Pieces of My Sister's Life (35 page)

“Where’d you get it from?” I whispered.

He didn’t answer because this was back in the time when he couldn’t talk, when seeing my dad dead and maybe bloody had swallowed up his voice. He just turned away and walked out of my room, and so I followed him. He walked up to the bathroom and then he looked at me, and there was a rushing through my stomach, a dark wind.

“There?” I said, and then I sat down right on the bathroom floor and Toby sat down next to me, his knee touching my knee. We sat there not looking at each other, both of us holding the heart the same how we did on the bad days. And when we were done, I wrote a note, and we slipped the heart and the note back under the cupboard.
“We love you,”
my note said,
“and we’re okay.”
Because I didn’t believe it, not really, but part of me did.

Later that night we looked under the cupboard again, and even though all of me hoped, really I was sure they would still be there. That even though I’d looked weeks before, I’d somehow missed the heart there in the shadows. But when we looked again that night, the heart, and my note, were gone.

The next morning my dad left the heart again, and again the next night it was gone. It went like that for two days, back and gone and then back, and we’d sit there on the floor, both of us holding it, smelling it. Our daddy. Our dead daddy. Who loved us enough to find a way back home.

And then on the third day, along with the heart was a letter. The letter came in an envelope, with a little heart printed where the return address should be. “To Anna and Toby and Natalie,” the envelope said. A letter from heaven.

“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.”

“I hated Mom for leaving us.” Eve’s voice cracked and she swallowed quickly. “And Daddy I hated, too. Anything I ever used to feel about them got swallowed up by the hate.

“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.”

PIECES OF MY SISTER’S LIFE

A Bantam Book / August 2007

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

“Cowboy’s Lullaby” by Badger Clark from
Sun and Saddle Leather
© 1920.

Excerpt from
Charlotte’s Web
by E. B. White © 1952.

Excerpt from “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll from
Through the Looking Glass
© 1871.

“Lighthouse Keeper’s Log” by Jerome X. Tull. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved by the author.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2007 by Elizabeth Joy Arnold

Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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eISBN: 978-0-553-90388-1

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