The Secret Language of Sisters

by Luanne Rice

  He pulled a delicate screwdriver from his shirt pocket, the kind I used to use to fix his glasses, and unscrewed a one-inch plastic frame from the back of my camera.

  “I’m enlarging the viewfinder,” he said.

  That little window you looked through, to set up the shot. Then he placed the camera in the box, threaded the straps through small holes in the box’s sides, and attached the other end of the straps to the helmet.

  I watched, remembering the ease that had always been between us. We’d do homework together at my family’s dining room table for hours, barely speaking, our feet touching under the table. I felt that way now. One time, Newton built a water filtration system out of junk he found in the basement. Tilly had called him a mad scientist, a geeked-out genius. Maybe he was both. But watching him work calmed me down.

  “Okay,” he said when he had finished assembling. “The challenge is that you’re so good. If you just wanted to point and shoot, I could hold the camera for you, and you could direct the computer to click the shot. But you shoot stars, sky objects. It’s dark out, and there’s movement. So I needed to figure out how to hold the camera steady and stable long enough for you to get the settings right.”

  I probably won’t be going to Little Beach to photograph stars any time soon.

  “Yes, you will.”

  How?

  “I’m working on it. Let’s just get you familiar with the apparatus first. We’ll do some test shots in here before we go out to do fieldwork. Can we get you into the wheelchair?”

  Call Christina. She’s on today; she’ll do it.

  “We don’t need Christina, Roo.”

  He lowered the side of my bed, made sure all my IV lines were out of the way. My catheter was there, too, and I felt mortified. But he just unclipped the bag of urine and hooked it to the side of the chair, as if it was no big deal.

  He slid his arms around me. He held me for a minute that way, wedged beside me on the bed. I couldn’t move my arms, but if I could, they would have slid around him. My hands would have touched his face. He smelled so good, that quintessential Newton combination of salt air, soap, and pencils. He brushed his face against mine, and it made me laugh to be jostled by his glasses. A tiny little grunt actually escaped my mouth, but from Newton’s chuckle, I could tell he knew it was a laugh.

  Then he lifted me up. He held me against his chest; I felt his heart beating through his shirt. His body felt warm, and I wanted to stay right there all day. From up here, I had a better view out the window—of the Charles River, a bridge filled with traffic, and the sky. But I barely saw. I just wanted Newton to hold me.

  Finally he put me into the wheelchair. He strapped me in, then made sure my wire harness was connected to the computer. He placed the helmet on my head; it was my own, the one I’d worn on hundreds of bike rides. There was a scuff mark from where I’d wiped out in the beach parking lot.

  He secured the small, almost delicate, wooden box holding my camera to the aluminum frame—I recognized it as the modified frame from a backpack; he had cut it down a third of its size, and instead of putting it on my back, he strapped it to my front—to support the camera and balance the weight.

  The box had cutouts on two sides—one that pressed against my right eye, the other to accommodate the camera’s lens. The straps looped from the box sides to the temples of my helmet, to hold the box in place. Once he had the whole thing put together and strapped it to my body, I was gazing straight through the camera’s viewfinder.

  I looked through the camera, but because the muscles of my left eye were paralyzed and I couldn’t close my eyelid, too much light came in. Newton had anticipated that. He slid a pirate-style eye patch over my right eye, and that made a huge difference.

  He had positioned me to face the window. I saw seagulls wheeling around in the blue sky.

  “Dr. Howarth told me how to program this in, hang on a sec,” he said, looking through the pages of notes. He ran the camera cable from the back of the box to the USB port on the laptop. Then with a few keystrokes he got the computer to recognize the camera.

  “This part’s complicated,” he said. “The computer is used to responding to the cursor and expressing your words. Now it needs to hear your thoughts about taking a photo. The basics are up for zoom, left for distance, and right for click the shot.”

  He came around front, made a few adjustments to the frame and the way the camera rested in the box.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  Because I couldn’t see the keyboard, I wasn’t able to answer. But we were in synch, so he took my silence as a yes.

