Sisterland (55 page)

Jeremy said, “When you were fucking Hank, did you think about me?”

I bit my lip. “I was upset with you for leaving town. But, Jeremy, I only love you.”

“Did you enjoy fucking him?”

I wanted to defend myself, to explain, but I needed to answer his questions succinctly and carefully; after all, we were constructing the narrative we’d live with. I said, “The way you touch me—nobody else knows how to touch me like you.” Jeremy could say Hank’s name, but I couldn’t; I was pretty sure that was one of the rules of this exchange.

“Did you come?”

“You know what to do to make me come.” I stepped toward him, reached for his hand, and brought it down between my legs, where it was already wet. “See?” I said. And then I climbed onto the bed, onto him, my naked body on his, and I pushed down the covers, and he gripped my ass. I’m not sure it was a decision on his part so much as habit or reflex.

When he was inside me, I said it again: “I only love you, Jeremy. I only love you. I only love you.” Even when his breath broke against my ear, he didn’t say anything back.

Things were better
in the morning—not completely, but a little, and I understood that this was the most I could hope for. After breakfast, playing in the living room, Rosie said in an excited tone, “There’s pumpkin pie in Mama’s diaper!”

“I don’t wear diapers,” I said. “I use the potty.”

“But if she did wear diapers,” Jeremy said, and though he was ostensibly speaking to Rosie, there was something in his voice for me, too, “she would definitely have pumpkin pie in them.”

At Christmas, which
we hosted—Jeremy’s father and stepmother flew out for three days, and my father, Vi, and Stephanie joined us for Christmas dinner—Vi dried serving dishes as I washed them after the meal, and she said, “I dreamed last night of the earthquake again. Did I ever tell you that in my dreams, it’s all black people?”

No, Vi
, I thought.
No more of this
. I passed her the bowl that had held the sweet potatoes and said, “Yes, you’ve mentioned that.” After a few seconds, I said, “Dad is really quiet tonight.”

“Dad’s always quiet.”

Surely my recent nervousness about my father was nervousness about the prospect of moving. But I hadn’t yet brought up the job at Cornell with Vi because Jeremy had asked me not to, in case he didn’t get it. Even though I was certain that he would, I’d complied with his request. “I wonder if Dad’s been driving at night again,” I said.

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that tonight.” Vi and Stephanie had picked him up. Then Vi said, “I just wish I knew where my earthquake is.”

Was this never going to be fully behind us? No, it wasn’t. Even then, as
I was washing dishes at the sink, my belly was swelling again; it wouldn’t be long before people other than Jeremy and Vi knew I was pregnant.

“Maybe your earthquake was never an earthquake,” I said.

Three weeks later,
on the afternoon of January 12, 2010, as the children and I were driving home from the shoe store after buying Rosie a pair of purple sequined sneakers, I received a text from Jeremy:
So sad about Haiti
. I turned on the car radio and learned that a magnitude 7 earthquake had struck just west of Port-au-Prince, killing and injuring countless people, blocking the roads with rubble, and cutting off electricity and phone service.

As I was turning into our driveway, my cellphone rang, and when I answered, Vi was sobbing. “It’s awful,” she said. “It’s awful.”

In the backseat, Rosie reached out, plucked Owen’s pacifier from his mouth—her arms were getting long—and stuck it in her own. To Vi, I said, “Do you want to come over?”

“Maybe.” Vi sniffed. “Isn’t Haiti already really fucked up without this?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Jeremy and I didn’t watch any news until the children were in bed, and even then, I couldn’t take much at a time. I’d get up to put laundry in the dryer or to carry a water glass from the living room mantel to the kitchen sink, and I was sorting the mail that had accumulated recently when Vi called.

“I’m going down there to volunteer,” she said.

I had already heard someone on CNN say that you’d be better off just sending money, but there were so many steps between Vi expressing her plan and boarding a plane to Port-au-Prince that it didn’t seem like I needed to dissuade her.

“Come over,” I said. “Seriously.”

“Stephanie will be here soon.”

“She’s welcome, too.”

“I’m not talking to reporters, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Are reporters calling you?”

“Well, I heard from Emma about ten seconds after the quake. The ground might still have been shaking. But I’m done with the media.”

“Really?” I tried to conceal my relief.

“When I was doing all those interviews, it seemed fun, but the thought of talking to some newspaper columnist now—I mean, they all ask you the same questions over and over, the questions are dumb to begin with, and then they either take what you say out of context or just straight-up misquote you.”

May you always feel exactly as you do now
, I thought. Aloud, I said, “I can see that.”

After I hung up, there was footage on-screen of a collapsed hospital, and a weeping woman outside it was being interviewed, a translator speaking over her in French-accented English. I gestured toward the TV. “I guess this explains why Vi was so insistent about her prediction, if that’s what she was picking up on.”

Jeremy gave me a dubious look. “You’re really convinced her ghost guide mixed up Haiti and St. Louis? The poorest country in the Northern Hemisphere and a declining midwestern city?”

“I don’t think Vi would lie. She doesn’t have much to gain at this point.”

Jeremy was silent, and then he said, “I hope those godforsaken people down there get a fraction of the attention your sister did.”

I hadn’t yet
embarked on my plan, with regard to my father, to train Vi as my replacement—the first step would be to have Vi come along to the grocery store—but it turned out that I never needed to. Two days after the earthquake in Haiti, my father was having lunch at home when an aneurysm in his brain ruptured, causing him to double over with a searing headache. Though he was able to call an ambulance, he wasn’t conscious when the medics arrived, and they had to break down his locked front door. Early that evening, when Jeremy went to my father’s apartment so that neither Vi nor I had to, he found the door hanging from the hinges,
a splattering of vomit on the dining room rug, and the uneaten remains of a turkey sandwich at the table. My father had died five hours earlier, in the ambulance en route to the hospital.

