Pieces of My Sister's Life (6 page)

In the kitchen the teapot started to whistle, and I jammed the book back onto the shelf. LoraLee shuffled into the room with a steaming mug that smelled of raspberry. She watched as I drank, nodding slowly as I sipped at the tea, bitter on the back of my tongue. My mind swam with the heat of the steam and with the tangle of learned ingredients chanting through my head.

“LoraLee,” I said, “do you know magic?” It sounded stupid when I said it, so I ducked my head and faked a laugh. “That’s not what I mean.”

LoraLee smiled. “In town they says I’s a witch.”

I widened my eyes. “No they don’t.”

“S’okay, honey, I knows what they’s sayin’, people likes to talk. But there ain’t no such thing as magic.”

“I know that.”

LoraLee shook her head. “But there is maybe such a thing as shapin’. You can shape how you wants your life to be, and say spells to make it happen. That’s what I do. That’s what they calls witchcraf ’. And sometime God listen, sometime He got better things to do.”

I made my voice nonchalant. “What do you mean spells? What kind of spells?”

“Jus’ spells what change the things aroun’ you. Some peoples knows spells for power, for money. Some knows spells that makes sick people well. What I thinks is that it ain’t so much the spells do the shapin’. What I thinks is that it’s the wantin’ make things happen.”

I nodded but I felt a sudden sinking disappointment. I saw LoraLee sitting in her two-room shack decorated with things people threw away. I saw how her dress was torn at the hem and the cushion on her rocker dangled with loose threads. And I knew that if spells could work, LoraLee wouldn’t choose to live this way.

Still, the rest of that afternoon I thought about it. I remembered the days I’d gone to her with a sick stomach or sick head. She’d stroked my forehead with peppermint water, fed me ginger tea. She’d pressed her fingers to my temples and told me stories about Africa and Atlanta until I fell asleep. LoraLee knew how to heal the sick and maybe that meant she knew more. Maybe it meant she knew how to make Justin love me, but just didn’t want to say.

I cried all that night, silent, closed-mouthed tears. My insides felt close to bursting, like an overdone potato. Eve lay in the bed beside me, but she didn’t seem to hear my clogged breaths. Or if she did, she chose to pretend that she didn’t, perhaps allowing me my dignity. Close as we were, we both knew that there were times when closeness was beside the point.

As I lay in the dark, I imagined Leslie in her veil, dumb as a dead clam but still victorious. I imagined Justin holding her ringed hand and whispering his stories. I pictured him sharing the world where I’d fallen in love, everything that had once been sacred between us, and I cried.

Late the next morning, I woke after a fitful sleep to the sound of footsteps on the stairs. There was a knock on the bedroom door and Justin’s voice, “Kerry?”

I bit my lips between my teeth and stumbled out into the hall. His eyes searched mine, and then his jaw stiffened and he lifted a thermos. “Eve said you were sick. Mom sent me over with soup. Jesus Murphy, you look like you’ve had your face stomped by a soccer shoe.”

I felt my eyes sting and ran into the bathroom, slammed the door behind me.

Justin knocked on the door. “Kerry? You okay?”

I looked into the mirror. My nose was red, eyes swollen and dark, like a horrid caricature of myself.

“Kerry? What is it? You gonna be okay?”

I buried my face in my hands. “I look like crap!” Behind the wall of my hands I saw Leslie, her sparkling blue eyes which had probably never cried, her perfect little fingernails painted silvery seashell pink. No wonder he loved her.

“You’re crying because of how you look?” He sounded lost. “Okay, either you’re totally overreacting to my comment or you’re way too vain.”

“I’m not crying.”

He didn’t respond, probably pondering the absurdity of this statement.

I wiped my eyes and pulled my hair over my face, then pushed at the door.

Justin took one look at me and his face seemed to fold in on itself. He wrapped me in his arms, and I gulped a breath, tears freezing in my eyes. He stroked at my hair, his hands sending prickles down my back, through arms and legs. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe, my heart slowed, beats drawn like they were pulsing through molasses.

“Oh Kerry, hush,” he whispered. “It’s okay. I know it’s hard, you have to just let it out.”

His words whispered at my hair. I clutched at his soft flannel shirt, then slowly reached out my tongue and licked it over the stitching on his pocket.

