All These Lives

by Wylie, Sarah

  “The weird thing is that, to me, I never feel like it’s the end. I mean, obviously, that’s a good thing and I shouldn’t feel that way. Maybe it’s because I’ve thought I was dead or nearly dead so many times—when everything hurts and I’m sure I have to die now, because how can there be something worse? But I’m still here. So I don’t know what it feels like to die.”

  Silence. Beautiful silence.

  My lips stay together.

  Hers don’t. They quiver as words continue to fall from them, dribble that slides out and wets her pillow and mine and why can’t she please just stop?

  “I’m scared for you, Dani,” she whispers. “And Mom and Dad. I think you guys worry too much and you take everything too seriously and you’ve given up too much.” She sniffs. “I hate myself for being sick. Almost as much as you hate me.”

  My lips part so I can breathe.

  In. Out. In. Out.

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “Yeah, right. You hate being around me.” She double sniffs, a wheeze from her chest up. “I’m gross and ugly and weak and I’m ruining your life.”

  You’re not ruining my life. I am.

  You’re not gross or ugly or weak. You are stronger than I am.

  And:

  I love you.

  And:

  Promise me you’ll wake up every day I wake up.

  “Lives,” I say instead. “My lives.”

  Wrong answer, Dani. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

  You are weak. You are gross.

  I know she’s not sleeping because I hear her softly breathing and trying to bat away the tears. As soon as the spaces between her breaths are regular, I climb out of bed and head to the bathroom.

  There my lips part and they explode and they can’t stop.

  I’ll die if you die.

  That I did say. I said it when she had the chicken pox at age six, and I’d never had it, so we hadn’t been allowed to see each other for three days. A bright kid even then, I snuck out of Mom-sanctioned quarantine and up the stairs into her room, where since Jena’s unfortunate diagnosis Mom had ensured I didn’t set foot. She was itchy and cranky and I slid into her bed, offering to scratch her arm or read to her or make up a good Once Upon a Time. I was promptly discovered by Mom and had a red, splotchy chest area two days later, after Jena was beginning to feel better.

  I said it again nine years later, sitting outside on the swings by our house, while Mom and our aunt Tish talked in quiet, serious voices and took great care to dab at their eyes only when a particularly strong wind blew.

  She doesn’t know how much I meant it then. I tiptoe into our room and find the bag. Back in the bathroom, I dig around for the bottle. When I find it, I uncap it and begin to count.

  One. Two. Three …

  What do I need five lives for?

  She doesn’t know how much I mean it now.

  four

  27

  The good news is, nobody finds me facedown, heart-dead, drowning in a puddle of vomit, after I black out. The bad news is, I find me that way.

  The bad news is, my stomach won’t stop trying to jump out of my throat and expelling its contents.

  The bad news is, Mom doesn’t sleep and wanders to the bathroom when she hears all the flushing and hacking and so forth.

  “Jena?” She knocks on the door. “Jena? Why the hell did you lock this? Open up! Let me in!”

  She’s just about to bang down the door, when the real Jena stands up. “I’m in bed. What’s going on?”

  “Oh my God. I thought I heard you in there throwing up. Are you okay? Are you sure?”

  “I’m fine. Where’s Dani?”

  There’s momentary silence as they both try to locate my whereabouts. Since I can’t hear him moving, I assume Dad isn’t about to break his record as the only one in our family who still sleeps.

  “Dani?” Jena knocks on the door.

  I’m still testing out my voice, so it takes me a moment to call back, “Yeah?”

  “You okay, honey?” Mom asks.

  “It must just be something I ate.”

  The bad news is, it starts again.

  “Want me to come in?” Mom asks.

  “No. It’s … nasty.”

  Mom sends Jena back to bed, then waits outside my door as I attempt to get myself together. Five minutes and no throwing up. I take this as a good sign, stash the rest of Mom’s pills in the cabinet so she will think Dad brought them and Dad will assume she did.

  “You okay?” Mom presses the back of her hand to my forehead as soon as I open the door. “You don’t look so good.”

