Burning September (2 page)

How else would I have been able to pay for college?
was her rationale, and quite right—our father made next to nothing at his mechanic gig, and clogged arteries accented by a pickled liver did him in a month into her first semester.

Boyfriends throughout college almost always had connections to publishers, photographers, magazines, or better yet, richer fathers, and she soon made enough money through those introductions to break off the affairs.  And even after all that, the bulk of them remained hung-up on her.  A few stood outside our condo some nights, texted incessantly, called at all hours.

They’ll move on
, she’d say through delicate sips of herbal tea, pecking at her laptop keyboard. 
Men always do.

I never bought that.  There was a damn good reason Mr. Brown wrote a centimeter-thick letter a month.   

Kat
, she said, smiling in fond dismay after my curious teenaged questions concerning her ethics. 
This isn’t a television show.  There’s no need to infuse myself with false virtue to get an audience to like me.  They only make ‘hero’ characters that way for ratings.  That’s why they’re
characters
.  Real life isn’t like that.  Nobody’s all good, all bad, and everyone gets used at one time or another; that’s how people get ahead.  How many of those guys do you think used a handful of girls apiece to get their rocks off?  All of them.  And I don’t feel bad if they wind up with wounded little feelings for a nanosecond.  I can guaran-fucking-tee you they never spent a moments’ thought on anyone
they’ve
dicked over.  If anything, I’m just a blip on their radar.
And then she’d slit the tab on her most recent Mr. Brown dissertation and disappeared behind the wad of paper. 

How could I not agree after all I’d been witness to concerning men?  Our own father was a philanderer.  Such was our mother’s pain that she allegedly killed herself over it.  Caroline had seen her wither away, remembered more of it, having been eleven.  The only images I have of that time from my three year olds’ memory are close-up slideshows of creped muscle tissue sagging on her arms, eyes that seemed incapable of blinking, and the smell of scorched earth stuffed in my nostrils from wildfires smoldering behind our apartment complex in the Hollywood hills.     

OCTOBER

And now, sitting in the cramped living room, I knew what it felt like to be truly alone.  Our parents were gone, both dead, reduced to ashes in mosaic vases on the mantel above our fake fireplace, but Caroline had always been my constant.  All I had of her now were rambling voicemails I couldn’t bring myself to delete and her bizarre decorating schemes. 

I’m thinking inside of a circus tent meets Russian opium den.  No, don’t give me that look, not
ugly
circus with primary colors and elephant shit—like satin-lined walls, and some draped over the ceiling.  To make it look like the inside of a tent, you know?  Soft pinks and cream.  And little spindly end tables with apothecary things on top; even dusty it’d look awesome in an antique sort of way.  Big poufy couch and quilted ottomans with crystals all over them.  Hey, and maybe those door separator thingies made of beads, like the one Mom had?  Except not as tacky. 

Uh, sure,
had been my response. 
But that sounds expensive. 

Nah, we’ll hit thrift stores and whatnot, maybe make some of the crap on our own.  You need a project.  Idle hands, you know.  I’m resourceful.  Always find a way. 

And it was true, she always did, exempting her current predicament.  She’d made a case to a judge to keep me out of foster care after our dad died, became both mother and father to a ten-year-old girl at the tender age of eighteen.  She’d been my only real parent anyway, the judge noted.  Alcoholic fathers were never the best ones, and foster care wasn’t far behind them in the grand scheme of things.

Obstacles had always seemed to melt at her touch.  After twenty-five years they decided to teach her an important lesson in a big way. 

Sitting there in a stupor, gaze boring holes through a photograph on the wall that netted Caroline a few awards and freelance gigs, I had to wonder if having been tasked with the job of raising me contributed to any of this.  If she’d been a normal eighteen-year-old, she’d have learned about unrequited love and loss.  She’d have had a few friends to discuss it with, long bouts of verbally abusing the bitch who stole her boyfriend, and eventually learned to cope with that thing called rejection.  Everyone else on earth was well acquainted with broken hearts and the eventual moving on, but she’d missed that class since she’d been too busy making macaroni and cheese for her little sister.  She’d chosen me in lieu of bar-hopping and girls’ night, opted for bedtime stories and Disney movies.  No wonder she hated our father; look at what he’d done to her?

***

There was one huge difference I noticed upon entering the visitor’s room of the facility: the powers that be had decided it was safe to remove Caroline’s restraints.  They were unnecessary from the start.  The only person she’d been a danger to had been dead for three weeks.

