The Good Sister (25 page)

Thirty-Six

Rachel

I thought saying it out loud would help, but it doesn't. I thought seeing Asha hate me, despise me, know me for the horrible person I am, would start to set things right. But instead I see that I am only crushing her too. She doesn't have the strength to hate me the way I need to be hated. She's already broken.

I stare out the door that Asha has slammed. After a minute or two or three, my phone buzzes, and I see through the shattered glass on the screen that it's David sending me a text:
I left a package of your stuff in the mailbox. I guess this is good-bye
. I throw the phone against the door. It breaks into pieces and falls to the floor.

I stand up and go to the door, lock it. I go to the front door and lock it too. I am alone here now, and I hate this house. I have hated it ever since our dad moved out. It reminds me of everything bad that has ever happened. I wander from room to room, not sure what I'm looking for. In Lena's room, the curtains are pulled aside and light from a streetlamp pours in. The bed is unmade, and I sit down on it, where I can smell the faintest scent of Lena, something that once comforted me. The sheets are pale green and soft, Egyptian cotton. Expensive sheets, because Lena spares no expense on herself. I try to remember the last time I ever slept in her bed. It had to have been before Sarah got sick. I was little, had a nightmare, and crawled in with her, between her and dad, and felt safe there.

Some part of me wishes I could do that now. I want Lena—the old Lena—to hold me tight and make me feel safe again. This is the stupidest thing I could ever think, because she is long past seeing me as one of her children, as someone to take care of. I learned long ago that if I wanted to survive, I would have to take care of myself.

On her nightstand is a book of Buddhist meditations, with a piece of yellow paper sticking out. I open the book to the marked page, and on the paper is scrawled Ron's phone number and address. She has only been with him a few months, and already she is rearranging her life, pushing us away to allow space for him, pretending our past didn't happen.

That's probably where she is right now—with him, making sure he doesn't forget her before they say their vows of for better or for worse and all that. She's at that age where she knows she won't be attractive to men much longer. She's still pretty, but so many younger women, girls like me, are waiting to take her place.

I go into Lena's bathroom and open the medicine cabinet, where bottles of Percocet and Vicodin—Mother's Little Helpers—wait in their orange prescription bottles. I take the Vicodin bottle, open it, and fill a glass with water. I should have a more creative idea than this, but I dread the thought of pain. I don't have Sarah's courage to dive off the nearest cliff I can find. I just want right now, more than anything else, to go to sleep and not wake up.

The crazy thing is, I miss Sarah. I want to go wherever she is, be there with her in the nothingness. Why did it take my sister's dying for me to realize I love her?

My whole family had been shaped by the ugly deformity that comes from knowing a young person is about to die. Life reveals itself then to be the unfair, cruel, relentless joke that it is. When our family first found out about Sarah's leukemia, I didn't understand for a long time. I remember being vaguely titillated by the drama of it, even wishing I were the center of that drama. Life, I thought at first, was made all the more meaningful by big stuff happening, like death.

In a way, my first instinct had been right. But that wasn't the only truth.

I carry the pills and the glass of water into my bedroom because I don't want the scene of my last moments to be in Lena's dingy, orange seventies bathroom. I want to be in my own bed.

I lean against some pillows, sitting up so I can down a few pills at a time, gulping water between each palmful of pills. Maybe thirty are in the bottle. Enough to do the job, I hope.

When I've taken all the pills, I hide the bottle under the bed so that no one will see it right away and call an ambulance. Better if they think I'm just sleeping and leave me alone. I'm not one of those lame, half-assed suicidal girls who just wants to be found, to get lots of attention, to have my “cry for help” heard.

This is not a cry for help. Let's be clear on that, at least. My death may not be as dramatic as Sarah's, but we have already established that between us three sisters, I am not the good sister, or the brave sister, or the strong sister. I am the cowardly one.

