IN OUR LIVING ROOM we have a whole shelf devoted to the visual history of our family. Everyone’s babypictures are there, and some school head shots, and then various photos from vacations and birthdays andholidays. They make me think of notches on a belt or scratches on a prison wall—proof that time’s passed,that we haven’t all just been swimming in limbo.
There are double frames, singles, 8 x 10s, 4 x 6s. They are made of blond wood and inlaid wood and onevery fancy glass mosaic. I pick up one of Jesse—he’s about two, in a cowboy costume. Looking at it, you’dnever know what was coming down the pike.
There is Kate with hair and Kate all bald; one of Kate as a baby sitting on Jesse’s lap; one of my motherholding each of them on the edge of a pool. There are pictures of me, too, but not many. I go from infant toabout ten years old in one fell swoop.
Maybe it’s because I was the third child, and they were sick and tired of keeping a catalog of life. Maybe it’sbecause they forgot.
It’s nobody’s fault, and it’s not a big deal, but it’s a little depressing all the same. A photo says, You werehappy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, You were so important to me that I put down everything elseto come watch.
spaceMy father calls at eleven o’clock to ask if I want him to come get me. “Mom’s going to stay at the hospital,”
he explains. “But if you don’t want to be alone in the house, you can sleep at the station.”
“No, it’s okay,” I tell him. “I can always get Jesse if I need something.”
“Right,” my father says. “Jesse.” We both pretend that this is a reliable backup plan.
“How’s Kate?” I ask.
“Still pretty out of it. They’ve got her drugged up.” I hear him drag in a breath. “You know, Anna,” he begins,but then there is a shrill bell in the background. “Honey, I’ve got to go.” He leaves me with an earful of deadair.
For a second I just hold the phone, picturing my dad stepping into his boots and pulling up the puddle ofpants by their suspenders. I imagine the door of the station yawning like Aladdin’s cave, and the enginescreaming out, my father in the front passenger seat. Every time he goes to work, he has to put out fires.
It’s just the encouragement I need. Grabbing a sweater, I leave the house and head for the garage.
There was this kid in my school, Jimmy Stredboe, who used to be a total loser. He got zits on top of his zits;he had a pet rat named Orphan Annie; and once in science class he puked into the fish tank. No one evertalked to him, in case dorkhood was contagious. But then one summer he was diagnosed with MS. After that,no one was mean to Jimmy anymore. If you passed him in the hall, you smiled. If he sat next to you at thelunch table, you nodded hello. It was as if being a walking tragedy canceled out ever having been a geek.
From the moment I was born, I have been the girl with the sick sister. All my life bank tellers have given meextra lollipops; principals have known me by name. No one is ever outright mean to me.
It makes me wonder how I’d be treated if I were like everyone else. Maybe I’m a pretty rotten person, notthat anyone would ever have the guts to tell me this to my face. Maybe everyone thinks I’m rude or ugly orstupid but they have to be nice because it could be the circumstances of my life that make me that way.
It makes me wonder if what I’m doing now is just my true nature.
The headlights of another car bounce off the rearview mirror, lighting up like green goggles around Jesse’seyes. He drives with one wrist on the wheel, lazy. He needs a haircut, in a big way. “Your car smells likesmoke,” I say.
“Yeah. But it covers the aroma of spilled whiskey.” His teeth flash in the dark. “Why? Is it bothering you?”
“Kind of.”
Jesse reaches across my body to the glove compartment. He takes out a pack of Merits and a Zippo, lights up,and blows smoke in my direction. “Sorry,” he says, though he isn’t.
“Can I have one?”
“One what?”
“A cigarette.” They are so white they seem to glow.
“You want a cigarette?” Jesse cracks up.
“I’m not joking,” I say.
Jesse raises one brow, and then turns the wheel so sharply I think he might roll the Jeep. We wind up in a huffof road dust on the shoulder. Jesse turns on the interior lights and shakes the pack so that one cigaretteshimmies out.
