Secret Sister (2 page)

I sighed and crossed my arms. Somehow my caring about her was turning into a discussion of how I was letting her down. We said nothing for a few moments.

Roxanne wiped at her eyes and sniffled, then poked my arm. “New topic. So, do you like this blouse? It’s new. Thirty percent off at Nordstrom’s.” There was regret in her voice.

The top was red-and-white striped silk, with a simple ruffle at the neckline. She looked like Jennifer Lopez’s prettier, younger sister.

“It’s gorgeous. Like you. How does that feel, anyway? Being more beautiful than any other woman in the room?”

Roxanne’s voice was edgy with bitterness. “Trust me, dear friend, it’s not often fun to be me, no matter how I look.”

“I wish I were you, Lupeyloo,” I said softly.

Roxanne tilted her chin up, surprised by my words, and I caught the shadow of a smile.

This dumb little verse was a line from a school play we’d both seen in middle school, a story about nerdy twelve-year-olds who always want to be someone else. In the script, someone got leukemia or a flesh-eating disease or something, and the kids realize they were special just as they were. The play was hokey, but both of us had remembered the line to great laughter in high school. And we’d said it to one another a hundred times over the years.

Mostly me to her.

Rox tossed her sunglasses into the backseat. “I can’t remember the last time you said that to me, Cathy. You wouldn’t really want to be me for a second. Would you?”

“I always want to be you. Look at you. Angelina Jolie would want to be you if she was sitting here.”

“Don’t lie. You never judge people by how they look, but how they treat other people. So fair and kind.” Her voice was dreamy, but not particularly happy. “That’s why everyone loves you. That’s why Nick loves you. Why he’s there to watch over you. Believe me, Cathy, it’s
me
who would love to be
you
. I really would.”

I had never heard such yearning in her voice. “You’ll find the
right
man someday, Rox.”
A man like Nick.
I kept that thought to myself.

“If I can’t have Michael, I’m done with men. All men.”

“Don’t be crazy.” Which was a dumb thing to say. I bit my lip.

“I wish I were you, Lupeyloo.” Roxanne laughed then, but it sounded more like a gasp, or a cry.

I turned my eyes back to the road, thinking I should offer to come in with her to talk to Dr. Seth today, if Rox wanted me to. Maybe that would help. We’d done this in the past, given the doc an inside and outside view of Roxanne’s aching heart. I opened my mouth to suggest it, but didn’t get the words out.

Because that’s when I saw the truck.

It was coming directly at us, forty yards ahead. Way,
way
too close. It veered to the middle of the road, as if the driver didn’t see us.

I inhaled to scream and grabbed Roxanne’s arm, remembering only then that my seatbelt was unfastened.

Roxanne cried out, “Oh my God!”

I thought,
Nick
. . .

She didn’t swerve or brake and the truck struck us head-on. The noise of the impact was crueler than I ever imagined a sound could be. The windshield split with the sound of ten tons of ice falling on pavement, the horn blared, the airbags burst with an explosion that burned my eyes and smacked me as senseless as my stepfather did the time he broke my cheekbone.

I smelled gasoline and rubber and hot steel.

The car skidded and flipped sideways and slammed into the granite mountain beside the road. I was thrown through jagged glass and pain poured over me like napalm.

My arm was wrenched behind me as the asphalt flayed skin and meat off my body and I skidded like a human Dunlop, finally cracking my forehead against a curb. As I lay there, a dizzy, faraway feeling like I remembered from the dentist’s office enveloped me.

My ears bled and my teeth were in pieces. I couldn’t swallow. Or breathe. I sank into blackness, one hundred, ninety-nine . . .

And I floated upward. Below me, the blue Chevy lay on its side. I saw my body on the ground nearby, sprawled and unmoving.

My arm—
my arm?
—rested several yards away in a flood of red running down the middle of the street.

Suddenly, a dark-haired woman grasped my shirt and pulled me closer to the sky.
Don’t look down
. She didn’t speak aloud but I heard her anyway.

Higher I rose, into fog and blue stars as chimes and flutes pinged around me. A whoosh of air carried me toward the opening of a tunnel.

I was so cold.

The woman whispered, “Cathy, don’t be scared. I need to tell you something.”

My mother died when I was nine. I couldn’t remember exactly what she looked like, but this woman could be her.

