The Orphan Sister (6 page)

I typed in the last answers on my exam, hit save, then send. I was finished. All the eggs were in the basket, and I had to wait to see whether they’d hatch.

My father was missing, and still time ticked on, the grass grew, and the team of silent gardeners amassed on the estate—my mother hired a service that used no power tools, so our entire
two-acre lawn was mowed by hand, with a second worker following behind to rake up the cuttings and put them on the compost pile by the back of the property, where my mother brought eggshells and ceremoniously flung them over the six-foot white pickets the neighbors had been sorry to see, even though they kept the eyesore out of eyesight.

“O.” I left another message for Olivia. “Call me and tell me you’re okay.”

When my phone beeped, I jumped.

“Olivia!”

“I’m okay, Clem.” Then, before I could read anything from her tone, as if she suspected me of putting an emotional trace on her phone call, she hung up.

I threw my cell phone across the room, where it bounced on the plush couch upholstery and landed in a tasteful big-bellied crystal bowl full of river stones. It didn’t crack.

My mom would talk about anything except my father.

“Would you like lunch?” she singsonged, rapping on my front door.

“I haven’t heard anything—except that Olivia’s okay,” I called out to her. “And Dad has some other lawyer? Do you know about this?”

“I know Olivia’s okay. I asked about
lunch.”

“Just finishing up here. I can’t eat much because Eli’s coming for dinner.”

“Oh, Eli,” she said, raising her eyebrows.

“No, Mom, Eli’s my friend. Only my friend.” It didn’t matter
what either of us felt—he’d been off-limits since he was my boyfriend’s roommate in college.

“Either he’s gay or he has a crush on you,” she said, picking up the blood-orange spritzer she kept on the table by the door. It was hard for me to remember this was her guest home sometimes; it felt entirely mine until she waltzed in and reminded me her air needed freshening in case some real guests came.

“Okay. Chicken and watercress sandwiches,” she said. My mother
looked
like tempting company. She had lip gloss and updated makeup—light foundation that made her face sunny, and shimmery, subtle eyeliner. She was reading a biography of Napoléon and would tell me all about his jealousies and motivations. She wouldn’t talk about Dad, but she’d charm me the way she charmed everyone. It was possible that, with her makeup and clothes in place, my mother looked younger than I. I wore sweatpants and a coffee-stained white, short-sleeved sweater. Sighing, I followed her over to the big house.

It was ridiculous, infuriating, and wrong that Olivia wouldn’t tell any of us any more about what she knew. I called her relentlessly—or at least five or six times—and all my calls went to voice mail. I knew she was pressing the button. My sister was holding out against me, against Odette. Olivia had never done this before, and Dad was puppeting her, and I was confused, furious, and jealous. He must have known we would be jealous. Or maybe he didn’t even consider us. Maybe I had too often imagined he thought of us; he was a narcissist. He was selfish. And yet I cared what he thought of me.

When I let myself think about it, I wanted to shake my bulbous sister, but I was doing my best not to think about it. It had been two days, and my mother had said as long as she knew he was safe, she didn’t mind.

“If he were my husband,” I told Mom, chewing on the delicious, thinly sliced sourdough, “I’d hire a detective.”
I’d command Olivia to tell,
I thought.
I’d threaten divorce.

“Do you like the bread? Mary Beth gave me the culture. She brought it back from her trip to San Francisco. Well-traveled bacteria!” My mother smiled.

I tried to smile honestly, but felt as though I were acting. My jaw ached. I took another bite.

I had eaten four meals at the house in the two days since he vanished, partly to keep an eye on her, at Odette’s insistence. It was pleasant and uncomfortable, like an elaborate wool dress: itch and splendor. I leaned back on the kitchen chair, waiting for Mom to tell me to put the front legs down. We’d had almost an entire bottle of cabernet, probably worth more than my car, a ten-year-old Toyota with a dent in each fender, as if it had been hugged too hard. Mom tugged the watercress out of her sandwich and nibbled.

“Delicious,” I admitted.

We used to have a full-time cook, but never a maid, only a cleaning service once a week. The Accounts. It amazed me that my mother, with her doctorate in comparative literature and executive experience, could spend more than three hours a day vacuuming an empty mansion without going mad.

“Don’t you want to know?” I asked her as I washed and she dried. Never mind that we had a dishwasher, with just a few dishes my mother insisted on hand washing.

