The Secret Language of Sisters

by Luanne Rice

  “Why?” I asked, and I swear I was surprised. “I thought you said you weren’t—that you blamed yourself for the texts, too.”

  Newton, she said.

  My heart stopped. How had she found out?

  “Roo …”

  The way you’re always coming up here together. I’m surprised he’s not with you right now. You talk more to each other when you’re here than to me. Dr. Howarth was right—you need to talk to me.

  “It was hard to get used to the board,” I said. “I’m sorry, it was just so awkward.”

  A little awkward for me, too.

  “I know.”

  But you and Newton.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  You held hands here right in front of me.

  My face scalded. She saw that?

  “It wasn’t anything.”

  Um, it seemed like something.

  “We were just happy about you getting better.” My blood was barreling through my veins and I felt the most terrible combination of guilty and defensive possible.

  So you’re saying there’s nothing between you?

  “You’re between us! We both love you!”

  That’s all?

  “He thinks you don’t love him anymore. He said that last night.”

  He shouldn’t be talking to you about us! When did you see him? You got together last night?

  My mouth was dry, and I could barely swallow. “It was the Full Moon Dance. A fund-raiser for you, Roo. The science club put it on.”

  I know about it. But you went with Newton?

  “No! Of course not. But I saw him there. He didn’t even want to go; he was just working at the booth. He didn’t get dressed up or anything.”

  But you talked to him? Did you dance with him?

  “I only danced with Slater,” I said.

  Okay, she said. Then silence, and we were both thinking, and I wondered how soon our mother would be back, and I knew this was my only chance. My mouth was dry, and I was a nervous wreck.

  “There is something I have to tell you,” I said, just wanting to get it over with, get the words out. “It’s weird, it’s so hard to explain, it’s going to sound worse than it was, but you have to believe me—it was nothing, honestly.”

  Silence from Roo.

  “I was worried about him, about Newton. He looked so miserable, and I saw him run off down the beach, to the dark end. He’d been acting strange. I went after him. I thought he might do something desperate. Like drown himself, I swear. I couldn’t have lived with myself knowing first you, then him. So I ran down the beach, and I couldn’t see where I was going, and I fell into the bight. I just went down so hard.”

  Are you okay?

  Her question made me feel even worse. “Not really,” I said.

  Why?

  “I did a terrible thing. It was a mistake; I hate that I did it. But everything is so messed up and confused. I love you, and he loves you, and you’re not there, so somehow when I fell in, he rescued me, and it was almost as if he was rescuing you, as if he could have that chance.”

  Oh, no. I don’t want to hear this.

  “I have to tell you, to get it out in the open, because it meant nothing—we’ve been in a nightmare, and this was part of it.”

  Tell me!

  “We kissed.”

  Roo said nothing. I waited ten seconds, thirty seconds, a minute, and she said nothing. I inched around to look at the screen, to see if there was writing, if maybe the computer sound went awry, but the screen was not only blank, it was dead. The computer was off.

  I sat there staring at my sister. I lifted her hand, pressed it to my cheek. It felt lifeless and cold. I thought of what Martha had said, that Roo didn’t need me as much as I needed her, and I knew she was right.

  “Roo, please?” I said. “I’m so sorry. I had to tell you so you’d know, and because you have to believe me that he was kissing YOU. It will never happen again.”

  But she didn’t say anything. After a while my mother returned with a cup of coffee, and she began fussing with Roo, trying to figure out why the computer had gone off, and I left the room.

  Why doesn’t the computer have a SCREAM button? “My” voice comes out sounding so calm and measured, so robotic and digitalized, and when Tilly told me about the kiss, I wanted to yell, and scream, and wail.

  My mother so innocently tried to check the computer’s connections, trying to figure out why it went off, not realizing I did it myself because I would rather be locked inside my brain than try to express myself in a remotely reasonable tone of voice. I’ll have to have a word with Dr. Howarth and his software designer. When it comes to emotion, this system is EPIC FAIL.

