The Orchid Sister

by LeClaire, Anne D.

  “Relax,” Lonnie had encouraged her one night over wine. “Enjoy yourself. Jack’s a wonderful guy. Don’t get ahead of yourself with where it’s going. Take the plunge and enjoy. Life’s a risk.”

  Like Maddie didn’t know that. She was tired of people telling her about risk and daring.

  She was aware of the whack-whack of a helicopter overhead, sounds she heard as she was airlifted to the hospital, sounds she would always associate with her parents’ deaths. She rarely allowed herself to think about them: a pointless exercise that only brought sorrow and loss. Moving on. That was Kat’s motto, for sure. Moving on. She wanted to phone Kat. Now she wanted sister talk, Kat’s reassurance. She picked up the phone and punched in her number. After five rings, she heard Kat’s recording telling her to leave a message.

  “Kat,” she said, “It’s me. Pick up if you’re there.” She waited but heard only echoing silence. “Call me,” she said and hung up. She felt inexplicably edgy. She flicked on the small TV. The local network anchorwoman gazed out, her face solemn. The screen changed and a reporter, mike in hand, eyes earnestly fixed on the viewing audience, filled the screen. A LIVE graphic flashed in a box at the bottom. The camera cut to a background shot of firemen dragging hoses, working the scene. The cameraman panned the area, the length of runway, a row of private planes tied down, then zoomed in on the wreckage. Maddie could discern a fragment of tail section.

  Acting independently of thought—an impulse of denial—she clicked off the set. Her hands were frigid, as if grasping ice cubes, a chill that traveled through her until she was shaking. The screen went blank. She closed her eyes, but she couldn’t erase the image of the crash scene. She felt the pressure of Winks against her ankle and bent to lift him, cradled him against her chest, stroked the gray fur, tried to absorb the warmth of him. “Don’t worry,” she whispered into the back of his neck. “It’s not him. He’s fine.” But she had to know. She turned the set back on.

  On the screen, the reporter was talking about two fatalities, and then the newscast cut back to the anchor desk. A meteorologist nattered on about warm fronts and weather patterns. Maddie flipped to another local station. A segment with something about baby ducks was being aired.

  She was hugging the cat so tightly, Winks wriggled to get free. It wasn’t Jack. Not Jack. She picked up the phone and hit his number. He didn’t answer. She scrolled down to the number for the airport office. It was busy. She pressed redial and stayed with it until she got through.

  Rick, the airport manager, answered. They had met twice. “Rick? It’s Madison DiMarco.”

  “Who?”

  “Maddie. Jack Moroni’s—” She struggled to find the right word to identify herself. “Girlfriend” sounded like a teenager. “Lover” sounded too intimate. “Jack’s friend,” she finally decided on. There was a brief silence she strained to interpret.

  “Maddie.” There was a definite shift in his voice. “Listen, there’s been an incident here. I can’t tie up the line.”

  “I know. I just saw the news.” Her stomach was cramping now. “Is Jack there? Can I speak to him? Is he okay? I tried his cell but—”

  “Maddie. I’m sorry. The FAA won’t let us release any information right now.”

  She closed her eyes, saw again the twisted fragments of a plane made nearly unrecognizable by impact and fire. She sank to the floor, drew her knees in as if to ease the pain in her stomach. “Rick,” she whispered. “Jack’s all right, isn’t he? He wasn’t in the plane, right?” There were voices yelling in the background, a rising din that she strained to hear above. She wasn’t even sure that Rick could hear her above the pandemonium.

  “Listen, Maddie, I gotta go. Sorry. I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Promise.”

  GRACIELA

  “Tell me the story,” Graciela used to beg her madre. And Inez, eyes focused on the distant sky, would recount how, just before giving birth, she’d gone to Tia Clara, who had cast the black and white corn and foreseen that the child would be a girl, a beautiful child, strong and healthy. “My name,” Graciela would urge. “Tell me how I was named.”

