The Good Sister (16 page)

Standing alone together in the kitchen, only a few feet apart, I am aware all of a sudden of how many times we've been closer, lying in bed with our bodies touching, even. During those times, I felt the sort of closeness I had with Sarah. Comfortable, intimate, like a favorite sweater. But now I see there was always something more, a little twinge of energy beneath that comfort.

My mind skims over the idea but won't settle on it. I feel it now, that spark of heat, not like any other feeling I have known.

Sin, with his hard stare, his arms crossed over his paint-stained, gray sweatshirt, is having none of it. “You smell like chocolate.” It's an accusation.

I remember the last Snickers bar still clutched in my hand. It must be goo by now. I hold it out. “For you.”

He eyes it and makes a face. “It's not even shaped right.”

“It melted.”

He sighs heavily. “Tristan was bribing you with his private stash, wasn't he?”

Busted.

“No,” I lie. “He was just sharing. While I waited for you to get back.”

“I bet that's not all he shared.”

“Actually, it is.” I hold out the Snickers again.

“I don't want your old, melted candy bar.”

He turns and heads for his room, and I follow him. I see on the door that the kitten poster is gone now, replaced by one of killer robots.

“What happened to the kittens?”

“The robots killed them.” He starts to close the door in my face.

“Sin, please, wait.” I stick my hand between the door and its frame so he can't close it all the way.

Through the crack, he glares at me.

“Will you go with me, tomorrow?” I say, playing my final card. If this doesn't soften him, nothing will. “To the spot?”

He knows which spot I mean.

The hardness in his eyes softens a bit, or maybe it's my imagination. For a long, painful stretch, he says nothing.

“Okay,” he finally says, annoyance lingering in his tone.

I breathe a sigh of relief. “Do you think your mom would let you borrow her van? Maybe in the morning?”

“I'll just take it before she gets up. Ten o'clock?”

I nod. “Thank you.”

In the old days, he would have invited me into his room. I would have spent the night. We would have lain awake taking sips of contraband whiskey and speculating about the sex lives of our classmates.

But something fundamental has changed between us, and I'm afraid things aren't going to be like they used to be anymore.

“I'd better go,” I say, wishing I could stay and knowing I can't, even if he did invite me.

I can't stick around, smelling of chocolate, seeing stars whenever I close my eyes, knowing Tristan is right in the next room, possibly wanting me. And all with Sin right here, stirring up feelings I don't know what to name.

So I go. It's painful, and I don't want to be at home, but I have to be anywhere but here.

Twenty-Three

Rachel

I can't stop thinking about all the ways Sarah was brave and I am not. She is really gone now. There is no more of her sitting in the next room, her ghost appearing to me every time I see that damn urn, because the urn is empty now.

But her ghost is maybe still here.

I don't believe in ghosts, but then again maybe I should.

I am haunted as fuck.

That's what I am.

It's becoming clearer to me by the day, because I cannot sleep anymore. I don't want to eat. I just want something to happen that will obliterate my memory.

Or me.

Either one.

Because I apparently don't have the guts to do it myself.

Maybe that's the lack of sleep talking. I have never been the suicidal type. Yet having Krishna leave me standing alone on the street in the middle of the freaking night, and scattering my sister's ashes tonight … it's like all signs point to life as I know it ending.

And what's a girl to do with depressing signs like that?

So when it is four in the morning and I'm still not asleep, I instead find myself thinking about Krishna. I sit in bed with my laptop and do an Internet search of his name and the meditation center. I find the center's website, which has a lame-ass bio page for each of its instructors, including him. In his photo, he smiles out at the camera in that way he has, as if he is peace itself.

His bio says the same kind of stuff he has already told me, only less detailed and more fakey-fake, so I click back to the results page and look for anything else juicier that I might find about him in less official places. Like, do Buddhist monks have Facebook pages?

He doesn't, but I find an interview of him on some punk-rock Buddhism website, which seems like a ridiculous contradiction if you ask me, but nobody has. The interview has a couple more pictures of him—one in which he's sitting on a tree stump looking off into the distance, and another of him laughing as he stands in front of a class of meditators.

I stare at him, try to burn those images into my memory. Something is seriously wrong with me because I think I'm falling in love with a guy who has no interest in having sex with me, or anyone else.

How could this go anywhere interesting?

I read the interview, which is mostly about how Krishna credits his recovery from his addiction on his spiritual practice, and how he works a lot with recovering addicts, and how he struggles to stay true to his Buddhist values with blah blah blah …

I stop reading, but then I force myself to go back and pay attention to every last word because I have to know more about this guy who has me up all night and not giving a rat's ass about the other two guys in my life.

Then I find a few other references to him online. Like he was part of a peaceful protest at San Quentin for some guy who was wrongly imprisoned for something, and he is listed in a
Marin IJ
article as a volunteer tutor in a new program for some crappy school in Marin City where the kids don't have books or whatever.

So as far as I can tell, he is exactly what he says he is; not the kind of guy I should be interested in.

Someone to be left the fuck alone.

So why do I want to do anything but?

When I look at the clock again, it's nearly 5:00 a.m. Don't monks get up at the butt crack of dawn to meditate?

I want to see him right now. Seized with a burst of crazy energy, I get up and go downstairs. By some miracle, Lena's car is in the driveway, and her keys are hanging on the little hook by the door. All I have to do is get in the car and go, and I could be at the meditation center in like fifteen minutes.

So I go.

I don't think about it. Don't do anything to my hair or even change my clothes. I don't even have a reason for going, exactly.