  “Sweetheart, I’m afraid to fiddle with it too much, it’s such a specialized machine, not like my good old desktop. I asked Christina to call Dr. Howarth, and he should be here soon.”

  Good, I thought. He’s my guy, and he gets it. He knows how crazy it is, trying to merge the way I am now into the world of normals—that is how I think of everybody now, the people who can walk and talk and go to school and wonder whether they feel like having grilled cheese or strawberry yogurt for lunch. Dr. Howarth might be a normal, but he understands me almost as if he’d been through this himself.

  It seemed to take forever. My insides were churning, my mind had hold of that image of Tilly and Newton kissing, and I couldn’t stand it. No amount of meditation helped. Learning CBI was a million times easier than dealing with this. I wanted to obliterate, just block it all out. Maybe if Dr. Howarth showed up, touched my hair, called me darling, got started showing me how to use the camera—Why had my mother forgotten the tripod?—I just wanted to get lost in photography and Dr. Howarth and forget the two people I had loved most for so long.

  “Hello. Good morning, Roo. And Mrs. McCabe.”

  Dr. Gold came into my line of vision. Where was Dr. Howarth?

  “Hi, Dr. Gold,” my mother said. “We seem to be having technical difficulties. Roo was speaking just fine—the audio, oh my God! I love it!—but suddenly it went off, the screen is blank, nothing.”

  “Hmm … okay. It’s just a matter of pushing the ‘on’ key. Roo, did you try the switch? Dr. Howarth showed you, right?”

  I didn’t respond, so Dr. Gold hit the button manually, and the computer powered up.

  As soon as it did, I asked, Where is Dr. Howarth?

  “Roo, I’m glad your mother paged—I was planning to come up this morning to talk to you, but I had surgery first thing. Dr. Howarth asked me to tell you he had to leave late last night.”

  He left? I asked in shock. I couldn’t believe it.

  “He would have come to say good-bye, but he got the call when he was at home, and he didn’t even stop at the hospital on his way to the airport.”

  “Where did he go?” my mother asked.

  “He had an emergency, a new patient in Toronto. Roo, he knows you are well on your way, and he felt confident leaving you in my hands. Even though he developed this software, he trained me and several other doctors, and we’ll be right with you every step of the way.”

  He said he would be here, I said, rocked with grief and emptiness.

  “I know. He thinks the world of you, Roo, and if he could have stayed longer, he would have.”

  What about photography? He made me promise I would take my first photo with him.

  “I am not up to speed on those plans, but I will be in touch with him as soon as he gets settled, and I’m sure he will tell me everything he’s thought of, to get you up and running as a photographer again. Will you be a little patient with me, Roo?”

  I couldn’t respond. My eyes blurred with tears. He had left without even saying good-bye. All our time together had been just work for him. My mother pushed the camera closer to me. I saw the warmth and love in her face, but if I could have, I would have thrown my camera out the window.

  “She’ll be patient, Doctor,” my mother said. “You have no idea what my daughter can do when
she sets her mind to it.”

  “I am sure of that,” Dr. Gold said. “She is a shining star, that’s for sure.”

  Tilly had returned from her big dramatic exit, and she stood in the doorway. She heard everything that had gone on, and her expression sent a shiver of grief through me—she looked so sad, as upset as I felt, and I realized that with all my thoughts about them and me, the normals who walk among us, Tilly was still my sister.

  She was my little sister, and she was right here, but she might as well have swum to the moon last night. She was too far away for me to reach. Or maybe I’m wrong about that: Maybe I was the one too far away.

  I didn’t want to see her now, or ever.

  Ever again.

  I buried my face in My Ántonia and hid out in study hall. It was quiet in here, and I really hoped no one would bother me. Emily came to sit beside me, whispering about how she and Jeremy were probably going to go hiking at Devil’s Hopyard that Saturday, but honestly, I didn’t care. She was one of my two best friends, and she was happy, but I was numb.

