The Orphan Sister (21 page)

“Clementine,” said Eli. “I’ve been instructed to take you home.”

“Really? By whom?”

“Olivia called me. She said you’d done a long shift here, and that you needed to get to bed.” Again, his face was enigmatic.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“One a.m.”

“Really?” It occurred to me that I hadn’t checked my e-mail or cell phone for hours. There could be news. But there was all the news I needed for one day: the baby, my sister, the other wife, my father.

“My father’s here,” I said.

“I know,” said Eli. “She told me everything.”

“I drove.”

“I biked. Give me your keys and I’ll put the bike in the trunk.” We were holding hands, too, the way we often did, only it felt different. He was important; if I didn’t hold on to him, I might drown in the ordinary weight of the world.

“It doesn’t fit,” I said. “Remember?”

“It will fit enough.”

Eli escorted me to my own car. He propped his bike in the trunk, and we drove home in the breakdown lane, hazards clicking. I sat in the passenger seat, closing my eyes, but I kept seeing her, my sister, pale and crying with pain—such enormous pain. I was shaking by the time he pulled up by the carriage house.

“What, exactly, do you see in me?” I joked with Eli. “I’m always a wreck.”

“Not always,” said Eli, smiling seriously. “You’ve been quite sturdy when I was the one who needed a shoulder.” I thought to the two Thanksgivings we’d spent together at Oberlin, makeshift meals with unmatched silverware, of Eli crying because his mother was “still dead.” We’d both cried and laughed at “still dead.” He’d tried to apply it once to Cam, but I was never ready. Until, perhaps, right now.

“Bring me home,” I said.

“I’m going to put you to bed.”

“I’m going to let you. She could have died,” I let out, finally voicing what I’d been thinking, finally letting it dawn on me. “I can’t lose my sisters.” Now I was sobbing.

“It’s okay,” said Eli, settling me onto the couch. He held both of my hands and kissed them. And then I kissed his mouth, and then he pulled me to him, and it wasn’t just comfort. I looked at him and wondered what it would be like to hear him the way I heard my sisters. It would make things easier, but there would also be no privacy.

“I’m not going to take advantage of you,” he said, smiling, as we lay together on my bed, still fully clothed, but tousled and kissed and so aroused—at least in my case—the cloud of sleep and dread had vanished.

“Okay,” I said, unbuttoning his jeans. “But I’m going to take advantage of you.”

“I don’t know if we should, Clem.” But he didn’t stop my hands, which were pulling off his shirt. “You’re not yourself. I mean, of course I’ve wanted this forever—wanted you forever—”

“Excuse me?” I said, and Eli stopped talking and kissed me some more. It felt so exquisite I thought I might die. I wondered what the hell had taken us so long, and then I remembered—this was Eli, who’d seen me through losing Cam, this was Eli, who dated many beautiful women, who was so viscously sexy he couldn’t meet me for lunch without collecting a few phone numbers. This was probably a bad idea.

“No,” he said, as if divining my thoughts. “I can’t—I have to tell you first—”

“What? What’s wrong with me? Why can’t you? What did I do? Is it my sisters? My—”

“Stop.” He folded his hands together. Origami. Prayer. “The first week at Oberlin—remember? I saw you first, but Cameron said he did.” Eli looked at me—the name, Cameron, like a poisonous gift. We usually said
he
, or
him
, and that was close enough.

“Excuse me; I’m not a tree dogs pee upon.”

“No, I mean, I liked you right away—and I still liked him at that point—I wanted him to like me. He was so, well, everyone liked him. But he didn’t like me. And I promised him.”

“But you two fought all the time—were you in love with
Cameron?
Is that it?”

“No. Well, kind of. Not in love—I wanted to be like him, or be his best friend. That’s what I wanted. But we fought, probably because we were both used to being alone, being in charge—”

“All those years you wouldn’t—because of Cam—”

“I promised him, okay? And then he died, Clem—”

“That was a long time ago,” I said, meaning it. “So please shut up.”

I kissed his mouth closed. Then open again.

Relief, sweet, sweet relief. Eli was like a drug, only better. I was too far gone to think about side effects. I wanted this more than I wanted to get into vet school, more than I wanted to know for sure my sister would be okay, more than I wanted to punish my father; more than anything, I needed this fix. And it was better than I’d imagined, better than oblivion. Better, I thought, as we moved to the floor, blankets bunched around us like a frame, than it ever was with Cameron.

