The Orphan Sister (27 page)

My parachute was blue green and looked like a pool in New Jersey. I’d called Eli fifteen times and he hadn’t answered. My sisters were still in Cambridge. My mouth tasted of sour airplane air, three days later. The dogs, slightly wild after their sedated journey in the pressurized baggage (in the cabin, I thought of them every minute with guilt and a little jealousy—I would’ve liked sedation), started barking; Ella ran in furious, ridiculous circles around herself, and of course it was Eli who came over to the pool and pushed me in. Then he jumped in, too. I wasn’t sure I was up for the roughhousing, but I climbed on him, my legs around his waist, my arms on his shoulders, and pretended to dunk him. He stood, holding me, and beamed. I couldn’t stand so much touching, even though we were wearing clothing in the pool, and I extracted myself and climbed out, collected towels from the pool house.

“Hello,” he said, shedding his soaked polo shirt. I almost cried again, watching his sinewy shoulders tug the wet cotton away from his chest.

“Jerk,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. Everything about him reminded me of Oberlin—the openness of his face, that he was different here in the land of sameness, the grin that reminded me how we’d biked through the brain trees, how he’d teased me about the hickeys Cameron left on my neck, how he’d pretended to wrestle over my honor with Cameron—suddenly it didn’t seem as if he’d been a brotherly figure, suddenly all the complications of his love life seemed invented to compete with mine. I didn’t need another competitor: I had my sisters. I wasn’t sure I needed a brother, either, but I clearly needed Eli, and that was the relationship we’d established.

“Got any naked brunch?” he asked me as we changed in the pool house, separated by the Japanese screens my mother had set up to maximize changing space.

“Sounds good,” I said, and ducked, naked, around the screen. Eli was toweling off his privates, and he blushed a cinnamon color when he saw me, then snapped his towel in my direction.

“Come to Vermont with me,” I said, realizing I needed the deep green, the cold dip of the lake, the quiet and lupines.

“Okay,” said Eli. “I’ll check my social schedule.”

“Now.”

“Okay. I’ll drive.”

We packed backpacks: a few clothes, a lot of snacks—Eli baked us snacking granola with cashews and flaxseed—and bathing suits. No one was home in the big house, and it suited me to only leave a note. Home had the wrong kind of silence. I was surprised how much I missed the stark blue and white lines of San Francisco,
brightly colored houses tilting into the horizon, the way the sea cut off the sky, the way, if you were headed downhill near the Presidio, the green of the lawns and brown buildings seemed to stand atop the water, mingling with the sailboats and tankers coming in under the bridge.

I sat in the passenger seat and cried while Eli drove. It felt as though I’d saved a year’s worth of tears, as if I’d been holding everything inside, though I’d been sad for long enough that I should’ve exhausted my sadness and moved on into another stage of grief by then.

“Stages of grief,” Eli said, grinning, always grinning, as if things such as grief could be a joke if we willed them to be.

“Flatulence, pissed-offed-ness, night tremors, nocturnal emissions, and the last, most excellent: extreme thirst. Can you pass me a soda? I want one of the pomegranate ones.”

He’d stocked a cooler with exotic sodas, with juices and fresh cheeses from the farmers’ market—his fridge, as usual, was full of beautiful things. He’d told me once that when his mother returned from a tour of Asia, filming for her new show on the Food Channel, her scent had changed. She’d left with one combination (“Think patchouli softened by citrus and made richer by a combination of musk and vanilla bean—not vanilla extract . . .” Eli grew rapturous when he talked about scents, though he often also grew melancholy, thinking about his mother, missing her) and come home with new elements—a little passion fruit, a little lemongrass. Eli’s cooler smelled like bergamot and lemongrass, like Eli’s apartment, a little like Eli himself.

“I think I’m stuck at flatulence,” I said, handing him the soda and zipping up the cooler. I sniffled and started crying again. It
felt great. I’d long since emptied the first box of tissues, and now I was sniveling and sobbing into Eli’s bandana. I wasn’t feeling sorrow, though; I felt relief.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Not you, never my sweet petunia Clementine.”