“No. Leave me alone, I’m not going!”

“You have to listen. I’m going away.” Her voice was so loud. “But I want to do something for you.”

“Don’t touch me.” I flailed wildly to push her away. But I had no arm.

The woman laced her fingers in my hair. Her face had turned away from me but I knew she was crying. I could hear her thinking. She wanted to make things right. Beg my forgiveness for not telling me her secret.

The light at the opening of the tunnel got bright, too bright to look at, too bright to bear.

I wish I were you, Lupeyloo.

The words were a chant, a lullaby. A dirge.

I felt so cold. Dead cold.

Then, I felt nothing.

Chapter 2

Saturday, July 9, 3 p.m.         

Nick

When I got to the hospital, I abandoned my car in front of the emergency room entrance and ran to the door. I dropped my keys, picked them up and then dropped them a second time.

I tripped trying to grab them with my shaking hands.

“Fuck!” I yelled as I banged my knees against the asphalt and my elbow on the curb. But the pain of the fall didn’t register. I didn’t feel anything but the presence of fear.

I thought I had experienced fear before in my life, but I had not. I’d lived with apprehension and embarrassment; I’ve worried about the ordinary slings and arrows of life, had personal failings drive me to despair.

I have worried I would never rise above, or move beyond, moral weaknesses, especially when I was drinking.

But I had never really experienced fear until now.

Fear, with a capital ‘F,’ is the real thing. He’s a vicious, merciless prick that knocks you on your ass and shrieks that he can, and will, take everything from you, forever. He’s a hurricane that pummels you and all you can do is hold on and try to wait him out, praying he will go away.

But Fear doesn’t go away that easy. Fear hooked into me the moment I got that cliché of a phone call, and paralysis of brain and nerve endings was my only defense to Fear’s presence.

You see, my wife is my life. Poetically corny, but true as a mother’s kiss. And I was told in that ridiculous call, curtly, that the woman I have been devoted to for years, first as a geeky high school jerk, lately as a man exultantly secure in knowing that I’d somehow,
Thank God
, married the right woman, was ‘seriously injured in a car accident and I needed to come right away.’

But Fear didn’t repeat the words ‘seriously injured.’ Fear told me she was dead.

Dead.
Cathy was dead.

Inside the hospital, I stared without blinking at the police officer who murmured, “I’m so sorry, your wife is dead.”

Fear was right.

I stood silently when the nurse standing beside the cop pressed her condolences to my sleeve.

“How can she be dead?” I wrestled my arm away from her and wanted to slug the cop.

He saw this in my face and his voice changed. “I’m sorry, Mr. Chance.” He told me Cathy had been pronounced at the scene. He told me the EMTs had used the Jaws of Life to pry her friend from the car.

Jaws of Life? Seriously injured?

Motherfuckers.

I may have said this aloud.

“Come with me, Mr. Chance.” The nurse’s voice was practiced. “I’ll take you to your wife.”

“It’s not my wife,” I shouted.

The nurse hurried off. I followed, feeling neither blood nor bone in my moving body. A dull whooshing filled my ears when I entered the room where Cathy, my Cathy, lay. She was on a metal table, covered with white sheets, like in a TV show. Her blonde hair hung off the edge, full of debris, dried blood, dirt. She was wearing one of her favorite turquoise earrings, the ones I’d bought for her in New Mexico last Christmas.

When she saw them, Cathy had said, “Oh, we can’t afford those.” And we couldn’t, but she wanted them so I bought them for her.

She enjoys presents more than anyone I’ve ever met. Wrapped and bowed and served up with a flourish, or tucked into her hand, or handed over by a sales clerk, she loves them. When she was a little kid she’d never had presents after her mother died. So I make sure she always has bunches of them.

Tears stung my eyes like ashes. I rubbed them, my hands cold.

The nurse whispered, “It’s shocking, I know. Would you like me to stay?”

“No, no, I don’t need you,” I mumbled.

The hospital people said Cathy had lost a limb. Her arm. ‘Lost a limb,’ like she was a goddamned lemon tree. But someone must have reattached it, for the shape of both of her arms was visible under the blanket. I had the thought I should check, lift up the sheet and be sure they’d attached it to her, so she wouldn’t lose it, because . . .

