The Good Sister (2 page)

Afterward, I ate an entire carton of rocky road from the 7-Eleven, then threw up—an event that to this day I'm sure my mother would deny having allowed. These days she's too aware of the evils of processed food to admit having ever entered a convenience store.

The second tattoo I had done a few months ago, a half-moon on my upper thigh that my mother does not know about. Sin put it there, his slight fingers working over areas no other guy has really touched. There was Ben Thomas, but he only groped me through my jeans in the backseat of his car before I wised up and got the hell out, which in my opinion doesn't count.

But Sin, he doesn't count either. I've never been attracted to him the way I am to other guys, the way I am to his brother. Sure, there is a little of the inevitable guy-girl tension between us, I guess, but from the time I first met him at the start of freshman year sitting in the row across from me in Honors English, I've never thought of him as a guy the way I do other guys. It's probably because he was wearing a purple dress that day, and he looked better in it than I would have.

Not that Sin is a full-time cross-dresser, but he is totally comfortable wearing girls' clothes whenever the mood strikes him. Mainly he does it to confuse people.

Our friendship feels natural, if a bit addictive. I'm used to being the unnoticed one because having a sister with cancer means you learn to get over yourself, and Sin is used to attracting attention. It's what he does best. He's teaching me things.

Also, I just like that in a sea of freaks, he manages to stand out from the crowd.

“I found one of Sarah's hairs in the sink this morning,” I say out of the blue, and Sin takes this news in stride.

For days now he's been listening to me recount all the ways I can't believe my sister is gone.

“It was a really long one, so blond it looked white.”

“God, I'd kill for her hair.”

“You don't have to now—she doesn't need it anymore,” I try to joke, but it falls flat, and I loathe the sound of my own words.

An image of her body, all burned up now, rendered into ash and crammed into an urn, invades my head, and I torture myself with it a little. How could my sister be inside an urn? It makes no sense.

Sarah had survived two battles with leukemia, and she'd been in remission for nearly five years. Miraculously, her hair had grown back even more beautiful than it had been before, long, silvery blond, capable of turning heads a mile away.

“I kept the hair and put it in my treasure chest. Is that weird?”

Sin stops his work and glances up at me for a half second. “It's only weird if you collect a bunch of them and crochet a memorial bikini with it.”

He prides himself on topping my weirdness. I don't reward him with a response.

My treasure chest is one of those old-fashioned hope chests people used to give their daughters to store stuff in that they'd need when they got married. Mine is a carved Asian one that used to be my mother's, given to her by her parents before she rebelled and ran off to the commune. Years later, she gave it to me because my name means “hope” in Hindi, and she thought a hope chest would be the kind of thing I'd like.

It's the only nice thing I own, which is why I screamed and raged when Lena (that's my mother, but she's not the kind of woman who enjoys being called Mom—she considers it a restrictive and unnecessary label) tried to pawn it a few years ago to help pay the rent. In it, I store the things I don't want anyone else to take from me: my journals, a collection of coins my grandfather gave me before he died, and an odd selection of crap I've collected over the years.

Sin is filling in the largest star now, wiping blood away and inking in black. Over and over, he repeats the pattern. Ink, wipe, ink, wipe.

The stars are for Sarah, who liked to lie outside on the roof at night with me and stare up at the sky. She would say things that made my head hurt, things I could barely understand. Like “How can the universe go on forever?”

I never had an answer to that one, though I always wanted to. I didn't believe it went on forever because I couldn't wrap my mind around it, the same way I can't wrap my mind around my sister's being rendered into ash and stuck inside an urn.

In my childish head, when I considered her question, the universe stopped on the edge of heaven. Wherever that was.

But for Sarah's sake, I'd stay quiet and try to imagine how something could have no end. Was the universe a big circle? Did it close in on itself, like my own life often felt as if it would at any moment? Did it collapse somewhere out there, unable to bear the weight of its own complexity?

