The Good Sister (10 page)

Scattering ashes. It can't be so. I am not going to scatter my sister in the wind.

“Asha, this will give you some closure. You need it, and I need my daughters there. This isn't easy for me either, you know.”

“No. I'm not going.”

Her lips get all thin. “Fine, if you're going to be a spoiled brat about it, I don't want you there ruining things the way you did at the funeral, but if you aren't going to be there, you
will
come to a therapy appointment with me next week.”

“No way.” I have been to mom's therapist exactly once. There will not be a repeat performance.

“This isn't up for debate, Asha. You can't keep staying here—you're going back to school, and you're coming home to sleep at our house tonight, and you're going to therapy with me. Do you understand?”

I think, if I relent on the school thing, which will at least be a distraction and will keep me from flunking out for the semester, she'll give in on the other two means of torture.

“I'll go to school. Just leave, okay?”

She sighs loudly. “Is that a real tattoo on your ankle?”

I ignore the question. I want to ask her about the ring she's wearing, but I'm afraid of the answer.

“That alone is reason enough not to let you stay here. You shouldn't be getting tattoos from your friends without my permission.”

She knows about Sin's tattooing hobby from the tattoo of a bluebird he put on his own foot. It's a beautiful piece, especially for someone with so little experience.

I say nothing. Her hand drops from my back. I look at her then because for a moment I wish I could bury my face in her chest and cry until her expensive new top is soaking wet. I want her to be the kind of mom who comforts me with kisses and cookies and commonsense advice, not therapy appointments.

“Our family is in crisis, Asha. It's not just you who's suffering. You should be home, not here.”

She stands up, and I watch her leave. Something about her now is different, and it's not just the expensive clothes and the salon hair. She's walking with purpose, like she knows where she's going, for once.

Why couldn't she drag me out of here if it matters so much? Why couldn't she have showed up when I first disappeared?

Why now?

I'm wearing one of Sin's hoodies, a black one covered with little gray skulls. I tug it tighter around me, and I give him a look as my mom disappears out the door.

“Bye, Ms. Kinsey,” Sin calls after her in an impressively genuine tone.

But she doesn't answer. She's gone, on her way somewhere more important than here.

Sixteen

Sarah

Love, my favorite four-letter word

And the official topic of all

Bad poetry

Do you know the difference

Between Love and lust?

Between Love and hate?

Between Love and death?

Have you ever felt the subtle twist of the knife

When one turns into the other?

It's a feeling that should need no past

Present or future tense

But tell that to the knife.

I am awake, but not Awake. Dreaming in slow motion.

 

 

I used to think that love could only be a good thing. I thought loving someone was like bestowing a gift upon them. And I listened to all those love songs and believed them. Love is all we need, right?

It only occurred to me a few days before I died that maybe love wasn't such a wonderful gift. Maybe, sometimes, it was a curse, or a weapon, or an affliction, or all three.

Take my parents, for instance. If you met Lena and Ravi, you'd have a hard time believing they were once deeply in love. I only have a few early childhood memories to prove it. And you might not understand why they'd have had three kids. Ravi (aka John in his new and improved corporate, six-figure life) might point out that he never wanted children, and Lena, though she claims to love motherhood, is far more temperamental drama queen than nurturing maternal figure.

When you look around you though, really look, you start to see that all families are the crippled, imperfect by-products of our flawed attempts at love. Evolution created this weird chemical process to bind us together long enough to raise kids—in theory—and we in our infinite creativity decided to create a mythology around it. I see this now, and yet, I still don't understand it completely.

It still makes me ache.

Over the years, I pieced together the more or less complete story of my parents' falling in and out of love and having three daughters. It's a long, sordid tale, but these days I seem to have nothing but time to consider and reconsider the past.

And I like to think that having such a messy example at home is why I never quite got things right the one and only time I fell in love.

David was my first lover. We met at the bookstore where I worked two days a week after school. He was looking for a copy of the
Tao Te Ching
and I told him we were all out of stock. Crazy how well that little old book sells, I said.

He smiled at me and asked if I was interested in Eastern philosophy.

“My parents lived on a commune, so I kind of grew up with it.” I shrugged.

“Really? Mine too. Which one?”

“The Peace Ranch.” I already knew he wasn't a part of the same crowd because I'd have known him if he was.

“Cool. My mother was a follower of Osho.”

So, there we had it, the common bond of growing up in the weird, upside-down world of a commune. And we talked for the rest of my shift, flirting, laughing, sizing each other up. I told him about my cancer, my family, and my lack of a boyfriend. He told me about how he'd graduated two years ago from a school in the city and was living with some friends, attending College of Marin part-time while he painted houses to earn a living. By the end of the night, I was dizzy from falling in love with him.

And even dizzier, probably, with the sensation of seeing myself through the eyes of someone who never knew me with cancer. To him, I was just the girl who worked in the bookstore. Every guy I'd ever known, to that point, had not seen me apart from my illness. I'd never had a real boyfriend before.

I didn't want anything from David. He's not the kind of guy you hook up with thinking forever or even next year. But then, I wasn't the kind of girl who needed long-term promises, given my slightly iffy health prospects. I just loved him in the pure, innocent way that is probably true of all first loves.

Funny how it works out though that when you expect nothing from a person, they might just give you everything you didn't know you wanted. At least that's how it felt sometimes, when he'd show up at my house all excited because he'd written a song for me, or he'd spend hours braiding flowers into my hair and telling me a hundred ways he thought I was beautiful.

Really, I'm not making this stuff up. He was that sweet. And he did it all without the slightest bit of self-consciousness.

So I never saw it coming when he fell for my sister Rachel too.

