The Language of Sisters (8 page)

In a few minutes two women appeared behind us. The stylist who was going to work on Jenny inquired if she needed to be careful of anything while doing my sister’s hair. “Keep your hands away from her mouth,” I joked, in an attempt to put her at ease. “She bites.” A horrified look popped up on the woman’s face. “I’m
kidding,
” I relented, reaching out to wiggle my fingers in front of Jenny’s wet lips. “See? Completely harmless.”

She laughed a bit awkwardly, her palm to her chest. “Jeez, you scared me,” she said. “I’ll just work on her in her own chair. Is that all right?”

“Sure.” I settled back and let my stylist begin the unenviable task of untangling my hair. Jenny remained quiet while her hair was washed, deep-conditioned, and trimmed, her expression still fairly blank. I wondered if she was overstimulated, if bringing her to the spa had been a mistake. Maybe I should have just kept her at home to help her get readjusted to being there. When the stylists moved us to the pedicure station, I took Jenny’s hand in mine. “You doing okay, Sis?” I asked. “Your hair looks great.” Though not as long as they used to be, her dark waves shined softly around her face again, the layered bob complementing the new round curve of her jawline. I glanced around until I found a handheld mirror and put it up in front of her. “Look at you! You’re gorgeous!”

The fog over her eyes seemed to lift, and a light began to fill her face as she stared at herself in the mirror. A small smile tickled the corners of her full, rose-petal lips, and she ducked her chin down to the left in the tiniest motion, flirting with the image she saw reflected back at her.
Pretty,
I heard her say, and I smiled in relief.

The rest of our visit went by quickly. Jenny giggled the entire time her feet were in the bubbling footbath, and since she was extremely ticklish, the poor pedicurist had a heck of a time getting a pale pink polish on my sister’s tiny, round toenails. But all in all, the appointment seemed a success and I was glad I had brought her. I paid the bill and tipped well, promising to spread the word about the service we had received.

As I pushed Jenny back to our childhood home, I thought more about what drove people to stare at her. It suddenly struck me that perhaps it was the same phenomenon that caused commuters
to slow down as they passed a fiery crash on the freeway, the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I syndrome. They looked at Jenny and counted their blessings. So did I, I realized, looking at the dark cap of my sister’s head as we turned the corner that led down our street. My heart ached with emotion I had forgotten I was capable of experiencing. I counted my blessings, too, but for entirely different reasons.

•  •  •

Three o’clock in the morning and she was moaning again. Every two hours; I could almost set my clock by the noise. The thin wall between our rooms did little to mask the sound. It reached into my chest and twisted my heart, pulling me from a fitful rest. “Jenny,
please,
” I groaned into my pillow. “I need to sleep.” God, I was tired.

The first two weeks of her waking in the night had not bothered me too much. My body was used to being active in the dark and I had immediately run to soothe her, to adjust her pillow, to turn her over so she wouldn’t develop sores. But the long hours awake with her during the day—feeding her, walking her around, changing her diapers, giving her her medications—had drained me. I longed for a four-hour-straight block of sleep like a starving man longs for bread.

Jenny’s needs were constant, their strength coaxing me to her even as I tried to pull away, tried to take a shower or finish a cup of coffee. My lower back screamed from lifting her swollen pregnant body. A dull ache had settled in behind my eyes. My sister woke several times a night and rose early; she needed to be fed, showered, diapered, and dressed. Then there was her medication schedule, which I had scrupulously charted out and stuck to the refrigerator but often passed by without consulting.
Take her back to Wellman,
a small voice within me cried.
You can’t do this. It’s too
much.
I felt inept, lost in the wilderness of what caring for her demanded of me, afraid I might never return to the freedom of the life I had known.

I wanted to leave, to go back to San Francisco. I missed Shane. I missed Barry. I missed the simple, solitary pleasure of taking Moochie for his afternoon walk. I wanted to be able to go to the grocery store without having to think about the logistics of pushing a wheelchair
and
the shopping cart, or whether I had packed enough diapers for an hour away from the house. I wanted to be able to take more than a five-minute shower without worrying that Jenny had fallen out of her bed and cracked her skull. I wanted to take back all my lofty promises, to take back what had happened to Jenny and return to the life I’d lived for the past ten years.

