Before Everything

by Victoria Redel

  Reuben was putting up with Helen, but Caroline saw he just wanted to scour the sink or do anything that had a result. Cleaning, joking, shopping, knitting—there wasn’t a caregiver Caroline had met who didn’t have some fallback, to get through the slog of it, find a way to cope. If any of it could be called coping.

  It wasn’t that Caroline found any of her sister’s breaks actually funny. But what was the choice? Had there ever been a choice, an official sign-on for being her big sister’s caregiver? It had happened. Slowly. It had taken years for her to realize that it wasn’t isolated episodes, that her vibrant, wonderful sister wasn’t having a temporary life glitch but an illness. And just when Caroline thought she could rest back into whatever she called regular life, Elise would blow off meds and be found wandering barefoot—more likely naked—in Toronto. Toronto if Caroline was lucky. Elise had a penchant for faraway places. You had to give it to her for exotic and expensive. Funny—not really. Not funny the steady erosion of Caroline’s beautiful sister, her childhood idol. Lost teeth, drug bloat, group homes, loops of paranoid thought, loops of grandiose thought, caseworkers, unpaid-for apartments, collect calls, weeks with no calls. But it made for good stories. Caroline knew her friends let her have that. Because what was the other option? Whining? Sounding like one of those long-suffering, insufferable family members who spent days online, creating chat-room friendships with family members of what was these days called a “person with emotional challenges?” Or a “neurodiverse” person. When exactly while Caroline was taking care of Elise did good old “nutcase” or “certifiable” become verboten?

  “Helen.” Caroline might as well throw Reuben a momentary lifeline.

  Helen didn’t look up. She was deep into her rant.

  “Helen.” Caroline pressed in, practically wedging herself inside the grip Helen had on Reuben’s arm. “Anna’s asked if you’d bring her a glass of ice water.”

  The Vow

  Cut it out, Helen, Reuben felt like calling over as he watched Helen slide onto the love seat and lift Anna’s legs onto her lap. Helen touched and talked, no doubt making her selfish plea for medicine. She’d gone at him, and now he could only guess what she was saying to Anna. Helen could not be counted on. Anna predicted it, and now, Reuben understood, she was right. Always good at picking her allies. Maybe not the battles, but definitely the allies.

  What did Helen think? That Reuben was having a jolly time with hospice? Till death do us part. He was the one who’d taken that vow. And whatever had happened in between, including all these years living apart in this unmarried-married, uncertain state, he could be counted on. Anna knew this. He thought back to their wedding. Anna’s face upturned to him. Pretty, pretty face. The flower garland crowning her long wavy hair. Twenty-five years old. They’d held hands and made promises. For a marriage. What a hopeful word “marriage” is. They were just children. What could a child know, promising, as they promised, adventure and joy. Who could imagine the uncertainty that became a marriage? There was his girl, Anna, on a couch. Always his girl. He’d led her into the woods one night into a circle of silver branches. He’d offered her the secret of those woods. Only her.

  Marriage

  Once, just after the separation, Anna said that if she couldn’t make it work with Reuben, if they couldn’t reconcile, maybe she’d go lesbian. “I obviously like being around women a lot more than men.”

  “I’ll marry him if you don’t want him anymore,” Helen countered when Anna complained.

  “You’ve just forgotten how annoying a husband can be.”

  Anna then was in the first flush of separation. Happy not to have fights. Happy to stay up late and not have Reuben ask when was she coming to bed. She’d been gigging and recording with the band. Every suggested caution bounced off her.

  “But only a waist-up lesbian,” she announced.

  “Oh, you’ll be real popular,” Molly said. “Belle of the dyke ball.”

  Tic-Tac-Toe

  Molly heard laughter even through the closed sliding glass door. She looked into the room, but first there was her own reflection and through her reflection the friends gathered inside, Helen scooting close to Anna with a glass of water.