“I never see you cry, you or Eve. It’s not healthy, Kerry, it’ll never feel better unless you do.” He pulled away, studied my face. “There’s something else though, isn’t there? Something happened.”

I shook my head.

“I know you pretty well, and something’s going on. I can see it in your eyes, you look like you’re being torn apart.”

“No. Nunh-unh,” I said, but the funny thing was, this is what I’d been thinking all the night before, about one of his stories where a girl had literally been torn into two pieces when the boy she loved had left. Justin hadn’t described the blood that must’ve been involved, the spilling out of guts, but I’d pictured how that kind of death would look, more revolting than romantic. Lying there, I’d felt that bleeding and spilling, and I’d known it was the worst way in the world for a person to die. Maybe his words were not just coincidence but some kind of sign, divine intervention, a way I could make him remember our world. I wiped at my face. “Hey, y’know what, Justin? You know what would help? Maybe you could read me some of your stories.”

Justin stared at me like I’d gone off my rocker, and I thought I could read his mind.
Leslie never goes off her rocker,
is what he was thinking. I steeled my shoulders. “Like you did when we were kids. It used to make me forget everything, become somebody else.”

Justin nodded slowly, considering. He finally smiled. “Didn’t especially want to go into work anyway. If that’s really what you want, really think it might help. But you have to promise not to laugh, or I’ll sew your lips together. My feelings get hurt easily.”

I wanted to jump, twirl Modern Movement pirouettes. Instead I rolled my eyes. “What a wimp,” I said.

I dressed quickly and followed Justin to his office, my heart skipping with jumping-bean beats. I pictured how Eve might react when I told her, how she’d have to shrug and pretend she didn’t care. And I’d tell her everything, the way he smiled at me, the expectation in his face, working on her until she was caught up in the thrill of it too.

In the office Justin knelt on the floor and began gathering loose pages, looking suddenly excited. “It’s a real mess, not really shaped into any kind of story, just a bunch of stories that don’t have any kind of chronology.”

He stacked a pile of papers and rolled his sleeves to the elbows. I studied the veining on his arms as he sorted through the sheets of paper, the vulnerable hollow at the nape of his neck where the ends of his hair were sun-bleached to the color of beer. He finally threw the pile up into the air so that the stories fluttered around us. “Pick a page, any page.”

I ran my finger over the scrawled script on the paper that had landed on my lap, then handed it to Justin. He glanced at it. “Okay, good choice.”

He leaned beside me, resting on his elbow, and I closed my eyes and listened. His voice was smooth and deep and I fell into it, saw the marshes where fairies lived, saw little blue-faced Morwyn left stranded among the reeds.

“‘For eight years Morwyn had lived there with the fairy folk,’” he read, “‘so much time that her blue hair had grown long past her knees, enough time for her to wonder if there was more to learn from life. Each night she would gaze into the vast, star-stung sky, waiting for the future that felt like rushing, crushing waves against her chest. And watching her, the fairies saw what that future would bring, and they were afraid.’”

Justin stopped talking and I opened my eyes, found him watching my face intently. He blushed and glanced away. “You want to hear another one?”

And so we spent our day sorting through the pages, him leaning on one elbow, me on my back beside him with my vision blurred, listening and dreaming. I waited for the moments our eyes would meet, because each time he looked my way something passed between us, something silvery and thin as gauze. The afternoon light began to fade, but instead of switching on the lamp, Justin reached for a flashlight and read on, the two of us surrounded and held together by the dark.

When he’d finished, Justin sat up and gathered the papers into a pile. “This was amazing,” he said. “Completely amazing. I’ve been writing this all down for months, but for some reason this is the first time I’ve actually sat to read the whole thing together.” He smiled hesitantly. “So, you think it’s any good?”

“It’s totally incredible.”

He traced his finger over the dim oval cast by the flashlight. “Know what I was thinking sitting here reading? Maybe I could make this about us, the two of us, a boy telling a girl the stories he’s made up in his head. And they both get so caught up in the stories that they actually enter the world while he’s talking, as Morwyn and Gaelin. Dream the same dream.”

“About us?”

“We could name the world after us.” He grinned. “Call it Ker-tin.”

“Juserry,” I said, playing along.

“Or last names? Barnacaine? Cainard? Canardia, how’s that?”

