The Language of Sisters (12 page)

“It must be Shane,” I concluded, as I pushed back from the table and stepped into the hallway by my bedroom to catch the call. “Hi, sweetie,” I answered, fluffing my curls for a man who could not see me.

“Already I’m
sweetie
?” a female voice teased me.

“Nova?” I ventured, slightly disappointed it wasn’t Shane. I slumped against the textured wall. He hadn’t called me for days.

“Yep,” Nova said. “I hadn’t heard from you, so I wanted to make sure you didn’t lose my number.” The confusing chatter of her children played in the background; the loud screech of the television competed with them. It was good to hear her voice again. After our meeting at Dr. Fisher’s office I had hesitated to call her, fearful I’d misread the apparent ease of our reconnection, that she’d only been so friendly to me out of a sense of politeness. I’d fallen out of practice communicating with other women. I hadn’t had a friend like Nova in San Francisco; I’d never found someone I felt comfortable opening myself to. There was always too much to explain about who I was, why I didn’t talk with my family. I kept my relationships pretty much on the surface, going out for drinks and movies and other things friends do together, but never moving past the basics into deeper emotional territory. I was afraid that even if Nova were the friend I remembered, I might not remember how to be the friend I had been to her.

“So, when are you coming over?” she asked me.

I hesitated. “Are you sure it’s okay?” A loud crash erupted
through the phone, followed by the high-pitched wailing of a child.

“James, honey,” Nova soothed, “I’ll be right there.”

“Is he okay?” I inquired, sitting up from the wall where I had been leaning.

Nova sighed. “Yeah, but he bit the dust off the couch and whacked his head on the floor. I should go. But come over tomorrow, okay? I won’t take no for an answer.” She quickly reeled off the address and basic directions. I agreed to come, then hung up, returning to the kitchen only to find my mother gently cleaning up Jenny’s hand and face. “Who was it?” she inquired.

“Nova,” I said flatly. “You don’t have to do that.” I stepped over to take the washrag from her. If she wasn’t going to offer her help, then I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her think I needed it.

“I know I don’t
have
to,” she said, letting me take the rag. She began clearing the table. “Old habits die hard.”

You could’ve fooled me,
I thought as I finished cleaning Jenny up. “We’re going to see Nova tomorrow,” I told my sister, ignoring my mother altogether. Jenny’s eyes lit up at the sound of Nova’s name. I touched her nose with the tip of my own and smiled. “We’re going to see our old friend.”

•  •  •

On the way over to her house the next day, I considered telling Nova about what had happened that night so many years before. What my father had done to Jenny. What he continued to do for several years. The times he hit her—those were the nights he’d go into her room. Nova knew about my father’s physical violence; she’d even seen him hit Jenny a few times herself. But I wasn’t sure what my old friend was ready to hear, what kind of support she would provide. From our brief interactions at Dr. Fisher’s office and on the phone, I was fairly sure she’d react with compassion, but then again, maybe she’d be disgusted that I hadn’t done something to stop my father—the same way I was disgusted with myself. Terrified by the thought of being judged for my inaction, I had long ago vowed never to talk about the sexual abuse to anyone. But being home, being in the same room and hearing the ancient squeak of Jenny’s bed every night as I laid her down, had reached into my heart and lodged there like a splinter. I could not ignore its sting much longer.

After years of schooling on the subject, my psychologist’s mind knew that men like my father, men who felt weak in their own lives, often resorted to sexual abuse as a means to exert power over those who made them feel most powerless. That it wasn’t about sex—it was about control. I understood that my father felt lost in the life that having Jenny had created for
him; I understood that her disabilities overwhelmed him, made him feel inadequate as a man for having created her. To be the father of a retarded child is to have failed. Sperm malfunction. You are told by men in white lab coats with official-looking certificates on their walls that it is impossible to say what caused your daughter’s retardation. They say it is nobody’s fault, but you feel it deep in your bones that you made it happen. All the pot you smoked in college, the bad LSD trip you took only a year before your girlfriend got pregnant and you knew the only thing to do was marry her. You are deficient, broken, not a real man.

