by Nicole Baart
Danica
Char used to say that Natalie was born prickly, all elbows and knees, angles and corners that made her hard to get close to even as a baby. She didn’t like to cuddle, and instead of squalling like other infants, she would fix Char with a peeved little stare when she was hungry—a look so condescending and so mature beyond her years, Char loved to tell people that the somber child frightened her. When I was old enough to wonder at the strange relationship between my mother and her eldest, I found myself taking turns blaming Natalie’s personality flaws on nature and nurture. The pendulum swung one way and I was convinced my sister was indeed born perspicacious, and then it tilted back and I knew my mother had shaped her as surely as hands form clay.
But whatever twist of fate blessed my mother with a child as different from her as night is from day, growing up in the long shadow of Char’s irresponsibility, I came to love Natalie’s immutable strength. And never did I appreciate it more than the day I split open my chin.
I was six years old when Char’s boyfriend of the week invited us to Wild Water West in Sioux Falls. The brochure promised water slides, a wave pool, and a lazy river that looked to me like something straight out of a summertime dream—waterfalls and kids pink-cheeked with laughter and big rubber tubes the color of cartoon ducklings. I couldn’t have imagined a destination more awe-inspiring, and even though I hated Maxwell, the grinning idiot who drove a gold SUV and called my mom “baby,” I thought of nothing but our water park excursion for days before the red-circled date on the calendar.
When we finally pulled into the jam-packed parking lot and joined the hundreds of people already crowding the turnstiles, I didn’t even mind that it was free admission day. Or that I would have to wait in line for a half hour to take one slow spin down the curving water slide. Or even that we had to spread our towels on the hard-packed dirt ground near the chain-link fence because all the loungers were taken. But it was a good thing I didn’t know that long before I ever dipped one little toe in the water of the slide, I would be pushed from behind by a group of rowdy teenage boys and fall face-first onto the concrete steps of the giant tower.
I don’t remember if I cried out or not. It was over so quickly, and my heart was pumping so much adrenaline, that I didn’t realize I was bleeding until Kat screamed. And it wasn’t until I brushed a finger against the spot where the line of my jawbone had split a deep ridge in my chin that I felt the first blinding stab of pain. After that I could hardly stand. A lifeguard had to carry me back to the spot where we had left Char and Maxwell tanning.
The emergency room was ice cold, and I shivered in my white terry cover-up, trying not to notice the way blood had made a crimson flower bloom on the puckered bodice. Char was apologizing to Maxwell, and Kat was crying softly, but while I trembled in the plastic seat and tried not to pass out from the throbbing that had spread all the way to my temples, Natalie stood beside me and held her balled-up T-shirt against my chin. She wasn’t the sort to offer words of comfort, but it was enough that she was there.
I don’t know when I started singing or why, but at some point as we waited I began to whisper the words to “Jesus Loves Me.” We went to church because Char thought it was an admirable thing to do, a way maybe to atone for all the ways she had screwed up. At the very least, our somewhat sporadic attendance provided a way for her to feel like we were covering all our bases. But she also religiously read her horoscope in the Sunday paper—just to make sure that everything evened out.
Though Natalie and Kat merely tolerated church, I actually liked it. But then, I didn’t have to sit through the entire, boring service. Just before the stern-looking pastor took his place behind an equally imposing dais, the kids in first grade and younger were ushered out by a group of dewy teenagers who brought us to the Sunday-school rooms for our own version of church. We sat on carpet squares and lit a candle when the Bible story was read. Then there was singing and a time of solemn prayer when we all held hands and recited one-line supplications like, “Please be with Cameron’s aunt Ethel.” It was all a bit baffling, but I loved the songs.
And for some reason as I sat in the emergency room waiting my turn, “Jesus Loves Me” slipped out. I wasn’t even sure that I had the words right, but when the song was over I sang it again. And again. And again. No one stopped me. In fact, no one so much as breathed a word about it until the homeless-looking man who was slumped across from me half lurched out of his seat and shouted, “Shut up!”