T
he summer after Cameron died I went up to Vermont with my mother before my sisters were freed from Harvard. They had summer internships in Cambridge and had rented an apartment together in Back Bay, courtesy of Dad, so I’d only see them for a few weeks before they were gone again.

First, it was just my mother and me padding around the wood-and-glass house, setting the table with cobalt-blue stoneware and bouquets of lupines and daisy fleabane from the wild-flower garden. My mother was surprisingly quiet on the subject of my dead boyfriend, but she paid attention to me, something usually reserved for roses and my father.

We walked along the dusty road to town together with baskets for the general store—I felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder, having loved
Little House on the Prairie
in both book and TV versions. We picked black raspberries along the path up to the neighbor’s sugarhouse, staining our fingertips and tongues with sweet deep purple. Vermont in the early summer smelled of mineral mud and timothy. Daisies watched us from fields, a thousand yellow eyes lashed in white, as my mother kicked pebbles like a child inventing a game.

Twice a week we volunteered at the Buffalo Mountain Food
Co-op in Hardwick. I was my mother’s rehabilitation project: Save Clementine from the Depths of Despair, as if that were a place I might travel, packing my Tom’s of Maine toothpaste and the short cotton skirts I’d made as part of a winter term project: learning to sew.

One week at the co-op we were transferring honey from huge tapped vats into labeled, sterilized jars. My mother held the jars with two hands and I pressed the spout open and tilted the vat, watching the viscous, amber liquid pour thickly into the glass, pooling like liquid energy, sunlight and certainty, the masticated product of a thousand worker bees, when the cowbell on the co-op door signaled a visitor. The co-op’s one paid employee, a man named Dirk who had a thick, black beard and skinny runner’s legs, was out for lunch, having baked the granola and stocked the bulk bins at dawn.

“Just a minute,” called my mother, her voice lilting politely. I was embarrassed; my mother sounded rich. She sounded like a summer person, even as she stooped under a barrel of honey holding a jar. She was wearing chinos, of course, a neat little preppy, whale-embroidered belt, and her signature hair scarf, which, I had to admit, always made her eyes look large and her hair neat. It was her rustic look, just for the Green Mountain State. Never mind the platinum cards and embarrassing yellow Audi convertible parked in the dirt lot over by the bike store.

“Hello?” called a male voice. It was familiar. I almost thought it was Cameron, or my father.

“
Just a minute
,” my mother enunciated again, capping the honey before I turned off the spout, so honey spilled down my thigh. I cupped the rest of the lost gold as I put the barrel upright.
My mother was wiping off her incomplete jar with a wet rag, preparing her smile. It was the same face she made in a mirror before a dinner party, and, I realized with a green shoot of sadness unfurling under the skin of my chest like a time-lapse sunflower seed sprouting, the same face she made when she heard my father coming.

“You poured honey all over me,” I said, but I wasn’t really mad, I was sad. Always, that summer. Sadness like a layer of skin under my own. Sadness as thick as the honey and almost as sweet. I could cry for an hour, sitting on the damp dock, smelling the algae and hot lichen smell of the lake, or I could sit for the same hour unable to cry or speak. This was why my mother was rescuing me, why I needed her, why I didn’t mind the honey all over my thigh, the handful I could think of nothing to do but to taste.

“Clover!” I said to my mother. “It says rose hips and lavender, but it tastes like clover!” My mouth was messy and sweet and my mother was talking to someone at the cash register, palming a Buffalo Mountain Food Co-op T-shirt like a good waitress explaining the dessert tray.

“Hello?” I said, and he looked up. Grey Munro. After all this time, Grey, my Sky Masterson. I breathed in the scent he brought with him, mud and diesel. He cradled a motorcycle helmet under his arm, which, I had to notice, was tan and firm. He wasn’t as beautiful a man as he’d been as a child, but there was the too straight red hair, the wide blue eyes slightly smudged around the corners by early laugh lines in the freckled, tan face.

“Are you Clementine?” he asked as I stood with a face and hands full of honey, thinking I should go wash up, but if I went to the sink, the mirage might disappear.

“Grey?” I asked, but of course it was he.