Florescent lights, normally so unflattering, poured over my sister standing in the center of the room, pale blue scrubs sagging around her like a melting iced cake.   

She broke into a jog and threw her arms around me.  The only time she’d hugged me tighter was when we were newly orphaned and she’d dropped me off for my first day of fifth grade. 

“I missed you,” she said when she pulled back with a luminous smile.  I echoed her, and she sat on the couch, dragging me down next to her by both hands.

It was amazing how vibrant she could be when surrounded by the other dead-eyed patients.  Breakthrough Recovery Center was not where she belonged.  Anybody who saw her would have said it.  Except Detective Slater; he’d say she belonged in a two-man cell. 

“Have you been keeping up with your classes?” she asked, arranging my hair around my shoulders.  Her pupils whizzed between mine, sized me up in a blink, intuitive as ever.  A stark contrast between the eyes of her fellow lunatics.

“Yeah.”

She snorted, an overgrown hank of hair ruffling.  “That doesn’t sound convincing.  School’s important.  I hope you’re not blowing it off.”

I hadn’t been blowing it off.  Every day I’d shown up.  My body, anyway.  “I’ve got a class in two hours.  I’m heading there after this.”

“I don’t want this mess to affect your grades.”  She rubbed both thumbs beneath my eyes.  “I can tell it’s been affecting your sleep.”

I’d never been good at sleeping.  She knew that as well as I did, since she was the same way.  

“I’m glad you’re here, though.  There’s a few things I need to go over with you.  You have my debit cards, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.  The landlord automatically debits my account for rent, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“It will be when the account runs dry.”  Breakthrough didn’t offer work-release programs, and I doubted the magazines she wrote for would be dying to run an in-depth piece on insane asylums. 

“That won’t happen.”

I arched an eyebrow.  Maybe she
was
insane, forgetting how money and debit accounts worked.  “Caroline, you’re not going to be out of here in a month.  Even if they release you, they’ll send you straight over to jail.  I’m not a little girl anymore.  I can handle this.  I’ll get a job.”

“It’s handled.  Your job is school.”

“Well, I can do both.” 

“I don’t want you doing both.  School needs all of your effort and attention.”

I leaned forward, turning my head so she wouldn’t see my eye roll, and rested my elbows on my knees.  “You’re not my mother.”

“I might as well have been.”  She snapped her fingers in front of my face so I’d look at her.  “You’re not getting some bullshit dead-end minimum wage job.  There’s no need, and you’re under enough stress as it is.”

Is that what you’d call this oxygen-less freak show?  Stress?  I always thought it was something only bored housewives complained about. 

Stress
was as good a descriptor as any, though.  The enormity of the issue at hand and all the variables that would crop up as its bastard children would certainly cause some discomfort. Or
stress
. 

Stress
.  The word felt foreign, twisting on my tongue. 
Stress
. 

Whenever I learned a new word when I was little, I’d write it over and over.  Bunny bunny bunny bunny.  Caroline would feed me reams of paper to continue my written repetition. 

Suddenly I couldn’t believe I’d said she wasn’t my mother. 

“Do you ever regret it?”

“What, school?”  Her eyebrows contracted.  “Not for a second.”

“No.”  I ran a hand over my face.  “Do you regret
me
.  Being forced to take care of me when there were plenty of better things to be doing.”

A shocked Caroline isn’t one I’m used to seeing, but she recovered in a second.

“That is literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, and—” she inclined her head at the guy who passed his days screaming about ferrets, banging his head against walls, “—I hear Mr. Ferret’s crap 24/7.  Nobody
forced
me.  Foster care was never an option.  I wasn’t going to lose you to the system.” 

She waited for a few beats.  Expecting some kind of response, but I couldn’t dream one up. 

“Where is this coming from?”

“I don’t know.  You had so much responsibility so young.  I wondered if you hadn’t gotten the chance to experience normal dating and stuff people your age do.  Your whole life’s been about taking care of me.  And maybe you couldn’t get over your first broken heart because you’d never learned how.”

Her lips twitched from side to side before settling into a deep frown accented by narrowed eyes.  “I’m only going to tell you this once, so you need to hear me.  You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.  Brian was the worst.  I didn’t do it because he broke my heart.  I did it because he was an asshole who deserved it.”

Did he?  I wasn’t his biggest fan, but he taught me how to play guitar.  That counted for something. Of course he could have taught me simply to win points with Caroline, but why quibble?

