The Orphan Sister (24 page)

I stopped packing and got dressed instead. When I came out of the bedroom, he was gone. I made cinnamon toast because the world is more bearable with butter and cinnamon. My cell phone rang.

“Clem?” said Odette. “Are you coming in to see me?”

Of course, I thought. Leave it to Dad to get me to forget all about my sister and her new baby and her stitches and missing ovary. Then I sighed. That part was all me. I was the one who’d slept with Eli, I was the one whose life was a total disaster.

“Of course,” I said. “On my way. How is he? How are you?”

“Gotta go. We have lactation consultancy.”

We have Mars liftoff
, I thought. My sister, the maker of milk. I shivered.

“Okay. Be there soon,” I said.

I was about to leave, keys in hand, sunglasses atop my head, cinnamon toast in hand, when I realized I hadn’t checked my
e-mail since yesterday. I logged in to the multiple-application site and checked my status. Three were pending, and three, though I actually touched the screen, not believing the all-cap green words, were ACCEPTED. I’d got into vet school. In Iowa, Wisconsin, and Davis, California. I was going, going, gone. And the first thing that occurred to me was that I wanted to tell my father. I wanted him, after all, to be proud of me.

T
wins—and triplets, for that matter—understand each other in ways other people can’t. When Odette came to visit me in San Francisco without Olivia, the first time I’d seen one sister alone in years, I kept looking and listening for Olivia, who was stuck at home at work, and so did Odette. It was almost as though Odette were missing a limb, and we both felt its absence. When we were little and played duck-duck-goose, three of us enough to make games fun—no need for schoolmates, we were a class all by ourselves—Odette and Olivia knew whom they would goose, when even I didn’t know which sister I’d pick to chase me in the circle, put me in the pot. In a way, my own secret language with my sisters was to see their couplehood in a way no one else could. It didn’t seem fair that my gift was related to their relationship, when their gifts were related to each other. No one was my doppelgänger.

I’d been in San Francisco for six months, and I was dating a man named Marston, who had grown up in the cranberry bogs of Cape Cod. He actually had pictures of the family, grainy little Marston and his three younger brothers, his wide mother and tall, skinny father, wearing waders in the pink bog. He had the impaired r’s of a Bostonian, and dark, curly hair, fierce blue eyes,
and a candid smile. If I hadn’t been in love with a ghost, we might’ve stuck together longer, though Marston was only interested in traditional, missionary-style sex, and at the same time every evening, so if we’d stayed out late at a movie at the Pacific, we’d have to wait until the next night to make love. I liked the smell of him, green and minty, a bit like outside, and a bit like spearmint gum. He worked a job in construction and a job in air-conditioning sales and was finishing his bachelor’s a few credits at a time.

Every weekend for my first few months, my roommate Liz invited me on outings—a hike in Marin, a cooking class in the Castro. I said no every time and felt vaguely uncomfortable, as if I were ditching a suitable suitor. But I wasn’t ready to have a new friend, a confidant; I wasn’t ready even to like myself. Instead, I found Marston at a café.

I wrote letters to Sophie, who had graduated from Michigan and was giving two years to the Peace Corp in Guatemala. She invited me to visit and offered to visit me, but somehow I never let it happen. I wouldn’t lose her; she was my longest-lasting friend, but I couldn’t bring anyone closer right now.

Once I picked up the phone, innocently, to call Marston, and overheard Liz complaining about me to Eli.

“She’s just so cold,” she said.

“No,” said Eli. “She’s not cold at all, just injured. But I’m sorry you can’t be my proxy. You’re a good friend, Liz.” It was true—I couldn’t let her be my friend, and she’d have been a wonderful one. I thought of my mother, and her inevitable distances—was I becoming my mother, so soon?

I’d hung up as quietly as possible.

I had Marston sleep over on Odette’s first night, probably to prove something to Odette, who had taken off three days from her oncology rotation to come out to see me. Liz was on vacation in Hawaii with her boyfriend, an anesthesiologist. My joke with Eli was that Liz would marry him so she could shield herself from pain. It wasn’t really fair; like most people, Liz had enough pain in her life, she deserved some unjudged pleasure. But Eli had humored me and laughed.

