The Orphan Sister (18 page)

Evan waved me away, either protecting Odette or giving me a break, I wasn’t sure. Part of me wanted to stay glued to her side; I wanted to be needed.

I ducked out of the hospital so I could use my cell phone—they weren’t allowed inside.

“Dad?” I asked his useless voice mail. I was furious, but almost contrite. My hands hurt, my belly hurt, my eyes hurt from the light of the outdoors.

“You need to tell us how to reach you. Please. It’s urgent.” I sighed and dialed the next number.

“Eli?” I said, as if it would be someone else answering his phone.

“Clementine, my love.”

“That’s it. Sometimes I wonder about your love.”

“Me, too,” said Eli, and I felt as though I’d been kicked in the shin. Ow. What next?

“My sister’s having her baby,” I said. “She asked for me.”

“Clementine! Are you in the room now? What is it like? You know Liz is pregnant, right? I mean, you two were roommates—”

Liz and I rarely kept in touch. Despite our living together, Eli had really been our only link. I had been a sourpuss when we’d lived together, and it wasn’t her fault. I had temporarily forgotten
how to be a friend. It would have been different if we’d met sooner, or later, and it hung in the back of my closet of guilt like a horrible, expensive dress. I didn’t want to hear about Liz.

“
Right now,”
I said. “It’s wild. Don’t tell me about Liz now, please.”

“I just thought—”

“Don’t think.”

“So you didn’t know about her?” Why was he so languorous, so casual? It was too important—this wasn’t what I needed.

“I should probably get back,” I said, wondering why I’d called him. I just felt as if Eli needed to know what was happening. Eli my lifeline, Eli with his too long lashes and creamy, almost-brown skin. Those chocolate eyes. And obnoxious calm.

“Do you want me?” Always the double entendre.

“Of course I want you,” I said, wondering how I meant it.
Please don’t like him more than me
, I heard Cameron whispering. “But here, I don’t think they’d let you in. I’ll call you later. It’s early, you know. Not
too
early, but—” My mother and Olivia walked by the lobby, their bodies close, clearly exchanging confidences. My mother touched Olivia’s back with a sweet sort of guidance.

“Gotta go,” I said. Eli said something else, but I wasn’t listening. The scales were all unbalanced, the new normal was impending, and Dad was still AWOL.

Something in the way my mother and sister walked together was a warning. I was wanting for something that wasn’t about me; it was Odette who needed a full hand of family right now, and I could see order and reordering in the way people touched and
separated. Triplets couldn’t afford to have soft connections; triplets had electric poles—without a proper connection, we’d spin in space.

“Olivia,” I said. “I’m just going to say it.”

My mother donned her warning face, the one that said,
I don’t like strife—don’t you girls fight, no bickering, or I’m going to have to stop this car right now.

“Yes?” Olivia said. “Since you’re clearly the chosen one. Hey, what’re you doing outside the room? I thought she needed to massacre your hand?”

“Evan’s here,” I said. “And don’t feel left out—you get to do it, too.” I cleared my throat. “Okay. I’ll just say it: Odette wants you to call Dad—call that number he left. It isn’t about him, it’s about her, and she thinks it’s enough of an emergency and so do I, and if you won’t give me the number—”

“It is
not
an emergency,” said Olivia, tight-lipped, clutching her belly as if otherwise her fetus might walk off.

“It is,” I said. “Everything about his leaving is an emergency; everything about Dad is an emergency. Hurry up and wait. Do what I say, not what I do. You having the number is just his way of dividing us so we’re not united against him.”

“Enough!” said my mother. “I already called. He’s on his way.”

For a moment I wondered why my mom had the number—why she’d kept that to herself all along. Then everything was about the
baby and Odette—their hearts’ work recorded and amplified for everyone to hear. Urgency and miraculous exertion.

I was there for the rest of the labor, which lasted five hours, and the pushing. I stood at Odette’s head as they decided to try for another ten minutes, or else it would be a C-section. She started to sob, but stopped for each contraction to hold her breath and grow red, then white. It was horrific, but also mesmerizing; I actually believed she could die, that having a baby was a huge deal after all. It wasn’t a handful of stringy snakes wriggling out of a cloaca like a matter of fact. Odette was suffering, and she was strong. She’d had her epidural, but it wasn’t too potent, so she was able to push, which meant that, according to Olivia, who came and went like the doctors and nurses, “It still hurts like hell.”

