The Secret Language of Sisters

by Luanne Rice

  “Is this my fault?” I ask. I blurt it out, straight out of nowhere. And suddenly I know why I am nervous and my stomach is turning: It’s not just that my sister is in the hospital, it’s that I’m worried I’m the reason she’s here. If she hadn’t been driving to get me, it wouldn’t have happened.

  “What are you talking about? The dog ran out. Is he okay?” she asks, her sapphire-blue eyes brimming with tears.

  “I don’t know. Roo, what happened?”

  “He ran out of nowhere,” she said. “That’s all I remember.”

  “You were coming to get me.”

  “Tilly, my head hurts.”

  My stomach does cartwheels. I glance around the room, because seeing the blood seep through her head bandage is making me sick. I notice her stuff is missing: Where is her camera, her backpack, her phone?

  “Tilly. Can you find out about the dog?”

  “I will.”

  She’s trembling as if she’s cold. I glance around for an extra blanket but don’t see one. So I take her hand, which is freezing, to warm her up. She’s wearing a plastic hospital bracelet, her full name looking so official: RUTH ANN MCCABE.

  “Tilly, I don’t feel so good … my neck aches. I want Dad.” Her voice breaks. “I want him now.”

  “I know,” I say. “Me too.”

  Just then she throws up on herself. I give a feeble, hysterical chuckle—I am so inappropriate sometimes, I hate myself. I start to dab her with a washcloth I find on the tray table, and I gag from the smell of her barf. A nurse comes in to clean her up.

  “My head,” Roo says to the nurse. “And I have a stiff neck.”

  A doctor walks in, shines a light in Roo’s eyes and says to the nurse, “Corneal reflexes.” Then he tells Roo to touch the tip of her nose with her right index finger. “Good, now the left. Good.”

  So she’s fine, I’m thinking. She’s passing the dumb tests. She threw up, but that’s probably normal, right? Meanwhile the cartwheels in my stomach have turned into backflips, as if my insides know something my mind can’t deal with.

  I realize my time is up. I should let Newton come see her, but I can’t leave; I want Roo to reassure me she’s okay. I want her to ask about my project—it’s so Roo to talk about homework. That would be how I’d know she’s going to be fine.

  The doctor and nurses walk out, and Roo and I are alone again.

  “Feel better?” I ask.

  She doesn’t reply. And I notice that her lips look parched. Roo, whose mouth always looks like it belongs in a lipstick ad, perfect and cherry red and just-licked shiny, whose blue eyes are huge and whose lashes are thick and long and dark, unlike my eyelashes, so pale and reddish you can barely see them, my gorgeous sister, Roo, seems to be fading before my eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask.

  “I feel strange,” she says.

  “Your head’s really hurting?”

  “It’s buzzing,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Roo lets out a low moan. It sounds like a whisper, then a rumbling laugh, and then an earthquake, and she starts shaking in her bed, like a demonically possessed girl in the movies, my angelic sister, her arms and legs thrashing around, her eyes rolling back into her head so only the whites are visible.

  “Mom!” I yell, and I’m still clutching her hand as I throw myself on my sister’s body to hold her down. Her wild movements have yanked the needle and tube from her arm, and a thin stream of bright-red blood writes a soaring, exuberant, and illegible note on her white pillowcase.

  My mother and Newton run in, and a bunch of nurses, and that same doctor who made her touch her nose, and Roo is tossing around like a cat on a trampoline, and I finally let go of her hand as the nurses push me away, and we don’t know it yet, but our world has just changed forever.

  TEEN IN COMA AFTER SHORE ROAD CRASH

  BLACK HALL, CONNECTICUT—A Black Hall High School junior, 16, remains in critical condition at Shore Hospital after a single-car accident Saturday afternoon on Shore Road. Conditions were icy, and it appears she swerved to avoid hitting a dog and lost control of the vehicle, said Black Hall Police Department spokesman Sgt. Paul Simpson.

  “It was a very serious accident,” Sgt. Simpson said. “Our emergency crews had to use the Jaws of Life to extricate the victim. She was conscious and alert when pulled from the vehicle.”

