The Orphan Sister (29 page)

“Of Feet? Of Marston? Really?”

“Of Cameron. Always of Cameron. None of my girlfriends were ever serious—not even Guinivere, really—I was always waiting for you.” He said this grimacing at the towel as if it were blood-drenched, but really, he had just a scrape.

“Really?”

“Quit milking it.”

I did what any other confused girl would do. I kissed him. Then I administered antibiotic ointment and a Band-Aid, turned off all the burners, and took him to bed.

“So what’s the deal with this sister?” I asked Odette, when she called.

She was nursing the baby; I could hear his suckling noises and her little gasps of pain. “Just like that. Don’t suck that part, little boy, it just hurts!”

“Can you talk now, or would later be better?” I asked.

I’d noticed a rental car parked at my mother’s house, but I didn’t want to go in. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see her, it was that I wanted to know how I was supposed to approach all this. Claudette. A name to match mine—if I’d had a twin.

“Yes,” Odette said.

The phone was quiet for a good twenty seconds.

“So,” I said. “We have a sister. Dad betrayed us, all that.”

Odette sighed. “I guess I don’t really think it’s about us.”

“Okay, about Mom, then.”

“That’s the thing—Olivia seems to think it’s about us, and Mom is off in outer space somewhere, but she’ll land, and it doesn’t matter, really, what we think, does it?”

“Sure it does,” I said.

“Ow, that hurts!” The baby started to cry, a sweet, fussy noise. “I mean, we’re grown-ups. I’m a mom, Clementine. Sure, I’m surprised Dad had this secret other life, and sure it’s upsetting, but I’m not willing to let it dominate
my
life. Ow! The boy insists on nursing too hard. Hold on.”

I wanted to hold him. It was going to be my job, and I was impatient, but Odette had said she wanted a few days of quiet before we all came over. I had other things to worry about—whether I would be living here anymore, whether I would become a vet, whether I would have purpose in this world, and of course I could worry about Eli.

Eli was sleeping, and I was trying to finish his cooking. It
looked like a curry soup. I cradled the phone, cramping my shoulder, while I waited for Odette to return to the call. I opened the can of coconut milk and spooned rice out of his rice cooker into my pot. There was never a recipe with Eli.

“They were still married,” I said as soon as I heard her fumbling to retrieve the receiver.

“Yeah, sort of, I guess, but she passed away, Clem.”

“Our dad the bigamist,” I said, thinking maybe marriage wasn’t such a great idea after all. And babies. It was too complicated. Animals were much easier to understand. Then I thought of my vulnerable-looking father in the light of the hospital, of how mortal he was, how I’d been terrified he had Alzheimer’s, how he could still get Alzheimer’s, how maybe Mom would have to care for him in dotage after he ran around sowing seeds until his other wife died.

“Sort of,” Odette said. “But now he’s sort of a widower. A remarried widower.”

I knew it was a played-out drum, but I still felt it and asked, “Aren’t you furious? You sound so calm.”

“We all make mistakes. I slept with O’s boyfriend once.”

“Yikes! You slept with Jason?”

“God no, not Jason. Just some guy in college—he was a jerk, and he never even guessed I wasn’t her. I suppose I wanted to prove I could do it.”

“How perverse.”

“I didn’t say I was proud of it,” said Odette. I thought of how they looked together, how I’d always assumed they leaned lovingly, but perhaps the competition for light, for nutrients, made them as dangerous to each other as superfluous seedlings.

The baby started crying again, a full-force baby wail. It sounded urgent and also cute—babies were so much like other animals. The problem was when we began talking.

“I have to go, Clem. I’m too busy right now to be mad. I’ll save that for later—maybe eighteen years?” Odette’s voice escalated over the wail. “I might need you for an intervention, though.”

“Um? O? Who’s the alcoholic? Why not throw in some anorexia, some drug addiction, while we’re at it?”

“No alcoholism—yet, anyway.” My sister laughed. I loved how loose she was in her self—like limbs relaxed in their joints. Motherhood suited her. “I just mean that Olivia says she’s never speaking to him again.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. I see no reason not to move on—or, at least, I’m too distracted to make this any bigger a drama than it is already—okay, baby Adam, okay, honey.” She put down the phone. So, wishing I could help soothe my nephew, and seething about my father at the same time, did I.

