Pieces of My Sister's Life (34 page)

The laughter froze on my tongue as she inspected the pill bottle. When she finally opened it I turned away, trying to focus on another life, the nights after our mother left. For months after, we’d fall asleep in the same bed, curled against each other as Daddy sat over us and sang in a hoarse, deep bass.

Desert silver blue beneath the pale moonlight,

Coyote yappin’ lazy on the hi-i-ill

We’d hold hands, my cheek nestled in her neck. Our breath would come and go in unison, a halo of tooth-pasty air. I heard the rattle of pills and sang louder.

Sleepy winks of light along the far skyline

Time for millin’ cattle to be sti-i-ill…

In my head I’d see Eve’s dreams. I’d imagine us on Daddy’s boat with our mother, all of us floating on Daddy’s voice, all four of us together.

So-o now the lightnin’s far away,

The coyote’s nothin’ scary, just singin’ to his deea-rie.

I lay beside her with my head on her shoulder. Her arms moved against me but I couldn’t tell what she was doing, not really, as she reached for the melted ice cream, gulped at it, one arm up and then the other. I stiffened and sang on.

Ya-ay ho, tomorr’s another day,

So settle down ye cattle till the mo-or-ning.

One arm and then the other and then the clunk of empty carton and empty bottle on the nightstand. And I was full up with something pressing outward against my skin, pushing up the hair on my arms, pushing out against my stomach and my chest, hollow but full like air in a taut balloon.

Eve sucked in a raspy breath and squinted at me. “It wasn’t all bad, Ker, was it? More good than bad, or at least the good stuff was more important.”

“Definitely,” I said softly. “Yeah.”

“I never thanked you. For being here, I never said that, did I? Even in the beginning when I hated you for coming now when I thought it was too late, the deepest parts of me felt so much better with you here, knowing you remembered how it used to be.”

“Me too,” I said. “That’s part of why I came.”

She smiled. “Don’t miss me, Kerry, okay?”

I took Eve’s hand and pressed it against my cheek, held it there with my eyes closed. Her hand was cold and moist and I tried for a minute to push my life into it. We watched each other silently until her need overcame my resistance and she closed her eyes, pulled her hand away.

Her body lay still, her skin unlined and lustrous, her chest as girlish-flat as the child we’d been. Sometimes on those nights after Daddy left we’d giggle and lift our tops. We’d press my chest flat against hers and we’d work to synchronize our hearts,
pa-dum, pa-dum
. Is that yours or is that mine? The stretching of my beat to hers, the pulling of her beat to mine, one of our best, most secret tricks, the beats that slowed and pulsed as one.

Now I lifted my blouse and pressed my chest against her chest. I felt my heart,
pa-dum, pa-dum,
I listened for hers and pushed to shape it. Is that yours or is it mine? The beat unyielding and pushing on as long as it would go. No longer. Our beat, my dance to that beat which was different but the same.

Epilogue

I
T WAS AN IMMACULATELY CLEAR DAY
when we said good-bye. I could see the contours of the mainland in the distance. We brought the urn up north, to the long sandbar at the island’s tip. The Block Island Sound met the Atlantic there, and the two often squabbled over territory. But it was ultimately all the same ocean. Ultimately neither of them won.

It was particularly calm, only a thin drag over the sandbar as I waded into the sea. I reached into the urn, then brought my closed fist to my mouth. I kissed it and then opened it and let the breeze blow the ashes against me, breathed them in. I let her drift to the water, watched the waves billow and curl and claim her until finally, she was gone.

It was two weeks later that I got the call. “Just a few questions,” they said and so I went to answer their questions. Through it all I imagined Eve, her laughter at the seriousness of the detective’s face.
Just get off it,
she’d say, and so I acted with the same disdain. It didn’t hurt to lie, because I knew the truth. Eve died of cancer and strength of will, that’s all. And in the end they were satisfied with this. With only circumstantial evidence, they’d have to be. Of course I didn’t think till later to ask the obvious question: why had they analyzed the blood of a woman who for months had been only steps away from death?