So, stars for Sarah, who should have gone on forever, and maybe she does. Maybe now she's just a part of the endless universe she loved to talk about.

I close my eyes and wonder where my grief is. Except for an occasional welling up of tears, I've been dry-eyed since my sister's body was discovered washed up on Agate Beach in Bolinas, bloated, tangled in seaweed, and stuck facedown in the same tide pool I'd once visited on a field trip with my second-grade class.

This makes no sense. It's like a thunderstorm raging overhead, clouds black and heavy with water, but no rain coming down.

I want to cry, need to cry, but the storm won't come.

“You still okay?” Sin says, more solicitous than usual, as he wipes the tattoo clean one last time.

I leave my foot propped up on his lap because I know he still needs to put some antibacterial stuff on it.

“I'm fine,” I lie.

He knows I'm not. “I mean about Sarah. You gotta go to the funeral after this, right?”

I don't know what to say. Do I have to go? What will happen if I don't?

If I don't mourn Sarah's death, does that mean she's not really dead?

If only I had such control.

Before I left the house this morning, Lena had given me a business card with the address of the funeral home and told me to be there at noon. It was already twelve thirty.

“You can't skip your own sister's funeral.”

“Yes, I can.”

He stops putting away his supplies and gives me a look. “That's messed up.”

“I don't believe she's really dead, so I'm not going to mourn.”

I sound ridiculous now, and I'm not fooling Sin for a second, but I don't want to say the stuff that needs to be said. Instead, I shrug and try to look defiant.

“You mean like you think someone else's body was just found out at the coast, and that someone just happened to look exactly like Sarah?”

I don't expect him to argue with me, and it takes me by surprise. I guess I was hoping I'd get sympathy, not a bitchy attitude.

“No, I mean … I don't know what I mean.”

It was easy to love Sarah, with her angelic blond beauty and her sweet, long-suffering nature. If I had been creating her life, the movie version, I couldn't have cast anyone more perfect for the role of cancer sufferer than Sarah Kinsey. And in the movie version, if Sarah had to die, it would have been from cancer, just like she was supposed to, or else she'd live on happily ever after. She would not have died unexpectedly from a fall off a cliff.

Sarah couldn't be gone. She had to still be out there somewhere, even if it was only her disembodied spirit, floating off into forever.

“I've been wondering something,” he says. “But don't get mad at me for saying it, okay?”

“What?”

“Do you think she really fell by accident?”

“Of
course,
” I say, the one sounding bitchy now. “She wouldn't like … jump, or anything. And Rachel was there. She saw her fall.”

“Maybe she faked it. Like maybe her cancer came back, or she was worried it had returned, and she didn't tell anyone. That would be a pretty good reason to be depressed and jump off a cliff.”

But Lena would have known if Sarah had been sick again.

Even if it had been true, it wasn't a good reason for Sarah. She'd lived with the disease for so much of her life, for her it was as much a fact about herself as having blue eyes and blond hair. She was thankful for each day she had alive in a way that only a cancer survivor could be.

“She. Wasn't. Depressed.”

But I am not as convinced as I try to sound. The police—and everyone else—took Rachel's story of Sarah's accidental fall at face value. They'd had no reason to question it, and no evidence suggested anything but yet another tragic accident on the treacherous Marin coast. The newspaper reported such stories with horrible regularity.

Our conversation is interrupted by the aroma of weed and Tristan's entrance into the room. All the air whooshes from my lungs as I take in the sight of him, shirtless and stoned, his dreadlocked, brown hair pulled back into a messy ponytail.

I am so in love with him, I never manage to produce a coherent sentence when he's around. Yes, in love. It's true. For me and nearly every other girl in this corner of Marin County.

Though I'm at a distinct disadvantage to the rest of them since I've only known him for two years, and I'm not even sure he realizes in any concrete way that I exist.

