The Orphan Sister (22 page)

The psychiatrist asked me to tell her why I was there. She wore a velvet wrap over a neat wrap dress. All wrapped up. She had colossal dark eyes and parentheses of kind wrinkles around her mouth. She sipped tea while we talked, and her lipstick stained the mug, a subtle kiss. I told her Cameron died, how he died, how I felt close to his family but couldn’t stay close anymore—another loss. I told her how his brother had held my hand at the funeral and laughed, inappropriately, at the grave site. How I hated cemeteries and wanted to be cremated and thrown in the ocean.

“Why do you feel you should be in the ocean?” she asked me.

“Because we all came from the ocean, right?” I improvised. Really, I just didn’t like the idea of graveyards. “Or maybe Caspian Lake, I mean, it’s named after a sea.”

“Have you been thinking about your own death?” she asked, sip, sip, sip.

“No. I haven’t really been thinking about anything.”

Then my sisters came.

There was always this moment after not seeing my sisters—whether for a day or a month—that felt like looking in a mirror: surprise, recognition, awareness of things I’d forgotten. Even though I was nonidentical, it was as if I’d forgotten the shape of my own eyes in the corners of theirs, as if I thought of the lashes as lighter, when really they were cast dark webs against the pale skin. I loved Olivia in this moment of seeing her as I loved no one
else, and partly as I loved myself. As long as they were in the world, I couldn’t miss enough pieces to be the sort of puzzle you have to cast aside, disgusted.

Sometimes, I had felt almost that way about Cameron. Sometimes, after he died, I still found myself wanting to remember what he looked like, that sweet surprise. Like opening a gift you picked out yourself. I had pictures, of course, but I also lugged some other things in a box: an answering machine he’d attached to his dorm room phone, cables and cords connecting the clandestine apparatus before there was campus-wide voice mail. And cell phones. If Cameron had carried a cell phone, I would have kept it if I could. But he didn’t so I had this shoebox-size machine with his outgoing message on a tape I never played because, if I did, it would be stretched and grow brittle and no longer reassure me.

With my sisters, there was no box, or I was the box. We kept our own voices, but there was some of Odette’s voice in mine, some of Olivia’s. There was a disastrous confluence about us, a we-ness that sometimes preempted individuality, even when we lived with the distance of the continent between us. It crippled me, sometimes, wanting to look in the mirror and see my sisters. And sometimes my differentness made me stronger than they were, and sometimes it made me feel as though something were always missing.

“Stop moping” was the first thing Odette said when she saw me.

“We’re going to have fun,” said Olivia, though her face was worried.

“Nice,” I said, hugging them both. I was moping, but still felt
I had every right. I had found my
bashert
, my destiny, as Eli said, my other, my pair, and now he was dead, and I didn’t want to look for anything new, or even look. I wanted to close off my senses to the green and the buzzing of flies trapped between window and screen.

My sisters took me swimming every day. Took me, because Odette picked out my suit and led me to my room to change. Olivia held my hand when we walked down to the dock. And to jump in, they stood on either side of me and counted. Brittle, cold mornings, the occasional steamy afternoon, we jumped into the blue-green Caspian Lake, all three holding hands. When we hit the water, we let go, three maidens in the water. I belonged with them; I made them whole. They would never let me extinguish myself.

And then I started to get better. I longed to talk with Cameron’s mother. We’d held hands at the funeral—she’d invited me to stay with them, but I felt as though I couldn’t keep them without Cameron. She wanted to be my friend—I couldn’t have her that close now that he was gone. On the phone she most often cried. She asked me once, “Do you believe he’s in heaven? Or reincarnated?” The conversation was too close—her loss would always dwarf mine. We both stopped calling. I was still angry with God, if there was a God, for giving me such a beautiful boy, then taking him away, but I liked the taste of iced tea again, liked the chocolate ice cream I churned with my sisters on the deck, after shucking corn, watching the lake lap against the glacial erratics that made smooth, gray cliffs by the shore. We had a hand-crank ice cream
maker and needed to churn for about an hour, though one’s arms grew exhausted after about three or four minutes. So we rotated. Mom was driving to Burlington to meet some friends from Princeton.

“So,” said Olivia, churning. “What’s it really like?”