He was dressed in a shabby sport coat that smelled of mothballs and urine, and his hair hung in greasy hanks halfway down his back. His bushy gray eyebrows were downright terrifying, and it was only when he screamed at me—a sudden, furious explosion from less than six feet away—that I began to cry.
I wasn’t wailing or anything, but my muted sniffling only made him angrier. “Shut up!” he bellowed again. “Shut up! Shut up!”
The poor man was probably hungover and my song was like a stab to the brain. But Natalie wasn’t feeling an ounce of forbearance. I could sense it in the way she tensed beside me, in the thick aura of indignation that emanated from her and filled the small waiting room with static. “Keep singing,” she told me, though I couldn’t have squeaked out another note if my life depended on it. “Keep singing,” she hissed again, and that only made me cry harder.
When the hobo across the narrow aisle leaned forward to yell yet again, Natalie erased the distance between us in the blink of an eye. She was ten, far too old for the sort of impulses that usually got me and Kat in trouble, and not the sort to act rashly in any situation. But as she pulled back her leg, I could see the determination swathed across her shoulders like a scarlet mantle. I felt a rush of deep tenderness for my sister, a firm understanding that though she may not be affectionate, she was bound to me by blood.
And then she kicked him in the shin with every ounce of strength her little-girl body could muster.
I got six stitches that day, a thin line of careful crosses that would mark the place where I had fallen for the rest of my life. But the pink crescent was never a reminder of our failed trip to Wild Water West or even of the man who shouted at a little girl in an emergency room. From then on, my scar was a testament to the loyalty of my sister. And the sound of her toe cracking against that stranger’s shinbone was Natalie’s version of I love you.
Etsell adored my scar. He traced it with his fingertips or brushed his bottom lip against it in a prelude to a kiss. The doctor who stitched me up told Char that I would likely need plastic surgery, that as I grew the scar would scale my cheek like a mountain climber and leave an ugly, puckered path. But it didn’t. Instead, the small ridge of cicatrix tucked itself neatly below my jawline, a hidden imperfection that was visible only to someone who had reason to tip back my head or touch the spot where the evidence of my childhood injury was secreted away.
It was sensitive, always, and when Etsell would trail a knuckle along the contours of my face, I would hold myself very still and wait for the moment when he skimmed over the scar. I’m sure the nerves were damaged, possibly even severed completely and capable of sending only scrambled messages through the delicate filaments of my nervous system. But the slight tingle was a reminder to me, a lodestone that pointed like a compass back to where I began. Back to the place where I was a little girl in the middle of a storm I couldn’t hope to understand.
As I ran now beside Natalie, trying to keep pace with her shorter but unimaginably stronger legs, I felt that same strange pull, that magnetic thrum that seemed tuned to evoke every mixed emotion of my youth. Love and fear and hope and regret all mingled together in a past that felt almost preternaturally concocted to prepare me for this day—for these days alone, these days between. The only difference was, back then I believed that I would find my way out. And I had. I just didn’t know if I would be so blessed a second time.
“All the way to the top?” Natalie asked when we rounded the final corner through the twisting labyrinth of the state park
. It was a route we had jogged dozens of times when we were both in cross-country the one year we overlapped in high school. I had taken up the sport only because Natalie was a cross-country star and I could tell she wanted me to follow in her footsteps. I quit the year she left for college.
“Sure,” I huffed. “Why not?” I had managed the three-mile run through the hills above the river without collapsing. What was another seventy-five steps?
The lookout tower rose above us in the shadows, an angular steeple that gleamed in the light of a full moon. During the day we would have been able to see into three states—Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota—but the only thing the climb would afford us tonight would be a spectacular view of a starry sky. I wished for a moment that the moon was waning, but we wouldn’t have come this far if the light hadn’t allowed us to leave the road.
