shook my head. “Why?” I whispered. “How?”

“She come to me,” LoraLee said. “When your daddy die she come to the island. She come to be certain in her own mind that you’s cared for, and she see’d me with you, see’d how I’s there for you and she say to me, you don’t owe me nothin’, don’t know me from Adam, but I’s gonna axe you the biggest favor I ever axed of anybody. She say every year I been gettin’ a letter that show me I done right by leavin’. Now he gone and I don’t get them letter no more.”

“So she was using you to ease her conscience,” I said.

LoraLee watched me with narrowed eyes. “You got that wrong, chile. She feel pain in her heart every day for what she done. She say to me, she say these chilluns is the only thing I done what is good in this worl’ and I couldn’t even do right by them.”

“She didn’t even try!”

“She try the bes’ she knowed how, Kerry. What matter is you sees how your momma kep’ on lovin’, and how your daddy kep’ on lovin’ your momma even when she don’t show him nothin’ to deserve that love. And someday, chile, I think you see how you kep’ on lovin’ your momma too. That don’t never stop.”

“After what she’s done—”

“Affer what she done, my foot. I tell you a lesson, Kerry, most important lesson life learn me. Onest you loves a person, that don’t jus’ die.” She stared at me pointedly. Her voice was soft and deep. “Everyone you ever love, anyone who ever love you, lay a light like a canopy on your soul. Your soul, it fashion up of those canopy, one on another, and you can turn yourself away, you mebbe covers them with time or anger. You can close your eye to it, but when you opens them the light still there. The light still there and still you shine. That there’s how it works to be a human. The love become a part of you.”

Eve picked a piece of lint off her sheet, smiled at it. I watched her for a minute, then narrowed my eyes. “How could you not tell us, LoraLee? All those times I’d talk to you about my mother and you’d sigh and shake your head like you felt sorry.”

“I did feel sorry. It mebbe soun’ bad, but there ain’t no good answer here. Jus’ to wait and hope she grow enough to face you by the time you’s old enough to unnerstan’. Till then it’s better to think she be there if she could. Better to think she don’t know where you is.”

“She’s right, you know.” Eve reached for her water, drank it in three echoing gulps, then lay back down. “She knew Daddy was dead and still she couldn’t bring herself to take us back in her life. If we’d realized it, we would’ve felt so worthless.”

“We did feel worthless.”

Eve watched me without speaking. After a minute LoraLee stood. “I leaves you two be.”

“You can’t leave, not until you explain it. Why would she come here now? What does she expect from us?”

“She don’t ’spect nothin’, chile. Sure, she want forgiveness, but that’s your choice.” LoraLee started toward the hallway, then stopped suddenly and turned back. “I wisht I coulda did more for you, coulda tole you sooner how you’s in her mind. But what I can tell you again is she done the bes’ she could by you, the bes’ that she knowed how. You ’members the money come to your door? That money come from your momma.”

“No,” I said. “You gave us money, the brown envelopes. We saw you put them on the doormat.”

LoraLee raised her eyebrows. “From your momma. She studyin’ then, schoolin’ to make herself a better life and she didn’t have much to spare, but what she have, she send for you.” LoraLee smiled and walked to the hallway. “The bes’ that she knowed how, you ’member that. That’s all anyone can do.”

We watched after her. “You’re okay, right?” Eve said finally.

“This is worse,” I whispered. “Knowing she thought her only obligation was money, that’s worse.”

“I don’t think that’s it. She saved our teeth, Kerry.”

I stared at her and she shook her head. “I mean, yeah, I still hate her for leaving, but this does help me understand her better.” She shifted to face me. “I saw her eyes, Kerry. I thought they’d be the empty eyes you see on druggies, on serial killers, but they weren’t at all.” She smiled crookedly. “They were my eyes.”

Eve was right, now when I pictured our mother’s eyes they were Eve’s eyes, strong even against the glare of what she’d never have. Even her tears had seemed resolute. “I wanted her to look sorrier,” I said, “like she understood what she’d done.”

