The Orphan Sister (5 page)

The town car took us all the way home to Oakville. I laughed privately but out loud with my sisters—we’d stayed up late, talking about how odd Me and Da were, how Da disappeared for hours, and he must be constipated. We were kids, after all, and this was hilarious. Me had “made” us breakfast by ordering things from the chef. But she let us have hot chocolate with homemade marshmallows in the lilac bedroom and didn’t complain when I spilled a small comma of chocolate on the pale purple rug. I gasped, a little bit of our imagery manifest. We decided it was more fun to make our collaboration visible and had developed a silly sign language—holding our heads—to imitate how Me’s hair stayed all in one piece on her head, a stiff brown helmet. We flapped our hands at each other and said
la-di-da.
Little did we know we’d be actual rich girls soon.

When we came home, our parents kissed in front of us more
than they used to. Mom positioned her hand on Dad’s thigh; Dad dipped her as though the two of them were dancing. It felt like a show, but at the same time I knew they belonged together, congruence. Odette groaned and Olivia said, “Ugh,” but I didn’t mind all that much.

Despite the way he pulled all energy to himself—his lectures about his work successes, his theories of politics, and subtle embedded preferences for colleagues who had Ivy League educations—Mom had a particular way of listening to Dad, a pursed lip, almost kissing, a leaning in across tables, a glossy expression that I thought, when I was younger, was the epitome of romantic love. I wanted that. But then, a few semesters into courses at Oberlin, I began to think theirs wasn’t abiding love, but an unsubtle gender bias. What Dad did was better, more important, more meaningful, more profound, not just because he was a doctor, but because he was a man. I seethed against it, but I also wanted to forgive her, because she had obviously been brainwashed by a generation, by her parents, by the lack of financial diversity in her upbringing.

As much as she taught us we should put ourselves first, before we had families, that we should build careers and then proceed to childbearing, as she had—she had been a marketing manager for a high-end women’s clothing store, a job she once said she loved, though her love seemed to fade with distance, and she began to say, “It was easy to give up for you girls,” with an artificial ease—as much as she taught us this, she was a horrible example of how to be in love. If my father was excited about something, she buzzed around him waiting to help him, waiting for a role to be cast her
way, though it rarely had to do with her. He got excited about medical research he read, about participating in studies for his patients—he was a pediatric neurologist and semifamous neurosurgeon. Sure, he would defend her forever; he insisted we apologize when we’d mistreated her. It was a subtle puppetry, and I resented it.

I
jabbed at my fingernails with the top of a doggie-treat pack while Olivia’s cell phone rang. I’d put it on speakerphone so I could repeat dial. After three rings, it went to voice mail, which meant she’d pressed the little button on the side to send the call away. Again. This was my fifth call since our stunning conversation.

“O,” I said. “Me again. You need to talk with us. I’m calling Jason if you don’t call back.”

I wanted to read her. I wanted that feeling I’d had all my life when I felt my sisters’ feelings; when I’d picked up their frequency, an electric current of pleasure just under the alternating current of my own heart. With Odette, I knew she was as anguished and confused as I. We were shut out. We heard the same outgoing “This is Dr. Lord . . .” blah blah blah.

“O,” I said, amending my previous message. “Just talk to me. I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

This was something we told each other as adults. “We’re dolts,” Olivia joked at our latest dinner when Olivia didn’t want to eat the broccoli rabe with pounds of garlic. “And dolts don’t make each other do things they don’t want to.” Because we could—because we knew how to make each other feel too directly to resist. “It’s a
pact,” Olivia had said, pushing aside the greens, and Odette and I didn’t need to nod or say anything in order to agree. We meant everything, not just dishes that might generate dyspepsia.

But now I wanted to make Olivia tell me everything—as if she’d held secrets about Dad all along. Maybe I shouldn’t have threatened to call Jason; that would only infuriate Olivia, who liked, much more than Odette, to maintain a margin between her husband and the rest of us. Jason had an awkward side; he would answer for Olivia—yes, we’ll make pie for Thanksgiving, and, yes, we’ll bring in your mail, and, no, we don’t want the desk Mom remodeled out of the study—and Olivia would feel grudgingly obliged, but she hated his definitive, undiscussed decisions in the realm of the Lords. I wondered, sometimes, who initiated their sex, and whether there was ever a tiff over location, timing, position, or pleasure.

