by Susan Juby
Keira was sitting up in bed. She showed only the mildest surprise to see me.
My sister’s presence in the house, in the school, in this town is so outsized that the reality of her comes as a shock, even to those of us who live with her.115
She wore a plain dove-colored smock that hung on her thin shoulders and would have looked expensive and chic in her new town house, but which in our worst-of-the-1980s suburban house looked a bit Walker Evans-ish. I don’t think the smock was actually sleepwear, but everything she owns could double for pj’s.
Keira tilted her head at me, taking me in with her staring blue eyes. Flyaway swirls of dark brown hair were held off her face with a simple, white cotton scarf. A girl out of time. That was my sister. Could anybody really be that ethereal?
No, I thought. No one could.
“I need to talk to you,” I said, and pushed into the room.
“Normandy!” said my mother from behind me. I turned and saw my parents standing at the entrance to my side of the closet. Unlike my sister, my parents never invaded my privacy, not even when they should have.
“Girls?” said my father.
I closed the closet door and faced Keira.
Her delicate features were ever so slightly pinched, as if an ill-scented wind had just passed.
My courage coughed once, sputtered, and began to fail.
I didn’t need to do this. Keira required special handling. She’d never been confronted with . . . anything.
I thought of the art I had seen.
I thought of Neil and Dusk sitting in Neil’s car, just outside.
Truth telling was messy, unpredictable. But avoiding it was worse.
“I found your house,” I said.
Keira’s lips, only slightly darker than her parchment facial skin, parted slightly. She licked them and put her bare feet on the floor.
“Oh?” she said.
“It’s nice. High-end for this town.”
“You want to sit down? I have this new record. It’s French. We could listen to it.”
My sister orders a lot of vinyl over the Internet—mostly European albums featuring old guys who croon in gravelly voices and young women who whisper. Self-conscious, pretentious records.
“It’s barely seven in the morning,” I said. As though there was some agreed-upon standard time at which a person ought to listen to old French guy records. My sister’s room was white and spare as a monk’s cell. Her bed was ostentatiously small and simple, topped with a plain white down duvet. No art on the wall, except a small, beautifully executed and framed drawing of a rabbit with a guilty look on its face.
An old padded chair covered in a fine white quilt sat in the corner. A white wooden armoire held her few expensive clothes and, presumably, the rest of her meager but expensive belongings. Of course, she didn’t have a closet, either.
At least she’s not a hoarder, I thought somewhat hysterically.
“Take the chair,” she offered.
I did. I’d never sat in it before. Normally, I stood in Keira’s doorway or on the other side of the closet. It was disorienting to be in her room, but the chair was very comfortable.
“We went into your house.”
My sister, who’d begun to relax, stiffened and stood up again.
“We?” she said.
“We saw the art for your new book.”
Her head jerked once to the side, like an invisible companion had just said something surprising.
“I saw all the stuff about me.”
Keira did the head-tilt thing again, a confused canary. She touched her thumb to her chin. “Normandy,” she said. “You do know that’s a fictional story about a fictional character.” Her voice was like a series of soft slaps to the face. I imagined doing something to make her speak up. Grabbing her by the neck, maybe. “I know you get a little sensitive about some aspects of my art. About my success,” she said as gently as only someone who means you harm can do.
I marshaled a response. I’d been silent for so long. Too long.
And then it all came pouring out. “Keira, you use me—or at least an awful version of me—in your art. I get nothing for it. You’ve been telling me all these terrible stories about what happened to you at school. About your affair with your teacher. About how he raped you. Only it was all some twisted lie. Now you’ve put it all in your new book and made all the bad things happen to me.”
Her fine lips curled. Her dimples showed. And yet somehow her face remained entirely humorless.
“As a fellow artist and as my sister, I expect you’d understand. It’s like alchemy. No one knows how inspiration works. But source material is quite different from the imaginative product.”
“I know about Mr. Reid. About his husband. Did you hurt him?”
She reared back. “Of course not!” Then, without any hesitation, she continued. “I can’t believe you and your friends invaded my privacy like that. You looked at my work before it was ready. Do you have any idea how many people want an advance look at my stuff? This is a serious betrayal.”
“What did you do to Mr. Reid?” I asked. I felt my fingers digging into my thighs.
My sister was so pale, she looked like an accessory in her own room.
When she turned to me, the smile and dimples were gone and her voice was glass.
“The new book wasn’t coming,” she said. “People were waiting. Getting impatient. I was bored with Vermeer. People said I’d peaked already. As an artist.”
I waited.
“I haven’t peaked, obviously. I’m only twenty. I just needed a kick start. Some inspiration.” She let out a laugh so full of disdain, it made me wince. “Turns out I need you guys,” she said, waving a thin hand. “My family. You’re my material. And then I had a brain wave. I realized that I don’t need to wait for you to do things. After all, I could die waiting for you to do something interesting. I’m a writer—I can make things up. For my stories.”
