The Secret Language of Sisters

by Luanne Rice

  It hurt my feelings to have her act this way, as if I didn’t matter, as if I weren’t there. To her, I was just a lump; she was doing her job, nothing more. My eyes filled with tears and spilled over. They ran down my face, but the nurse didn’t even wipe them. She just assumed they were simply more leakage from my useless body. To get away from her, I went inside my mind.

  I thought of Tilly. The day she punched Newton she was wearing jeans and my Nantucket hoodie. Pretty daring of her to wear it straight up in public without my permission—we’ve always been a little possessive of our clothes—and I know she was wearing it for a reason. Wrapped in my hoodie, she was keeping me close. I got that completely. She left it behind, wrapped around me, to keep me warm.

  She and I could speak in silence with a look, a birdcall, a hoodie. When it did involve words, they could be oblique. Like that time in the fall when I was driving her and Mom to school. I was so full of grief from losing Dad, I missed him so much, I had faked a sore throat so I could stay home and read the Yale papers he’d brought home the day he died. See you later, he’d said, but we hadn’t.

  Mom had made a doctor’s appointment for me, and I was supposed to go straight to Dr. Whitcomb’s office after I dropped off her and Roo.

  I was driving Dad’s car, the old Volvo, with his sunglasses over the visor and his faded Red Sox cap stuck in the door pocket, and I pulled into the parking lot our two schools shared. Tilly had just joined me at the high school, and Mom taught at the middle school next door. The teachers were heading in, students were milling around waiting for the 8:10 bell, and Tilly called from the backseat, “See you later.”

  It was the way she looked at me, the spark of our eyes meeting in the rearview mirror. Even the words: See you later. He’d said them to me, but Tilly had heard, too, and she was giving me a message. The back of my neck tingled, and I knew. After I dropped Mom off, I sped around the block, and when I returned to the school lot, the bell had just rung, kids were streaming in through the open doors, and Tilly ran the opposite way, straight to the car.

  “What took you so long?” she asked.

  “I hit traffic coming over the Matterhorn,” I said, something completely nonsensical because in those first months after losing our dad, the world had seemed surreal. Why shouldn’t my route back to school and Tilly have included a detour to Europe and over the Alps? It made as much sense as our father dying.

  “Next time I advise you take a hot-air balloon,” she said, catching on right away.

  “Let’s go test-drive one now,” I said.

  And because Tilly and I instinctively share everything and I’d taught her how to drive as soon as I got my license, I shoved over and she sidled under, and my fourteen-year-old sister took the wheel and we went straight across the bridge to the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through. She couldn’t get her permit for another year; I just considered that I was giving her a head start.

  We picked up a half-dozen crullers and chocolate-frosted donuts along with two black coffees—we had both developed a taste for black coffee, and it was handy because supposedly it was healthier than drinking it with milk and sugar. You’re saying, But what about the baked goods? and I know, but our dad had barely been dead three months, and we were a little on the despairing side, and donuts helped.

  Tilly drove us carefully through town, past the old white church so many famous artists had come to paint. Our town is the prettiest stretch of land on Long Island Sound.

  Rich people come in summer, but our family was working- and middle-class. Our grandfathers had been a firefighter and a telephone lineman, and they’d just had the brilliant sense to buy shoreline property before it got expensive. They sent their kids, my parents, to good colleges. Education meant a lot to them; they saw it as our family’s way to a better life.

  We have silver sands and golden salt marshes, deep blue bays, and that secret path to the hidden beach where Newton and I escaped to kiss and watch the stars, where we said we loved each other. Our parents met at Hubbard’s Point, too, and we grew up barefoot and in the water whenever possible. Our father taught us binomial nomenclature—the Latin names of every bird, tree, fish, and mammal at Hubbard’s Point. Now he is buried there. That day, Tilly and I went to visit him in the cemetery.