  More and more these days, accidentally catching her own reflection, it was her mother’s angled face Molly saw, and with a flush of anger she’d quickly duck away. This mother Molly had worked hard never to become. Years ago, after school, she’d walk through the kitchen door uncertain which mother she’d even find. Mother of sprinkle cookies still warm or mother slumped off the ladder-back chair, drunk, asleep in piss on the linoleum floor. Or, worse, she’d find her mother awake, a hurl of vicious, slurry questions. She’d been accused and accused. “You slut!” her mother screamed before Molly had ever even kissed or been kissed. “You’ll lose all that pretty!” Her mother filled the juice glass with sherry. “I should know.” Then her mother wrinkled her nose and drained the tumbler as if its contents were bitter medicine.

  Now Molly watched her friends inside. These friends who knew her so well didn’t know. Never knew. Or never knew the extent. Caroline stopped sleeping over. But Caroline never really knew. Not about the bottles tucked behind ironed pillowcases in the linen closet. Not about the force of her mother’s fist or the day her mother came at her with a paring knife. She had washed puke from her mother’s face, changed her mother out of another soiled dress. This was the storm inside. Outside the house, her mother barely existed. Outside the house, boys talked softly and wanted to touch Molly’s long hair. And once Anna had kissed her. “I wish I were you. Everyone wants to be you,” Anna had said, her mouth moving again to Molly’s. Later that afternoon Molly had driven alone through town. The light on the trees glowed pink. The roads were blue. Finally she forced herself to go home.

  “You’re late.” Her mother was at the kitchen table. The overhead lights off. Even in shadow Molly could see her mother. Churlish, furious. And drunk.

  “For what?” Usually she didn’t say a word, since every word was the wrong one. But that evening her mother’s sour breath couldn’t hurt her. She brushed past her mother. Kept from actually pushing her. Tonight she wouldn’t be afraid to see her mother stumble. Maybe hit her head. But even more, she’d wanted to get upstairs. Wanted to call Anna. “Caretaker,” she’d coo conspiratorially. Everyone wanted to be Molly, Anna had said. Molly was the wild girl, and everyone wanted a taste of her. But Molly had seen her mother’s lined face, the wreck her mother slurred that she was doomed to become. If no one knew about her mother, she’d never become her mother.

  I just want this to be our secret, Anna had said that day, and Molly felt ashamed. Sometimes Molly was certain her own daughters felt her old damage, her mother’s hand smacking her skull against the floor. That she carried the rancid odor of her mother’s vomit. Her mother now a withered, sober, old woman she couldn’t forgive. Over my dead body.

  She looked through herself at her friends. Inside, Helen was whispering to Anna. All the things they’d all confided, pinkie-sworn to secrecy. They were all a tic-tac-toe of secrets. All the beautiful confidences of friends who promised to tell one another everything. Then there were their shames. All that they could never tell.

  Serena was wrong. Molly’s silence with Anna’s choice was not an insult to the men who died for lack of medicine. This was a choice beyond medicine. A measure of what Anna could accept as a life.

  Serena could push. So could Helen. But Molly’s acceptance, her silence with Anna, was her love.

  I Remember

  Here was Helen’s moment. “I need you, Anna, at my wedding.”

  Instead Helen said, “Do you remember that hopeless summer when I wanted to follow Lucien back to Toronto? You kept me from going.”

  She needed to believe that Anna knew where the conversation was going, because her Anna would look up and say, What is it, Heli? Get to the point. Don’t bore me with building your case
.

  Or her Anna would say, Lucien the addict from Toronto. Yes, that beautiful muscled back made up for his pathetic personality. Not to mention the coke.

  Or her Anna would say, Lucien was another serious waste of your life. And, thank God, you learned nothing from that mistake.

  Or her Anna would say, I knew as soon as I saw you today. Asa wants to marry you.

  Instead Anna murmured, “I remember.”

  “You’ve saved me from so many mistakes,” Helen began.

  That was the understatement of the century. But Anna knew what she meant. The spindle of Anna’s leg under Helen’s hands, so breakably delicate that Helen almost couldn’t speak as she concentrated her fingertips along where the tendons knit against the bone.

  “Anna,” she tried again. She was ready to tell her, to bargain for Anna to stay alive.

  But Anna had slipped into sleep.

  Hospital 101

  Late in the evenings, when the unit quieted to hums and beeps, the stuck wheel of the blood-pressure cart, Anna had walked the hallways. From his mother’s room, Asa watched. Then one evening he joined her.