“No,” she said. The room smelled of mayonnaise and the custom organic, lavender dish soap. I had eaten too much, my whole sandwich and Mom’s scraps, two helpings of new potatoes in butter with parsley. I was supposed to be saving my appetite for Eli’s genius work, but being around my mother made me nervous, so I ate to fill the hole.

“Mom, you have rights, too.”

She dried my dish, once, twice, drying it over and over as if it had absorbed water and needed the constant attention of a dish towel to return to its ordinary state.

“I have that meeting at the Morristown Museum tonight,” she said.

“He just
left
, Mom. And you go on as if everything’s okay.” I knew she didn’t like how I patted the cutlery with the dish towel.

“I think you underestimate your father sometimes. I’ve had my more difficult moments.” She sighed, and I could almost hear her editing her words before she spoke them. “And your dad was unfailing in his attentions. He’s always encouraged me, supported me . . .”

“But, Mom, he’s just gone off—”

“I used to dislike being left alone. But now I actually crave it.”

“Left alone is one thing. Abandonment is another.”

“When you have a husband, my dear, then you can make your own decisions about how you treat him. I trust your father.” She put the dish in the cabinet and started rubbing at a spoon.

“Dad?” I asked his cell-number voice mail. “What the hell? We’re worried about you, and Mom’s calm, which means she’s
panicking, and how dare you? You’re killing her! Call her, okay, Dad?”

I look like him. My father is seventy-three now; his hair has yielded to a faded silvery-red. He has a freckled forehead, a freckled chin, a freckled neck, and freckled chest, as I do. My sisters are smooth as cream. I don’t mind the hair, though; it’s dark enough to almost not be red. I think it’s my best feature, suggestive of another color, suggestive of wildness when really I’ve been subdued since I decided to return to school.

After Mom left for her Morristown Museum meeting, I lingered in the big house, telling myself I’d just check the Diary, one more time, for clues. The Diary was the same, but I started fingering the table’s little drawer pulls, tarnished brass, heavy curves like binder-clip handles, holding things together within. When we were little, we’d extract a rubber-band ball, risking the wrath of our organized mother. We’d bounce it in the hallway of the little house, peeling off the bands, counting, chaining, entertaining ourselves with the limited properties of afternoon and rubber.

Here was a packet of bills from the landscapers, all stamped
PAID
. Here was a tiny bundle of potpourri, bound in one of my mother’s old stockings, dried rose petals that smelled uniquely of the Octavia rose. Here were old report cards wrapped in a ribbon. Odette’s A A A A and a handwritten note from her seventh-grade teacher: “Olivia is an outstanding pupil!”
Olivia.
On
Odette’s
report card. I didn’t remember this story, but it must have felt wretched to Odette. It was one thing to be one of three wishes, and another entirely to be called by your sister’s name—not just by a confused person, in person, but on a report card. I tucked the report cards back in the drawer. The house was ticking. Clocks in
the living room, the grandfather in the hall, moon phases and exquisite serif numbers, and I realized I needed to climb up to Dad’s attic office; I needed to hunt for more.

My steps required stealth; I’d outgrown my privileges to romp up the stairs. Of course, Dad was the one who encouraged romping. Dad, despite his seriousnesses, was playful in the privacy of houses. He played hide-and-seek with us in the couches, let us get wild, never reminded us not to bang our heads on the corners of furniture—so sometimes we did. Dad could tickle all three of us just by wiggling his fingers in our general direction, at least until high school. Possibly he could get me to laugh if he did it right now.

His office smelled like Dad. There was a paper smell, old books, and maybe something like cloves—probably aftershave, or something Mom used to press his shirts. I bit the inside of my cheek. I loved her care and I hated that she pressed his shirts, and that he was gone.