My mother wasn’t helping stem these feelings of regret. I watched her move around Jenny and me as though we were polite but uninvolved acquaintances. I did not understand her. Putting aside my own complicated issues with my mother, I had truly believed that having Jenny home would soften her, bring her back to the mother she had been to Jenny before Wellman. “Help!” I longed to plead. “Help me do this! She’s your daughter. What’s
wrong
with you?”

She seemed to float above us like a balloon attached to our wrists, tied to us forever but distant, inanimate. She slept at the other end of the house, in the same room she’d shared with our father when we were children. She wore earplugs, something she said she had done since Jenny moved to Wellman. “After she left,” my mother told me, “even the tiniest sound would wake me. I’d be sure it was Jenny crying, needing me.” She shook her head. “A woman’s hearing becomes supersonic when she becomes a mother. Intently tuned to the sound of her children’s cries. Even the illusion of them. If I didn’t wear these”—she held up the earplugs—“I’d never sleep again.”

But despite her words, the first time Jenny had woken up in the middle of the night, I’d stepped back into the hallway after comforting my sister and sensed my mother’s presence nearby. I also smelled something burning. I caught her sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, smoking. Her legs were crossed, and her dangling foot wiggled furiously. “What are you doing?” I asked. I was sure she had come to check on Jenny, but I wanted her to be the one to say it. To admit she cared.

She looked at me, her pale, angled face suddenly illuminated pink by the glowing tip of her cigarette. Her expression resembled a rubber band that had been stretched to its limit. “I was hungry,” she said. There was nothing to eat on the table in front of her, only a saucer filled with ash and two spent cigarette butts. She jutted her chin toward the hallway to Jenny’s room and tapped her cigarette with her finger. “Everything okay?”

I wanted to say, “No, everything’s not okay. Jenny’s knocked up and I’m exhausted.” But I bit my tongue, unwilling to share how I was really feeling. After her refusal to visit the salon with us, I hadn’t reached out to my mother. I sheltered my emotions under deep cover, unwilling to let her hurt me again. “When did you start smoking?” I demanded, ignoring her question.

“I’ve always smoked.” That explained the still-yellow walls in the living room.

“I thought you hated that Dad smoked.”

“I hated that he smoked in
front
of you.” She looked at the end of her cigarette as though it might have something to tell her, then squished it in the saucer. “It’s not something I do every day,” she said without looking at me, and I left her there in the dark, wondering what else there was I didn’t know about my mother.

But now, Jenny’s cries worsened, tightening their hold in my chest. I trod out my door and into her room, the rancid stink of fresh excrement attacking my nose with its fist. I flipped on the light.
She lay on her back, her hands clawed and in her mouth, fat tears rolling from the corners of her eyes to the pillow, mixing with the drool there. The long hairs around her round face were damp with sweat. I covered my mouth with a hand and pulled back her covers. The dark stain spread out from her diaper to the edges of the twin bed. “Oh, Jen, what happened? Are you sick?” I felt her forehead; it was cool. Then I remembered. Last night’s botched enema. I didn’t know what I was doing, and look what it had done to her.

She moaned again, her eyes pleading with me. She could not stand this, I knew—the horror of lying in her own waste, unable to move, unable to do anything but wait for someone to come. How could anyone stand it? I imagined her at Wellman, her cries muffled by thick walls and other patients, how long she must have lain there, helpless.

“Come on,” I said, swallowing, as best I could, the rolling wave of nausea that traveled up my throat. I bent down and slid my arms under her back as levers, sitting her up and swinging her to the side of the bed so I could get her to the bathroom. She’d need a shower, and I’d have to change the sheets—the white, lace-trimmed sheets I’d picked out as a child for my baby sister’s new big-girl bed. My mother had tried to get me to choose a darker color, perhaps foreseeing the impractical nature of my first choice, but had relented when she saw how excited I was to give them to Jenny. I wondered how many times Mom had been stuck doing laundry in the middle of the night, running these ridiculous sheets through the bleach cycle.