  “Do you mind?” he asked. They walked slowly together.

  “You probably shouldn’t walk with me. I might be the Grim Reaper,” Asa said. His wife four years before. Now his mother.

  They were staring at the vending machine as if some new option might have been added since they’d studied it on the prior lap.

  “I’m over all of this.” He pushed two buttons, and a granola bar dropped. He was over how quickly he slipped right back into mapping the hospital unit, figuring out which resident to step around. Or how he made sure to befriend the cleaning staff, who, amazed to be acknowledged, let alone saluted with Asa’s “Morning, Captain,” slipped in extra bags of lemon swabs when his mother suffered from mouth blisters. The good nurse. The idiot nurse. All the effort. Still, the multitudes of incompetence. He’d learned to press hard on Thursday. The Friday-noon dread that now nothing important happened until Monday.

  They’d circled again to the vending machine.

  “Want to know how much time is too much time in hospitals?” With his eyes shut, Asa incanted line by line the exact order and names of the snacks and candy bars.

  “That’s quite the party trick. No one should ever know this about you,” Anna said, and started walking another lap. “Given my life expectancy, your secret’s still pretty safe.”

  Well, She Was

  “I can’t get anything here.” Caroline wandered the periphery of the living room, holding out her phone as if it were a Geiger counter. A moment before, in some surge of connectivity, there were eight texts from one of her kids. Not completely decipherable, but something was up. Caroline needed to get hold of Danny and learn exactly what was what. Hopefully, it was crisis averted. Danny could handle kid shenanigans. Though why exactly were they still managing any shenanigans when the very last college bill had already been paid? Wasn’t there a clause in the parent job description that said basta, finito, finished, task accomplished? That at some point Caroline might actually stop feeling that she’s steering. Still, there’d been a kid texting and retexting: MOM. CALL.

  There was also a text indicating that a new Serious Situation loomed on a short horizon with Elise.

  It seemed she was always in one situation while managing another. Not this or that, but this and this. Always calibrating what needed the most attention.

  Still, she had to admit—even a little—that a Home Crisis or a new Sister Situation was momentary relief from the way the skin on Anna’s arm sagged and folded on itself with no muscle left. Who wouldn’t want to avert her gaze? At least Caroline was skilled in caring for her kids and her sister. Here, with Anna, there was nothing she could do. Just be present. That was almost funny—wanting to be entirely present for unbearable sorrow. It seemed pretty lame.

  “I can’t get anything.” Caroline held up her phone but stopped—mid-room, midsentence—at the sight of Molly curled close to Anna, the two of them tucked into a conversation that seemed private. So private they didn’t even look up, and now Caroline was stuck foolishly in the middle of the room waving her cell phone. She felt a flush of childish uncertainty—uncertain if the normal thing to do would be to plop down next to them and fold into their conversation. Or would she be intruding, breaking up their intimacy? There it was. All the old awkwardness. The odd girl out. Even now, after so many years, Caroline couldn’t switch off the itchy worry. Where she fit in the group. Really? She checked herself. How petty it turned out—over and over again—she was.