I think he’d hoped that by implicating me, he could absolve himself of responsibility. Responsibility for making love to me, for needing Eve’s sickness to be over, for being grateful that I’d ended it for him. He felt guilty for all of it but couldn’t let himself look at any of it. Like years before he’d convinced himself that he actually had been tricked by Eve. Like he’d thought he could free himself by confessing to that betrayal, Justin needed to be the hero in all his stories.

But it doesn’t matter now. I don’t believe in heroes or villains, only in mistakes. I know the false seduction of escape, hiding from the mistakes in an attempt to make them go away. What he’ll see soon is they don’t go away. They’re relentless and they search for you until you stare them in the eye and see they’re really not that ugly after all.

That’s what I told my mother when I called after the funeral, how I understood the realization she’d faced when Daddy died. That regret changes nothing. That the time comes when you need to face your decisions, the life you chose, to make amends and reach some peace with how you lived it. Forgiveness of yourself is like forgiveness of others, it takes distance and growth and time. And I know that’s what we both need now, distance and time. But I’ll come back for her, I know I will. I need to learn who she is.

Really I think I should be grateful in a way for what I’ve lost, for what I have now and who I am—more, in a way, than I might have been. I have a high school degree; I can write that on job applications. And next year I’ll study nursing, which has started to feel to me like a calling.

And I have Gillian now, that’s the most important thing. I write to her almost every day, hoping to give her some feeling of constancy, let her know that I didn’t want to leave. I wonder what Justin thinks when he sees the letters. I guess in a way I’m writing to him as well.

I try to write messages between the lines, things I think will help him, but I’m pretty sure he won’t get what I’m trying to say. He’s not ready. There’s so much I want to tell him, but I still haven’t found the right way to say it. Mostly what I want him to know is that he needs to face his monsters. To realize that they don’t change the person he really is, only his image of himself. An image is hard to deal with. Like photographs, which always seem to have so many more dimensions than two, swept into impossible significance by the knowledge of what came after.

There’s a picture I keep in my bottom drawer beneath an empty bottle of Kahlua and an empty bottle of morphine pills, all the things I don’t want or need but can’t bring myself to throw away because they are my past. In the picture two girls stand at the beach, their arms around each other’s shoulders. I think now if I dared to look at the picture, I’d see things that aren’t really there. I think I’d imagine I could read their souls, see one clinging to the past, the other fighting to move on. I think I’d try to read love in the placement of their arms, read hate in the fact that they face the camera and not each other. I’d imagine I could tell that one would live and one would die, that one would steal and one would try to retrieve what was never really hers.

But I know that the truth is these two girls really are the same. They’re just girls standing at the beach with wind blowing at their backs, cheeks stretched dry from sun and salt, and bathing suits that itch with sand. The truth is that both girls have dreams of love and laughter and tomorrow, and both girls wish that long summer would never end. I think now maybe it didn’t, maybe it only faded and returned and faded again, in the way summers do.

It’s a different thing altogether to lose a person in life and in death. I see her all the time now in new expressions I’ve adopted, a sideways glance in the mirror when I pass. And I see her on clear nights when I look into the emptiness to find her. She comes to me, a twin aura, through miles and worlds and lifetimes to let me know it’s okay. That’s what she’d tell me if she could, and what I’d tell them all if they’d let me. You can face what you’ve done, can sort through your past and tuck the bad parts with the good parts into a bottom drawer. You can remember that they’re hidden without ever having to take them out again, and in time the edges will blur and you’ll be left with the truth.

Acknowledgments

I AM INFINITELY GRATEFUL
to Kim Lionetti, for believing, and to Caitlin Alexander for her enthusiasm and careful, insightful comments.

Thanks to my dad, one of the most generous people I know, for your encouragement, the example you set every day on faithfulness and commitment, as well as the quote on perseverance that hangs over my desk. Also to my mother, who will never understand this acknowledgment, will never even understand that this book is mine, but who taught me most of what I know about love.