Because she would need it?

I made a noise like a dry heave.

“What can I do?” the nurse asked.

“Go away.”

“I’ll leave you alone then.” She touched my sleeve and made her escape.

Leaving me. Alone.

Fear left, too. He’d done his job.

The noise in my ears got louder as I moved closer to Cathy. She had some dried blood on her neck. Her chin was scratched, her cheeks pitted from their contact with the road. Her eyelashes threw a shadow on her skin, which was not the right color.

I touched her cold face. Cathy seemed pressed into the table as if held by massive magnets, her body sculpted like stone under the thin hospital sheets.

I stepped back. “Cathy.” Tears burned my face and I regained some feeling in my arms, which tingled as blood returned to my veins.

“Cathy, don’t be dead,” I pleaded.

But she didn’t answer me.

An hour later in the hospital waiting room, Cathy’s friends from work showed up first, then my mom and sister, then our friend Bradley Chandler.

Cathy hadn’t spoken to anyone in her family for twelve years, and I didn’t know how to find them. ‘Them’ included a great-aunt on her mother’s side, and the stepfather, not that he was really family. Besides, I think he was dead.

Bradley said he would try to locate someone. He’s a human GPS who can find anyone on the planet if you give him a name to work with. He hugged me before he walked away in search of some quiet workspace, a laptop folded under his muscular right arm.

Cathy’s friend, Vera Apodaca, the secretary at the school where Cathy taught, was crying like a kid lost at the zoo. The principal of St. Anne’s, a black woman who had never seemed to like me, was hugging Vera and wiping her own eyes with a pink tissue. A man, whom I numbly recognized as Freddy, Vera’s husband, walked over to the little group of mourners and joined in, his big face sad, his shoulders sagging.

Freddy and I had almost come to blows at last year’s school Christmas party. He was an arrogant and dishonest son of a bitch, but my reasons for wanting to cold cock him didn’t matter anymore.

Our eyes met and I turned away. They were obviously talking about me, but I couldn’t make myself get up and cross the waiting room to speak to them. I sat with my mom and sister while they called people on my sister’s cell phone. I heard my mom say, “They said she died instantly. She was thrown from the car.”

I put my head in my hands and squeezed my eyes closed as tight as I could, before opening them again. I saw funny bright lights and starburst-type spots, but it made the noise decrease a little in my ears. I suddenly remembered I used to do this in high school, in Algebra II, when I didn’t have a clue about the homework. The behavior usually got me called on as soon as I looked up.

I looked up.

“How are you doing, Nick?” the principal asked. She stood in front of me.

“Okay, Mrs. Cordell, thank you.” I got to my feet and extended my hand.

“Call me Althea, hon.” She grabbed me around the shoulders and pulled me against her bony chest. She was tall, about six feet, and thin as beef jerky. I nearly knocked foreheads with her.

“Thanks for coming here, Althea. How did you hear about the accident?” Though she still held onto me, I took a step back to give us both room to breathe.

“Roxanne’s mother called. She told us about Cathy. It’s such a shock.” Althea Cordell crossed herself and tears welled in her small eyes. “I’ll never know why God takes such sweet angels from us. But in his wisdom we cannot question. Only celebrate.” She rested her head on my shoulder and patted my back furiously. “Have you seen Roxanne?”

“No.” The scent of stale popcorn, probably from the cafeteria, reached my nose. I cleared my throat, feeling like throwing up. “She’s in a coma.”

“Yes, yes,” Althea mumbled. Her tears splashed across her brown skin. “They won’t let anyone in to see her. Freddy checked. But the doctors are hopeful she’ll wake up. They’re watching for brain swelling. That’s what they worry about.”

Her voice dropped. “And mental impairment. They worry about that. She wasn’t breathing when they pulled her from the car, but she started again once they did CPR.” Althea dabbed at her eyes. “She’s been blessed by above.”

I couldn’t answer. I had heard all those details about my wife’s friend from one of the staff. Gently I led the principal over and introduced her to my mother. They fell into each other’s arms and moved back to where the secretary was unleashing a fresh bout of tears against her husband’s chest.

He looked at me but I turned away and focused on my sister, Zoë. She was staring at me.

“Was Roxanne driving the car?” my little sister asked.

“Yes.”