Seething wasn’t useful, though I could see Olivia’s point. I wasn’t sure how I felt yet. I wasn’t sure how much it mattered right now, anyway. I lifted the family portrait I’d put facedown on the desk when Dad had first disappeared—I’d been afraid to look at his face, in case he was dead. Now I stared at him and realized, through the haze of my own self-framed vision, through my own griefs and agonies and pleasures, that I knew little about my father. All along he was mysterious. And mystery makes us desirable. We all wanted to know him, and at the same time we were intimidated, afraid. The closest I’d come was our fights—that was when he revealed himself the most. Part of me, all along, and part
of my sisters, because we were a team, a three-against-two with my parents, fighting for separation, fighting with them to belong to them, to matter—part of us always knew our father lived somewhere else—if we knew it metaphorically, and it was literal.

My job now was to let go a little—and to kiss Eli for every time I’d missed that opportunity. I wanted to love without mistake, to love without pretending it matters what anyone else thinks, anyone except the people I respected, anyone, regardless of their ability to betray me. My sisters matched me more than ever before, even as we each took to our own invented families while leaving the one into which we were born.

She was at my door, my other sister, her hair a halo, and though I’d left the door unlocked, she knocked politely.

“Clementine?” she said when I let her in, as if I could possibly be someone else.

“So, you’re my half a sister,” I said, walking to the sink to wash my already-clean hands.

“Ha!” She grinned. “If I go on a big diet, maybe.” She worried a curl with one long finger. One familiar finger—her hands looked just like O&O’s.

It was going to be difficult to dislike her.

“So,” I said, sighing. “Do you want to stay for dinner?”

“No, thank you. This is new to me. It’s kind of a lot—and I have to get back to my son—my mom just died,” she said as if I didn’t know, as if this weren’t a keystone in the fallen arch of my own family.

And we just found out about you. And my sisters just had three
babies
, I thought, but of course she could hear none of it. I pitied her—never having this.

“I just wanted to say I’d like to get to know you if you feel comfortable. We could e-mail, or call, or visit—or not. This is new to me. I didn’t know I had a sister—let alone three. I knew I had a traveling dad—he was so hilarious when he was with us, so much fun. My dad—your dad—” She paused and tugged harder at her hair. This must feel bad for her, I thought, at least as awkward as it was for me. She didn’t know either, she wasn’t complicit, she was as much a victim as I was.

Hilarious
? I was incredulous. But then, I could almost envision it.

“Whatever,” I said. “That’s okay, go on. I didn’t know—that you didn’t know.”

“We saw him once or twice a month. He had clothes, a dresser drawer. He brought birthday gifts—unless he missed my birthday. And he was almost always there for Hanukkah—except when it overlapped with Christmas, which was always a puzzle.”

“Hanukkah!”

“We’re Jewish?” she said, putting her arms around herself. “Sometimes we didn’t see him for a few months—so of course I knew there was something—at least, I really knew by the time he missed my wedding. But Mom never explained, except to say that we should enjoy his company when we had it and not fuss when we didn’t.”

“Wow.” My fingers smelled of garlic; it would take forever to fade. I wanted to return to not knowing. I wished I could unknow, but the closest I would get for now was to meet the other victims—
my halfs. If he missed her wedding, he wasn’t one and the other—he was himself in two places. How could he lie like that?

Claudette had already backed toward the door again. She’d never fully committed to the room.

“Um, are you sure you don’t want to stay?”

“No, but thanks.” She handed me a wrinkled slip of paper with her name and phone number and started to go. “Oh, and I’m going to wait to meet your sisters until they’re not immediately postpartum.”
She sounds like Dad
, I thought.

“Claudette?” I said, feeling that I had to take a few steps onto the bridge between us.

“Clementine?”

I stepped forward and hugged her. It was a gangly hug, not quite comfortable, but neither terrible. Claudette blushed. She smelled sweet, and minty. She had maps of laughter at the corners of her eyes. I wasn’t sure I could bear being so close to her, to the product of my father’s betrayal. But then, she was a person in her own right, not just a product. As were we—the three of us, people in our own rights. I longed to hear my sisters thinking something to me, but this way, I could let the news of this woman dwell in my unedited self for just a while.