Natalie hit the bottom step at a jog, but before she rounded the first corner, she had slowed to a steady pace. I counted the steps on my way up—fifteen per flight, five stories in all—just the way I had every time before. If I reached my hand out on step sixty-two and pressed my fingers into the support beam at eye level, I could feel the place where Etsell had carved our initials in the weathered wood. E loves D. It could have been anyone, Ellen loves David or Eric loves Danielle, but I was there when he took his pocketknife and added our legacy to the thousands of others that decorated the tower with declarations of forever. It was indelible for me, an emblem on the wood as permanent as the scar on my chin.
But as I followed Natalie up the winding path, I kept my hands by my sides. I didn’t want to feel the grooves that traced his profession of love as deeply as an oath. A broken promise.
“I forgot how hard it is to run in this humidity,” Natalie said when I finally joined her at the apex. I was comforted to hear the slight wheeze in her voice.
“It’s not humid in New York?”
“Not like this. Nothing is like this.”
“That sounds like an indictment,” I said, putting my forearms on the railing as if to get a better view of the stars. All I really wanted was to catch my breath.
Natalie leaned on the railing beside me and threw her head back. “It is. I hate it here.”
“Why?” I had asked her that question more times than I could remember, but her answers were always vague. I didn’t expect anything different now.
But she surprised me. “Because I have a lot of bad memories.”
“Of what?” I asked, stunned. “I know Char wasn’t always the most present mother, but—”
Natalie’s unattractive snort drew me up short. “Char was a terrible mother,” she said. “Wait, Char is a terrible mother. You know that, don’t you? That we grew up different from most kids?”
“Well, yeah, but . . .”
“But nothing, Danica. You were little. We tried to protect you as much as we could—and I guess we succeeded. But for Kat and me, growing up a Vis girl was far from easy.”
The moonlight was casting pearls on Natalie’s face, highlighting the tip of her nose, the crest of each cheekbone, the place where she would have had a small dimple if she ever smiled big enough to crease it. Her eyes were hard as stones in the otherworldly light, smooth and reflective like pools of dark water where the spitfire of distant stars fizzled and sank. Suddenly I felt like I was standing next to a stranger.
“Char tries,” I said haltingly. “I know she’s far from perfect, but she loves us, Natalie. She tries.”
My sister pushed a hard breath through her nose. “Char has grown up. We all have. But if you could rewind the clock twenty years, you’d understand.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Did you know my specialty is sociology of women? Particularly victim advocacy and abuse awareness?”
I was grateful that it was too dark for Natalie to see me rolling my eyes. “Are you trying to tell me Char abused you?”
“Not directly.”
All at once my blood turned to ice. “Are you trying to tell me someone abused you? One of her boyfriends or—?”
“Your definition is too narrow,” Natalie cut in before I could rush to more damaging conclusions. “Traditionally speaking, we were all neglected to varying degrees. But there was also a constant parade of people in and out of our home that inflicted different forms of verbal, psychological, and even physical abuse.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Were you ever spanked by one of Char’s boyfriends?”
I didn’t have to think hard to answer that question with a resounding no. But once I dwelled on it for a minute I realized that I had a very vivid memory of someone slapping Kat. I didn’t remember who he was, but I could hear Kat cuss at the man on our couch and feel the back of his hand as if he had whipped it across my own cheek. She had swept me out of the house, assuring me that it didn’t hurt, that he had only grazed her. But even then I knew better.
“I’m sorry,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. “I’m so sorry. I always thought that I took care of you. . . . The cooking and the cleaning . . .”
“You did,” Natalie assured me, placing a hand on my shoulder for the span of a split second. She removed it before visions of tight-knit, gossipy sisters could dance in my head. “We all took care of each other in different ways.”
We were quiet for several minutes, lost in our own thoughts or maybe trying not to think. I felt we had bridged some immeasurable gap, some chasm that had separated us for years. But in spite of the tenuous connection, I didn’t feel any closer to Natalie.
