Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (36 page)

Stop it. I must be the big sister. The one who can make allowances. The one who has no needs. The one who must take the higher road.
Forever and ever and ever.

Calmly I say, "Beth, that's not a very nice thing to say."

"Iz the
truth.
I'm just telling it like it
is.
"

Restraining my anger so forcefully I hear a quiver in my voice, I explain what I know she was already taught by my father and Vera: that there are certain courtesies a host offers a guest. If a guest asks for a towel, for instance, the host says yes. "It's another way to show Jacob's do-unto-others idea. Do you understand?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. So, can we try it again?"

"I don't
know.
"

I take a breath. "Beth, I'd like to take a shower. Can I use a towel?"

"If you
want.
"

I put my hand to my heart. "I can't believe you're saying this again."

"Well, I can't
stop
you."

The darkness detonates in my throat, and I blurt out, "I hate you."

Her face contorts with pain and horror, as if something deep inside her has been shattered.

Immediately I regret it. I know I should apologize on the spot.

Instead I snatch a towel from her closet and slam into the bathroom. My heart is pounding hard as I get into the shower, and every breath I take slices through me. I close my eyes, and all I can see is her newly beautiful face as she proudly offered me my present just the night before.

When I come out, she stares at me with hurt and confusion.

I say, "I'm sorry. That was a terrible thing to say. I don't hate you."

"It wasn't
nice.
"

"No, it wasn't. It was wrong. I hate your behavior when you're rude. I don't hate
you.
"

"You said you
did.
"

"I know. But I didn't mean it."

"What did you mean?"

"I meant..."—and I know right then what I meant—"I meant that I don't think I should come to visit you anymore."

"
Why?
"

"Because I don't think you really want me here."

"I
do
want you here."

"You don't act like you do."

"Well..." she says. "Well...."

In silence we drive to Max's house. I don't care that the darkness has taken over.
Why the hell should I care about her when she doesn't
care about me?
During the holiday meal, though she keeps giving me perplexed looks, I sit far on the other side of the table.

So that's it, I tell myself. I return my sofa cushions to my sofa. I leave her wrapped present to me in my car trunk. So my year with her will have a sour ending. So what. At least I can return to my life. Free at last. Back to the classes and papers and editors and phone calls.

Though something has changed. The next day, I reach into my mailbox and find an invitation to a party. I call the host. "Yes," I say.

And again the day after, a new business obligation swells beyond reasonable bounds: "Sorry, I can't put in that much time anymore," I say.

And the next evening, at the height of the holiday season, I am hunched over my desk and hear laughter outside. I peek through my blinds into the night. In front of my building is a cluster of people in overcoats, bending low to the ground, lighting matches. I look closer, and I see that all around them, lining the sidewalks, are small white bags, each holding a candle. Then I realize that the entire street is lit with hundreds of these flames, flickering into the hills that rise away from my apartment.

I turn off my desk light so I can see the candles glowing more clearly. I shut off my computer and sit for a minute in the dark. Then I grab my scarf and coat and go outside to join my neighbors.

Three days after our fight about the towel, I discover the first letter in my mailbox:

To sis,

Hi. I love you. Sorry about Hurting your feelings. I didn't mean too. I Do care about you. So bElieve me.

Cool Beth

Skeptical, I set the letter aside. The next day, I find two more:

Dear R,

I wasn't mad at you. At All. Sorry if I hurt you. I had fun with you. now. I didn't mean to makEyou mad.

Love,
Cool Beth

Hi.

I will try harder to be a lot nicEr to you. You can use anything in my House. OK. I had fun with you.

Cool Beth

Phone calls begin, too. I have been out catching up with old friends, but when I get home I have voicemail messages:

Operator: It's a phone machine, miss. You'll have to call back.
Beth:
(dejected)
Okay. I
will.
Okay.

Besides, one of her letters the next day says:

To R.

Every night I bEEn calling you. But you are not home. OK so I try. I do care.

Cool Beth

***

It is five days after our fight, and a light snow has begun to fall. I cut my car's engine in my parking lot, emerge into the flurries, open the mailbox—and discover a new quartet of apologies. I fan them out in my hands. Snow White stickers dance on the envelopes, Beth's irregular letters form the words, and smiley faces adorn the insides of random a's and e's and o's. And suddenly I am stricken with the grim awareness that I am being self-righteous and cruel. It's not making me feel better, and I doubt that it's doing much to help her.

I close my fingers around the envelopes, and the metal mailbox squeaks shut. In the cold silence of the night, I stand at the bottom of the stairs, flakes coiling around me, and know that I can try to get along with Beth, and I
must,
but that the dark voice will never go permanently away. It will keep billowing up inside me at moments when I least expect or want it, after I have tricked myself into thinking that we are over the hump forever.

Saddened yet also tremendously relieved, I carry her mail upstairs to my apartment. Before I can even brush off my coat, the phone rings.

"Collect call from Beth. Will you—"

"Yes."

