Swan Sister (19 page)

We walked under some scaffolding around a bank. “Look, Jessica! Look, Rachel!” said Mother. A construction
worker had taken off his metal hat and was bowing at us.

We turned down Sixth Avenue so that Mother could show Rachel the pet store, Animal Kingdom, where she worked. Chihuahuas jumped at the glass in the window display when I lowered her into view. My sister’s legs had no strength, but I felt a tremor in her, telling me that she would kick with pleasure if she could. She had raw, thin skin so much like the flesh of these puppies that they forgave her for being a bird. The pet store smelled of grain, leather, newspaper, and the milky scent of baby animals. My mother introduced Rachel to her boss, Doris, who had red hair that she brushed upward into a flame. She was the person I lied to whenever I called to get my mother out of work, and I often feared that Doris would explode into a torch that would burn its way to the truth.

Instead, Doris gave us a toy cloth mouse with a small bell attached to its collar. I shook it in front of Rachel and her head tilted.

“You taking care of yourself, sweetie?” Doris asked my mother. Doris has a voice like a volcano erupting.

“Rachel is taking care of all of us,” said Mother.

We visited Mr. Wing, who runs the stationery store where I buy pens and notebooks for school and fold-out maps of the subway. I call him my “Quarter Friend” because one day I was fumbling with my money, and customers were impatient behind me, but I could not bear to use my special quarters with the mementos of the states on them. Mr. Wing laughed and said, “I’m also a collector.”
He likes Georgia with its huge peach, which leaves me no choice but to roll my eyes and say, “But Mr. Wing, how
common
!” He never fails to act like this is the richest joke he’s ever heard. He keeps a shrine with joss sticks and oranges on a shelf with a red paper poster of the Double Happiness symbol. “Ask for happiness and also a long life, Jessica. A long life without happiness is useless, and a happy life that isn’t long is not good either,” he once explained to me.

Today he gave Rachel a red envelope with a dollar in it and said, “For good luck.”

Oh, the wonders we took in, my baby sister and Mother and me! We saw fish with open mouths, like trophies, in the window at Balducci’s, and the bricks and spires of the old courthouse that makes me think of a palace in Moscow. It’s now a library. Rachel whined and fussed; was she sad because she could not read books? Mother said, “I’ll take you to the big public library with its stone lions, and Jessica and Father and I will read to you at home.” I would take her to art museums and show her Monet, who paints the world as if it’s melting. And to gardens with birds-of-paradise, lilies, and other children.

We backtracked to West Fourteenth Street for a surprise visit to Antonio’s, my father’s store, where he sells fruit, vegetables, bread, and candy. Sometimes in the alley behind, the pale green and yellow wrappings from the apples and pears get loose and fly about. They look like the moltings of canaries. When I handle the fruits there, I imagine them full of bird-singing. I put them to my ear
and listen. Today I held one to Rachel’s ear; she’d been born knowing the language of the skies.

Father was cutting open a burlap sack of lemons when we walked in, and he stopped and smiled. The world froze. “My girls,” he said.

He helped Mother steer the oxygen machine around a stand with a pyramid of red apples. They gleamed. They had white kisses on them from being polished and stacked in the light.

Father said, “Rachel isn’t too tired, is she? Are you, dear?”

He wiped his hands on his apron. He is skin and bones, and his hairline is already receding. Even his mustache is thin. He handed me a caramel and suddenly, unwrapping it, I was struck as if I had been sleepwalking through my many foolish days and now I was jolted awake—because all of us were here, my sister fluttering against my chest, my Mother exhausted but at peace. There was sweetness in my mouth. We were surrounded by fruit that could be split open to hear better the birdsongs inside them. My father is quiet (Uncle Jack once said he had no ambition), but on the day of Rachel’s great adventure, I put my head to my father’s chest and discovered that there was singing, loud birdsong, inside my father, too.

The weather turned colder after that, and we agreed to keep Rachel inside. But I longed for the day to take her out again, and I began to knit a jacket for her. Mother bought me thick yarn, blue and white. I wanted to work small waves of blue into a white background. I sat by
Rachel in her crib and my needles clicked out a little music that made my heart sing. They made a
tap, tap
that lulled her to sleep—but many nights she fussed, and many mornings she awakened short of breath. “That’s part of a swan’s story, Jessica,” said my mother when she saw me worrying. “Swans disappear at night and perform bold deeds and must race back by daylight, panting.” Mother taught me a cable stitch, and I kept unraveling my work until it came out just right. I did a front panel, the blue yarn peaking along, and started one of the sleeves—not easy! “You’ll be wearing it by Halloween,” I told Rachel.

I imagined the night as a swarm of crows biting at her feathers. They must have nipped her without mercy because often at first light she was red and crying. I finished the collar. It was rough, not as smooth as it should have been, but I knew I had to hurry.

We ventured into the city one more time: Uncle Jack called to say that he was getting an award for the best sales of stocks and bonds for his company that year. Invitations engraved in gold arrived, including one for Rachel. And one for me: I ran my fingers along my name, indented on the page:
Jessica
. We took a taxicab because we thought Rachel’s life would not be complete without a genuine ride in one. The driver kept saying, “Poor child, poor child,” until Mother said, “What are you going on about? Sir? She’s off to Wall Street. She’s in heaven.” Mother was in her black velvet dress, and I wore my cranberry velvet one with a matching sash. Rachel was in green togs that made her skin less yellow.

Uncle Jack was wearing a black suit in a theater-like room. When he saw us, he stopped talking to some people and came to hug us. He took Rachel in his arms and said, “It wouldn’t be the same without you here.”

