The Good Sister (8 page)

Maybe he's right.

I grapple with this as I head in the opposite direction. The bell rings, marking me late for art class. The teacher won't care though. She rarely arrives on time, and we're all supposed to retrieve the previous day's work and get started on it when we get to class.

I enter the large classroom, and someone throws a paper airplane that narrowly misses my cheek as I make my way around tables toward the drawing rack.

I thumb through until I see a paper covered in black pencil lines. The effect is a nearly solid black page, with only the slightest hints of white peeking through. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I have a feeling some heavy erasing is going to take place soon.

I'd originally intended to call the piece
Night Sky
and leave it black, but I've tired of that idea. It seems cliché and lazy.

I turn to head toward my table, and it strikes me that I just can't do this. I'm surrounded by kids I know. Happy, sullen, belligerent, dazed—they are every kind of kid, and I don't want to see any of them. I don't know why I'm here. I don't know why I thought I could do this.

So I put away my crappy work in progress, and I walk back out the door. I keep going and going until I am off campus, free again, with no idea where to go or what to do.

Back to my sleeping bag in the park? Back home to battle Lena's agenda?

I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

I wear my trousers rolled.

And I suffer the same malaise of spirit that we read about earlier this year in T. S. Eliot's “Prufrock” poem. I may not have understood most of it, but this feeling, I got that much.

I am walking toward the park, hungry and wishing I had some money to get a burger, when a silver car pulls up beside me. I look over to see Ravi, my so-called father, with his window rolled down. I haven't seen him since the funeral, and that event is fuzzy in my memory, but I'm pretty sure the barely-a-beard he's sporting is a new look.

“Shouldn't you be in school right now?” he says with a half smile.

He doesn't much believe in formal education, so I know he's not concerned about my skipping class, but still I feel a surge of panic that he might make me go back.

“I left early, citing emotional issues,” I lie, as if I actually consulted someone before walking out the door.

“I've been meaning to talk to you. Would you like to go somewhere for lunch?”

Although the thought of having a heart-to-heart with dear old Ravi doesn't thrill me, I am hungry enough to nod and get in the car. I haven't eaten more than a few bites at a time in days, I think, and my body is finally telling me that's not going to fly.

Without my even asking, he drives us to my favorite burger joint on the edge of town, where I order a double cheeseburger, large fries, and a large chocolate milk shake. While we wait for the food, we go sit outside at one of the tables that's shaded by a red umbrella.

Ravi, I notice, is not wearing the thin leather bracelet he has worn for as long as I can remember, a gift his own father gave him before he died. “Where's your bracelet?”

He looks down at his wrist, then back up at me, surprised. “You remember that?”

I nod, and my stomach growls at the scent of fried food wafting past us in the breeze.

“I lost it a few months ago.” The two lines that form between his eyebrows are the only indication of how much I know this saddens him.

“I'm sorry.”

“I guess it's a lesson not to cling to anything, right?”

Except people, I think. We are supposed to cling to people. I look away, watching a familiar VW van painted to look like van Gogh's
Starry Night
as it heads toward town.

“What is it?” he asks when I say nothing.

“Maybe not things, but people. We need people.”

“Yes. The trouble is, our expectations get in the way of appreciating what they have to offer.”

I feel like screaming at him because I think he is talking about us. Our family. How our expectations of him to behave like an actual adult, like our dad, are just too much for him. But I want to stick around long enough to get my cheeseburger, so I try as best I can to sit there and not say anything.

“I get the feeling this little chat isn't going so well,” he says with his crooked smile.

I shrug.

He cocks his head to the side, and his smile vanishes. “As hard as Sarah's death is on me and your mother…” He pauses, trying to steady his shaky voice. “I think it might be harder on you. I'm worried about you, Asha.”

“Don't be. I'm fine.”

“You don't look fine. You look like a homeless kid on drugs.
Are
you doing any drugs?”

“What do you care? You wouldn't want me to go and have any expectations of you to take care of your family, now would you?”