I cried a little longer, watching the sharp, rocky profiles of New Hampshire open and close like the pages of a book as we drove north.

“You need to open this for me,” said Eli, handing back the soda. “Here.” He handed me a Swiss army knife. It was something Cameron would have had. Cameron actually brought his Eagle Scout manual to Oberlin, and his tent. We’d taken a weekend trip together, hiking through cornfields and along dusty roads, stopping to camp by the Black River in the Indian Hollow Reservation, the outcrop of rock and silver mica in the river such distinctively different colors from New Jersey I felt as if I’d moved to another country. The aspens were yellow, and Cameron found a walking stick clinging to the tent in the morning, a stubborn bug, hanging on to the tent fly as if he’d found a mate in the rip-stop nylon. Finally, Cameron had extracted the insect, but it left one of its legs behind. The whole hike home, we’d made up prayers for the walking stick, songs of mourning for the walking stick, hymns of walking-stick thankfulness. I wished, now, that Cameron had lost a leg. I could’ve dealt with that—I could’ve stuck by him—I could have made him even more mine for suffering through it together, but instead, he’d left me for death.

“Clem?” said Eli, interrupting my sobs. “I’m really thirsty.”

We were alone in Vermont for two days. We played house, unpacking staples from the storage pantry, with Eli’s commentary on the brands and how they measured up. He loved going to the Willey’s store, picking out the best cuts of meat—cut fresh for him, though I had a hard time not thinking of the cows that watched from the timothy fields, their innocent giant eyes, and the sheep. Goat I didn’t mind as much—they seemed tough and uninterested in pleasing anyone. Eli chatted with Charity, the woman who wore the bloody butcher’s apron and taught swimming at the town beach when she finished work.

We swam twice a day, like a ritual, first in the morning when the cold water hurt, so we had to race out to the raft. I was a better swimmer than Eli, but I didn’t want to beat him every time, so I lingered with each stroke, letting him touch the slimy wood before me. In the early evening, our swims were more comfortable, the raft dry and warm, the surface of the water clear and almost warm enough not to clear the breath from my body on impact.

We had a schedule—Eli made plans for us each day, even after my mother arrived, then my father, then my sisters. I felt cared for—letting him make all the decisions—horseback riding at the stable where I’d taken lessons, a trail ride up into the farmland and preserve on Barr Hill. Eli hadn’t ridden much, and his horse knew it and trotted when he wanted her to canter. We stopped at the top of the hill, and the horses ate early apples from the trees, though I knew it would make a mess of their tack. I’d clean it when we returned; I still knew the woman who ran the stable.

We drove out to Cabot creamery, where they gave us curds if we asked, letting us have them for free, because they were unpasturized and not salable. They tasted delicious, creamy, warm, and
squeaked against my teeth. We took the factory tour and bought six kinds of cheese, which Eli would use for frittatas, foccacia, a magnificent veggie open taco he prepared for all the women of my family, but mostly, I knew, for me.

Then, the last day of my sisters’ stay, he started flirting with them. It was subtle, and not unprecedented, but it felt like the end of the reverie, the end of his singularly dedicated friendship, which had almost felt like courtship, only mostly chaste. I say mostly, because he’d kissed my hand twice during the week, and my forehead, and my shoulder, once on the raft, not that I was counting.

That last day, we all raced to the raft. My sisters, taller, less practiced, and as usual luckier than I, stretched past us both and tied at the raft. They looked like girls almost, long and lean in their matching blue-and-white, sailor-themed bikinis. Of course, I just wore a functional Speedo, red and plain. They lay out on the towels Odette had ferried out on the kayak so we could sunbathe the way we had when we were kids. She’d also brought sunscreen, but no one wanted to use it. We wanted to take a risk. And apparently, so did Eli.

