The Orphan Sister (20 page)

“But the truth is, he never had enough for everyone. He came and went at will—he never
fully committed.”
She gripped her babyful belly.

Our father was in the room with the baby and Evan—Dr. Dad to the rescue, as if we hadn’t all been here doing just fine. Was he testing the baby’s brain? Odette had started bleeding, though, and now she was getting another exam. She had looked so empty, pale, her breath short and shallow, and she’d felt so cold; I was suspicious that something was wrong. She couldn’t just collapse so quickly, could she? Suddenly I didn’t fully believe in science—some bad magic seemed to be at work here, even if Adam looked fine to them, “pinked up” as they said. Nothing was as it was supposed to be. And Odette had asked for Mom when they said just one visitor could stay with her. Mom had straightened her shoulders like a soldier and marched forth, nodding apologetically to me, though, honestly, I didn’t mind relinquishing this particular duty. I was scared of what they might find.

And here I was in the waiting room with my other sister.

“You, jealous of me?” I said. “If you’re trying to make me feel better because O wanted Mom, you don’t have to, I don’t mind. Though I am surprised it wasn’t you.”

“I’m not,” said Olivia. “It’s not like we’re a set. I mean, we love each other, and we can finish each other’s sentences, and neither of us likes peppers . . .” This speech I’d heard before; it was for new
acquaintances, for the curiosity seekers who were fascinated by their identicalities. “But in some ways I’m more like you,” she finished with something new.

“Again,” I said, finally putting my hands over Olivia’s on the ID to stop the fidgeting—her hands were cold, and a little clammy. She rested them, with mine, atop her belly, lest I forget there was still a baby to be born. Maybe this one would wait. I felt a kick and pulled my hand away. “I don’t get it.”

“I think being pregnant—him leaving—it changes my perspective. It’s like the frame around the family portrait shifted, and I can see how separate we are. I sort of want something back, but I’m not sure what.”

“It can’t be the early childhood where we shared outfits,” I said. I thought of Me and the puppy-ribbon dresses.

Olivia chuckled. “Maybe it is. Maybe I’m nostalgic for when I believed our parents were invincible. That Dad was a small god. That Mom was happy being a mom.”

She was exhausting her breath and took in a deep draft.

“Is it still kicking you?”

“She,” whispered Olivia. “We found out I’m having a she. Or at least I did. Jason didn’t want to know, and he missed the last ultrasound, and I just changed my mind. I wanted to know. So I could exchange some of the yellow for pink. Frills. You should see what I have in her closet, though Jason isn’t allowed to open the door. I wanted girls, Clementine. I don’t think I can go through this again—” She waved her hand in the general direction of Odette’s room. “And I haven’t even done the hard part.”

“You’ll be fine.” I wanted to know why she was jealous of me, but I didn’t really want to ask. Things were charged enough
already, and I’d felt her baby kick, and I’d held my nephew, Adam, and he was beautiful, so new, so extraordinary, a whole person, just like that, from a beating, kicking idea that lived inside my sister, now a person.

And Dad was here and had deflected my fury like wiping an easy frost off a window.

“I can’t believe this whole thing with Dad,” she said, wiping at her eyes and getting back on track. “I mean, I always felt like he was sort of closed—okay, really, really closed.” She laughed at my raised eyebrows.

“Constipated,” I said.

“Yeah.” She laughed harder, her eyes starting to well. “And absolutely unwilling to let us really see him. But I thought that was a surgeon thing, or an old-father thing. Or something. I really never expected this. She’s in Boston. His parents, I guess, didn’t want anyone to know.”

“Maybe she’s poor and Hispanic.”

“I didn’t get any more information,” said Olivia. “I mean, except that she lives in Boston. And it’s not Lee.” She smiled, rubbing away her laugh-tears. Her beeper buzzed and phone rang at the same time. She looked at one, then the other.

“Lee, wow. That was a long time ago.”

“I need to see a patient,” she said without picking up the phone. “Luckily, she’s going to be admitted here. Do you think Odette—”

“She has us,” I said, noticing, for the first time, how much weight my slim sister was carrying. It wasn’t just her belly; it was her face, her legs, her clammy hands. She was a great vessel of baby, somehow much bigger than Odette was just hours ago, and she must feel very, very tired.