It’s hard to say what would have been a preferable way for him to go, but the lunch alone, the vomit, the fact that he called his own ambulance, then died in pain and among strangers—if I had been choosing for him, certainly I’d have chosen something else. We used the same funeral home he’d used for our mother, and though I initially didn’t want a graveside service—I feared no one would come—Jeremy and Vi persuaded me. Fourteen people showed up, including Jeremy’s mother; we hired Kendra to watch Rosie and Owen. Vi had said she’d write a poem about our father, but as Jeremy and I turned in through the gates of the cemetery, she called my cellphone and said, “I started something, but it seemed really cheesy, so I’m reading the poem Jackie O’s boyfriend read at her funeral.”

“That’s fine.”

“You’ll like it,” Vi said. “It’s classy.”

More irritably than I meant to, I said, “I already told you it’s fine.”

The service lasted ten minutes, during which I thought about how my father had been lonely before meeting my mother, then lonely in a different way after marrying her. But wasn’t I filled with sorrow less for the quiet futility of my father’s life than out of fear that my own children would judge me as harshly as I judged my parents? Was I enough different from my mother and father? I tried to be, but hadn’t I just messed up in other ways?

We hadn’t arranged to have a reception afterward, which felt inhospitable but not inhospitable enough to spontaneously invite everyone back to our house. Instead, we made small talk by the casket, then drove home with Jeremy’s mother, followed by Vi and Stephanie. Jeremy’s mother had come to the cemetery in a taxi from the airport and was flying out the next morning.

No one at the grave site had said anything about Vi’s prediction. Or at least no one had said anything to me.

The following weekend,
Vi and I cleared out our father’s apartment. He wasn’t someone who’d held on to much, which was part of why it was a surprise to find, in the drawer in his bedside table, a letter from a neurosurgeon I’d never heard of dated August 24, 2009, confirming that he had been diagnosed with a cerebral aneurysm and that against the doctor’s advice and in spite of the risks of rupture, including but not limited to subarachnoid hemorrhage or intracranial hematoma, he did not at this time wish to seek further treatment.

I took the letter into the kitchen, where Vi was emptying cabinets. She pointed to a large flat cardboard box on the table. “That’s a really nice skillet, and he never even opened it.”

“Jeremy and I gave it to him.”

“Does that mean you have dibs on it?”

“Keep it. Look at this.” I passed the letter to her and waited while she read it. “Why wouldn’t he have wanted treatment?”

“He was seventy-four, Daze. Maybe he didn’t want to use his remaining time being poked and prodded by doctors.”

“But to not even try—you don’t think he was, like, depressed—”

In a skeptical voice, Vi said, “Do
you
think he was depressed?”

“Not that I noticed, but—”

She shook her head. “Dad was fine. He had all those sexy massages to live for.”

“You never said anything about that, did you?”

Vi rolled her eyes. “No, I didn’t say anything.” She set the letter on top of the skillet box. “Although now I wish I hadn’t let you talk me out of asking him about having senses. You know how he hardly asked us questions about our lives? Do you think it’s because he didn’t need to? Like, he just knew?”

I thought, for the first time in years, of that evening the summer after Vi and I had been in eighth grade, when my father had taken me to get ice cream and told me how he hadn’t enjoyed junior high. “You know what?” I said. “I think he did. Did he know we were the ones cooking dinner all that time? He must have.”

“Did he know I’d grow up to be a big fat dyke?”

“Believe it or not, I think he knew that, too. Did he know Mom would die so young? Or what an unhappy marriage they’d have?”

“They had good times together, Daze. You don’t believe it, but they did. Did I ever tell you that a couple months before she died, I went to Steak ’n Shake one day for lunch and saw them? I walk in, and there the two of them are. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they were definitely talking.”

“Mom was up that early? And eating?” I tried to picture them, my father in a short-sleeved plaid polyester shirt, my excessively skinny, once-pretty mother.

“I decided not to say hi. They looked like they were having a nice lunch, and why disturb them? So I left.”

“Do you think it’s not true that Mom didn’t like Dad?”

Vi puffed out her cheeks, considering the question, then exhaled. “I think Mom didn’t like Mom.” Then she said, “But she didn’t kill herself. Despite what that douchey boyfriend of yours claimed. Wow, I can’t even remember his name.”

“Ben,” I said, and at the same time, Vi said, “Don’t tell me. He doesn’t deserve the space in my brain.” Vi reached for the letter from our father’s doctor and, as I watched, folded it into a paper airplane. When she launched it, it hit the refrigerator before bouncing to the floor. She said, “The fact that he wasn’t jumping for joy all the time doesn’t mean he was miserable. It’s not one or the other. Mom had problems, yeah, but I really don’t think Dad was depressed. He was just a grown-up.”

Although Vi didn’t
end up traveling to Haiti, there was a child, a ten-year-old girl named Ginette who was written about in an Associated Press article that ran in the
Post-Dispatch
, whom Vi became preoccupied with. After losing her mother in the earthquake, Ginette was living in a donated tent with five other children, the youngest of whom was eleven months and the oldest of whom was fifteen. They were sleeping on carpet scraps and foraging for food, and they had intestinal parasites. A pastor
checked on them erratically; the baby lay in filth, covered in flies, and when he fussed, Ginette sang him lullabies.

For a few days, Vi wanted to adopt Ginette; then she wanted to make a donation to the pastor so that he could buy the children uncontaminated food. One afternoon while Rosie and Owen were napping, Vi and I looked online together, trying to figure out how to find the pastor, or at least the reporter who’d written about Ginette and the pastor, but when Jeremy got home, he said what I already knew, what Vi probably knew, too—that it was better to give money to an aid organization. This was what he and I did.