The Secret Language of Sisters

by Luanne Rice

  “I know,” he said, flashing a smile that I couldn’t help noticing was really cute. “I hope the same for your sister.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Then I spotted Newton walking toward us. My stomach flipped—I had avoided him since I’d belted him. He and Slater nodded at each other, and Slater walked away.

  “Mind if I join you?” Newton didn’t wait for a reply; he just put his backpack on the bench and sat down.

  “I’m surprised you want to.”

  “Would you prefer I hold a grudge?” he asked.

  “I would if I were you,” I said. I peered at his mouth. It was five days since I’d punched him, and I felt relieved to see that his lower lip was no longer swollen, and the bruise was turning yellow.

  “It’s given me a little credibility, to tell you the truth,” he said.

  “Newton, you’re such a nerd. It’s called cred, and this isn’t the kind you want, trust me,” I said. “What, are you telling people you got in a street fight?”

  “I let them use their imaginations.”

  “Huh,” I said. I knew he was just trying to make me feel better, but the strange thing was, it was working. He’d actually made a semi-joke.

  “You going to the hospital today?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean no. I’m on hospital probation for hitting you. I really am sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it, I already told you. You were upset.”

  “Uh, yeah. A little. But I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I have all this sideways anger, apparently. I’m mad at the universe, so I go after whoever’s handy.” I glanced around, looking for Slater, but he’d walked around the corner of the school, out of sight.

  “Does she seem better to you?” Newton asked.

  Better. An interesting word. What did better mean, when it came to Roo? Did it mean that she had lost only two pounds this week instead of five? Did it mean that the new foam hand splints had stopped her fingers from crabbing, permanently clawing at the air, quite so badly?

  “Yes, much,” I said.

  “Now you’re being sarcastic.”

  “No, I swear.”

  Newton smiled, a wicked look in his eyes. He was so lanky, his narrow shoulders hunched over as he sat, his long wrists sticking out of the cuffs of his shirt. For a second it was like the old days, when the three of us would hang out. Except now there was no Roo. I used to feel like a third wheel sometimes, but I’d give anything to have her here and feel that way again.

  He wiped his lip, breaking the scab from where I’d hit him, and a drop of blood fell onto my extra-credit history report. I smudged it into a diagram of the Turtle with my thumb.

  “Oh, Newton,” I said. “You’re Scarface because of me.”

  He wiped his lip. “It’ll heal.”

  “If it makes you feel better, I had bruised knuckles the next day,” I said, flexing my hands.

  “It doesn’t, Tilly. But maybe you should talk to people instead of being aggressive. Your friends might actually help. What were you and Slater talking about?”

  “Nothing,” I said, not sure why I didn’t want to say how close I’d felt, for just a second, to Slater.

  “Hola,” Isabel said, walking over. She sat down, put her arm around Newton, closing her eyes so her long, dark lashes rested on her cheeks. He leaned his head on her shoulder for two seconds, and I wanted to pull her away. She might have been Roo’s best friend, but she shouldn’t be taking liberties with him. She should keep her arm off his shoulder.

  “Do you have class next period?” she asked.

  “English,” Newton said. “In fact, I’d better go now. I’m supposed to be memorizing some poem. Not my strong suit.”

  “Hard to concentrate on poetry, cariño,” Isabel said, giving him a sorrowful look.

  “Hard to concentrate on anything,” he said.

  “What about you?” she asked me.

  “I’m working on my report.”

  “Take a walk with me,” she said. “You can get back to it, okay?”

  “More than okay,” I said, relieved to take a break.

  Officially we weren’t supposed to leave school during the day, but no one really got in trouble for driving off campus during lunch. A lot of kids went to Paradise Ice Cream or Black Hall Pizza and ate there or brought food back. But it wasn’t lunch period yet, and Isabel didn’t have a car, so I had no idea what she had in mind.

