As Close as Sisters

by Colleen Faulkner

  “Yeah.”

  We were both quiet for a minute. I could hear the surf. I didn’t know if she could hear it, too, from behind the door.

  “The docs can’t change them up? I mean, with modern medicine and all, you’d think they could give you something to help that wouldn’t make you puke.” I was quiet again. “Of course, you’d think with modern medicine they’d be able to cure cancer, too.”

  “You’d think.”

  Again, we were quiet, but it was an okay quiet. I leaned my shoulder, my cheek against the door, and I could feel the heat from her body. Was that even possible? Maybe I was just imagining it.

  “You okay, Janine?” McKenzie asked.

  “Am I okay?” I sat up. “Okay with what? You puking in there? You dying? Hell no, I’m not okay.”

  “I meant are you okay being here,” McKenzie said. “Sleeping in your room. You’re welcome to sleep with me. I’m lonely down here by myself.”

  I’ve tried to explain, over the years, why I need to sleep at night alone, in my room. It’s like . . . I have to be there with Buddy. With the ghosts. As crazy as it sounds, it makes me stronger. Not weaker. Lying in my bed at night, here in the house with my girls, I find the courage to get up in the morning. Do what I do.

  I didn’t answer her.

  “You know,” McKenzie said after another long silence, “I don’t think you did it. The pregnant woman.”

  Tears burned the backs of my eyes. But I didn’t cry. I tried never to cry.

  “I know you wouldn’t, Janine,” McKenzie said. “I know you could never hurt—”

  “That’s a lie, Mack. You know I could.” I drew my knees up closer, folding over them. “You guys know. It’s always been there. The . . . potential.”

  “But you wouldn’t.”

  I closed my eyes. Suddenly, I was sleepy. “I hope not.”

  10

  McKenzie

  I was excited that my girls were coming over. I know it sounds crazy. I’m their mother, for heaven’s sake. I carried them in my womb, gave birth to them, sans drugs. I’ve wiped their butts and threatened to wash out their mouths with soap. How many hours have I spent with them over the last seventeen years?

  They could be a pain in the ass. Particularly Maura. Mia was sweet-tempered, for the most part. I always felt as if she wanted to please me on some level and sought my approval. Not that she does everything she’s told or always takes my advice. But I always felt like she listened to me. Like she valued my opinion. And she tried to be a good girl. She got good grades in school. She never missed curfew. And when she had a boyfriend, he always seemed like a nice boy from a good family.

  Maura, on the other hand, had never been so amiable. At least not with me. As a toddler, she was the one who threw temper tantrums and her milk cup. She brought home a steady stream of Cs with teachers’ comments like “not working to her potential.” Maura fought me on every front: what she wore, what she said (no F-bombs in my house, please), and whom she dated. She wasn’t a bad kid. She had a good heart. But she worried me. What was she going to do when I was gone? Who was going to remind her to do her homework . . . and to go to class when she went to college?

  If she even got into college. Right now, she was likely looking at living with her dad and going to community college for a year or two. It worked for a lot of kids, but my Maura . . . I just couldn’t see her getting motivated enough to get out of bed and drive to class every day. And I certainly couldn’t see her dad making her do it. He was all about “I never went to college and I made out fine.” And I understood that argument, but Maura hadn’t expressed an interest in a trade. Of course, she did have the NBA-STAR-WIFE possibility to fall back on.

  So, Tuesday afternoon, I sat on the porch, wrapped in a beach towel because I was chilly. It didn’t matter that it was a high of ninety-one today. My new drug seemed to be playing havoc with my central nervous system. This morning I discovered a rash on my palms and the bottoms of my feet that made them tender. I had been warned that that was one of the possible side effects (among thousands, including erectile dysfunction). Was there no end to this joy?

  I was alone for a few minutes. Lilly and Janine were in the kitchen making dinner. Mia had called an hour ago and said they were on their way, which in her book meant they were thinking about heading out. Aurora was supposed to be on “McKenzie watch,” I think, but she’d gone for a walk. Clearly, she wasn’t taking her duties seriously.