Evan proved to be marvelous, bringing ice chips, performing foot rubs and back pressure with a tennis ball, which didn’t seem to help, but certainly distracted everyone. “Here?” he asked. “Here?” while Odette just moaned.

“Love—nothing,” he said, grinning soulfully at me.

Evan cracked jokes about ordering room service, about how terrific the drugs were, about how now she had some idea how her patients felt, which prompted Odette to kick him. But it was an excellent diversion. Sometimes Evan reminded me of a taller version of Eli—his kindness and intensity.

She might die, I kept thinking, watching her husband at the foot of the bed, staring into the inside of her body, where a baby was coming to and fro with her pushes—finally they realized the cord was around his neck. Odette’s face was mottled with effort and blood vessels; her eyes were huge and bloodshot. Here I was, with my sister the obstetrician and my sister the pediatrician, and
they were just as vulnerable as anyone else, performing this basic, primeval, dangerous feat of human childbirth.

“It’s a . . . ?” prompted the doctor, handing the wailing mass at last to Evan.

“Boy?” gasped Evan, as if he hadn’t known what to expect.

“Whew. He knows the difference,” teased the nurse.

The baby was exquisite. He lay looking astonished on Odette’s half-gowned chest for a moment, surprisingly quiet, and had nuzzled her, but wasn’t ready to nurse. Odette stared at him as if she couldn’t believe he’d happened; they were in concert, singing silent surprise. He was a little small, but they’d yelled out the normal Apgar before the nurse wrapped him up like a burrito and whisked him off to the NICU, where they’d double-check that everything was all right, since he was just under five pounds. Perhaps despite the obsessive planning of my highly organized sister, she’d gotten pregnant earlier than she estimated.

They delivered the placenta—an enormous and amazing organ—and then it had taken a little while to stop Odette’s bleeding.

“Baby’s fine,” said the doctor, washing her hands and walking out as if something momentous hadn’t just happened. She wasn’t Odette’s chosen doctor, who was still on vacation, she was just filling in, and she was perfectly fine, but not warm, not as heroic as I’d always imagined my sister would be at every birth. Odette had deserved more.

Mom and I stood in the room for an hour, holding Odette’s hand as they ferried baby Adam away to be cleaned and measured.
Evan went along with the nurses so Adam wouldn’t be left alone, and I gripped Odette’s icy hand and tried to tuck the blankets in around her as she shivered violently.

Odette shivered and shivered and couldn’t get warm.

“I’ll get more blankets,” said my mom, who looked a little ashen herself. “He’s so beautiful, darling,” she said, kissing my sister’s head. Blood was smeared across Odette’s cheek. “Wish number one!” Mom smiled. We were her three wishes, always.

“Performed like a pro,” I said. Odette laughed a little. I licked my finger and wiped off the blood.

“Am I okay?” she asked me. Her eyes looked lost, as though she had witnessed something unbearable. I wished I knew. I wished I were a doctor, able to diagnose what was wrong with people, how to fix them. Oberlin made me crave purpose in the world, and even though I’d eschewed the authority and self-importance of becoming a
physician
, part of me knew they were necessary to make the kinds of calls my sisters made every day. I wondered how they could stand doing this sort of work—watching people’s lives change daily and not collapsing from the sheer drama of it all.

“They left you alone—they wouldn’t leave you alone with me if you weren’t okay?” I said, but I wasn’t sure myself.

“Can’t get warm,” said Odette.

And then, though we’d all forgotten, blissfully, for the past five hours, my father marched in the door like a king reclaiming his throne.

A
lthough I love children, I have always been ambivalent about ever having my own, even when I was with Cameron. However, I had always wanted to be an aunt. My mother’s sister was a fine example—adulthood without the burden of responsibility. She was
fun.

When Eli and I were at Oberlin together for the fall of senior year, we volunteered to visit the Oberlin public schools as part of a college-town outreach project. Eli accompanied and coached a small group of students who were playing violin in the school orchestra; I did a science experiment with the third grade, collecting soil from sundry sites and testing it for pH, organic content such as worms, leaf matter, and insect larvae, and trying to sift out the mineral content. The kids were amazing; what looked like a bored bunch when I walked it, sitting slumped at their round tables holding their heads in scabby hands, turned out to be a group of amazing minds. They asked questions like “Are you married?” “Why do we need mosquitoes?” “How much money do you make?” and “Why did God put lava in the earth when it could squirt out and hurt people like it did in Italy a long, long, long time ago?” They wanted coaching, hand over hand, with the tests.
They wanted to know why and how, and they were willing to listen, even if their bodies were in perpetual motion.

