by Alix Ohlin
“The summers there are so bright,” she said. “They all sail to the islands and then build fires and cook and chat. The light makes people crazy, nobody ever wants to go to bed.”
In the silence that followed a few raindrops fell, a quick light shower that ended as soon as it began. She shifted in her chair, moving her hands from her belly to the armrests, and I thought about how I used to hear her fingers tapping when we lived together, rehearsing whatever music she was learning at the time. Instead, now, she stretched two fingers out as if holding a phantom cigarette between them.
“Is that what you were doing—sailing around the islands?”
“A little. I met some people. Hung out various places. Busked for money, singing.”
“Sounds fun,” I said, unable to keep the acid from my voice. I was thinking of my calls to police, the postcard she’d sent from Ytterby—Don’t look for me—and my own sleepless nights. How I’d flailed at work and school.
She spoke as if she hadn’t heard me. “But when summer ends everything changes. People go outside, sure, but they avoid each other. Nobody would look me in the eye. They all keep their distance. I felt like I didn’t exist. It scared me.”
“And that’s why you came back?”
Years later, great and heavier, my sister shook her head, and a strand of hair caught on her lip. She drew in her breath and then tilted her head back; she stared at the sky as she exhaled.
“No,” she said. “I was going through something like this. Strange to think about it now.”
It took me a moment to understand what she meant by something like this.
“What?” I said. Even though I’d seen the paperwork, the information was hard for me to take in. I wasn’t sure which was more difficult to grasp—that it had happened to my sister, or that she hadn’t told me about it. Both.
“I wasn’t far along like this,” she said. “It was just at the beginning. I left the tour because I wasn’t sure what to do, and I wanted to be by myself. To figure things out.”
I looked at her, but she was staring straight ahead at the inky line of pine trees, the darker sky above them. “So you and Bernard—”
“I didn’t tell him. You know how Bernard was—like a puppy. He wasn’t capable of carrying a weight like that.” I remembered Bernard as a young man, and knew what she meant—how guileless he’d been, how gentle, how vague.
There was another chair nearby and my sister got up and dragged it over, declining my offer of help, and put her feet up on it, then rested her hands on her belly. “I never wanted to be a mother,” she said. “Still don’t. No offense.”
I tilted my head to say, None taken.
“Of course I keep thinking about it lately,” she said, looking down at herself, her changed body. “It was a weird time. I left the tour because it didn’t seem important anymore. All that practicing, all that jumping through hoops, for what? To please other people. I was so tired of my life. In a way what happened was just an excuse to abandon it. I left and I just…wandered for a while. It felt good. My whole existence up to that point, people had been telling me what I should do. Mrs. Gasparian. Boris. Everyone at Juilliard. Even you.”
I bit my lip against the words I wanted to speak. I would have apologized or explained; I would have said that I was only trying to take care of her; but I knew she didn’t want me to say anything. What she wanted was silence.
“In Sweden, I felt like whatever happened should be my own plan. I would get to decide, me and only me. Eventually I made up my mind that I’d have the baby in Sweden and give it up—I thought I’d leave it at the doorstep of a church or something, like in a book. Growing up in Sweden seemed like a good life. The kids looked pretty happy there.”
She still wasn’t looking at me. The weight of what I’d asked her to do, of what I hadn’t known, settled on my chest. My vision smeared, a dirty lens.
“I made money busking for a while, staying wherever, and then it got colder and darker and less fun. My clothes didn’t fit anymore and the whole thing started to seem more real, and scary. Then I got sick. I was staying in this hostel and one night I woke up in bed and there was blood everywhere. I had terrible pain and I couldn’t even think or breathe. I got up and crouched in the bathroom and there was more blood. Two girls from Belgium came in and one of them started screaming but the other was great, she took charge, and she kicked the other one out and she held me for a while and then we went to a hospital—I don’t even remember how we got there. This girl from Belgium stayed with me the whole night, holding my hand and singing these Belgian folk songs. Oh, man, she had a terrible voice.”
I reached out a hand to touch her and then drew it back: her arms were crossed over her chest, her palms on her shoulders, and the look on her face was inward, private.
“At some point they gave me drugs to knock me out and when I woke up I was alone. It was over. By the time I got back to the hostel the girls from Belgium were gone. I never even knew their names. It took me a while to sort through what had happened. I spent two more months in Sweden in this state of—suspension, I guess.”
I thought about how starved Robin was the day she returned to the Tunnel, how when I pulled the thick wet sweater over her neck, I was startled by the rise and cut of her bones. There was almost nothing left of her. And then I recalled my own feeling of suspension in New York after I left Wheelock, how I’d called no one, spoken to no one, because I didn’t know what I would say.
Robin looked at me for the first time. “And then after a while I just said Fuck it and came home.”
“I remember,” I said.
“Listen. It’s not like I was heartbroken or traumatized for life,” she said. Her voice was clear and unwavering. “You shouldn’t think that.”
I nodded. “But why didn’t you tell me?”