  And Inez would tell her how on the night she had been born, as was their tradition, her padre had chosen what she would be called. “He believed you were a gift from God,” she would say. “Your name,” Inez would tell her, although Graciela knew this part by heart, “your name means ‘Thank you for her.’”

  In the dark, Graciela wondered if Inez was weeping for her now and whether she had knelt before the Virgin and prayed. She wondered, too, about Ángel. Ángel el fisgón. Ángel the busybody who was always running everywhere, seeing everything. He had watched her walk away from the village the day she left, and it occurred to her that perhaps he had gone to her padre at the taxi stand and told him this. She prayed that this was so. Even if it meant that Ángel had told him everything.

  The afternoon she left home, she had waited until siesta time when her madre and the little ones were asleep, Inez snoring so loudly that at another time Graciela would have giggled at the noise. At the sight of her sisters curled in the hammock, their small bodies sweaty and deep in sleep, she had almost weakened, but she had steeled herself against this moment. Whether she stayed or left, she would bring shame to her family and break her padre’s heart. Better to go. Better to be thought a runaway than known as a whore. Carefully, holding her breath lest even that betray her, she’d tiptoed from the room. At the last moment, on impulse, believing that they would make her look older, she’d crammed her feet into her madre’s red shoes. But soon, walking along the highway that led away from town, she’d realized that wearing them had been a mistake. The walk was long, and although she was only fourteen, her feet had already grown larger than her madre’s. Before she had gone one mile, blisters had formed on her heels.

  Now the blisters were dry and calloused: a sign that many days had passed, although she could not say how many. From the start they had kept her drugged. Sometimes she believed she had been here for weeks and at other times only days, as if time flowed as liquid as the sea and was as difficult to reckon. But perhaps, as her abuela believed, all time was like that, keeping its own measure and season, stretching, bending, condensing until some moments seemed to expand and last forever while other days passed in an instant. So, too, did the years pass. It seemed to Graciela that only yesterday she had been a child, and she remembered how on Sunday evenings, before the others were born, she would sit with her madre and padre on the seawall near the pier where the boat from Cozumel came in. Her parents liked to look out at the sea and watch the tourists stream down the gangplank from the ferry, but Graciela liked to look down at their feet, at the three pairs of shoes. Her padre’s, worn but thoroughly shined because it was Sunday; her madre’s red ones with impossibly high heels; and, in the middle, her own small white shoes and white socks, the tops edged with lace and carefully folded down. The rightness, the symmetry of their feet, the six shoes, filled her with joy.

  More memories came. The warmth of her padre’s hand in hers, the roughness of her madre’s. The sound of the sea lapping at the shore; the ever-present smell of fish and garbage; the music of guitars; the soft swishing of her madre’s skirt and the clicking of her red high heels on the walkway.

  Graciela stirred and shifted the new weight she carried, but her body was heavy and the bed unyielding against a spine accustomed to the curve of a hammock. She had come here for the money the woman had promised, the many pesos she needed to make her aspirations come true and rid her of the obstacles that prevented this. Graciela the dreamer, her family called her. She hadn’t minded. She knew it was important to have dreams. In hers, she was rich and lived in Mérida, the white city she had seen on the postcards in the stand outside the tourist shop. She’d come to this place because it was a path to the life she wanted to live. It had seemed an easy solution. The woman had said it would be easy. But lies were as easy to believe as truths if a clever person told them.

  At first she had int
ended to be brave, but the difficulty was that there was much to be afraid of. The cool air machine that was always on and made evil wind. The norteamericano with cold eyes and quick hands. The room with the hard table and lights as harsh as the summer sun, and, at night, the sound of a woman weeping in a nearby room. The reality of what would happen. So different from what she had imagined, what she had been promised.

  KATHERINE

  Kat was still caught in the dream that had woken her only moments before, one so convincing that she had called out her sister’s name. Maddie had been alone and hurt. Needing her.