  I laid my book in my lap. A historical romance. Another book not on the best one hundred books of all-time list. Fritz looked at me. I looked at him. He was lying in front of the door to the living room; maybe he was on McKenzie watch. I could smell ground chicken with chili powder and cumin frying. I was tickled that Lilly remembered that Mia and Maura liked tacos. At home, we made them for dinner at least once a week. We called it Taco Shmaco night.

  “Hey,” I called to Aurora, and waved. She was walking off the beach, toward the house. Her hair was pulled up in a messy pile on her head the way high schoolers wore theirs. She might not have been carded at a bar, but she could have passed for twenty-eight.

  “Hey, yourself,” she called. “Girls here yet?”

  I liked that Aurora, Janine, and Lilly all had good relationships with Mia and Maura. It would make it easier for my daughters when I died.

  Wouldn’t it?

  I kept coming up with ways I could make the transition from having a mother to being motherless easier for them. It was a way to alleviate some of my guilt. Because I felt so damned guilty about abandoning them. Logically, I could tell myself it wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t asked for stage four cancer. My hand was definitely down when that question was posed. But I still felt guilty. I wondered if I had done something, somehow, to deserve this. When I was feeling really dark I wondered, had I known this was going to happen, would I have chosen to have children?

  Aurora came up and over the dune. She was carrying something in one hand. She bobbed up the steps to the porch. Fritz lifted his head, checked to see who it was, and relaxed again, closing his eyes. He and Aurora (she wasn’t into domesticated animals) felt ambiguous toward each other, and both seemed okay with that.

  “Should be here any minute,” I said. “They both have off today so they don’t have to be anywhere.”

  “Seventeen-year-old girls always have somewhere to be.” Aurora dropped a seashell from her hand onto the arm of my green Adirondack chair. “For you.”

  I picked up the bleached cockleshell and ran my finger over the ribs. “Beautiful,” I sighed. We didn’t get loads of shells on the Delaware beaches, not like some beaches I’d been to in Florida. Something to do with the tides, I supposed.

  “It’s got a hole in the top. I’ve got three more.” Aurora sat down in Lilly’s chair beside me.

  There was sand all over her legs. She didn’t seem to notice. I resisted the urge to brush it off. I loved the beach but hated the sand.

  “I thought I’d get something and string them for all of us so we can wear them. Maybe something classy like silver thread.” She made her living welding huge pieces of metal together, but she could draw and paint and make jewelry.

  “I’d wear it.” I handed it back to her for safekeeping.

  “Girls are here!” Lilly hollered from in the house. I heard the squeaky brakes on the Ford Focus they shared; their father was supposed to have taken the car to the shop two weeks ago.

  Fritz rose and trotted into the house; we rarely kept the air-conditioning on during the day. Instead, the doors and windows were left open to welcome the sea breeze. He barked a greeting. Then there were squeals from Lilly and the girls, followed by more squeals from the girls. When they saw her belly, I would bet. I hadn’t told them. I wanted to let Lilly surprise them.

  I listened to the voices in the kitchen: Janine’s, Lilly’s, Maura’s, and Mia’s. It made me smile to hear them talking all at once. Like good friends. But what they really needed was a mother, not a friend. Aurora and Ja
nine didn’t have much maternal instinct. Lilly did, but she was about to have her own baby. I wondered if there was any way to cultivate a little maternal instinct in Aurora and Janine. Was it something that could be learned or was it really instinct?

  Maura walked out onto the porch first: butt-cheek-length, white cotton shorts and a light pink T-shirt. The hem of the shirt didn’t quite meet the waistband of the shorts. I could see her hot pink bra through her shirt. I bit my tongue; I didn’t want to start a fight. She knew how I felt about some of her wardrobe selections.

  She could have been a Victoria’s Secret Pink model. She was tall and thin. Her long red hair was lighter than mine and Mia’s. A strawberry blonde. A mother never likes to think that one of her daughters is prettier than the other. I think they’re both gorgeous, but Maura definitely has the couture look shown on one of their favorite reality TV shows, America’s Next Top Model.

  “Aunt Aurora!” Maura threw out her arms and ran past me to hug Aurora. I saw that the word Hotty was printed, in rhinestones, across the back of her shorts.

  How could that even be comfortable?

  “Maura!” Aurora wrapped her arms around my daughter and kissed one cheek and then the other.

  “How was Italy?” Maura gushed. “Did you eat a lot of spaghetti and gelato?”