“Is this because of Mom and Dad? The affair?”
“Don’t be an idiot. That was nothing. Half the kids in the world have divorced parents. Or worse. Your mind is really mundane.”
Keira stared toward at her bedroom window, covered in a hand-painted paper blind she’d made herself. “I think the new book is some of the best work I’ve done.”
“Mr. Reid,” I said. “What happened to him?”
“He fell,” she said simply, as though telling me that she’d eaten the last cookie.
“What about all those things you told me?” I asked.
“I needed to see how you’d react.”
I still didn’t follow. Couldn’t. “To what?”
“Don’t be dim, Normandy. Sometimes you need to go above and beyond the basics of imagination. It’s called ‘research.’”
“Did he touch you?”
“Of course not. He was gay. He thought he understood my writer’s block. He kept trying to talk to me about how I needed to ‘move beyond my family in my work.’” Keira’s voice was flat.
My sister was not accustomed to criticism.
“Everyone thought he was this animation genius and a saint and everything, just because he was a popular teacher.”
My sister shrugged and looked over her shoulder in the direction of some voice that only she could hear.
“He thought I was having a breakdown. Urged me to get help. We went for a hike so we could ‘talk it out.’ I told him that walking was the only way I could think. He liked to be helpful. He had an interesting face. Really open.”
“Did you push him?” I asked.
“Normandy, you’ve always been so reductive,” said my sister, going from pretty to terrifying in the flutter of an eyelash. “He fell and I watched. I was too far away to catch him. Plus, I’m not very big.” She said this with icy satisfaction.
“You didn’t tell anyone?”
Keira sighed. “A section of the trail collapsed, and he went with it. I didn’t want to get into a whole big deal about it. No one knew I was there. And it gave me a great idea for the new Chronicle. So I came home and got to work.”
“And me?” I said.
“I told you the stories so I could watch your reaction. You’ve got such an interesting range of expressions. Even when I add all that flesh to your face. Is there anything more expressive than a human face?” She gave her head a little shake in wonder at human faces and all they could be made to tell. “If you keep working at your drawing, maybe someday you’ll begin to see like an artist.”
“And the money?” I said, my voice nearly gone. “Why did you tell Sylvia you wanted to pay off the mortgage?”
“I knew she’d like that. Also, they’d get me my money sooner if they thought I was being generous with it. You saw that town house—I had to have it. Nanaimo isn’t exactly awash in cool places.”
“So you’re not going to help out Mom and Dad?”
Keira looked at me like I’d just said something insane. “Maybe Mom and Dad need to stop looking for handouts.”
“The only reason they thought you were going to help them out was because you said you were. Then you didn’t.”
“It’s not my fault our parents are failures,” said Keira.
That was as much as I could handle. More, actually.
“Okay,” I said. I got to my feet. I had an urge to run out of her room, with its atmosphere anesthetized by a lack of color.
I thought about asking her about the bottles of pills. But I didn’t. I’d had my fill of her truth.
“Where are you going?”
“Out,” I said.
She smoothed the fabric of her smock over her sides, then ran her hands over her bedding and nodded distractedly.
I let myself out of her room through the regular door, and found my parents in the kitchen.
“I think you need to know that Keira’s new book is—”
“Normandy! You know how your sister doesn’t like anyone to see her work before it’s ready,” said my mom.
“Come on now, girls,” said my dad. “Let’s be positive!”
“But she’s—”
“Seriously, Normandy. It’s unacceptable for you to interfere with your sister’s work.”
I had to try. Just once more.
“She showed me being attacked in her new book,” I said. “And by ‘attacked,’ I mean sexually. She drew that in her new book that she’s writing in her new town house that you don’t even know about.”
The silence that followed was the moment between the bomb blast and the debris raining to the ground.
My dad put both hands on the counter. He seemed to be using it to hold himself up.
My mother’s jaw worked silently. Then she swallowed.
“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” she said finally. “You’re misinterpreting.” She gathered some steam and kept going. “And really, Normandy, what are you doing? Did your sister invite you to her new town house? I’m sure she just wants to surprise us with the news about her . . . purchase.”
For a split second I saw the way my dad stared, openmouthed, at my mother and I understood the terrible position he was in.
When he recovered, he said, “We’re a family. We support each other. I’m sure your sister didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
My ears rang and I seemed to be watching the scene from somewhere outside my body. Hurt my feelings? How was that any less serious than hurting me physically? Talking to my parents was pointless. They couldn’t hear, they wouldn’t see. They sure as hell weren’t going to negotiate some useful solution.
So I went to my bedroom, packed up my laptop, and put a few other things into the cheap suitcase I bought to accompany Keira to her publicity events before I realized that I was being put on display as the Flounder. I thought of all those years I’d worshipped my sister. Was she really such a great artist if she had to steal people’s lives? Twist them and make them ugly?
I walked down the driveway and back to Neil and Dusk.