  She looked down at her phone and angled purposefully toward the back of the room. The Old Friends. Whatever they called themselves, there was always a pecking order. Pretty pathetic considering the circumstance. If she felt a little displaced, maybe she was to blame. All those years she’d basically checked out. Still, always, even now, when she knew it was she who had moved to the periphery, it was that feeling of having been replaced. Early on, she’d had Molly. They’d pledged the whole best-friend thing. They’d walked to school together as soon as they were allowed to walk alone to school. Then there were matching orange Sting-Ray bikes with sparkly banana seats. Afternoons they practiced popping wheelies. Caroline pulled off a half spin. Then, after the summer between seventh and eighth grades, Molly came back from camp and everything was different. It wasn’t just those startling breasts. “I know, it’s like hello, Inflate-a-Boobs!” Molly said when Caroline looked kind of gaga. Breasts were old news; Caroline had started wearing her bra in seventh. But with Molly it was different. She looked dangerous. And not just her body. Molly’s pretty strawberry curls had tangled into a sun-streaked mane. And everywhere Caroline and Molly went, boys showed up. Whatever Molly wore—it could be her baggy overalls—she looked like Ginger from Gilligan’s Island in a tight evening gown. And Caroline was that sidekick, Mary Ann. But less cheery. It wasn’t just the stupid boys from their grade. What scared Caroline was high-school boys. They had cars. They took Molly out on dates. God, even Caroline’s dad said something about Molly growing into quite a beauty, and Caroline’s mother laughed and told him, “You keep those wolfish eyes to yourself.” It was disgusting. Caroline invented reasons to permanently shift their regular Friday sleepover to Molly’s house. Then, by ninth grade—certainly tenth grade—those sleepovers pretty much stopped. Molly stopped inviting her over. Which was terrible but also kind of okay, because she found Molly’s house and Molly’s mom a little scary. If Caroline shrugged off trailing behind Molly and the flocks of stunned and drooling boys, Anna and Ming seemed thrilled to be close to all of Molly’s heat. Though they never excluded Caroline or Helen. Helen seemed actually okay on the sidelines, showing up to get Anna out of trouble. But Caroline wasn’t okay. She felt anxious around Molly. Forget the show-off boys swerving in their fathers’ cars, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” cranked, just watching Molly dump out a film canister to clean seeds and sticks from pot made Caroline anxious. “It’s all cool,” Molly said, looking up through the perfect fringe of her lioness hair. None of it was cool for Caroline. Not the way Molly tossed that hair at the end of every sentence. Not when Molly lifted her Minnie Mouse T-shirt to show off the twenty hickeys that Jeff Thomas had given her, ten to a breast, and Anna squealed, “That’s amazing!” Amazing? It looked gross. Gross like a disease Molly might not recover from. Then Caroline learned that Molly and Anna were bringing boys to the Farm. Anna and Molly described a Saturday evening they’d partied at the Farm. Somebody shook red capsules out of a tennis-ball can, and Anna woke to a boy touching her, and she described the effort it took, the slow taffy drift up to make her mouth and tongue work together, “Please stop.” Caroline said, “That’s horrible,” but Anna and Molly shrugged it off, saying, “Caroline, we’re fine.” But Caroline wasn’t sure anything was fine. She wanted to declare they couldn’t bring other people to the Farm. The Farm was Caroline’s
special place, one she’d shared with her closest friends. She’d shown them the break in the fence, the pine forest, the rose garden. The Farm was sacred. Their sacred place. She wanted to say they weren’t allowed to smoke pot or do stupid things and practically get raped. But she knew it was ridiculous. It wasn’t Caroline’s anything. They were all trespassing. Really, she just wanted her friends back. She wanted Molly back. Caroline missed Friday nights playing Parcheesi and Monopoly. Eating ice cream directly from the pint containers. Forget board games, Molly, Anna, and Ming had concocted dumb-ass fake IDs and extolled the virtues of vodka-and-Kahlúa drinks. Why wasn’t Helen worried when she heard about the night the three of them got wasted on Singapore Slings? She dismissed it. “Yeah, they’re idiots, but they sure make it sound fun.” Wasn’t Helen even a little jealous that Anna was always off with Molly, basking in Molly’s golden heat? Helen argued that friendship wasn’t monogamous, it wasn’t predicated on or affirmed by who you hang out with most. But Caroline thought that sounded like a tagline from a consciousness-raising pamphlet. Or Ram Dass’s Be Here Now. Wasn’t actually the whole point of a best friend—of wearing those stupid necklaces Helen and Anna had given each other with their names engraved on either side of the silver disk—that it was exclusive, that a best friend came first? Finally Caroline screwed up the courage and told Molly she seemed like a wobbly roller coaster about to derail. That she, Caroline, was scared just watching Molly. How many boys had she already done it with? And now she’s sixteen and dating a college guy? What about that sounded like a good idea? Wasn’t this part of being best friends? Not just treating Molly like she was some new Marilyn Monroe. Molly smiled her assured smile and snuggled into Caroline’s neck. Even her voice was a purr. “You’re my nervous Nellie. That’s why I love you. But relax. I’m just having a little fun before we turn into our parents.” Caroline never made a big declaration. She didn’t have to. She just started staying home.