The Orphan Sister (9 page)

I drew out the audience with my fake hiccups; I sang, holding the notes the way Mrs. Carrigan had instructed me. I ran backstage in my Chinese slippers at the end, and Mrs. Carrigan squeezed my arm and told me to pull my socks up. Then we went out for bows. My father came to the front of the auditorium and
handed me the bouquet. Never mind my Hot Box sisters, who wore supershort skirts and sparkles on their lips. My father brought me a fat bouquet with roses, African daisies, freesia, and orchids. It must’ve cost a fortune. He was wearing a suit and smelled like the airplane he’d been on less than an hour before, but he brought me the flowers and kissed my cheek and I adored my father, in that moment, more than Grey, more than the whole stageful of classmates who had been stunned that shy Clementine was their star. Then Grey’s mother brought him a bouquet of garden flowers—heavy-headed peonies and poisonous, handsome lily of the valley, and Grey turned and handed them to me. He may even have said something, but I couldn’t hear it for the applause. And then I made a mistake I would rue forever—in that moment of pleasure and confusion, I walked over to Mrs. Carrigan as she took her own drama coach’s bow and handed her all my flowers, as if they’d been intended for her all along.

For the last week of school, I walked by her classroom and visited my flowers from afar. They had been meant just for me, from my father, from Grey’s mother, who must actually have looked at me, who must have said something about me to Grey—such a titillating possibility, that my name had come into their house like a visitor—and I hadn’t been able to bear all that attention, but I wanted it now, when it was too late to take the gesture back.

Even back then, Odette and Olivia never faltered—they’d planned on medical school forever. “Pass the butter. Cornell is pretty good” was the sort of thing my father said at dinner. We sat
around a huge table in Princeton, oval and teak, which smelled of the Murphy oil soap my mother used to clean it herself.

“Our daughters can do whatever they want,” my mother said in a rare moment of assertiveness. We were eating meat loaf, which the cook had made at the triplets’ request. My mother made the mashed potatoes herself, and my father grunted that there was no point in having a cook if she was going to waste her talents making plebeian food.

“I know,” said Odette. “But we
want
to go to medical school.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said.

“She can speak for me,” said Olivia, wadding a buttered roll into her mouth.

“This isn’t an eating competition,” said my mother.

It’s okay
, said Odette silently. I didn’t want to listen.

“And Columbia,” said Dad. “Of course you’ll be legacies at Harvard.”

“I want to be a vet,” I said. I’d been waiting for the dog they’d promised me when I turned ten, but Dad lied and said Mom was allergic. I had rabbits in a hutch in the backyard, the ponies, two chickens that I tended until the neighbors complained about the noise and odor—from over an acre away I couldn’t imagine they’d have any idea, but mother agreed and the chickens went off to be fricasseed, or whatever. I ate meat; I wasn’t rabid with rights or anything, I just loved them, the differentness of animal bodies, their quiet attention to the world. When I told my father I was planning this, I hoped he’d give me a little smile, a little redemption, since I was the odd one out, the runt, the unmatched spoon. Instead, he’d made an odd growling sound.

“Ha,” he coughed.

“Or an artist,” I continued. “Or chanteuse.”

“She makes wonderful pots in that class,” said my mother, and I silently thanked her for defending me. She took a bit of oily salad, and a speck fell on the front of her shirt—it was enough to make me want to leave the table.

I could hear Olivia thinking,
Mom is mortifying.

And Odette:
Poor Mom
.

“You think you’ll get into vet school?” my father asked.

“Yes.”

“We’ll see,” he said. “Anyway, why would you want to work with heartworm and ticks? You’d spend most of your life excising the reproductive organs of cats and dogs.”

“Charles,” said my mother. “That’s not necessary.”

“I’m not trying to be cruel, Octavia; vets mainly neuter and vaccinate.”

“And doctors cut out the reproductive organs of people, too,” I said. “And make their noses look like other people’s noses instead of their own. And make old ladies look like they’re in a state of perpetual surprise. If it’s just about money, almost any profession has its limitations.”

“Enough,” said my father.

“Your father helps children,” said my mother. “You know that.”

“And I can help animals.” I meant it, that helping animals seemed every bit as important as helping humans.