On Odette’s first morning, Marston was sleeping. The sun spread across my living room like an egg in a pan. San Francisco was too bright for me, sometimes. I plucked my sunglasses from the shelf by the door and sat beside Odette on the futon couch where she’d slept.

“Mmm,” said Odette. “I don’t have to work today.”

“It’s Saturday. Would you have to work on Saturday?”

“Yep.” She shaded her eyes. “I have to work whenever my attending writes my name on the whiteboard. I hate his handwriting—it’s illegible, and he always leaves out one of the
t’s.
”

“You’re awfully perky this morning,” I said because, I suppose, I wanted to pick a fight. The night before we’d talked about Dad’s checks, and about how he came to visit her at work, and how she was getting serious with her boyfriend, and fancy that, so was Olivia, with hers. I’d pictured a double wedding, and spleen spread inside me like stomach acid.

“East Coast time,” she said. “And I don’t have to work. I feel like I never come up for air.”

“You’re a good little fishy,” I said, appeasing. “Dr. Odette.”

“That’s what Evan calls me.” She grinned.
Marriage
, she let slip without saying it. I didn’t think she even knew, even remembered what I could hear. “I might as well tell you.” She smiled again, then pulled the flowered sheet—one I’d stolen from home—over her head.

“You’re getting married,” I said because I couldn’t let her say it.

“Hey.” Odette punched my arm. “You didn’t let me have my moment.”

“Nope. Don’t tell me Olivia’s marrying her Jason, okay? I don’t want to hear it.”

“Okay. I won’t.” Odette pouted.
She is
. “I thought you’d be happy for us.”

“Which us? You and Olivia, or you and Evan?” I’d met Evan exactly three times. He seemed nice enough. He had a long nose and light blue eyes, and he shook my hand with an almost campy enthusiasm, but he clearly cared about my sister.

“All of us,” she sighed. “Why do you have to be mad? We want you as double best girl. None of this matron crap—you’re best girl.”

“How about best woman?” I asked, my Oberlin training showing.

“I know you probably meant to marry Cameron,” she said, holding the sheet over her mouth so I couldn’t see her full expression. “I know you’re not over him.”

“Hey, Marston’s in there.” I pointed toward the door and stood to get coffee started. It hurt, a wedge of sharp heat in my throat. She would have to know that would bloody me. I pretended
it didn’t; maybe she could feel it, too. Maybe I could will my pain across the amniotic ocean, wash her in the red tide.

“You’re not serious about Marston,” she chirped. “He’s cute, and you’ve entirely outmatched him. He’s not half as smart as you are. Nice guy and everything, but c’mon, Clem, he’s no intellectual match.”
Do-de-doh
, she thought. She couldn’t help herself.

“Why do people have to match intellectually? And are you hoping he’ll hear your insults?” I asked, extracting three eggs from the fridge, balancing them in one hand, the way Eli would, the way Cameron would—he could juggle balls, eggs, pins, oranges—eggs, without accident. He could keep eggs intact, but not his perfect, invisibly fragile self. I dug in the crisper drawer with the other hand, realizing my roommate had thrown out my mostly rotten parsley. I’d planned to use the still vaguely green parts, so I slammed the fridge closed and dropped an egg on the floor. It cracked, but oddly the contents stayed inside. I picked it up and looked at the cracked surface.
These come out of chickens
, I thought, to keep myself from crying. It almost worked.

“We were too young anyway,” I said to the wall.

“Duh, it isn’t meant as an insult. But you do need a match,” said Odette.

“Jesus. How is insulting his intelligence not an insult?”

“I just said you don’t match.” She actually thought she was being rational.

“See how far collective brilliance got Mom and Dad?” I said, my nose stuffy with the oncoming sob. “Mom’s frittering away her talents and genius on window treatments and folding Dad’s clothing with algebraic precision.”