  We walked single file through a worn deer path in the marsh, toward Shore Road. I gazed at the back of her head. Both she and Roo had dark-brown hair, but Isabel’s was shoulder length, wiry and tightly curled, and Roo’s was long and silky-straight. Isabel wore hers pulled back with a turquoise papier-mâché barrette, and I stared at the yellow butterflies and pink flowers painted on the shiny surface and wished so hard I was walking behind my sister instead of Isabel.

  When we broke through the reeds onto Shore Road, I could barely move. This was the exact spot where Roo had flipped her car. Isabel walked along the road, to the edge of the gully. As often as I’d driven past, with my mother or on the bus, I’d never actually stopped here since the accident.

  “This is where it happened,” Isabel said.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “I don’t want to be here.”

  But she ignored me and started to climb down the steeply sloping bank into the marsh. I stepped off the pavement and went closer to the brink to see what she was doing.

  Morning sun sparkled on the tidal creek, four feet down from where I was standing. The light split into a million pieces, riding on the shallow water. Willows curved over the banks, new spring leaves just starting to emerge, throwing shadows. A great blue heron stalked away from us, then spread its enormous wings and rose like a pterodactyl, legs trailing out behind, then landed twenty yards away.

  The tide was low, and the creek smelled of sea creatures and rotting vegetation. With much of the bank exposed, Isabel crouched down and began to examine what was there. She collected a handful of broken glass, a twisted metal shard, and a piece of clear red plastic.

  “From her taillight,” she said.

  “It’s still here?” I asked, shocked and feeling sick to see bits of Roo’s car left over from the crash.

  “It’s been buried,” she said, “but last night was the new moon.”

  “The ebbiest ebb tide,” I said.

  “¿Qué es eso?” Isabel asked.

  “The apogee, the lowest tide of the year,” I said. “Roo always called it that.”

  “Yes. You’re right. I’ve come here a lot, since the accident, to talk to her. It’s weird, but I feel as if she can hear me when I’m here. Yesterday, when the tide was so low, I walked a little farther into the marsh.”

  “Okay,” I said, my pulse thumping. Why was she acting this way? She was talking strange. The marsh grass was brown with mud, or could that be some of my sister’s blood? It made me feel dizzy, and I wanted to leave.

  “I don’t feel good,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “I have to show you something,” she said, staring up the small hill at me.

  “You can show me on the way back.”

  “No, it had to be here, where she nearly died,” Isabel said. I knew she was religious and superstitious, and I really didn’t want to get a whole bunch of that right now.

  “I’m not going to pray by the river,” I said. “Or anything like that.”

  “No problem. Just get down here, Tilly.”

  My shoulders tightened up. It really upset me, Isabel acting this way, high and mighty, closer to Roo than I was. That happened sometimes, Isabel acting as if their friendship was as important as Roo and me being sisters. One thing about me: Push me too hard one way, and I’ll go the other. This was making me feel stubborn.

  “I can see everything from up here,” I said.

  “Not this,” she said, pulling a shiny object out of her jacket pocket. It glinted in the sunlight,
and I recognized the red polka-dot plastic case and Roo’s cell phone in it.

  I scrambled down the bank, tumbling four feet straight into the marsh, barely thinking. I sloshed toward Isabel; my sneakers squished, sinking into the mud, silvery with bits of clamshells, mussel shells, and broken glass. I reached out to grab the phone, but she held it away from my grasp.

  “You shouldn’t have done it, Tilly,” Isabel said, her eyes hard and glittering with angry tears.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was dead when I found it,” she said.

  “Let me see,” I said, my heart pounding, as if deep down I knew something horrible was about to happen.

  “I took it home, plugged it in, charged it,” Isabel went on, pushing against my shoulder and holding the phone just out of my reach.

  “What’s on there?” I asked.

  “I have to admit, I was muy inquieto,” she said. “Preocupado.”

  “Isabel,” I said, needing her to get to the point. She often lapsed into Spanish when she was excited or upset.

  “Okay,” she said. “I was very worried. Terrified, if you want to know the truth, because I’d been feeling so guilty, texting her the day of the accident. She’d sent me a photo of the bait shop right around the time the police say she crashed. So I looked at the texts, and did the math.”