I pulled Jenny into an upright position, and she stood, shaky, a pitiful cry hiccuping from inside her: “A-huh, huh, huh.” The stench reached down my throat, and I gagged, once, twice, but managed to keep from throwing up on the rug and making the situation worse.

Again, I had to stifle the urge to call my mother for help.
This
is
her
job,
I thought petulantly.
I shouldn’t have to do this alone.
I just didn’t understand why she was holding herself away from Jenny when she obviously loved her. Maybe it was me she was keeping away from. Still, I didn’t think that was enough to justify standing by and watching me do this alone.

But you said you wanted to,
a voice reminded me. And I knew it was true: I did want to. But I honestly didn’t know whether wanting to would be enough.

It took about an hour to get Jenny cleaned up and the bed changed. She stood patiently in the shower as I washed her, her fleshy belly slightly raised and hard beneath my touch. I wondered if the baby was moving yet, if Jenny felt it tumble inside her. If she knew what had happened to her. What was going to happen to her. We had an appointment in the morning with an obstetrician who had agreed to take Jenny as a patient—one of the doctors Dr. Leland had recommended to me. Dr. Ellen Fisher had worked with developmentally disabled patients before, though never one as severely handicapped as Jenny. She had been businesslike in our brief conversation, so professional in her tone that I almost felt chastised for not having dressed better for the call. I was a little apprehensive about meeting her.

It was after four when I tucked Jenny back into her bed, lying on her left side. I kissed her and smoothed her hair, making sure she was adequately propped up by pillows so she wouldn’t roll onto the floor. Exhausted, I stumbled back under my own covers and slept, mercifully, until the moon faded away and the sun took its turn at lighting the world.

•  •  •

“Did she always wake up like this?” I asked my mother over a huge mug of industrial-strength coffee that morning. “I don’t remember.”

My mother smiled a little wistfully. “Yes. Not every night, but often enough.” She sat down carefully at the table, wiping away invisible crumbs from the front of her dove gray, pin-striped suit. She glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. The bank didn’t open until nine, but since she walked the eight blocks to the Junction’s Washington Mutual, she needed to be ready to leave by eight-thirty. Her dark hair was pulled into a tight French twist, and she wore a pastel pink lipstick that did little to brighten her already pale face. She needed to find a new shade.

“How come I never used to hear her?” I asked, my eyes heavy with lack of rest. And the unasked question:
How did I hear Dad go into her room and not you?

“I was quick. I could hear her before she even started.” My mother patted my hand, then leaned forward to tighten the laces around her too-white tennis shoes. When she sat back up she looked at me, obviously considering something. “Nicole,” she started, but didn’t go on right away.

“Yes?”

“What does Shane think of your being here?”

I bristled at the inquiry. “He’s fine with it. He supports me.” At least, that was what he had said the last time we’d spoken. But then again, he hadn’t called me since then; the few messages I’d left for him had gone unanswered. I felt hurt and a little angry at his lack of concern, but I wasn’t about to tell my mother that.

“He doesn’t have a problem with you being away so long?” she asked.

“No,” I said, hopeful my face didn’t give the truth away.

“Well, he must be an exceptional man.” Then she stood, grabbed her purse, and moved toward the hallway that led to the front door. “I’ve got to get going.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come with us to Jenny’s
appointment?” The question tumbled from my mouth before my defenses could stop it. Something deep within me wanted her to be involved in this process; she’d always been the one to deal with Jenny’s doctors. And if I was honest with myself, I had to acknowledge she’d always been the one to deal with Jenny. The short time I’d spent caring for my sister had shown me that. Whatever assistance I thought I’d provided as a child was nothing compared to what my mother had done all day, every day, for Jenny for fifteen years. I felt a newly developed, grudging respect for my mother. Perhaps that was why I asked her to come to Jenny’s appointment.

My sister moved her eyes from her toast to our mother, seemingly interested in her answer.

Mom hesitated, but then shook her head briskly. “I can’t. I can’t do it all again.” It seemed she said this more to herself than to me. “But you can tell me about it tonight,” she offered, then paused, considering something. “Wait. I’ve got dinner with my book group tonight. I won’t be home until late.”