We could not stay long because Rachel began to cry again, but Uncle Jack ordered a limousine to take us home. I said, “Rachel! Maybe people will think we’re rock stars.” I’d brought along my knitting in a brown paper bag because I knew that time was running short. I still needed to fix the hem, and one more sleeve was left to knit.

That night I sat up even though my eyelids kept dropping. I stitched the hem in place. Just as I was starting on the right sleeve, Rachel returned early from her night flight, wailing, and I had to comfort her. Father got up; it was almost his usual time. There’s a courtyard below us, and I showed Rachel that pieces of the moon had gotten caught in some of the bramble bushes. Father nursed a cup of coffee and stood with us. The sky flipped stars into his cup, tiny ones, a size that could fit over Rachel’s eyes. He said, “It’s my favorite time. The night is finishing and the day is starting, and they’re both together for a moment, right now. It’s like there’s no one else awake.”

“Almost no one,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “There’s us.” It was four in the morning. Rachel screeched worse than ever, and he took her from me to see if he could quiet her. Her screams brought Mother to us. We tried to pat Rachel, sing to her. She hollered, she raised the roof. She hit high notes and then low ones and started in again all over.

“She’s in pain,” said Mother.

An ambulance took Rachel and Mother to the hospital, and Father and I rode in a police car, but I was frantically knitting. I needed to finish the jacket. Hospital clothing is so horrible and unpretty, and Rachel liked to look nice.

When Father and I got to St. Vincent’s, Mother met us in the emergency hallway. She was serene, so I thought Rachel would be fine. I had ten rows started of the last sleeve. I’d been getting the thread wet with sweating. The soles of shoes in the corridors made a squishing sound, and some nurses were laughing and I almost yelled at them to shut up. I was still hearing Rachel’s screaming inside me.

“They tried to revive her,” said Mother. “But they couldn’t.”

Her insides were too small and too wrong for her to live.

Father and Mother did not want me to see her, but I said I needed to. I had that jacket to give her.

She was lying alone on a table in a room without much light. A white plastic tube like a pretend cigar was still in her mouth, and Father took it out. He was weeping, but Mother was quiet. I stared into Rachel’s blue eyes. They were half-open, looking at me—didn’t that mean she was alive? Mother closed them with her finger. That’s when I began to cry and bellow. I was going to be sick. I’d failed her. I hadn’t taken her to the museum, or the library. I hadn’t even finished her autumn jacket.

“Never mind,” said Mother. She took the jacket from my hand and threw the ugly white hospital blanket off my sister and dressed her in the white-and-blue knitting. I shrieked enough to shatter walls and take the color out of paint. A sleeve was missing! I hadn’t been fast or good enough!

“Let me tell you the last part of Rachel’s Story,” said Mother. “It goes like this: Everyone knows that swans only sing once, the most stunning song of their lives, but unfortunately, it’s right before they die. Remember how she screamed tonight? Well, it’s only because we’re people and she’s a swan that we couldn’t tell at first that it was the most beautiful song in the world. And the mistake, the terrible mistake, that most people make when a swan dies is that they wrap it completely up tight. They cover its wings! And so, in the grave, a swan turns into a skeleton of a person, nothing more.

“But Rachel has a wing free. That was very thoughtful of you. Now she gets to fly wherever she wants. You’ll have to look carefully; she’s blue and white, so she’s in the ocean and the sky. She wants to stay with you, and do you know why? Because it was brave of you not to turn away from her. You gave her a full life.

“She went to a place of many parties and a hundred candles. A man asked to marry her! Friends greeted her wherever she went. Like a wise old woman, she soothed me and then won over your uncle Jack. Can you believe he loves us again? That was Rachel’s doing. Most people in a long life don’t do as much good as she did in thirty days. She made the crowds stop and gape at her: What fame!
She dressed up for fancy financial-street events. The city was at her feet; she was already soaring above it. How can she give that up?”

Uncle Jack came to the funeral at the cemetery, and I thanked him for walking in step with me, gripping my hand, because I kept shutting my eyes not to see the graves.

“She won’t be able to breathe in the earth,” I said.

He pointed at the sky. “She’s everywhere now,” he said.

Nowadays the subway rumbles and I think, “Listen, there’s life underground.” I see a white cloud and it’s Rachel’s swan-like wing, waving to me. Her blue and white jacket fills the air, but it’s her bare wing that I want to touch when my feet feel like stone. I’ll have to rethink the idea of Double Happiness: One can have a complete, amazing existence in just a few days, and it’s joy as big as creation. Rachel is a generous sister because often, as I walk along, she dips down to let me catch hold of her feathers. I lift my sad face and gaze around. The buildings here, they want more and more of the sky, past the simple blue of it. They wear that blue on their collars and keep on stretching. I want the sky of New York, too, and beyond it. I sprout wings on my back, wings on my ankles. My swan sister, Rachel, whispers, “Hold on tight,” and what a shock. What a surprise. I’m the one flying.

K
ATHERINE
V
AZ
says, “The stories of Hans Christian Andersen have always enchanted me, especially ‘The Wild Swans.’ Elisa, the heroine, must knit shirts made of nettles to change eleven swans back into her brothers, but she runs out of time and cannot finish one of the sleeves. Her beloved younger brother is restored—except that one of his arms remains a wing. What’s so beautiful in that notion is that we might do our best to save or repair our loved ones, but the result isn’t always as we want or expect. And somehow that falling-short, that affectionate error, that mistake, that wing, strikes us as even more radiant and powerful because it is a visible mark of how much love we had.

“Rachel was a real little girl who did not live long, but—pretty as a swan, light as a feather—she managed to remind my family that even when time runs short, even when we cannot speak, we can still work wonders.”