Thanks to the friends and family who shrieked with excitement when I told you this was happening. You were the ones who made this all feel real.

Finally, and of course most importantly, thanks to Jerry. Without you I wouldn’t have been able to even start this, let alone finish it. My name may be on the cover but this is as much your book as mine, from the Thomas Rathburn quote to the Boston scene and the nights we spent debating and laughing and refining the plot. I may be a writer, but I’ll never be able to find the words to express how much I love you.

About the Author

E
LIZABETH
J
OY
A
RNOLD
was raised in New York, and has degrees from Vassar College and Princeton University. She lives with her husband in Hopewell, New Jersey, where she is at work on her next novel. Visit her website at
www.ElizabethJoyArnold.com
.

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PROMISE THE MOON

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1

Natalie

I
’d been kicking Josh’s headstone.

In retrospect, I should’ve gotten the flat kind of stone instead of the sticking-up kind, because before too long the thing will probably be on the ground anyway. Retribution for Toby, who hadn’t said a word in more than two months, retribution for his night terrors and the flatness in his eyes. Retribution for Anna, who pretended to me she wasn’t hurting but still came downstairs every night to stare at the photo of herself on Josh’s shoulders.

I’d been to the cemetery six times in the two weeks since they’d laid the stone, five of those times without the kids, which meant I’d come for the express purpose of kicking. Which felt good while I was doing it, but once it was over all I’d gotten was a sore foot and, on the fifth day, a funny look from an old man one row down, who’d been clipping the grass around a stone with a pair of orange-handled children’s scissors.

It was Josh I really wanted to kick, of course. But mostly, mostly I just wanted to hold him.

2

Anna

S
o I looked up
hero
in my dictionary, and here is what it says:

1) A person who is admired for great courage, noble character, and performing good deeds.

2) A sandwich, usually made with crusty bread, a.k.a. submarine, hoagie.

3) An illustrious warrior.

My dad was the number one and number three kind of hero, both. A double hero.

How he died is this: He went on this mission without telling us and was gone all night, after which he got shot in his plane, after which Marines brought him home to our driveway to rest in his new Pathfinder because Mom told them it was one of his favorite places to be. After which Toby found him. In my opinion, it was not the sort of thing he should’ve seen. In my opinion, Mom should’ve had them take Dad away before we got up, but it’s too late now.

I’ve thought a lot about what’s the right thing to say to a kid in these circumstances, and have come up mostly with wrong things. These are some that came out of Ms. Thomas, Amanda Greer, and Tim Emerson, in order: Number 1: “Oh, poor sweetie, you gonna be okay?” Number 2: “I
totally
know how it feels because my bunny died last spring.” And worst of all, Number 3: “What did he look like without a head?”

The right thing is probably what Madison, who is my best friend, did. She didn’t say anything for my whole first morning back to school, just followed me around wherever I went, sat next to me, and gave everybody else dirty looks.

I used to like school because I am good at it. But since Dad died I stopped caring about being smart. And the day Dad came back from heaven was, I have to say, an especially bad day. Not just because it was Wednesday, math-test day, and I have not mastered division, but also because of art. We were doing this thing where you color patterns on paper, smear over them with black craypas, and then draw, and voilà, magic colors. What I drew was me, Toby, and Mom in front of our house, which looked boring, so I added rain, after which Mrs. Goldberg hugged me from behind, for no reason, and said, “Your daddy will always be part of your family, too.” Which, for whatever reason, is also not a right thing to say. It makes you feel alone.

So I was not in a good mood when we got the heart. I had what my dad used to call “the weight,” where what I used to think he meant was “the wait.” Because that’s what he did when he had it, hung around in bed until he felt better. But now I understand what he meant, a punch in the stomach that makes the hurt spread heavy up your chest and down to your legs, so all you want to do is fall over and lie there forever.

I sat next to Toby on the bus ride home because I always do now. It used to be I wouldn’t be caught dead, but now he needs me, so I don’t care what people think. Also, to be very truthful, by the end of the day I need him, too, because he’s the only person who understands, and also he is part of home.

