The Secret Language of Sisters

by Luanne Rice

  Maybe I would just let him go.

  Maybe that would be the most loving thing I could do.

  On the way home from the hospital, Mom and I went to the Big Y. I pushed the cart. My knuckles hurt from punching Newton, and my hand was so stiff I could barely grip the cart handle. As we’d left the hospital, the nursing supervisor had spoken to us sternly, telling my mother I couldn’t be in Roo’s room without adult supervision again. That meant my mother or a doctor. And she thought it best I not return for a few days.

  My mother walked along looking numb. Her back seemed extra straight, as if having one daughter comatose and the other a juvenile delinquent had given her exceptional posture. She was ashamed of me. I felt it.

  Being at the grocery store made my stomach hurt. I grabbed some of the usual stuff our family liked, but every time I reached for one of Roo’s favorites, I felt like crumbling inside. Would we never have corn toasties in the house again? With organic peanut butter? Would we never again argue about whether to get McIntosh apples (my choice) or organic Gala (hers)?

  “What should we have for dinner?” Mom asked, standing in the meat department.

  “Uh, I don’t care,” I said.

  The glass counter was filled with packages of red meat, and it all looked so disgusting I wanted to throw up. Maybe it did to my mother, too, because she seemed to forget about getting anything and just drifted along, down the frozen food aisle. She would have kept walking, around and around the store in a daze, without remembering we needed a meal, so I pulled two cheese enchilada dinners from the freezer.

  My fingertips stung from the cold and because they had grabbed only two packages. There should be a third, for Roo. We went down the tea and coffee aisle, and my mother reached for a box of Lemon Zinger, Roo’s favorite, then just stopped dead, hand in midair, as if she were a statue.

  “Mom?” I asked.

  “Roo can’t drink tea,” she said.

  “Maybe not today,” I said. “But she will again.”

  “She won’t.” She just stood there, her arm straight out. She seemed as immobile as Roo, except for her face. It was a mask of anguish. People walked past us, and I cringed with embarrassment. I wanted to help my mother move along, get out of the public eye of our small town, away from all these staring people.

  “Mom?” I asked again.

  “I’m her mother,” she said. “I can feel it. If she were going to get better, I would know. She’s not going to come home, she’s never leaving the hospital. I’ve lost her, I’ve lost Roo. I’m afraid she’s going to die.”

  “No, Mom. Don’t say that!”

  I gently took her arm, lowered it to her side. I put my arm around her, tried to lead her down the aisle, toward the front of the store. She wore a navy wool sweater and plaid skirt; her graying brown hair curled softly over her shoulders. She looked just like my mom, but she felt like a stranger. I felt panic racing through me. What was it like for her, saying these words, saying she’d lost Roo? What was it like for her to feel that way?

  To feel that Roo might die?

  But I felt it, too. Leaving that Lemon Zinger on the shelf was like admitting Roo would be in a coma forever. And one step worse than a coma: that she would die. I had thought it before, even during her seizure. And of course my mother had been fearing deadly colds turning into pneumonia. But this felt different, as if Mom thought it could happen at any time. I wanted to cry, but I had to stay strong for my mother.

  I swore then and there that I would never lose my temper again. I would never hit anyone, I would never be banished from being alone with Roo at the hospital. I vowed it.

  I would be the perfect daughter, and my sister would come home.

  We wheeled our cart to the checkout. My mom paid while I bagged. Walking out the glass door, I saw an African American woman in a motorized wheelchair heading from the parking lot toward the entrance. She wore a red jacket and big dark glasses, and there was a Metropolitan Museum of Art sticker on the back of the chair.

  “Hey, Tilly,” Slater called out, running to catch up with the woman.

  I waved. I watched him push the door open and hold it for her. He’d said he had a disabled family member. His mother, I thought.

  Following my mom to our car, I paused to glance over my shoulder at him. I saw that Slater had done the same. We stood there looking through the grocery store’s glass windows at each other while our mothers went on ahead.

