The Good Sister (3 page)

As a form of self-torture, I've tried a few times to imagine what my sister must have looked like, her moon-pie face all stretched out like a balloon, seaweed tangled in her long hair, her body no longer the 110 pounds of perfection her cheatin'-ass boyfriend probably once thought it was.

From the corner of my eye, if I turn my head just so, I can sort of see David. He cries freely, tears streaming down his face and getting soaked up by his beard. His body shakes occasionally with the intensity of his grief, and I kind of envy that. I sort of want to wail and throw myself on the floor and show everyone how much pain I am in, but that shit is pretty hard to fake.

Because what I feel is not grief, exactly. It's more like horror at what I—and my life—have suddenly become.

I'm not sure I ever loved David. I realized, as soon as Sarah died, that what I'd loved was taking him from her. I had a guy of my own. Still have him. AJ couldn't be here today, mostly because I didn't ask him to come and also because I couldn't have him and David in the same room without some crazy daytime-talk-show brawl going down.

Weird how love works—or doesn't work in this case.

David is not my type. He's the kind of guy who sits in the park playing his conga whether anyone is listening or not, likes to talk about the meaning of life, and is just as happy with the girl's paying as anyone. He is not what most people would call a real man.

He believes in free love because it looks good on paper and not just because it's convenient for him.

But Sarah was clearly crazy about him, and he probably loved her about as much as any dude could love a girl who might drop dead of cancer in the near or distant future.

If I weren't such a player, I'd have left well enough alone. But I saw the way he looked at me.

My stomach growls, but no one seems to notice. I wish I at least had a piece of gum or something in my purse, and I wonder how long this crap is going to last, and will there be food after?

I know this is not something I'm supposed to be thinking now. I'm supposed to be so wracked with grief that I can't eat. I'm supposed to get nauseous at the thought of food, not be fantasizing about a chicken burrito.

I wish I had a watch so I could see the time, and then I wonder if I can get away with sliding my hand into my purse and pulling out my cell phone to look at the clock on it. Better not. The little brochure thing I'm holding says that there will be a slide show of images from Sarah's life, along with a chance for loved ones to speak about her. How long can that shit last? All day, knowing these motherfuckers.

Lena asked me if I wanted to speak here, and I said no, and she got pissed, and I said, well, maybe I'll change my mind so chill the fuck out. But it's not going to happen. I can't get up there and spew half-truths about how much I loved my sister, how tragic her death is, blah blah blah.

It's tragic, okay, whatever. But just as my feelings about David are complicated, so are my feelings for Sarah. I mean, is being forced to live in the same family for eighteen years the same thing as love?

And speaking of family, where the hell is Asha? Leave it to her to skip out on her own sister's funeral. My thought vibes must have reached our mother, because she looks up from her sniffling to the empty seat on my left and whispers, “Where is she?”

I shrug. Don't meet her eyes. She looks away.

Asha's probably somewhere getting drunk with that little shitbag best friend of hers. He creeps me out, the way he doesn't seem all that much like a guy, and yet he doesn't act all flaming gay either. He's like a sexual in-between.

The lights go dim in the room, and somewhere, someone turns on some music. The sound of Sarah's all-time-favorite makes-me-roll-my-eyes-and-gag song, “Both Sides, Now” by Joni Mitchell, comes through unseen speakers, and the slide show begins on the wall in front of us. I try not to engage in any eye rolling or pre-vomiting. An image of Sarah from what looks like maybe a few months before she died is the first to appear along with Joni's voice singing about angel hair and ice-cream castles in the air.

Yeah, yeah. Here come the waterworks all around me. I feel sad too, but for none of the right reasons.

From behind me, I hear more sniffling. Soon it's coming from all directions.

I look away from the image on the wall and down at my skirt, which I spent half of last week's paycheck on just for this occasion. I smooth my hands over it, until I reach the hem, and I cross one leg over the other. I don't smoke a pack a day or anything, but right now I'd give anything for a cigarette, or a shot of tequila, or both.