He goes to the refrigerator without saying a word, removes a glass of something green and sludgy that I know from experience is the barely palatable spinach smoothie their mother, Jess, makes as her specialty breakfast drink, then leaves the room without looking at or acknowledging either of us.

I'd strip naked for him in a second. I know this about myself. I'm presently, officially, a virgin, but I'd give it up for him. That's sort of been my secret plan since the first time I laid eyes on him.

Totally inappropriate thoughts, given the occasion, and that at this very moment I'm supposed to be standing around near my sister's urn and contemplating the brevity of life.

Now that Tristan is gone, Sin says, “Have you ever thought it was possible somebody pushed her?”

This idea startles me, then makes me want to throw up, because I haven't considered it for even a second. I'm still stuck in the denial stage, looking for some way to make Sarah alive again.

But I know this is beyond stupid. “No! Of course not.
Rachel
was there with her, for God's sake.”

Sin says nothing because he thinks my sister Rachel is about as trustworthy as a rattlesnake. She may have a petty, vindictive streak, but she's not a murderer. Not in a million years.

“Hmm,” he finally murmurs.

“What? What does that mean?”

“The trail where she fell isn't all that narrow, at least not that I can remember. It's hard to imagine her falling accidentally.”

I want to stab him in the hand with one of the tattoo needles for saying that.

Since this isn't an option, I finally bring up the other reason I've come here today besides getting a tattoo. “Will you go with me, to the funeral?”

“Sure,” Sin says casually as he digs around for something in his tackle box full of tattoo stuff. “Thought you'd never ask.”

He pulls out a little packet of antibacterial ointment, and a bandage.

“No bandage,” I say. “I want to be able to see it.”

He rubs the ointment on my skin, and when he's done, a large, glistening black star, two inches around, surrounded by a spray of smaller stars, adorns my ankle.

Black, like darkness. Black, like Tristan's eyes. Black, like the weight in my chest that feels as if it might bury me alive.

Three

Rachel Anne Kinsey

I've never been to a funeral before. I look at the little crap brochure someone has handed me with my sister's name printed on the front in fancy script. Sarah Jade Kinsey. Printed below that are the dates of her birth and death, dates I know too damn well and don't want to be reminded of.

Then, a quote somebody must have thought to write down for just this occasion while Sarah was still alive, or maybe it was something she'd written herself in a journal (it would be just our mother's style to read it) or a school essay. It was some shit she'd once said when asked how she felt about dying:
I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of forgetting to live.

Right on, Sis. That Sarah. She always knew how to produce a cliché inspirational quote for her own funeral handout.

No, not a funeral. It's a memorial service, I read, when I flip to the second page. You see, even our free-loving, acid-dropping, idol-worshipping parents can fall for the sales pitches of the funeral-industry assholes, who must have convinced them to print up this little keepsake I am staring at now.

I'd have expected something more bohemian from them than this lame-ass assembly at the Spirit Friends Temple of every goddamn person who knows us. Maybe a gathering to toss flower petals into the ocean where Sarah drowned while someone plays the guitar and sings “Kumbaya.” But whatever. I'm glad we're here and not there, and probably the suddenness of Sarah's death caught them so off guard, they just went into robot mode and started doing whatever the funeral people told them to do.

The petal tossing will come later, and in private, for each of us, along with our own guilty baggage we may or may not attempt to throw into the Pacific along with the flowers.

Guilt. It's my new best friend, my hobby, maybe even my full-time job.

I'm sitting in the front row of the temple, with an empty seat to my left where Asha is supposed to be, and my whimpering, sniffling mother to the right. Next to her is her asshole boyfriend, Ron, and beside him sits our dad, Ravi, alone.

He must be pissed Lena brought her boyfriend, but I am working hard at not giving a crap.

Candles flicker at the temple altar around the dark blue urn that contains the ashes of what used to be Sarah (when the coast guard found her body, it was already too bloated and wrecked from being in the ocean to make an open-casket service possible, or so I've been told).