The Orphan Sister (16 page)

“You two must be twins!” she said to Odette. Odette smiled.

“No,” said Olivia, her face steady and humorless, despite the cone of chocolate dairy joy, coated with rainbow sprinkles, in her hand.

Odette laughed with her head back while her mocha almond melted down the cone and onto her fingers, and my mother came by in the big car, rolling down the window to call out to us on the sidewalk.

“Oh, Clementine,” she called. “Clem!” She parked in the middle of the street and tore out of the car, her foundation smeared with tears. The pregnant woman walked on, cowed.

In the summer Cameron and I would both come back to Princeton—Cameron had a fellowship in a lab at Columbia Presbyterian, and I would work at my father’s hospital, helping a colleague with his arthritis research. I was looking forward to bringing home my golden boy. Drew had just been practice. This was my other self. This was how my story ended and began. I was looking forward to being a pair in the face of so much matching.

Cars began to honk, almost immediately. My mother grabbed me, as if she were drowning, pulling on my clothes, almost pulling herself up toward my head.

“Your boyfriend died,” she said quietly, into my ear, as I dropped my ice cream cone onto the ground.

After Cam died, Reed checked on me, calling weekly for a month or two, even when we had little to say to each other. When Cam’s mother called, she needed something from me; she was brittle and broken, like the dazzling crystal Christmas globes Grandma Me had sent us the winter we were six. Odette’s had shattered moments after she opened hers, and my mother had cursed her own mother in front of us.

Sometimes Reed would recount some story about Cam, as if my knowing might erase the loss. Sometimes we were quiet together on the phone, as if breath was enough.

It made no sense that he drowned. It made no sense because he was lifeguard-trained, because he was strong and lean. What did make sense was that Cameron had a sort of absence about him, what made him singular, what made him not exactly part of things growing up, even though he made the motions, even
though girls attached themselves to him like leeches in a flesh-starved pond.

And when my mother told me Cameron was dead, my first thought was that someone had killed him. But he had been entirely alone in the backyard, supposedly swimming laps, no forensic evidence of a struggle, when he drowned. I thought his father had passed on something unbearable—unintentionally, of course—his father was never diagnosed with manic depression, but Cameron said he’d known that’s what it was since he was in high school and took a psychology course. Or maybe all the pressure of freedom from his brother had caused them each to collapse like a pricked balloon over time. It was hard to imagine such need, and then such letting go. Cam looked different to me from the minute he was gone—before, he was golden, and afterward, he held dangerous energy under his skin. I wanted to be angry at someone, so I stopped talking to his mother. It was too much, anyway, her intonation like his, her loss allowed to be closer, even, than my own.

The night before he died, Cam and I had talked until 2:00 a.m. Back then, phone calls were still expensive enough to irritate my mother, who paid the phone bill from her allowance. I could care less. I’d found the other half of my pair, and no mother was going to stop me from practicing our attachment when we had to be apart. Neither family had been willing to let us go to the other’s for spring break—or, rather, willing to pay for our airfare. Cam’s mother had called me and said, “I wish I could do it, honey—I miss you so much!” and I knew she meant it, even though her words made my mouth feel prickly, as if I’d said something obscene.

My ticket to Newark was purchased six months before, and Cameron flew home for every break, even for the long Thanksgiving weekend.

“I miss you,” I’d said, for the fourteenth time in twenty minutes.

“I miss you,” he’d said back. “I wish Dad could relax—he’s on some thing about building an arbor. And he keeps saying we should have brought you here, as if saying it could make it so. I miss that thing you do with your tongue—”

“You mean this?” I licked the receiver. It was disgusting, of course, but we were in love, and no one had ever been in love this way, and the germs on the phone were no match for the antibacterial superpowers of our love.

“He wants me to teach him violin. I just want to chill, but we started lessons anyway. And you know what? I don’t hate teaching. He’s a very eager student. But I have to say, I’m not sure about the fifth year for violin.” Cameron, like Eli, was in the double-degree program. If it had been possible to finish two degrees in four years, Cameron would have done it, but too many credits were involved.

“We’ll figure it out.” I was so certain of our future, I’d already made plans for after we both finished school. He’d start med school, and I’d join him in San Francisco, or Boston, or Seattle. I might work for a while to support him, and then he could take his turn while I went to graduate school. We’d have a sunny second-floor walk-up and would feed each other strawberries at night on our futon, too tired to make dinner.

My own plans for med school were wavering, even as my sisters were taking practice MCATs and wandering Harvard Square
with any one of their unserious boyfriends. They had a five-year plan: they’d date until the last year of medical school, because forming attachments before you know where you’re going for residency was a bad idea. Then it would be okay to get serious. My answer to a five-year plan was imagining setting up an apartment off campus with Cameron. Imagining a job where I could pay for our rent and food and maybe even help Cameron as he played violin and studied medicine. I was that in love, or that deluded, and I’d never have a chance to find out, now that he’d drowned.

I drowned, too, just a little. My sisters tried to tell me things, tried to give me comfort, but I was closed—it was as though I’d lost that fourth dimension, and even the third. The world was flat. Music sounded like noise.

My sisters lay on either side of me as I tried to become part of the couch.

“Can you hear me?” Odette asked aloud. “I’m trying to sing you a song, silently.”

“No,” I said.

“How about a game?” asked Olivia.

“No,” I said. I let their bodies rest again mine, but felt itchy, as though I ought to peel off my surfaces and pool into the earth, unfettered by skin.

They tried not to let me go, but it was spring break, and then it was the last semester, and my sisters went back to Harvard and I took a plane back to Ohio. The engine noise was a relief, a silence, a nulling of possible harmonies.