“I know. She might need me later,” she said, confidant again, my sister again, because she was a doctor.

“Are we going to finish this conversation sometime?” I asked as she stood.

“Probably should. But in small doses. It’ll be enough to face him.” She flashed her professional smile and marched her huge, pregnant self down the corridor.

“Clem,” said my mother, coming up the other hall. “We need to bank blood, just in case.” She was carrying a spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen, brandishing one in each hand as if they would protect Odette, shield and sword.

“Crap—she’s okay? Right? The baby’s okay? Odette’s okay?”

“She’s bleeding a lot. They think they can stop it, but just in case she needs some—” My mother gripped my arm and led me toward the elevator.

As we stepped on, my father got off. His skin looked pocked in the terrible light.
Blight, gall
, I thought.

“Charles? We’re going to bank blood for her,” my mother said, looking at him, then stepping close enough so he could lean down and kiss her hello, which he did, as if he hadn’t left her for another wife, without taking his cell phone, as if he’d never been gone. My mother’s lips pursed—her kissy face for Dad; I hoped it was involuntary, that it was just habit. They were weird people, my parents, even weirder than I’d thought before. How could they be so stolid? I cried at weddings and at movies and even the occasional TV show, which Eli said was adorable. They fought, but everything
was muted, blanketed in something. Money, I decided. Like insulation, money kept everything quieter.

“That’s all?” I said. “He goes off, and that’s all?”

“Now is not the time,” Mom said.

“Right,” said Dad.

Mom looked at him, a flash of despair in her face. “Wait,” she said, stopping him from owning this minute, holding it like a rose, inspecting it for blight.

“You girls don’t understand,” she said, as if I were all three of us. “Your father was married before. He—”

“I’m widowed now,” he interrupted.

My mother’s face turned; it had held grief, sadness, but this was something else, a fury, a humor, almost relief. She turned to him, pen and notebook in hand. Had she been writing a note to a nurse? A gardener? To Dad? A lover? A note to herself?

“I don’t understand either, Charles,” she said. And then my calm, tamped-down, passion-held-only-in-her-marrow mother gripped the pen in her first and sank it into my father’s shoulder, through his white button-down, through his old skin, like an inoculation, ballpoint poison. The elevator screamed at us—we stood in the doorway, all three.

“Christ, Octavia!” Dad grabbed his arm. The white shirt stayed white. He stuck his arm out to examine the wound, but there was just a tiny bull’s-eye: black ink, a petite circle of blood. He stared at my mother with the strangest sympathy.

“Everything’s fine, girls,” he said. “I’ll go to her room.”

“Dad,” I said because I could think of nothing else, as he stepped off and the doors closed.

“Not really,” said my mother. “Not really fine.” She sniffed like a knee-scraped child. She was recovering herself.

Half of me felt sorry for him, petulant, regretless. Half of me wished my mother had used something far more punishing than a pen—a scissors, a scalpel, a sword.

The elevator landed in the basement and we walked toward the blood bank.

“He can’t just do that, leave and come back as if nothing happened.”

“I always knew your father had more history than he offered. He is a good husband—not perfect, but he’s learning. The sex has gotten better, actually—”

I covered my face. If you can’t see me, I can’t hear you.
Ick
, like a child.

“You didn’t know this,” she continued, “but his parents were very uptight people. Rich, but stingy. Did you know he wanted to go to grad school—but maybe not in medicine—and they cut him off? As if anything but med school were some diminutive kind of career—he really is very supportive of you, Clementine.”

“Why are you saying this now? Why couldn’t I know before, when I was feeling inferior? Why is he such a secretive asshole?”

“Don’t say that about your father. He’s not the only one with a history, with secrets. I took him, secrets and all. We are friends first—the sex is just glue. We managed to raise triplets, and we didn’t only rely on family money—and I think you all turned out beautifully. Most of the time, I really respect your father.”

“Most of the time?”

“Nothing’s perfect. He will tell me everything, and he won’t betray me,” she said, confident, shoulders squared.

“He
did,”
I insisted, but she stepped ahead of me, refusing to engage.

We filled out the necessary paperwork and sat side by side in the weird blood-donation desks—all cramped angles like the legs of a praying mantis—our arms tied with tourniquets. I winced as the phlebotomist coaxed the vein to the surface and pressed the needle in, but it didn’t hurt that much.