It feels too delicate between my fingers, like the fine bone of a bird. I hold it the way I think a drama queenought to, between the vise of my second and middle fingers. I put it up to my lips.
“You have to light it first.” Jesse laughs, and he sparks up the Zippo.
There is no freaking way I’m leaning into a flame; chances are I’ll set my hair on fire instead of the cigarette.
“You do it for me,” I say.
“Nope. If you’re gonna learn, you’re gonna learn it all.” He flicks the lighter again.
I touch the cigarette to the burn, suck in hard the way I have seen Jesse do. It makes my chest explode, and Icough so forcefully that for a minute I actually believe I can taste my lung at the base of my throat, pink andspongy. Jesse goes to pieces and plucks the cigarette out of my hand before I drop it. He takes two long dragsand then tosses it out the window.
“Nice try,” he says.
My voice is a sandpit. “It’s like licking a barbecue.”
While I work on remembering how to breathe, Jesse pulls into the road again. “What made you want to?”
I shrug. “I figured I might as well.”
“If you’d like a checklist of depravity, I can make one up for you.” When I don’t reply, he glances over at me.
“Anna,” he says, “you’re not doing the wrong thing.”
By now he’s pulled into the hospital’s parking lot. “I’m not doing the right thing, either,” I point out.
He turns off the ignition but doesn’t make an attempt to leave the car. “Have you thought about the dragonguarding the cave?”
I narrow my eyes. “Speak English.”
“Well, I’m guessing Mom’s asleep about five feet away from Kate.”
Oh, shit. It is not that I think my mother would throw me out, but she certainly won’t leave me alone withKate, and right now that’s what I want more than anything. Jesse looks at me. “Seeing Kate isn’t going tomake you feel better.”
There’s really no way to explain why I need to know that she’s okay, at least now, even though I have takensteps that will put an end to that.
For once, though, someone seems to understand. Jesse stares out the window of the car. “Leave it to me,” hesays.
We were eleven and fourteen, and we were training for the Guinness Book of World Records. Surely therehad never been two sisters who did simultaneous headstands for so long that their cheeks went hard as plumsand their eyes saw nothing but red. Kate had the shape of a pixie, all noodle arms and legs; and when shebent to the ground and kicked up her feet, it looked as delicate as a spider walking a wall. Me, I sort of defiedgravity with a thud.
We balanced in silence for a few seconds. “I wish my head was flatter,” I said, as I felt my eyebrows scrunchdown. “Do you think there’s a man who’ll come to the house to time us? Or do we just mail a videotape?”
“I guess they’ll let us know.” Kate folded her arms along the carpet.
“Do you think we’ll be famous?”
“We might get on the Today show. They had that eleven-year-old kid who could play the piano with his feet.”
She thought for a second. “Mom knew someone who got killed by a piano falling out a window.”
“That’s not true. Why would anyone push a piano out a window?”
“It is true. You ask her. And they weren’t taking it out, they were putting it in.” She crossed her legs againstthe wall, so that it looked like she was just sitting upside down. “What do you think is the best way to die?”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” I said.
“Why? I’m dying. You’re dying.” When I frowned, she said, “Well, you are.” Then she grinned. “I justhappen to be more gifted at it than you are.”
“This is a stupid conversation.” Already, it was making my skin itch in places I knew I would never be ableto scratch.
“Maybe an airplane crash,” Kate mused. “It would suck, you know, when you realized you were goingdown…but then it happens and you’re just powder. How come people get vaporized, but they still manage tofind clothes in trees, and those black boxes?”
By now my head was starting to pound. “Shut up, Kate.”
She crawled down the wall and sat up, flushed. “There’s just sleeping through it as you croak, but that’s kindof boring.”
“Shut up,” I repeated, angry that we had only lasted about twenty-two seconds, angry that now we weregoing to have to try for a record all over again. I tipped myself sunny-side up again and tried to clear the knotof hair out of my face. “You know, normal people don’t sit around thinking about dying.”
“Liar. Everyone thinks about dying.”
“Everyone thinks about you dying,” I said.