If this was a fictional story, it would end with a happily ever after. The parents would come to their senses and put down their feet about the way the family was portrayed in the Chronicles and the sister would apologize and burn the new book and emotional justice would reign.
This is not a fictional story, even if it may not be the truest or most complete story ever told. Not because I lied or made things up, but because the more I write, the more I realize that when you tell a story, you shape the truth. What you leave in, what you leave out, every word and every emphasis changes the meaning. Writers create the truth, for better or worse. I’ve done my best to make this story as accurate as I can. And the truth is that nothing ended neatly. It didn’t even end.
What happened is this.
I told my creative writing teacher about my sister’s book. I didn’t plan to. I had to submit my proposal for my Spring Special Project, and it wasn’t ready. Ms. Fowler called me into her office and asked me what the holdup was. I told her. She called in the principal. You have to remember that my sister is Green Pastures’ most famous alumna. I was impressed that they didn’t just tell me to be quiet in the hope that Keira would give them the endowment she’d been hinting at for as long as she’d been talking about paying off my parents’ mortgage.
They asked what I wanted to do. They asked what I needed. They put me in touch with the school’s lawyer. No one knew how to handle the situation. They didn’t know if I had any rights. But Ms. Fowler and Principal Manhas stayed when I said I wanted to call Sylvia. I thought my sister’s agent might be able to help.
I was wrong. We had a seriously non-funny, uncharming chat, and I got a lesson in how Sylvia earns her 15 percent.
Keira must have called her already, because for once Sylvia wasn’t friendly. At all.
“It’s Normandy,” I told her, even though I’d already announced myself to her assistant.
“Yes?”
“It’s about Keira’s new book.”
Silence.
“She can’t publish it.”
I could practically hear the ice crystals forming over the phone line.
“Normandy, I’m not sure what gave you the impression that you have any say in what Keira publishes.”
This set me back on my heels, until I remembered I was now all truth, all the time when it came to my relationship with my sister. “I do think I have a say. For starters, Keira’s been drawing and publishing pictures of me without my permission. And her new pictures have crossed a line. I’m not a public figure. I’m a private person. What she’s doing is wrong.” I looked down at the notes Ms. Fowler and Principal Manhas helped me prepare so I wouldn’t go back to tongue-tied, intimidated silence. I cleared my throat. “I, uh,” I said. Cleared my throat again and tried to hide the shaking in my hands.
“Normandy, I thought you were more sophisticated than this. The Chronicles are fiction. Pure fantasy. They take place in an alternate universe, for God’s sake.”
“She’s drawing me and my parents, and you know it. You’ve always known it and you’ve never cared as long as you got paid.”
I cast a quick glance at Ms. Fowler, who nodded encouragingly.
Sylvia, whom I’d always thought of as the world’s coolest city aunt, dropped her voice into a phone-harassment register. “Do you have any idea how much is riding on this project? It’s two years late. Viceroy has paid mid-six-figures for it. The studio included it in the movie option with the other books based on a partial. This is no time for you to begin behaving like a child.”
“I know that.” I took a deep breath. “It’s time for me to start acting like an adult. I don’t want to be in any more of Keira’s stories.”
Sylvia made a hissing noise through her teeth.
“If Keira does publish that book, I’ll tell everyone what she did. How she told me she’d been raped by her teacher. How she hinted that she had something to do with his death. All so she could see how I’d respond. And then she drew it all happening to me!”
As I spoke, I realized that I didn’t know what any of this would mean. Keira’s fans probably wouldn’t care what she said to me or why. Her demented mind games would just add to her allure. Maybe the world thought she could represent me any way she wanted. Well, the world could suck it.
“You are being very selfish,” said Sylvia finally. “Inter-fering with your sister’s career in this way.”
After that, the situation got even more unhinged. Let me lay out the facts in the least exciting possible way. I don’t want to influence anyone’s opinion with my overly persuasive prose.
After presumably consulting with Keira, Sylvia arrived in town the next day to fix things. She gathered up my parents, and Ms. Fowler and Principal Manhas and I met them in his office.
“Kiera can’t be here. She’s too stressed by what’s happened and has to focus on her deadline. I’m acting as her representative in this matter.” Sylvia leveled her expensive eyewear at me. “Normandy, you’re saying some pretty irresponsible things. These kinds of accusations could have long-term ramifications for your sister’s career.” She’d apparently decided that calling me selfish on the phone hadn’t quite gotten the message across clearly enough. She wanted to have the same conversation all over again, this time with my shell-shocked parents sitting beside her.
“I told you I don’t want to be in Keira’s book,” I said. “Especially not in those drawings.”
“Now, Normandy,” said Sylvia. “You know that’s not you in those pages.”
“I know it’s not me. Flounder just looks like me. A hideous version of me.”
“It’s art,” she said.
“It’s stealing,” I said, my head thumping. “And her new story is lies.”
I looked at my parents. What could I say to get them to understand?