The Orphan Sister (19 page)

“My sisters are my sisters. And we’re triplets; they’re not twins, even if it seems like they are, and you can just marry
them
if you think they’re so fabulous.” I picked up one of the brain-tree fruits, stumbling to keep my bicycle upright. It was sticky, green, and odd.

“No,” he whispered. “It’s you I want.” Then he swung his leg over his bicycle and pedaled on to the library without looking
back at me. I tossed the fruit in his path. My shirt got drips of brain-tree sap on the front, and like some kind of Super Glue, the wads of sap never washed out.

I always wondered what it would’ve been like to know Eli in high school, whether I would’ve loved him the same way. Or Cameron, for that matter, though for each boy I would’ve had to have had a whole different life to know them; until his mom died, Eli went to a private school in Manhattan and spent weekends at the Juilliard prep program with the other music geeks, playing first chair and talking about which summer programs had the best teachers, the best food, and the most comfortable living quarters. I had never known anything like what he described: a group with a sense of purpose and belonging, a group that was preprofessional at such a young age, but even more important, a place where everyone belonged, all talented; despite any pecking order, they were all musicians. They all had a particular talent (and most of them, like Eli, had more than one). It wasn’t that I didn’t fit in, in high school, it was that I never had that sense of belonging somewhere, the way my sisters belonged everywhere they went, owned a place, because they knew who they were and where they were going. You might think they would be the two out of the three of us who had trouble with differentiation, with individuation, but, no, I was the one who felt like a mateless shoe.

If I had known Cameron in high school, I would have been a California girl, and San Jose was nothing like Princeton.

When I first went back with Cameron, it was summer after freshman year, partly because of the cost of flying to California,
partly because I had argued with my father every break when I came home, but I still felt obliged to be there, as if something might be lost if I didn’t come back to check.

Cameron’s family lived in a split-level on a cul-de-sac, a short brick-and-siding house that looked like the other houses. When we rode up in the SuperShuttle from San Francisco airport, I was surprised by how small it looked, how modest. The front yard was dry—it was a no-watering month—and a black mailbox was on a post by the curb, the kind frisky teens decapitated with a baseball bat from a car window in the movies.

“Oh,” said Cameron’s mother, a tall, frighteningly lean woman wearing coral lipstick and a polo dress. “
You
must be Clementine.” She folded me into a brief, generous hug, leaning down as if I were a child. Then she held me back at arm’s length and examined my face. I found it difficult to make direct eye contact; her eyes were the same color and shape as Cameron’s. She shone; I wondered how her skin emanated warmth.
There must be something in the California air
, I thought. And then:
I wonder if I can ever live up to this.

“I’m Alice. I have so much planned for us!” She swept my hair behind my ear—such an intimate gesture, I blushed. “You can come to my painting workshop? Unless you prefer shopping? And swimming—the girls can’t wait to meet you? Did I tell you I’m in Master’s Swim—nothing special, it’s just fun. Do you swim?” Eye contact, more eye contact.

“Mom,” said Cameron. “Remember me?” I knew he did it partly to give me respite.

“She’s never had a girl,” said Cameron that night, sitting on my twin bed in the guest room. The house was deceptive on the outside; inside it rambled along, four bedrooms, a guest room, his mother’s tiny sewing room, and constant little closets. You had to lean way in past their little doors to hang up your coat. I had unpacked into a dresser in the guest room, noticing the orange smell in every room, and then I noticed little sachets attached on hooks to the backs of each door.

“Clementine!” she called. “Oh, darling!” She wasn’t daft, she was darling herself—a bit overwhelming, but darling nonetheless. “You must come make the salad dressing. All our guests make the salad dressing.”

“She might not want to make salad dressing,” said a huge voice.