  Hospital officials say the star student is paralyzed from the neck down and has lapsed into a coma after suffering a seizure. They refused to speculate on whether she is expected to remain in a vegetative state. The cause of the crash is unknown.

  “She must have hit ice, because I saw the car coming straight at us,” said Martha Muirhead, who had been walking the dog. “I ran to her right after the crash, and she knew she’d hit Lucan. Her only concern was for him.”

  School officials contacted Monday said the victim is an honors student and active member of the junior class. On Sunday, friends and family of the 16-year-old were keeping vigil at the hospital. “She’s in there fighting for her life,” her sister, 14, said, hurrying past reporters. There was no additional comment from the family.

  The victim had been driving to pick up her sister at a local museum. After she drove north on Shore Road, she lost control just before Haley Creek, and according to Ms. Muirhead, the car flipped end over end, landing upside down in the marsh.

  “Lucan has a broken leg, but he’ll be fine,” Ms. Muirhead said. “I just hope she knows that somehow. She was so caring. I pray she pulls through.”

  Investigators will continue examining the scene to determine the cause of the accident, and will conduct tests to determine whether drugs or alcohol were a factor. The victim’s name is not being released because she is a minor.

  I sat by Roo’s bed with Mom and Isabel, the article on the bedside table next to us as we listened to the sounds of Roo’s machines. Her breath sounded like dragon fire, whooshing in and out as the respirator pumped air into her body; her chest rose and fell in a way that looked artificial and violent, not the sweet, soft breaths of my big sister.

  Isabel leaned over Roo, her thick brown hair falling into her red-rimmed eyes. She wore a white sweater and a bunch of necklaces, a gold one with a cross, and chains with little tin charms on them: a winged heart, another cross, a dolphin, a skull, a praying girl, and also a pendant Roo had given her, with two pressed violets encased in a glass circle.

  “Roo,” Isabel said, kissing her forehead. “We love you.”

  “She knows that!” I said.

  “Don’t snap at Isabel,” my mother said.

  “Just stop talking to her,” I said. “Or tell her that the dog is okay instead. That’s what she’d want to know! Not lame stuff she already knows. You’re acting like people in a movie talking to someone in a coma.”

  “Honey,” my mother said gently, as if I were a time bomb. “She is in a coma.” She paused. “And paralyzed.” Her voice sounded hollow.

  “That’s just because she’s asleep!” I protested. “She’ll move when she wakes up.”

  My mother stared at me but didn’t reply. Her silent pity toward me was deafening.

  The doctors weren’t sure of the precise cause of Roo’s paralysis—MRIs and every other test known to medical science revealed her spine was unbroken—but still my sister couldn’t move or respond to stimuli. It might have been due to the stroke.

  Yes, sixteen-year-olds can have strokes, and Roo had one right after the seizure—that’s what it was, those wild, uncontrolled movements the last time I talked to her. As the doctors had rushed her out of the room, she apparently suffered a brain stem stroke affecting the basilar artery system. They called it a pediatric stroke, which bothered me, as if it was in any way less devastating than the kind adults get.

  And Roo has been lying in her hospital bed, eyes wide open, on a ventilator, ever since.

  “We do love you,” Isabel said, stroking Roo’s cheek, purple and yellow with bruises, caked wi
th dry spittle. It made me insane seeing her do that, partly because I couldn’t bear to touch my sister, to even go close enough to smell her.

  I stared at Roo. Her eyes were open and protruding, practically popping out of her skull, but she wasn’t in there. Roo’s doctor, Dr. Danforth, told us open eyes were normal in coma patients—as if anything was normal. Roo didn’t blink, there was no consciousness, no intelligence. And her expression was shockingly, terribly startled. Dr. Danforth said that Roo was incapable of emotion, that her face had just been frozen that way, left behind by the stroke.

  It made me think of an essay by Roo that our father had loved. She had written about Hubbard’s Point, our beautiful rocky coast, and how a glacier from the last ice age had carved out Connecticut’s craggy and immovable rocks and ledges in its wake. That’s basically what Dr. Danforth was saying: My sister’s expression had been sculpted by not a glacier but a stroke. Her face had turned to stone.