Asha

When I am halfway to Sin's house, the shock of Rachel's words has started to wear off, and I begin to accept that what she's told me is true. It makes more sense than I want to admit. Sarah had grown quiet, I think, in the weeks after that hit-and-run. I thought it was just one of her withdrawn periods that she went through now and then, but now I see what it must have been.

I try to imagine how horrible and alone she must have felt, but my anger at her for not telling me what was going on gets in the way. Then I think how she would never have wanted to burden me with such an awful secret, and I know exactly what she was going through. Sarah always tried to be the big sister, even when she was the one who needed caring for.

Unlike Rachel.

Rachel. Stupid, selfish, vindictive …

And yet, she told me the truth. She sounded sorry.

Sorrier than I've ever heard her sound.

I shouldn't have left her like that. I shouldn't have left at all, not now. It's not what Sarah would have done.

I turn around and go back.

Thirty-Seven

Sarah

What does forever look like?

If you vanish from the earth but are still a part of the universe, what does that mean?

Do you wonder?

My whole life I wondered, how do we know the difference between reality and a dream?

And what if our dreams are a window into another world, an afterlife that exists even as we live?

As if I have been trapped in a nightmare and begin to awaken, a world starts to take shape around me. It is a universe of my own making, a place of dreams and memory.

No longer am I suspended in that white, San Francisco fog of a dream.

I begin to sense myself becoming.

Becoming what, I don't know. Not at first. I only know I am lying in a bed in a dark, familiar room, and bright light pours in from a window nearby. From where I lie, I can see blue sky, and my heart leaps at the idea that perhaps …

Perhaps it was all just a terrible dream.

Perhaps I have been made new by that hellish sleep, given a second chance to do it all again. To live a life illuminated by the mistakes I almost made.

I sit up and a familiar cover falls away. It is a pale blue blanket I loved as a child, a blanket that feels a lifetime apart from me. I grasp its satin edge and marvel at the presence of it for a moment, before turning my attention to the rest of me, whole again.

Or perhaps always whole. Perhaps still the Sarah who almost jumped but didn't.

I am wearing the blue tunic I bought at Second Chance, the local thrift shop. Bloodstains streak the front of the top, marring its once-delicate perfection, and I only observe this, feeling no sense of its ultimate meaning. It is blood I recognize, but I simply note its presence.

The room too I begin to recognize. It is the bedroom I shared with my sisters in the earliest years of my memory, right before we left the commune. On the wall is a small painting of a bird that feels like a fossil of the girl I once was. My heart aches now to see it.

In the far corner is Rachel's bed, and just to my left, Asha's crib, with its giraffe-print sheets. Neither of them is here though. I am alone in the room, and I have a feeling I should be getting up, finding someone now.

I stand up and marvel at the fact of my body. I am whole. My chest moves in and out with each breath. My limbs feel strong and whole.

Here I am. Wherever this is.

I go to the door, then down a hallway I remember only vaguely, passing one closed door after another. I feel only slight curiosity about what I might find behind each door, because the one I am truly interested in is straight ahead. It's the front door of the trailer that my family once shared with another family.

I grasp the cool brass handle and turn it, memories dancing at the edge of my mind of other times I opened this door long ago.

Outside, the light is blindingly bright, so bright that at first I can't see.

I squint and cover my eyes, waiting for them to adjust to the brightness, and after a few moments, I can see that I am, perhaps, on the ranch where our commune was once located. It is more of a desert than I remember, but some buildings are familiar.

The more I look around, trying to orient myself, the more I see that the ranch is eerily different from the one I recall. Not different in big ways, but in little things. Aside from the stark, flat desert landscape, the buildings are neglected, dingy, suffering from what looks to be many years of abandonment.

I move without any sense of deciding to do so, my bare feet stepping on the hot, dry, cracked earth without feeling any pain.

The sound of a badly played guitar disturbs my thoughts, and I look to see a figure hunched over a guitar, sitting under a tree across the long, wide courtyard.