“I understand why you left,” I finally said. “I don’t blame you for going.”
“I understand why you stayed,” she countered. “And, Danica? I’m so sorry about Ell.”
The sound of his nickname on her lips made my throat seize. “Oh, God,” I breathed. “You have no idea, Natalie. How much I miss him . . . How much I failed him . . .” I wanted her to console me, to say that I hadn’t failed my husband. But Natalie wasn’t given to meaningless sentimentality.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
I swallowed, wondered for a moment if I could tell her about the weight that threatened to bury me beneath a lifetime of remorse and insufficiency. But before I could consider the implications for too long, it all started to come out. “Everybody thought we were the perfect couple,” I said. “But nothing was perfect. We fought, we were cruel to each other in small, everyday ways. . . . I was so selfish. So absorbed with what I wanted and so willing to ignore the man that I promised to love forever. I don’t even know where to start,” I almost shrieked, vertiginous from the climb or the trickle of truth, I couldn’t tell.
“Start at the beginning,” Natalie said.
So I did. “It started so small,” I breathed. “It was easy in the beginning to put him first, to think about us instead of me. But then he wanted kids and I wasn’t ready, so I told him I stopped taking my birth control even though I didn’t. And then we’d go days without touching and I didn’t think anything of it. When he had a chance to live his dream, I resented it. I let him go but it was so grudging. . . .” I didn’t realize I was mangling the railing until I could feel splinters in the old wood pierce my skin. “No wonder he left,” I choked out. “No wonder I lost him.”
“Is that all?” Natalie asked. “For heaven’s sake, you’ve just described every relationship under the sun. We’re selfish, miserable people. It’s a wonder we exist in relationship at all.”
I blinked at my sister, trying to comprehend why she was belittling my confession.
“Seriously, Danica. That’s what we do—fail each other; put ourselves first. It’s the human condition.” Natalie sighed a little. “Etsell knew you loved him. You loved each other better than anyone I’ve ever known. You didn’t fail him.”
I knew she was wrong, but somehow my shortcomings didn’t seem quite as terrible as they had felt only minutes before.
“We fail each other,” Natalie repeated. “Every
day in a million different ways.”
She meant it as an accusation, proof that the world was a dark and lonely place populated by people whose greatest ambition was to look out for number one. But for some reason in the glow of the moon with my sister beside me I didn’t see it that way.
I saw how Etsell cared for his dad in spite of his sickness, and how Kat still laughed with Char about the little things. I thought about my husband and all he did to hurt me—intentional and accidental—and I realized that even now I loved him so fiercely it took my breath away. And Natalie, who had left me to grieve for nearly an entire summer without the balm of her presence, had once avenged me with a well-timed kick. My cynical, fatalistic sister was here. Didn’t that say something? She didn’t have to come, but she did.
Natalie was right: We fail each other. But sometimes we come through for one another. Sometimes we forgive.
12
Gravity Fades
Natalie acted as if her trip to Iowa—the first in almost three years—was a huge inconvenience. But Dani was convinced of her sister’s love, even if Natalie couldn’t bring herself to say it and didn’t know how to show it. What Dani thought would be a quick, weekend visit expanded into a monthlong stay. At first Natalie talked a lot about her upcoming residency and the research grant that her team had been given for a two-year field study on the effect of domestic violence in immigrant populations. But it wasn’t slated to begin until the middle of September, and as the days wore on, Natalie simply stayed.
The first few nights she slept at Dani’s house, but Kat kept showing up and then slinking away when she found Natalie sleeping on the couch. So one morning, Natalie got up and moved her things back into Char’s trailer, and without so much as discussing the arrangement, Kat packed up her stuff, too, and established a more permanent camp at Dani’s.
“I don’t know how I feel about this,” Dani said as she watched Kat hang a few of her more dressy shirts in the hall closet. “You never asked me if you could move in.”