  “I’m okay,” I answer. While Mom prepares me a salt-and-water mixture (supposedly to keep the food down), I can’t help thinking about the irony that is my life. The most fitting occupation for my mother is no longer a stage actress or momager or anything like that; she would make—she is—a fantastic nurse.

  She checks on Jena once more, then has me come and sit on the couch with her as she channel surfs. Finally, she turns off the TV and we sit there in the silence, my body pressed against hers, stealing her warmth. As I lie there focusing on breathing and getting my stomach to stop swirling, it becomes overwhelmingly clear to me that she is stronger than I thought.

  It’s not just a front; a front could not hold me up tonight, while I shiver inside as everything within me threatens to spill out onto the floor.

  She buries her chin in my hair and I fall asleep, feeling less myself and more like Jena.

  Five lives down, four to go.

  * * *

  In the morning, Dad finds me in Mom’s arms, huddled against her like she’s the highest part of a ship that’s going down.

  He shakes her first and then me, telling us both to get up, get up, we need to see this.

  What’s wrong? we both think, but only Mom says it, brushing me off her lap.

  “Where’s Jena?” Mom asks.

  “Outside,” he answers.

  “She’s not sick, is she?” Want me to answer that? “Dani had food poisoning last night. It’s strange we didn’t all get it.”

  “Ah, I wondered about the setup,” Dad says as Mom pulls on her coat and makes her way out of the RV. “Feeling better, kiddo?” His hand ruffles my hair, then settles on my shoulder.

  “Yeah. What’s outside?”

  Dad grins. “You’ll see.” So I know it’s good. Or he thinks it’s good.

  When I reach the last step of the RV, I freeze. Someone used a cotton wool machine to spray the world with fake snow. It silently falls from the gray sky above, dancing: twirly, cold balls of cotton that land strategically on the ground, filling all the spaces where patches of ground and dead yellow snow once lay. I wonder who else is seeing this.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Jena calls from where she is, kneeling beside the RV and picking up handfuls of the stuff with her bare red hands. Mom notices and pulls out gloves from her coat pocket, handing them to my sister.

  “Magical. This is the perfect way to end our vacation,” Dad answers.

  Mom nods, looking up at the sky. “God knew we needed a little snow.”

  There’s something so childlike, so naïve about the way my mother says it. It’s a sweet sentiment, that God saw us with our rotting snow, the fungus of our winter, and wanted to give us something new, beautiful, soft, and white. But there’s something so wrong about it, too. My sister is dying; snow is the last thing we need right now.

  It seems suspiciously like a cop-out on His part that that’s what we get. And I can’t believe they’re all falling for it.

  “Maybe,” Dad says, “we should stay for one more night. I mean, it might even be dangerous to try to go back tonight.”

  “It’s hardly a snowstorm, honey,” Mom replies.

  “I know.” His smile is sheepish, see-through. “But I don’t want to leave just yet.” He steals a glance at Jena, who is quietly still scooping up bits of snow and letting them soak into the woolen gloves Mom handed her. This mom
ent is a little like stepping into a time warp, an alternate universe where we have the memories of scars and battles and bleeding bones, but somehow we’ve managed to leave them behind. In this world, we get a bite-size, if not full, serving of hope.

  The Baileys are greedy and they want more.

  Always want more. More time. More Jena. More smiles. More happiness.

  Greedy, greedy pigs.

  Dad has his arm around Mom now. She rests her head on his chest and says, “I know what you mean. But we have to go back. Dani has school and then there’s Jena’s appointment.”

  Pause to insert Dad’s disappointment. He sighs. “You’re right. I guess we’ll just have to enjoy it while we can.”

  Then all of a sudden, he kicks up a little snow that crashes into my knee. Most of it is the gross, harder stuff that was on the ground before.

  Everyone laughs. I roll up some snow into my palm, while Mom does not yell at me for doing so gloveless, and aim it at Dad’s chest.