The room went so still that I wondered if we ought to go for a different record—how long can two sistershold their breath?
Then a twitchy smile crossed her face. “Well,” Kate said. “At least now you’re telling the truth.”
Jesse gives me a twenty-dollar bill for cab fare home; because that’s the only hitch in his plan—once we gothrough with this, he isn’t going to be driving back. We take the stairs up to the eighth floor instead of theelevator, because they let us out behind the nurse’s station, not in front of it. Then he tucks me inside a linencloset filled with plastic pillows and sheets stamped with the hospital’s name. “Wait,” I blurt out, when he’sabout to leave me. “How am I going to know when it’s time?”
He starts to laugh. “You’ll know, trust me.”
He takes a silver flask out of his pocket—it’s one my father got from the chief and thinks he lost three yearsago—screws off the cap, and pours whiskey all over the front of his shirt. Then he starts to walk down thehall. Well, walk would be a loose approximation—Jesse slams like a billiard ball into the walls and knocksover an entire cleaning cart. “Ma?” he yells out. “Ma, where are you?”
He isn’t drunk, but he sure as hell can do a great imitation. It makes me wonder about the times I have lookedout my bedroom window in the middle of the night and seen him puking into the rhododendrons—maybethat was all for show, too.
The nurses swarm out from their hive of a desk, trying to subdue a boy half their age and three times asstrong, who at that very moment grabs the uppermost tier of a linen rack and pulls it forward, making a crashso loud it rings in my ears. Call buttons start ringing like an operator’s switchboard behind the nurse’s desk,but all three of the night-duty ladies are doing their best to hold Jesse down while he kicks and flails.
The door to Kate’s room opens, and bleary-eyed, my mother steps out. She takes a look at Jesse, and for asecond her whole face is frozen with the realization that, in fact, things can get worse. Jesse swings his headtoward her, a great big bull, and his features melt. “Hiya, Mom,” he greets, and he smiles loosely up at her.
“I am so sorry,” my mother says to the nurses. She closes her eyes as Jesse stumbles upright and throws hissloppy arms around her.
“There’s coffee in the cafeteria,” one nurse suggests, and my mother is too embarrassed to even answer her.
She just moves toward the elevator banks with Jesse attached to her like a mussel on a crusty hull, and pushesthe down button over and over in the fruitless hope that it will actually make the doors open faster.
When they leave, it is almost too easy. Some of the nurses hurry off to check on the patients who’ve rung in;others settle back behind their desk, trading hushed commentary about Jesse and my poor mother like it’ssome card game. They never look my way as I sneak out of the linen closet, tiptoe down the hall, and letmyself into my sister’s hospital room.
One Thanksgiving when Kate was not in the hospital, we actually pretended to be a regular family. Wewatched the parade on TV, where a giant balloon fell prey to a freak wind and wound up wrapped around aNYC traffic light. We made our own gravy. My mother brought the turkey’s wishbone out to the table, andwe fought over who would be granted the right to snap it. Kate and I were given the honors. Before I got agood grip, my mother leaned close and whispered into my ear, “You know what to wish for.” So I shut myeyes tight and thought hard of remission for Kate, even though I had been planning to ask for a personal CDplayer, and got a nasty satisfaction out of the fact that I did not win the tug-of-war.
After we ate, my father took us outside for a game of two-on-two touch football while my mother waswashing the dishes. She came outside when Jesse and I had already scored twice. “Tell me,” she said, “that Iam hallucinating.” She didn’t have to say anything else—we’d all seen Kate tumble like an ordinary kid andwind up bleeding uncontrollably like a sick one.
“Aw, Sara.” My dad turned up the wattage on his smile. “Kate’s on my team. I won’t let her get sacked.”
He swaggered over to my mother, and kissed her so long and slow that my own cheeks started to burn,because I was sure the neighbors would see. When he lifted his head, my mother’s eyes were a color I hadnever seen before and don’t think I have ever seen again. “Trust me,” he said, and then he threw the footballto Kate.
