The Orphan Sister (17 page)

My sisters came home from Harvard and tried to jolly me out of my gloom. It was too soon and I stayed in my third-floor room, under the covers. I burrowed under a quilt I’d had since childhood, soft as skin, but it felt rough and stiff; I was a bruise. Olivia came inside with me, trying to get me to emerge.

“We can go to lunch,” she said. “There’s a new Thai place. We can do Party Trick to the waitstaff.”
Come out
, she said silently.

“Not hungry,” I said, trying not to listen.

“It’s been too long,” said Olivia, meaning both food and Party Trick.

Odette floated around the doorjamb like a moth. I couldn’t hear her, but she was trying to tell me something in the ether. They were talking to each other. If I heard them, I couldn’t be
alone, so I was trying not to listen. If I don’t look at you, you can’t see me.

“I can’t,” I said, and I knew Odette knew this already. Olivia probably knew, too; she was trying to will me better with her pure and powerful force.

They brought me feasts and flashlights in bed and we tried to sit under the quilt-tent. They felt my sorrow; I could taste it in their sisterly kisses. They persevered and I stayed stuck as a barnacle to my bed and despair until they went back to school, to their hopeful fellowships and practice tests.

At the end of winter break, I’d started eating again because the food my mother cooked was tempting, and because I’d fainted twice in my room and hit my head on the metal screen in front of my fireplace—I’d explained the bruise away, but I didn’t want to die, and I was tired of feeling partly dead. I stood in my room looking at the backpack full of things from school. I was going to live off campus in a group house and had only a few sets of clothes there and a thousand houseplants I’d inherited from the last occupants. My room at home was safe, and suddenly I couldn’t go back.

“Mom?” I said, walking into her bedroom after a perfunctory knock. She was folding laundry on her big, king-size bed. She smelled of sandalwood salon shampoo.

“Clem,” she said. “Ready to go to the airport?” Mom was going to drive me. Dad was away. He’d come home for Christmas dinner and had left before New Year’s. I preferred the house when
it was empty of him—he was a magnet when he was home, collecting all the attention and energy from my sisters, my mother, when what I wanted was to be noticed, to be rescued.

“No,” I said.

“Can I help you pack?” she asked, looking up from the pair of my father’s underwear she was folding. It was worn, and suddenly I was sad, because if my father’s underwear was that old, he could be old. For all the money in the world, his underwear still sagged at the elastic waist. He wouldn’t live forever, either.

“No,” I said, welling up. “I can’t go back. I miss him too much.”

My mother dropped the underwear and folded me into her arms. “Honey. I was wondering. I mean, we all thought you were doing so well.”

“Mom, I stopped eating, and no one noticed.”

“I did—I mean, I said you looked great.” She was stroking my hair now; it felt so lovely, but tender at the same time, as if my hair had nerve endings and was too sensitive to be touched.

“I didn’t look great,” I said. “I mean, I stopped eating—I fainted. I haven’t had my period in two months—”

“You’re not pregnant?” My mother’s stroking hand froze.

“Of course not,” I said, the tears stopping. “I’m just not going back.” Why couldn’t she just feel that? Why couldn’t she just
know?

“You can stay here as long as you like,” my mother said.

My father disagreed. He and Mom rarely yelled, but I could hear his voice through the phone and my mother winced as she listened.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want me at home; it was that no daughter of his would drop out of college a few credits shy of graduation. There was still a chance of medical school, he said, he knew several first-rate tutors in town who could help me with the MCAT. All this information was doled out in brief bursts via my mother, who spoke to him several times a day on the phone while he was away.

Then he came home, his bags deposited in the front hall by the cabdriver—though Dad could afford a limo, he chose the cab service from two towns over because it was cheapest—and was a demanding presence once again. Even if I had thought I could stay home before, once he was back, I knew I had to leave. Eli had a friend who was living in San Francisco and needed a roommate, and within two hours I had plans.

“I’m not paying for a plane ticket to San Francisco,” said my father as I came downstairs with my backpack, having applied lip gloss for the first time in months. Maybe years.