“May we be excused?” Olivia asked for both of them. Always for both of them.

If my sisters ever wanted to do anything else, they never let on. Sure, their anticipated specialties changed, from emergency
medicine (“It’s sexy,” said Olivia, when we were in seventh grade, trying to shock someone. “No,” said my father. “It’s underpaid and dangerous”) to pediatrics (“the least-respected specialty,” said my father, though later he recanted, when Odette finished her rotation and found she held a lingering love for babies and toddlers and even teens) to psychiatry, for a while, for Olivia, when she was fifteen and thought our parents were repressed. Which they were.

In our eleventh year, shortly after we moved to Princeton, Odette once ran away—she left the house and went to the Big Rock, an island at the end of the block where you could watch boys ride by on bikes and ants navigate the preposterous cavern of a crack in the glacial erratic that stood about four feet high and was a perfect cool spot for thinking. Odette took a whole packet of graham crackers and the peanut butter jar, though she forgot the knife. Olivia, of course, went after her. We were all in fifth grade, and Odette had gotten a B on a paper about mummies. It was fall and the wind washed my face of the long red hair that usually covered my eyes, caught in my mouth like a question.

“Mom,” I said, calling out to the hallway. It was always too quiet in the house when my sisters were out; I could hear the floorboards agonizing under my weight as I walked to the stairwell.

“Mom!” This time I yelled it. This was the way it worked: Odette did, Olivia followed or judged; I told. That was our natural order. Sometimes we were protecting each other; sometimes we were simply illustrating the autonomic responses of triplethood.

“You can come up here,” said my mother, who was arranging leaves in a vase on the landing. Dad was away again; this time some drug company had flown him to San Francisco for a conference on postoperative-pain management. Lee was with him. I wasn’t sure whether I was more jealous that she was with him or that he was with her, but mostly it didn’t matter, except that Mom seemed more distracted when he was gone. We had pancakes for dinner, the cook was off, and when Olivia had asked for bacon, Mom had just sighed, never answering.

“Mom,” I called up the stairs. “Odette ran away. She took the peanut butter.”

“She’ll be back,” said Mom, humming the Schubert quintet.

“She got a B.”

“Okay,” said Mom.

“A B. Does that mean she won’t get into medical school?”

“Honey,” said my mother, looking at me in a way she never did at dinner, “not every minute of every day is about medical school.”

“I know. Odette doesn’t run away, though.”

“She won’t go far,” said my mother, suddenly wise. I wished I could turn them off the way she could. Sometimes I didn’t want to listen; I didn’t want to know them before myself.

“Why does it bother her so much? It hurts,” I said, showing Mom the vulnerable spot in my throat where I felt Odette’s tenderness.

“Sometimes I’m not so sure you girls have a balanced attitude.” Mom picked a tiny ant off her leaves and squashed it between thumb and forefinger, then casually wiped it in a tissue.
You could’ve put it outside
, I wanted to say.

And at that moment I felt more alone than I had, probably, since being born. My mother was trying to reach out, but her arms were short. I wanted that comfort—I wanted her all to myself, and here we were, alone together, but we were still each alone.

“One of us does,” I said.

I
did belong at home in some ways; just a few days after I moved into the carriage house to take classes and apply to vet school, I volunteered to help at the Princeton Junction animal shelter, three days a week. It was close to my sisters’ McMansions, but not too close—there’s no way the property values would allow for the inevitable barking and urine odor of a shelter. Each time I newly loathed the stink, though after a dozen or so minutes each time it blended into a sort of acrid background. The manager kept the shelter very, very clean because the most dramatic drain on a shelter’s finances is veterinary care, and with so many animals—often sick with worms or viruses or infections—in close quarters, sickness spread. I spent most of my volunteer time sterilizing cages, with bleach and hot water and scrubbing brushes wearing a pair of enormous rubber boots. “Are you using the boats?” I would call out to the other volunteers. We took turns wading. My hands were raw, inflamed, and parched, but I felt as though the world was a slightly better place for my work.