He winces at that, and I know I've hit him where it hurts most. I didn't exactly mean to, or maybe I did, but as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I wish I could take them back.

“That's not what I meant about expectations,” he says carefully.

Our number, fourteen, is called over the loudspeaker, so Ravi gets up and goes inside for our food. When he comes back out carrying a tray of burgers, fries, and shakes, I am less hungry than I was before. Thinking about Sarah leaves me with a giant feeling of soul-deep emptiness that obliterates hunger.

Ravi places my food in front of me, and I stare down at it. Slowly, I unwrap the burger and dump the fries on the makeshift paper plate created by the burger wrapper. Then I poke my straw into the lid on the shake and take a drink. I focus on the food in front of me, force Sarah out of my thoughts, one mouthful of chocolate shake at a time.

“I want you to know I am sorry if I've left you with the feeling that I don't want to be your dad.”

“You didn't even
want
kids.”

“Is that what your mother told you?”

I shrug and take a bite of my burger. It is huge and unwieldy, cheese and tomato and lettuce and special sauce squeezing out every which way.

“I've wanted and loved each of you, Asha. I promise you that,” Ravi says, all serious now. “Whatever fears I had as a young man, worrying about losing my freedom, they vanished the moment I held Sarah in my arms.”

I stare hard at my fries, getting serious about selecting the perfect one to eat next. Not Sarah, not thinking about her.

“And when Rachel was born, and then you, I was thrilled each time. The days of your births were the best days of my life. I can't imagine what kind of shitbag I would have become if I hadn't had my three girls.” He falters on those last two words, and I know he is thinking there are only two girls now.

Only two.

I blink and blink and blink. A wind is coming from the coast, drying out my eyes, thank God.

“Are you going to eat that?” I nod to his fries because mine are gone as if I have sucked them up in one giant inhalation.

He pushes them toward me, and I pick one up.

“How's your sister?”

“Which one?”

He gives me a dark look, and I leave it alone. “Rachel is Rachel.”

“Rachel is the one I worry about most.”

I don't worry about Rachel. She is like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, perfectly fine watching the destruction all around her.

Ravi's cell phone beeps, and he looks at it and mutters a curse. “I have to take a business call in ten minutes. I'd better get home so I can be at my computer for it.”

“Thanks for lunch.”

“Will you be okay walking home?”

“Sure.”

“Call me if you need anything? I mean it.”

“Okay.”

“I'm serious, Ash,” he says, putting his hand on the back of my head and looking into my eyes the way he used to when I was little. “We need each now more than ever. Call me, night or day. I will always answer, even if it's three in the morning.”

I endure his hug, then watch him go, simultaneously relieved and not quite ready for him to leave. I hadn't gotten comfortable enough with Ravi in that short time to say much of anything that mattered. But what would I have said?

That I wake up at night wondering why anything matters at all? That I don't know who I am anymore if I'm not Sarah's sister? That I am not as good as she was, and I don't matter as much as she did, so it makes no sense for her to be gone and not me?

I know I wouldn't have said any of that, no matter how long he'd stayed. We are not that kind of father and daughter.

We are the kind who bump into each other on the street, have lunch, and part ways again, off to our separate lives. Me to my new home in a sleeping bag at the park, him to his A-frame, hillside bachelor cottage, free of the messiness of a family. From his living-room window, he can see for miles, nearly the entire town laid out below, but he can't see our old house, the one where we still live and he doesn't.

I have only been to his new house once since he moved back to Marin, but I wondered, did he choose that view on purpose?

Twelve

Asha

I am lying in the park again, in the shade of a towering redwood grove, reading a five-year-old
People
magazine I found on a bench, learning all about Brad and Angelina's parenting skills, when someone plops down beside me.

I look up and find Sin. It's after three, so he must be on his way home from school.

“You're not sleeping here, are you?”

My first reaction is relief, but then I realize he still sounds mad at me. “Yeah, I am.”