He wasn’t huge like his voice; he was a modest six feet tall with silver, boyish hair and a ridiculously boyish grin. If Cam looked like that when he was older, I’d have to work hard to compete. Maybe I’d have to swim a mile a day, like his mother. I was brave with my salad dressing and added six or seven different spices to the crushed garlic and green-yellow olive oil and the balsamic vinegar the Kites had brought back from their trip to Italy.

“It’s so odd to be able to travel,” his mother said. “All these years we’ve been home—and learned to love being home—Oh! You made the best dressing ever! We’re going to have to keep you, Clementine!” She kissed my cheek. Then she looked into my eyes again. I couldn’t decide whether I liked so much touching, or whether it made me nervous. Was I a prude? I asked Cam later, alone in his room.

“I’m not exactly exotic,” I said. “And I’m sure you’ve had girlfriends home before.”

“Not really,” said Cameron, tucking my hair behind my ear—it was her gesture, I suddenly realized. Cam had learned it watching his mother, from infancy. I loved this man. I felt a surge of heat in my groin. Cameron could just look at me and I would want him. I’d wanted him on the plane; I’d wanted him as we held hands and walked across the airport; I’d wanted during dinner, when he ate his polenta and eggplant with tomato sauce and caught the tiniest bit at the corner of his mouth.

“She’ll calm down. She just adores you.”

“How come she glows, Cam?”

“Ha! I think it’s probably some fancy skin cream. Or else all the swimming.”

“I’m not sure I can ever live up to—”

“She’s had a lot to deal with—my brother—,” he said. “And now she has some
space.”

“Can we visit him?”

Cameron’s autistic brother lived in a group house two towns over. His mother went almost every day, though Cameron said she didn’t really need to. His brother had a job at the local grocery store and was taking art classes at the community school. Cameron talked to him every week on the phone, and once he’d put me on, and I’d asked his brother how he was, and he said, “You mean how tall? I’m six feet tall. I wear work shoes to work. How tall are you?” It hadn’t been too odd, just formal, just the kind of conversation you might have with a shy and literal child, only he had Cameron’s same deep voice and chuckle.

“Cam?” his mother turned the knob on my door. Cameron scootched away from me, as if sitting beside me were a sin.

“Oh,” she said, looking at us, her eyes scanning the abbreviated distance between us. “Don’t let me interrupt.”

I was surprised she insisted on separate bedrooms, though I knew my parents would do the same when we went to Princeton, which I dreaded, and longed to do.

“Want some wine?” She beamed. “We’re tasting.”

It was too much, too wonderful.

“Well, I just wanted to say, your father wants to take you to the office tomorrow to see about something for the summer. Clementine, would you like to lunch with me and the ladies? And there’s Master’s Swim practice at the club—swim club.”

I looked at Cameron; I’d assumed we’d spend all our time together.

“Okay,” said Cameron, looking at his hands, then at me. “Clem, is it okay?”

“Fine,” I said, trying to sound okay. I felt like crying. I felt like calling my sisters; for the first time since leaving for college, I really missed them. It was one thing to be gone during the school year, when life was filled with extraordinary musical performances, lectures, homework, raucous dining-hall dinners with the entire dormful of friends; it was another entirely to be on my own in a strange suburban house like a foster child with the most effusive mom on the planet. The truth was, I enjoyed being near her. She felt genuine, if overzealous. She was trying so hard I couldn’t help liking her—though I didn’t know how quickly I could love her, and that was clearly what she wanted, to be loved.

I went swimming with her the next day. The women, all in their fifties and sixties (and one was eighty-nine, Alice whispered to me, tilting her head toward a blur of speed and blue tank suit as it passed), only talked during the breaks. Their coach had them swimming in lanes divided by speed, and Cam’s mom was only in the middle lanes, though trying to keep up with her in the guest lane, I was lapped twice in the first workout. My whole body burned with the heat of exertion. I was winded. These women still lived in their bodies, strong and calm. I wondered what Cam’s mom—Alice—thought about while she was swimming, sound dun underwater, light in pieces from the sharp blue outdoors. Arms lifting—a slice of cooler air, a warm plunge. I thought about being alone with Cam. I thought about my sisters, how I could see them, years from now, swimming with me in a pool like this. I wanted to move to California. I wanted to bring them all. I wanted to bathe my mother in the pleasures of olive oils and wine tastings and swimming in the middle of the day.