  I sat there smiling, trying hard not to be jealous. Why wouldn’t Maura hug Aurora first? She’d seen me last week. She hadn’t seen her Aunt Aurora in months.

  “Drank a lot of wine. Dated some hot Italian guys,” Aurora said.

  Maura’s eyes got big. “You have to tell me everything.” She glanced at me with none of the enthusiasm she had for Aurora. She didn’t even try to fake it. “Hey, Mom.”

  “Hey, sweetie.”

  Maura leaned over me and brushed her lips across my cheek, barely making contact. I closed my eyes and savored the smell of her strawberry shampoo and the more elusive scent of her skin. I once read about a study where mothers were blindfolded and separated from their infants. The subjects were able to find their own babies in a room of babies, just by their scent. A scent others couldn’t detect. I could find my girls with my eyes closed in an auditorium full of teens in booty shorts.

  “Hi, Mom.” Mia walked out onto the porch and leaned over my chair, giving me an awkward teenage-girl-hugging-her-mom-because-she-has-to hug. But she touched her cheek to mine, and for just an instant, I felt the deep connection I’d known when she was a little girl. Before the rules of society and her hormones came between us. Mia had used the same strawberry shampoo as Maura this morning, but her scent was subtly different. I could have picked her out from Maura in a roomful of girls, too.

  “How you feeling?” She adjusted my teal head scarf. “You look good. Like you got some sun. Have you been on the beach?”

  Before I could answer, Aurora took center stage.

  “Mia!” Aurora opened her arms.

  Mia was shorter than Maura and a little thicker in the waist and hips. Mia desperately wished she had been an identical twin. She was always talking about going on a diet. And wanting me to let her lighten her hair so it was closer to Maura’s shade. She wore her hair piled on top of her head like a bird’s nest—just like Maura’s and Aurora’s. She was the least skimpily clad of the three of them, though, in cute jean shorts and a white volleyball team T-shirt with our last name on the back.

  Mia threw herself at Aurora. “I’ve missed you so much,” she murmured, her voice surprisingly emotional.

  “Me too.” Aurora kissed her on both cheeks, too. The girls loved how she did that. European-style, they said.

  “So tell me what’s going on.” Aurora looked from one teen to the other.

  Maura had her cell phone out texting. Apparently it had been located.

  “Boys? School? Boys?” Aurora asked.

  I wondered what Jude would think if he saw his mother interacting with my girls this way. Would he be jealous? Or did he just not care? He’d grown up a privileged kid with his über-wealthy father and stepmother. To my knowledge, Aurora hadn’t seen him in at least two years, and that encounter had been unplanned; they ran into each other in Geneva.

  So maybe he didn’t think of Aurora as his mother at all. I wondered if she was like a cool auntie to him. Or just a nice stranger? I honestly didn’t know. Aurora would talk about nearly anything: her sexual escapades, her yeast infection, or how she got her pubes caught in the zipper of her jeans. No subject seemed to be taboo with her, except Jude. Janine was the only one who could bring him up, and even she had to be cautious. Aurora had been known to take an unplanned trip to the Azores, just to avoid a conversation about the boy she gave birth to twenty years ago.

  “I’m not going out with anyone. Andy and I broke up before the end of school.” Mia lifted her shoulder and let it fall. “He was going to college. I didn’t think it was a good idea, dating him when he’d be in Virginia and I’d still be here. But you have to ask Maura about Viktor.” She sang the name, using the silly pseudo-Russian accent again.

  “So you guys are going out?” I asked, looking at Maura.

  She didn’t glance up from her phone. “We’re just talking,” she deadpanned. Then she held up her phone in her sister’s direction. “Do the kiss thing again, Aunt Aurora. I want a pic.”

  Aurora complied, kissing Mia on both cheeks.

  “Got it.” Maura hit the screen of her phone with her thumb.

  “Your camera looks different than mine.” I leaned toward her to look at the screen.

  “It’s the same.” She sounded annoyed with me. I thought I was pretty technology savvy for a woman my age, but I wasn’t in the same league with seventeen-year-old girls.

  “I don’t have that red button on my camera.”

  Maura turned the phone so I could see the screen and hit an arrow key in the middle of the photo of Mia and Aurora. The still photo became a video, and I watched Aurora kiss Mia again.