  I wondered what had happened, why his mother couldn’t walk.

  Then I opened the car door and got in and my mother and I headed home. I was already worried the phone would ring when we got there. I was so afraid it would be the hospital saying my sister had died.

  This was one of those times I wished I had a talent like Roo’s, a way to take pictures or write a brilliant paper, to let the world know what I was feeling.

  “Poetry of expression,” my dad had said, sitting at the kitchen table last July, of the photos Roo had taken of a family sail across Long Island Sound.

  “Poetry of life,” my mother had said, looking through the images. “She captured the day so we can keep it with us forever.”

  I had sat in my usual spot, looking anywhere but at Roo’s laptop screen. We get it, I’d wanted to say. Roo is the best at everything. Finally, I couldn’t resist, and glanced over at the photos. These were not for her portfolio, but they were just as good: all of us on the boat, taking turns at the tiller, putting up the sails, with sunlight dancing on the water and all around us the expressions on our faces, eating the picnic lunch Mom had made, our parents in an unguarded moment with our dad’s freckled arm over our mom’s shoulders.

  When I looked up, I saw Roo watching for my reaction.

  “Nice,” I said, barely able to get the word out.

  “Can’t you say more about your sister’s photos than that?” my dad asked.

  “Very nice,” I said.

  “Tilly,” my mom said. “Why don’t you have Roo show you how to use her camera? We’d like to see pictures by you, too.”

  “I’ve tried,” I said. “I’m just not talented. I’m going upstairs. Thanks for a fun sail, though!”

  And I went up to my room. I sat on the edge of my bed, wishing I could fly out the window and find a family that wasn’t so smart, so good at everything. I instinctively reached for my owl pellets and held them in my hands. There were five, and each was about two inches long, an inch wide, and to the untrained eye they might look like small bundles of sticks and leaves, or spools of horror-movie thread—there were brown feathers sticking out of one, and a tiny shrew skull poking out of another, little white femurs and backbones and bits of sinew.

  I tried to remember every owl I had ever seen. I had seen great horned owls every month of the year. And a barred owl three Octobers in a row. Eastern screech owls sounded like the whinny of a horse played backward, and my dad and I had followed their calls through the swamp and woods, to the black gum trees behind the salt pond. My dream was to see a snowy owl one winter day, preferably with my dad, who had told me they look like soccer balls, plump and round, on icy beaches in years when food is scarce on the tundra and they fly down here in search of mice and voles.

  I heard a knock at my door and looked up. Roo walked in, leaned on my desk and didn’t say anything. We stared at each other for a long time, and my eyes felt hot with tears.

  “I know,” she said.

  I couldn’t speak; my voice was too tight, my throat too sore.

  “I know how you feel,” she continued.

  How could she possibly, my beautiful, brilliant, talented sister? All she had to do was point a camera and bingo, everyone fell at her feet. I stared at her, so tall and thin, her eyes so blue and her dark hair so long and shiny, and I felt like an owl pellet in comparison: small, undistinguished, with mud-colored hair and eyes.

  “Or maybe I don’t,” she said, coming to sit next to me on the bed, starting to play with my hair. It felt good, her fingers separating the
strands into three, giving me braids. I leaned against her, and the bad feelings started going away.

  “I’m not good at anything,” I whispered.

  “Oh, that is so not true,” she said, finishing one braid and starting another.

  “Compared to you, I’m not,” I said.

  “Well. Because I have poetry of expression,” she said. “Poetry of life!”

  We both broke up laughing but kept it quiet so our parents wouldn’t hear. She began another braid. I hoped she would cover my whole head with them. I didn’t want her to stop.

  “But you have something better,” she said.

  “What?” I asked, totally not believing her.

  “Poetry of owls,” she said.

  I laughed again, but she didn’t.

  “Owls, Tilly. You’re good at owls. No one is better at them than you.”

