The Orphan Sister (11 page)

“What, are you jealous, my Clementine?” Elainamartella was long gone from the Spoon. Eli put his hand over my sticky one.

“No, I’m worried. I’m a wreck.”

“You are not,” said Eli. Then, quietly, he said, “I’m sorry you have to experience this.” Suddenly, it felt real, and I did cry. My mouth opened and I gasped and made silent, awful sobs. Everything hurt. I cried because I was furious, because I wanted to know where Dad was and why he was gone and I didn’t want to cry and I didn’t want to care so much.
What about me?
I thought.
When will something be about me?
I looked up at Eli and stopped crying. I was pathetic, a narcissist. Maybe I was about to get my period. I was glad I hadn’t said my thoughts out loud.

“How’s the bear claw?” my friend asked, tearing off a piece.

I looked at Eli’s calm face, the face that would never abandon me—a trait I found both essential and infuriating. He wouldn’t leave, but did I ever really
have
him? I loved the mess of him, the lost, sturdy, assuredness. Drop him in the middle of the woods and he’d look up at the sky and just start walking. Cameron had needed me, had made me exquisite with the pressure of watching me, the pressure of his wide mouth. Eli just sat beside me. I brushed a crumb from his mouth with my sleeve.

At Eli’s suggestion—and after seeing him off at the library, trying not to notice how his T-shirt clung in the right spots: around his shoulders, his lean back, trying not to always be a little bit in love with someone I couldn’t have and shouldn’t want—I went to see Olivia at her office. Eli had been Cameron’s roommate, Cameron’s nemesis. I could never expunge it from me, losing Cam, but I was beginning to wonder whether we still had to pretend the dead man was in the room, kissing me.

Maybe she’ll feel more forthcoming away from that castle of
yours
, Eli had suggested, sending me off to Olivia’s medical offices. I didn’t admit that it was killing me that she knew more than the rest of us, but of course it ate at me. And puzzled me. Never before had our father shown any preference for the right bookend (Olivia) or the left (Odette). At least, not in front of me.

My sisters worked in Siamese-twin offices within a new brick building in a new brick office park landscaped with the art of a local sculptor: giant bronze reclining women and horses, the bronze still brownish, the green years yet to come.

“Do you have an appointment?” asked the receptionist, who sat in a low chair behind a tall, cherrywood and glassed-in wall.

Do I look like I need an obstetrician?
I almost asked. Of course, it could be the gynecological portion of the program, but I hated her efficiency. Instead, I said, “She’s my sister.”

“Really? I’ll see.”

You’ll see?
I thought. Sure, I hadn’t been to my sister’s office since the grand opening party, and sure, there was Odette, identical and also swelled like a fruit, and here I was, wearing jeans and a shirt I’d had since high school, tie-dyed in art class, a bit too tight, but not unfashionably so. A bit of bear claw frosting stuck just above my chest. I rubbed at it, licked the spot, and then looked around to see whether anyone had seen me sucking on my clothes. Maybe I really needed to go next door, for a pediatrician.

The receptionist came to the door, the opening to the chambers—while I was ogling the tall play structure designed to look like a tree. Two computers were set up with slide shows of gestational stages. The few developmental toys still looked clean, despite the daily grubby hands exploring them. I wondered if the
receptionist boiled herself along with them, sanitizing her sour face and the happy talking telephone in one evening’s endeavor.

“Ms. Lord?” she called as if I were a patient. “The doctor will see you.”

I half expected the nurse to prick my finger or ask me to pee into a cup, but instead, when the receptionist handed me off, she ushered me into a little exam room, squeezed her lips whitely together, and said, “Hm, you look nothing like her.”

“Thank you?” I muttered.

My sister left me waiting for thirty-eight minutes in her little exam room. I sat on a chair, then the crinkly-papered table. I took apart the little model of an ear. I studied the pamphlets on STDs, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, and herpes. I counted sixteen wrapped swabs in the culture drawer. I checked my cell phone three times, but I was waiting. It was time to have it out, even if it was on her terms, even if she was infantalizing me by putting me in her exam room. When she finally flurried in wearing her lab coat and her stethoscope with a panda bear gripping the cord, she sighed deeply when she saw me.