After I was done scrubbing, I would give the dogs a little playtime, walks, and the kind of examination someone who has not yet been to vet school can give them, in hopes of solving the mysteries of their appetite loss, hoarse barking, limps, or dry
noses. It wasn’t that I neglected the cats (though since watching
Lady and the Tramp
at age five, I have never had the same love for elusive, claw-bearing felines as dogs, who were all habit and trust), it’s that the majority of the shelter was filled with dogs, and because of the neighborhood, those dogs were often purebreds—golden retrievers, Lhasa apsos, Pekinese, pugs, a veritable breederville of expensive animals who had jumped their invisible fences, whose owners were too busy at work to notice that Jessica the Labradoodle was gone, off in search of entertainment, skunks, and garbage cans unfettered by the rubber straps that challenged toppling.

Walking around the neighborhoods of Princeton Junction three days after Dad went AWOL, I scanned all the empty houses, their open-eyed windows looking out on geometrically manicured lawns.

One particular dog had been my favorite for the past three weeks—I was calling her Pony because she was a Harlequin Great Dane, and tall enough for a small child to ride. My own animals were quite huffy when I came home smelling of Pony, but she needed attention, needed to play ball in the tiny patch of grass by the parking lot, needed to tell me, in her silent, drooly way, that she was sorry she was taking up too much time and space. Poor thing—she hadn’t been underfed, and she showed no signs of illness, but she was the most apologetic dog I’d ever met, and though she wasn’t hand shy and showed no signs of abuse, I kept thinking she’d had a family expert in psychological torture of some kind, to make her seem so embarrassed by her own presence. It was a glorious presence, too. When I walked her down the street and back, she was so light on the shelter leash you hardly felt her, and
people stared openly from their car windows, oogling the dog as they might a movie star.

I’ve always been a softie for the orphaned. Dead birds on the road made me weep for their children. My God, these poor dogs had no families! It seemed so lonely, so cast-off. I couldn’t imagine not knowing my sisters existed—for whatever fights we had, we’d gouge out the eyes of anyone who betrayed another of us. Alone, so alone, poor Pony!

“Pony,” I said as I brushed her in the little grooming room behind the reception desk. “You know I’m waiting, right?”

Pony looked at me quizzically, her tail straight down, her eyes averting when mine met them.

“He’s not perfect, but I only have one Dad. It’s like there’s a shoe about to drop somewhere.”

Pony tilted her head. I wanted to take this one home.

I wrested my cell phone out of my pocket for the fifth time in about ten minutes and checked. I felt his missing, a glowing pain, almost pleasure.

Pony’s tail waved, a low, quiet gesture. She gave my hand a swipe with her giant tongue. I would not cry, and I would not take her home unless she didn’t find another one. I bit my lip, drawing a little blood. Then I changed the subject.

“And I’m waiting for my Chem grade, which may help and hopefully won’t hurt.”

Pony’s soft, beautiful flank quivered.

“Is that too hard?” I put the brush down, a rubber groomer we stored in a jar of disinfectant like a barbershop comb.

“Hello?” queried someone walking into the shelter, calling through the open office door.

“Oh!” A woman wearing a Versace suit and carrying a patent leather briefcase. “You’re getting her ready for me?”

“Excuse me?”
We are not your groomers
, I wanted to say,
you selfish, irresponsible lady. Maybe
lady
was too generous.

“I was going to send the nanny, but she doesn’t like driving with Alexandria in the car.”

“Alexandria?” Of course, people sometimes came to claim their pets at shelters—I’d volunteered on and off for years and had seen happy reunitings and the angry relief of dog owners who had left the fence open, who had meant to keep the collar on, who had moved and forgotten to relicense, who let their dogs run off leash in the park and stopped too long to gossip. But somehow I hadn’t expected Pony to go home. I knew better than to grow attached—I had enough in the way of furry and scaly attachment waiting for me in the carriage house.

“There will be paperwork,” I grumbled, watching closely to see if Pony—Alexandria—was afraid of this woman.

“I called ahead, I simply can’t do it now—I have to be in court at ten—” The woman waved her hand at me and opened the half door that separated the office from the lobby with deft, beautifully manicured fingers.

“No,” I said. “The manager will be back in twenty minutes—or so.” She had left to pick up her daughter at preschool because someone had thrown up in the water table.