Pieces of My Sister's Life (4 page)

Eve glanced at me. “See, I was over at Justin’s yesterday, and Mrs. Caine was acting all sorry and sweet, and she said if there was ever anything she could do and how I’d always be welcome.”

My legs felt suddenly like the insides of a jelly donut. “You can’t.”

“It won’t be a big deal, Kerry. I’ll be right next door. We’ll have you over for dinner and you’ll see me in school.”

The pictures seared through my head: Eve and Justin sharing breakfasts, sharing a bathroom, sharing a bed. “Fuck that. I’m coming too.”

Eve smiled at me like I was a not-completely-funny joke, but I didn’t care. “You really think I’d stay here alone? They’d drive me bonkers.” I stared at the heels of my hands, then pressed them against my eyes.

Eve stroked my arm, then slid out from under the bed. “I’ll help you pack.”

I could feel my pulse quickening with excitement or fear. I crawled out and looked up at her, then saw the suitcase on the end of the bed, filled and zipped like finality. “They’ll send us back. Bert and Georgia, they’ll make us come back.”

Eve raised her eyebrows, smiled with half her mouth. “They won’t,” she said. “I’ve got plans. You just wait and you’ll see.”

We were lucky that only Justin was home. I’m sure that greeted with adult faces of questioning discomfort we would have realized the insanity and turned back. But Justin only glanced at our bags and nodded like he’d known it was only a matter of time.

He set us up in his office with sleeping bags and hot cocoa and talked to us about the sorts of things (sports, the love lives of the stars) that kids tend to talk about in abnormal situations, precisely because they are so mundane and unrelated to their lives. It was exactly what we needed, enough to give us composure and confidence so that by the time Justin’s parents came home, we knew just what to say.

“They’re always telling us how they’re too old to be watching over two teenage girls,” Eve said.

I nodded. “Seems like they’re always either out in the shops or sleeping, and Bert, he always smells like whiskey.”

Mrs. Caine raised her eyebrows. “He drinks?”

“It’s hard for us ’cause it’s so much like Daddy was on his bad days,” Eve said. “The things he says, how he smells, it just brings it back.” Her eyes were suddenly misty with tears. I wondered if they were real. “It just makes us remember all the things we’ve been trying to forget.”

Mr. Caine’s face flushed red, and Mrs. Caine’s eyes softened with pity. I felt a twinge of guilt. “It’s not like they’re not trying,” I said. “I know they’re doing good as they know how to do. It’s just they haven’t had to take care of a kid for years and years, so I guess they just don’t realize.”

Justin’s parents watched each other in silence. I tapped four times on the underside of the table, and then again on the chair.

Finally, Mr. Caine squeezed Eve’s hand. “I guess you could stay here tonight,” he said. “I can let your grandparents know. And tomorrow we’ll have a talk with them.”

Mrs. Caine bent to hug me, then Eve. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I know it’s hard now, but I promise you’ll always be taken care of.”

Later, Eve and I lay in the dark, whispering. “Did you see their faces?” Eve said. “They looked like they wanted to pull us onto their laps and feed us chicken soup. I know they’ll keep us.”

I buried my head in the sleeping bag. Had Justin slept here? Was this the scent of his sleeping body? “Would Bert and Georgia ever let us?”

Eve made a soft snorting sound. “I can’t think of anything that’d make them happier.”

I tried to smile. “Remember when the Potters’ grandkids came up for the summer? How ever since Christmas the Potters were talking about it? And they put up a tire swing and bought a rocking horse and those lawn statues of geese and elves.”

“Yeah, well.” Eve was silent for a minute. When she spoke again her voice was soft. “It’s impossible to love teenagers unless you loved them when they were kids. And maybe it’s the same thing, impossible to love old people unless you loved them from the beginning. If we were six instead of sixteen, things would be different for sure.”

“I guess,” I said. But I remembered when they’d first arrived for Daddy’s funeral, how Georgia had gathered me in her arms, whispered hushing noises in my ear. Maybe it would have been better if they’d never seen us grown and we could love each other in the abstract. Maybe they’d have held the picture from years ago when we’d first met, of Eve and me singing “White Coral Bells” in duet, finishing each other’s sentences to make them laugh. “But what if they actually do want us?”

