Pieces of My Sister's Life (24 page)

27

D
R. KRAMER CAME
to insert a catheter to drip morphine from an IV into Eve’s arm, allowing her to dose herself once every two hours. She made him use her right arm so he wouldn’t see the scars on her left wrist, which left her helpless, awkward, hardly able to feed herself or brush her teeth.

She slept more, but began calling out in her sleep, like she was conjuring a new world in her dreams to make up for the waking world she was missing. She would cry out and we’d come running, me and Justin, only to see there was no awareness behind her opened eyes. And each time it would raise the nerves to the surface of my skin, this creepy stillness, this dead-eyed gaze, foreshadowing.

And then one morning I woke to the sound of an inhuman screech. I sprang up and sat a minute, trapped in a blind post-sleep confusion. There was a thunderclap outside and then an answering guttural wail. “Eve?” I said, then jumped to my feet and ran downstairs.

Gillian was standing at the entrance to the den, barefoot, her shoulders trembling with tears. I pushed past her to the bed where Eve lay writhing, her face contorted and deathly pale. Justin, just as pale, was fumbling with the morphine pump, his hands shaking. “What do I…? Oh God, Eve, please, oh God!”

I ran to Eve, threw myself over her body like I could stop her writhing, muffle the pain. Justin pulled at me. “She’s dying! Is she dying? Is she—?” His voice broke into a sob.

“The pills, get the pills!” I said. I pushed the button on the morphine pump but it gave a dull beep and wouldn’t deliver more. “Dammit!”

Justin ran in with a pill bottle, pulled at the cap, spewing tablets across the bed. I grabbed one, lifted her head and reached for water, but she gagged before the glass touched her lips, spit out the pill and swung at me. “Just go ’way,” she croaked. “Go ’way!”

Justin lifted her in his arms, cradled her, rocking, the tears glassy on his cheeks. He looked up at me and I backed away, my hands pressed to my mouth.

Gillian grabbed my waist and I wrapped my arms around her as if I could hide her from it. “It’s okay,” I sobbed. “It’s okay, it’s okay…”

I pulled her into the hall and we slid to the floor, her head against my breasts, my face buried in her warmth. “No, no, no…” Gillian whimpered with the voice of a girl half her age, as behind us Eve wailed, pleading for an end.

The rain started, first slow, then heavy, and I sat on the front porch trying to remember the last time I’d listened to the rain from this porch swing. Storytelling afternoons, Justin sideways on the top step and Eve on the swing beside me, nudging at my arm to mock the passion of his voice. But this rain sounded different. They’d replaced the corrugated tin roof with slate and the rain knocked like pebbles, unrelenting. Not magic anymore.

Justin found me there and stood beside me, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye, not speaking.

“That was bad,” he said finally.

“Yeah,” I whispered. “Yeah.”

“They want to up the morphine and put her in the hospital, but I can’t. I won’t.” He walked to the porch railing and leaned against it. “You know she asked me to help her.”

Wind gusted rain into my face, and I focused on that, the cold insult of it, rather than his words.

“Asked me to end it for her and sometimes, I don’t know.” He sank to the rocking chair, rocked back and forth, back and forth, a centered, schizophrenic rock. “She has these clear times once in a while, where she hardly seems to hurt. She talks about us, about Gillie, about the time she was training for the marathon. You know she ran the freaking Boston Marathon two months after she was diagnosed? She talks about our life with so much energy and I know there’s still so much living she has left to do. But what comes after the clear times is that helplessness, the pain in every muscle and bone and every pore of her. Nobody should have to hold out against that, and I think if it was me…Sometimes I think about it.”

I turned to watch his face, his hair strung with sprayed rain, cheeks glossy with tears. And I don’t know what made me do it.

Just an emptiness, my aloneness, maybe a need to mourn with him that made me climb onto his lap. He inhaled sharply, and after a minute wrapped me in his arms and we rocked together, rocked. Rain sprayed softer now, or at least it seemed softer; there was a splash of thunder and faintly I felt his lips brushing at my hair. That’s all it was, innocent maybe, but it felt like so much more, an aching, awful burning. I couldn’t move.