  Only a dream. But so realistic that Kat couldn’t shake off her apprehension. Over the years there had been times when she’d known Maddie needed her, a knowing beyond rational explanation. Like the time Maddie, then twelve, had fallen at the school playground, breaking her arm. Their parents had been off on a trip, leaving Maddie in Kat’s care. Kat had been shopping—a sale at Macy’s—and even before her cell phone had rung and the nurse had explained what had happened, she had known, had known she had to go to Maddie. She’d dropped her purchases on the counter and fled the store, driving like a maniac, so carelessly it was a wonder she hadn’t caused an accident. She was in the school parking lot before her cell rang with the news. She would never forget the look of relief in Maddie’s eyes when she rushed into the nurse’s office, the way Maddie had run to her, her one good arm hugging Kat so tight she could hardly draw a full breath. And there had been other occasions. When Maddie was at the design school in Rhode Island and had been struggling with some difficulty. A tough final exam, a fight with a roommate. Or a boyfriend. Even Carl had commented on the prescience they shared.

  The doorknob turned and Helen Mercer entered the room carrying a tray. Verner was not with her. The first time Mercer had appeared without him, Kat had pursued the possibility of creating an ally, or enlisting her sympathy, but it had quickly become apparent Mercer’s alliance was unquestionably with Verner.

  “Here’s breakfast,” Mercer said.

  Kat looked at the tray without interest. Sweet bread, orange juice, sliced melon, the fluted white paper cup that held her morning’s medication, the pill Verner had said might reverse the dramatic aging. And coffee, a tiny triumph for her. Caffeine was on his list of taboo foods. A toxin, he proclaimed, that poisoned the system. He forbade clients to consume any form of it, but Kat had asked for it yesterday, and now here it was on the tray. Did that mean he had softened toward her? Perhaps it would be possible to convince him to let her leave, to make him believe that she would never tell anyone what he did here. She was ready to promise him anything. “I need to see Dr. Verner.” In the cat-and-mouse game she found herself in, she allowed a pleading tone to creep into her voice, the better to continue to appear docile, unthreatening.

  Mercer gave her a sharp, searching look. “His schedule is quite full today.”

  Kat propped herself up in the bed. “I have to see him.”

  “I’ll relay the message, but I can’t promise anything.” Mercer picked up the paper cup and waited for Kat to hold out her hand and take the small white pill.

  Kat stared at it. For days she had taken it, hoping that it was the magic remedy that would return her to her younger self, even while a suspicion had been growing that its sole purpose was to keep her sedated. She waved it away.

  Mercer’s mouth tightened. “Doctor’s orders.”

  Kat felt her resolve stiffen. Mercer’s insistence only strengthened her suspicion. She permitted herself this small act of rebellion. “I don’t want it.”

  “Orders are orders.”

  “I need to leave.”

  “You’ll have to discuss that with the doctor.”

  “When?” She succeeded in keeping her voice level, but the effort was exhausting her.

  “When he makes his rounds.”

  “It’s important.”

  “Why?” Mercer’s eyes narrowed at this show of resistance.

  The lingering impression of the early-morning dream would not be denied. “My sister needs me.”

  “Your sister? You’ve been in touch with your sister?” Mercer cast a searching glance around the room, as if in the night a phone had been smuggled in.

  “Not exactly.”

  Mercer grasped Kat’s wrist, tightened her fingers, the grip nearly cruel.

  Kat had no doubt the woman was quite capable of cruelty.

  “What, then?” Mercer said.

  “A dream,” Kat said. “I dreamed she was in trouble and needed me.”

  Mercer released her wrist and turned her hand palm up, an abrupt movement that said she had no more time for fantasy or foolishness. She shook the white pill, similar in appearance to the medicine Maddie had been given in the burn unit, into Kat’s hand. “Take it,” she said. She passed Kat the glass of juice.

  “You’ll tell Dr. Verner I want to see him?”

  Mercer ignored the question. “Rosa will be in later to bathe you and change your linens.” She stood by the bed, watching.

  The last time, Kat silently vowed as she washed the pill down with the juice. This was the last time she would swallow one of Mercer’s pills. From the corridor outside, there was the sound of raised voices, a man yelling something. Mercer hurried off without a second glance at her. For one instant, when the door was open, Kat thought of shouting out for help, but before she could make a sound, the door closed behind Mercer.