  “But who cares?” I whispered. “Loving something doesn’t mean you’re good at it. I’m not going to be an owl scientist or anything.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m not good at science.”

  “You’re only thirteen,” she said. I turned fourteen in September. “You’re so smart, but in a different way. The reason you don’t like taking photos is that you don’t like to stand still. That’s how your mind is, too. It moves around, flying over everything.”

  “Like an owl?” I asked, a little sarcastically.

  “I was going to say, like a dragon,” she said. “Something imaginary, not of this world. You go everywhere in your imagination. I am stuck with facts. But you’re different, Tilly. Just look at your shelves.”

  We both did. All my toys, my collections, were jammed together: owls, dragons, unicorns, white horses. But mostly owls and dragons.

  “See, if it were me,” she said, “I’d keep them apart. In taxonomic order, probably, owls on one shelf, horses on another. I’d even apply Linnaean taxonomy to dragons.”

  Growing up with a dad who worked at the Peabody Museum and in one of the biology departments at Yale, it was hard not to have heard about Linnaeus and his scientific classification, but I honestly didn’t know and didn’t care about the difference between orders, families, genera, species, and whatever.

  “But not you,” she said. “You put owls and dragons together because they’re part of a story that only you know. And someday I want you to tell me.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  And I leaned into her even harder, and knew she meant it. We sat there for a long time that day, after she had done so many braids I couldn’t even count them, until the sun began to go down over the beach, shining through my window straight into our eyes. I don’t remember what we talked about after that, or even if we did. Sitting together was enough. And laughing about the poetry of everything.

  We understood each other like no one else. She didn’t mind that I got jealous sometimes, and I mostly didn’t mind that she made our parents so proud.

  She made me proud, too.

  But driving home from the Big Y with Mom, worrying that the call could come at any time, that Roo had taken a turn for the worse, I couldn’t get it out of my mind: I wished I had some way to create something that would express the way I felt about Roo.

  And what she was going through.

  I woke up abruptly, wondering again, for the hundredth time, where I was. But the harsh yellow overhead light and the sight of a nurse moving around my bed, checking my heart monitor, quickly reminded me. I was in the hospital. The clock on the wall read 3:20. In the morning.

  As soon as I became aware, the dread began again, my mind resumed the endless cycle. How could I get people to hear me, to realize I wasn’t in a coma at all? If Tilly hadn’t flown off the handle, beaten up Newton, she might have figured it out. I was so mad at her for it, but at the same time I wanted to comfort her. Tilly was scared.

  I pictured our house as if I were there right now. The idea of it comforted me, took me out of this sterile, antiseptic-smelling neurology unit. I imagined myself tiptoeing up the creaky wooden stairs of our salty old beach house, into her room. Most kids wanted their own rooms, but I loved having a sister, always wanted to share with her. I had once asked my dad if we could knock down the wall between our rooms, and he had laughed and hugged me.

  “Roo, look, it’s snowing!” Tilly whispered one night, waking me up, when I was eleven and she was nine.

  We stood at the window, watching snow blow sideways off Long Island Sound. It swirled and drifted against our house and the big granite boulders in our yard. The wind howled, and Tilly shivered, pressing close to me.

  “What’s it saying?” she asked. It was funny, her asking what the wind said. Our dad being a marine biologist, specializing in humpback whales but with a huge soft spot for owls, we were urged to use our imaginations, though never to give human qualities to forces of nature. So it seemed extra fun to play along with her.

  “It’s saying, ‘Tilly and Roo, I want yooooooo,’” I said.

  “Don’t make it scary,” she said.

  “Okay, I won’t. It’s saying it came all the way from the Arctic, across Canada, to bring us snow to play in. To build forts and to make snow angels.”

  “Not snow angels.”

  “You love making them.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “They come to life at night and fly past the window; their wings are white, and they brush against the house, trying to get inside. They’re ghosts of little girls who died.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I dreamed it,” she said. And she was trembling, so I hugged her harder.