“Clem.” She put her arm around me as if we were not just sisters, but friends. “I’m so tired. All my patients brought their other children.” She waved the panda at me. Then she sat down on the chair and propped her feet up on the counter, which was surely a health code violation.
Depleted
, she thought.
Exhausted. Candy bar. Babies.
I was listening to her thoughts as deeply as I could, but that was all I could divine.

“Did you wash you hands?” I asked, reciting the question from above the sink.

She heaved herself up and started foaming up her hands under the water at the sink.

“I was kidding,” I said softly.

“So, want to feel the kicking?” She took my hand in her still-damp, now scrubbed one and put it on her belly.

I felt nothing but taut skin.

“Did you feel that?” she asked, a bright tone in her voice.

“Wow,” I lied. “I’m here about Dad.”

Olivia pushed my hand off her belly. “Right. Forgive me for thinking you actually cared about me.”

“Of course I care about you. I just think it’s weird for you to know where he is—”

“I have no idea where he is. I only have a number—”

“A number we should call,” I said.

“No one’s in labor. Yet.” I felt a sliver of her fear—a sharp splinter invisible under the surface. My sister was afraid of labor.

“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” I said. “All this mystery. Who’s going to die if you tell? Dad? It’s just not fair to anyone—to Mom, or O, or me—”

“It’s not about fair,” Olivia started.

The nurse knocked at the door and poked her head in. “Sorry. You’re getting backed up, and I know how much you hate backup—”

“Just a minute,” said Olivia, her voice commanding and professional. “I’m almost done here.” I couldn’t read her at all now; her doors were up, ramparts.

“Olivia,” I said. “Don’t you think you should share what you know? It’s been almost a week. Mom’s pretending she doesn’t care, but I swear, she can’t take this. She’ll go nuts, or she’ll get a lawyer and start divorce proceedings—”

“She wouldn’t. She loves him.”

“So do I, but I think he’s being an asshole. Where is he, Olivia? Where is he? Is he going senile?”

“He is not going senile.” She grimaced and took a breath.
“I don’t know.”
Olivia held on to her belly as if I were attacking the child therein.

“Everything okay?” the nurse asked, opening and knocking at the same time.

“On my way,” said Dr. Lord. She stood up and looked at me, teary-eyed. Her face was puffy. My sister looked awful. I actually felt guilty. I wasn’t sure whether it was her guilt or mine.

“Fine,” said Olivia, relenting perhaps because of her pregnancy, or because she hated backup, or because she couldn’t stand my pressure, though I doubted that—she’d always withstood it with hauteur and extraordinary strength.

“Dad gave me the number of his lawyer, that’s all. He said to call if there was an emergency. But I know something else because I did a little research on my own.”

She was half out the door, and I stood up, reached out my hand, but didn’t touch her.

“He’s gone to see his wife.”

“Um? Mom? No, he’s not
at home
—” I felt as though I were talking to a recalcitrant child.

“He’s married,” she said.

“Duh. Hence us.”

“No, I mean, to someone other than Mom.”

“Excuse me?” My mouth was suddenly postdentist fuzzy, half-hot, half-numb. Nausea, evil nausea.

“Our father was married before Mom—before we were born.
He’s been supporting her for years. Don’t feel sick now; you’ll make me barf.”

I said nothing, staring at the bear on her stethoscope.
This can’t be true
, I wanted to say. How was this possible? How could he get married to Mom without telling her first? Our father, the bigamist. It sounded like a joke. The bridal portrait hiding in the Wife of Bath. Was that woman—?

I cleared my throat, hoping the funny feeling in my mouth would pass. “Does Odette know?” I should have asked a thousand other questions first.

“No. Neither does Mom, unless she’s an incredible actress,” said Olivia. “And I won’t be a beheaded messenger. It’s his job, the asshole. Not mine.”

“O? Why didn’t you tell us?” I sucked in air—there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room.

“I didn’t want to be the one to ruin everything. I guess I thought if I didn’t tell, it might not be true.”

For a second, I didn’t recognize my triplet, her face smooth as stone, her eyes desolate, pupils tiny. Then she turned to the door.

“I have to go,” she finished. “I hate backup.”

T
he third place I lived was Oberlin, Ohio, where I went to college. There I met Cameron Kite, whom I loved, and who died in an accident in his backyard pool in San Jose, California, where he grew up and was home for break. There was blood in the water from a scrape on his leg, his mother told me, her voice a closed calm, confessional, lost in her own perpetual panic, describing everything, the weedy look of his white-blond hair in the blue.