The desk itself was neat; the top drawer held fountain pens accompanied by their cartridges or ink bottles, mechanical pencils, felt tips, Sharpies, a regatta of writing instruments. The next drawer was just the office supplies—rubber bands again, paper clips segregated by color, a slide rule—a slide rule!—a metal protractor, a compass (the kind we used to stab holes in our paper when we were supposed to pencil perfect curves). Nothing suspicious. But then, beneath the drawer dividers holding this supply bonanza, something crinkled. I extracted a packet of papers, messy, very un-Dad-like, tied with string. Here was my sixth-grade report card. Math was only satisfactory. Here was a program from Olivia’s production of Ionesco’s
Rhinoceros
, first year
at Harvard. Here was another report card—Olivia’s? No. Not Olivia’s. The first page was missing, but I didn’t recognize the form. There was no year, only onionskin paper grown thin enough to hold to the light and trace. Someone had earned three A’s and two B’s. I couldn’t remember a year anyone other than me had such a dismal record. Maybe it was Dad’s—maybe Dad himself got two B’s!

Here was a picture of Ella. I was beside her, but you could only see my leg. Here was a picture of my apartment in San Francisco. I felt a welling of love for this man who collected evidence of my life in a messy string-collated bundle. A school photo from third grade, my lower lip red and chapped, my shirt pastel blue, pansy-patterned, my eyes like his. Odette and Olivia were here, too, eyes so blue, clean, and distinct to me—the smallest fold around Olivia’s mouth, I knew it was a secret sarcasm, even in third grade. And then there was an extra photo—sometimes whole sheets of the wallet-size ones never made it out of the school-photo envelopes because we had so few relatives with wallets to fill with our faces. It was someone I didn’t know at all.

A quick poison ran through my veins—why did my dad have a photo of another kid? A mistake. Someone’s stuck to ours in the envelope. I had to think it—Dad was not a pedophile. Olivia had said we’d be better off if he were dead. No. My dad—no. Maybe this girl was Dad’s sister—we never knew if he had a sister, maybe he’d kept her photo bundled with ours by accident. I looked on the back but there was nothing. The background was like ours, mottled indigo of a fake sky. Would a photo of Dad’s sister be in color? The girl herself looked a little pissed off, but her mouth was sweet in a smile—it was only her eyes that held irony. Straight,
mouse-brown hair. A barrette and a middle part. A pink button-down shirt on a narrow chest. She looked maybe nine.

My dogs were barking—I’d left them far too long. I reassembled the bundle, tucking in the mystery photo. Maybe the photography studio sent home one of our classmates to keep the three of us company—I didn’t know this girl, didn’t remember her. Just one more look—Dad’s yearbook from high school. I flipped through to his picture. Charles Lord, so young, so vulnerable and simultaneously stubborn. The dogs. I closed the book and put it on the shelf next to Chaucer. I wanted to read the Chaucer. It called me names—
science geek, procrastinator
—I should have taken the photo or the yearbook, but instead, still feeling guilty for intruding at all, I grabbed the volume of Chaucer and went back to my carriage house to let the dogs out.

I acquired my love of science from my father. I used to think we all inherited it, but I think Odette just loves being in charge and Olivia loves the drama of deliveries more than anything. She’s the kind of doctor to whom patients ascribe undying love—during deliveries she tracks down the anesthesiologist and persuades him to bump up her patients in the schedule when they’ve changed their minds and don’t want natural birth, but an epidural, and pronto. She finds private rooms when the whole hospital is full. The patients think she’s a goddess and send her gift baskets of cheese, homegrown honeycomb, even jewelry. If I ever have a child, I want my sister to deliver it. I want my other sister to examine it. I want to be safely bracketed in their parentheses—whether I have a child or not.

Both my sisters glided through medical school because they inherited Dad’s ease with learning, his quick mnemonics and methods and whole-page memory. One Thanksgiving my father laughed with glee as Odette recited, “Skip lifted Brian’s law book heartily,” then grinned and finished, “the five heaviest human organs: skin, liver, brain, lungs, and heart!”

Not to be outdone, Olivia chanted, “Old people from Texas eat spiders—the bones of the skull are occipital, parietal, frontal, temporal, ethmoid, sphenoid.”

“Ethmoid schmethanoid” was all I had to add. I didn’t have that kind of memory. School was hard work. If I saw the insides of something—an equation, an eyeball, a work of art—I understood it better, but I wished I could swallow whole ideas the way the three of them did, whole ideas that they could regurgitate whenever needed.

Odette knocked on my door, smiling seriously. She was on her BlackBerry, and she gave me the eyeball. As my dogs rallied around her, giving her the physical greeting I wished I could, too—smelling and wagging: you’re you! I’m me!—I picked up my own phone and dialed her number, knowing she was going to patch me into a conference call.