The dawn light is just starting to change the sky in the east, but it's mostly dark out. Streetlights are still on, and the town isn't up and moving yet as I drive west. I don't have any kind of plan, and nothing occurs to me as I drive in my sleep-deprived stupor. I don't know how I will find Krishna once I get there, and I don't know what I will say if I find him.

The only thing I know for sure is that I want to see him again.

When I park in the lot closest to the main building, I sit in the car for a moment in a sleep-deprived stupor, and it finally occurs to me that I'm losing my mind. Sane girls don't go out searching for Buddhist monks at five in the morning.

Maybe it's not a question of sanity, though, so much as it is a need to fill up the big empty-ass space I feel inside. Or to crowd out the ugly facts of Sarah's death that won't stop screaming at me every time I let my guard down.

Nothing is sacred anymore.

I'm not even sure what the word
sacred
exactly means, except when I think of life in the commune, which I can barely remember, I remember a feeling of peacefulness. Life made sense. We had a purpose. We knew the rules of the game we were playing.

None of that is true anymore. There aren't any rules, or if there are, no one has told them to me. I don't know of anything or anyone worth believing in, and I'm not sure about the whole question of God.

Is there a God? If so, after what happened with Sarah, I'm definitely going to hell.

I only know that when I'm with Krishna, that feeling of hollowness starts to go away.

Sacred … the word, the idea, whatever … maybe it applies to him somehow.

But I will have to get out of the car to find out, so I do.

I recall seeing a row of dorm buildings down the path a little way. I hear a few cows lowing in the pasture at the bottom of the hill, but that's pretty much the only sound.

I am never awake at this time of day, unless it's to come home from partying, and by then I'm always too trashed to notice the peacefulness of dawn or any crap like that.

Just as I make my way up the path from the parking lot, I see two people walking up ahead, toward the main building. The one on the left looks my way, and it is Krishna. After saying something to the other person, he breaks off and heads in my direction.

When we meet halfway on the path, he smiles. “What a nice surprise. I was hoping you might show up.”

“You were hoping I'd show up
today
? Before dawn?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

He has to be bullshitting me. But this is Krishna, and I don't think he does that sort of thing.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I was a jerk to you.”

“You had a hard weekend.”

It is so good to see him, but I can't think what else to say. He is wearing his orange sarong again, with another white shirt, this one with red embroidery along the collar. It seems a little fancy for monk clothes, but what do I know?

His hair is pulled back in a little ponytail, and he somehow manages to look not at all tired at this ridiculous hour of the morning.

“Have you been up meditating all night or something?”

“Just for the past hour.”

“Where are you going now?”

“Early-morning group meditation. Care to join us?”

I feel awkward now. I guess I was hoping I'd have him all to myself for a while. I am definitely not in the mood to face a group of happy Buddhists, but I don't want to say that.

“Is something wrong that you're not telling me?”

I shrug, hoping like hell I don't start crying.

“You scattered your sister's ashes.” He places a hand on my arm. “Would you like to talk about it?”

Another shrug.

I think of how Catholics have confession, a little anonymous booth where they can sit and spill all their sins. Maybe that's why I've come to see Krishna—to confess to him my sins, of which there are many. I want his goodness to rub off on me, to somehow wash me clean.

I feel filthy inside.

“I can have someone else lead the meditation session. Come up to the center with me and I'll get that taken care of.”

I say nothing, but follow him up the path. A couple of cars are pulling into the lot now, the first to arrive for the class, I guess. What kind of crazy people show up here this early in the morning to meditate? Can't they do that at home?

But I'm here too, and with no real purpose, so who's crazier?

I wait next to the reception desk, still with its job posting taped to the counter, while Krishna talks to a gray-haired, hippie-looking woman about her taking over the meditation session this morning, and moments later he is leading me toward I don't know where.

“Would you like some breakfast?” he asks as we pass the cafeteria.

“No thanks.” I'm afraid I'll puke if I put anything in my stomach right now.

He leads me back outside, where the sun is just starting to peek over the horizon. Up on the hill, we have a great view of the sunrise, a slight band orange blazing in the far distance.

“I'll show you one of my favorite places on earth,” he says as we walk along a path that leads away from the center, toward the woods.

I feel oddly wired, my body buzzing from lack of sleep, my brain hyperalert. I notice every little thing, from the cacophony of the birds calling in the trees, to the feel of the crisp air on my skin, to the spongy texture of the ground where redwood leaves fall again and again. When we enter the woods, it's much darker, and I can barely see where we are going.

Krishna takes my hand to guide me. The contact, innocent as it is, makes me crazed with his not wanting me in any of the ways I want him. He keeps holding my hand until we come to a clearing, where a perfect circle of redwoods stands.

“It's a fairy ring,” he says when we are standing in the middle of it. “When one redwood died, these trees formed sprouts from the dead tree stump.”

I think of Sarah, of course. Our family isn't exactly sprouting new life from the remains of my fallen sister, and I wonder if it would even be possible for something good to come from all the crappiness that's happened.

“Look up,” Krishna says, and I do.

Above us, the pointed tops of the redwoods form a circle. The sun blazes over the horizon somewhere beyond the woods, and a ray of light pierces the forest darkness, glistening on the branches of the redwoods. I feel dizzy, standing here looking up, exhausted, wired, aching, wanting things I can't have.

I start to lose my balance, and Krishna grasps my arms before I fall. He leads me to a tree stump, where we sit down.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

“The only way you'll get through this is to go through it.”

“What?”

“Have you ever heard that saying that the only way around a problem is through it?”

“No.”

“It's the same with grief. You have to let yourself be in it, sit with it, feel it.”

“I just got dizzy from not sleeping.”

“And you're not sleeping because your sister is dead.”

“If only it were that simple,” I say before I even realize the words are exiting my mouth.