Eve was silent for a moment, then took my hand. Her fingers were cold and dry. “It won’t matter what they want,” she said. “I told you I’ve got a plan.”

I sat with my arms folded on my desk, chin resting on my wrist, and watched Leslie at the desk in front of me, her too-tight sweater over her too-tight jeans. She looked, I thought, like the kind of girl who wouldn’t wear underpants under a skirt.

“‘Instantly afterward,’” Mr. Suter read, pacing back and forth across the front of the classroom, “‘the company were seized with unspeakable consternation, owing to his springing to his feet, turning round several times in an appalling spasmodic, whooping-cough dance, and rushing out the door.’” He raised his head and grinned widely at us, as if expecting something. The class stared back, waiting for the clock to click towards three.

Mr. Suter was heavy. Not just heavy, he was massive, his belly leading the rest of him by a good two feet. I used to think it was cute how he was always so excited over the stupidest things. Now it just seemed sad to me, like he was acting out some stereotype. Even sadder because on this day I could hardly pay attention, let alone laugh back.

“Don’t you get it?” he said. “Dickens was like the sitcom of the nineteenth century! Folks would buy their Sunday papers and turn straight to the story, maybe first because it made them laugh, but then because they got involved with the characters!”

Leslie was scribbling furiously. I peered over at her paper.
Dickens…19teenth cenchery…Sunday papers…first laugh then charicters.
God, she was writing down everything.
Ditz,
I wrote in my notebook, circled the word and crossed it out.

Three-two-one, the bell. The class shuffled their books into their bags, not caring that Mr. Suter was mid-sentence. Only Eve and I stayed at our desks. We turned to each other, and then I nodded. “Let’s go.”

“You think they’re home?”

“Mrs. Caine’s always home, just about. This better have worked, or else we’ll have gotten Bert and Georgia pissed for nothing.”

Eve shrugged. “Look, the question is who they like better, us or Bert and Georgia, which is a no-brainer, and who they believe more. And we were good last night. I even felt sorry for myself. No competition.”

I tried to smile. “You were good. I felt sorry for you too.”

We walked home without speaking and stood outside the Caines’ front door, unsure if it would be right to assume this was where we belonged.

Suddenly Eve pulled at my arm and pointed at the picture window. Bert and Georgia sat with their backs to us. On the sofa across the room, Mrs. Caine poured tea and Mr. Caine reached for a cookie. As we watched, Mrs. Caine laughed and Georgia threw back her head, tittering, “Oh, no!”

Eve watched, unblinking, then turned to me. “I’ll be right back. You stay here.”

I nodded, watching as Bert rose to accept a cup of tea. “Must’ve changed five times,” he said. “I’d go to check on her, and there she’d be by the mirror, new dress, new hat, new gloves.”

Eve ran across the lawn and I sat on the front step, knocked softly on the porch rail, then lined four fallen leaves neatly against the step. This done, I reached for the comfort of Daddy’s key necklace and squeezed my eyes tight-shut. Of course they were getting along; the Caines liked everybody. Bert and Georgia would tell their little stories, the Caines would laugh about the overdramatism of teenagers, and when we came inside they’d hug us and send us home.

More laughter. Georgia’s voice. “Well, it could’ve been the most important day of my life. Wouldn’t you say it’s better to be prepared than look like you don’t care?”

“Sure it is,” Mrs. Caine replied. “I’d have done the same, I bet.”

The stuttering hope of the last hours vaporized, and my body flooded with a hot red frustration. How stupid were we? How stupid to think the Caines cared how our lives would be.

“Scream.”

I looked up. Eve stood in the driveway, hands behind her back. A loud whisper, “Kerry, scream.” She brought one arm forward, lifted it to her head, and I gasped. Daddy’s handgun.

Time stood still. I could see the image before me and struggled to put the pieces together: A finger on a trigger, Eve’s eyes bright with expectation, the black barrel in wild tufts of brown hair. I screamed.

