Stay With Me (4 page)

In many ways, I am uniquely qualified to discover why Rebecca has done this.

T
HE PROCESS OF DISCOVERY
is slowed to a grinding halt by all that needs to be done when someone dies. It seems wrong that such an event can be reduced to a series of chores, but there's clearly an ironclad set of rules here. We all line up to follow them.

At Rebecca's memorial service, which seems to take months of planning instead of the actual nine days, both Raphael Barclay and Clare's boyfriend wear the same tie. A black and gold checkerboard pattern masquerading as a splash of muted color. Although Gyula Racz, who has been Clare's big love on and off for five years, is older and better-looking than Raphael, seeing them together makes me think that Clare has a type. I wish I could conjure up her boyfriend before Gyula. The one she lived with for a year and whom Da called a
vile example of humanity.

I was barely eleven when they broke up and simply not paying attention to anything about the woman I thought of as my
other
sister. I just don't know her, I realize now. I can see she's upset because of the death grip she has on Gyula's hand, but has she cried? At Janie's service, Rebecca and Da cried, but not Clare. So where does she go to do it? I wonder.

And, also, does she wonder the same thing about me, or has the distance between us simply grown wider without her noticing? Clare has recently grabbed my attention by leaving me off the list of people surviving Rebecca. Here, wrapped in stories I hardly know, is someone I should have thought to make important. Preferably before she went from being my
other
sister to my
only
one.

We got the programs—an idea I thought really smart at Janie's service and less fitting at this one—last night. Printed on the back, after information regarding
in lieu of flowers,
is
Rebecca Jane Abranel is survived by her father, Julian A. Abranel, her sister, Clare Lucie Abranel, her cousin Raphael Barclay, and her stepmother, Elsa Kent.
It's much worse, in my limited view, that William is not on this list. Divorced for four years maybe, but the service is at William's swanky club right off Park Avenue because-finding available space in the city two weeks before Christmas isn't possible.

Da had a fit that there was no mention of
Leila Gwendolyn Abranel.
I couldn't believe he didn't see it as an accident.

"This is classic Clare," Da said. "Incredibly thoughtless and needlessly hard."

He continued on in this vein for some time until I pointed out the obvious.

"It's not like she did it on purpose," I said. "Clare doesn't know me well enough to dislike me. She's just stressed out."

My mother's not sleeping, Da's nose is bleeding almost every day, and I heard Raphael say he's got a headache no amount of aspirin can touch, so Clare's stress level is more than a guess. Add in some jet lag and it's clear how easy forgetting to put my name on a list might be. But my father didn't see it that way.

He put his head in his hands—he's doing that a lot when his nose isn't bleeding—and said, "That's very kind of you, Leila. You have such a big heart."

Da is always talking about what a big heart I have. At first, I thought it was only something he said when the girls were being particularly difficult, but eventually I came to see that he believed it. Personally, I think that what he calls a big heart is my inability to gather information easily. When you screw up your left and right, see letters backwards, and know you often make mistakes, it's easier to wait and see exactly what's what. Deciding quickly on an answer or conclusion—about anything—makes me wrong more than is already necessary.

It's possible Clare's whole purpose behind the program was to hurt my feelings, but I'd need to know a lot more before I decided that.

Thanks to Raphael and Gyula, I wind up spending most of the service thinking about men's ties. Mostly I think about them—picture them sliding under shirt collars and folding into perfect knots—as a way to avoid thinking about the best way to help my parents. They are going to have to go to Poland. They '11 be gone about a year, but are still unsure of how to ask Clare if I can live with her while they're gone. Mom's not even sure that my living with Clare is a "workable" plan.

It's the only one we have, though, so it has to work.

Last year, my parents were offered positions on a team going to Poland to help create a state-of-the-art teaching hospital in Krakow. At first they were going to bring me along, but what with eleventh grade being so pivotal to college acceptance and my having dyslexia, that option was ruled out. Krakow, apparently, is not crawling with education specialists.