“I could actually, if you don’t mind, I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Of course,” I said.

In the carriage house, you had to do something when someone was in the bathroom so you wouldn’t hear them, but I couldn’t think of anything I needed to do, anything I could do, besides wait. I heard Claudette shuffle, I heard her pee, and I heard her
sigh. Then she screamed: a short, controlled burst of fearful sound.

“Um, Clementine?” she asked without opening the door.

“Are you okay?” I pictured blood. She’d cut herself on Eli’s razor. She would bleed out in my bathroom.

“You have a boa constrictor in here.” Her voice was steady. She flushed. The sink water ran. Claudette was wiping her hands on her own sleeves when she opened the door. There was Skinny, coiled under the radiator in a patch of buttery sunlight.

“Skinny!”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Ha! Do you like snakes?”

“Not particularly,” she said, shrugging endearingly. She gave my hand an extraneous shake and left my carriage house. Someday I might know her, but not yet.

I had a bit of a workout, getting Skinny back in his tank, then went out to find my mother. This time, I wouldn’t accuse her of anything. She must have known all along, the way we did—only more explicitly. What inspired her to stay with Dad? Did she think that little of herself, or did she like being left alone? I didn’t know this woman, either. I thought of something Cameron said to me once in bed. We were lying across his futon, the damp Ohio light revealing every stain and bit of lint and dust mote that filled the scruffy room.

“So, I guess this is a little too soon to be in love.”

“Excuse me?” We’d professed love, we’d dissected love, we’d
invented love, so I knew there had to be something of great theoretical complexity following this statement.

“Well, I always felt one has to know himself—or herself—really well first. Then you can get to know another person really well. Then you can be in love.”

“Can’t you do all three at once, Professor Kite?” I chuckled, because his language was so plain, but made so much sense.

“Maybe. Or maybe number three can lead you to number one.”

“What makes you think I don’t know myself?”

“It’s me I’m worried about,” he said, and for a minute he sounded entirely serious.

“I’m not worried at all,” I said, kissing his warm, smooth stomach. He smelled of oranges and I wanted to burrow into him, to be as much his flesh as his flesh. I changed the subject with my body instead of words.

My mother wasn’t in her house. I went out to look around the pool, my heart hurting. Would I forever be afraid of losing the people I loved? I didn’t trust her not to take herself away from me, I realized, as I found an empty pool and let some of the pain in my chest fall away.

“Mom?” I called out to the grounds. The sprinklers were hissing, wasting water to the late-afternoon heat. Even I knew you should water in the still of the night.

“Clementine!” my mother called. “Over here! It’s marvelous!”

My mother was lying in the lawn. Her white eyelet dress was
grass-stained, as though she’d just been rolling down the hill. Her makeup was a smudge of slightly smoother flesh tone across half her face; her eyes were raccooned and somehow young. She looked like a rock-star groupie, and she was watching the sprinkler cast its spray over her, she was part of the lawn—a robin, a grasshopper, a mourning dove crying its hollow longing, only she was laughing.

“Mom?”

My mother reached up and pulled me down beside her. I lay on the grass, shading my eyes from the spray.

“A rainbow!” she said like a child.

“Are you losing it, Mom? I just need to know if I should call someone.”

“Not losing it, Clementine, finding it. There’s a rainbow—I learned how to turn on the system today because the grass looked dry—but it’s still a rainbow. A fine thing. I want to appreciate fine things. I want to look at rainbows with my little girl. One wish.”

“Okay.”

We lay there for a minute while the lawn hissed and water seeped into the back of my shirt. The air smelled green, and I noticed my mother’s hand, still in mine, felt vulnerable, as though it might crush under the weight of the water.

“I’m a grandmother.”

I grasped her hand. Maybe she felt left out sometimes, too—I could sense my sisters even now, a thin gold vein, warm exhaustion.

“Okay,” she said, getting up and wiping her hands on her dress. “Time to change and get this dress to the cleaner.” She turned her lips up politely. “We lost the deposit on the New Black
Eagles, so they’re still coming. Want to come over for a very small anniversary party next week? I canceled everything else.”