  My father holds back in a lot of ways. He doesn’t always say what he’s thinking and when he does, he expects to get shot down. But snowball fights are his forte and “This means war,” he declares.

  We pelt limp balls of snow at one another, laughing and making idle threats. Somehow Mom gets involved and aims a few well-placed shots at Dad’s head. It is two against one, and we are all too scared to involve Jena. We might if Mom weren’t here. To associate yourself with any one of Jena’s ailments—in this case, if she got hurt or ended up with a cold—is a bit of a suicide wish.

  I hear her laugh when someone gets hit, the creaking of her smile, her heavy, loud breathing, even with my back to her, and I remember what I am fighting for. I want her here. More than anything. More than being here myself.

  I shape a giant ball of snow that makes Mom laugh and tell Dad he’d better look out. Dad glances up and searches for something to duck behind.

  This snowball has more new snow than the ones I’ve made before, so it won’t hit its target and fall flaccidly to the ground; it will melt against coats and shoes and hair and knees. This snowball takes a long time to make, building an air of anticipation as Dad starts throwing smaller ones at me, to scare me from going after him. This snowball is heavy, not light, as I finally pick it up off the ground and prepare to use it. This snowball goes up, high, a world of white against the blue of the sky, up, up, up, over my head and backwards to where she is.

  This snowball makes everyone freeze temporarily and then she shrieks and goes, “You cow, Dani!”

  And a million little snowballs start flying at me. From Jena and Dad and even Mom, who has forgotten that she did not pray for snow—she prayed for something else.

  And these snowballs make me giggle for the first time in a long time. They make me shriek and they sting and the tips of my fingers ache and I remember for the first time in a long time that I am here. Not dead or dying or waiting to die; not passing time as I wait for the people I love most in the world to drop one by one by one.

  I don’t know how long I’ll stay, or anybody else for that matter.

  But I am. Here.

  28

  O Wind, If Winter comes,

  can Spring be far behind?

  —Percy Bysshe Shelley

  The drive back home is better than the one from it. Happy is a clichéd word to use, but we are closer to it than not.

  While Dad drives and Mom goes back and forth between us and him, Jena and I hang out. We play several games of cards. I forgot what a sore loser she was, and she says she forgot what a gloating winner I was.

  We watch TV. No game shows today. We watch some Animal Planet documentaries and a reality show about a divorced couple living together. It’s completely tacky. We can only stand it because the man is hot and doesn’t speak much, and the woman’s confessionals to the camera are super dishy and inappropriate.

  It’s a marathon, though, so when their voices become grating, we mute them out and make up dialogue for them. This is amusing for about an episode and then Jena falls asleep underneath her six blankets, and I steal the Jena Book from where she left it, beside the couch.

  It’s nothing like I expect. Each entry starts with the date and then a detailed entry of what she ate that day, how she felt, when and how much medication she took. I’m just about to close it when the back cover flips open and I see that, going backwards, Jena has been drawing in it. Upon closer examination, I recognize that these are comics. Characters with names like Captain Spearhead and Villain Vikon fill the pages. It crosses my mind that this must be a code between Mom and her. They leave messages, coded inscriptions that nobody else would understand.

  I wonder if I am Villain Vikon.

  “They’re good, aren’t they?” Mom says, sitting on the arm of my couch since Jena is spread out across it and I only just have enough room to sit. “Don’t tell her I said that, though,” she whispers, with a shake of her head. “She does it to piss me off. Here I am trying to keep official records of what her days are like and she takes up half the pages of each book, drawing little superheroes.”

  Mom tugs down the blanket, where Jena’s foot sticks out. “She’s showing me who’s boss.” Even though Mom is smiling, I get the sense that it’s something that actually drives her crazy, the way so much about Jena used to. The way she’d lazily throw her hair into a ponytail every single day. The way she never cleaned her room and left her door wide open, so Mom never went a day without seeing it, but then kept skulls and the NO ENTRY sign on her door, denying my mother permission to enter and fix things, the way she always wanted to.