  The injured parts of her head, bruised and bloody, were shaved for stitches—there were bald patches beneath the big wads of gauze bandage, and the rest of her hair, once thick and glossy, with the color and shine of ebony piano keys, was flat and dirty. Her skin, formerly as fresh as a peach, was pale and grainy, almost gray, as if there was no blood left inside her.

  Her long, dark lashes were encrusted with yellow goo. Her lips behind the breathing tube looked cracked; nurses drifted in and out constantly to dab them with Vaseline.

  Why? I wondered. She can’t feel it. She’s not even breathing on her own.

  A plastic tube snaked into her nostrils and down her throat, held in place by clear tape and attached to a ventilator that looked almost like a kitchen appliance, with dials and a screen, right next to the bed.

  That machine is keeping her alive until they can figure out what to do with her organs, I thought.

  “My sister is going to die,” I whispered.

  Or maybe I didn’t speak. No sound came out, and neither my mother nor Isabel reacted.

  I looked back down at the newspaper on the bed stand, skimming over the words again.

  “This article is disgusting,” I said, slapping the paper. “Drugs and alcohol? Roo?” I once saw a show on E! about a Disney actress who sued a magazine that had claimed she’d been drunk on a yacht. She’d said those lies could wreck her career. She’d called it slander, or maybe libel. Or defamation? “It’s slander, Mom,” I went on. “Defamation! I’m going to write a letter to the editor.”

  “Tilly, they’re not saying she took any—it’s normal to test after an accident. That’s all they’re saying,” Mom said calmly.

  “Still, it gives the wrong idea about her,” I said.

  Yesterday, the reporter from the newspaper had been waiting in the hospital lobby, and I remembered talking to her. She’d seemed nice, but now I realized it was phony sympathy. She was just a defaming wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  “We know Roo,” Isabel said. She glanced over at me, attempting solidarity. “The tests will come back negative. She was taking photos, not partying. We texted about it.”

  “Oh, God. Don’t tell me she was texting,” my mother said.

  “No, not while she was driving,” Isabel said, sounding a little outraged. One thing about Isabel, she was always clear about the difference between right and wrong. She had a little bit of moral outrage going on at all times.

  “Could we stop talking?” I asked. My stomach flipped, thinking about how Roo and I had been texting. But she must have pulled over to answer me. Roo was not the text-and-drive type. I shivered the thought away.

  “Sweetheart,” my mother said, leaning close to Roo. “We have some good news. Lucan, the dog, is fine. He’s going to recover. Tilly said you would want to know, and …”

  I stopped listening. I remembered how Roo had teased me in the fall for talking to Dad’s grave. He wasn’t there, he couldn’t hear me, she had said. She was being all scientific and rational, and I was acting like an emo baby. So I had stopped.

  My mind prickled with the fact that I had promised Roo to be rational. Would she consider it “rational” for us to be talking to her now?

  I got up and left the room. Hearing my mother talk to comatose Roo was a nightmare I had to wake up from. The hallway felt chilly. I had this morbid thought: They want this neurological floor cold because the patients can’t feel anything, and if the temperature is down, it will keep those lifeless bodies on machines from rotting.

  Help. I’m thinking horror-movie thoughts about my sister.

  “Hey.”

  I looked over, and there was Newton unfolding his lanky self like an origami crane from a vinyl sofa. He swallowed a few times, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his long throat. His glasses looked crooked and smudged, as if he’d slept in them three days straight. Then I realized he probably had; none of us had left the hospital for very long.

  The four of us—me, Mom, Isabel, and Newton—took turns sitting by Roo’s bed while the others went in search of food and coffee. I’d always thought I’d be happy for any excuse to miss school, but ha: I was so wrong. I hadn’t been back since Roo’s seizure, and I’d give anything to be stuck in algebra till the end of time, if only Roo could be okay.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “How is she?” Newton asked.

  “The same.”

  “That’s a scientific impossibility,” he said. “Nothing remains static.”

