The Moment Before (4 page)

This is Sabine. Have a great day
.

Her greeting sounds more tentative, distant, as if the greeting has been re-recorded by someone pretending to be my sister. “Everything’s going to shit,” I say into my little speaker of my cell, into the voicemail void. The tree that falls in the forest that no one will hear.

The black of my room is lit up only by the pinprick light from my phone. A violent rain beats against my window, but other than that, there’s the no sound of 2:00 a.m. “Where are you?” I ask Sabine.

I’m still wearing her Juicy Couture, the soft cotton blend of it hugging my ribs. Nona’s blanket is a cocoon over the dress and I’m hoping I’ll wake up as a butterfly tomorrow. Or one of those spectacular moths that spins silk.
Don’t be such a drama queen,
says Sabine in my ear like a bullet. And, as if she orchestrated an accompaniment, a branch from the azalea bush outside my window scrapes against the glass.

If I was a moth, I could flutter around light bulbs all night then collapse my wings together into a wafer come daylight. Tuck myself into a closet. Eat some wool. Contemplate the layers of betrayal that the human heart is capable of. I dial Sabine again. The immediate voicemail, her greeting
This is Sabine.
The bossy demand,
Have a great day
. And into the vacuum I say, “Martha is dating Nick, Sabine. What the hell is up with that?”

Thank God Mom and Dad were asleep by the time I got home. After the embarrassment of the art show, the last thing I wanted was to process the whole thing with them. I’m sure it’ll come up in the grief counseling session next week. The counselor will ask us all how we feel. Mom will be furious. Dad will be sad. We’ll use I-statements like the quick-study grief clients we are. We’ll yank the Kleenexes from his lacquered tissue box and dab at the corners of our eyes. On Dad’s insurance we have eight free sessions, and so far we’ve used three. As the hole of time opens wider and wider between Sabine’s death and our continuing lives, we’ll fit in five more grief counseling sessions. A season. A summer. Christmas. If I were a moth, I’d chew that hole bigger, feeding on the things that keep me going. But I’m not a moth. I’ll never be a moth. “I’m going to skip school tomorrow,” I tell Sabine’s voicemail.

I wake up with the phone in my hand and Nona’s blanket corded around my neck. It’s morning, and too late for me to get to school on time, so there’s no hurry. Rain drains down the gutter outside sounding like a toilet running. My phone’s on silent and I see I’ve missed three calls and eleven texts. The texts are mostly from Martha and I delete them without reading. The ones from Mom say,
Hope you get up in time for school
, and
Sorry about last night.
Let’s debrief later
. One from Dad says,
Beach house bound after work. Pack a bag
.

We haven’t been to the beach house yet. Our last trip was Thanksgiving, when we were still two parents and two kids. One big unhappy, yet intact, family. What would we have done differently had we known that one of us would be dead in a few months? Maybe Dad wouldn’t have spent the whole weekend watching football. Maybe I would have been less snarky about playing endless games of hearts with Nona and Nono. Maybe I would have been kinder about Nick being part of the weekend. Nick and his sly feeling-up-my-sister-under-the-blanket-in-the-living-room moves. Her giggling and squeaking in that girl way. I wish I could take back my eye-rolling. Nick. Martha. And what does
seeing
mean, anyway? Are they doing it? Is Martha, Patron Saint of Pity Favors, giving my dead sister’s boyfriend hand jobs in the front seat of her car?

The morning is half over already. I’d be done with trig and art and now I’d be in world history, taking a test I haven’t studied for. Before this term, I’d been rocking a 3.5. Now? I’d be lucky to not fail everything. Ms. Bowerman’s folded arms. Her bushy eyebrows, concern lined into her forehead, she’d be disappointed if I flunked out. She, who just last month had written me a stellar recommendation for San Francisco Art Institute’s Precollege Summer Program.

I crawl out of bed and stumble out to the kitchen, where the crumbled Voodoo Doughnuts bag sits like a centerpiece to last night’s series of misfortunes. The maple bacon bar is stale when I pull it out, a shingle of diarrhea-colored glaze slides off and splinters on the tile floor. Sabine loved these. She could eat three in a sitting before vomiting the calories down the toilet.

