Pieces of My Sister's Life (25 page)

The front door opened. “I’m home!” Gillian called. She tramped into the den, one hand behind her back, then stopped. “Oh, hi,” she said.

Our mother looked at her, then slowly, tentatively, raised her hand for Gillian to shake, held so tightly and so long that Gillian finally pulled away. “I’m Gillian Caine,” she said, wiping her palm against her leg.

“Pleased to meet you,” our mother said, then hesitated a minute before smiling. “I’m Mrs. Evans.”

“Good to meet you. You feel better now, Ma? Because I brought you something I thought might help. The petunias are going crazy.” She brought her hand from behind her back to reveal a fistful of multicolored flowers. “They’re escaping all outside the edges of the bed, so I just brought the extras. I thought maybe they’d make you happy.”

“They make me very happy,” Eve said. She sat forward to kiss Gillian’s head, then set the flowers into her water tumbler.

Our mother gazed at the flowers a moment, then bent to touch the spot Eve had just kissed.

Gillian stumbled back, then gave our mother a wide, fake smile. “Well, I got homework, better go. Nice meeting you.”

When she’d left, the three of us stayed motionless, eyeing the petunias, their stunted stems and brilliant heads crushed inside the glass. Until I spoke. “You didn’t introduce yourself to your granddaughter.”

Her shoulders stiffened. “I would’ve. I would’ve but I think it’s best if I don’t just now.”

“So how long are you staying?”

Silence, one of those silences louder than any answer would have been. She didn’t talk for so long I almost started babbling, saying anything to keep her from giving the answer I knew she’d give. But then she turned to me, her eyes sharp with a sort of fear, and spoke in a near whisper. “I’m not. I mean, I can’t. I don’t think it would be good for any of us if I stayed. I’ll give you whatever I can, whatever you need from me, but then I think it’s best if I go.”

“You’re leaving. You mean today?”

“Kerry…”

“You just breeze in like you’re delivering some gift and then breeze away. Then why did you even bother coming? What good does it do us?”

“I’m not sure why I came here exactly. I don’t know, for selfish reasons, maybe. Franny told me you called and I just got to thinking about life, about dying, about my life and these two pieces of me out there somewhere, and about what I’d been looking for all this time.”

“Looking for us?” Eve said. So much desperation in her voice, like we’d been at six, at sixteen, so much we wanted the hole in her to be as big as the hole in us.

“I don’t know. I think you were a part of what I’ve been looking for, trying to find what I should’ve felt for my family but for some reason couldn’t.” She smoothed a hand over her hair, her eyes distant, smiling a strange smile. “I’ve gotten everything else I wanted, put myself through school working two jobs, a few years back I married a great guy and then left him after three months. And I won this huge award last year, the Presidential Award at my PR firm.” She shook her head as if amazed, then walked to the window and leaned forward, resting her forehead against the pane. “Everything I ever tried for comes to me, except that I didn’t know how to love you. Not enough.”

I held my breath and felt a bubble in my chest, expanding and hardening, crowding out my lungs.

“It’s okay,” Eve said. “You tried.”

I stared at Eve. Her face was calm, almost sympathetic.

Our mother turned back to us, smiling. “I wanted to show you something,” she said, reaching inside her slicker for a large manila envelope. From the envelope she pulled out a photo of Eve and me, walking on Water Street, taken in what looked to be the year I’d left.

“How’d you get this?” I asked.

“Your dad sent pictures every year.” She handed it to me and smiled. “And after he was gone I got this from a friend, a mutual friend who thought I should know what you looked like. It was the last picture they ever sent.”

I studied the photo. Eve’s hair was short, but shaggy. I had a startled look on my face. “Who?” I said.

She ignored me, reaching again into the envelope. “I wanted to give you this.” She held out her hand. A gold locket, the size and shape of a pocket watch, fell onto the bed. I lifted it.

“Your father sent it to me the year I left. There was a key on the same chain, and after I filled the locket I locked it and sent the key back for you and your dad. I sent it back and all this time I thought of you across the ocean, the three of you, me having the filled locket and you having the key like it would mean something was waiting to happen. It wasn’t over.”

I flipped the locket to look at the back. It was inscribed in graceful script above a tarnished keyhole.
You will always be inside me,
it said. I stared at the inscription, fingering the lock, and then wordlessly, I pulled the key from my neck.

It was worn by time but still a perfect fit. I turned the key and the clasp sprung on its hinge, emptying two tiny teeth and two locks of baby-fine hair onto the bed. Eve glanced at me, lifted the teeth and cradled them in her palm.

Inside the locket were two small photos, one of my mother in a gown and veil with Daddy beside her, the other a family picture, taken when Eve and I were four or five. We wore matching dresses with sailor collars, and sat in front of our parents who stood hand in hand, Daddy beaming in ignorant bliss.

“Here.” She set the envelope on the bed. “Look at it when I’m gone, okay? It’ll explain everything.”

“You saved our teeth?” Eve whispered.

