The Orphan Sister (2 page)

I did feel calmer when I heard both my sisters’ voices. And I could tell them apart—Odette’s had an almost imperceptible deepness, a quiet, sad quality, a clarinet, while Olivia was all flute, in all circumstances. No one else could hear this, however.

We were polyzygots—they were identical, monozygotic, one egg and one sperm met and then split into two zygotes. I was fraternal—another egg, another sperm, but the same timing, which means I was like an ordinary sibling in terms of genetic material, and they were halves of a whole.

We had this special triplet quirk called Party Trick we developed in elementary school, time of Ouija boards and Monopoly (you would never want to play a strategy game with us; we knew how to team up and committed our own form of natural selection): we could speak word by word, each of us in turn, with the fluidity and natural cadence of a single person speaking. We were sleepover favorites when we were little; this was captivating, no
matter how dull the subject. “We” “don’t” “like” “ham” “because” “it’s” “too” “salty.” It wasn’t practiced. We had a pact to do it whenever one of us asked—something we used rarely as adults, but still, it was always there, ability, connections, quirk, Party Trick.

In the middle of this crisis, I was struggling with my computer, trying to gain access to an online exam I needed to take in the next twenty-four hours. The server rejected my password. I was all ready, notes, coffee softened with Ghirardelli chocolate powder and half-and-half, a final exam indulgence. I had a bag of carrots and a bag of cheddar bagel chips and a giant sports bottle of water, even though I knew, from my undergraduate research, that bottled water is less stringently regulated than tap. I had my blanket and my most devoted mutt, Alphabet, who was lying on my feet as if he knew I wouldn’t walk him until I’d at least half finished the timed exam. You could only log out and back on once. I had to get an A. I hadn’t done as well on the lab portion as I meant to, but that was because I’d broken up with Feet (officially Ferdinand, an engineering graduate student from Spain who had fabulous dimples and little regard for my privacy), my brief boyfriend whose nickname should have kept me from giving him my phone number in the first place.

Sitting ready at my desk, I tried to log on. I used my password, dogdocClem, but the system said it was invalid. Dad always did this: he made us worry. He blustered in at family gatherings and brushed away queries about his lateness like lint from a suit. But somehow we all worried he was Not Okay—and I was the especial
queen of worrying this—as if his Okayness held together the very universe.

I tried again, pounding the keys as I typed in my account number and the password. I was still invalid. I felt invalid. My head throbbed and I was still wondering whether Dad was all right. So instead of starting my exam, I apologized to Alphabet, restarted my computer, and got up to go see my mother.

Maybe he ran away,
I thought, as I walked up to the conservatory. My father had built two additions for my mother: an art studio, because she had once casually mentioned she might like to take art classes again, and the conservatory of flowers, a long, inventive, difficult-to-maintain greenhouse that extended from the back kitchen into the lawn. She was usually there, my mother, though we had full-time gardeners for the roses and the vegetables that would be transplanted, after the last frost, into a raised plot by the three maidens’ fountain. Mom made exquisite botanical drawings, having taken a class at the New York Botanical Garden before we were born. Sometimes I thought she was simply a woman of too many talents and opportunities—each was diluted in the soup of all her possibilities.

Maybe he went up to the house in Vermont because he is getting senile and thought it was summer vacation. Maybe he’s had enough of keeping everything gripped in his fist and he let go; he went mad, like King George III.

I’d been mulling, for about six months, the possibility that my father might have early dementia, or even Alzheimer’s. I’d researched the topic when I should have been studying chemistry.
Symptom one: memory loss that disrupts daily life. This was a disruption, for sure, though generally his focus on—and memory of—family commitments and plans had always been rigorously limited. Symptom two: challenges in planning or solving problems. No. Yes. Maybe. He had twice had Mom reschedule her plans for an anniversary party because he had forgotten about other commitments. But this wasn’t new.

“I’m going to have to go to the golf outing,” he said, the second time. “You don’t have to come.” My mother had sighed, dialing her party planner.

Symptom three: trouble with tasks at home, work, or leisure. No. He seemed to have no problems with work. Until now—not showing up for rounds. I was probably getting ahead of myself. I never used to get ahead of myself; I used to let the world unroll like a scroll, the beginning happening before the middle and the end, but ever since Cameron, I’d wanted more dimensions, I’d worried more about the unrevealed paper.