Seventeen

Rachel

Sarah's urn, an ugly navy-blue thing with gold trim, has been sitting in our living room over the fireplace for weeks now. I find myself obsessing over the ashes. What do they look like? Will they smell bad? I sort of want to take a peek inside the urn and check it out, but I can't quite bring myself to do it.

Part of me imagines if I open the lid, her ghost will come seeping out of the bottle genie-style and spread the word about what an awful shitface of a sister I am.

We are supposed to take Sarah's ashes to the top of Mount Tam and scatter them, but Lena has been told this requires a permit. So, I guess we have to sneak and do it when no one is watching, because Lena doesn't believe in getting permits.

Also, she keeps saying we have to be united as a family when we do it. This is her go-to way for putting things off. Whenever Asha
is
around, she and our mother have these crazy fights like I've never seen. Asha's always been so whatever-I-don't-give-a-damn, it's hard to pick a fight with her, but Lena manages. My theory is the little donor-match sister reminds her too much of the dead daughter.

Everything reminds me too much of Sarah.

I'm not really mad at Asha anymore for showing up drunk at the memorial service. I kind of feel sorry for her since she is, after all, the one who's probably the most wrecked over Sarah's death. Even if I'm not sure she has the right to be.

Okay, I don't care if my stupid little sister has decided to live in the park with Barefoot Jack and the other local homeless and crazy, but it does make me curious. I imagine she's on a downward spiral, like we all are, but I don't think the parents realize how much closer she is to the edge than the rest of us. She loved Sarah more than anyone else did, and she's got to be taking her death the hardest.

You'd think any average parent could figure that out. But Lena, she's lost in her own world right now. She is taking the role of grieving mother seriously. She's been waiting a long time to play the role, ever since Sarah got her first cancer diagnosis all those years ago.

As I pass by the park on my way to David's house, I consider stopping and giving Asha a personal plea to come help spread the ashes. I think she'll want to be a part of it, even if she acts like she doesn't.

But she's not there now.

As I turn onto David's street, I see his car in the driveway of the house he shares with friends, and my stomach knots. It's been a long time since we've seen each other alone, and not just his stopping in to say hi while I'm working at Sacred Grounds, which he's started doing again lately. Problem is, AJ stops in too when he's in town doing business, and if the two of them ever cross paths, some shit will go down.

I climb the front steps of his porch, and he must have seen me because he opens the door and comes out. “Hey, what a surprise.”

He looks seriously fugly, his beard overgrown and his shirt off. He's wearing a drooping pair of jeans that stay up thanks only to a belt. His ribs and hip bones jut out in a way that isn't exactly attractive, reminding me of pictures of starving people in India.

He leans in for a hug, and I hug him back halfheartedly. When my sister disappeared over the edge of a cliff last month, whatever I felt for David went with her, I think. He just feels like a whole lot of nothing to me now.

I'm relieved when he doesn't try to kiss me.

“You doing okay?” he asks as we sit down on the front steps together.

“Yeah. You?”

“Not so much.”

I nod and make a sad face. I guess I should be falling apart more—David and I united in our grief or some shit—but I can't muster the energy. I am remarkably calm, detached, waiting for some real emotions to come along.

I look away from David, at a house across the street, a run-down, blue cottage with faded Tibetan prayer flags hanging limp over the front porch.

“We're scattering her ashes Sunday night, around nine o'clock,” I finally say when I feel enough time has passed.

He stares at a squirrel scurrying across the street.

“I could ask my mom if you can come along.”

“That's okay. It's a family thing. I shouldn't be there.”

“I don't think she'd care,” I say, but I'm kind of relieved he said no.

Silence again.

When I'm about to change the subject to the reason I guess I've come, he says, “I went out to the spot. Where she fell. I did my own thing there … and scattered some flowers … you know.”

“Oh. That's cool,” I say lamely.

Some bitchy, little part of me feels jealous that he had this private moment for Sarah. And some part of me feels violated that he went there, to the spot that belongs to me and my own fucked-up feelings.

“I've been thinking…”

Before he can go on, I hold up my hand for him to stop talking. I have to be the one to say it. “I have too. I don't think we should see each other anymore.”

I watch his face, not sure what I want to see there. Grief? Pain? Relief?

Love?

Shock.

Long, awkward-ass pause.

I look down at his hands, which are clasped a little tighter than they should be on his knees, as if he's holding on for dear life. Here is my evidence of strong emotion, and I'm satisfied to see it.

I realize now, I came here looking for something more than an end to this thing we've been doing. I want to see him beg for me to stay. And if he doesn't, then what?

“That isn't what I was going to say,” he says.

“It isn't?”

He shakes his head, frowning. “I guess it doesn't matter what I was going to say now.”

“Tell me.”

“I … I was going to ask you if you wanted me to take you out there … to the trail where she fell.”

“Oh.”

This is what I am supposed to be consumed with—my sister's death. Still. Maybe forever. I am, sort of. Breaking up with David was supposed to be part of getting on with my life, wasn't it? Making right some of the shit I've done wrong?

“I just thought, maybe you'd like someone to go back there with you. So you could get some closure.”

Closure. As if that were something that happens to people like me.

The cliff where Sarah died is the last place I want to be right now, even if I do feel like it belongs to me. I am repelled from it like a burn victim from fire.

“That's sweet of you to think of it. I don't think I can go there now though … it's too soon.”

“You really want to stop seeing each other?”

I open my mouth to say yes, but no sound comes out.

If I knew what the hell I wanted, life would be so easy, like a menu with only one choice. But it's all the options that trip me up. I am dazzled by the endless possibilities.