“What?” I tortured her, rubbing my sore wrist. “Sex? You’re still a virgin?” I knew she wasn’t. I knew both sisters had lost their virginity to their matching MBA boyfriends sophomore year, that neither had enjoyed it all that much, but both were proud. They’d broken up with the boyfriends a few months—and a lot of sex—later, realizing sex actually mattered. I’d heard about it in conference phone calls and over winter break, but I hadn’t really listened; I’d been in my Cameron haze.

“Love,” said Odette, who was lying on a towel with her eyes closed. She wore a sweatshirt because it was cold out, and her legs were chicken-skin cold—I saw hers and felt it on my own. There was still that, physical empathy.
Love
, she said again, without speaking.

“Oh,” I said, hurting as if she’d stabbed me with a rapier. “I don’t know because I am having my heart surgically removed. Really, it’s an extra organ. I figure I can get some kind of motor to circulate the blood. . . .”

“You actually felt it in your heart? Not just your head? Can you feel love in your heart? I don’t even know if your heart has much in the way of nerves, being a muscle and all—”

Odette sat up. She sent me not a word, but a feeling, an electric current, a buzzing from my shoulders to my palms.

“She can make a metaphor once in a while, don’t you think?” Olivia stopped churning.

“My chest,” I said, shaking out my arms. “I felt it in my chest, and my nose, and my eyes, and my fingernails, my dead-matter fingernails. I felt him everywhere. Probably the way you two feel each other—almost the way we three do—only different, of course.”

“Of course,” they said, in unison, which made us all laugh.

“You don’t think you’ve been in love?” I asked both of them at once.

“No,” they said, unison again.
Maybe
, said Olivia, but just to me. She was trying to give me something, an exclusivity.

“Your turn,” said Olivia, handing me the churn.

“I just went,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Go again.”

It was perfect, the jumping into the lake, over and over, holding hands, then letting go. Sometimes I let myself sink without moving, then let my body rise slowly. I might have scared them sometimes, underwater for a minute, maybe even two. The silky waterweeds had made us scream like the children we hadn’t finished being. There were fish if I opened my eyes—trout, minnows, and shadows that meant nothing, unidentified things of the lake, which made me imagine, made me want to be eleven again, made me want to feel as if I could do anything.

Then my sisters left, in tandem. They took the internal dialogue that left me revealed. They drove to Boston in Odette’s Porsche, a grudgingly accepted graduation gift. Olivia had refused a matching car, insisting that she would consent to a car when she didn’t
live in Boston. But I knew they drove the car to the beach, to Walden Pond, home and back again, up to Vermont. They drove the Porsche and Odette let it gather door dings and the pits and cracks from gravel roads, without fuss. She appreciated the car, she told our disapproving Dad, but she wouldn’t spend all her time worrying about it. It was transportation. They drove off, waving to Mom and me, and I felt the sadness slip under my skin again.

“Dad’s coming up for the week,” said my mother. She sounded so joyful, like a girl anticipating her birthday party. I didn’t really want to see my father. When he was there, Mom worried about dinner; when he wasn’t, we ate ice cream and pie, or noodles from a pot. I convinced her we didn’t always need to set the table, and she indulged me, letting me cook food co-op recipes with ingredients from Buffalo Mountain—chickpea and feta salad, three-bean chili, which left us gassy and uncomfortable, but tasted really delicious with loads of cheddar cheese, cracked-wheat tabbouleh and marinated tofu. Making it reminded me of Oberlin, and Oberlin reminded me of Cameron, but I was getting better. I was thinking about going back, or moving on, finishing up somewhere else, getting a job, becoming a cowgirl on a Western ranch. I reread the books of my childhood that sat on the knotty-pine, built-in shelf in my room, over the narrow brass bed and pilly white bedspread with fringe from the 1970s.
Black Beauty, Anne of Green Gables
, and books brought from college, the eager first year’s
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
, and
Gödel, Escher, Bach
. I reread a hardbound copy of
Walden
from the Greensboro library, its cover thick cloth, an occasional pink or wood violet pressed between the pages by another thoughtful soul. Maybe Grey had read it, I thought, maybe he sat out on the rocks by his summerhouse, tearing flowers
from the cracked lips of the boulders, thinking of what he would become.

I was going to change things. I was going to change myself. I wasn’t going to care so much what other people thought, even if it made my father angry, even if it disappointed him. I was going to remake myself, so I could start again.

