Pieces of My Sister's Life (8 page)

8

I
DON’T KNOW
how long I knelt there on the porch, my head in Eve’s lap, waiting for her to speak. But she didn’t. She didn’t cry or move to touch me. Only her legs shifted under my weight as she exhaled a long and level breath. I pulled away.

I’ve heard that eyes are a distinguishing characteristic, that from babyhood on they never change. But it turns out that isn’t true. I didn’t know the eyes that watched me, dry and guarded. It was like Eve had cried enough to last a lifetime, and now she was already dead.

“I knew you’d come.”

I let her die.
“I should’ve come sooner.”

“It’s good that you didn’t. You missed the worst of it, and now all that’s left is the waiting.”

“I would’ve come.”

Eve smiled then, but it wasn’t her smile. It showed her teeth and pressed wrinkles in her hollowed cheeks. “For yourself, or for me?” she said.

I shook my head and she stood and patted my shoulder, a quick dismissive touch. “Justin called you, I guess. I knew he wouldn’t be able to stop himself. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled you’re here. Come on in.”

I saw without wanting to see the strange flatness of the deflated breasts under her sweater and the seat of her jeans hanging loose against her body. Shake her and her bones would probably rattle like a maraca.

“Sorry ’bout the mess,” she said as I opened the door. “We hardly ever have guests anymore, and cleaning’s not exactly one of my priorities.”

How bizarre, the casualness of this, as if I were just a visiting friend. There was a heaviness in my chest, like my heart and stomach were all one solid mass, and I wanted so much just to say
Fuck it all
and hold her, pull her so close I’d be able to feel her again. It was obvious, though, that if I did she’d pull away.

This was like a twisted dream, this hallway to someone else’s home, the bottom step where I’d learned to tie my shoes, Eve standing above me, instructing where to tuck the laces. But now the hall was dressed in Victoriana and even smelled different, like old food, like a motel restaurant. It was distorted to something else entirely, and I suddenly lost all sense of direction. Which way to the kitchen? Where do these stairs go?

We walked into the den, now crowded by a white hospital bed. Eve sat on the bed and I stood beside it, trying not to stare at the bony wheelchair set where a rocker used to be. As I turned from it she reached for my wrist, held it for a brief second, then let her hand drop to her side. “Gillian’s over at Mom and Dad’s,” she said.

For a second I was afraid she might be speaking from a cancer-induced brain funk, then realized with a slightly sick feeling that by
Mom and Dad
she must mean the Caines. “How are they?”

“Same old, same old, Dad saving the bikes and Mom saving the earth. They take care of Gillian every day after school. What with me on my last legs and Justin locked upstairs with his books, they’ve been totally indispensable. That’s where he is now, in case you’re wondering, which of course you are. Upstairs writing or staring out the window. He seems to think they’re both equally productive.”

Justin was upstairs. I reached for the blanket at the end of the bed and wrapped it over my shivering shoulders.

“Look at your face. You’re thinking I look like shit, right? Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and think some crackhead broke into the house.” She shrugged. “I feel better than I look, though. This is remnants from the chemo, but now I’ve stopped I’ll beef up, probably just in time to kick the bucket.”

“You don’t look bad,” I said, knowing how it would sound, an empty platitude, like trying to convince a kid that her hooked nose and buckteeth were actually cute.

“Watch this,” Eve said, her eyes glinting with merriment, becoming for a brief second the eyes I’d known. She reached for a button by the side of her bed. A chiming doorbell sounded from upstairs. “This thing comes with all the gizmos. Not that I need them yet, but it’ll be useful in a few weeks when I don’t have the breath to call them downstairs to watch me die.”

“Eve…”

“Can’t wait a few weeks? Well, it might be a few days or it might be months, nobody knows for sure. Makes it kind of exciting, doesn’t it? Like playing the lottery, will it be today? Justin went and bought this damn bed and chair instead of renting, like he thought it would make me live longer. Guess he couldn’t deal with the prospect of having to estimate a duration of rental.” She flashed a grin, more a stretching of lips than a smile.

I shook my head. “Please, don’t.”

“It’s okay, I don’t want to talk about it either, there’s no point. It’s why Justin called you, I guess. He thinks there’s something I can learn or some peace I should reach, but really I’m way beyond peace. There’s no time and I don’t have the energy, and besides, once I’m dead, who cares?” She nodded over my shoulder. “Speak of the devil.”

“Honey?”

I looked up and there he was, and all of it hit me at once. Hundreds of remembrances flashed instantaneously through my head, of the storytelling afternoons, of secrets whispered and silent, of the night I’d first told him I loved him, and then the last night when I’d learned the pointlessness of love.

Justin’s cheeks flushed and his eyes seemed to cloud. Everything I’d needed to see on Eve’s face was in his, the pain, the joy, the bitter remorse. His palms opened to face the ceiling and he looked from me to Eve and back, then strode forward to pull me into his arms.

I inhaled his smell—wood, moss and pine—as if it could press out the blackness that had numbed me. I wanted to take from him what I’d needed from Eve, but I could feel her eyes at my back. I pulled away.

Eve’s face was tight, watching us, eyes red with the tears she hadn’t shed in greeting. And I suddenly understood she was afraid.

Eve sat in bed, hunched against the wall, her face gone slack and her eyes glazed over like the black marbles in the heads of stuffed animals. “Just a minute,” Justin said. He kissed Eve’s temple, then lifted her, easily as one would lift a child, settling her down to the pillow.

“She gets like this sometimes,” he said, “like she’s too tired even to close her eyes. It’s the morphine that does it. She takes more than she needs because it’s easier just to sleep.”