Toby rode with his forehead against the window, and I shoved up close to him; he’s little but he’s also compacted like a muscle. How it is sitting so close is like having some part of you that you need, having it outside your body and not being able to put it back in.

I’d been trying to memorize everything I saw out the bus window, because soon it wouldn’t be our home anymore. What I saw was: houses, all with rooves made out of flower pot material and little lawns; dirt that was the same color as the rooves; the library; a girl playing hopscotch; a girl holding a baby doll with a dirty face; a boy standing there. I wrote these things down in my notebook so I would remember, which I’d been doing since I found out we were leaving. I had a list of everyone in my class, along with who I liked and didn’t like, and the color of all the carpets and curtains in our house, and my favorite places to walk. You wouldn’t think you could forget these things, but you do.

I also started a list about my dad, but it didn’t really work because you can’t explain a person in words. I used to write things and then scribble them out and try again.
“He was nice. He was funny. He used to crawl around with me and Toby on his back. He liked coffee.
He had yellow hair.”
But it all just sounded like I was explaining somebody who could’ve been anyone, so after a while I gave up.

Where we were living was called Camp Pendleton, and why we had to move was because it was a place for only families of Marines people to live. My dad’s rank was posted outside our door, lieutenant colonel, which was no longer applicable.

Where we were moving to was near my grandparents and was called Red Bluff. Me and Toby would have to share a room, which was okay except that Toby had nightmares that woke me up. Which was also okay, though, because I’d go lie in his bed and we’d just rock until we both fell asleep. Except sometimes he wet the bed, which was gross and not okay, but it wasn’t his fault.

When we got home on the day of the heart, Mom was waiting out by the door. She was wearing the kind of funny smile she gets sometimes, like she just tasted bad food at a party and she doesn’t want to offend whoever cooked it. She was wearing her Storytime Sally clothes, which are: a white shirt, a skirt and vest made out of squares from different fabrics, a red velvet hairband. Which normally would’ve been embarrassing, but since Dad died I didn’t care. They could tease me, but they didn’t matter anymore.

We got our hugs, and then we went inside for our milk. Usually Mom asked about our day and listened, but that afternoon she seemed different. Mom has three personalities. Her first kind is quiet, her voice all low and soft and nice, which she wears around grown-ups, and when you interrupt her while she’s reading a book, and when she is putting us to bed. Her second kind is smiley, which she wears when she is Storytime Sally, reading to the little kids like everything she’s saying is a thrilling, astonishing secret she wants only them to know. And her third personality is right in between, the one she usually has with us, listening like we are important and smiling like she wants to know more, and always saying the right thing to make the good stuff seem better and the bad stuff not so bad. But, that afternoon, she was none of the above.

“I have a new favorite letter,” I said. We were learning script in school, and last week my favorite was the capital E, but now my favorite was definitely capital S, all fancy and swirling. I pulled out my notebook to show Mom my practice:

“Look,” I said.

But Mom didn’t look. “How d’you guys feel about ravioli for dinner?” she said.

I traced my finger around an S, then got embarrassed. My S’s were definitely not as good as I’d thought. “Lookit this,” I said, and I got up and went to the middle of the kitchen, did a cartwheel, and ended with my arms in the air. “Give me a rating,” I said.

Mom smiled and said, “That was a perfect ten!” But she wasn’t even looking. She was reaching for my milk, and she chugged it down in three gulps. Which made me mad, so I grabbed a cookie and left.

“Anna?” Mom called, but she didn’t come to get me.

I went to my bedroom to read. It was a good day in my reading life. I had discovered a book every person should read, with the title of
A Wrinkle in Time,
and it was everything a book should be. Scary but not too scary. About things you know you will never see but that are real enough you believe someone else might really have seen them. It was the kind of book you stay up to read until your eyes feel like they are bleeding, and it was because of that book that I was able, that day, to believe in magic.