What I remember about that day was the way the ground bit back when you sat on it—the first hint of winter.
I remember being tackled by my father, who always braced himself in a push-up so that I got none of theweight and all of his heat. I remember my mother, cheering equally for both teams.
And I remember throwing the ball to Jesse, but Kate getting in the way—an expression of absolute shock onher face as it landed in the cradle of her arms and Dad yelled her on to the touchdown. She sprinted, andnearly had it, but then Jesse took a running leap and slammed her to the ground, crushing her underneathhim.
In that moment everything stopped. Kate lay with her arms and legs splayed, unmoving. My father was therein a breath, shoving at Jesse. “What the hell is the matter with you!”
“I forgot!”
My mother: “Where does it hurt? Can you sit up?”
But when Kate rolled over, she was smiling. “It doesn’t hurt. It feels great.”
My parents looked at each other. Neither of them understood like I did, like Jesse did—that no matter whoyou are, there is some part of you that always wishes you were someone else—and when, for a millisecond,you get that wish, it’s a miracle. “He forgot,” Kate said to nobody, and she lay on her back, beaming up at thecold hawkeye sun.
Hospital rooms never get completely dark; there is always some glowing panel behind the bed in the case ofcatastrophe, a runway strip so that the nurses and doctors can find their way. I have seen Kate a hundredtimes in beds like this one, although the tubes and wires change. She always looks smaller than I remember.
I sit down as gently as I can. The veins on Kate’s neck and chest are a road map, highways that don’t goanywhere. I trick myself into believing that I can see those rogue leukemia cells moving like a rumor throughher system.
When she opens her eyes, I nearly fall off the bed; it’s an Exorcist moment. “Anna?” she says, staring right atme. I have not seen her look this scared since we were little, and Jesse convinced us that an old Indian ghosthad come back to claim the bones buried by mistake under our house.
If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when theother half of the equation is gone?
I crawl onto the bed, which is narrow, but still big enough for both of us. I rest my head on her chest, so closeto her central line that I can see the liquid dripping into her. Jesse is wrong—I didn’t come to see Katebecause it would make me feel better. I came because without her, it’s hard to remember who I am.
There are double frames, singles, 8 x 10s, 4 x 6s. They are made of blond wood and inlaid wood and onevery fancy glass mosaic. I pick up one of Jesse—he’s about two, in a cowboy costume. Looking at it, you’dnever know what was coming down the pike.
There is Kate with hair and Kate all bald; one of Kate as a baby sitting on Jesse’s lap; one of my motherholding each of them on the edge of a pool. There are pictures of me, too, but not many. I go from infant toabout ten years old in one fell swoop.
Maybe it’s because I was the third child, and they were sick and tired of keeping a catalog of life. Maybe it’sbecause they forgot.
It’s nobody’s fault, and it’s not a big deal, but it’s a little depressing all the same. A photo says, You werehappy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, You were so important to me that I put down everything elseto come watch.
spaceMy father calls at eleven o’clock to ask if I want him to come get me. “Mom’s going to stay at the hospital,”
he explains. “But if you don’t want to be alone in the house, you can sleep at the station.”
“No, it’s okay,” I tell him. “I can always get Jesse if I need something.”
“Right,” my father says. “Jesse.” We both pretend that this is a reliable backup plan.
“How’s Kate?” I ask.
“Still pretty out of it. They’ve got her drugged up.” I hear him drag in a breath. “You know, Anna,” he begins,but then there is a shrill bell in the background. “Honey, I’ve got to go.” He leaves me with an earful of deadair.
For a second I just hold the phone, picturing my dad stepping into his boots and pulling up the puddle ofpants by their suspenders. I imagine the door of the station yawning like Aladdin’s cave, and the enginescreaming out, my father in the front passenger seat. Every time he goes to work, he has to put out fires.
It’s just the encouragement I need. Grabbing a sweater, I leave the house and head for the garage.
