My Sister's Prayer (5 page)

Just don't trust her,
said the voice in my head.
Bond, yes. Love, yes. Trust, no.

I whispered a quick prayer, fully aware that taking Nicole in could turn out to be either a tremendous blessing or the biggest mistake of my life.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

Maddee

I
woke Thursday morning to the sound of rain tapping against my bedroom window. The pitter-patter made me want to pull up my blankets and sleep some more. A glance at the clock told me I didn't need to be up for another fifteen minutes, but when I closed my eyes again, all I could see behind my lids was a to-do list of the many things I needed to accomplish before Nicole could move in.

I sat up and looked over at the stained glass window. Despite the rain, a sunbeam must have been piercing the clouds because greenish-blue light was dancing on the wall across from it as it did most mornings. The sight always gave me instant peace, reminding me of the complexity of the inexplicable union between man-made things, like glass, and God-made things, like light.

This tiny building, first constructed more than a hundred years ago, had been done and redone several times throughout the years. My landlady, Vida Zimmerman, had been the last one to make changes, renovating the interior to take advantage of the building's earlier charm. She'd uncovered as much of the original structure's wood as possible, exposing beams and tearing out carpets and polishing the floors until
they glistened. Then she'd painted and furnished the place in light, muted tones, making it feel open and airy despite its small size. Up here in the bedroom, the pale blue walls were a perfect complement to the light that refracted through the stained glass.

Charming as it all was, no one would call this place spacious. The downstairs held a kitchen, living room, and bathroom, all quite small. The upstairs consisted of just the bedroom. It had come furnished with a single bed, a dresser, and a bookshelf, to which I had added a small arm chair by the window and a cedar chest at the foot of the bed. The closet wasn't huge, though I managed to make it work by installing a floor-to-ceiling shoe tree in a corner.

Looking around the peaceful space now, I whispered a prayer of thankfulness. Then I headed down the narrow staircase to the kitchen to start the coffeemaker. In minutes, the rich scent of ground beans filled the room. As the machine bubbled and slurped, I stood in the wide doorway between kitchen and living room, contemplating the space. If I ditched the coffee table, shifted the TV to one side, and pushed the couch all the way against the wall, there might be enough room for Nicole's hospital bed, though it would be tight. She wouldn't have a closet or dresser, but clearing off the bookshelves temporarily should make room enough for her things. There was also the matter of privacy, thanks to the open floor plan. Maybe I could rig a curtain of some kind. Glancing at my watch, I knew these were matters I would have to deal with tonight after work. For now, I needed to focus on getting dressed for the day.

By the time I was ready to go, the rain had stopped and the sun was fully out, which meant I could bike to work. As I headed off down the road, I thought back to Nana's comment that had started me on this anti-perfectionist, self-improvement plan in the first place.

It happened six weeks ago. I had been at the office just wrapping things up for the day when I got the call from my mother, saying Nicole had been badly hurt in a car accident south of Norfolk. Frantic, I raced southeast on I-64 and was well on my way when Mom called back to say that Nana had just arranged to have Nicole airlifted to Richmond's VCU Medical Center, the number one hospital
in Virginia. I turned around at the next exit and sped back the direction I had come, making it in record time.

There we were told that though my sister would need surgery on one of her legs the next day, the primary concern was to get her safely through the night first. She'd lost a lot of blood, and her condition was precarious at best. While she hovered between life and death in intensive care, all any of us could do was wait and commiserate with one another and pray. Even my eighty-three-year-old grandmother insisted on sticking it out till morning.

Hours past midnight, Nana awoke from a light sleep in the chair next to mine. I asked if I could do anything to help make her more comfortable, and she said thanks, but no. Then, giving me an appraising look, she added, “Have I ever told you, Maddee, that out of all my grandchildren, you're the only one who always looks impeccable? Your hair, your face, your clothes, everything. You can't imagine how satisfying it is that at least one of you understands how important that is.”

Considering the situation, I found it inconceivable that she would bring up something like that at a time like this. What kind of person was she?

My shock turned to mortification, however, when I realized that not thirty minutes before, after using the restroom, I had paused to freshen my lipstick, brush my hair, and run a purse-sized lint roller over my blazer and slacks. Forget what kind of person was she.

What kind of person was
I
?

For the next hour, as she dozed off again beside me in the ICU lounge, I ruminated on that question.

I knew why I was always so careful with my appearance. The time I spent making myself look my very best surely came out of the years I'd spent looking my very worst. I was the classic ugly duckling as a child and teenager, shooting up to my current height of five feet eleven inches when I was only thirteen. Besides being abnormally tall, I was skinny and gangly, my teeth in braces, my face freckled, my hair a frizzy red mess. For many years, I spent almost every waking hour feeling like a hideous freak of nature.