The moment the operator disappears, Beth is off and running. "I'm sorry, I'll
watch
what I
say.
I'm already practicing. Really,
ev
ry day. Jacob helps me, and Rodolpho, and Cliff. Really, I
mean
it, I'm
sorry.
I'm really trying to
change.
"

I lean against my wall, moved and chastened. For fifteen minutes I watch the flurries turn to serious snow outside my window and listen to her, and think how hard this apology must be for her—and how hard all this is for me. I had always told myself that facing my feelings about my mother was the hardest thing I would ever have to do, but now, standing here after telling my sister that I hate her, and hating myself for hurting her so, I realize that being a good sister to Beth might be even more difficult. No one can be a good sister all the time. I can only try my best. Just because I am not a saint does not mean that I am a demon.

I look at all the letters piled before me, a small mountain on top of all my own notes and papers. In pink or green or blue Magic Marker, set in envelopes lavished with stickers of Snoopy or hearts, consisting of a one-carat sentence or a breathtaking nine, they all seem put together with a loving heart, honesty—and trust.

"So," she asks, "can you keep coming?"

"Yes," I say, "I can. I
will.
"

When we get off the phone, I open my front door. The snowstorm is sweeping across the streets as I run out to my car and unlock the trunk. In the darkness, I find her holiday gift to me, the one I threw in here and forgot. I rip open the wrapping paper and hold it in my hands.

It's a scrapbook.

In the gathering storm I turn it over and over. An attractive fake-leather scrapbook, with wide laminated pages and a stack of refills. Something she must have chosen with care.

Inside, like a bookmark, is a letter. I pull it out and angle it toward a streetlight.
N©w. you Won't lose anything,
Beth has scribbled. The wind flutters the paper, and I look up into the sky, to the white flecks showering through the dark. Each one both like and unlike all the others.

Blowing the snow off the paper, I open the book and slip in the letter.

I am driving on a long wooded stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, about to visit Beth. I am coming to give her her holiday present: for the first time ever, I am coming to ride the buses.

I shoot past a certain apricot-colored outcropping, and I remember being on this same span of highway ten years ago. It was the night before Max's wedding, a summer evening shortly after Beth had moved into the group home and years before she discovered the buses. Sam and Beth and I were zipping along, listening to her tape of Neil Diamond's greatest hits, Beth nodding off in the back seat, when smoke suddenly poured out from under the hood of our car.

"
Oh, my God!" Sam yelled. "Get out! Fast!
"

He screeched over to the shoulder as Beth woke up. I jumped out, threw open the back door, and hauled my sister onto the gravel. The three of us ran toward a grass embankment at a bend past the rocks. At a safe distance, we turned back.

There was our old car, smoking on the side of the road, and here we were, stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Eventually three different truckers stopped to help us out, and a man in a tow truck drove us forty miles to a garage and then a motel, where we would wait out the night.

But before that happened, Beth and I plunked down on a tuft of grass somewhere deep in the Pennsylvania mountains, the nighttime wildlife behind us, the world whizzing by before us.

"
Oh, no," I said. "What on earth are we going to do
?"

Beth said, "Iz gonna be all right.
"

I think of that now, as I round that same bend in the road. I turn my gaze from my windshield and spy the very spot where we sat, ten years ago, as Sam ventured back onto the shoulder to wait by the car.
In the dark together, Beth and I were two sisters holding onto each other, both of us knowing that we needed help, one assuring the other that somehow help would come. I put my arm inside her elbow, and she leaned against my side. Then, in the night, under the stars, we named old tunes, and we sang.

I maneuver my Toyota off the exit ramp from the highway, then turn onto the outlying streets of Beth's city. Blankets of ice dot the shoulders, and I accelerate for the final fifteen minutes into the downtown. There's the scrapyard, the always vacant motel, the motorcycle repair shop, the topless restaurant. I've made good time, having left my apartment early for her annual Plan of Care meeting. I'd told myself that I wanted to get the highways behind me before I encountered the rain that I'd read about in the forecast, and, besides, I could use the extra hour to develop Olivia's negatives from our day at the beauty salon. Once in the car, though, I conceded the truth: I just wanted to drive here more slowly, so I could gaze out the windshield at the silos and rolling valleys and sleepy cows and forests where naked trees nod in the wind.

There's that hex sign on the old red barn. The acre-sized gas station. The Kmart where Bailey stopped. The city neighborhood where a six-year-old Jack sold fruit from a truck long ago.

And there, up ahead in my lane, as close to the icy shoulder as possible, rides a man on a bicycle. Cars arc around him as he pedals fast. An athletic-looking African-American man, I see as I come up behind him.

"Hey!" I wave at Jesse.

He looks over through my passenger window. For a second he strains to figure out who I am. Then he breaks into a wide smile.

I pull around him and, pointing, turn into a florist's parking lot.

He brakes beside the driver's window as I slow to a stop. I roll it down, and a January chill rushes inside my car.

"I knew you was coming," he says. "But you're early."

"Thought I'd beat the rain," I sort of explain. "Hey, I heard you're preparing for some big bike races this summer."

"I got a coach," he says. "My coach said, you should be riding with your stomach looking at the road. I'm trying to make it so I can do thirty times around a track. I'm getting there."

"You'll do it," I say.

"I know I will"

I remember my errands. "So what'd you think of Beth's makeover last month?"

"It's not her style. She's happier like she is."