So when Odette called I should have just waited, I should have circumnavigated the mess of other people’s early and late, but I was a triplet, and triplets have extra arms, extra eyes, extra marginally obsessive worries. I thought of my father standing by his car, staring at his keys as if they were foreign objects. Last week, I’d been witness behind the carriage-house curtain as he stood like that for a moment; was he thinking, or was he lost inside his own head? Was this the beginning of a crumbled father? The beginning of interventions and wheelchairs? No. No. Maybe.

A
ll the way from the carriage house, where I was living, to the main, where my mother lived mostly alone, but for the occasional large presence of my father, A Very Busy Man, I tried to stop visualizing an accident. He’d been hit by a truck as he tucked his car door shut, giving it the love pat I’d observed with nausea—and, if I’m being honest, a simultaneous pleasing familiarity—since he bought the car. It was now almost ten years old, a top-of-the-line Mercedes sedan. Dad bought his car when the twins neared the end of Harvard undergrad; Odette had teased him and called it a Nazi car when he drove his prize into the drive. It was April, spring break, and my mother’s three hundred daffodils from White Flower Farm smeared the lawn with cream and gold, trumpets of triumph.

Dad had turned the deep plum color of his quiet anger, and Odette giggled, Olivia giggling to match her anxiety. I felt the bubble of it, but refused to succumb.

“Nazis are not funny,” said my mother, holding her hands like stop signs in front of the twins, two twenty-year-old women who were home from Harvard, finishing their medical school applications. Harvard and Oberlin were the first step in our lifetime of
long division. I had to listen harder to hear them whenever we reunited.

“Yeah,” said Odette, who was at the peak of her rebellion, which was a mild phase, and tolerated well, like many of the newer antibiotics. Olivia, because she was the same as Odette, rebelled quietly. She got a tiny, tiny tattoo of a rose just above her shoulder blade, much like the rose that had been named after our mother. She also had it removed in an operation she described as “excruciating, but elegantly successful,” the next year.

“But Mercedes did use the Jews in factories—I read,” I had said, wanting more, wanting my dad’s face to blossom into rage. We were just post-teen years; we were pushing out the margins of family. My father, who controlled everything, the money, the order of the house, the comings and goings. As long as I could remember, we asked him to be excused, we asked him if it was okay to go out, we asked him if we could speak at dinner, in subtle ways, waiting for one of his lectures to subside, like requesting to speak freely in front of a superior officer. Part of me thought of it as civility and respect, but that part was dormant.

“This subject is closed,” my father said. “The Holocaust is history, and this car is something I have desired for a long time and you girls won’t ruin it with your delayed adolescent lashings.”

“Hey,” quipped Odette. “I didn’t lash.”

Olivia furrowed her brow with insignificant rage, but said nothing.

“It’s okay,” he said, cupping Odette under his shoulder. He took my mother under the other arm, and Olivia leaned on Odette. They were like a family of birds in a single nest. Olivia
reached for me, and Odette silently told me to come in closer, but I could only hold their hands.

“Mom?” I asked, walking into the conservatory, as if she could be anyone else. My mother’s hair was a perfect artificial light, blond-streaked brown that matched my sisters’. I didn’t know why she didn’t dye it red like mine—her original color was in-between. If it weren’t for the crow’s-feet, you might mistake her for one of her daughters. She used Botox, though we weren’t supposed to know about it. The sad part was that she probably only did it because her friends did, not because she wanted to be smooth in that strange, paralyzed way brought on by toxic injections.

“Over here,” she said. She was by the Octavia rose, the one named after her. There were specimens in the New York Botanical Garden, in the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco; the Octavia rose had won best in show twice in the mideighties. It was peach-colored, with tight, small blossoms and pale pink veins that made the petals appear almost like a light-skinned woman’s translucent skin.

“It’s got something,” she said. “Maybe a must. Or bug—” She sighed and waved her hand over the plant as if imparting a magic spell.

Blight, gall
, I thought. We knew these ailments from an early age. We helped her with grafting projects.

“Do you know where Dad is?” I asked her, casually testing the thorns.

“Don’t break those,” said my mother. “It’s not good for her.

“He’s at rounds I believe. You can check the Diary.” She smiled, benevolent, but ignored my question and continued tending her rose.

“He isn’t—that’s why Odette called.”