I tried to bite back my smile. It was wonderful, not just a joining of names but a joining of souls, like a marriage. Justin pulled me into a quick hug and I thought how here it was, destiny coming together just in time. It was just like LoraLee always said, that destiny usually came to you disguised as a bang-up coincidence. “We have to celebrate,” I said.

“Celebrate?”

“I’ll cook you dinner. Over at my house tomorrow night.”

“You can cook?”

“I’m an amazingly great cook, you’ll see.” I squeezed my hands into fists. “I’ve got these special recipes I’ve really been wanting to try.”

Justin smiled at me and brushed his knuckles against my cheek. Just the briefest touch, but it echoed through me and I had to bite my lip to keep from sighing. And maybe I was wrong but I thought Justin’s eyes momentarily flickered a lighter blue. It almost seemed as if he’d felt something too.

6

I
PLEADED A BELLYACHE.
It was more or less true after all; my stomach felt like a washing machine on spin cycle, and I had way too much to do to waste the day in school. Half of my brain laughed at me, the other half steeled its shoulders and began to go down its list.

I bought frozen chicken and strawberries. Strawberry soup, the book had said, and the chicken should be cooked with apricots. I had never in my life tasted an apricot, and all I could find in the fridge was a jar of toast-crumb-littered marmalade, but it was orange and fruity; close enough.

Lettuce for salad. Dressing made of mayonnaise, brown sugar and vinegar, with poppy seeds I brushed off sandwich rolls. Apparently poppy seeds were supposed to engender lust. The dressing also called for dandelion leaves. Where the heck would I find dandelions this time of year? I remembered last spring spraying LoraLee’s dandelions and pulling the withered stems. How long did it take for compost to decompose?

On the way to LoraLee’s I knocked on the trunk of every tree I passed, which of course made the walk take significantly longer than was justifiable. Sometimes I wished my lucky number was two.

I jumped over the fence to her back garden, feeling utterly depraved. But honestly, nobody could consider stealing dead dandelions to be real stealing, and besides, I had no choice. I would rather have Justin fall in love with me naturally, but that just wasn’t going to happen in time.

I dug through to the middle of the compost heap, where things seemed the least decomposed, the smell of green mixed with the smell of rot, like broccoli left in the refrigerator too long. Dandelions had been everywhere in LoraLee’s garden (since her weed-control practices mostly consisted of hot pepper spray and lots of pulling) and I found them easily. Brown, yes, and covered with Lord knew what, but still pretty recognizable. I tucked them into my pocket, then went to LoraLee’s door.

She was wearing an orange flowered dress with a pale blue apron, probably the only person in the country who could make those colors work. “Why Kerry, ’magine this,” she said. “Don’t you mos’ often has school on a Tuesday?”

I waved my hand dismissively. “Teacher’s conferences. LoraLee, could I ask you a question? Just for curiosity’s sake.” I gave her a quick, innocent smile and said, “I was just wondering if you ever heard of lovage root.”

“Lovage root? Where you heard of that?”

I shrugged, thought fast. “In school. We’re studying…” I flashed another smile. “Studying roots.”

LoraLee eyed me carefully, then walked into the kitchen. She opened a cupboard door and gestured at rows of labeled peanut butter jars and margarine tubs filled with powders that were all minor variants of the same shade of brownish-gray.
Snake Moss
I saw, and
Betel Nuts
.

“You sees these here,” she said. “These is the spices what I uses for my tea. Mix ’em right, and they makes goodness in your belly.” She gave me a pointed glance. “Mix ’em wrong and you be sorry. This here the lovage root. It’s for your heart, jus’ like it sound.”

She handed me a plastic bag of tan powder. I sniffed at it and detected the sweet earthiness I’d often tasted in her tea.

“I brew this for you when your heart were broke for missin’ your daddy, and with a touch of raspberry oil besides.”

She turned again to the cupboard. Pulse racing, I opened the bag of powder and stuffed a handful into my pocket with the decayed dandelion petals. I closed the bag as LoraLee lifted a jar of pink liquid. “Good for soothin’ the soul,” she finished.

I rubbed my hand against my jeans. “Do you think it really works?”

LoraLee inspected the bag I returned to her, then looked into my eyes. “It’s difficult, matters of the heart.”