“Dad, I’ll finish college, just not right now. Maybe I’ll take classes at UCSF—”

“Maybe isn’t good enough. No daughter of mine—”

“Cut it out with that patriarchal crap,” I said. My father stared at me as if I’d struck him. “Yes, crap. I appreciate that you’re looking out for me. I appreciate the financial support—even if it comes with a spiderweb of strings attached—but, Dad, I’m getting over something, I can’t go back right now, and I’m
going to San Francisco!”
I shouted this last bit for my own benefit as much as his.

“Clementine Lord,” he said, taking deep breaths (I could almost hear him thinking,
Breathe one two three, breathe . . .
), “I have given you roof and education, clothes and care—and I insist
you finish college. It’s very, very important. More important than you know.”

“Charles Lord.” I wouldn’t give up now. “I’m going to San Francisco. Mom already paid for my ticket. I’m going to get a job, and you are not going to stop me.”

I cried in the car on the way to the airport, but then I refreshed my wiped-off lip gloss and marched into Newark Airport with a sense of purpose. I would get over it, all of it, and my father was, for once, not going to tell me how.

Two years and three jobs later (I worked at a health food store that reeked of patchouli and I was worried about maggots in the bulk grains but couldn’t bring myself to say anything; I worked at a coffee shop and finally at a bookstore, which paid decently, and the owner contributed one dollar for every ten for courses I took at UCSF. It wasn’t much, but it helped. Two loans got me through), Oberlin mailed me my diploma. I was a college graduate, and I had a great job in a bookstore, and the weather was glorious and my apartment had a view of the bay, if you stood on a step stool in the bathroom and craned your neck. My roommate, Liz, was a performance artist who worked at the coffeehouse where I’d been for six months, mixing up syrup-tinted drinks and making perfect
crema
on her cappuccinos.

Eli kept in touch, calling every week, or sending long letters from Kalamazoo, where he went for a master’s in music before deciding his true passion was the pure science of biology and transferring to Princeton. Feeling very free from my father, I applied for doctorate programs in European history, in women’s
studies, and in ethnomusicology, but my heart wasn’t in any of those, I just wanted to bother Dad. I lived in San Francisco for another year, waitressing, dating inappropriate men, and refusing to cash my father’s checks, which I knew, from my sister’s reports, were much smaller than the ones they collected. They finished med school, together, at Columbia.

Then I decided to apply to vet school, though my father was against that as well. Vets made small inroads into some of the world’s injustices. People loved their animals, animals loved their people, and wasn’t the wellness of those who couldn’t heal themselves a small balm to a troubled planet? But with Dad, it was as if being a vet were some horrible betrayal, some pale imitation of doctorhood, though Mom had always encouraged us to be whatever we wanted to be. She also told us, don’t forget to look for love, though; don’t forget to look for love.

I
had witnessed three births in my life—one dozen gerbils born at my friend Sophie’s house—never mind that the mom ate four of them right away because she didn’t have enough nipples, a tiny litter of two pups at a shelter (tiny, I thought, especially given that three of us had emerged from my mother’s womb at once), and the thrilling viviparous birth of some snakes at the wildlife shelter north of San Francisco in Marin where I went to visit, though I never worked there. Snakes slithering out of a snake—I found it wondrous; Eli, who was visiting with Liz and me for a week, was repulsed. Eli reconciled with his father that year; they’d started to realize they could be friendly—Eli told me it was okay to have a father who had nothing exotic about him, that they could still talk about things. Ironically, I had tried to imagine having a parent with a whole family other than me.

Now I was standing beside my sister Odette, the ob-gyn, who could not yet have an epidural, and who said the contractions felt like hell.

“I’m dying,” she croaked, crushing my hand and grimacing. She said it so calmly I almost believed her. Then the contraction stopped and her face became smooth. Smooth, but suffering.

“Okay,” Olivia said, clapping her hands together as if she were
about to make an announcement to a class of six-year-olds. “How’re we doing? Breathing okay? Hanging in there until we can get you some relief?”
Get a damn epidural
, I heard her think.

“You’re not my doctor,” said Odette, waving her away. “And I heard that—I asked already.”

“Fine,” said Olivia, her lips crushed white. My mother came blustering in with two cups of coffee, one of which she promptly spilled on her jacket.