  “Wow. My phone will do that, too?” I picked mine up off the armrest.

  Maura rolled her eyes, taking my phone from my hand. She scrolled and touched the screen several times, faster than I could keep up, and the red button appeared. “You just hit the button to start and stop the video.” She handed it back to me.

  I was momentarily fascinated. “Do it again,” I told Aurora, gesturing with my free hand.

  “Mom,” Maura groaned.

  “Aurora, kiss her again.” I held up the phone.

  Aurora and Mia humored me. I watched Aurora kiss Mia on both cheeks through my screen. “Aww,” I sighed. When they were done, I hit the red button. The little light kept blinking; it kept recording. I pressed it again. It stopped. “And I can upload this onto my Facebook page?” I asked. I hit the replay button and watched it, hearing my “Awww” in the background and Maura muttering, “Really, Mom? Facebook is so lame.”

  “Where does the video go when I close the app?” I ask.

  Mia looked at her sister, then me. It was a “be patient” plea. “With your pictures. Pick the photo icon and it will be under camera roll. You should have something that says videos, too.”

  “So which does it go in?” I asked, trying to follow her instructions with my two left thumbs.

  “Both, I think.”

  “Ah, there it is.” I didn’t know why I was so delighted. Actually, I did. Because something had just occurred to me. “Aurora, what would you think of me doing a video diary this month? Instead of the usual written account? Think that would fulfill my obligation?” I looked at her through the lens of the camera in my phone. “This would be way easier.”

  Aurora shrugged. “I like reading the stuff, but I guess. It might be cool.”

  Lilly walked onto the porch, with Janine following behind her, carrying a tray of glasses of iced tea and sodas. I hit the record button again.

  “Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes,” Lilly announced. “Just waiting on the rice.”

  I watched them, via my cell phone screen. It gave me an in
teresting perspective. Janine looked funny carrying the tray, walking behind Lilly like she was her maid: Lilly in her pristine sundress, Janine in her baggy board shorts and a K-Coast T-shirt. What was even funnier was that Fritz was following dutifully behind her. Which made it crowded on the front deck. And everyone was talking at once.

  “Unsweetened,” Janine told Mia, pointing at one of the iced tea glasses. She pointed to another glass. “Coke.”

  “Nope, just one,” Lilly was telling Maura as she rubbed her protruding abdomen.

  Aurora grabbed a glass of iced tea and set it down on my armchair, filling my screen with the glass. I’d have to learn to use the focus button.

  “Sugar?” Aurora asked.

  I hit the red button. The video stopped. “Please.”

  We sat on the deck and sipped our drinks; Lilly and I in the chairs, Janine standing, Aurora and my girls perched on the rail. Everyone talking, and Lilly was getting loud—to be heard—and it was . . . glorious. I was so happy. The five most important people in the world to me were at arm’s length.

  I listened to Maura giggle over something Lilly said. I heard snatches of conversation between Janine and Mia; they were talking about where Mia would be applying to college. As I listened, I felt as if I was taking a step back from them. One minute I was in the fray, the next, I was an outsider. Watching, but not participating.

  Would it be like this when I was dead? Would I be able to watch my daughters interact with my best friends from the clouds? Would my spirit hover over my daughters? Guide them? Would I ring bells on Christmas trees? Would my face appear in condensation on glasses, to let my daughters know I was with them, in spirit if no longer in the flesh? Or would it be like one of my assistant librarians had said: When you died, you just no longer existed?

  One would think that dying would force one to come to some conclusions about death. So far, I hadn’t. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it, because I had. A lot. I was envious of my friends who had strong religious beliefs—who knew what was going to happen to them when they died. I wrote “Methodist” on forms when asked of my religious affiliation, but only because when I was a kid we’d gone to a Methodist church on Christmas and Easter. My mother now attended regularly and belonged to a prayer group at her local church. I got the feeling, though, that the women spent as much time drinking tea as they did praying. She said they prayed for me all the time, though exactly what they were praying for, I wasn’t sure. For me to be healed. Or at least not die, I suppose. I found it hard to believe old ladies drinking tea could save me when science couldn’t. But I wasn’t so convinced that I had asked my mother and her friends not to pray for me.