I went to the window, rested my elbows on the chipped wooden sill. Even in the midday light, the sun seemed distant. I could blot it out with my thumb. “You ever been in love?” I said.

LoraLee made an odd grunting sound, then lowered herself into a chair by the table. “Oh, Kerry.”

I sat beside her, suddenly wary. In a way, I’d never considered LoraLee a real person with real dreams and desires. I guess I’d thought she was above it.

“His name Hector,” she said after a minute. “He live with me in Atlanta some forty year ago, work hisself near to death jus’ cos he haves a dream to travel up north and study for the ministry.”

“Did he leave you?”

“Yep, he lef ’, but ’fore he go, he carve me this ring I wears.” She slipped the thick wooden ring from her finger. “And he say, ‘This ring my heart I gives to you, whilst I goes to find the Lord. Onest He tell me what best to do,’ Hector say, ‘onest I fix on my greater love, then I come back to reclaim my heart from you or to pledge eternity, one or the other.’”

I watched LoraLee’s fingers caress the edge of the wooden circle. When I couldn’t stand it anymore I asked, “So then what? What happened when he came back?”

LoraLee shrugged. “I’s still waitin’.”

I stared at her. “But it’s been forty years.”

“Forty year and I still has his heart.” She slipped the ring back on her finger. “And he still haves mine, and I’s still waiting.”

I studied her face, not sure what to say, whether to console or commiserate. In the brightness of her eyes I saw dreams once so real they’d been played in two minds, now vaporous as birthday wishes. And I suddenly saw myself in forty years, saw the creases at my eyes as I watched Justin, gray haired, with Leslie by his side. They’d raised children and grandchildren and still held hands. They talked about the past and were glad for all of it. And I saw myself watching Justin with his greater love and still waiting to win back his heart.

I glanced at my watch. Two hours left. It was time to get dressed. I rooted through the closet I shared with Eve. I tried on and discarded an Indian skirt, a jeans skirt and peasant blouse, my tartan kilt. All wrong.

I began to panic. My striped pantsuit? God no, I looked like a mix between a clown and a convict. The pink bridesmaid’s dress? It made me look like a Marshmallow Peep. My blue jumper? Way too conservative. Everything either made me look like I was trying too hard, or trying hard and failing miserably.

I glanced towards the door, then pulled out the grape costume Eve had tried on the other day, remembering how it hugged her hips and breasts like a second skin. It might look too sexy for this particular occasion, but then again wasn’t sexy just what I wanted? I pulled it on carefully, looked in the mirror—

—and nearly cried out loud.

It was awful. My hair was frizzed with static, my face was red, eyes frantic. I looked like I was playing dress-up, like a little girl pretending to be a hooker.

I pulled off the dress and threw it onto the floor. But still I could see the horror of my monstrous purple reflection. Next to Leslie’s pretty, perky perfection, I was like something that had been dragged up from the mud and left to rot.

I reached for the jumper I’d discarded and slipped it on, then pulled my hair behind my ears. Now, even if I looked like a preschooler, at least I didn’t look like I was pretending to be anything else.

I smoothed careful makeup over cheekbones, lips, eyelashes, then began to play with hairstyles. When I heard the front door open, I hurriedly pulled the purple dress back onto its hanger.

Eve stamped up the stairs, calling down the hall. “Men are so freaking gullible.” Her voice trilled with laughter. “You’d think a cop would be beyond it, like when they put on the uniform they should get a little more sane, but he was like a walking hard-on.” She turned into the room and blinked. “Hey, what’s going on?”

I slid a bobby pin into my hair. “Who’s gullible?”

“Never mind. I thought you were sick.”

“I was.” I shrugged. “I’m better now. You think this looks better with tendrils in my face or without?”

Eve looked down at the pile of clothes on the floor. “With,” she said quietly. “What’re you doing?”

I smiled. “Getting dressed for dinner.”

“Dressed up?”

“I’m having dinner with Justin.” At the sound of his name I felt my heart doing little flips. “Just the two of us. I’ve been cooking.”

“For Justin? You’ve got to be kidding. Does he know about this?”

“Of course he knows.”

Eve made a face. “Really, Kerry, he’s obviously not thinking of it the same way. Besides the fact that he’s marrying Leslie, you have to realize he thinks of you like his little sister. If he dated you, it’d be like incest.”