Our mother gave Eve a smile that looked more like a grimace. “I named you, you know that, Eve? Kerry was your father’s but you were mine. You were the first baby out, and I said to him, that’s Eve.”

Eve squeezed a fist over the tiny teeth. “I recognized you standing in the window, you know. I saw you standing out there and at first what I thought was you were some tourist hiding from the rain.” She gave a strangled laugh. “Damned mainlander come to see the sights, the freaky bald lady, world’s skinniest surviving being, but then I saw your face and I knew you.”

There were tears in our mother’s eyes. Real tears and I locked onto that, played the image of those tears over and over so when I thought back on what she’d said to us, this was the picture I’d see. She turned to me as if waiting for some confirmation, but I had nothing I could give. I just fixed my eyes on hers, and waited for her to leave.

Our mother stayed through the afternoon. I hardly spoke, I couldn’t speak, just listened to her voice, calm and deep and distant, the only part of her I really remembered. I let Eve condense our lives into flat, emotionless snapshots and I listened as our mother tried to explain her life, not answers, only words. But they were the only answers she had, and not even close to what I needed.

By the end it seemed like we’d run out of things to say; we sat there uncomfortably as if waiting for some event, some understanding that never came. When it was time for her to leave, she turned to Eve. “You know that I probably won’t ever see you again.”

Eve nodded slowly. “It’s okay.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Eve smiled. “I know. And that’s enough.”

After she left, I stood at the window, watching the slip and sway of her hips as she walked, even beneath the coat so unmistakably Eve’s walk. She’d left without ever taking off her coat, without giving us a hug or a kiss. And part of me wanted to stop her, tell her all the things I’d wanted to say, twenty-five long years of things. Eve was leaving and she’d come back and there should be some sort of balance, a serendipity in it. When instead it was like a flash in the darkness that leaves you even blinder than before.

“What did she talk about before I got back?” I said. “Did she say anything?”

“Nothing about herself. She talked about me a little, the things she remembered when I was a kid. About both of us.”

“What kind of things? Good things?”

“Of course good things. And she seemed so happy when she was talking about it. I do think she loved us, Ker, in her own way.”

I watched her for a minute, then reached for the locket, fingered the tiny teeth inside. On the nightstand was the manila envelope our mother had left. It was bumpy, full with something. I lifted it and emptied it on the bed, spilling letters, maybe twenty-five or thirty, written in an uneven print.

I unfolded one, and as I saw the signature the realization came slowly and heavily. “This is how she knew you were sick,” I whispered.

Eve took the letter from me and scanned it slowly, her eyes filling. She looked up at me with a wide, flat smile. “Holy crap,” she said.

June

1994

28

W
E SAT AT THE HARBOR
in Justin’s idling car, looking out over the ocean. Only the crests of distant waves were visible in the dark, ragged and unpredictable, lashing rocks and licking slantwise to the shore. Every so often the engine coughed and gave a shudder, like it was preparing to speak.

“Okay,” Justin said finally. His face was gray under the dim streetlamps. There was a smear on the arm of his jacket and I stared at it, unable in the dusky light to tell if it was dirt or blood. “What’re you doing tomorrow?” he said. “Were you planning anything?”

I glanced at Eve in the backseat. She was hunched against the car door, her head wedged against the window. When she didn’t respond I turned to him, needing something, some kind of reassurance, but he kept his eyes on the dark windshield.

“When do your jobs start?”

“Next Monday.”

“Okay.” He gripped the steering wheel. “I’m going into work tomorrow. And you have to do something, it doesn’t matter what. Go to the beach, buy a magazine, whatever, just so somebody sees you.”

I stared at him blankly. How could he be so calculating? “You think anybody who looked at us now wouldn’t realize there’s something wrong?”

“I know.” He was quiet for a minute, then turned to me. “But what you’re going to have to do, both of you have to put on the best act of your lives. Tell yourself a story about what would’ve happened if the day just ended at graduation. You and me, we walked around until real late at night, and then we went home to sleep.” He turned to look at Eve. “And you, Eve, after the Stantons’ party you came home and crashed.”

“You know something weird?” Eve said, her eyes empty. “They injected rum into a watermelon with a turkey baster. And when you take a bite it just slips down your throat like candy.”

We both stared at her. Finally I climbed over the seat and sat with my knees bent on her lap and my head tucked against her shoulder.

“See what happens,” Justin said, “you get your head inside that story and live like it was true. And it becomes true in the end, that’s how it works. For you and everyone else out there, it becomes true.”

Eve’s neck was damp. I burrowed against it so all I knew was her salt smell. I wanted Justin to stop talking. I wanted him to go away, to leave us. All I wanted was Eve’s smell. Her pulse against my lips. Just us.

We lay in Daddy’s bed that night, Eve and I, huddled together like we used to, my hand clutched at her sleeve. I drifted time and again to the edge of sleep, jerking back to consciousness as soon as the fall tried to overtake me and then lying with my eyes squeezed shut. Behind my lids the pictures swam, so I cluttered them away by reciting a nonsense poem memorized long ago.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe; all mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe…
And after several times through it started to work, the pictures blurred to no more than a half-remembered dream, when suddenly Eve cried out and sprang to her feet. In the moonlight her eyes glistened wide with terror.