  “Go for it,” he said.

  I watched gulls wheel and turn in the blue sky, saw the patterns they were making in relation to the dark horizon. When one gull soared past the window in a perfect glide, I moved the cursor right and heard the camera click.

  “You did it!” Newton said, standing by the monitor.

  He was right, I’d taken a photo. I felt like throwing my arms around him, I felt like flying.

  I wanted to zoom in on a building across the river, a brick factory-looking edifice with five tall chimneys spiking the sky. I directed the cursor to move up, and I heard the lens motor whir as zoom engaged and the building enlarged within the viewfinder. Shadows fell from the chimneys, creating an effect that filled me with longing, made me think of trees. I took the shot.

  I spent some time on that building—the color of afternoon light on the bricks, the juxtaposition of chimneys against the blue sky, arched windows broken and empty, pigeons roosting on the window ledges. I took many shots. It felt limiting because the camera was in a fixed position—I could only shoot what appeared exactly in the viewfinder, and I had no lateral or vertical motion.

  And it felt weird to not be able to just check the monitor, keep the photos I wanted, and discard the rejects along the way, but I kept taking pictures anyway. The building, the sky, more seagulls, different patterns, a plane on its final approach to Logan Airport.

  The more I did it, the more I felt lost in the pleasure of taking pictures, and I forgot the limitations and actually began to enjoy the challenge of finding the best photo possible with a completely stationary camera. I knew this was brand-new technology, and that Newton had worked so hard to invent it for me, but I quickly went from marveling about the newness to feeling like myself again, connected to the camera and the thrill of taking photos.

  After a while I felt tired, so I stopped. Newton was in tune, and he unhooked me from the camera-holding apparatus and lifted me back into bed. He switched the computer program back to the keyboard, but left the monitor open with all the photos I had just taken.

  “Look, Roo. Look what you just did.”

  I gazed at my shots and wondered, is it true, I really took those?

  They were all right. A few were blurry, out of focus, but a few were pretty decent. They weren’t so different from photographs I would have taken if I were mobile, not paralyzed. My eye was the same, drawn to dark and light, shadows and sun, sky and birds and nature, the warm red of the bricks, the luminous blue of the sky, the desolation of broken windows, the freedom of seagulls.

  Thank you for doing this for me, I said to Newton. Making it possible.

  “You made it possible,” he said.

  That whole setup, with the camera and harness, it really works. How did you come up with it?

  “I let myself be you for a few hours,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I imagined I was you, and then I tried to figure out what I—you—would need to take beautiful pictures. Then everything just fell into place.”

  You did a good job of being me.

  “There are so many things I want to say to that.”

  Say them.

  “I would be you if I could. Take this away from you. But I know I can’t. I feel bad saying anything’s hard for me, considering what you go through, but that is hard for me. Seeing you suffer in any way. So instead of being you, I just want to be with you.”


  I thought about that. My stomach flipped, wanting his words to be true, so true they would last forever.

  Tilly, I said.

  “I know. I can’t even explain or excuse it, Roo. Some kind of insanity took me over—her, too. We are both lost without you, and she is such a part of you. The fact that you can stand to look at me says a lot—I can’t stand to look at myself.”

  Get over that, I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  I thought of Martha. Of what she and Althea went through, how they battled their demons and stuck together till the end. They chose each other, and they forgave each other for being human.

  We belong to each other, I said to Newton. We claimed each other when we were young. I don’t expect you to stay with me; you can’t. But I want us to be friends. That means all three of us.

  “That sounds nice,” he said. Why did those words feel like a dagger in my heart? Then he took my hand. “But it’s total bull.”

  No, it’s not.

  “Yeah, Roo. It is. You and I can’t be friends. Not like that. You think I can undo everything we are to each other just because you’re in this bed? Because I can’t.”

  Not undo. Just recalculate.

