The Good Sister (20 page)

“We weren't getting along so great at the end, is all,” he finally says.

“Why?”

He shrugs. “It's kind of hard to admit now, after, I mean, you know…”

“What?” I say when he doesn't continue.

“I wanted to see other people, and she didn't.”

Did those other people include Rachel?

No.

Who would do something like that?

Even if he would, I can't believe Rachel would betray Sarah in such a shitty way. Not even she was that low.

I swallow the dryness in my mouth. “Do you think she was depressed about that?”

He shrugs. “She was just upset with me was all.”

“Were you trying to break up with her?”

“No. I just wanted to have, like, an open relationship.”

“Right. Like that ever works.” I am disgusted on Sarah's behalf, but I contain myself. I try to imagine Sarah wanting to kill herself over this unbelievable shit of a guy, and I can't. She wouldn't. She was too smart for that.

“I'm really sorry. About everything.”

I don't know what I was hoping to hear from David when I came here, but it's not his pathetic apology.

Suddenly, I feel too antsy to sit still, too pissed off by this conversation to stay for another second. I stand up and descend the stairs, grab my bike, and start walking it down the driveway.

David says nothing as I go.

I feel as if an unspoken question hangs in the air between us, but I'm not sure what it is, or if I want to know the answer.

Twenty-Nine

Sarah

I am selfish. I am a coward. I am anything but a saint.

I deserved the cancer I got, only in reverse.

The punishment before the crime.

Except it wasn't enough.

I will need to explain some things, but I still don't have the words for most of it.

Especially not for Brandon.

He was the kind of kid you meet on the Northern California coast. Creative, slightly adrift, educated in a halfhearted way. I know some things about him now that I didn't know then. I know that his mother loved him dearly, that she has never recovered from his death, that his father, an alcoholic, is sunken deeper into his disease since the accident. I know they are troubled by the lack of closure to the case. They want to know who killed their son. They want someone to pay.

They deserve that.

I see now how much more selfish I could be than anyone ever thought possible. That's the thing about being the good sister. People overlook too much. They forgive too often. I didn't deserve the mark of sainthood just for having once been sick.

Thirty

Asha

Back at school again. Permanently this time, I suspect. A truancy officer has gotten involved, and I'm tired of battling Lena anyway.

I'm in English class with Ms. Abel. It is, or was, my favorite class, back when favorite classes were a thing I had. I loved to read and write and analyze. Now I forget what it's like to love doing things. I want to remember, but the feeling eludes me.

“Asha,” Ms. Abel says to me when she looks up from her desk and sees me sitting there waiting for the bell to ring to start class. “Could I speak with you for a moment?”

I go over to her desk, and she has this look on her face. “I know you're having a very difficult year.”

I look down at her hands. She's holding my poem about dead people's things. I didn't use to write poems—it was something Sarah did—but now it feels like the only thing that will come out of me when I pick up a pencil and try to write. It's the first thing I've turned in for weeks. I keep thinking I'd better start doing some makeup work, but all that comes out of me are fractured words and phrases when I try to write whole sentences and paragraphs. Not literary analysis. Not five-paragraph essays.

“This isn't exactly the assignment I gave you, but it's a very good poem.”

I look into her eyes, then back down at the paper. It's wrinkled, written in purple ink on a scraggly piece of notebook paper.

“I want to help you pass this semester, so I'll give you a bit of leeway on the type of assignments you turn in. Does writing help you process your grief?” she asks in a careful voice.

Process your grief.
It sounds like something that happens at the Department of Emotions. If I fill out the right forms and turn in the proper paperwork to the correct department, in six to eight weeks all will be well again. I'll get an official certificate in the mail making it so.

I shrug. Shift my weight from one hip to the other. I've never been all that friendly with Ms. Abel in spite of my love of the subject, so I don't know what to do with her personal questions. It feels like she's peeking into some place private.

“What if you spend some time just writing whatever comes out? And you turn that in for some credit?”

I think I can do that, so I nod.

“Good. And I was wondering if you might like to read this poem aloud to the class. It's so moving, I was hoping your classmates could hear it.”

“No.” I shake my head, blushing already. “I can't.”

“Would it make you feel uncomfortable if I read it?”

Most definitely, but I'm too flattered by her compliment to say anything.

“I understand if it's too personal, but I think it might be cathartic to share it with the class.”

Cathartic?
I remember this word from studying the Greek tragedies. It's like when watching a sad movie makes you cry and you get out all your sad feelings that way. I don't know if I'm ready to let go of any feelings, but something about the idea of everyone else hearing those words …

I guess I like the thought, because what is a poem without an audience? “Okay.”

Ms. Abel smiles. “Thank you for sharing it. I'll read it at the start of class.”

I go to a desk in the back of the room and slump down in it, feeling shy now that I know what she's going to do. Sin walks in, and like always lately, he is careful not to look at me.

Nothing has changed since our drive to the coast. He was so sweet and thoughtful that day, but afterward, we are back to this. The cold war, or whatever it is. He is still mad at me, even if he says I'm forgiven. He still doesn't trust me, still thinks I'm a skank for messing around with his brother. He hasn't said it out loud, but I know how he thinks.

Our friendship's vanishing before my eyes leaves me feeling so empty I'm afraid I will collapse in on myself, like one of those buildings in Las Vegas that's being demolished so as not to fall on all the others around it.

How does he even know I'm here if he isn't looking? He must catch a glimpse at the doorway so he knows where in the room not to look. Or maybe he just senses my presence because we were so close. He should know where I am just by scent, or vibes in the air, or something.