“Eve?”

She covered her mouth and shook her head quickly, backing from the room. I followed her into the hallway, listened to her heaving choke behind the bathroom door. When she was done I knocked on the door and entered, wet a washcloth and wiped at her mouth, then held it to her forehead.

She clutched at me silently, her head buried in my neck, her breath hazing sour around us. “It’s okay,” I whispered, stroking her hair.

“I dreamed him,” she said, her lips tickling my skin as she spoke. “I dreamed it all, his face, his eyes…”

“It’s not real, Eve. Like Justin said, for tonight none of it’s real, okay? Just for now.”

She shook her head and stumbled away from me, backed into the hall and down the stairs. The front door slammed open and I ran after her, watched from the door as she reeled down the drive barefoot, dressed only in Daddy’s flannel shirt. I closed the door and laid my cheek against it until the dizziness in my head cleared, then climbed back into Daddy’s bed.

I don’t know how long I lay there staring up at the ceiling. Waiting for Eve, waiting for morning, the seconds pulsing slow and torturous.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe
. And when I knew I couldn’t stand it, I rose and started for the Caines’. The light was on in Justin’s office. I tried the door but it was locked. I heard shuffling behind it, but when I called to him in choked, pleading whispers, he didn’t respond. I stood there, my hand on the door, gravel cutting into my feet. After a minute I turned and started back home. I lay on Daddy’s bed, grabbed onto his pillow and curled against it. I wrapped myself in his quilt and began to rock slowly side to side.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe….

It was the front door that startled me back awake, clicking softly to the latch. I listened to Eve’s footsteps on the stairs, waiting for her to come and curl against me. It took me a minute to realize she’d gone back to her own bed instead.

I rose and padded to the doorway of our room, watching, wondering how she could stand to sleep there. On the floor, dark lines of blood still streaked between floorboards. The blankets had been stripped from my bed; Eve’s torn dress and heels were heaped in one corner. I shivered, wishing I could go to her but sensing she needed to be alone. So instead I left the house and walked back outside. The office door was open on its hinge. Empty.

I walked to the Caines’ house, started upstairs. Justin’s bedroom door was closed. I knocked softly and then entered, crawled into bed beside him, ran my lips across his ear to wake him.

Justin flinched away with a gasp. He fumbled with his bedside light, then huddled back. “Please,” he said. He didn’t look at me. His eyes shifted from wall to door to window. “Please,” he said again.

“It’s okay,” I whispered. “It’s just me.”

“Please, Kerry, you have to go.”

“I need to be here. I can’t stand this by myself.”

Justin shook his head. “We’ll talk tomorrow, I promise we’ll talk, okay?”

“Couldn’t I just lie here with you?”

“I can’t do this!” Justin squeezed his eyes shut and curled against the wall. “Please.”

My eyes filled as I watched him, a huddled lump beneath the sheets. I reached forward, then pulled my arm away. “Okay. Okay.” I stood and looked back at him. “I’m going now.” I bit my tongue and backed away.

At home I stood in the hallway shivering, the weariness draping over me like a lead blanket. I stumbled to the living room and fell onto the couch. I was asleep before I finished closing my eyes.

It was a fitful sleep, and when my mind drifted to consciousness, I fought off waking. I lay still with my eyes closed until I realized there was a weight on my lap, a warm and steady weight like a curled cat. I slowly lowered my hand to Justin’s hair.

He looked up at me, eyes red. “I’m sorry, Kerry. I’m sorry…”

I wiped a tear from his cheek. “I know.”

He sat on the couch beside me and slipped his hand around the back of my neck. He watched my face for a minute, then suddenly his eyes hardened. He pulled me to his lips and kissed me, his hands clutching, his teeth crushing against my teeth, then pulled me against his body so fiercely that it hurt. “God, I love you,” he said hoarsely. “So much, you know that, right?”

I heard steps from the hall and looked up. Eve was watching us, her face tight and pale. Our eyes met and I reached my hand to her, but she shook her head slightly and slipped back down the hall. So I turned back to Justin. I kissed him, first soft and then deeply, running my fingers down his chest, pulling at buttons and belt, letting myself slide to the floor and pulling him down beside me. My mind was fluttering and swirling as I reached inside his briefs, grasped the smooth flesh that fit so perfectly in my palm. The image assaulted me, Ryan Maclean’s open zipper, the bluish sheen of his penis against his leg, but still I pulled Justin to me, opened my legs to press him inside me. I wanted it; it was all I wanted.

And then the front door swung shut.

Justin rolled away. He hunched on his side, jeans pulled around his thighs. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, “I love you, please know that.”

“I do know,” I said. “It’s okay, I do.”

He stood and straightened his clothes. “I have to go to work.”

“You’re really going to work?”

He stood without answering, then turned and walked away. I looked down at my bare legs, at my nightshirt pulled crooked to expose my breasts. I looked down at the pale strap lines left from a suntan almost a year ago and began to sob.