I didn’t answer her, but inside I was seething. Mostly because I knew what she said was probably true. I knew he didn’t sniff at my bottles of shampoo, pull my jeans from the clothes hamper just to touch where my legs had been. But I would change that. I would.

“Stop being bitchy,” I said, and turned away before Eve could say any more.

But as I walked from the bedroom she said, “I’m sorry. Look, you want some help with dinner?”

I stopped, looking out at the hall.

“Not like I know much about cooking, but there’s gotta be something I could do. Chop things up maybe.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, that’d be nice.”

“Yeah, I
am
nice, aren’t I? Why don’t you go on down and I’ll be there in a sec.”

“Sounds good.”

“By the way, you look real cute.”

I smiled and gave her a quick hug. “Thanks.”

She hugged me back, then smiled widely. “Yeah, Kerry, you look real…sweet.”

Sweet
. I studied her face. There was a kind of wildness in her eyes, and obviously she’d used the word on purpose. So I shrugged. “Well, good, because he goes for sweet. I mean hell, look at Leslie, she’s like a pink gummy bear.”

But the word echoed in my head as I ran downstairs.
Sweet
. Sweet as sugar, sweet as a baby. Sweet as a little girl in a baby jumper dreaming the impossible, tearing moldy dandelions into salad dressing like love was a chemistry equation.

I mashed the strawberries, added the lovage root and a sprinkling of dandelion leaves and dumped the mixture into a pot on the stove. I pulled the chicken from the fridge. It still looked frozen; that couldn’t be good. I tried to warm it with my fingers, then spread it with orange marmalade and stuck it in the oven. I frowned at the temperature dial, then set it to five hundred degrees.

“Petit escargot flambé,”
Eve said from the doorway. She’d wrapped a white towel around her head. “Chef ’s hat,” she said, grinning.

“God, Eve, only you could look glamorous in a turban.”

“
C’est vrai, mademoiselle
. So what’s left to do? Where’s your first course?”

“I have soup,” I said, nodding at the pot.

Eve raised her eyebrows. “It’s pink.”

“Yeah well. Listen, could you maybe do the salad? Lettuce is over there.”

Eve nodded and began tearing the lettuce into a bowl. “So you and Justin, hunh? Guess you might as well go for it. It’s not like stealing him away is a sin until they’re actually married.”

“I’m not stealing him away, Eve. It’ll be his decision. If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen.”

She shrugged. “Right. So has he given you any sign that it might happen? Like flirted with you or touched you when he didn’t have to?”

I wiped my hands on my jumper. “I don’t know. Not exactly.”

“Ah,” Eve said.

I waited for her to continue, but she just reached for a knife and began to hum tunelessly.

“Stop acting like you’re the expert on men. I just have to show him how right it would be. Leslie doesn’t know him like I do. There’s something between us that nobody on the outside would understand.”

Eve watched me for a minute, then nodded. There was a strange flatness in her eyes, like they’d been covered by eye stickers.

I glared at her, daring her to say whatever it was she was dying to say, but she stayed silent, concentrating on the lettuce. I left her there and went out to start the fire. I stared into the flames and imagined Justin watching the orange glow on my face, stoking the fire to the croon of Johnny Mathis from the radio and realizing it was me he really loved. This would work. It would have to.

What next? What next? I lit the tapered white candles on the dining table and stepped back. LoraLee’s book had mentioned using a pink or green tablecloth, and after a frantic search I’d finally ended up dressing the table with the ribbon-woven, pink-flowered sheets that had covered our beds in early girlhood, when we’d still been entranced with ribbons and pink flowers. With the candles, the effect was actually pretty romantic.

I strode back to the kitchen. Eve was stirring the soup. “Strawberry? That’s pretty weird.”

I checked my reflection in the oven door. “It’s exotic.”

“If you say so. It was Brad Carrera by the way, the gullible cop. He’s just walking by and I give him this half smile, the kind that doesn’t show your teeth, and he winks at me and says, ‘Hey, beautiful.’ And then, get this, he spins around to watch me walk. I look over my shoulder and there his eyes are, on my butt.”

“Officer Carrera? Jeez! I’d’ve thought he’d have better taste.”

She smirked, but then her smile suddenly faded. “So you really think he’ll go for all this?”