First, though, there was the rebellion. Beginning in junior year of high school, my father hired a college counselor for us—paying some ridiculous sum, not subtracted, as most of our activity fees were, from the Accounts and mother’s allowance. By my teen years, I was disgusted by our father’s tight grip on every activity of the women of his house.

He chose when we took vacations to the Vermont house—a glass-and-wood beauty perched above Caspian Lake in Greensboro, Vermont, the Northeast Kingdom. Even if our father was staying in Princeton, he mandated our trips there with Mom; he told her what to pack, what to buy at the supermarket before we left, and what to get at the Willey’s general store once we arrived. He had her schedule lessons at the odd tennis club up above dairy farms, and private sailing lessons on the lake. It wasn’t a Princeton
sort of town, but for some reason people from Princeton flocked there. In junior high, I discovered that Grey, whom I’d loved in elementary school, and who had left for a private boarding school in Boston because his grades were lacking (probably he was distracted by snow, by the three girlfriends he supposedly juggled in sixth grade—but still—I harbored a secret desire to kiss him again, for real, to tell him I wished I’d kept those flowers his mother brought to our musical), had a house on the lake as well. His parents had been coming to Greensboro for three generations. They owned farmland worked by a dairy farmer and woodland logged periodically by teams of Clydesdale skidding horses and the last of the big Vermont men whose hands were cracked and muscled by work.

I spent my high school summers enduring tennis lessons, and savoring riding lessons at the Greensboro riding stable, where girls my age from town looked at me sidelong, left my girth strap loose so I might easily slip (luckily I’d learned about bloat and walked and cinched Melody, the horse I rode, whenever I could tell she was holding her breath), and clearly resented the Summer People. My sisters and I played at the private beach on the lake below our house. We wrestled on the raft and sailed across the lake together in one of our two matching Sunfish, Odette trailing her hands in the water, leaving an instantly erased seam in our wake. We got along sometimes, and sometimes we fought. We went to square dances at the town hall and Olivia flirted with the sons of dairy farmers and kissed one behind the barn—no one ever knew except for the three of us. We were so bored; we had to read each other for lack of enough books to consume us.

Then, the August before senior year, after a month of college
prep courses (Odette and Olivia went down to Johns Hopkins for a summer program for supersmart premed geeks, and they sent me postcards making fun of their classmates. I didn’t get in. I worked at the Baskin-Robbins and sat in the verdant backyard pretending to study SAT review books), we were followed to Vermont by a college counselor, a young woman who’d grown up in Paterson, New Jersey, and had crawled up the cliff to Harvard by grabbing at every tiny crack in the wall between her bottom-level life and the top. She had tenacity. Now she had her own business coaching the children of the rich on how to fatten their applications, make them juicy, appealing, and make the essays relevant, brag without bragging. Her name was Juliet, and she was a mocha girl, she said, half-black, half-Hispanic. She stayed in the only bedroom that didn’t have a lake view and wore khaki pants and polo shirts every day. She didn’t bring a bathing suit, so while we dived from the dock, she sat on a towel with her pants rolled up, reciting vocabulary words to us as if we weren’t obnoxious and privileged. It embarrassed me to remember just how snotty we could be.

Odette and Olivia took her seriously in the evenings, though. They convened at the big oak table, bought at auction along with our brass beds and the cuckoo clock in the front hallway. They reviewed what they had yet to learn because they both planned to apply to Harvard early admission, with Princeton, Yale, Brown, and Cornell as the second-tier choices if they didn’t get in.

I had a hard time taking it all seriously. All I wanted to do was sail past Grey’s place across the lake and wonder whether he still remembered me. I’d had a boyfriend by then—I dated a senior my sophomore year: Drew McFarlane, who was six foot five and
played no sports, much to his parents’ chagrin. He wrote dark poems and painted his toenails black and kept his hair short and precise and threatened his father, a partner in a management consultancy firm, by saying he planned to apply to West Point. He’d had the requisite summer volunteer job with a senator, living with his sister in D.C. and not getting carded at bars. Then we dated, and he told me he really wanted to be a poet. He’d been shaving since he was ten; I pretended to braid his chest hair, and he was the best kisser I’d ever met. Of course, he was the only boy I’d ever really kissed.