“She understands, I think, but she doesn’t take responsibility. And I guess I don’t need her to anymore. Guilt doesn’t change anything, that’s what Justin always says.” She shrugged. “Anyway, it doesn’t hurt me anymore. All of this, what she did or didn’t do, I’m coming to terms. Months back, this probably would’ve made me so angry I could explode. But now…” She stared into her empty water glass, then set it back on her nightstand. “Now I’m starting to realize people do what they need to do. No one means to hurt you, they just don’t know any better. They’re just trying to help themselves.”

I brushed at the water that had dribbled onto her collar, then lay beside her.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “How we’re twins, so biologically, genetically, we’re the same. And when we were born we both had this same potential to do good, be honest and upright, all that crap. That’s how I should’ve turned out, what I wanted. But somewhere down the line, without consciously making a decision, we came out different.”

She glanced at me, then shook her head against the pillow. “So I was looking for a reason and what I think is maybe I felt guiltier. Mom left and from the beginning I thought it was my fault.” Her voice shook and she cleared her throat. “That somehow she felt this…
heat
I had inside me, this wanting, I wanted everything.”

“That’s crazy, Eve,” I said.

“I’m just telling you how I thought. What happened is it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. You focus on the bad parts of you, the bad thoughts, and they grow.” She reached for the button that would deliver her medicine. At the muted beep she exhaled a rattling sigh. “If you think of yourself as a bad person, you do what you can to confirm your inner expectations. It’s okay to lie, to steal, to steal your sister’s boyfriend away with lies because you can’t help it. That’s who you are.”

I curled my legs up to my chest. Eve’s eyes were glazed. “Mom left because she couldn’t make herself stay. Daddy died because he was stupid, because he was sad, and there’s nothing we could’ve done. Neither of them was happy about leaving us, and the things you did to me, the things I did to you, we never wanted to hurt each other, not really.”

The tears stung behind my eyes. I blinked quickly and nodded.

“You know I asked Justin to help me die the other day.”

I pulled her hand to my chest, rubbed a finger against her nail. “I know,” I said. “He told me.”

“And now I’m going to ask you.”

My hand froze. “Eve—”

“I feel like I’ve reached this resolution inside myself now, like I’m ready to go. And I want to give you whatever it takes to reach that same resolution so you can help me. It’d have nothing to do with—”

“Stop!” I brushed her hand away.

“It’s okay. Just take your time and think about it is all, how it could be about love, not anger.”

I stared at the window. Since I’d gotten here, I still hadn’t ever told Eve that I loved her, like I’d forgotten how to say the words.

“And I need something else from you.”

I shook my head.

“See, I need you to be there for Gillian. Be here.”

I didn’t understand, but then with a shock, I realized what she was saying. “I can’t,” I said.

“Yes you can.” She lifted her head, then let it drop back onto the pillow. “You will because she needs you, she needs a mother just as much as we did, maybe more because she’s never been without one. I couldn’t forgive myself for leaving her just like we were left.”

“This is so different, Eve.”

“Is it? Not in the mind of a twelve-year-old girl it’s not.” She smiled a strange, flat smile. “And listen to me, Kerry, because also I need you to be there for Justin.”

“No,” I said quickly. The word felt like a gulp.

“Thing is, Justin was yours first. And hell, I’m not blind, Kerry, I know what’s going on around me.” She made a strange crow-like sound, somewhere between a caw of laughter and a choke. “Now he’s yours again.”

I jumped to my feet, an impulse, then slowly sank back to the bed. When I knew I could speak without my voice shaking, I turned to face her. “Tell me the truth, Eve.
Was
he mine first? Was he ever really?”

She turned her head away from me, then brought the back of her hand to her mouth and whispered, “I don’t know.”

I stared at her.

“I mean, yes, of course he loved you. Back when his stories were the most important thing to him, you guys shared that in a way we never did, which to him probably felt like you were sharing his soul. But the thing is, he was also drawn to me for those kinds of indefinable things that attract a person to someone else. He always loved you, maybe he was even happier with you, but he felt passion for me.”

At the word
passion
I felt a sudden searing rage, more anger than I’d felt since I’d returned, maybe more than I’d felt for thirteen years. I dug my knuckles into the mattress and said, “And you fed on that, didn’t you? You could’ve had any man you wanted, but you had to prove to yourself that you could seduce the one man who was supposed to be off-limits.”