  Dad’s grave was on the hill, shaded by oak and pine trees, near the tree where great horned owls roost. In the five miles between the drive-through and the train trestle that marked the entrance to Hubbard’s Point, we had already inhaled the donuts and crullers, but we still had our coffees. We carried them up the small hill, sat down next to him.

  The headstone was made of Connecticut granite, smooth and plain. It was engraved with his name, Thomas McCabe, and the dates he was born and died. Underneath was the phrase WAIT FOR THE EARLY OWL.

  Tilly and I had the idea for the T. S. Eliot inscription. In fact, our mother let us pick out the stone and choose the lines. She wasn’t up to handling much; the shock of having him die so suddenly had shut her down. Our parents loved each other the way other kids wished their parents would. We were the best family.

  “Hey, early owl,” Tilly said, glancing at the stone. Then she began to quote from the poem, “East Coker” in Eliot’s Four Quartets. “‘Wait for the early owl …’”

  And I continued, “‘In that open field if you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, on a summer midnight, you can hear the music.’”

  Owling had been Dad and Tilly’s special thing. The truth is, I’d rather have used a phrase from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Falling Stars,” but I had let Tilly choose the lines about an owl because I sometimes worried about her, felt sorry for her. But just then I felt jealous.

  “We brought coffee,” Tilly said, spilling a few drops.

  “He can’t feel that.”

  “No kidding. We’re a science family; we don’t believe in the afterlife. But still,” she said. “I want to do it anyway.”

  “Okay,” I said, softening my tone. “But do you think you’re being a little irrational?”

  “Who cares?” she asked, slashing tears from her eyes. We both cried, but we didn’t reach for each other. It was one of those rare moments when we were trapped in our own private grief.

  She told Dad the owl fledglings, hatched in June, were probably getting ready to fly from the cavity in the hollow tree. And she said she wished he were there to see them with her.

  “We’re skipping school,” I said when she stopped.

  “Do you have to say that?” she asked.

  “Well, he can either see everything and already knows,” I said, “or he’s just plain old dead in the ground and doesn’t care. Like you said, we’re a scientific family.”

  “So why say it? Either way?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Isabel’s the superstitious one,” she said. “You’re acting like you believe in ghosts and spirits or something.”

  I hid a smile. I wasn’t the only one feeling jealous; it bothered Tilly that I had such a close friend, that I shared some things with Isabel that I didn’t with her.

  “Tell him the Red Sox are in the play-offs,” she said. “Tell him all the ospreys have left on their migration. Tell him we miss him too much to go out for Halloween.”

  “You tell him,” I said. “If you honestly think he can hear you.”

  “Dad, one more game and the Red Sox will clinch and be in the World Series again,” she said.

  “If they make it,” I said.

  “Don’t be so mean,” she said.

  “I’m just being a realist, like him.”

  “Yeah, but you had to say that, Roo,” Tilly said. “About us skipping school.”

  I couldn’t argue with her there, and it was a sign of how unhinged we were by his death, by missing him, that we were talking to his gravestone. That we had skipped school at all, that I was letting a whole day go by without working for the grades I would need to get into Yale.

  The sun was bright and lowering
in that October way, the air cool and smelling of fallen leaves, the sky golden blue. Picture autumn light so beautiful it can make you cry for no reason. You’re not even thinking that soon the branches will be bare, and the ground frozen, and the weather more often gray than not. It’s just that the sky is so blue, so saturated with sunlight, and you want it to stay that way forever.

  Tilly spilled more coffee. Our father had loved a good mug of joe. I could see him at his desk, writing about whales and deep dives or reading T. S. Eliot—head bowed, chin in one hand, a steaming cup of coffee by his elbow; sometimes, when he was reading student papers during baseball season, he’d have the radio on low, listening to the Red Sox game.

  “I should get back to school,” Tilly said, standing up. “I have algebra next period and I’m already getting a C. I really am a loser.”

  “You are not, Tilly.”

  “You’re just being nice,” she said. “You’re smarter, that’s just how it is. You did so much better as a freshman than I’m doing, and I don’t even care.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  She shrugged. “One thing for sure. I’ll never talk to a grave again. Or anyone who can’t hear me. I’ll be rational. I promise, Roo, just for you.”