That is what I spent the other half of last week's paycheck on. Serving up coffee drinks at Sacred Grounds is not exactly the glamorous life I'm destined for, but it and my fake ID keep me steadily supplied with my vices, making it hard to quit. Most of my more ambitious friends are eagerly awaiting acceptance letters from the colleges of their dreams, but at the age of eighteen, I graduated a semester early thanks to not failing any classes and not giving a crap about college prep, and I'm having a hard time figuring out what I want to do with my life past next weekend.

Not Sarah though. When I look up again, I see a picture of her at the age of five or six, wearing a stethoscope and an oversize white shirt she called her doctor shirt. She spent so much time in the hospital, it wasn't any big mystery why she always knew she wanted to be a doctor or a nurse.

One year one thing, the next year the other. Back and forth endlessly, except for that one year when her cancer came back and Lena decided it was time to give alternative medicine another shot. Sarah developed a short-lived fascination with studying Chinese medicine and becoming an acupuncturist before she went back to the nurse career path.

It was both sweet and pathetic, this girl who likely wasn't going to make it to adulthood, busily planning for her future. Part of me always wanted to point out to her that she might as well slack off and have some fun, not go around acting like she had a big future to live for. And another bitchy part of me enjoyed watching her waste her time.

Yes, I am a bad sister. The absolute worst you will ever meet.

But this is what you have to understand about me—I became invisible when Sarah was diagnosed with leukemia. I was not a genetic match for donation purposes, but Asha was. So she got to be the hero, and I got to be the dumb little kid everyone forgot about. Not that I'm bitter or anything. These days, I know how to get what I need.

I look back up at the slide show and am stunned to finally feel a wave of grief wash over me as big as any natural disaster. It's crazy; what finally gets me is the image of Sarah in a sort of nurse's uniform, standing on the front porch smiling wide. I'm pretty sure David took that picture. It's from last summer, when Little Miss Perfect did a volunteer stint at the hospital taking people's blood pressure and writing down vital signs. My eyes burn with furious tears, and I might let out a few good sobs, except that a loud door-slamming noise interrupts the flow of my grief.

I turn with most of the other people in the room and see Asha stumble through the double doorway, followed by her weird-ass friend Sinclair. She looks drunk, and not at all dressed for the occasion, in her ripped jeans and faded green tank top. Her long, dark hair spills over her shoulders looking like it hasn't been brushed in days—like me, she inherited Dad's dark hair and green eyes, but unlike me, she doesn't know what to do with herself.

Because almost every other seat is full now, she is forced to weave her way up the aisle to the front row, to her designated seat, but Sin follows her, so there's an awkward scrambling for a second chair. Someone two rows behind gives up his aisle chair, moving it forward to be next to Asha's, then takes another seat that requires much shuffling and apologizing.

All the while, the Sarah slide show plays on, but I am unable to look at it now, not when I have my reeking-of-whiskey sister beside me, taking up all the space in the room.

She has a crazy way of doing that. I've never figured out what her game is, or where she gets her nerve, but she is an energy vortex. When she's near, I feel like I need to go take a nap.

I glare at her, and she looks back at me through eyes that appear not to give a damn about anything. I think, maybe this is her thing, that she never seems to care just how catastrophic she is.

I don't even bother looking at the emo. Instead, I let my gaze travel over Asha's inappropriate attire, but it stops at her ankle. She has the legs of her jeans rolled up to capri length, and a new tattoo—a cascade of black stars—is on the outside of her right leg, the one closest to me. I can see that it's real by the way her skin is red and raised around the edges of the fresh ink.

I know she has done this on purpose. She has figured out a way to create maximum drama even in silence.

She used to call Sarah Starlight. It was one of their many cutesy habits, coming up with tongue-in-cheek hippie nicknames for each other.

My stomach cramps, and I start to sweat. If I try hard enough, I might be able to lose my breakfast croissant right there all over Asha's fresh tattoo.