In June, they were still thinking about going and asked Rebecca if she could stay with me (the apartment she shared with Clare was too small for all three of us). I think my parents would leave me alone for a long weekend, but not a year. Rebecca was the clear choice as I'd spent most of fifth grade with her and William while my parents worked at a medical clinic in Africa. Da does a lot of this kind of work, including seven months at a refugee camp in Bosnia. Or in Serbia, but maybe it was Kosovo. Except that was, I think, later.

Keeping straight what happened when during that war is really hard for me. Da thought I wasn't paying attention until Rebecca pointed out that I'd only been six when the Bosnian war began. She told him to get over himself. I thought this was unkind, and to make up for it I started keeping a notebook of things I should know but don't. They're almost always things I overhear or read.

Write it down and figure it out later. That's something I can do.

Anyway, about Krakow Rebecca said, why not, she'd stay with me, but then they decided not to go. I'm pretty sure they will now. I've even told Mom that she should go ahead and call the hospital. Make the arrangements.

"Nothing's been decided yet, Leila," she said.

"He can't go alone," I said. "You have to go with him."

"Of course I do, but it's not, so simple," she said. "Your happiness is important to us."

There was something so wrong about the word
happiness
in this particular conversation that we both fell silent. It was after midnight and it had been days since she'd told me not to stay up so late. I kissed her good-night after deciding I would find a way to help them go to Poland. The problem they have leaving me with Clare hinges on how much she travels, for both work and Gyula. We are in need of a better plan, which is something my mother can usually devise without help.

My father can't stay here. It's out of the question. He can barely get out of bed. And when he can, his time is totally taken up being mad. He's beyond mad, actually. Volcanically angry is more like it.

It turns out that Rebecca didn't make a last-minute decision.

Back in August, she got the drugs she used to kill herself by writing prescriptions with Da's and William's DEA numbers. This did not look good to the police, who were all over their offices. The hospital where they both work is considering an inquiry. There is, in all the questions, the idea that either Da or William gave Rebecca the information she needed.

"She was a hospice nurse," William apparently told the police. "She didn't need any help from us."

The police, or so Da told us, looked at them blankly. One of them flipped his notes back a few pages. "Thought she was a cook."

"Chef," Da corrected him. "Pastry chef. But she had been a hospice nurse."

I love this image of my father trying to improve the police's vocabulary, but the real point of the story, as even I can tell, is that Rebecca planned, for many months, to die. She used her own training against herself. She risked damaging reputations. She turned my father into someone who's exactly split between grief and rage.

I think that the more her death looks unforgivable, the more it seems obvious that she had cause—she had a reason—we haven't yet discovered. The note, which I had been so sure would explain, is of no help. Short, unaddressed, and left open on her desk, all it says is
Don't be sad. I really want to go.

During October, she was in touch with people she hadn't seen in a long time. She even had lunch with William. If she went to the trouble of saying goodbye to everyone, she has to have had reason to leave. Something that made her do it.

I wish there were a way to explain this to Da. I think it would make him feel better to know why she did it, but maybe not. I don't feel better knowing Rebecca had a reason. It's more like I have a huge undone task: finding her story. Her why.

But first. Staring at Raphael and Gyula's ties has focused me. I know how to help my parents ask Clare to let me live with her. I pull William aside after the service, saying I need to talk to him. He takes me to the club's library, off-limits to nonmembers. I tell him about Poland. That my parents will be prevented from going by worrying about me.

"They have to go," I say. "They can't stay here."

"It's, um, well, the worst I've ever, um, seen him," William says, his small, fine hands gesturing into the air for no reason.

William is short and a little roundish and has, Da says, the wrong personality for a surgeon. But the right hands, I guess, because if you need a tumor removed, William's the go-to guy. In spite of his being almost as old as Da, I always have trouble remembering how important William is at the hospital. He never acts like he's a big deal.