  I smiled at her, but she wouldn’t smile back.

  “Come on. Let’s go,” she said.

  But neither of us moved. We stood staring at the headstone. It was beautiful in a cold, hard way. He taught us a lot of things, and one of them was to read poems and memorize them; he had taught us his favorites, said they were part of him.

  Eventually we got back into the car, only this time I drove. I knew the teachers of Black Hall were tight and loyal to Mom, and they were used to cutting Tilly slack.

  I thought they felt sorry for her. There was no point in having false modesty, especially now—just look at me—but the truth was, Tilly had to deal with me, the fact that I scored high on tests and she didn’t, that I loved to study and my grades reflected it. Tilly told me Principal Gordon had actually said to her face, the day she started freshman year, “It’s a hard act, trying to keep up with a sister like Roo. Those are big educational boots to fill.” Educational boots. Yes, he said that.

  Tilly got Bs and Cs. She was used to hearing the phrase, from both teachers and my parents, “You’re not working up to potential.” Sometimes I think she was actually distinguishing herself, setting herself apart from me, by not trying.

  “You’re a brain,” she said one time. “And so is Newton. You’re perfect together.”

  And for so long we were.

  I still loved him, even though so much had changed. Before the accident I’d been thinking of taking a break, putting space between us. But that was in the past. Right now I just needed to survive.

  The harder I tried to remember the accident itself, the more I pushed it away. The dog, I pictured running into the street. Did I crash trying to avoid the dog?

  No. I was distracted even before I saw him. My mind wasn’t on driving. Was it on Newton? No. It was on Tilly. I was late to get her, but more than that: I had taken my eyes off the road. I wasn’t concentrating. Oh, God, I was texting. That’s what I was doing.

  I did this, I brought this on myself!

  The awareness pricked my brain, jabbing me like a pin. Everything was shockingly clear, the memory of what I was doing just before I drove off the road, my eyes on my phone, my thumb on the keys.

  Stephen Hawking was one of my favorite writers, weaving webs of possibility, quantum physics and cosmology, with his words. I used to think maybe we were all living on a parallel path to the alternative, the scary things that lurk. But that for today we were fine.

  Now I was on that other path. And today I was not fine.

  I won’t get better, I’ll never leave this bed, and it’s my fault. I am scared and screaming, but no one can hear.

  Tilly won’t even try, because she thinks I’m just a comatose body. She’s keeping her promise.

  Do you know how it feels, knowing I did this to myself? It’s the worst feeling in the world.

  The bus drove along Shore Road, and when we got to the spot where Roo crashed, every single person on the bus turned to look, as they did every day. And there just above the creek bank, as if waiting for the bus to go by, was Miss Muirhead. She watched us pass, and my face burned. I could almost feel her watching me.

  “Why does she keep going back there?” I asked, more to myself than to TEN. “You’d think it would be a bad memory, after what happened to Lucan.”

  “Maybe she likes the scenery along the marsh. It’s so pretty,” Em said.

  “This whole town is pretty. She’s going there for a reason,” I said. “She seemed weird to me.”

  “You met her?” Nona asked.

  “Yeah.” I hadn’t told them about my visit to the creek with Isabel, for obvious reasons. The truth about the phone needed to stay a secret. It was eating me up. I could barely sleep, going over and over the memory in my mind, the texts I had sent, so impatient and awful.

  I wanted to convince myself I’d thought Roo had stopped the car. But deep down I knew she’d been behind the wheel. Even if she had pulled over to take photos, she would have to start driving eventually, and some of my texts would have landed while she was speeding along Shore Road.

  It’s all my fault.

  “Martha Muirhead’s eccentric, that’s for sure,” Nona said now. “My mom used to talk about her when she worked there. Martha and her sister lived together almost their whole lives. I guess they never got married or had kids or anything. It just about killed Martha when Althea got sick.”