Worse, still, is that you cannot do anything to fix her. Every day you don’t know the name of her disease you are ground a bit deeper into a hole. Every day as your wife wheels her into the kitchen for a pureed breakfast, you see your child’s sagging mouth and startled, wide eyes and you are reminded how you have failed this child, bringing her into the world malformed, unable to experience the joy of being alive. Your child does not live; she is simply maintained.

You ache for a life without medical bills and doctors’ appointments and a wife who cries herself to sleep almost every night. You long for family barbecues with the neighbors without the bright, uncomfortable chatter and polite inquiries about your daughter’s health. The sliding stares that glance over her but never truly see her. The stare that is becoming more like your own. Your inability to see her anymore, the detachment you are attempting so that maybe, if you can open your eyes and she isn’t there anymore, you can leave. Or maybe your wife will finally decide to place her in a home where they are trained in maintenance. You want her to leave so that you can have a normal life. If she isn’t going to leave, you will have to.

I halfway thought I decided to study psychology in the first
place so I could find a way to understand all this about my father, and though I did, I could not forgive him. Would not forgive him. What he had done was unforgivable.

I looked over to Jenny, who sat next to me in the car, a twenty-five-year-old strapped into a booster seat that was designed for children, yet even with her weight gain fit her perfectly. She stared out the window, hands quiet in her lap, entranced by the bright lights in a stereo store’s display. I gripped the wheel a bit tighter.

“How you doing, sweetie?” I asked her, but she did not look at me, seemingly lost in her own thoughts. What were those thoughts? I often wondered. Was she communing with God? Conversing with angels? I could not believe her mind was a blank, as so many doctors had told us over the years. I saw such life behind her eyes; I imagined piles of words in her brain, laid up like a logjam desperate for release. The language we shared was a gift, a link between sisters. I believed that when I heard her voice within me, one or two of those jammed words managed to slip through whatever held the rest back. Whatever disease threaded through her brain, it had not touched her soul.

Nova lived near Alki Beach in a sky blue rambler with a daylight basement. “It’s the one that looks like there’s a yard sale going on,” she had said with a laugh over the phone. Finding this description true, I pulled up in front of the address she had given me, a little taken aback by the mess on the lawn. Piles of brightly colored plastic toys littered the grass along with a few scattered lumps of clothing. There were a swing set off to the side of the yard and a Big Wheel and three open bags of sand on the parking strip. I had to move the car a little farther down to make sure there was room to get Jenny out and into her wheelchair.

Nova saw me through a small window over the garage and
waved. Her three older children ran out the red front door and down the stairs toward us. “They’re here! They’re here!” they screamed. “Mama, they’re here!”

My eyes widened at the small onslaught of tiny bodies clambering around me as I tried to maneuver Jenny out of the car. Nova came rushing down the stairs, her wavy hair frizzed and loose around her shoulders. She was barefoot and wore a brightly colored East Indian–style wraparound skirt that emphasized her fleshy hips. Her white V-necked T-shirt was hiked up on one side over her breast, an appendage to which Layla was firmly attached. Nova appeared unfazed by nursing in the middle of the street, as if she were simply holding her child’s hand. I admired her comfort with such a seemingly intimate act. It told me she did what she thought was best, despite what other people might think. It told me she was still the woman I had known.

“Hey, Buster Browns,” she sweetly addressed her brood. “Give ’em some room! Remember what we talked about?”

Isaac and Rebecca nodded; their little brother, James, watched them and followed suit, his head bobbing vigorously in agreement. Nova smiled. “Okay then. Back off.” She smiled at me, too, a bright and beautiful thing. “We’re working on the personal-space issue.”

“Gotcha.” I leaned down and forward, wrapped my arms around Jenny’s waist, and hiked her into a standing position. “Ow!” I touched my twinging back.

“You okay?” Nova asked, concerned but still watching her children race around the front yard.

“Yeah, just not used to all this lifting. She weighs a ton.” I stopped myself and hugged Jenny. “I’m sorry, sweetie. You don’t weigh a ton. You’re just right.”