“Your father leads his own life.”

Wake up
! I sniped, but only internally. Olivia was the only third who could actually say things like that to Mom—some small piece of Dad was lodged in Olivia by nurture, or maybe nature; maybe a dad gene expressed itself somehow with louder song in Olivia than Odette. She had the tiniest pinch more confidence, the tiniest bit of directable anger in the chiaroscuro of her eyes.

I wanted to ask again, but I didn’t want to hurt her. When my mother answered questions with obscurities, she was shutting down. I had to be gentle with her—this was the way we were closest—unlike my sisters, I avoided maternal conflict. I wouldn’t scratch at her surface for the welling of sap.

Still, I tried once more. “Do you think he forgot to write it in? Has his memory seemed different lately, Mom? Do you think he forgot?”

She fingered a thorn. “No. He is getting older, but he’s not senile.

“Sometimes I don’t know why I bother with this prima donna flower,” she deflected.

“Because she has a lovely name?”

“Maybe.” My mother smiled again, but this time it was enigmatic. I could almost imagine her dumping the rose on the ground and dancing up the aisle of the greenhouse, freed at last from a single domestic obligation. My mother was talented, and kind, and thwarted, but I think she took the yoke of beauty and detail
willingly. She could do more—Dad wasn’t stopping her, he just wasn’t paying much attention to her choices, I thought. Maybe her
maybe
marked letting Dad and his flower go just a little in return for his benign neglect.

In the front hall stood a tall sideboard that had belonged to my father’s family. The drawers were lined with shoddy velvet, and silver teapots, six of them, huddled in the glass cabinets on the bottom. Paul Revere supposedly cast one. In the drawers Mom kept the two important books of our family lives, books I had resented for years and now looked upon as a ridiculous compulsion, my parents’ control manifest. My sisters were both married, both pregnant, and in private practice—together—an ob-gyn and a pediatrician, nothing as fancy as Dad’s career, but manageable, matching, and compatible, more or less, with motherhood; while at the same age, twenty-nine, I was living the single-student lifestyle in my parents’ carriage house, so I might have to look at the books once in a while. I couldn’t ignore them: the Diary, which listed where everyone important (being my mother or my sisters, mostly; Dad only put in his work appointments, but my sisters were tracked religiously. I had a spotty record ever since I left for college) was at any given time. Even now that Odette and Olivia had their own suburban minimansions in Princeton Junction, on the same street, three houses apart, Mom kept their work schedules, their own ob appointments (she attended the hearings of the heartbeats), their vacation schedules, in the Diary. They were so full, my sisters—I felt it when I was with them, the slowing of all systems after a meal. Packed patient schedules, occasional dates
with their husbands; it would only be busier soon. I felt how wanted and whole and overwhelmed they were, each centered in the middle of a seesaw, unable to move for fear of losing balance. I knew it was easier for me; I was unencumbered, except for the tipping of my own concerns.

I checked the book for today and it just said
Rounds, Odette; Office hours, Olivia; Inspect conservatory, Octavia;
and
Rounds, Charles
. I sort of wanted
Final Exam for Organic Chemistry (prerequisite for Vet School) Online After She Gets the Fucking Computer to Log Her In, Clementine
at the end, but after I finished packing for Oberlin almost a decade ago, I’d ripped out a page of the Diary, swearing I didn’t want to be part of such anal, weird, Waspy, Big Brother recording. Dad had agreed, calmly writing me a note that said Mother would no longer list my whereabouts in the Diary, but he’d like to know in general when tuition would be due and whether I’d please my mother with my presence at Thanksgivings and Christmas.

I was living in the carriage house behind my parents’ mansion with my dogs, Ella and Alphabet, a ferret named Cheese I’d kept since someone abandoned him at Oberlin, and a boa constrictor, Skinny, whom I’d rescued from a sewer when I first moved home. Feet, my ex, was with me when I dropped my cell phone into the leaves, then kicked it into the storm drain like some physical-comedy act. I reached in, lying on the sidewalk while Feet stood above to make sure no one stepped on me, and felt Skinny before I felt the phone. Skinny, ever friendly, twined himself up my forearm, and I was not repulsed, which I took to be a sign. Also, no
one claimed him, though I contacted the university, the shelter, and the police, who thought at first I was putting them on about a five-foot boa.