  “You caused her accident?” I asked, practically screeching.

  “No, Tilly. You did.”

  Now she gave me the phone, and I saw all the texts I had sent Roo that day, and the very last one she’d written in response: 5 mins away. And I remembered getting the text. It was on my phone, too—I had looked at it a few times, to remind me of Roo—until it got too painful, realizing she might never text me again. But I had assumed Roo had sent it while the car was stopped. She was too smart to text and drive; she had pulled over, texted me while taking pictures.

  “No, you’re wrong,” I said, looking into Isabel’s brown eyes. “Why are you doing this?”

  “She loves you, and so do I,” Isabel said, her voice breaking. “But this horrible thing happened. I couldn’t keep it to myself, you see? I had to tell you. You needed to know. She went off the road right here, texting to you.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said, staring at the text. “It could have been from earlier, when she was stopped!”

  “Tilly,” Isabel said, her eyes starting to flash. “Look at the time. It’s stamped 4:05 p.m. Her last photo was taken at 3:59.”

  “Six minutes before?” I whispered.

  Isabel nodded. “That’s how long it took her to drive from the bait shop, where she took her last picture, to this spot.”

  “NO,” I said.

  But Isabel was right.

  I scrambled blindly up the hill, wanting to get away from her, from the phone, from the truth that was staring straight at me. I was on my hands and knees, on the side of the road, wishing I could die, wishing Roo could live, wishing Isabel had never shown me the phone.

  The horrible thing was, I’d known I was somehow responsible. I had felt guilty and thought it was just because I’d made Roo come to pick me up.

  I had tried telling myself I wanted her to get a shot of the sun going down behind the pine trees by our dad’s grave, but that wasn’t true. Deep down I had wanted to see the owls fly out for the night. That had been selfish, but this was a million times worse. I might as well have grabbed the wheel and yanked the car off the road.

  “What do you think we should do?” Isabel asked, climbing up the bank, sitting beside me on the road.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “The texts,” Isabel said.

  I felt even more jarred, as if she had shaken me. “What are we supposed to do about them?” I asked.

  “We have to tell someone,” she said.

  “WHY?” I asked, shocked.

  “Because it’s the right thing,” Isabel said stubbornly. I knew she was obsessed with being good and doing right, but in this case, how could telling help?

  “It’s not going to do any good, or make Roo better,” I said, fighting back tears. “It’ll just upset people.”

  “That’s the easy way out,” Isabel said, her brown eyes flashing.

  “But …” I began, but she interrupted me

  “Tu madre, claro. Y yo no quiero ser …” She started in Spanish, but switched quickly to English. “Your mother at least. And I really don’t want to be the one to tell her. You have to come clean. Tilly, this is for your own sake as much as anything. It’s too big a burden to carry, for both of us. I almost wish I hadn’t found her phone.”

  “Why did you even go looking for it?” I asked bleakly.

  “I’ll give you some time, but if you don’t tell your mother, I will,” she said, not answering me. “End of the week, okay?”

  I couldn’t respond. Inside, I was shaking so hard I felt I might come apart at the seams. I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to hold my skin and bones together. It was impossible to think about what Isabel had just said, that I had to tell my mother. I was still trying to face the fact that my text had driven Roo off this road.

  The skid marks were fading, but were still visible.

  “You can see where she hit the brakes,” a voice said. “She tried so hard to avoid us.”

  I looked up, over my shoulder. A tall, stooped woman in a long blue dress and straw hat had walked along the road, and as soon as I saw the black Lab with his leg in a blue cast, I knew: This was the dog Roo had hit.

  “You saw it happen?” Isabel asked.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “This is the same route we walked that day. We come here every day. Do you know Ruth Ann?”

  “She’s my friend, and Tilly’s sister,” Isabel said.

  I barely heard the voices. I stared at the dog, put my hand out, let him come close and investigate. He was a beautiful, stock Labrador retriever with a gray muzzle, a red collar. He had a cast and walked with a hitch in his gait. He licked the back of my hand.