  “Nice try, but I don’t think so. ‘Recalculate’? As if we’re on GPS, a navigation system? A machine? You are my navigation, Roo.” He touched my head. “You’re my north star. Will you try to keep going with me?”

  I’m so afraid we’re going to hurt each other.

  “Because of what I did?”

  I hesitated, wanting to tell him the truth. I don’t believe you can handle this. No one could.

  “After all this time, you don’t know me if you can say that. Inside, you’re the same as ever, so beautiful and smart, making me keep up with you.”

  We won’t be able to do anything. Go outside, use our telescopes, run to Little Beach. Kiss, I said, but inside I felt my resolve weakening. What if Newton and I COULD be together in spite of everything?

  “Hey, Roo? We can still do that,” he said.

  But, I began. He interrupted me, hand on my wrist.

  “Remember that night, the Leonids, what I said?”

  Yes. My heart began to pound.

  “I still feel it,” he said.

  So did I. What is love? It’s only everything.

  And he kissed me. He put his arms around me and held me against his body, and I felt his lips on mine. The thing about a kiss, it either fills you with stars or it doesn’t. And this one filled me with stars.

  Late Thursday afternoon, the third week of June, I went to Martha’s after school.

  I hadn’t seen much of Nona and Emily lately; TEN wasn’t together that often anymore. Sometimes I wasn’t sure whether it was just normal growing up, or whether all the drama had driven a wedge between us. I hoped it hadn’t. But the thing was, I didn’t seek them out the way I had before Roo’s accident. They were fourteen and innocent, and I was fourteen and had lived a few lifetimes. I wanted to spend time with people who got it.

  I had also distanced myself from Isabel. I couldn’t get over what she’d done. Telling on me had started a gigantic avalanche in my life, and I was still digging out. Sometimes I wondered: Would I have come to it myself, told my mom about the text? Would Mom still have given that interview if she and I could have really talked first? I didn’t know; I probably never would. But the TV trucks were gone, on to the next tragedy, and we were left here with ours, trying to put our lives back together.

  The two people I most wanted to spend time with, it turned out, were Slater and Martha. They didn’t judge me. I needed people like them.

  That afternoon, I stood on a stepladder, washing the windows in Althea’s old studio. I’d mixed up a bowl of cool water and white vinegar—Martha’s recipe—and polished every pane of glass with old newspaper. Years of dust and grime came off, making them sparkle.

  Martha’s property had several small outbuildings on it, abandoned and overgrown. Slater concentrated on the barn, preparing it for the exhibit, but I had gravitated to the studio, a tiny one-room house. When the sisters were young, Martha told me, it had been their playhouse. Later, after Althea moved back, she turned it into a place to make sculpture.

  It was magical. The walls were hung with photographs of sculptures by Elisabeth Gordon Chandler, Camille Claudel, Louise Bourgeois, and other women sculptors; postcards of places Althea had visited—both when she was married to Charles and at other times with Martha; some handwritten quotes from favorite books; and shelves holding plaster casts, shells, beach stones, and a collection of birds’ nests. A beehive kiln stood in the corner.

  I left the door open to air out the musty space. There was a small refrigerator in the corner, humming away. I wondered why it was still plugged in, when no one was ever in here.

  “You’re doing a great job,” Martha said, walking in.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You have no idea how many hours Althea spent here,” she said. “It was her favorite place.”

  “It’s really cool,” I said. “I like the kiln.”

  Martha nodded, smiling at me. “Althea did, too. What’s your art, Tilly?”

  “My art?” I laughed uncomfortably. “I don’t have one.”

  “Everyone needs art, a way to express themselves. For me, it’s poetry and working with herbs. Althea had sculpture. Your sister’s a photographer. What about you?”

  I shrugged and just kept working. Memories smashed into me like a tidal wave, of how I used to wish I had a gift, just like Martha was suggesting. But I kept those thoughts to myself.