“Here,” said my mother, abandoning the shirt for the wet cloth, which she used to mop my hands, as if I were three and the victim of an ice cream disaster.

“I can do it, Mom,” I said, though really I hadn’t minded.

“Grey. How are you? Are you living
here?
” Last I’d heard through the grapevine, he’d started and left Emerson, then UVM, though I wasn’t sure my source, Sophie, had reported correctly what her mother had heard from Grey’s mother at the tennis round-robin.

“I’m just up for the weekend,” he said, though it was a Thursday. “I’m going back down to school next week.” He looked at me almost the same way he had in our school play, before we fake-kissed. Before the flowers.

“School?” I asked.

“You’re at Oberlin, right?”

“Sort of,” I said, feeling Cameron’s pulse under mine, his thin, pale skin. His soft angel hair, his heart still doing the work of circulating his blood. I could almost taste his mouth, apricots; I could almost feel his hand on the small of my back, bringing my body into his.

“I’m at UVM,” said Grey. “I came up on my bike because my mom wanted me to open the house.” He opened his hands, offering them, or opening the air the way he’d open the house. My parents usually had the fireman-dog-catcher-teacher-milkman open the house for them, but Mom and I came up without warning and did it ourselves, following a list the fireman-etc. made for us. Open taps. Turn on water. Check furnace pilot light. Check fuse box. It had felt like an adventure. It had also reminded me
that my mother had once been an independent entity. Maybe she even knew how to change a tire, something I’d learned at Oberlin in the experimental college in Car Repair for Women, something I would use later to help Eli out of a half dozen flats in his grease mobile.

“Okay,” I said, staring at him. Had I been in love with this person? What was love when you were twelve years old? He was still in there, the boy who twirled in the first snow with such pure enchantment, the boy who’d helped me start the rope climb by offering his back. Chapped lips and scabs and all. He wasn’t as tall as I’d imagined, and he had a smudge of dust on his cheek, which I longed to wipe off, and which I would leave. He was a stranger. Beloved stranger. Not that I was up for loving anyone right now, but I realized I’d never let it go, that unrequited adulation. I would never let it go entirely, I would never relinquish each love—would I let go of each wound? Or any of them?

“Studying engineering.” He grinned.

“Okay.” If I said more than a sentence or two at a time, I might cry. Best to keep everything short.

“Just wanted to pick up a T-shirt for my girlfriend.” He grinned at my mother. The same wide grin, offering everything.

“Okay,” I said again, starting to feel stupid. My mother had rung up the shirt and folded it, offering a reused plastic sack. Grey nodded no, and Mom came back to attend to me, swabbing at my face and thighs, still sticky with honey.

“Nice to see you,” said Grey, holding up the shirt, then tossing his head and popping the helmet on the way someone might pull a lollipop from his mouth to hear the hollow sound. Pure boy. And then he was gone.

I never wanted to go home. I wanted to stay in the warm belly of the Vermont house, where I was only responsible for my own sleep and food. I wanted the small noises of outside to matter; I didn’t want to share the world with my sisters, like having extra eyes, extra limbs, but no great brain, so I focused in one direction at a time, couldn’t walk with any preferred gait.

With Grey there, I could be in elementary school again. With Grey there, I could accept the flowers from my idea of love, and from my father, and keep them both. I would never have to meet Cameron Kite and stitch myself to him, then rip away when he left me, leaving thread and wounds and unfinished edges.

For a while, I did think about ways to die. It wasn’t purposeful; it was almost like a hobby, a distraction. The pain of losing Cameron came and went like sweet sips of iced tea. I almost liked the pain—when I wasn’t feeling it, I was numb, my feelings asleep, like a pincushioned limb. My mother took me twice to a psychiatrist in Burlington, and I enjoyed the ride in her convertible, the top down, our hair snarled and battered, the rolling green dotted with bright red barns and copses of trees, deeper green. Cows wandered the fields, purposeful in their simple chewing. I could unbuckle quietly, open the door now, and let myself fall out. I could swallow the pills my mother kept in her Estée Lauder free-with-purchase bag, festively flowered, filled with Valium and Xanax and things I’d never heard of. I had looked a few up before we left Princeton, using the library to search suicide websites, so no one could trace it back to our home network. Not that I planned
on doing it. I didn’t plan anything; I just let time tick on and hoped I’d feel something other than hurt once in a while.