  Petting him, I buried my face in his ruff. I felt destroyed. My text had nearly killed my sister, and this dog, too. Then, glancing up and shading my eyes against the sun, I looked at the woman. She was old, the age of a grandmother, with long white hair and, behind gold wire-rimmed glasses, lines around her eyes. She had a gentle smile.

  “How is he?” I made myself ask.

  “Lucan is doing well,” she said. “I’m Martha Muirhead. I was the first one to see your sister after the crash. How is she now?”

  “I don’t think she’s going to get better,” I said.

  Miss Muirhead didn’t speak; she just tilted her head and stared at me.

  “What happened that day?” Isabel asked.

  Miss Muirhead seemed not to hear her. She gazed straight at me, as if I were the only one there. I was still sitting on the road, and after a few moments, she bent down next to me, to meet my eyes. She reached out a quavering hand, and so did I. Our index fingers met.

  “I talked to her,” she said. “Until the police came. She was in and out of consciousness. She was badly injured, but she wanted to know how Lucan was. Whether she had hurt him. Her eyes were very bright, almost glittering. Such blue eyes. Even though yours are hazel, I can see the resemblance between you. You look so alike.”

  “No one says that,” I said.

  “Oh, but they’re wrong. You’re just like her, so caring. You asked for Lucan, first thing. And he’s fine. He broke his leg, but it’s healed cleanly. Will you tell your sister that?”

  “She can’t hear us. She’s in a coma, and she won’t understand,” I said, my voice ragged. “And it wouldn’t be rational to try.”

  “Oh, I think it would be. Very rational,” Miss Muirhead said. “And I very much think she will understand.”

  “She’s in bad shape—” I stopped myself. For one thing, my voice wouldn’t work. For another, I didn’t feel like discussing Roo’s vegetative state with a stranger, especially after what I’d just learne
d from Isabel.

  “That may be true,” Miss Muirhead said calmly, her gaze so warm and direct it made my heart thump. “But I believe she will understand very well. Please tell her, okay?”

  I couldn’t answer. I turned away, let out a ragged sob. I heard Isabel assuring Miss Muirhead that she would pass on the message. She explained about Roo’s condition, how the doctors said she had no awareness, but that Isabel believed in God and knew that He was taking care of Roo, and that her spirit was exactly the same as before. Through it all, I could think only of Roo’s cell phone and how I’d ruined her life.

  “I want Tilly to be the one to tell her about Lucan,” Miss Muirhead said. “It will mean more coming from her.”

  Now I did turn around. The old lady was staring at me with such intensity, I felt weird. It was as if she could see right through me, read my mind. Did she know? Marlene had said she knew spells—had she magically realized we’d been texting?

  The morning had been relatively warm for March, and still, but just then the breeze began to blow. It swept in from the south, and although we were a few miles inland, it brought scents of Long Island Sound: salt, seaweed, a storm far at sea. I shivered. Miss Muirhead straightened up, tapped her thigh so Lucan limped to her side. The two of them stood there for a few seconds, then walked away.

  Isabel was saying how we needed to get back to school; morning study period had ended and we were missing class; we’d get in trouble if we didn’t hurry, but I barely heard her. I watched Miss Muirhead and Lucan go. I swear it had nothing to do with what Marlene and her friends had said, but I had the feeling I had just met a witch.

  The days went on and on, and no one knew I was there.

  Mom, Newton, and Isabel visited nearly every afternoon, but Tilly hadn’t been here in days. Pearl was off today, and so was Taylor Swift. The indifferent nurse was on. She touched me as if I were an inanimate object; she never said hello or how are you, the way the others did, even when they obviously thought I couldn’t hear them.

  Indifferent was giving me a sponge bath. I could smell myself, and it wasn’t good: pee and sweat. Pearl always used a special soap she brought from home; it was light and sweet, and made me think of the honeysuckle growing at Hubbard’s Point. She left it on the sink, and Taylor Swift now used it to wash me, too. But Indifferent didn’t bother. She used liquid soap straight from the dispenser, and it was harsh and institutional-smelling. She wasn’t rough, but she wasn’t kind.