"Clare travels a lot," I say. "They won't be able to leave me only with her."

Not to mention she may tell them exactly where to go, but I am banking on Clare needing to feel useful. Since no one can do anything for her, she may be willing to be the one who does for others. Especially if she can split the job with someone else.

"Oh, Leila," William says. "Of course. I told you after the ... you know, when your sister and I, um, well, when we separated. You always have a home with me."

In the library's dim light, I worry that he's about to cry, but probably not. It's been a while since I've been around a grown-up man who isn't weeping.

"I'd do anything, Leila," William says. "Not just for Julian. For you too."

Good. Because there's this one thing. Would he please tell my parents that he'd like to have me stay with him while my sister's away on business?

"It'll sound like a great idea if you bring it up," I say.

"Elsa's worried about leaving you," William says.

"A little," I say. "Yes."

"There will be pressure on them to stay," William says. "But every time he looks at you girls, all he sees is the one who's missing."

"He needs to be working," I say.

I have, over the years, heard Janie, Clare, Raphael, my mother, and most certainly Da talk about work as more than what they do to earn money. Clare is happy working. Mom and Raphael sound as if they feel safe in their labs. Da loves to find out what he still doesn't know about how people both fall sick and get well. Work is where they all go to be who they are.

"Of course he does," William says. "Remember the first thing Janie did when her illness began?"

I nod.

"If I'm working, I can beat this," Janie told my sisters when they tried to keep her from going to Berlin right after finding out she had cancer.

"Leila, he'll be okay," William tells me. "You mustn't let it weigh on you."

"Yes, right," I say, trying to avoid thinking the obvious: Barring accident or disaster, the next memorial service my family organizes will be for my sixty-seven-year-old father.

Da himself has to have sat through Janie's service thinking that he would be next. Now burying Rebecca has made him—made all of us—feel that the end is that much closer.

W
ILLIAM WORKS FAST
and, as far as I can tell, soothes many of my mother's fears about leaving me behind.

I think he spent most of his energy convincing Mom, but even Da takes time from organizing notes and supply lists to listen in on my mother's discussion with me about their departure.

"You don't know Clare very well," Mom says. "It's almost as if you know William better than you know your sister."

I lived with him when I was in the fifth grade. I probably do know him better.

"Elsa, that's not right," Da says. "The girls love Leila."

The girls. I try sending my mother
be quiet
signals. This is just too hard for him. I look at Da, saying that I'll be fine, of course I'll be fine. It's easier for me, I say, meaning easier than for Clare and him. Rebecca was my sister, yes, but not in a daily way. More like a special treat sister. I miss her, but not the way you'd miss air.

"A special treat," Da says, his voice and face both revealing that he hardly knows what he's saying. "I like that, a special treat."

He's an easier sell because he really has to go. He'll see what he needs to, and I was kind of counting on that. Mother's another story.

I like my mother. She's fair and reasonable and, when she chooses, funny. If I'd rather be like Janie, it's not because there's anything wrong with Mom. She wears pants she's had since medical school and really expensive jackets over men's shirts that are too big. She's as tall as I am (as Janie was) and her shoes, which have no heels, never look comfortable or stylish.

I like it that before my father, my mother's great love was her work and that what caught her attention was that Da needed her. This isn't anything she's told me, of course. But anyone could take the facts of my father's two marriages and put a story together. I may have put the story together incorrectly, but it's the one I like best. Mother helped Da use the pieces he had from his first life and they've built a whole new thing.

When the old thing (by which I mean Janie, Rebecca and Clare) bumps into her new thing, Mother makes it fairly smooth. So when she comes into my room as I am dressing to go out with Ben and says she wants to talk, I try to be as much like her as possible. She is, after all, someone who can build or fix almost anything.

"Let's assume Clare agrees to this," Mom says, getting right to the critical question.