  After school I waited for the buses to leave before I went out to the bike rack. At least the TV trucks had gone back to wherever they’d come from. I really didn’t feel like seeing anyone at all, and I wasn’t in the mood for that special brand of torqued-up end-of-day energy. It was only the first week of June, but already hot and humid. I heard locusts in the trees.

  Unlocking my bike chain, I thought I was the only one left in the parking lot. Then I saw that someone had been sitting in the shade of the long row of trees: Newton. And he was coming toward me.

  I fumbled the combination, wanting to get on the bike and ride away before he got close. But my hands were shaking too hard.

  “Tilly, we can’t keep avoiding each other.”

  “Gee, I think we can.”

  “We didn’t mean it, what happened.”

  “We didn’t?” I asked, looking at the ground.

  “Well, we did, actually,” he said. “But it was a mistake.”

  “Yeah. It was. We screwed up.”

  “Big-time,” he said.

  That hurt a tiny bit.

  We stared at each other. It was weird, being this close to him for the first time since the beach. I hadn’t been sure about how I was going to feel. I tensed up, ready for a flood of emotions, but they didn’t come.

  He smiled at me, and I found it pretty easy to smile back. The strange thing was, there was none of that fizziness that had been flooding my veins for weeks now, no wishing he’d come closer, none of the strange, delicious yet shameful feelings that had been there since Roo’s accident. It was just Newton and me, a little but not totally like old times.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Getting there,” I said. “You?”

  “Not so great. She won’t see me,” he said. “I drove up yesterday, and the nurse said my name was off the list; she specifically told them not to let me in.”

  “I’m sure she feels the same way about me,” I said. “I wanted to be honest with her, not have a big secret between us. So I told her about the kiss.”

  “You WHAT?” His mouth dropped wide open and his eyes got huge behind his glasses.

  “Yeah, I did. I had to, Newton. We can’t have secrets like that; she reads my mind, and I read hers. She’d have known. I had to tell her.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Think about it, Newton. Think about Roo. Can you imagine her not figuring it out? She knows me, and you, too well.”

  “Maybe you did,” he said slowly, shaking his head with total regret even as he came around.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Was it bad?”

  “What do you think?”

  “It had to be as bad as it gets. It would have been for me, if she’d been the one to kiss someone,” he said. “God, that sounds horrible.”

  I nodded.

  “It kills me, hurting her. And her not wanting to see me. She’s probably falling in love with Dr. Howarth.”

  “Big news,” I said. “He’s gone. He just flew away, on to the next patient. Roo is devastated.”

  “He left?”

  “Don’t sound so happy. She needed him. He was going to help her figure out how to take photos again. I really thought she had a chance. I know it was a long shot, but if she had just been able to take another few pictures, she could have submitted her portfolio in time for the deadline.”

  “To the Serena Kader Barrois Foundation,” Newton said. “What was he planning to do? I mean, how could she actually take photos? Literally, how would it work?”

  “Some kind of robotics,” I said. “They’ll program an arm so she can reach for a book, or lift a glass to drink, or position the camera. Dr. Gold, his fill-in, was going to try to help her. But, Newton, Roo has stopped caring.”

  “She’s hurt,” he said quietly. “But she’ll try again.”

  “No, you don’t get it. She’s not speaking.”

  “To me? To you?”

  “At all,” I said. “She’s shutting down.”

  He stood there, stunned.

  I finally got my bike unlocked, and climbed on.

  “What did Howarth say about the camera, before he left?”

  “He didn’t say anything to me. All I know is that Roo was excited, and now she’s not. She’s giving up, Newton.”

  I rode away and left him standing there. The afternoon was so hot, I was sweating by the time I hit Shore Road. I didn’t want to go home and face my mother; I found it hard to look her in the eye. Roo hadn’t told her what I said about the kiss, so she had no idea why Roo didn’t want to talk on the computer anymore. The fact that I was behind this latest disaster in my sister’s life, too, was too much to face. Instead of riding home, I cruised down Ferry Road.