  It took Kat a moment to realize that she had forgotten to lock the door when she left.

  If the white pill was, as she now suspected, a drug to sedate her, she figured she had ten minutes tops before the medication kicked in. She got up. She couldn’t wander around in pajamas, so her first step was to get dressed. She crossed to the dresser, and a wave of panic swept her. She always worried that they would take her clothes away, and each time she checked and saw them, she allowed herself the illusion that she would go home. She opened the top drawer. No, there they were. She was being paranoid, but they had given her every reason to feel that way. She understood the danger she was to Verner.

  Shakily, she pulled off the clinic’s pajamas and tugged on her panties, bikini bottoms the color of flax that belonged to a different life. Her head began to swim. She closed her eyes, but that only made the dizziness increase. I’m coming, Maddie. She slipped first one arm and then the other into the sleeves of her blouse. I’m coming. She pulled on her skirt. It hung from her waist, although it had fit perfectly when she had arrived. She took one step, then two and fought off a surge of fear as a hollow ringing filled her ears. She blinked her eyes against the threatening darkness. The door was heavy and her body grew slick with sweat from the effort of opening it. Precious seconds passed as she waited a moment, listened for the voices she had heard earlier, but an eerie stillness filled the air. She stepped into the empty corridor, fought another wave of vertigo. She hadn’t thought about where she could go, how far she could get. Only that she had to try.

  Hang on, Maddie. I’m coming.

  MADISON

  Maddie paced as she waited for Rick to call back from the airport, bracing herself against the news that was to come and torturing herself with conjecture. Surely, if Jack was all right, Rick would have told her. Wouldn’t he? She clung to the fragile fiber of hope that Jack had not been the pilot lost in the wreckage, but she knew what the odds were. The airport was small and was busy only in the summer when part-time residents and vacationers flew in and out, and dozens of small single- and twin-engine planes were tied down on the strips composed of asphalt and grass along the taxiway. No more than ten residents kept planes there year-round, and only Jack flew there on a regular basis. She kept moving, as if that would allow her to outrun reality, and outpace, too, the memory and flashbacks that had begun to surface. The fierce intensity of flames. The discordance of sounds, of metal tearing and the roar of fire. The haunting acrid smells, a combination of fuel and metal and a sickly odor close to floral, like that of rotting narcissus.


  She forced herself to breathe. The counselor at rehab had taught her this. How to inhale, counting to four or eight, focusing only on that single inhale, and then to let it go in one long slow exhale. Again and again, in and out, until the terror abated, until the flashbacks ceased. She concentrated on that now. She continued walking, circling from room to room in the house. Doing the breathing thing. She considered driving to the airport, but the fear of what she would find there was greater than the agony of not knowing. She continued to prowl, walking from one room to another.

  She found the note in the bedroom on the floor by the nightstand. It had been written on a page torn from the notebook she kept by the bed. Maddie—I left something for you in the studio.

  The origami swan, she thought. She remembered the impossible intricacy of the folded wings. Enjoy your day. Miss me. As I will miss you. Love, Jack. Beneath the words, he’d sketched a cartoon of a pilot with goggles and a goofy grin waving from the cockpit of a biplane. On the side of the fuselage, he’d drawn a tiny row of hearts. She clutched the note in her fist, sank on the chair, and held his trumpet in her lap. His trumpet, the first thing she had seen on waking that morning. That morning. An eon ago. When he had left to fly a charter.

  A haunting image from the noon news—the crushed tail ripped from the fuselage—wavered in her vision. After the first frozen moments, she began to cry. The noisy, nose-running, swollen-eyes kind of crying she and Kat used to call the ugly cry. Winks leaped into her lap, regarding her with his green stare.

  She imagined she heard a door open downstairs, steps in the hall outside her room, but knew this could not be true. Only magical thinking of a mind that could not bear the truth.

  “Maddie?”

  Winks circled in her lap, kneaded her thigh with his paws.