I was there on my bed when Toby came into my room. It took all my strength to come back into the world, and I wanted to yell at him for ruining the dream of it, until I saw that he was crying.

There was a Secret Special place in our house, in the upstairs bathroom, under the cupboard where Mom kept the towels and toilet paper. The cupboard had these golf ball feet that made a space only my and Toby’s hands could fit to reach inside. It was a space that only us, and my dad, knew.

It was Dad who found the space and figured out what it was for. He showed us the first day after one of his bad weeks. First days, this is how it was. His eyes would still look flat like they’d been painted on, and bruised like he’d been rubbing his fists into them hard. He still wouldn’t be able to hug us or even look at us, no room to let us in. But on the day he showed us the space, he’d been able to sit on Toby’s bed, with me on one side and Toby on the other, and he could talk. “I have something for you,” he said.

He reached into his pajama pocket and he pulled out a little heart. It was the exact size of my palm, and made out of soft fabric the color of a banana, a little mouse pillow. “Smell,” he said, and he held it first to Toby’s nose and then to mine. It smelled like winter and like fog, like washed clothes before they’ve gone into the dryer. “That’s called lavender,” he said.

I smiled, to be polite. It seemed like about as good a present as getting socks, and definitely not a kind of thing me and Toby could both share. But, that is because I didn’t know.

“Thanks,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. Anything else would have been too much. But then he took us up to the bathroom.

I loved that bathroom. Everything in it was white except the walls and ceiling, which were blue. This is what I wrote about it in my list of things:
“Upstairs bathroom—Crack in sink shape of Big Dipper, have to wriggle toilet handle, faucet shaped like jewelry.”
This is what I could have written, too, that when you laid in the tub you felt like you were floating on a cloud. When we got up to the bathroom, Dad bent down and he pointed. “This,” he said, “will be our Secret Special place. We’ll be the only ones who know. And on days when I can’t be with you, I’ll do this.” He held up the heart for us to see, and then he tucked it under the cabinet. We watched it disappear.

“Now take it out,” he said.

Me and Toby reached under the cabinet and we both brought it out, me holding the pointy end and Toby holding the bumps. Dad held out his hand and we gave it back. Wondering.

“On days when I can’t be with you,” he said, “I’ll leave this here while you’re asleep. And in the morning, when you’re missing me, you can come here and reach inside to take it out. This’ll be my secret message to let you know that I’m still here.” He gave a smile that was not a real smile, and then he said, “What it means is that I’m okay, and that I love you.”

I understood. I understood exactly, and I think Toby did, too. On days when he couldn’t talk, the heart would be his words.

So that is what we did the whole last year before my daddy died, the times when he couldn’t unlock his bedroom door. Toby would wake up and he’d come to get me, and we’d both go together to feel under the cupboard. We’d take the heart out and we’d hold it, smell it. And then, when we felt better, we’d put the heart back in the Secret Special place, to show Dad that we loved him, too. And that we were okay, even when we weren’t.

This is what I did on the day Mom told me about my dad. I couldn’t breathe and so I ran up to the bathroom. And I knew what dying meant, and I knew it would not make sense to look, but I couldn’t stop myself. My knees bent and my hand reached, stretched under and then farther. I swept my hand around first carefully, scaredly, but then faster, back and forth, grabbing for nothing until my knees got sore and my shoulder got sore and I got a deep indented line in my arm from the edge of the cupbord.

The heart wasn’t there. Obviously it wasn’t, he was dead. What was there were dust and a black ball of lint. There were four little brown pellets. There was a dead ladybug. I put them all into a sandwich bag. I hid them under my mattress and slept on them every night. I don’t know why. I guess because I felt like they might have been some kind of message, a puzzle he left from heaven, like a rebus:

But the heart, the only message that meant anything, was gone. Until. Magic.

Toby came into my room. He stood there watching me and he was crying, a shaking, underwater-gulping kind of crying, like he couldn’t get enough air. He walked over and he put something on my bed, and there it was.