There was this kid in my school, Jimmy Stredboe, who used to be a total loser. He got zits on top of his zits;he had a pet rat named Orphan Annie; and once in science class he puked into the fish tank. No one evertalked to him, in case dorkhood was contagious. But then one summer he was diagnosed with MS. After that,no one was mean to Jimmy anymore. If you passed him in the hall, you smiled. If he sat next to you at thelunch table, you nodded hello. It was as if being a walking tragedy canceled out ever having been a geek.
From the moment I was born, I have been the girl with the sick sister. All my life bank tellers have given meextra lollipops; principals have known me by name. No one is ever outright mean to me.
It makes me wonder how I’d be treated if I were like everyone else. Maybe I’m a pretty rotten person, notthat anyone would ever have the guts to tell me this to my face. Maybe everyone thinks I’m rude or ugly orstupid but they have to be nice because it could be the circumstances of my life that make me that way.
It makes me wonder if what I’m doing now is just my true nature.
The headlights of another car bounce off the rearview mirror, lighting up like green goggles around Jesse’seyes. He drives with one wrist on the wheel, lazy. He needs a haircut, in a big way. “Your car smells likesmoke,” I say.
“Yeah. But it covers the aroma of spilled whiskey.” His teeth flash in the dark. “Why? Is it bothering you?”
“Kind of.”
Jesse reaches across my body to the glove compartment. He takes out a pack of Merits and a Zippo, lights up,and blows smoke in my direction. “Sorry,” he says, though he isn’t.
“Can I have one?”
“One what?”
“A cigarette.” They are so white they seem to glow.
“You want a cigarette?” Jesse cracks up.
“I’m not joking,” I say.
Jesse raises one brow, and then turns the wheel so sharply I think he might roll the Jeep. We wind up in a huffof road dust on the shoulder. Jesse turns on the interior lights and shakes the pack so that one cigaretteshimmies out.
It feels too delicate between my fingers, like the fine bone of a bird. I hold it the way I think a drama queenought to, between the vise of my second and middle fingers. I put it up to my lips.
“You have to light it first.” Jesse laughs, and he sparks up the Zippo.
There is no freaking way I’m leaning into a flame; chances are I’ll set my hair on fire instead of the cigarette.
“You do it for me,” I say.
“Nope. If you’re gonna learn, you’re gonna learn it all.” He flicks the lighter again.
I touch the cigarette to the burn, suck in hard the way I have seen Jesse do. It makes my chest explode, and Icough so forcefully that for a minute I actually believe I can taste my lung at the base of my throat, pink andspongy. Jesse goes to pieces and plucks the cigarette out of my hand before I drop it. He takes two long dragsand then tosses it out the window.
“Nice try,” he says.
My voice is a sandpit. “It’s like licking a barbecue.”
While I work on remembering how to breathe, Jesse pulls into the road again. “What made you want to?”
I shrug. “I figured I might as well.”
“If you’d like a checklist of depravity, I can make one up for you.” When I don’t reply, he glances over at me.
“Anna,” he says, “you’re not doing the wrong thing.”
By now he’s pulled into the hospital’s parking lot. “I’m not doing the right thing, either,” I point out.
He turns off the ignition but doesn’t make an attempt to leave the car. “Have you thought about the dragonguarding the cave?”
I narrow my eyes. “Speak English.”
“Well, I’m guessing Mom’s asleep about five feet away from Kate.”
Oh, shit. It is not that I think my mother would throw me out, but she certainly won’t leave me alone withKate, and right now that’s what I want more than anything. Jesse looks at me. “Seeing Kate isn’t going tomake you feel better.”
There’s really no way to explain why I need to know that she’s okay, at least now, even though I have takensteps that will put an end to that.
For once, though, someone seems to understand. Jesse stares out the window of the car. “Leave it to me,” hesays.
We were eleven and fourteen, and we were training for the Guinness Book of World Records. Surely therehad never been two sisters who did simultaneous headstands for so long that their cheeks went hard as plumsand their eyes saw nothing but red. Kate had the shape of a pixie, all noodle arms and legs; and when shebent to the ground and kicked up her feet, it looked as delicate as a spider walking a wall. Me, I sort of defiedgravity with a thud.