  They compromise because they have to now, but maybe deep down inside, they are still the same people I know and love. Maybe they’ll come back soon and tell me stories of where they’ve been and what they’ve seen and I’ll tell them too and everything will be okay.

  * * *

  We pull into town in all our RV-relaxed glory, an ethereal feeling of togetherness and vitality and our own non-LSD-inspired, seventies version of “everythinggunnabearite, man.” God sent snow, Mom thinks, and He’s got a whole lot more resources where that came from.

  I single-handedly repaired this family over a weekend, Dad thinks. Maybe finally my wife will stop holding against me all the other ways I’ve failed, projects I haven’t finished, and kids I can’t save.

  The sun is setting when we get home, an orange-red tinge painted carelessly across the sky by those angel friends of my mother’s, the ones she’s sure are keeping Jena alive.

  We all help bring in stuff from the RV, and I shrug off Dad’s coat, which I’ve kept ever since ice-fishing.

  Jena looks tired but fine, and we’re all set to continue our RV vacation right here at home.

  After we’re unpacked—in the loosest sense of the word—Jena and I battle our tofu dinner by ourselves. Mom is doing laundry, while Dad is upstairs.

  “I think,” Jena is saying, “you and Jack would make an adorable couple.”

  “You know who we haven’t talked about lately? Rufus.”

  If Jena notices my stepping around the subject of Jack, she overlooks it, opting to glare at me instead.

  Right then, Mom appears in the doorway, walking into the kitchen and dishing up a plate for herself, then heading to the table.

  “Jena, why’s it taking you so long to eat?” Mom glances at my plate. “Have either of you even touched your food?”

  “We thought we were supposed to wait for you,” I lie. “Where’s Dad?”

  It’s then I notice Mom’s splotchy face, the red around the rims of her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” Jena asks before I can.

  “Nothing,” Mom sniffs, pushing her fork into her food and bringing it up to her mouth.

  “Mom, we’re not stupid. We can see something is wrong.”

  At least it’s not with Jena, I think.

  Ignoring her, Mom points her fork at me. “Dani, we had a voicemail from the Whitaden people. You booked the commercial.”

>   The dining room is completely quiet except for Mom’s chewing, which sounds harsh and vigorous. I realize she’s mad, not upset.

  “Congratulations, honey,” Mom says, as if suddenly remembering what she just told me. “Jena, say congratulations to your sister.”

  Jena’s lips don’t budge; neither do her eyes, which are fixed on Mom.

  When I got a non-speaking part in Oliver! three years ago, Mom called Aunt Tish to tell her the happy news. Now I’ve booked my first commercial, and she looks robotic. I’m not offended; I’m worried.

  We finish our food in silence—that is, those of us that do. Some of us are well-schooled in the art of not finishing food and not being seen by our mothers, so all we have to do is push the food around in our plates a little, wait till her focus is elsewhere—the best bet is on your sick twin sister—and scurry into the kitchen to expertly dispose of it.

  We’ve figured out by now that Dad probably knows what it is she’s angry about, so when I can, I sneak up to their room and find him. He’s on his laptop checking e-mail.

  “What’s wrong with Mom?” I ask as soon as I see him. “Did she hear something about Jena?”

  He frowns, still looking at the computer screen. “What do you mean? Isn’t your sister downstairs?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “but when Mom came to eat, she looked like she’d been crying. And she’s acting … weird.”

  Dad finishes typing his sentence, then rises from his chair, stretching. “I’ll go and talk to her. Try not to worry. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  I know it’s not nothing because I hear snatches of their conversation. I hear snatches of their conversation because they don’t talk; they yell. Or Mom does. First she asks if he’s smoking again. He must say yes, because things get even louder.

  “How dare you!” she shouts from downstairs. I hear the sound of forks scraping plates and I realize she’s washing dishes. I’m surprised they’re not all broken by now, what with her exceeding the sound barrier and all. “After everything we’ve been through! I only asked you for one thing. One thing. And you couldn’t do it.”