  Martha crouched by the small refrigerator, her amber velveteen skirt trailing on the floor. She pulled out a plastic bag filled with clay. Lucan looked over her shoulder, very interested.

  “This is the last of Althea’s clay,” she said. “I’ve kept it in the fridge to keep it moist, but I think it’s time to do something with it.”

  “You want me to throw it out?” I asked.

  “I want you to sculpt something.”

  “Me?” I asked doubtfully.

  “Roo’s photographs are remarkable, and I can’t wait to hang them for the show. But they made me wonder, what do you do, with all you have inside?”

  “It’s funny,” I said slowly, remembering that time last July when Roo had sat on my bed, braiding my hair. “I was just wondering the same thing. Roo and I talked about it once.”

  “What did she say?”

  I laughed, embarrassed. “It won’t make sense. You had to be there.”

  She stood still, waiting to see if I would say more. Maybe I would have, if I could have. The thoughts were too powerful and confusing to put into words, though.

  “Well, I’ll leave you with the clay,” she said, smiling after a minute. “Don’t think too much about it. Just get your hands into it. That’s what Althea used to say she did. ‘I let the clay tell me what it wants to be.’ ”

  “As if it has a life of its own,” I said, trying to laugh.

  “Just see what happens,” she said.

  It seemed weird to be playing with clay; that’s what it felt like—playing, when I was supposed to be working. But Martha had told me to do it, and she was my boss. I glanced around the room, hoping for inspiration. Martha stood by the door with Lucan.

  “Can I ask you one thing?” I said.

  “Of course. If it’s about technique, I don’t know. You just have to feel your way, have fun with it.”

  “It’s about Roo. When you visited her, did she say anything about me?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  My stomach fell; I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I had to ask. “Can you tell me?”

  “We spoke about love between sisters, and we spoke of princesses and dragons,” Martha said, a smile twinkling in her eyes as she and Lucan walked out the door and headed toward the barn.

  Too mysterious for me, I thought. Pulling the stool close to Althea’s worktable, I stared at the lu
mp of clay. I remembered middle school, making Christmas ornaments, and how we’d needed water to keep the clay moist. So I pulled a sage-green bowl from the shelf and filled it.

  When I returned, the clay stared at me. It seemed to be daring me. Martha had it all confused. Roo was the artistic one. She had the talent. But I kept thinking about what both Martha and Roo had asked me, at separate times: What do I do with all I have inside? And I had plenty. I had anger, fear, dreams, hope, sorrow, and love for my sister. I thought about the anger, how mad I was at myself for texting her, and, surprisingly, how mad I was at her for texting back, going off the road.

  And now we were so distant. We were so far apart. I felt grief for how we used to be, how badly I wanted that again. My fingers found their way into the clay. I wasn’t really thinking or trying; I was just feeling. Martha’s words echoed in my ears: love between sisters, princesses and dragons.

  And words of Roo, from last summer: poetry of …

  Not of owls, not of life, but something else.

  The clay felt slippery and smooth. It was pale gray, and turned my hands white, as if I’d dipped them in flour. My mind filled with a story about sisters who were princesses, who lived in a castle in the clouds, and who were attacked by dragons. I pushed and pulled the clay, fighting Roo’s dragon, wanting to slay it for her. Althea had said the clay tells you what it wants to be, and as hard as I tried to make a wicked, evil beast, it didn’t work out that way.

  When I was finished, I had a cute little dragon on the worktable. She was about the size of an orange, round and compact, with a scaly tail and off-kilter wings. Her face looked a bit like Lucan, including a tongue that lolled out. I was so proud of her, I wanted to show Martha and Slater.

  As I ran, holding her in my cupped hands, she began to wilt from the heat. I entered the barn and saw that Newton had dropped off Roo’s framed photos. He must have left right away. Martha and Slater were standing back from the wall, trying to figure out where each one should go.

  “I did it,” I said. “I made this.”

  “Cool, a stegosaurus!” Slater said.

  “With wings?” I asked, scoffing.