“Is she going to die?”

“No. The doctors say she has a severe concussion, but she should pull through.”

Zoë raised one eyebrow. She was seventeen and had always been an odd duck of a kid. People never knew what to make of her. Zoë is grouchy. And a little spooky. A few months back she told me she heard things in the night and saw things in people other people couldn’t see.

I told her she was a fruitcake and to stop watching old Demi Moore movies with Cathy and lay off the pot. But I think Zoë does have a sixth sense about things, about people. My parents adopted her when she was five months old, and I was twelve. I remember when I first looked at her, she stared at me like she was deciding if I could measure up to brother material.

When I said, “Hello sweet baby,” she smiled and the sun came out forever. We’ve loved each other since that second.

“I hope she dies,” Zoë whispered.

Her words jolted me. “No, you don’t. Don’t say that.”

“Yes, I do. I hate Roxanne.”

“Zoë.”

“I love Cathy.” Zoë licked her chapped lips. She stared down at the magazine. “Why wasn’t she wearing her seat belt? She always wears her seat belt.”

Zoë was right.

“I don’t know.” Tears burned my eyes and I felt like screaming.

“I don’t think she’s really dead.”

“She is, Zoë. I just saw her.”

“Maybe if I saw her, I could believe it, too.”

“I don’t want you to see her.” I squeezed her shoulder. “She wouldn’t want you to see her like she looks now.”

“Right! Like you know what she wants now.” Her voice shook. “We have to have her cremated. She always said she never wanted to be buried. She’s claustrophobic. You remember that, right?”

I shuddered
. Burn Cathy?
The room began to spin. “I haven’t made any plans yet.”

“Please don’t put her in a box.” Zoë’s voice was a low wail. “In fact, we better go to the morgue right now. If they’ve put her in one of those goddamned drawers, we’ve got to get her out. That will freak her to be in a drawer.”

My mother and the principal were staring at us.

“Come on with me.” I took Zoë by the hand and led her out of the waiting room and into the hall. There was a popcorn cart parked outside the cafeteria. A few greasy bits lay inside the glass compartment, oily streaks on the glass, paintings of huge, maniacal clowns cavorting on the side panels. I fought to not throw up and hurried Zoë away from the cart and past the cafeteria entrance and out the back exit of the hospital.

It was light outside. For a moment we both stood looking up at the blue sky in surprise. I blinked and walked toward my car. It was where I had left it, in the middle of the emergency entrance driveway. Across the way, a uniformed cop was standing by his police cruiser, watching us. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his shades, but I felt like he was holding off giving me a ticket, sensing a catastrophe he didn’t want to get involved with.

We got in my car and I started the engine and then looked at my sister. Her face seemed painted on, white and motionless.

“Where to, Zoë?” I put the car into gear, but my fingers were numb on the steering wheel.

She shook her head and flipped the radio on, filling the car with the sounds of NPR’s newscast.

Cathy is a news hound. She knows everything about politics, junk factoids about actors, the latest about sports, especially golf. She loved Tiger Woods, was crushed when he crashed his life and lost his family and the world’s respect. But she forgave him. Pretty much before anyone else did.

We’re going to see him play in a tournament next month in San Diego.

No. We’re not
.

My hands ached and I flexed my fingers, which were starting to go numb. I didn’t know what to do next.

Zoë switched to an oldie station. The Beatles were singing about a girl who was going away because she had a ticket to ride.

I started to cry then. My mouth hung open and the contents of my nose ran down my chin; my chest heaved with gut sobs. The car slowed to about ten miles an hour.

Zoë snapped off the radio. “Nick, pull over and let me drive.”

She didn’t have her driver’s license. But I pulled over in the middle of the street. My little sister ran around the car and motioned me to move. She settled in next to me and handed me a tissue and kissed me on the head like she was my mother.

A horn sounded behind us. Zoë flipped the finger at the guy who honked as she barreled out of the parking lot, heading for the McDonald’s near our house.

My house with Cathy.

There was a long takeout line. We got in it.

“I need something to drink,” Zoë said.

“Okay.”

Fear breathed on my neck. He was back. He is eight feet tall and his eyes are blood red and he has a forked tongue and he said in a raspy voice that he was moving in for a while.

I knew then that this day wasn’t a bad dream.