“Algebra’s not always precise,” said Odette, getting up. Her body always surprised me, so much like Olivia’s—so long and lean compared to me, beautiful in a childlike way. I was jealous, every time I saw her, though I wasn’t sure whether I was jealous of her mild beauty, or simply of the space she took up in the world, being my sister—something leftover from living together in the womb.

“Why didn’t Olivia call to tell me?” I was sobbing now.

“Because I told her to let me tell you in person.”

“If you’re married”—I was choking now, coughing and spluttering, my nose and eyes leaking. I felt disgusting and relieved—“you won’t live together. You won’t care as much about me—”

Now I was wailing. I wanted her here so much, wanted someone to will me back into the triad, someone to make me feel that I was needed. As if I had a home. Olivia had sent Odette alone—though Olivia was on a rotation she couldn’t leave, still, I had wanted both of them, even if I’d asked for no one. Didn’t they read that in our phone calls? I should be grateful for the visit, but I just felt more desolate. If everyone else was married, where did that leave me? Of course I’d always known I was distinct, of course I’d always enjoyed the privacy of not being twinned, and I’d always wished to be part at the same time, but this was unbearable. I was losing everyone.

“Hey,” said Marston, stretching his tan body, wearing only boxers and scratching his head in the doorway. “What’s up, Clementine? You okay?”

I could see the tiniest bit of his penis peeking out of the boxers, and I looked at Odette; she could see it, too. She raised her eyebrows, thinking,
Nice
, and I started laughing. Marston and my
sister both hugged me, and I surreptitiously adjusted his underwear. I was one in three, as usual. I stopped crying and laughing and kissed them both. I think, for a minute, Marston considered what it might be like to sleep with both of us, the twin fantasy incarnate, even if we didn’t exactly match. But of course it wasn’t sex time. It was time for breakfast, for walking on the Presidio, for me to start the long division of letting Cameron go, letting my sisters go, letting my anger and loss go, as much as I could let it go without emptying myself entirely into the sea.

Odette stayed for every possible minute of her time off. She would have to shorten her honeymoon by a day because she postponed her flight and took extra vacation days she couldn’t afford to be with me. We walked the city, taking the Muni to the Mission to shop Mexican shops for Ibarra chocolate and the world’s best burritos and embroidered blouses (matching but different, blue, green, and white, for Olivia, Odette, and me). We walked in companionable silence, something I missed, something Liz couldn’t give me, or else I never let her try, through a little park at the top of Kite Hill in the Castro. The little outcropping of rock and dwarfed conifers was a tiny mountain, lavender blooming, the city stretched out like a white model of itself, the sea part of the blue distance. I hadn’t been seeing San Francisco, even though I lived there. I’d let my despair dull the beauty of the place and let the exquisite pain dull as well.

We sat in the apartment eating strawberries while I fed Cheese the corncob Marston saved for me after he scraped the kernels into soup.

“I have to be honest,” said Odette, watching Cheese gnaw the cob. “I think ferrets are disgusting.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Don’t listen, Cheese-head.”

“When are you coming back?” she asked, looking out the window at the sharp blue sky.

“I don’t know.”

Cheese was watching. He’d always been a watcher—Marston had noticed he sat silent in his cage while we were making love, but his eyes were wide, even if he was curled in his fur-silky shape. He dropped his cob on the floor and bounded down; Odette yelped.

“I miss you,” she whispered.

We went to Golden Gate Park and rented a rowboat—I rowed Odette out onto Stow Lake, like a suitor. She leaned back in the bow, wearing a too thin cotton dress and one of my heavy sweaters, with a street-purchased baseball cap she gripped like a royal damsel holding her tiara.

“Shit!” she yelled suddenly as I tried to steer the boat past some grebes that were congregating like churchwomen after a sermon.

“Excuse me?” I said. “I’m doing my best.” All day we’d explored in relative silence, and for once I felt like a sister, a partial match, because we’d made decisions easily; she’d followed my lead when I steered her past the wax museum and out to watch the sea lions on Fisherman’s Wharf.