  “No, Tilly. They’re not scary. They’re not even real. We make them ourselves, lying in the snow, moving our arms and legs; that’s all they are.”

  “They’re not dead girls?”

  “Not at all.”

  I never wanted Tilly to be scared. I never wanted her to lie awake on a winter’s night, hearing the wind blow and imagining ghost girls flying past our house on the hill.

  Lying in the hospital bed, I tried to calm my pounding heart. I tried to picture Tilly in her room, the cozy blue quilt on her bed, posters of owls on her wall, her collection of creatures on the bookshelf beside her bed, the owl pellets she and my dad had collected from under the pine trees, a postcard of a snowy owl my parents had picked up in British Columbia before we were born, tacked to the wall by her bedpost.

  Tilly and her owls. Were they bringing her peace now? I knew she must miss me the way I missed her. I wished I could sit on her bed now, braid her hair and look out at the beach and let her know everything would be okay.

  I tried to imagine Tilly sleeping peacefully, not worried about anything, and I tried to keep myself alive, here on this earth, in a hospital bed, so I wouldn’t die, so I wouldn’t become a snow angel and scare Tilly.

  Five days after I’d socked Newton, I took my books outside during morning study period and sat on a bench in the school garden. February had turned to March and the piles of snow had melted, with the brown grass just starting to turn green.

  I had gotten a D on my history report. Mrs. Addams had said I could get extra credit by writing another paper; it was due soon, but I was getting nowhere. I just couldn’t seem to care about the Revolutionary War in Connecticut when my sister’s life hung by a thread.

  Staring at my own handwriting, it blurred, and I tried to remember what I’d been trying to say. The first report had been about the Turtle, the first submarine, made of wood, built in Connecticut to bomb British ships. I had started researching it the day of Roo’s accident. Good scholarship had fallen by the wayside. This one was my chance for a redo. But who cared? I closed my eyes, let the sun warm my face. A shadow fell across my eyelids, making me glance up. Slater stood there smiling cautiously.

  “I wanted to apologize,” he said.

  “You?” I asked. “No. It was me. You’re not that tough.” I gave him a smile.

  �
�Yeah, but I am, compared to this place,” he said. “I shouldn’t have grabbed you. I’m sorry. I just didn’t want to see you take Marlene’s bait.”

  “Rise up, don’t sink down, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you make that up, or hear it somewhere?”

  “Heard it from my basketball coach in New York. What’s Marlene got against you?”

  “Nothing in particular,” I said. “She’s just mean. Roo says we should feel bad for her. That she obviously has problems.”

  “Your sister is wise.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You have no idea.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Not good. I look at her, and she doesn’t seem like my sister.” I was horrified to hear my voice coming out in a croak; equally, I was surprised because I hadn’t said this to anyone.

  “Wait for the miracle,” Slater said.

  “What do you mean?” I felt my brow wrinkling.

  “It might seem really bad right now, but people’s conditions can change really fast and really deeply, in a minute. You’ve got to watch for it, and be there, ready for it, for her.”

  “I saw you with your mother,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, giving me a soft smile. A bunch of kids walked out the gym door and started jogging toward the track. I waited for them all to pass.

  “Why is she in a wheelchair?” I asked after they were gone, followed by Mr. Trombly, the gym teacher.

  “Multiple sclerosis,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Thanks. She’s had it a long time. It goes through different phases. Right now it’s affecting her eyesight.” He sounded calm, but his face looked sad.

  “That must be awful,” I said.

  “It is. She says she’s gotten used to not being able to walk by herself, but she can’t stand the thought of going blind. The world is so beautiful. She wants to be able to see it.”

  “I hope …” I began. But how to finish that sentence? Even with Roo I didn’t know what to hope for. Should I say I hope his mother gets better, I hope her condition doesn’t get worse, I hope she has a complete recovery?