The tree has no leaves and therefore provides no shade from the harsh sun. It is a gnarled, old mission fig tree that I remember vaguely having eaten fruit from as a kid. No fruit here now.

And since when do figs grow in the desert?

As I come closer to the figure, I realize he is the person I am here to see.

It's Brandon.

I halt in my tracks, but he looks up and spots me before I can think what I will do or say. He seems to recognize me instantly.

He stops torturing the guitar and waves me over. I close the distance between us, trying to think what would be appropriate conversation, but before I can speak, he does.

“Do I know you?”

“Not really.” I'm surprised at the sound of my voice, which emerges without my having willed myself to speak.

He squints up at me, as if trying to place my face in his memory.

“You're the girl who was driving the car, aren't you?”

His voice has a soft, gravelly quality, and his eyes … I finally get to see what they look like. Gray-blue, they remind me of the ocean where I spent my final moment of life. They contrast with his golden skin and blond hair in such a way that makes them almost startling to behold. He is beautiful.

I'm sorry I ran over you
comes to mind as perhaps what I should say next, but it seems ridiculously inadequate.

He looks much more alive than he did the last time I saw him. He is whole. Intact. Not exactly alive, but here with me. And we are whatever we are together.

“Yeah,” I say. “That's me.”

“Hi,” he says, not smiling, but not looking hostile either.

“I…” My words freeze in my throat.

“Yeah, I know. It was an accident, right?” He doesn't seem angry, but …

“I'm sorry.”

“It happens.”

“Yeah.”

“This is awkward.”

No kidding.

Slowly, I sit down beside him on the dusty ground.

I notice bloodstains are on his clothes too. They're dried to a brownish color, just like the stains on my shirt.

“How long have you been here?” I ask him.

He shrugs, looks down at his guitar, which I notice now has two broken strings, but isn't crushed the way it was at the side of the road. Maybe it's a different guitar. Yes, it must be. Guitars don't travel into the afterlife, right? But then, why would our clothing come with us?

None of this makes any logical sense.

“No idea,” he finally says. “It's not very easy to keep track of time here.”

I wonder why we are in my past—the ranch—and not his. Does he see the same surroundings I do?

He plucks at the guitar, which is completely out of tune. “I used to be able to play this thing.”

Not sure what to say, I cross my hands in my lap and study him. He is the first dead person I've gotten to see up close in this … wherever we are.

“So how did you die?” he asks.

“Suicide.”

A hot wind blows my hair into my face, and I push it back from my eyes. Nearby, a couple wanders between buildings, arguing about something. The woman looks as if she's about to cry.

“Why'd you kill yourself?” he asks.

I shrug, not sure what to say. Will he be flattered if I admit it's because of him? Or will I just sound like an idiot? And does it even matter what I sound like now?

“Guilt?” I murmur, half hoping he won't hear and won't ask again.

“About?”

“Oh, you know, running over an innocent hitchhiker. Stuff like that.”

“You shouldn't have killed yourself on account of me. I mean, no sense in both of us being dead, right?”

I stare at him, utterly without a response. He can't possibly be for real, and yet, he looks serious.

He strums the guitar one last time, then sets it aside. “This thing got trashed in the wreck when you hit me.”

I take another look at it and see that the body of the instrument indeed has been crushed and awkwardly repaired with duct tape. So there are adhesive products in the afterlife?

The shirt he was wearing was this stained shirt he has on now. The jeans, they're the same too. Against the tree leans the same grungy, green backpack he'd been carrying that night. What's in it, I wonder, that's so important he still has it now?

“So … this place, wherever we are. You can't get a guitar fixed here?”

“You don't know where we are?”

“You
do
?”

He laughs. “My family's Catholic. Of course I know where we are—purgatory.”

I frown at this. “I don't believe in purgatory.”

“You don't have to believe in it to be here. You can call it whatever you want, but we sure as hell aren't at the pearly gates of heaven.”