I wonder if Lena or Ravi sees the tattoo. It's impossible not to notice, since Asha is not wearing shoes or socks, only a ratty, old pair of gold-embroidered thong sandals, and a silver toe ring on one toe. She has her toenails painted dark blue, and this, I know, is also for Sarah, the color of night sky.

Her strategy has worked. I am furious, though I don't quite know why. I'm going to kill her when we get out of here.

I want her to stop sucking the energy out of me, so I am forced to turn my attention back to the awful slide show. But I can still feel her there, sucking, sucking, sucking.

The image on the wall now is a family shot, all three of us sisters before we became teenagers, maybe ages eight to eleven. We are outside somewhere in the redwoods, I think at Samuel Taylor Park. I halfway remember the day, a gathering of Lena and our father‘s old friends from the commune.

We look like filthy little hippies, our hair messy and our feet bare. Sarah is in the middle, the glowing wraith among us, her silvery-blond hair hanging only to her chin thanks to a recent round of chemo, her face oddly serene. Asha is on the left, tugging on Sarah's hand, looking as if she wants to escape the camera's lens. And I am on the right, the tallest even though I'm a year younger than Sarah, and definitely the prettiest of the three, my arm around Sarah's shoulders, a big, fake smile plastered on my face, looking as if I am trying to convince the world of my happiness.

Now, looking back, I can see the hint of everything to come after in my eyes. The lies, the guilt, the horrible end to our sisterhood of three.

And now the secrets that keep me up at night, staring at the ceiling.

Whoever said the camera never lies, well, maybe they were right. But you have to know what you're looking for, right there under your nose, to see the truth hidden in the details.

Four

Asha

If I had known getting drunk and jumping into the Tylers' hot tub naked would make Tristan Tyler notice I was alive, I would have done it a long time ago. Better late than never though, right?

But, no, wait, that's not how this part of the story starts. There was the funeral, which I do not remember because my brain-under-the-influence has mostly blacked out that part of the day. And then there was some debate about whether I should be forced to go home and sleep off my buzz or should attend the funeral after-party.

I remember Rachel glaring at me, maybe even threatening me, but this is nothing new and could have happened weeks ago or not at all. And I have a few fragmented memories of some horrible slide show, and some tearful speech given by my father, and that's all. I'm not even sure in which order these memories belong, or if they were but a dream within a dream, as my favorite poet, Edgar Allan Poe, once wrote.

Sin and I each did four shots of Jack Daniel's before hopping on our bikes and riding to the temple. This, I report with complete earnestness, was not a good idea. Between the two of us, I think we were nearly hit by four different cars, and for sure it wasn't the cars' fault.

Lena ended up furious enough to ban us from the after-party—I remember that part—leaving Sin and I drunk with no place to go. So we went back to his house, a little steadier on our bikes now that we'd had some time to sit and sober up in the temple.

Sin fell asleep on his bed, and I found myself bored and still a little wasted. It seemed wrong to ruin a perfectly good buzz alone in Sin's bleak little room, so I wandered outside, noticed that the hot tub was open, stripped off my clothes, and got into the bubbling, hot water.

Which brings us back to right now.

It is late afternoon, and a ridiculously warm, breezy day. Global warming at work, I guess. I lie with my head back, staring up at the light dancing on the leaves of the huge oak tree that stretches its branches partway over the deck where the hot tub sits.

I hear the back door of the house open, and I assume Sin has woken up and is coming out to find me, so I don't look toward the sound. We were alone in the house last I checked. My head tilted back and my arms outstretched to my sides on the edges of the tub, I am aware that my bare chest hovers at the waterline for whoever cares to look, but Sin has seen me naked enough times when we're changing clothes that it doesn't matter anymore.

And besides, he's decided again as of last month that he isn't into girls anyway.

But when I hear a low voice say, “Hey, nice day, huh?” I know it isn't Sin's.

It's Tristan's.

I rarely hear him speak, so the sound startles me out of my leaf gazing, and I sit up fast, then slide deeper into the water to conceal as much as I can of my nakedness.

When I look at him, he's got a lazy half smile on his lips that seems kind of … flirtatious, I guess is the right word.