I stared at my desk and at Ella, who stared back and thumped her tail. The first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do before bed and sometimes in between is to walk the dogs. Sometimes Cheese wants to come, too. I put him on a goofy little ferret leash and he winds his furry self around my neck and I feel dressed like a pimp.

Alphabet always has to be in front. He pulls the leash and I can feel the possibilities of my shoulder joint and I yell at him, or I use my firm, terribly important voice, when I’m feeling patient. Poor Ella. Alphabet was the squeaky wheel while Ella was the patient, unrelenting love.

“Oh, El,” I said. “At least you’ll always talk to me.” I scratched her back and she rolled over, still giving me her sweetest look.
Love me.

I had to look up Jason’s cell number because I didn’t call my brother-in-law all that often.

“Clementine!” he barked. “Planning a surprise second shower for my wife?”

“Oh, you’ve been prepped, haven’t you?” I said. “I just don’t think Olivia realizes we need to be in this together.”

“She passed her nonstress test beautifully,” he said, stalwart man. “Since I know you’re calling out of concern for her health.”

“Okay, Stonewall Jackson—can’t she just tell us where to reach Dad, or whose number she has?”

“His lawyer.” He coughed. He wasn’t supposed to tell. He changed the subject, as if I’d forget. “Her heartburn is awful, though. Do you feel that, too? You know, that triplet thing? Do you feel her heartburn?” I had to admire this unrelenting focus on his wife.

“His lawyer? We
have
his lawyer’s number, I’m sure,” I said, leaning down and scratching Ella’s soft, warm belly, as much for my own comfort as hers. She groaned.

“A different lawyer. Now I’m done talking about that. I’ll tell her you called to see how she’s doing. It’ll mean a lot to her, bye!” he barked again, hanging up.

“What the hell?” I asked my dog. Alphabet stood by the French doors and growled at a leaf. Part of me admired Jason’s doggedness. And oddly enough, I did experience mild heartburn when I was with them.

“Odette,” I said, happy to easily reach my other sister on the phone.

“Yes,” she began, knowing without my saying why I called.

“Though I don’t drink coffee, not even decaf anymore. Shall we meet at that place in town you like so much? I could use a pastry or two.”

I could tell from her voice that she felt like me, as though we were both ripped loose and vaguely lost, wires stripped akimbo.

“You know what this is—some secret lawyer?”

“Lawyer? Let’s deal with it over something gooey,” she said, and I pictured her manicured hands digging into a brownie with a pile of frosting.

Despite our closeness, my sisters were sometimes a unit without me. All my life I’d mournfully watched the walls of their castle, wishing they would crumble and let me march in. But now that they were looking vulnerable, I was terrified.

A new man was working behind the counter—dreadlocks and a tan, barely scruffy, warm face. He asked the question we’d heard all our lives, only this time it was just one rounded sister and me. He leaned into the counter grinning goofily and said, “You two must be twins!” to Odette.

Odette stared at me as if I’d just been invented.

“We are,” she said, putting her hand over mine.

“But we have another,” I said. “So really, we’re triplets.” When did I ever bother with all this? I missed Olivia’s deadpan habitual answer,
no.

Over coffee—I had coffee, and one of those gooey brownies, and Odette nibbled demurely at a scone and sipped her ginger-chamomile
tea sans sweetener—I told her what Jason said and she sighed and said it was time to hire someone to help us with all this.

“Like another lawyer? Don’t we have enough lawyers?”

“A private investigator,” she said, offering to ask around. Odette was taking crumbs off her scone as if she could parse it into individual calories.

“Why did she?” I asked. “Why did he?” It was all I needed to say, and Odette started, quietly, to weep.

“Now don’t do that,” I said, not really meaning it. She was allowed to cry. Along with Party Trick, we played other games—mind-reading games such as pick a number. When Odette picked a number, she could sometimes tell us one at a time—usually Olivia first, then me, but once in a while, she thought “eight,” obscuring it from her twin like a covered hand of cards. Olivia would get irritable when that happened, and even though Odette found her easier to read than I did, she’d reveal her number to me before Odette. I didn’t have the same control either did—if I thought a number, either they could both read it or neither could. Winning, for them, was just a matter of the fastest call-out. I felt as though I would never learn their perfect language, their control. But now Olivia was hiding from us both.