In the evening, we dined again on fresh things from the organic grocery; Cam and his father talked about the day, and Cam rolled his eyes at me. We were waiting to be alone.

“I think we have jet lag,” Cam said, yawning. “Clementine, are you ready for bed?”

We were in separate rooms, but Alice knew we weren’t staying in separate beds at night. Cam took my hand and led me from the table.

“Don’t worry, we’ll wash up!” Was his mother being sarcastic? She almost seemed jealous—but still accepting, still deeply
kind.

“Okay,” said Cameron. He brought me into his room, shut the
door between us and his parents, and leaped onto the bed like a flying monkey. “Get your clothes off, fast. Young lady.”

“Eek,” I said, kissing his shoulder as I tugged off his shirt. His chest was golden, he smelled like Cameron, orange and sunlight. His body against mine was worth just about anything. I pulled my dress over my head.

“I’m going to deflower you.”

“Too late,” I said, but it wasn’t. We were just beginning.

“H
ello,” said my father, his face bright with expectation and purpose. “Let me see the patients.”

“Hi,” murmured a barely awake Odette. “Baby Adam is in the NICU.”

I expected an accusation, a complaint, something stronger than
hi;
only Odette had just completed her Herculean task—there was no fight left.

I would have to go first.

“And how are you?” Dad wasn’t actually asking. He started reading her chart, pushing his glasses up his nose.

I couldn’t bear it, the civilized voices, subtle discussion about the state of things; I couldn’t do it.

I took a long breath, a guzzle of air like a diva about to sing, and hollered, “What the fuck, Dad?!”

“Clementine Lord,” said Dad, holding up his hand like a traffic cop.

Odette covered her ears, hear no evil.

“Don’t you dare,” I said, lowering my voice slightly in deference to my sister. “You leave us all—you disappear, make us worry about you, make us think you’re
dead
.”

“I’m going to the NICU,” said my father, replacing the chart at
the foot of the bed and tapping Odette on the shoulder almost lovingly. “I’ll be back to check on you.” He circumnavigated me as if I were a simple island in the sea and started out the door.

I followed him. “Yo, buddy, explain yourself! You are a
bigamist.”
I couldn’t let him go—I was full of steam, full of fury, weary of carrying it all inside.

“Don’t call me
buddy,”
he said without making eye contact. “That’s disrespectful.”

“Would you prefer
asswipe
?”

“Ma’am?” said a nurse, blocking my path so my father, the king, Charles Lord, could get away to rule another domain.

“You’re upsetting the mothers and babies,” she said, though she didn’t look convinced.

“Later,” I threatened no one in particular, because my father was gone. And I was suddenly deflated and empty. I thought of the bridal portrait I’d just discovered, and the child’s school photograph—maybe I knew these people I didn’t know at all better than I knew my own father.

“It never felt like he belonged to us,” said Olivia, twisting her hospital ID around and around and around. I was sure she’d slice her thumb on the plastic if she didn’t stop. I wanted to put my hands over hers, but I felt as if it were dangerous, somehow, to touch my sister. She was all our anger embodied.

“Sure it did,” I said, thinking of our phone calls. Of course, that was me, just me, because I needed him then.

“No, you know what I mean—you of all of us, Clem. I’ve always been jealous, you know, because you get to be special, you
get to be just you and not one of the pair. It’s almost like he couldn’t tell us apart. Which he couldn’t for a while—Mom said.” Olivia spoke as though this were ancient history. As though he were dead. A little dead to us, I supposed, though it didn’t feel that permanent; it felt like a feet-across-the-carpet expected shock.