Pointing out that in my personal opinion he absolutely broke her heart didn’t seem politic.

“His whole life he’d treated all women like shit.  Lying, cheating, juggling four at a time.  Not to mention the drug-dealing side business.  He had skeletons, you’d better fucking believe it.”

“That’s your plan?  You’re going to tell the jury he deserved it because he cheated on you and sold some weed?”

“That’s for a lawyer to decide.”

Yeah, right.  When hers actually made time to see her.

***

Waiting lists for college classes are something equivalent to a bottomless abyss.  You could spend eternity on one, but then I suppose when your sister is accused of a salacious murder it would tend to shunt you to the top.  Especially when that sister had been a favorite student of the Department of Arts head. 

Valerie Rasmussen had emailed personally rather than an auto message informing me of the good news—I’d been granted a reprieve from Waiting List Purgatory. 

Art teachers are an odd breed.  The bulk of those I’d been around were everything one would imagine a hippy getting on in years to be.  Matted hair grown long, more often than not sporting grease buildup at the roots.  No makeup; art materials might smear it.  Lopsided eyeglasses, attached to a groovy neck chain.  Not least, the air of a lecturing blowhard; someone who’s
been there, done that, probably done it better,
and
my my, you kids these days
. 

I couldn’t tell if it was a good thing Professor Rasmussen was none of the above.  With the looks of an aging soap star, sleek hair, and smart suit, she beckoned from behind the desk as I knocked on her open office door, cutting over my introduction.  “Katya, right?  Caroline’s sister?”

Of course it was never simply
Katya, right
?  Caroline always got a mention. 

“
Kat
is fine.”

“You look a lot like her.  I’m glad you stopped by.” 

I dithered in the doorway, fingering the strap of my backpack.  “I figure it’s not every day you get off a wait list.  Thanks for that.”  Though the jury was still out on her motives. 

She closed the thick datebook she’d been flicking through.  “Caroline meant a lot to me.  She’s a very talented artist; you always remember the gifted students.  Sweet, too.  A very nice girl.”  Sure, she was sweet.  Sweet like antifreeze.  “And you were one of her favorite subjects.  A lot of her pieces and projects had something to do with you.  That photograph of you with the tarot cards got her a lot of attention.  More than she normally got, even, which certainly says something.  I have a copy of it hanging in my classroom.” 

I don’t even remember Caroline taking that picture, but it must have been the first time we went to the fair.  The sun had begun its descent behind the mountains, and smoke curled in the air from an out-of-focus bonfire.  I had my little girl legs crossed as I sat alone in a deserted stretch of swaying bleach blonde grass on a violet swath of velvet that frayed at the edges.  My hair dripped over my shoulders, my hand cupped my chin as I considered the complicated tarot spread in front of me.  I’m sure my thoughts were along the lines of
uhh, what?
but luckily it didn’t come across in the photograph.

She gestured for me to sit in the chair across from her.  “Did you know she didn’t title it originally?  The photo of you?  She’d called it
Untitled
for months before I finally put my foot down.”

“Yeah.  It’s still in our living room.”  My backpack slithered to the floor with a dull
thud
as I sat.  “Is she the reason you wanted to see me?  You couldn’t find a way to contact her, or something?”

She sat back in her chair, gazing over the pen she fiddled with, letting the silence stretch further than was comfortable.  “She’s partly the reason.  Let’s just call it a mixture of general concern and maternal instinct.  I know a lot about your history, yours and Caroline’s.  You can’t have many people to lean on, given the circumstance.  I imagine it’s been rough going.”

Or
stressful
. 

“Well, it hasn’t been fun.”

Blue eyes considered me beneath knitting brows.  I’m not sure what she was looking for in my face, but I was plenty certain she wouldn’t find it. 

“I helped her win custody of you after your father died,” she said, after another long bout of dead air.  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an overwhelmed eighteen-year-old.”  She traced the contours of her pen with a fingertip.  “I wondered for a moment if
what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
was entirely accurate.  It looked like she’d fall to pieces at any second.”

Nice as it was to see my back-then sister through the lens of someone else’s gaze, I couldn’t tell why she’d decided to invite over only to drag me down memory lane.  Sure, Caroline had thought a lot of Professor Rasmussen, but she’d also taught me her own brand of paranoia, and never to trust implicitly.  Gather information first; make an educated guess later.