“Jesus, Justin.” How would I stand this, stand being here unless I just turned off, forgot who I was and who she’d been?

“It’s why I put the bed down here. She gets dizzy climbing stairs, and a month ago she fell. I hate it taking up our den, though, it’s like this constant reminder. Not like we need a reminder, I mean look at her.”

I watched as he tucked her under the stark white sheets, fighting the dark heaviness that seemed dead set on becoming tears.

With his face turned in profile, I could study him closely for the first time. At first I’d thought there was no change; he had the same full lips, the heavy-lidded eyes. But there were little things that disoriented me because they didn’t fit: the dimples lengthened to deeper grooves by his mouth, the slight graying at his temples and a kind of muting of intensity in his eyes, a distance. It drained something in me to see it, made me want to reach for him, but also to turn away. He brushed his hand over Eve’s eyes to close them, and I saw his face flush with pain and love. I focused on the ugly steel rails framing Eve’s bed so I wouldn’t have to interpret the clutch in my chest.

“Come on,” Justin said. “We’ll get some tea.”

I sat at the kitchen table as Justin filled mugs, gazing over at the wall. Still hung with crayoned drawings, but now printed with someone else’s name. I examined the signatures as if they could tell me something about the girl behind them. A kindergarten scrawl, a wide-looping script,
Gillian,
the first
i
dotted with a heart. I felt Justin’s eyes on me but didn’t want to look up, because exchanging glances didn’t seem like a good idea. I shivered and cupped my hands around the warm mug.

“It’s good you decided to come,” he said finally. “She needs you here.”

And then the tears came after all, stinging hot. I looked away, trying to steady my breath. “Doesn’t seem like she needs anybody,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows at me, reproaching.

I inhaled the steam from my mug, let it condense on my nose and eyelids. “I don’t know what to do for her. I don’t know her anymore.”

“The fact you came is enough, at least for a start. She needs to know everything she’s done is forgivable before she can forgive herself.”

“It’s not forgivable, Justin. I can be here in spite of it, but I guess I’m not a big enough person to go beyond that.”

Justin’s face seemed to sag. “She’s been a good wife, Kerry, a great mother. You need to let it go as much as she does. She’s your sister, for God’s sake.”

“We’ll put that on her tombstone: Eve Barnard-Caine, good wife, great mother, and also she was a sister.”

The front door rattled open. There was the sound of stamping boots.

Justin glanced at me, then called, “In here, Gillie.”

Footsteps slapped down the hall, stopping at the door to the den. I imagined Gillian standing there, watching her mother, maybe reaching to touch her hand.

The footsteps continued to the kitchen. “Hey, Daddy? I was gonna—” She froze and for a second I could see her as she was, this beautiful eleven-year-old girl with wise eyes. But as she looked at me her expression changed, melted, became more like the younger child I’d seen on the jackets of Justin’s novels, the picture I’d held in my mind.

Her nose reddened and she began to tremble, her hands opening, closing, opening, closing, and then with a sob she ran to me, buried herself against my chest. I looked up at Justin, shocked, then wrapped my arms around her, cradled her head. I could scarcely breathe, was dizzy with love for this girl I’d never met, and so I clutched at her like she would save me, this fusing of Eve and Justin, and also of me.

I looked over her shoulder, into Justin’s face. He watched us with his fist against his mouth, eyes clouded.

Suddenly, Gillian pulled away and stumbled backwards. She looked from me to Justin and back, face fragmented with confusion. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then spun away and ran.

“Gillie?” Justin strode after her. “Sweetie?”

I followed them to the den, stunned, numb like I was muffled by a thick coat of fur, and I watched as Gillian crawled into the bed beside her mother and curled, baby-like, head resting on Eve’s chest. Justin watched them, face flushed, then edged forward to smooth the blanket over them both.

I stood there for as long as I could stand it, then backed away to the kitchen.
Not anymore;
I made it echo through my head, a chant, a warning.
Not mine. None of it. Not anymore.

A shuffling woke me sometime in the dead hours before dawn. I lay there a minute, disoriented, then turned my head towards the noise. In the shadows I made out a hunched form on the floor next to the bed. “Justin?”

He didn’t answer, didn’t move. I heard a gulping wet intake of breath. “Justin?” I whispered again.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “I really am.”

I watched him for a minute, then reached out my hand.

He took it, held it to his cheek. “When you’re asleep, in this lighting you could be sixteen again.”

“How long were you sitting there?”

He didn’t answer, so I combed his sweat-damp hair back from his temple, not knowing what to feel, not knowing what was right to feel. But when he climbed into bed beside me I let him; the two of us curled against each other, minutes, then hours drifting in and out of sleep, waking with the weight of his head against my chest, the whisper of his hair at my neck. It didn’t feel wrong; it was like comfort, a fullness that I’d almost forgotten how to feel. And when the room finally began to fringe with the shadows of dawn, he touched my cheek and pulled away, closing the door behind him.

The sun filtered through my eyelids, a late morning sun, more cold white in it than yellow. How late had I slept? I lay awhile with my eyes closed, in the bed that had been Daddy’s. I lay there thinking of the weight of Justin’s head on me, still smelling the scent his hair had left on my pajama top, the homemade honey shampoo Mrs. Caine must still brew. I thought of the parts of this house that were irrefutable evidence of our childhood: the laundry chute in the front hall that Daddy boarded up after Eve slid down it, the memory of Eve’s hooting war cry and the presence of the nailed boards, both precious. The lines in the closet that marked our growth: no names, only years to denote them because our heights, mine and Eve’s, were always the same.