It was he who stood finally, spilling me to my feet. I kept my eyes where they’d been, down on the floor. He touched the back of my neck, then walked away.

I stood for a while, looking out at the puddles pooling in the divoted grass, and then I sat in the chair he’d just left, feeling his warmth.

I sat there, not thinking, my mind centering only on the squeal of my rocking, the spattering on the roof. I waited until I heard sounds from inside, then rose and watched through the front window.

Gillian was lying curled against Eve’s legs, head on her lap, stroking the side of Eve’s thigh. And Justin was hovering over Eve’s bed, combing his fingers through the fringes of her hair. I watched as she gazed up into his face, trusting him, trusting me.

When I couldn’t stand to watch anymore, I turned and began to walk. I walked down the hill, not bothering with roads, tramping on weeds and over lawns, the rain so blindingly heavy it seemed like I was swimming, my legs gliding, kicking and carrying wherever they wanted me to go.

When I reached the shoreline on the island’s north side, I turned onto the Maze, a tangle of twisting, branching, interconnected paths. I startled at the sight of the stunted pines, once full and arching between paths but now stripped by blight, their branches curled and bare like tentacles. The Maze was nothing special, listed in the Block Island guidebooks but really just a thing to do when you’d already done everything else. To us, though, it had been an adventure. We’d come out here sometimes with Daddy, pretending to get hopelessly lost, and then later, with the thrill of newfound independence, we came on our own and found a secret place hidden under a stand of cedar. We’d sit against the trunks and build tiny homes, sticks forming walls, moss for carpet, sand piles for beds, flint chips for twins, a smooth gray rock daddy and foggy quartz mother. She was rolling dough from an acorn cap as the twins sat beside her, all of them laughing at how perfect their little world was, pressing circles and stars.

I crawled now beneath the overhanging branches and closed my eyes, feeling the closeness of the branches dripping rain over my head. The flint chips were everywhere and I lifted them, sifted the stones through my fingers, cradled them and let them fall. Again and again I lifted and let fall, as around me the rain dwindled, the sun cleared the clouds, and the shadows shrank, then lengthened again. And when my vision blurred too much to see the stones between my fingers, I curled against the craggy ground and slept.

The sun was fully out when I woke up. I stared blindly at the brightness. Outside, why was I outside? And then the pictures came at me: the shrillness of Eve’s screech, her twisted face, lips nearly blue with pain. Dying.

My shoulders ached; my clothes and hair were damp and sticky. I pulled to my feet, grasping onto a branch to keep from falling. The path was rambling and abstract in the haze of sleep, each turn like every other, the bare bark-stripped trees leaning in rows of skeletal silhouettes. I started for home, thinking only of the comfort of the bed that had been Daddy’s, a flannel nightgown, the hiss of steam pipes and the inky scent of Justin’s papers.

There was a strange car in the drive, a red Nissan. And when I stepped inside I heard Eve’s voice, seeming fully recovered, cautious but questioning, the voice I’d looked out for in my telemarketing that told me there was potential for a sale.

And then a stranger’s voice. “I could understand hating baths,” she said. “I have to agree it’s much more fun playing dress-up or whiffle ball, but still.”

I stood by the stairway listening. The voice was somehow so very familiar, stretching a dusty, forgotten splinter of my mind.

“You used to run away and hide, and one time I actually thought you’d gone out the door and I called the cops. But when they showed up, there you were behind a curtain. You were all excited. One of the cops let you wear his hat.”

I shook my head slowly. I wanted to go upstairs and lie in Daddy’s bed. I wanted to comb the pine needles from my hair. I wanted to soak in a deep tub, breathe in steam until I wasn’t sure where I ended and where the water began. But my feet walked forward without my will. I stood in the doorway and watched.

They were sitting on the bed, Eve in her nightgown and the woman in a raincoat and heels, wearing a face that looked more like my face than Eve’s did now. She looked up, her eyes wide as a child’s, holding more fear than joy. Or pain. Or love. “Kerry,” she said.

I shook my head. “You…” I inhaled quickly. “You?”

She gave me a smile, again more fear in it than anything else. “Kerry,” she said again.

I looked to Eve and then back again, almost expecting her to disappear while my head was turned. I reached to touch the tendril of brown hair that fell across her ear. The hair was stiff like spray, not real, not my mother’s hair.