My sister was crazy for food. As a little girl she’d moan orgasmically while savoring Nona’s homemade bread, Mom’s rhubarb cobbler. I’d seen her go through an entire pizza, just herself. Pork down a pound of BBQ ribs, licking her plate at the end to get at every bit of sauce like a retriever. Whatever she’d inhale, she’d burn it all off. Until a few years ago when her height leveled off at five-foot-eight and her ass started to pad up. “Cheerleaders can’t be fat,” she’d whine, and then weep like a widow. Then she discovered how she could have her cake and eat it too. So to speak.

My sister did everything big, with her whole heart. A cheerleading natural, her gritty alto voice belting out G R E E N M E A D O W letter by letter. You didn’t always see it in her, but she was tough. If you got up in her business on the wrong day, she’d go all laser tongue and cut your heart out. I cram the nubby end of the doughnut in my mouth robustly, like Sabine would, and in my head she approves with her signature,
Atta girl, Midge
.

There’s a list of things to pack for this weekend lying on the kitchen table. Trader Joe’s items: white bean hummus and dark chocolate almonds. Some of that premade bagged salad with cranberries and walnuts and little globs of goat cheese. Spanakopita, Sabine’s favorite comfort food, is scratched out. The remaining Wilsons do not like cooked spinach. So I guess it’s settled. We’re officially “getting away.” Our therapist will be pleased.

Outside, it’s sheets of rain. Where yesterday’s warm, sunny weather had lawn mowers firing off, today’s more typical April skies leave the streets and parks empty. This is perfect, since it appears that I am now officially cutting school. Amid the last sugary crumbs of the doughnut, an idea blossoms in my head. I need a solitary road trip before tonight’s family road trip. This idea includes me taking Sabine’s car out for a spin. A whole movie plays in my brain, one that features a ride through Kaady Car Wash—the premium offering that includes a liquid polish spray. At the very least, I’d get the bird shit rubbed off with those jiggling chamois sponge-strips.

In a few minutes, I’m dressed and have the car keys in hand. I’m licenseless and permitless, but that hasn’t stopped me from several emergency designated-driver runs when Sabine was too wasted to drive. I can almost see the old Volvo smile, its headlights greeting me as I approach and then squeak the heavy driver’s side door open.

Inside though, it looks like an interrupted day. A mostly empty Starbucks Venti-sized paper cup with Sabine’s lipstick marks on the white plastic lid pokes up from the cup holder. Two notebooks and World of Chemistry lie in a stack on the passenger seat. It still smells like my sister in here. That damp, perfumy smell with a little spearmint mixed in. The engine makes a kachung-kachung-kachung sound before bursting to life. The car shakes a little, and then settles into its Volvo purr. The wipers smear the rain across the windshield as I back out of the drive and head out onto the road toward town.
I miss that car
, says Sabine, her voice dimmer and sadder than usual.

I drive up into the hills a bit, my hands at ten and two as though following some lesson from a driver’s ed class I’ve yet to take. I pass all the houses of all the kids I’ve gone to school with forever. Sabine’s teammates on the cheer squad, girls I once played soccer with. I’m heading to the big cell tower behind Martha’s house, where, if it’s clear, you can see both Mt. Saint Helens and Mt. Hood. But it’s far from clear today. Little mud creeks run down the shoulders of the road as I head up. Bright green fern fronds and glowing moss jut off of the occasional downed log. There are no sidewalks in our part of town, and many roads are gravel, pocked with potholes. As much as everyone complains, they choose to live here in this seemingly rural countryside a few minutes from the center of downtown. When the city threatens to assess improvements and charge homeowners for curbs and gutters, there’s always uproar. Petitions, meetings, and brouhahas. Ergo, the goat paths.

I guide Sabine’s car around a couple of branches and some chunky rocks from a little mudslide that must have just happened. Ahead of me are the fancy iron gates that grace Martha’s house. I know the code. I could just press the keypad and, voila, I’d be in the Hornbuckle compound, where a pair of mastiffs often lope about as though protecting a castle. Martha is a wealthy girl. Logging money from decades of clear-cutting, which her liberal, environmentally progressive parents justify through foundation activity that claims to be saving some rare species of butterfly. Martha getting the $500 Cupworth scholarship is like Bill Gates winning a computer. Ridiculous on so many levels. The compound looks empty today. Her parents might be off on one of their cruises, leaving Martha to manage the staff around her extracurricular schedule. What would I do inside the Martha estate if I were to trespass? Short sheet her bed? Pull up the carefully planted tulips so lovingly tended by a crew of Hispanic gardeners? I drive past the entry, past the ginormous tree house where Sabine and I enjoyed many a summer sleepover, and then U-turn at her neighbor’s driveway.