  “Why do you have to talk like that with me? It sounds so stupid. ‘Nothing remains static.’ ”

  “I’m trying to reassure you,” he said. “You idiot.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  “No problem.”

  But coming from Newton, with his goofy smile, the word idiot had a ring of affection.

  “So tell me why I should be reassured,” I said.

  “Well, her vital signs have been stable. Her blood pressure has stopped falling, so they’re not worried about internal bleeding anymore.”

  “But they said she’s paralyzed.”

  “True, but the reason is unclear, so that could mean movement will return. Her C3, 4, and 5 are intact.”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh,” he said, as if suddenly remembering it was nonscientific me and not Roo he was talking to. “Cervical discs. Quadriplegia can be caused by injury to the spinal cord above those three. And as we know, her spine is intact. So it must be related to the stroke, and …”

  “You’re a doctor now?”

  “I know how to do research, Tilly. What do you think I’ve been reading about since it happened? Anyway, her doctors are continuing to do tests.”

  He was right about that. The doctors huddled around Roo throughout the day, maintaining intravenous lines and saline locks, administering blood tests and brain tests, pushing her eyelids up with their thumbs and shining tiny flashlights into her eyes to see if her pupils dilated, throwing around phrases that belong in science fiction—or at least someone else’s sister’s life: anticoagulants, diffuse axonal brain injury, and cerebral thromboembolism.

  “Nothing is conclusive yet,” Newton added. “It’s an evolving diagnosis.”

  “Have you seen her?” I asked. I wanted to shove him for saying “evolving diagnosis.” I realized that being brainy was his default mode, but it really got under my skin and made what was happening to Roo sound so distant. “The way she stares without seeing.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Machines are keeping her alive. True or false?”

  “True.” He cleared his throat, looked straight up at the ceiling. We both stood there staring at a tiny dot that might have been a fly. No, it was just a dot. It hypnotized us for a couple of minutes. Then the horrid thoughts returned.

  My sister is gone—or she might as well be. Not only is she comatose, she is a Q—quadriplegic. However she got that way, whether her C-whatevers are intact or not, she is in a vegetative state.

  If anyone at school uses the word vegetable, I will kill them.

&
nbsp; I took my phone out of my pocket. There was a long thread of a group text from Emily and Nona, sent from school earlier.

  How is she, everyone wants to know???? Emily had texted.

  Did she wake up yet? Does she recognize you? Nona had asked.

  Give her a HUUUUGGGGEEE hug from me! Emily had written.

  Me 2, Nona had added.

  Miss u luv u, Emily had written.

  I wasn’t exactly in the mood to tell anyone anything. But Emily and Nona were the people closest to me besides Mom and Roo. Standing beside Newton in the hall, I wrote back: She hasn’t woken up, we’re here with her now, thank u luv u.

  So yes: Everyone was talking; Roo was the topic of the year.

  “Uh,” Newton said.

  “What?” I asked, looking up from my phone.

  “Did Roo say anything to you?”

  “No! She can’t talk, you know that.”

  “Not today,” he said. “Before. The accident.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. Did she mention me? Mention us?”

  “You and Roo?” I asked, confused. What was there to say? The two of them were pretty much inseparable.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Not really,” I said. But thinking back, I did remember a couple of weird moments Saturday morning—the day of the accident. Our landline had rung, and I’d seen Newton’s name on caller ID. Just as I reached for it, Roo had said to let it go, she’d call him from her cell phone. But then her cell had buzzed. Newton again, and she’d ignored that, too. What had that been about?

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Never mind,” he said, looking away. I felt a little unsettled. What could the problem have been? With the entire world falling apart, I didn’t want another dreadful thing to worry about.

  “Tell me,” I pushed.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “Seriously.”

  I heard the loud and ever-present sound of Roo’s respirator coming from her room. I wanted to go in there and ask her what Newton was talking about, and why she hadn’t taken his call that day. I wanted to snuggle up next to her while she braided my hair, the way she’d always done, clipping the braids with tortoiseshell barrettes that had been our mother’s in college. I wanted everything to go back to the way it was.