  “Feeling bad about her sister getting sick makes her eccentric?” Em asked. She glanced at me, and I nodded. It was so Em; I knew she was thinking of me and Roo.

  “More than that,” Nona said. “She has a big herb garden, and the whole time her sister had cancer, she was cooking up potions. She’d make these silk pouches and fill them with dried goldenrod and thyme and stuff, for her sister to wear around her neck.”

  “They didn’t help, though,” I said. It was a statement, not a question. Daughter of a scientist and all.

  “Not really. Althea got better for a while, and even my mother started to wonder. But then she went downhill really fast.”

  “That’s sad,” Em said, and I agreed but didn’t say anything. Miss Muirhead obviously knew how it felt to see a sister suffer. But I still felt strange about the way she’d been so vehement that I be the one to tell Roo that Lucan was better. I hadn’t. Not yet. I hadn’t been back to see Roo. I was afraid to look at her now, knowing what I’d done, that I’d put her there.

  Last night, I’d lain awake. I had surrounded myself with stuffed animals, both mine and Roo’s. One of my arms was around an old teddy bear of hers, and my other embraced my stuffed snowy owl and purple dragon. Most of the fuzz had been worn off all three animals.

  Roo’s bear smelled like her. I buried my nose in him, thinking of how often she had held him. My owl and dragon felt so familiar, snuggling into my side. I loved fierce creatures and had always hoped they would make me brave. Because dragons fought battles, and owls were the most efficient hunters in the forest. I clutched my owl and remembered holding my dad’s hand. He had taught me to walk silently through the woods on owling nights.

  I’d always tried to be brave, but things scared me: the dark, a snapping twig, the mystery of what was hiding just around the next rock. Trees loomed over us, gigantic monsters. My father would whisper to me that he had my hand, nothing would happen. One night when I was ten, we crouched by the big curved boulder, as quiet as could be. He pointed toward the tall pine, and as my eyes got accustomed to the dark, I looked for the shape that shouldn’t have been there.

  That’s how I’d learned to spot owls—my father had told me to look up, scan trees for anything out of place. You don’t expect to see a huge pumpkin-shaped blob in an oak, or a tall black oval in a pine, but if you do, pay close attention, because it might be
an owl.

  Sure enough, as the dark deepened, the rods and cones in my eyes allowed me to see the owl. It was waking up after its long sleep throughout the day, and it moved and stretched first one wing, then the other, just like a person stretching before jumping out of bed. Starlight caught its yellow eyes; they seemed to be looking straight through me, and I shrank into my father’s side.

  The owl flew out. Without a sound, it glided straight over our heads. I held my breath, watching it go. In the darkness, its feathers looked ruddy red, and its wingspan was wider than mine. We watched it fly into a cluster of oak trees, and we ran after it, my father never letting go of my hand.

  That was the bravest I had been.

  Sitting on the bus, I closed my eyes tight and knew I would have to, somehow, be a thousand times braver now. I pictured Isabel holding Roo’s cell phone and how she had said we had to tell my mother.

  Emotional blackmail from my sister’s best friend. Isabel had thrown so much guilt and worry at me, I still felt sick. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Getting in trouble for what I’d done was so much easier to face than the fact of Roo in a coma.

  Slater’s words filled my mind: Rise up, don’t sink down. These days I felt anything but brave, and most of the time I wished I could sink down into the mud, where Isabel found the phone. But just then, on the bus, I knew what I had to do: go see Roo and tell her everything. Not my mother but Roo, even if she couldn’t hear me, whether I was being rational or not.

  “What’s the matter?” Em asked. “You look pale.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. My phone was burning a hole in my pocket. It was crazy, but I wanted to text my sister, tell her I was coming. Instead, I started to text Newton: Can you give me a ride to the hospital? I hesitated before sending.

  I didn’t want him there when I talked to Roo. But how else would I get to the hospital? My mother had spent the morning there, and I knew she had plans to meet with an insurance person about the bills later this afternoon.