I watch him sit in a seat three rows over, five desks up. Not beside me like before. I study the back of his head. He put some kind of purple tint in his hair, but you can barely tell. Jenna Carson sits down beside him, laughing at something that must have happened in the hallway, and I look away. Down at my notebook. I take out a pen and start drawing a black swirl, doodling without thinking.

The class fills up and Ms. Abel is talking about expository essays due Friday. I don't remember this assignment, but I will do what she asked. I will write down something, whatever comes out, and turn it in. I'm not sure I care about passing tenth-grade English, but I like the idea of seeing what comes out of me. I like the way I felt after writing the poem—sort of clean—and I want to feel like that again. It's as if I'm grasping some little part of Sarah when I write.

“Before we get started on today's reading, I have something special to share with you,” Ms. Abel is saying.

I feel my face start to burn. I should have told her not to say it's
my
poem, I think in a panic.

But then she already knows, because she says, “One of your classmates has written a poem that is quite good, and I've asked permission to read it aloud to all of you.”

She is using her Very Serious voice, the one that makes everyone get quiet and listen. I've always wondered how she could do this, because it's not a stern voice. It just has some quality that makes kids shut up and take notice. People glance around to see if they can spot whose poem it could be. It's pretty unusual for Ms. Abel to compliment anyone's writing—she's an old-school teacher, stern and quick to point out errors—and even more unusual for her to want to read it aloud.

She clears her voice and begins to read my words:

In a room that's silent now,

This is all that's left behind:

A jewelry box

A journal

A pair of jeans

An unmade bed because she hated making the bed

A cell phone that doesn't ring

Everyone knows not to call

And the battery is dead

An alarm clock glowing red: it's 3:29

Or 4:15 or 1:25 or any number at all because

Time is the thing that matters least now.

The coroner cannot give the exact time of death

Though we all want to know—

Was it dark, light, morning, night?

Perhaps daytime, they say, at high tide

When the water would have covered the rocks

A kindness to spare us, or the truth—

It doesn't matter because

Time has ceased to pass since

And no detail like the time of death can

Erase the fact of an empty room

That holds the things she left behind.

She uses just the right tone of voice, careful and with no emotion to get in the way of the words. But you can tell she's touched by it. She looks sad as she's reading. I feel my eyes well up with tears, and I blink hard, then swipe at my cheeks before anyone looks back at me.

When she finishes, people know it's my poem of course. Some kids turn and give me kind of sad or understanding looks, and I feel awkward from all the attention, so I start doodling again. What I don't expect when I look up again, when Ms. Abel has moved on to asking everyone to take out their copies of
As I Lay Dying,
is to find Sin staring at me. He's turned sideways in his desk, and I don't know what the look he's giving me means, but then he looks away. Five minutes later, a text causes my phone to buzz.

I take it out of my pocket, careful to keep it in my lap, and read Sin's message:
u r beautiful. I want us to not b mad at each other.

My heart swells up so much I can hardly breathe. I will stay away from Tristan for real. I will never touch him again, so long as Sin and I can go back to the way things were.

I text back,
you 2 … and me 2.

I watch him read the message and slip the phone back in his backpack.

The rest of the class period is agony. I try to pass the time by paying attention to the book, but Faulkner is so hard to understand, and the class discussion is too much to follow. I just want to put my head down. I start writing in my notebook, thinking I will come up with something else I can turn in for a grade. I write about what I remember from the first few chapters of the novel, about my confusion with the stream-of-consciousness style—while writing in my own stream-of-consciousness style—and this passes the time.

When the bell rings, my chest goes tight, and I look over to see if Sin is going to wait for me. He does. I feel this huge relief, like crazy just-got-pulled-back-from-the-cliff relief.

“Hey,” he says. “Good poem.”

“Thanks.”

“What are you doing after school?”

“Lena wants me to clean out Sarah's room.”

Apparently, we are not one of those families who will keep the room as a monument to the last day Sarah spent there. No, that is not the Kinsey way. We will transform the room into a meditation space for Lena, or perhaps a yoga studio, or a stylish yet comfortable guest suite.

“Ah. The inspiration for the literary work?”

“Sort of. I mean, I go in there and try to put stuff in boxes, but it's hard. I don't know what to keep, what to give away.”

He pauses, as if considering his options. “I'll help.”

This is the best idea I've heard since, like, forever. “Okay,” I say, containing my joy in a careful voice.

“Come on.” He gestures for me to follow as he heads for the door.

I trail after him, kind of breathless with relief that we are talking again. Sin isn't mad at me anymore. This fact dances and tumbles in my head, whirling like a little kid trying to make itself dizzy. I had almost given up hope. But there he is, his thin back leading me down the hallway, toward our lockers. I have to make sure I never, ever, ever lose him again.

And I realize something. That sense of danger about our friendship, it's mostly because I need him so much in order for me to stay sane. It's because in this vast world of unreliable people, he is the one I know I can rely on.

 

 

I have not ventured into the dark, hidden places of Sarah's room before. I have stuck to the safe territory—the tops of dressers, the bookshelves. It feels wrong to invade her privacy, even though she is gone. Is there even such a thing as privacy for the dead? I think so, I decide, as I sit on my knees on the floor of the closet and pull out pairs of shoes.

I want to know what happened the day Sarah died, but I'm not sure I want to know what might be hidden in the truth of it.

Having Sin here gives me confidence, but still this process makes me want to throw up. The idea that her feet will never fit into this pair of sandals or that pair of boots … it's further and further proof that she will not be coming back anytime soon. Or ever.