Then everything happened at once. I jumped up and ran down the drive. The front door opened, Mrs. Caine’s voice, “God, no!” A cry from Georgia, Eve’s eyes sparkling with a wild, neuron-firing look, the thump of someone’s body hitting the porch floor as I dove for the gun. The trigger squeezed beneath Eve’s finger, and for a second I imagined the ear-shattering explosion of skull and brain and warm blood on my face, and I shrieked as the gun went off, an empty click.

Eve shouted at me, animal, hysterical, “I won’t! I can’t!” Mr. Caine wrapped us in a bear hug, wrenched the gun from Eve’s hand and hurled it into the bushes. I sank to the ground and grabbed hold of Eve’s leg until she sat beside me, clutched me.

On the porch, Mrs. Caine bent over slapping at Bert’s cheek, while Georgia clasped her hands, knees bending, straightening, bobbing up and down like she was preparing to jump. “Is he breathing? His heart, his heart…”

Eve smiled at me, and there was a moan, guttural, Bert’s moan. “That’s it,” she whispered, and I didn’t know whether to shake her or grab onto her and never let her go.

4

H
OW COULD YOU?”
Georgia said. “How could you do it?”

We were sitting in the living room. Bert was against the far wall in the recliner, arms crossed over his belly, eyes closed. I couldn’t tell if he’d been drinking. Probably he had.

“You knew it had no bullets,” Georgia said. “You just had to cause a scene.”

“I didn’t know.” Eve spoke through clenched teeth.

“He was our only son,” Georgia said, “our baby. And now we’re doing the best we can by you, the best we can do.”

I was shocked to see her tears, and I wanted to go to her, apologize, tell her that it hadn’t really been her fault. But beside me Eve was trembling, and I knew my allegiances. I squeezed Eve’s hand and said nothing.

“You don’t get it,” Eve said. “I wanted to die. I’d rather die than live with you!”

Georgia gasped. Bert opened his eyes, then quickly closed them again.

There was a hesitant knock at the front door. We all stared at it. The knock came again, and the door opened. Mrs. Caine poked her head into the hall. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you okay? Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” Georgia said. “Thank you.”

“I’m here because my husband thought…I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea, but he thought maybe it might help if you all talked this through with me here as a sort of mediator.”

Across the room Bert gave a grunt and stumbled to his feet. His feet seemed to be giving him trouble, catching in the thick rug. “I’m too old,” he slurred. “Old…”

“We worked hard all our lives,” Georgia said, “just saving for our retirement.”

Bert nodded. “Retirement…”

“He was our only son, and we want to do right by his children. They just don’t realize the sacrifices we’re making.”

Bert shook his head as if in pain. “That’s true.”

Mrs. Caine hesitated, then said, “Well, I’ve maybe got an alternative.”

My heart skipped a beat. I glanced at Eve.

“What we were thinking, my husband and me,” she said, “is it might make sense for the girls to stay here.”

Bert stumbled over the leg of an end table, sat down upon it with a thump.

“We’re only right next door, so we can watch out for them, make their dinners, handle any crises.”

Georgia stared at Mrs. Caine. “But you’re not family.”

“I know it sounds unconventional. But the girls only have two more years of school. Really, they’ve been through so much change already, we thought they should at least have a chance to finish out school at home.”

Eve clasped her hands beneath her chin as if in prayer.

“They could help us out in the garage if they need extra money for rent. We could use someone to watch the register.”

There was a loud crack from beneath Bert, and the end table toppled onto the floor. Somehow he managed to stay on his feet. “Yes,” he said.

Georgia gaped at him. “Bert!”

“I’m too old for girls, Georgia. We’re both of us too old.” He stared at the table mournfully. “If you think it’s best, I do suppose they should.”

I felt Eve’s hand slipping into mine. When I turned to her, she bent to whisper in my ear. “Ta-da!”

Just like that, life turned around. Bert and Georgia packed up and left, and Eve and I began our life without family. We got a quick lesson in grownup headaches, rent and groceries and electricity bills paid for with a thousand-dollar check, signed by Bert, which we found on the hall table after they’d left. I had to pinch myself daily to make sure this was real; the first few weeks I felt blanketed in a kind of haze.