I
t wasn’t an ordinary morning—the sky was thickly gray, the light-filtering shades my mother had ordered custom for the two front windows of the carriage house were battering their frames with the ambivalent wind’s exhalations. I’d walked the dogs and given Cheese a frozen chicken neck. Someone was knocking at my carriage house door, and I guessed, by the shape and slice of blue button-down I could see through the glass, that it was my father.

“It’s open,” I muttered, clearing my throat.

It wasn’t open, which meant he had to turn the knob and push, then try again, in his stubborn, certain manner—unwilling to give up on the information presented to him.

He knocked again.

I was leaning on the counter trying not to spill the coffee beans as I filled the grinder. Eli was asleep in my bed, and my voice-mail light was blinking, and I had a sore spot on my neck, quite possibly a hickey. The last time I’d had a hickey was the day I broke up with Feet, who seemed to like sucking my neck, my fingers, and even my toes—hence the nickname.

“Fine,” I said, turning the dead bolt, but not opening the door.

“Hello, Clementine,” said my father, walking into the cottage as if he hadn’t been gone for a week and a half, as if he didn’t arrive
in the twelfth hour, thirteenth, really, just in time to oversee the repairs to his daughter’s reproductive organs. The only cadential change was that he’d knocked on my door instead of entering unannounced, using his key, which I suppose was a minor act of deference. I’d take that, but I expected a hell of a lot more. I’d meant it when I called him
asswipe
, but I’d lost some of my steam since then—seeing my sister slip on the dangerous ice, sleeping with Eli.

“Hello,” I said. “So, I hear you have another wife.” I went to my desk and slid the bridal portrait out of the Chaucer.

“Clem?” Eli called from the bedroom.

My father raised his eyebrows at me. “Sleepover?” The corners of his mouth revealed his amusement. Historically, I’d take umbrage because his approval of my sex life wasn’t something I cared about. Or I did, which was why I bothered to be bothered. But not today.

“Don’t change the subject,” I said.

“Everything okay?” Eli called.

“It’s just my father,” I said. I could hear Eli clearing his throat. “Is this her?” I waved the photo.

“Want company?” called Eli.

I did, I wanted him here to protect me from this familiar stranger, the way I wanted my mother to come into the classroom every day with me in first grade, even though there were only two first grades, so I was in Olivia’s class. I had wanted her to leave something of herself, even just her breath, in the room, before it was safe for me. Like a blessing. I had loved my mother so much, I thought, feeling melancholy for his betrayal of her.

“That’s okay,” I called to Eli.

“Snake in the bed,” he called back.

“Eli! My dad’s here. That’s kind of—”

“No. Skinny. He’s out of his cage again.”

I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t.

“Never mind,” said Eli. “I can put him back.”

I heard Eli shuffle into the bathroom, turn on the shower, and shut the door. He was giving us privacy. I had slept with Eli. At last. I wouldn’t think about this now, I couldn’t.

I brandished the portrait.

“Clementine,” my father started. Still gripping the portrait in one hand, I turned on the coffee grinder so he was inaudible. My anger was fierce, but my desire to know everything was winning the arm-wrestling contest with fury. I couldn’t look at his eyes or I’d know something I wasn’t ready to know. I poured water into the coffeemaker, poured the fresh grounds into the gold filter. My mother liked surfaces clean, so I wiped the counter, tossing the extra crumbs of coffee grounds onto the floor. I’d sweep later. I still couldn’t look at him.

“Clementine,” he started again. “Yes. That was her.” He made a hurt face. Boy expecting sympathy for his boo-boos. I hated him for lying.

“It’s more complicated than you might think. We all make mistakes—”

“Mistakes? Bigamy is a mistake?”

“It was supposed to be annulled,” he said.

“Mmm, so that explains away years of betrayal.
Supposed to be annulled?
What does that mean?” The weave of my dish towel was fascinating. My mother’s dish towel. I wondered whether she’d detailed this expense in that horrible Accounts ledger,
whether she’d sacrificed something she might have wanted—to go to a movie, to buy some seedlings for the greenhouse—to buy dish towels for the carriage house. I hated everything about my father—his bossiness, his control of everything, his obsession with money—because all of these things were orchestrated to keep his secret from us. He wanted to have more than everyone else—more information, more power, more money, maybe, it occurred to me like a breath of skunk air, more children than anyone knew about. Maybe he had more children, somewhere else.