  When I got to Martha’s house, I felt oddly comforted. A breeze blew through the big trees; the leaves were bright green, still untouched by summer’s dust. Lucan had been lying in the shade, but at the sight of me, he stood and limped over, his tongue hanging out in a friendly way.

  “Hey, boy,” I said, petting him. “Are you okay? Are you all better?”

  “He’s doing great,” Slater said. He came out of the barn, carrying a fifty-pound bag of topsoil on his shoulder.

  “Hi, Slater. How’s it going?” I asked.

  “Pretty good. I’m helping Martha restore the herb garden. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  I followed him along the neatly manicured path around the corner of the house, to a circular garden enclosed by a knee-high boxwood hedge. In the very center was a sundial. There were two weathered teak benches opposite each other on the perimeter; between the benches were several of Althea’s bronze statues: a young girl sitting cross-legged reading, another gazing up at the sky, and two more dancing.

  Lucan sat beside me as I watched Slater slit the bag and dump the dirt into a pile. The garden was divided like a six-slice pie. Five had been planted already, and he was working on the sixth. After a while I felt like a slacker, so I pitched in, helping Slater plant flats of five varieties of thyme: English, silver, lemon, wooly, and juniper.

  “What brings you to Martha’s?” he asked.

  “I like to talk to her,” I said. “Is she home?”

  “She’s inside, arranging slides of all Althea’s sculptures. She’s going to have an art show here, coming up soon now. It’s why she’s in a rush to get the yard looking perfect.”

  “When is it?” I asked while we worked. The sun felt good on my back, and I liked shoveling the dirt, arranging the plants.

  “The day of the summer solstice, June twenty-first. Back in New York, I wasn’t so in tune with the seasons. Nature was basically Central Park. Now she’s got me looking at birds, and the river, and figuring out which herbs like sun and which ones like shade. It’s cool.”

  “Your family wasn’t into nature?” I asked, wondering what it would be like to grow up without loving birds, clouds, the ocean.

  “Not too much. I hu
ng out in the park, but that was mostly playing ball, not looking at trees or anything.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “My dad died when I was ten. My mom worked at the museum all the time, but she had to cut back when she got MS.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  He shrugged. “Ups and downs. We moved out here because her doctor said fresh air and less stress would be good. So her sister made room, but sometimes they fight, and that seems like even more stress than back in the city. Martha gave me some herbs to give her.”

  “Sisters fighting,” I said, and I could relate. “Not awesome. Are the herbs helping?”

  “She says yes. She makes tea, says it tastes really good.”

  “I’ve had it,” I said. “It does.”

  Martha came out the French doors in a black dress, pink flowered sun hat, and a stark-looking streak of white zinc oxide on her nose. “Ah, hello, Tilly,” she said. “Slater is helping me get the herb garden back on track, and I see you’re getting your hands dirty, too.”

  “I like it,” I said. It actually felt great. It distracted me from my worries, working out in the sun with Slater.

  “There’s no better feeling than dirt under the fingernails! Hands in the soil. And don’t the plants smell wonderful?”

  I nodded. “Slater said you’re having an art show.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I started thinking after our last talk, when you told me about Roo and her photography. I decided art needs to be seen, talent deserves to be appreciated. Lucan and I are privileged to see Althea’s sculpture every day. I want others to enjoy it.”

  “So you’re having an exhibition?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “The night of June twenty-first, the summer solstice.”

  “Longest day of the year,” Slater said.

  “Will you come, Tilly?” Martha asked.

  “Sure,” I said, but I didn’t feel certain at all. I didn’t feel like seeing a lot of people, even to celebrate Martha’s sister. But I knew I would probably do it for her.

  “How is Roo’s progress with the camera coming along?” Martha asked.