I finished out my sophomore year and took a semester of leave, halfheartedly filling out applications for semester-abroad programs in France, Australia, the Netherlands. I slept in my bed at home for fourteen or fifteen hours, staying up late rereading the books of my childhood,
The Phantom Tollbooth, Anne of Green Gables, Black Beauty
, trying not to think of Cameron, but thinking of him just the same.

Dad checked on me when I was home; he’d come in every evening before he went to bed for a depression assessment. He referred me to the best psychiatrist he knew, who prescribed antidepressants. I filled the prescription and kept the pills in one of the makeup bags my mom got free when she bought her cosmetics—we three girls each had a dozen or more. I kept the bag in the file drawer of my desk after
Oberlin Application
and
Ohio Information. O
for
Only if absolutely necessary
. I never took them because I wanted the sadness, even if I were in a hole, at the bottom, no light and no chance of climbing up. I liked it in there, cool and lonely and dark.

Somehow, after my random selection of program applications, I wound up going to Australia, to a field studies program, studying the efficacy of several species of leeches—measuring their mouthparts and the amount of anticoagulant administered with each bite. It was hot; we lived on the outskirts of the rain forest, and the rainbows that covered dairy-farm fields like umbrellas after each day’s rain disgusted me—so much sun and beauty, when Cameron was dead. I made a few friends, but mostly kept to myself and my leeches, walking to my study site each morning
before breakfast, carrying two slices of bread and a hunk of cheese.

Never mind the beauty, I thought, for that semester. Never mind medical school. I collected regular postcards from Eli, letters from Lily, and Sophie and Mary, who were at Cornell and Michigan, respectively, studying religion and English literature. My father asked me to call once a week, though I had to go to the office and punch in a thousand numbers from his calling card to do it—this wasn’t from Mom’s allowance, this was from my father. It was the only time he gave me a lot of attention, and I was on the other side of the world, mourning and measuring leech mouths.

Australia was a rude shock—sun and company and humid heat.

I complied with Dad’s weekly call mandate. It was a ritual like the bread and cheese. The calls were brief but I relished them despite myself.

“Dad,” I’d say, standing in a phone booth in the tiny, eucalyptus-dusty town of Atherton.

“Clementine. How is the southern hemisphere?” Every time, habitual questions about my research and my measure of sadness.

The first call he established the routine, asking, “Okay, so how much does it hurt—scale of one to five?” I’d loved the post-op sense of that question, of his expertise, and I’d answered honestly with a five.

Toward the end of the semester he still asked the same questions, but our calls lengthened slightly, like sunlit minutes at the end of late-spring evenings.

“Do you love this sort of research?” he asked one night.

“I don’t know yet.”

“It’s okay if you do. You know, I once thought I might find some other calling in science. Being a surgeon is rewarding, but there are other ways to apply your talents. It’s okay.”

It wasn’t so much a lecture as an admission.

“Sometimes I sing when I’m alone in the field,” I said because it occurred to me. Because I missed the confessional nature of loving Cameron.

“Me, too,” my father chuckled. “You probably need to go,” he offered, a small, polite gift. “Scale of one to five?”

“Fi—no. Four point eight five today.”

“Good. Expect continued incremental improvements. I love you, Daughter.”

He didn’t pause for my reply; he hung up, and I didn’t mind. Four point eight five. It was the truth between us.

I went back to Oberlin for the first half of senior year. Fall was glorious. I walked through the arboretum past the brain trees—I looked them up in a tree guide at the library when I was supposed to be finishing a chi-square project: Osage orange trees, they were called. I preferred to call them brain trees. They dropped giant sticky fruits that looked like brains. I thought of my father and his surgeries. I thought of Cameron every time I passed the conservatory, every time I passed our old dorm. Now the ache wasn’t welcome. I wanted to move on, but I couldn’t, not here. My freshman and sophomore year, I’d avoided the phone in my room, gleefully not returning my parents’ calls, but now that I was back, I willed the phone to ring.

My weekly calls with Dad became biweekly, and he stopped asking for my pain assessment, as though he’d completed my post-op.

Still, he asked excellent questions—“Does your statistics class help you understand the tiny margins of research science?”

“It would, if I paid better attention,” I admitted.

“You should pay better attention, then.”

I wanted the pain scale. I wanted the balm of patienthood, but I didn’t know how to ask.

Now that I was back, though, my father worried less. He seemed to think I was on the antidepressants, that things were back to normal, but there was no normal for me. I stopped eating for a month, tricking my body with water and celery, enjoying the light-headedness. My period stopped. Still, I wasn’t exactly scrawny, so no one noticed. When I came home for winter break, my mom told me I looked great.

I had wanted my sisters to hear that sorrowful song—I longed for their crowding, but I had removed myself; I had chosen the quiet.

“Thank you,” I said, secretly hating her.

“I mean, look at you—bloom of health! Do you want to go shopping while you’re home? Do you have anything left in your budget?”

Of course, my father gave us each a budget to spend at school, for books, and for extras, such as movies, and clothes, and snacks, which I had none of, these days. If I’d ordered an Adjective Sandwich, it would have to be “empty.”

I was probably hoping Mom would notice, and telling me I looked good made me furious.

“So skinny!” she said, looking at my legs. “Are you thinking about dating again?”

Of course I wasn’t. I had Eli, who had become my best friend—though I had promised not to like him more than Cameron. I slept platonically in Eli’s bed with him, in Oberlin fashion, once a week if he didn’t have a girl there. I had two other friends who’d hung on through my melancholia, but most people were thinking about graduating, and I couldn’t imagine anything worse. I’d have to move on. I’d have to admit that, having switched my major from premed to biology to environmental studies, finally landing on biology again, but only because I had the most applicable credits there, I wasn’t ready to move on to anything. I still hadn’t moved on from Cameron.