We balanced in silence for a few seconds. “I wish my head was flatter,” I said, as I felt my eyebrows scrunchdown. “Do you think there’s a man who’ll come to the house to time us? Or do we just mail a videotape?”
“I guess they’ll let us know.” Kate folded her arms along the carpet.
“Do you think we’ll be famous?”
“We might get on the Today show. They had that eleven-year-old kid who could play the piano with his feet.”
She thought for a second. “Mom knew someone who got killed by a piano falling out a window.”
“That’s not true. Why would anyone push a piano out a window?”
“It is true. You ask her. And they weren’t taking it out, they were putting it in.” She crossed her legs againstthe wall, so that it looked like she was just sitting upside down. “What do you think is the best way to die?”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” I said.
“Why? I’m dying. You’re dying.” When I frowned, she said, “Well, you are.” Then she grinned. “I justhappen to be more gifted at it than you are.”
“This is a stupid conversation.” Already, it was making my skin itch in places I knew I would never be ableto scratch.
“Maybe an airplane crash,” Kate mused. “It would suck, you know, when you realized you were goingdown…but then it happens and you’re just powder. How come people get vaporized, but they still manage tofind clothes in trees, and those black boxes?”
By now my head was starting to pound. “Shut up, Kate.”
She crawled down the wall and sat up, flushed. “There’s just sleeping through it as you croak, but that’s kindof boring.”
“Shut up,” I repeated, angry that we had only lasted about twenty-two seconds, angry that now we weregoing to have to try for a record all over again. I tipped myself sunny-side up again and tried to clear the knotof hair out of my face. “You know, normal people don’t sit around thinking about dying.”
“Liar. Everyone thinks about dying.”
“Everyone thinks about you dying,” I said.
The room went so still that I wondered if we ought to go for a different record—how long can two sistershold their breath?
Then a twitchy smile crossed her face. “Well,” Kate said. “At least now you’re telling the truth.”
Jesse gives me a twenty-dollar bill for cab fare home; because that’s the only hitch in his plan—once we gothrough with this, he isn’t going to be driving back. We take the stairs up to the eighth floor instead of theelevator, because they let us out behind the nurse’s station, not in front of it. Then he tucks me inside a linencloset filled with plastic pillows and sheets stamped with the hospital’s name. “Wait,” I blurt out, when he’sabout to leave me. “How am I going to know when it’s time?”
He starts to laugh. “You’ll know, trust me.”
He takes a silver flask out of his pocket—it’s one my father got from the chief and thinks he lost three yearsago—screws off the cap, and pours whiskey all over the front of his shirt. Then he starts to walk down thehall. Well, walk would be a loose approximation—Jesse slams like a billiard ball into the walls and knocksover an entire cleaning cart. “Ma?” he yells out. “Ma, where are you?”
He isn’t drunk, but he sure as hell can do a great imitation. It makes me wonder about the times I have lookedout my bedroom window in the middle of the night and seen him puking into the rhododendrons—maybethat was all for show, too.
The nurses swarm out from their hive of a desk, trying to subdue a boy half their age and three times asstrong, who at that very moment grabs the uppermost tier of a linen rack and pulls it forward, making a crashso loud it rings in my ears. Call buttons start ringing like an operator’s switchboard behind the nurse’s desk,but all three of the night-duty ladies are doing their best to hold Jesse down while he kicks and flails.
The door to Kate’s room opens, and bleary-eyed, my mother steps out. She takes a look at Jesse, and for asecond her whole face is frozen with the realization that, in fact, things can get worse. Jesse swings his headtoward her, a great big bull, and his features melt. “Hiya, Mom,” he greets, and he smiles loosely up at her.
“I am so sorry,” my mother says to the nurses. She closes her eyes as Jesse stumbles upright and throws hissloppy arms around her.
“There’s coffee in the cafeteria,” one nurse suggests, and my mother is too embarrassed to even answer her.