I managed to hoist Jenny and her wheelchair up the few
stairs into Nova’s house. Her living room would have given Shane a heart attack. Toys everywhere, magazines and books spread across the floor like a second layer of carpet. I immediately noticed a plaque above the fireplace that challenged you to
LOVE ME, LOVE MY MESS
in Gothic black letters. The air smelled of cinnamon, something taken fresh from the oven, then set on the counter to cool.

Nova swung out her arm. “Welcome to my humble abode. Make yourself at home.” She set Layla carefully in the baby swing that sat next to the couch and hollered out the front door. “Time to play in the backyard, buddies, okay?” They seemed to ignore her. “Hey!” she bellowed. “Did you hear me? Backyard, now!”

The threesome scrambled through the house and out the back door without so much as a glance at their mother. She sighed in relief and plopped down on the navy blue leather couch, motioning me to do the same. “Ah, peace.” She screwed up her pretty face. “For the moment, at least.”

I maneuvered Jenny’s chair next to us so she could watch Layla in the swing. My sister’s gaze attached itself immediately to the infant, seemingly enraptured by her. I wondered if Jenny understood the connection between Nova’s child and the baby inside her; I wondered if she was even
aware
of what was happening within her body. But really, there was no way to know for sure what Jenny understood about her pregnancy. I settled in the opposite corner of the couch, a spot worn in deep and comfortable by another person’s regular use, and smiled at Nova. “So,” she began, “how
are
you?”

“Hanging in there,” I replied, which was as short a summary of the truth as I could manage. I could not hear myself telling her how I felt like the seams of a too-tight pair of jeans, ready to burst at any second. How my breathing became shallow and panicked
every time I allowed myself to consider all I had taken on. How the smell of my childhood home made me ill and the sound of my sister’s bed pushed me to tears; how my mother treated us like strangers. How I thought the man I loved might be the wrong man altogether and how afraid I was of letting him go for fear of never finding another.

But instead of relaying all of this and making her reconsider inviting me back into her life, I inquired politely after her. “How are
you
?”

“Oh, you know. Fine. Fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and exasperated.”

I laughed. “Excuse me?” I had almost forgotten how funny she could be.

“That’s what ‘fine’ stands for. F.I.N.E. That’s how I am.” She grinned.

“I’ll have to remember that one.”

There was a sharp knock and a man stuck his head in through the front door. “Hey, Nova,” he said, his voice rich and smooth, like melted chocolate. The sound of it made me want to roll my tongue around in my mouth.

“Hey, Garret. Come on in. These are a couple of old friends of mine, Nicole and her sister, Jenny.”

Garret stepped into the room. Tall and broad-shouldered, he wore faded blue jeans with a tucked-in, thin black sweater. His black hair was wavy and full, falling down to one side in front of lighter brown eyes. His expression was warm, his smile genuine and deep as he waved in greeting with one hand and pushed his hair away from his face with the other. The tips of his ears poked out from his head in an endearing fashion. He looked like a cross between a supermodel and an elf. I returned his smile, sure I was showing too many teeth. I wished I had taken the time to put on some lipstick.

“Where’s Lucy?” Nova inquired, glancing around his legs.

“Already out back with the other munchkins. We heard them halfway down the street.” He smiled again, and I noticed his front teeth slightly overlapped each other. “She took a pretty good nap, but refused to eat any lunch. I think she’s having peanut butter issues.” He screwed his smile into an amused expression.

“No problem. We’ll see you later.”

“Thanks again,” he said, then directed his attention to me. “Nice to meet you, Nicole. Maybe I’ll see you again.” He smiled at my sister and then addressed her. “You sure have pretty eyes, Jenny.” My stomach jumped at his speaking to her; most people felt uncomfortable when they first met Jenny. I wondered if he had had experience with other handicapped people.

Jenny perked up at the mention of her name, pulling her gaze from Layla. She bestowed a beautiful smile upon Garret in return for the compliment.

After he left, I widened my eyes at Nova, fanning my hand in front of my chest. “Whew! Who was
that
?”

Nova grinned wickedly. “He’s my neighbor. I watch his little girl for him in the evenings while he’s at work. He owns a restaurant down on the strip. Quite the charmer, eh?”