After our third and final visit, Eli and I rode back to the library on our bicycles, our
Thank you, volunteer
certificates signed by the students rolled up in my basket so they wouldn’t get crushed among biology and philosophy texts. His strong, sinewy body mottled by sunlight, Eli made up a song as he pushed the pedals.

“Kids are great, kids are good, and we thank them as we should, kids in the world, kids in the world, kids are swirled, kids, kids, kids!”

“Kids are swirled?” I howled, pumping hard on the ancient, one-speed upright I’d bought at the bike co-op, promising to sell it back after graduation—as it turned out, I never found out what happened to the bike because I left her on a rack outside Mudd, the main library, when I took my last shuttle to the airport, and never came back.

“Kids are burled! Those kids hurled!”

“They did not!” Eli’s legs were longer than mine, and I had to stand and run on the pedals to keep up.

Eli stopped beneath a brain tree in the arb, and I almost ran into him, I was pedaling so hard. The old bike’s brakes weren’t exactly state-of-the-art.

“Clementine.” He leaned over and picked a seed-gone dome of dandelion. It was October, and the arb looked like a painting, dazzling reds and yellows, the leaves shivering as if they expected the inevitable. A stone bridge crossed a river just ahead, and the sky was the sharp blue that cuts the world into earthbound and celestial properties. Eli’s face was bright with exertion, his impossible
lashes like fronds over his dark eyes. Eli’s lips were perfect bows, doll-like, only somehow masculine, perhaps because they were wide and his smile showed no hesitation. He knew what he wanted from the world, and the way he looked at me as I stumbled to stop my bike made my cheeks hot with possibilities. I felt Cameron still. Eli and I had been friends before Cameron drowned; only it was a clandestine, unexplored, mutual admiration. An unexplored friendship that is, only seeing each other in classes, or with a pack of other friends. I was a small-group person, best one-on-one, and I would never have hurt Cam by spending too much time with Eli. After Cam left me by dying, I thought, he had less sway. Not none, but less guilt-mandated loyalty.

“Clem,” said Eli. “We should get married. We would have beautiful kids. And we could teach them about science and music—” He blew the seeds off the dandelion, as if wishing.

I didn’t say anything because he kidded about this all the time. I was Cameron’s, even if Cam was gone. They’d been roommates—and even tape-divided roommates followed some sort of man code about not dating each other’s girlfriends. I felt guilty holding Eli’s friendship in my fist—too close for Cam—but it kept me from falling.

Eli was between girlfriends at the moment; he’d been with the voluptuous and gorgeous Guinivere, another double-degree student, studying voice and chemistry, a genius with dark blond, corkscrew curls and dimples when she sang, but a body like a mermaid’s. Guinivere had graduated, and she and Eli knew he wouldn’t follow her when she went to Juilliard for her master’s (later she would become a food chemist and work for a large corporation that was trying to improve the nutritional value of its
snack cakes—Guinivere would sing in a local opera company and marry an environmental activist and have five children and become even more voluptuous, as if that were possible), so they broke up.

“We could have two sets of twins.” He grinned. “Boys and girls, one of each per set, and then we would only need to get one set of pink and blue overalls—”

“What makes you so sure I want kids?” I asked. “And twins. I’m not big on twins.”

“But your sisters—” Eli was fascinated by my sisters. He flirted with them, and they often flirted back, though never in the presence of my father, or any of their respectable boyfriends. Or the unrespectable ones. Odette had dated a dramatically socially limited MIT graduate student who wore his hair in dreads—he called it a Jew-fro, and who was clearly so smart he should live on a more evolved planet. One where it was okay not to wash one’s hair or clothing, one where it was okay to skip wearing shoes, even in winter, in favor of thick-soled feet covered with a hobbity sort of fur. He only lasted a month, but did succeed in worrying my father. My mother liked him because he fixed the icemaker, an air-conditioning vent, and the intercom system during his one brief visit on his way home to his parents’ in Philadelphia.