In middle school, Martha hungered after my sister like a drooling groupie. If Sabine showed up wearing plaid boxers over eggplant leggings, the next day, there Martha would be in the exact same ensemble. I didn’t blame her though; everyone wanted to be Sabine. And Martha being Martha, she’d come around eventually. Call me up on a rainy Saturday and invite me to help her ladle chili at the soup kitchen.

Back in first grade, on the playground one day, a bigger girl, a schoolyard bully-type girl, pulled Martha’s bright pink jeans down, revealing her
Finding Nemo
underpants. There was little Martha, crying and trying to pull her pants back up, and the bully girl laughing and calling her a retard. I didn’t even think about it. I just walked up and kicked that bully girl in her big butt.

By then the teachers were onto what was going on and the bully girl got suspended and Martha threw her arms around me, and that was that.

We grew apart in middle school, but the last couple of years, Martha has had a renewed interest in me. Maybe it’s the art thing; maybe it’s just that she needs a break from all the intense competition with the popular girls. Don’t know. But I always seem to say
sure
when she invites me to do something.

The first time I ever smoked weed was in Martha’s tree house one August night. It was my 15th birthday, and Martha had invited me to a Wicked Tail concert to which her dad secured backstage passes. Our hopes were pinned on getting the lead singer, Hurricane Blu, to autograph our skin, but after the show he’d been whisked away, and the only people backstage were roadies and a few stoners who were friends of friends of friends. This ghostly boy with purple hair gave Martha a pinner in exchange for her teeth marks on his shoulder. She’d shrugged and bit down through the flesh just above his collarbone until a little trickle of blood pooled into a bruise under his skin there. Martha being Martha, she asked if he wanted one on the other side to match. He winked at her and told her next time, sure, and he slipped the weed into the front of her bra.

We lit that twisted paper and watched it glow and die a few times before one of us was brave enough to suck on it. Under the rubbery leaves of the magnolia, lying on smooth plank flooring most people would only use for their actual homes, Martha and I got high. Well, sort of high. The burning pot scorched the lining of my throat, and I coughed and coughed, and then, suddenly, everything seemed hilarious. A strand of Martha’s gleaming hair that caught itself between two branches, the way she made her eyebrows “V,” the sound of her voice feigning a Southern accent,
Whah Brady, I do believe you’re stoned. Now what would your mama think?
All of that rolled to a boil in the laugh center of my brain. Now, the tree house is gray and splintery after the wet winter. Littered with dead leaves.

I drive back down the hill, and the rain turns to ice pellets. Little balls of hail like Styrofoam bullets spray down on everything. Ping, ping, ping, ping. The wipers propel the icy mess across the windshield smearing up my view, and there’s no good reason why I should push my luck and continue on. None. And yet, I do. At the fork where I could follow the twists back down the hill toward home, I hairpin back up, toward the vast expanse of Forest Park, and its endless trails. Not too long ago a man and his young daughter lived in the woods of Forest Park for years before their camp was found. The man had home-schooled her, and the campsite was stocked with textbooks and writing implements. The authorities took the girl into protective custody, and her father fled, but as soon as the girl was in a foster home, she escaped and found her father again. I always loved that story.

The tiny bit of latte remaining in Sabine’s Starbucks cup sloshes around; little stop-sign shaped bits of mold lap up onto the cardboard and make a bright green ring. As the car climbs the hill, the icy pellets grow bigger and fiercer. A fog separating the warm inside of the Volvo from the almost freezing outside adds to my near-blindness. Up here, on this road, in a small farmhouse-looking bungalow is where Connor Christopher lives. I know this, and somehow can’t stop myself from aiming Sabine’s car in its direction. Sabine has no comment, though I’m straining to hear one. The Chemistry textbook slides off the seat as I take a corner too rough. I overcorrect, and now the tires on the right side of the car are in a ditch. There is a sound of rubber sliding through mud, and then the car shifts and the moldy latte tips over and green slime spills all over my shoe, which is pumping, pumping the brake. Ahead of me is a car length of mud before a straight drop onto someone’s roof and I pump harder, wondering if the last words out of my mouth will be
fuck
, or
no
, or
holy shit
. I think about my parents having to plan yet another memorial service, about my soul joining Sabine’s in the green room of heaven while Nona prays the rosary to get us on the big stage. I think about our cell phone greetings, the two dead Wilson girls and how now, for sure,
60 Minutes
would do an exposé on Greenmeadow High.