“That's why your hair looks so jacked-up.”

“Yeah.”

“You can't keep sleeping here. Something bad could happen.”

I laugh at this. “What bad stuff could happen? Could my best friend hate me? Could my sister die? Could my life be fucked?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Whatever.” Turns out, Brad and Angelina's French château is a mess from all those kids running around trashing it and no one cleaning up after them.

“It's going to rain any day now.”

“I don't care.”

“I know you don't, but I do.”

Relief floods my chest, and for a moment I can hardly breathe, I'm so happy. “I thought you hated me,” I say, pretending to still be reading the magazine.

He grabs it and tosses it aside, so I roll off my stomach and sit up to face him.

“You have to stay away from Tristan.” He looks at me all serious, like he means it.

I feel my cheeks flush because this is the first time we've discussed this Tristan thing, and I feel like I've been dishonest. Except I don't think I have been. Not exactly, anyway.

“Why'd you get so mad?” I finally dare to ask.

“He's a user, Asha. He doesn't care about you. He'll screw you and toss you aside like a piece of garbage. Is that the kind of thing you want?”

I'm insulted, but I have to choose my words carefully because Sin is talking to me and I don't want him to stop again.

“I don't want anything. It was just a stupid kiss. I was drunk, and sad, and there he was, wanting to kiss me. That's all.”

Okay, so now I'm being dishonest. I'm being a big, fat, shitty liar. I want to stop but I can't. The truth doesn't seem worth telling.

“I know you think he's hot, Asha. I'm not stupid. Girls dig him, but I thought you were smart enough to just leave it at that.”

“Whatever. I am. I mean, it's like I said…”

“Look, I'm sorry I passed out and left you alone, and got pissed off and threw your sandals, and slammed the locker in your face.”

“Thanks.” I study a blade of grass resting on my fingertips.

“You can stay with me. No more sleeping in the park, okay?”

“Your mom won't mind?”

“She probably won't notice, but if she does, she won't care.”

I wonder if Tristan will notice or care.

“Listen. You have to promise to stay away from my brother though, okay? I can't be your friend unless you leave him alone. He's too skanky for you. And too old.”

I wasn't expecting such harsh conditions, and this catches me by surprise. Sin's acting like he owns me or some shit? Telling me I have to choose between him and Tristan?

Stunned, I just nod. Then finally I choke out an “Okay.”

Normally, leaving Tristan alone is never an issue, since he doesn't acknowledge I exist. But now that he has, now that we've kissed and been naked together, will he go back to ignoring me? I guess I'm about to find out because Sin grabs my hand and tugs me up off the ground, toward my impending doom.

Thirteen

Sarah

Memory is that trick by which we see the awful events of the past loom over the good, like mountains over mice. We don't recall life as it was. Instead, we remember what was different, frightening, or strange, and we turn our lives into fun-house mirror images of the truth.

Now though, I see what was lost.

I see what I've lost with such a stark, painful clarity, I can hardly grasp it.

We weren't always the family with the divorced parents and the screwed-up, broken sisters. We were once each parts of a whole. We fit together like puzzle pieces still fresh from the box, our crisp edges unmarred by time and neglect.

Consider the sort of picture we made, a beautiful family, not yet haunted by the specter of a sick child or the many small disappointments of life.

I felt the most hopeful the year we left the commune. When it became clear their guru would be leaving the country, Ravi and Lena decided to cut out sooner rather than later. With our wealthy grandmother in Marin County, and many former members of the ranch moving there, that seemed the most promising place to call our new home.

For a few years, life was kind of storybook nice. Or at least it seemed that way when I looked back on it.

I was almost ten years old when I got my first cancer diagnosis: acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL for short. The symptoms had started with my feeling tired a lot, getting strange bruises that I couldn't remember a cause for, some of which my teacher saw and reported to the school nurse, suspecting I was being physically abused by someone. I remember their asking me if anyone hit or hurt me, promising I wouldn't get in trouble if the answer was yes.