“However,” said my mother, when we were left alone to fill the bags of blood, “this allowance business is ridiculous. I was a fool to put up with it, and it’s over.” Her lips turned up just a bit. “That part wasn’t such a great example for you girls. But I was so exhausted when you were born, and we wrote up a budget and it started from there. I had postpartum depression, Clementine. You might not remember, but I was hospitalized for a month. Nowadays I’d have been an outpatient, but then, it was total separation.”

My free hand went to cover my mouth. A gesture just like hers.

“Why does everyone admit everything when a baby’s born?” I sighed, trying to take it all in.

“Because it’s all new again,” said my mother, closing her eyes and leaning back in her chair. “And I didn’t talk about this because I didn’t want anyone to feel guilty—or to put off having children. We were always allied in giving you what you needed, Clementine, and many, many things you wanted.”

“Who took care of us when you were in the hospital?”

“My mother—your Me—and my sister, and your father. They didn’t even hire baby nurses.”

It was a tender thought, that collaboration. For us, for her.

“He is married to someone else.”

“Was.” She waved it away. “She’s dead now. That’s why he left. Went. You know what I mean.”

For the rest of the afternoon, I tried to avoid my father because I was afraid I’d call him out—and I was also afraid I wouldn’t say a thing, that I’d fall back in line like a good girl. But I couldn’t dodge from room to room forever. I saw him in the NICU, his huge hand cupping baby Adam’s head as my nephew howled during a blood draw, but I didn’t make eye contact through the glass and instead went downstairs to see my sister. She’d had to have one of her ovaries removed—a cyst ruptured and twisted the ovary during the delivery, which is why she’d started bleeding so much, why the pain was so intense. Now she had a single ovary, not that I knew whether she and Evan were planning to have more children—I realized I’d always assumed they’d have at least two or three, but I’d never asked. After Olivia’s admission, I realized it wasn’t easy, even for people such as my sisters, who looked so perfect on paper one couldn’t imagine any complications. But complications weren’t always on the surface.

“She’s asleep,” mouthed Evan, the more handsome of my two brothers-in-law, who was sitting beside my sister’s head in her recovery room.

“Okay,” I mouthed back. And then, because it had been so much, the whole day, the running from room to room, his sudden fatherhood and my sister, a mother—the amazing Adam, so small and clean and perfect, howling upstairs with
his grandfather—I went over and knelt by the bed, taking Evan’s hand in mine.

I don’t think I’d ever held Evan’s hand before. I’d stood close at the wedding; I’d seen him dive off the dock in Greensboro, his lilac swim trunks a silent joke between my sisters and me. “He’s comfortable in his manhood,” Olivia had said, giggling, as Evan and Odette swam across the lake together. Evan had been a diver in high school, and his body looked powerful and strangely smooth, like a single stretched muscle.

I’d been to Evan’s father’s funeral in Westport, Connecticut, the long line of black cars like ants in the sun. Events of sorrow and joy. Family conferences about my father most recently, but before that, parties, weddings, funerals, and swimming in our pool with his wife, still touching her as if he couldn’t believe she existed. I was jealous, of course, of their couplehood. I was also not attracted to the man, but I loved him for loving her. I loved him for sitting by her head just now; I loved him because I knew he wouldn’t leave her, wouldn’t suddenly reveal a hidden wife like a magician’s rabbit.

His hand was smooth and warm, much less hairy than the men’s hands I’d held recently—Feet’s huge paw, Eli’s elegant musician fingers, long and tapered, with hair on every knuckle. Cameron’s hands—strange square fingers, wide palms. I couldn’t remember then as well as I could Eli’s, or even Feet’s. Evan held my hand back, squeezing a little too hard, but nothing like Odette’s power grip during the delivery. It felt long ago, already, the event of it, the fear I’d held back like a wave of nausea suddenly coming forward, to the front of my head, blinding me, as I held Evan’s hand and tried not to sob.

“Hey?” whispered Eli, standing in the doorway.

The nurse came up behind him, waving us out of the room.

“Too many visitors,” she said in the hallway, after I’d kissed Evan good-bye—and he’d turned his head as I turned mine, so we’d inadvertently kissed on the lips, which was not unpleasant. A small assurance. He tasted like sprouts and avocado and smelled lemony, sweaty, and nervous. He was a daddy.