Then the strangest thing happened. During my senior year of high
school, my figure filled out, giving me curves in all the right places. Thanks to the time I put into various high school sports—swimming, track, basketball—my arms and legs grew tan and shapely. I found a decent stylist who knew how to work with hair like mine and showed me how a good cut with lowlights, the right products, and a well-done blow-dry could work miracles. The braces came off, and even the freckles on my cheeks slowly faded, giving me a more porcelain complexion, one I learned to enhance with just the right amount of makeup. I began to explore fashion, learning to play up my assets. Despite my height, I developed a fondness for heels, sometimes very high heels, and between that and the clothes and the hair and the face, before long people began saying I looked like a fashion model.

On the inside, of course, I was still and would always be the ugly duckling, but on the outside I had transformed into a swan. And I enjoyed it to the hilt. Throughout college and grad school, my part-time jobs were always at whatever my current favorite clothing store happened to be just for the employee discount. These days, I was more selective as I slowly built a professional wardrobe made up of quality pieces, but I was totally shoe crazy and owned at least seventy different pairs.

I did look impeccable all the time, as Nana had said, and that was understandable, given my history. But as I sat there that night with my sister's life hovering in the balance, I realized that the ugly duckling-to-swan thing wasn't the whole story.

My personality was part of it too. I was by nature orderly, conscientious, meticulous, and in charge—or, as Nicole liked to put it, I was a super-organized neat freak with an innate need to control the world. No doubt that played into this issue of mine.

But at last I recognized a third element of my incessant quest for perfection: the trauma we'd endured as children at the cabin in the woods. That experience had taught me at a young age that I dare not drop the ball ever again lest disaster strike. Of course, that was ridiculous, not to mention exhausting. Yet always in the back of my mind was the thought that if I just planned carefully enough and acted responsibly enough and looked good enough and worked hard enough that I
could do better next time, that I could keep bad things from happening to my sister and myself.

Yet here I was sitting in a hospital at four a.m., forced to admit that all the lipstick and lint rollers in the world couldn't have prevented Nicole's accident nor have any impact on whether she lived or died now. Control was an illusion.

In the end, Nicole made it through the night, thank the Lord. And the very next day, I decided to work on fixing the part of myself that erroneously thought by controlling the little things I could control the big things. Step one was to force myself to not be so hypervigilant about my looks. And though I had a ways to go before I would actually embrace the helmet hair, at least I was trying. As I neared my office in downtown Richmond now, I took in the beauty of the city streets, glistening from the recent rain, and felt the air in my lungs and the pull of my leg muscles as I pedaled. In that moment, I was reminded how one change for the better could be that first domino tipping over, starting a chain reaction that would bring multiple benefits.

It was a lesson I planned to hang on to, especially when the going got rough.

My day at the office was packed, but I managed to take a quick break midmorning to arrange for the delivery to the carriage house of a hospital bed, one smaller than the behemoth currently being used at Nana's, along with a rolling tray table. I had just finished that call and was about to return to my work when I heard a song by the Peterson Twins coming from the depths of my purse, a tinkly music box-type intro followed by the words,
My grandma.

“Hey, Nana. What's up?”

“I'm sure you're busy, Maddee, so I won't keep you,” she said in her usual efficient phone voice. “I just needed to let you know that you have an appointment with Nicole's doctor tomorrow at four o'clock.”

“Four? Tomorrow?” I pulled up my calendar, trying hard to suppress my annoyance. “I'm
tied up then. I didn't know you'd be scheduling things for me. I don't think I can make it.”

“It will just be a quick fifteen-minute consultation. You're lucky he had an opening because you really need to see him before Saturday, you know. You have to be up to speed on your sister's condition by the time she moves in.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose as she went on to give me the specifics of where to go and whom to ask for.

I sighed when she was finished. “All right. I'll try to shift things around.”

“Very good. Give me a call once the appointment is over if you don't mind.”

I did mind, but I agreed anyway, knowing that with Nana the path of least resistance was almost always the best—or at least the quickest—option.

That evening when I got home, as I turned in from the sidewalk and coasted to a stop under the covered portion of my small patio, I spotted a tuft of silver hair peeking up from the other side of the fence. My landlady had a garden behind her house, where she loved to putter around. Her efforts paid off. She was still reaping the fruits—and the vegetables, for that matter—of her summer labors, including squash, beans, cabbage, and sweet potatoes.

“Hey, Miss Vida,” I called out as I locked up my bike and helmet. “How are you doing?”

“Maddee? Is that you, darling? Come on over here. I have a big, fat cantaloupe with your name on it.”

I grinned as I crossed the tiny patch of grass and pushed open the gate in the fence.

Though she was up in age, Miss Vida was an agile woman with a ton of spunk, and I'd liked her since the day we met back in August, when I'd accepted my new job and was looking for a place to live. Once I found the carriage house, I
searched no further, and the whole situation had turned out to be even better than expected. She was the perfect landlady—never intrusive, always helpful, and a lot of fun besides.