“Damn!” she said. “I’m sorry, girls, I didn’t mean to say that. Is Evan here yet?”

He’d been to every Lamaze class, Odette had told me; he’d given his cell phone a designated ringtone for The Time, but he hadn’t picked up the message yet.

“I’m dying, Clem, I’m dying,” my sister said. Her face was pale, with red splotches that looked like some obscure disease. I wondered whether she could have contracted something in the lobby on the way in.

“You’re fine,” said Olivia.

“Fuck off!” screamed Odette, and I looked from one twin to the next, shocked.

“This always happens in childbirth,” said Olivia calmly. “She knows. We’re experts.” She patted her own swollen belly as if she wasn’t quite sure. No silent conversations ensued. It was eerie.

“Will you come with me?” my mother asked Olivia, probably just to get her out of the room. “I need to mop up.” She pointed to her coffee-stained attire.

“Fine,” said Olivia.

“I am
not fine,”
said Odette, crushing my arm this time.

“I just meant—,” Olivia started, but my mother led her out of the room by the lapel of her doctor’s coat.

“Now I am,” Odette said. She appeared to be drowning or sunbathing, from minute to minute.

“Evan will be here soon, I’m sure,” I said.

My sister scootched herself up on the hospital bed. She wiggled one leg, then the other. She breathed heavy breaths. The hospital was ridiculously cold and smelled of rubbing alcohol and bleach. Odette had a pile of blankets falling off her bed—I knew without discussion that she wanted her feet free and her considerable midsection covered, but she writhed so much during contractions the slippery synthetic things slid around the bed and onto the floor like tossed-off wrapping paper. The alcohol smell stung my nose, and the giant hospital gown my sister wore, covered in giant blue teddy bears, seemed ominous somehow. What if something was wrong? It wasn’t that early, but still—I wanted everything to be okay, I willed it so hard I realized I was chewing the insides of my cheeks as I gently rubbed my sister’s back, the bits I could reach around the bed.

It suddenly occurred to me that this pregnancy phase was about to be over. I would no longer have two pregnant sisters, they would no longer match; they would each have their own whole families without me, whole subsets of Lords—without the last name, and even though I overlapped, a Venn diagram of relationship, I didn’t belong in the core. And they wouldn’t belong so exclusively to each other, or to me. They’d belong to their babies. We all knew this. It was why she wanted me—it was what had allowed Olivia to hold Dad’s secret for a whole week.

“I want her to call him,” Odette said, grimacing, but not yet entering another bout of crushing pain—for her or my limbs.

“Evan? I can call again—” I reached for my cell phone, though I knew whom she meant.

“No, I want Olivia to call Dad. She has the number. I want Dad. I have Mom, and you, and O, of course, but I want Dad to see his first grandbaby right away. I want him here because he can make sure it all goes okay—you have no idea how many things can go . . .
wrong!”
This last word she screamed as she grabbed at my leg.

It occurred to me that there might have been just the tiniest bit of competition—a who will have the first grandbaby sort of thing—that I hadn’t even considered before today. But Olivia was acting bizarre, and Odette had asked for me, not that I minded, but really, with Olivia there, she usually had all the expert witnesses she might need.

“Okay?” I said.

“Tell her,” Odette said, coming down from the pain peak. It hurt under my belly button—I knew my own womb for just a second and wondered how anyone could bear such occupation.

“Why do I get the feeling you already did?”

“She said it’s not an emergency. I was going to ask Mom—she has the lawyer’s number, of course—but it didn’t seem fair. But it is an emergency, O’s being stubborn and mean. My baby’s coming early. I need him here, and he gave her the number specifically for labor. And you—thank you for coming, Clem. You know I’m going to need a babysitter.” She started to sit up, then lay back down.

“It’s all about movement when you’re not in this position. Move, and it won’t
hurt so fucking much!”

“I’m not leaving you in a contraction,” I said, but at that minute Evan rushed in, his face wan, his cologne a lovely sort of sandalwood, his shoes scuffed in an endearing businessman-on-the-run way.

“I’m here! You okay?” He took Odette’s hand from mine. This left me with relatively few options other than insisting Olivia fork over the number if she wasn’t willing to call.