She just moves toward the elevator banks with Jesse attached to her like a mussel on a crusty hull, and pushesthe down button over and over in the fruitless hope that it will actually make the doors open faster.
When they leave, it is almost too easy. Some of the nurses hurry off to check on the patients who’ve rung in;others settle back behind their desk, trading hushed commentary about Jesse and my poor mother like it’ssome card game. They never look my way as I sneak out of the linen closet, tiptoe down the hall, and letmyself into my sister’s hospital room.
One Thanksgiving when Kate was not in the hospital, we actually pretended to be a regular family. Wewatched the parade on TV, where a giant balloon fell prey to a freak wind and wound up wrapped around aNYC traffic light. We made our own gravy. My mother brought the turkey’s wishbone out to the table, andwe fought over who would be granted the right to snap it. Kate and I were given the honors. Before I got agood grip, my mother leaned close and whispered into my ear, “You know what to wish for.” So I shut myeyes tight and thought hard of remission for Kate, even though I had been planning to ask for a personal CDplayer, and got a nasty satisfaction out of the fact that I did not win the tug-of-war.
After we ate, my father took us outside for a game of two-on-two touch football while my mother waswashing the dishes. She came outside when Jesse and I had already scored twice. “Tell me,” she said, “that Iam hallucinating.” She didn’t have to say anything else—we’d all seen Kate tumble like an ordinary kid andwind up bleeding uncontrollably like a sick one.
“Aw, Sara.” My dad turned up the wattage on his smile. “Kate’s on my team. I won’t let her get sacked.”
He swaggered over to my mother, and kissed her so long and slow that my own cheeks started to burn,because I was sure the neighbors would see. When he lifted his head, my mother’s eyes were a color I hadnever seen before and don’t think I have ever seen again. “Trust me,” he said, and then he threw the footballto Kate.
What I remember about that day was the way the ground bit back when you sat on it—the first hint of winter.
I remember being tackled by my father, who always braced himself in a push-up so that I got none of theweight and all of his heat. I remember my mother, cheering equally for both teams.
And I remember throwing the ball to Jesse, but Kate getting in the way—an expression of absolute shock onher face as it landed in the cradle of her arms and Dad yelled her on to the touchdown. She sprinted, andnearly had it, but then Jesse took a running leap and slammed her to the ground, crushing her underneathhim.
In that moment everything stopped. Kate lay with her arms and legs splayed, unmoving. My father was therein a breath, shoving at Jesse. “What the hell is the matter with you!”
“I forgot!”
My mother: “Where does it hurt? Can you sit up?”
But when Kate rolled over, she was smiling. “It doesn’t hurt. It feels great.”
My parents looked at each other. Neither of them understood like I did, like Jesse did—that no matter whoyou are, there is some part of you that always wishes you were someone else—and when, for a millisecond,you get that wish, it’s a miracle. “He forgot,” Kate said to nobody, and she lay on her back, beaming up at thecold hawkeye sun.
Hospital rooms never get completely dark; there is always some glowing panel behind the bed in the case ofcatastrophe, a runway strip so that the nurses and doctors can find their way. I have seen Kate a hundredtimes in beds like this one, although the tubes and wires change. She always looks smaller than I remember.
I sit down as gently as I can. The veins on Kate’s neck and chest are a road map, highways that don’t goanywhere. I trick myself into believing that I can see those rogue leukemia cells moving like a rumor throughher system.
When she opens her eyes, I nearly fall off the bed; it’s an Exorcist moment. “Anna?” she says, staring right atme. I have not seen her look this scared since we were little, and Jesse convinced us that an old Indian ghosthad come back to claim the bones buried by mistake under our house.
If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when theother half of the equation is gone?
I crawl onto the bed, which is narrow, but still big enough for both of us. I rest my head on her chest, so closeto her central line that I can see the liquid dripping into her. Jesse is wrong—I didn’t come to see Katebecause it would make me feel better. I came because without her, it’s hard to remember who I am.