We began to work at the Caines’ garage, supposedly keeping the books, but mostly just sitting at the front desk searching for good radio stations, pretending we didn’t know that the Caines didn’t need bookkeepers.

I did a lot of remembering in those first days, spent hours poring through old photographs I’d long ago hidden in a shoebox under my bed. We were always smiling in those pictures, and looking at them I could almost forget we’d ever been anything but happy.

I was sorting through them one day, trying to place them in chronological order, when Eve walked into the bedroom. She stood without speaking for a minute, then came to sit beside me. She lifted each of the pictures in turn: Daddy riding one of our tricycles, his knees up at his ears; Daddy in his Santa Claus suit, white beard crooked to expose the brown beard underneath. These few pictures were all we had left of him, and she studied each of them so carefully, like she wanted to pull the life from them.

“I hardly even remember most of these,” she said finally. “It’s like they happened to someone else.”

I nodded. “Like a dream. Sometimes I think, God, what if it’s always like that? If when we get to be thirty we’ll try and look back on now, and this’ll feel like we’re watching it from the outside?”

“I am watching from outside.” Eve glanced at me, then turned away. “Aren’t you?”

“Sometimes. I guess.”

Eve’s face hardened. “It’d be fine with me anyway if everything up to now just disappeared. I don’t need to remember how it really was. It wasn’t like this.” She brushed away the pictures. “Maybe that’s why I don’t remember. It was all a lie.”

I lifted the most recent picture of the three of us, sixth-grade Halloween. Daddy was dressed as a great big banana, a peaked yellow cap on his head. I was a cantaloupe, in a burlap sack, and Eve was a bunch of purple grapes. “Not all of it,” I said. “Some of it was real.”

“It’s a waste of time to look through these and wish for something you never really had.” Her eyes were clouded and cold, maybe from anger, or maybe because she was fighting off tears. “I don’t miss him.”

“What?”

“I thought I did, but now I realize I don’t. And when you think about it, we never really had him in the first place. When you face that fact it makes the rest of it not so bad.”

Eve reached for the picture in my hand. She studied it for a minute, and a flush slipped over her face like a pink mask. “Remember how I had to pee so bad? And Justin had to pop my grape balloons so I could get out of that damned costume? I barely made it.”

I smiled. “You were totally bawling and running in place, and balloons were exploding all over.”

“I think we still have the costumes somewhere.” Eve stood to rifle through the closet, reached into the back and then started to laugh. “Man, this thing’s hideous.” She pulled out a beige cap and a burlap sack painted with green stripes. “How come we didn’t want to be fairy princesses like normal people? Try it on, Ker. See if it still fits.”

“Only if you put on that purple tube dress that made you look like an eggplant.”

Eve smirked and reached for the dress, stared at it. “And then we’ll take pictures we can use to blackmail each other when we’re rich and famous.”

I stripped and pulled the sack over my head. It had been loose when I’d last worn it, but now it strained over my breasts and under my arms, its thick middle, empty of stuffing, hanging in a deflated paunch at my knees. I giggled and bobbed a plié, up and down, then flung my arms out at my sides. “Am I beautiful or what? I look like one of those mold mushrooms you find on the bottoms of logs.”

“My, how we’ve grown,” Eve said.

I turned and almost gasped out loud. The purple dress hugged her waist and hips and breasts, so smooth you could see the indentation of her navel. Her hair was pulled back with a purple sequined headband, emphasizing the cords of her neck. “Holy shit,” I said. “You look like a stripper.”

Eve swayed her hips and tossed back her head, singing, her voice deep and throaty. “Oooh, I heard it through the grapevine…”

I watched her sway, hands caressing her body, then turned to the mirror, my own stretched burlap image. I felt the tears of laughter drying tight on my cheeks, and I suddenly remembered years ago when we were eight or nine, Eve had stolen a pack of cigarettes from the Caines. Daddy found it and we both got spanked till our butts were blue, but even before that, when I first saw the pack in our top dresser drawer, I’d felt this same muted tremble in my stomach, like a warning.