“It belonged to me,” she said, and I understood she meant not the baby but the experience, the secret she’d kept, and even the telling of it now. Her face softened, and she held a hand out to me, and I took it.
“Do you think about it a lot?”
She tilted her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Do you think about your thumbs, or your lungs, or anything else that’s a part of you?”
She didn’t mean for me to answer, and so I didn’t.
“I’m thinking about it now,” she said.
I gripped her hand. We sat quietly as a steady rain began to fall. I couldn’t stop thinking about my sister at twenty, alone in another country; sending me a postcard telling me where she was, a note that contained its own contradiction, that said both I am here and Don’t look for me. I wished I could have been there with her. As we sat together, I remembered Olga lecturing in an almost empty hall at Worthen; she was talking about Eisenstein, the great Russian filmmaker, and his theories of dialectical montage. He was interested in editing for contrast as well as continuity. If you juxtapose two images, he said—or Olga said—no matter how different, the viewer will make meaning from the montage. The second image in the sequence will alter the meaning of the first. It was, I thought, how memory worked: yoking disparate elements together across time. My sister next to me now changed how I thought of her then. My sister next to me changed how I thought of myself.
“This time is different,” my sister said as the rain fell harder.
“Yes,” I said. I moved close to her and pressed my wet cheek against hers.
37.
She was overdue. According to the nurse, this was common—“Don’t worry about your little lazy one,” she said, and I frowned—and Robin rolled her eyes. After patting her hand condescendingly, the nurse left the examination room. Robin made a low growling sound of aggravation, whether at the baby or the nurse or myself, I couldn’t say. In the final weeks of pregnancy she’d entered a new stage, of constant misery; she slept fitfully, raised
on pillows because of her heartburn, went to the washroom every ten minutes, asked constantly for food but didn’t eat it. I got used to hearing her pad restlessly around the house at night. Then I woke early one morning feeling strange, murky with prolonged rest, and realized I’d slept the whole night through for the first time in ages. The house was silent. I was terrified when I looked in her bed and didn’t see her there, or in the kitchen, or anywhere else.
I went outside; it was just before dawn and the sky was milky, drained of color. I tramped through the wet grass, which we weren’t good at keeping mowed since Bernard left and which lashed at my ankles and calves. First I looked in the barn, but she wasn’t there. The swallows were up, though, busy at their tasks in the rafters. The air smelled of mildew and hay. Another piano had recently been delivered, from a church in a nearby town that was being demolished; it was missing several keys, and it leaned against one of the walls like a drunk collapsing after a hard night. The day it arrived, Robin had played it for hours, producing jangly, ugly music, full of gaps and off notes, a wrong-footed sonata that was painful to the ear but that she seemed to enjoy. I’d asked, tentatively, if she had any interest in moving one of the pianos into the house. “These derelicts?” she’d said. “These are for falling apart.”
At last I found her, slumped over by the wolf enclosure, and for a long, terrible moment I worried she was dead, or dying. At the corner of the fencing that housed Catherine of Aragon and her pack, she sat on the ground, leaning back against the wire, legs outstretched, her head tilted grotesquely to the side, like a broken doll. When she heard me coming, she opened her eyes.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. I knelt down next to her on the cold, wet ground.
When she smiled at me, her face was calm. “I can’t sleep in that house anymore,” she said. “It’s airless.”
I began to argue—she had every window and door open, we were practically sleeping in a lean-to—but when I saw how content she looked, I changed my mind. “So you’re all right,” I said.
She nodded, and uncurled her fingers from the wire mesh of the enclosure. “They came and licked me,” she said. “For a while, they slept next to the fence, three of them. We fell asleep together.” The wolves, her better companions, had given her the comfort she needed.
* * *
—
The next day was hot and dense and we went for a walk together, Robin breathing hard. I could smell her sweat. I kept reaching out my arm, in case she wanted to take it, but she didn’t.
We were heading for the forest canopy, hoped the air would be cooler there.
I was telling Robin about the cache of old films found in the frozen landfill in Dawson City, though I knew she wasn’t really listening. I think I was talking to the baby as much as to my sister, trying to teach an unknown person to recognize the sound of my voice.
Then Catherine came running out of the woods, her half-hobbled gait unmistakable.
Later, I suspected it was Robin herself who’d opened the enclosure, so agonized by her own claustrophobia that she couldn’t stand fences anywhere. But when I asked, she denied it, and I think it’s possible she genuinely didn’t remember. We eventually found Catherine howling at her packmates from the outside of the fence; if she wanted to roam, she also wanted to return to her kind.
But at the time I didn’t know what Catherine was doing there or why she was running toward us, and panic burned my throat like bile.
The wolf came close and then closer, her yellow eyes fixed yet unseeing.
Vertigo hailed me: a spell of muddy sight, graspless touch. When I grabbed Robin she went down hard, and I was so upset that I barely registered the wolf go past us, continuing on her errand, whatever it was. For some time Robin couldn’t get up; I kept apologizing to her, which she ignored. When, eventually, she made her way to her feet, all she could talk about was Catherine. She wanted to go look for her; I asked her about the baby and she frowned at me emptily, as if she’d forgotten there was one. I put my hand on her belly and she swatted it away.