Eve turned back to me, looking vaguely stunned. “I didn’t seduce him! Okay sure, maybe I was teasing him a little, but I flirted with everybody, you know that. Even though I couldn’t control anything else in my life, I knew I could control men. But not Justin. Even if part of me was jealous, I wouldn’t ever have intentionally taken him away. He knew I was a flirt too, Kerry. It wasn’t like I was irresistible. Not if he was really trying to resist me.”

“So what happened that last night?” I said hoarsely. “The night I left?”

She lay there, her body slack, then gave a sharp nod. “Okay.” She glanced up at me. “Okay, I’ll tell you. Here’s the thing. I don’t know if he loved me. But he thought he did. Or at least he told me he thought he did.” She pulled the covers to her chin and closed her eyes. I could smell her breath, fruity and stale. “The night we wrote the letters, I was trying to prove something to you. He’d come to me, I was pretty sure he would, and when it was over you’d see how this was Justin’s fault even more than mine.”

“I couldn’t believe you’d do that to me,” I said hoarsely. “Do you understand how it was? With everything that was going on, when I needed both of you and neither of you was there.”

“I know.” She picked at the plasticine she now used to hold her wedding ring on her scrawny finger, then looked up at me, her eyes swimming with tears. “That’s all I’ve thought about all this time, how it must’ve been for you. And the night Ryan died, I swear I didn’t go to Justin planning to sleep with him. I kept seeing Ryan’s face, how he looked at Jill Stanton’s party, his eager boy face, and I had to find some way to get it out of my head.”

“You slept with Justin so you could stop thinking about Mr. Maclean’s face? Why didn’t you just use alcohol? Or, I don’t know, hit yourself over the head.”

“He kissed me first, I swear to you; what I told you back then was the truth. I went into his room just needing somebody safe to hold me, and he had me pressed back on the bed and I was the one who pulled away. So he ran to his office and I’m lying there on his bed and all these images are throwing themselves at me.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Ryan’s face, his voice, I had to stop thinking. Fuck, Kerry, a man had just died because of me!”

“Because of you?” And suddenly I realized what she’d said. “You saw Mr. Maclean at Jill’s party.”

She stiffened. “No.”

“Tell me.” I grabbed her under the chin, forced her to look at me. “Tell me!”

Her eyes reddened. “Kerry…”

“What did you do?” And suddenly I could see it all, Eve slinking up to him in her green silk dress, her hooded eyes and slim, seductive smile as she whispers in his ear. Then nibbles it. “You came on to him.”

“No I didn’t. I didn’t! I mean, not really. I just was so pissed off at everything, remembering how Mrs. Maclean hung off him that afternoon at graduation, her face when she looked at him. He was so used to being adored, and I guess what was in my head, I wanted him to know I never adored him like that, to think I was using him the whole time even more than he was using me. So at the party I blackmailed him.”

“You
what
?”

“It just got mixed up in my head, seeing the kids graduating, knowing how his sons would probably end up going to Brown or Harvard while we’d be stuck making six dollars an hour serving fried fish. So I told him I wanted twenty thousand dollars. I told him I’d call the papers.” She laughed sharply and said, “I’d prove it by telling them about the mole on his ass. He had a mole shaped like North Carolina.”

It was incredible, really, unbelievable. Eve had been seventeen, a child with a force invisible on the surface like a riptide, the guts to take down one of the most powerful men in the state. “How come you never told me this?”

“About the mole? I thought it was kind of private. A mole on the ass isn’t the most attractive thing.”

“You’re not funny,” I said.

“You wouldn’t have understood, Kerry. You would’ve blamed me for everything, and I couldn’t take that.”

This, of course, was true. Even without knowing what she’d done I’d blamed her. I raised my chin. “So. What did he say?”

“I remember all of it, you know? Every single word. It’s like that whole night’s been branded on me. I keep it in this separate compartment of my brain, but it’s all still there.” She shook her head, as if in amazement. “So I threatened him and first he goes, ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ and I said, ‘You really want to test me on that?’ So he pulls me into a back bedroom and he says, ‘I know you don’t want to hurt me because you love me.’ And then he kisses me, and first I’m pushing him away. But then I don’t know what happened. I guess I thought about you out with Justin and there I was all dressed up and all alone, so pathetic, and somehow I found myself kissing him back.”