“Girls!” he called, climbing up after them, dripping on their already sun-warmed bodies. It was midday. Usually we had plans, but Eli hadn’t said anything, he’d just lazed around the house with the rest of us, reading the leftover weekend
Boston Globe
and watching everyone. I’d even made breakfast—blueberry pancakes—serving them to my sisters, who ate six apiece, doused with wads of the fresh butter we’d picked up at the farm, and so much syrup their plates almost overflowed. I never loved blueberry pancakes, preferring my fruit and pancakes separate, but I
made them for my sisters, for my mother, who was sleeping late or hiding in her room up the knotty-pine stairs, for Eli, a tiny gesture of thanks.

“Hey!” shrieked Odette as Eli lay his wet body across my sister’s already towel-and-sun-dried legs. It wasn’t an angry
hey;
it was charmed, it was sexual.
Cute
, she thought.
And delightfully firm
. It was appalling to hear her.

“Cut it out,” said Olivia, but she rolled over so Eli was practically in her lap.

“You left me no alternative,” said my fickle friend, gracing them with his most charming smile. “There’s no room on the raft, and your four legs looked so warm—”

“Flirt,” said Odette, but she made no move to push him off.
You’re right, O
, she told us both. If nothing else, college had made my sisters assertive, sure of themselves, able to stand up to men in any realm. Or so I thought.

“There’s plenty of room over here,” I said, disappointed in myself for playing the game.

Eli didn’t seem to hear me. He was shaking his head, showering my sisters, who squealed obligingly.

I’d finished toweling myself off, and there was no way I could stay for this. Of course he’d never actually make a pass at either of them, but the Eli I knew and loved would be the charming, sinewy shoulders, the touchy guest and cuddly friend I knew with other women. My sisters, in particular, who had no need of a new man, who wouldn’t be interested, but who wouldn’t mind taking him away from me for a while.

“Fine,” I said, and dived back into the water, pulling through the cold underbelly of the lake, away from the house. I swam to
the middle of the lake, not looking back. I was chilly now, despite the sun. I rotated: ten strokes of crawl, ten backstroke, ten breast. Finally I stopped and floated, feeling the momentous work of my heart. I looked back toward the raft and could see three forms standing. Maybe they were looking toward me, maybe they were wrestling. Whatever the case, I knew better than to need Eli so completely anymore.

That night, I came into my room to find my sisters sitting on my bed.

“We’re worried,” they said. Their eyes, four animal eyes, four eyes that wouldn’t let me be invisible, and I was angry with them, and with Eli, and with everything. Then I noticed that Odette held something neatly in her lap, her manicured fingers resting on my journal. My journal—the fourth, perhaps, in a month. I’d bought the plain, short, stocky spiral notebook at Willey’s store while Eli chatted up Charity the butcher. I’d expected sometimes they read my journal before, but now, I thought they were too caught up in the English fence of their cojoined lives to care about what I wrote to myself.

“You said you didn’t think it was worth living,” said Olivia, gesturing toward the book.
Wallowing, or really?

I stood at the edge of my bed, a double, staring at their hands. Who knows what I’d written? I hoped I hadn’t written something as clichéd as
I don’t think it’s worth living
, but I knew I confided in my book more than anything, that it was where I could say whatever I wanted and not be judged.

My chest hurt; it was difficult to breathe. I felt as though I’d
swallowed great gulps of the green lake water; I felt as though I were drowning. As though maybe I wanted to.

“We want you to know we’re here,” said Odette. “And also that you can’t kill yourself. It’s selfish and mean and we won’t let you.”

“And we’re here,” said Olivia, her voice slightly softer. “And we can get you whatever help you need.”

“You must be twins,” said Odette, holding my hand too tight.

“Yes,” said Olivia. “You are twins and so are we. The transitive property. The triple math of doubling.”
Give me some of the pain
, she thought.

I gasped.
Can’t.

I couldn’t say anything. They had no right. They had every right.

Sometimes I dreamed I was in the womb with my sisters. Of course, I’m sure I invented all the details rather than relying on any sort of memory. But when I woke, I missed the jousting of elbows, the beating of two other hearts. I was forever a puppy on my first night away from the litter, howling for that collective warmth. When we were born, we were slow to warm on our own, slow, but it was not impossible that we’d find our distinct internal suns.