She started to speak, then stopped. “You’re wet,” she said finally. “You were out in the rain?”

Our mother was supposed to have warm eyes that crinkled when she smiled. She’d be attractive but in an earthy way, like she could hold you when you scraped your knee and could, with that holding, make everything better. But this woman had her hair up in a chignon, and her lips were lined deep red. She was so young, too young; she could have been my age, the kind of woman men turned their heads at. Not my mother.

“But you look good,” she said softly. “You grew up to be so pretty.”

She was wearing makeup. What kind of person would think of makeup when going to her dying daughter? This woman was untouchable, glossy like someone out of a magazine, like someone you could wrinkle in your fist and she’d still come out looking the same. I felt a sudden fierce ache for Daddy. “You’re here,” I said.

“I needed to see her,” she said slowly. “I wanted to see who she was before it was too late.”

Eve’s face contorted slightly, expressing everything, every knot and fold of my own tangled insides. “How did you even know I was sick?” she said.

Our mother stood and walked to the woodstove, stayed there staring at the blank wall above it. “Just know I’ve kept track of you, both of you.”

“Kept track of us how? I mean, was it the Caines? Bert and Georgia?”

“It doesn’t matter who. The important thing’s that ever since the beginning, I’ve done whatever I could to make sure you were okay.”

I watched her, thinking how all this time she knew where we were, all this time we were waiting. And just then I wished we were still waiting; it would be better than this, better to think of her as something in our heads, something we’d cradle there like a hope, a piece of our past and our future still on hold rather than this real woman I didn’t know.

I sat on the bed, the spot she’d just left, feeling the warmth from her body. I spoke in a whisper, it was all I could manage. “We were kids,” I said.

Eve took my hand, intertwined her fingers, and suddenly, with the two of us on the bed and our mother on the outside, I saw her for what she was. A fringe of us, something dangling and mostly disconnected, not some defining moment, not some answer. Only a woman. A woman who didn’t know how to be a mother.

“You know what we used to do?” I said. “Daddy told us you were sailing, you’d be back after you saw the world. So we’d wait out on the harbor, me and Eve, looking for you.”

Her eyes flinched. Just a second of confusion, a confession that she did know how she’d hurt us. But the pain was fleeting, soon glossed back over into that picture-perfect poise. “I know,” she said. “I know how it must’ve been.”

Eve smiled softly. “In the beginning it was almost every day we went out there, summer, fall, in the winter wearing our ski parkas, just standing out there holding hands and looking.”

Our mother blinked quickly. Scared? Fighting back tears? Something stuck in her eye? I couldn’t tell which. “I thought all the time about coming to see you,” she said, “but I couldn’t take you back with me, I just couldn’t. And I didn’t want to hurt you by telling you that. Besides, I knew you had your dad. And then the Caines.”

“The Caines weren’t our parents,” I said.

“I’m not a parent either, not like you mean it.” She stepped closer, raised her arms and then dropped them. “There are people who are meant to be mothers and then there’s people who give birth and feel like there’s been some mistake, no way could these babies belong to them. I know I can’t explain the kind of person I am, because I’m not like other people, I’m just not. But I tried, sweetheart. God, I tried.”

The endearment echoed through my head,
sweetheart, sweetheart.
I turned away so I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t.

“I wanted to be here,” she said, “for six years I tried but it was killing me little by little. And the fact that the things which should’ve made me so happy were killing me, that hurt even more. I needed to start fresh, make something better of myself.”

“We were killing you,” I said, and smiled widely.

“Your father never understood it, he was such a simple man. He drove a rig back then, and he’d be gone maybe five, sometimes six days a week.” She gave a flat, single-note laugh. “Hell, I was so damned jealous of that time he had, and part of me hated him for it. And then he’d come home and expect me to be this loving wife, totally there for him, like the days in between never happened.”

“He loved you, Mother.” The word “Mother” came from my lips without thought, sounding cold and awful. I shook my head quickly to lessen the sting of it.

“He loved his vision of me. I got pregnant and then we got married and he thought I’d turn into this mom and wife. But he never really understood me or he never would’ve married me. He would’ve known I’d leave someday.”