“Can you feel it moving?” I asked.
“I never feel it in the daytime,” she said.
Then she bent over, grabbing her knees with her hands, sucking her breath in hard, unable to hide the pain.
“We have to go,” I said.
“But Catherine—”
“Now,” I said, and when Robin stopped arguing I knew the pain had to be intense. We inched back to the house, my sister leaning her weight against mine. I drove to the hospital, my palms sweating against the steering wheel, Robin groaning at every brake and turn. She panted shallowly, and her eyes were unfocused and glassy. When I asked how she was doing she told me to shut up. Despite my urgent calls for help once we arrived at the hospital, the nurses didn’t seem excited. They timed the contractions and told us we’d come too early, and though I described Robin’s fall one of them shrugged and said it would be rare for such an incident to do damage. Eventually they left us to our own devices. The maternity ward was oddly deserted, with no other patients around, a desolation that felt ominous. I turned on the television in her assigned room, then turned it off. Robin kept shuffling up and down the hall, every so often banging her head against a wall. I brought her ice in a cup and she chewed it violently; they wouldn’t let her have any food.
We waited for her water to break, but it never did. What happened was that she fainted in the hallway, grabbing onto a wheelchair on her way down and whacking her head again. I caught her just before she hit the floor. I don’t remember screaming, but I must have, because the nurses finally came running, and then they took her away without saying a word to me.
For a seemingly endless hour I waited in the hallway by myself. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t see her and no one would explain anything to me. At last I was granted permission to enter the operating room where my sister had been prepped. I was given a surgical mask and gloves and gown and I saw her lying on a gurney, pale and limp, her eyes closed. They’d decided to cut her open.
I held her hand. I talked to her about our childhood, about Mrs. Gasparian and the Dean Smiths and the track team at Worthen, about Bernard and Catherine of Aragon, trying to stitch our lives into a story that would hold her fast to me. I don’t know if she heard anything I said. I smelled burning flesh. I saw a small dim form being carried to the other side of the room. What’s happening? I said or think I said, but no one answered. Robin’s eyes were still shut, and the doctor was closing the incision. My sister’s body remained motionless in what seemed like a permanent way. I was holding her hand, but she wasn’t holding mine.
“You can let go now,” the doctor said. “We’ll wheel her to recovery and she’ll wake up there.”
I let out a long-suspended breath. Later, I would find Robin, groggy and dry-mouthed from drugs, and she would smile at me winningly, cheerfully, because she was confused and high. I would spend the night with her, listening to the steady, medicated rise and fall of her breath. Two days later we would drive home. But first, in the operating room with that burning smell, I held the warm body of my baby, legs skinny and long, fingers curled into fists. Red and fragile with combustible life, she opened her mouth and cried.
PART FOUR
After
1.
I never wanted my mother as much as I did after my own child was born. It was an absurd desire, born as much from nostalgia and exhaustion as it was from any memory of tenderness in Marianne. But I wanted so much to thrust my baby into her arms; I kept thinking that it would have softened her somehow, would have made up for everything between us that was lacking. Nostalgia is a romance with the fantasy of loss, Olga had lectured back at Worthen, and at the time I thought of this as a condemnation; now, older, I thought it was a virtue, because in missing my mother I found her again, made a space for her in my days instead of trying to evade her memory.
<
br /> Robin told me I was being sentimental, and I’m sure she was right. Though it was my sister who endured the hormone changes of pregnancy and after, I was the one whose emotions wavered and sprang, buoyant one minute, sinking the next. In the first months after the birth, which we spent in the Laurentians with Robin, I cried every day and most of the time I couldn’t have said why. My sister, by contrast, snapped back to herself. Some part of me had worried that it would be hard for her to give the baby over, but she wanted very little to do with her. She returned to the wolves and her job at the restaurant, and her eyes were steely again, composed. Derya came to visit, and they played music in the barn together. I brought the baby to hear them, but she was cranky and disinterested and whatever image I’d held in my mind of some mystical moment of communion evaporated in the humid air, which kept giving her diaper rash.
When Bernard came back from Baltimore, he held the baby in an inexpert grip that made me nervous, but the look of pleasure on his face when she curled a hand around his finger was lovely and pure. He gave me, shyly, presents for her—two books and a fleece blanket, which I spread out on the floor in the living room, a stage for the baby as we admired her. I invited him to come see us in Brooklyn sometime, and he blushed and said he’d like that. Then he withdrew, making himself useful around the property, most comfortable, or so it seemed to me, at the periphery.
Both Derya and Bernard hovered around Robin as they always had, and I understood that things at the cottage would continue however she wanted them to; she knew how to bend the world to fit her needs.
I thought often of Marianne as she would have been at sixteen, weighted down by motherhood, and the hardest thing to grasp was that I’d never see her again. Sometimes I watched the film I’d made of her, and Robin finally watched it with me once, her head tilted to the side.