“It’s hormones,” Odette said, pretending. “The crying. I think Olivia did it because somehow he made her. She’s closed right now, Clem, it’s the oddest thing—I’ve only once or twice felt I couldn’t read her. It’s like not having a telephone, or worse—it’s not having a reflection in the mirror.” She paused to shake with sobs, almost as though she were laughing.

But then she cleared her throat and said, “But you know, it’s kind of a relief that it’s her and not me. I don’t know if I could bear it right now, whatever
it
is.”

“I know,” I said, only I’d felt closed out more than once or twice. I didn’t need to tell Odette that, she’d remember the numbers game. She’d remember hide-and-seek, when I was always left wandering the third floor while they snuggled like den rabbits under Mom and Dad’s bed. “She’ll come back.”

“He might not,” said Odette. “He might have gone off to become a yoga instructor at a school for orphans in the Congo.”

“He became a fashion consultant at a couture house in Milano.”

“He joined Doctors Without Borders and is leading an expedition to the south pole. To see if there are any borders there.”

“He left Mom.”

“That one’s not funny.”

“It’s not supposed to be,” I said.

My sister’s beeper began its alarm, and her BlackBerry buzzed, and her cell phone rang, all within seconds. She groped the devices and sighed. “Just a patient,” she said. Odette abandoned her dissected scone and we left the bakery together.

My sisters are not beautiful by the ordinary standards; they have light brown hair and clear blue eyes and slim, plain bodies. Their hands are long-fingered and agile, their voices matching pale sopranos that peak to girlishness when astonished or afraid. But there is beauty in their motions, in the assuredness about their destinies and capabilities. I used to think of them as a pair of
queens—they don’t embody the soft romance of princesses. And, of course, everyone is captivated by their doubleness. Including me—but they belonged to me.

My sisters aren’t the same—I know them each the way you know parts of your own body—left hand and right—without examination you intuit the differences. And now the left had an injury, or a weapon, or a coin.

As I came home from the café, Princeton looked aggressively pretty—clean, upkept Victorians, excessively green grass. I let my eyes cool from my own small bout of tears and breathed deeply. I had to focus on my own goals, see past the green and my family.

I opened the door to the carriage house, dropped my keys, and sat on the floor in front of my computer, petting the dogs, who circled me as if I’d been missing for days. My exam—I needed to get to it, to get past it, to move on. This time it let me log in, and I wondered why some things were easy some of the time, and some things lead nowhere. Odette would find us a private investigator, and I had a chocolate smudge on my arm, and suddenly I could do whatever I wanted on the server.

I needed to get at least an A-, though my applications were already in. I’d finished Genetics and Statistics (which my friend Eli called Sadistics) and Organic Chem was the final prerequisite before I was ready, actually ready, fully prepared, fully committed to vet school. Of course I had to wait to hear whether I was admitted. I could wind up in Wisconsin or California. I could have a mandatory Food Animals section, I could be moving somewhere I knew no one at all—for the first time in my life. Even when I
went to Oberlin I knew two guys from the grade ahead of me, who had joined the Can Consortium and played garbage-can instruments in joyous concert with fifty other enthusiasts on the quad. We all danced.

I wanted to stop thinking about the importance of the results. If I didn’t get in, I’d be unplugged, purely aimless. The GRE had been bad enough; I had to retake it since my scores were eight years old. I’d sat at the thick oak table in the carriage house leafing through the practice books, feeling as if I were sixteen again and practicing for the SATs, sitting out on the lawn by the pool, hoping to get a tan even though I wore sunscreen so I wouldn’t burn, hoping Odette would bring her boyfriend, Larry, by so I could flirt with him—he obviously liked me, not that I’d ever betray her. I’d loved the power of flirting back then, before I knew what could be lost.

I needed to get into vet school because after many false starts, I had finally decided what I was going to do, and I needed them to see me succeed—my parents, and my sisters, too. Of course, they’d be wrapped in the milky gauze of new motherhood—which they would juggle perfectly with their work and sex lives—but still, I knew a little piece of them wanted me settled in some way.