by Jamie Kain
Thirteen
Sarah
Memory is that trick by which we see the awful events of the past loom over the good, like mountains over mice. We don’t recall life as it was. Instead, we remember what was different, frightening, or strange, and we turn our lives into fun-house mirror images of the truth.
Now though, I see what was lost.
I see what I’ve lost with such a stark, painful clarity, I can hardly grasp it.
We weren’t always the family with the divorced parents and the screwed-up, broken sisters. We were once each parts of a whole. We fit together like puzzle pieces still fresh from the box, our crisp edges unmarred by time and neglect.
Consider the sort of picture we made, a beautiful family, not yet haunted by the specter of a sick child or the many small disappointments of life.
I felt the most hopeful the year we left the commune. When it became clear their guru would be leaving the country, Ravi and Lena decided to cut out sooner rather than later. With our wealthy grandmother in Marin County, and many former members of the ranch moving there, that seemed the most promising place to call our new home.
For a few years, life was kind of storybook nice. Or at least it seemed that way when I looked back on it.
I was almost ten years old when I got my first cancer diagnosis: acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL for short. The symptoms had started with my feeling tired a lot, getting strange bruises that I couldn’t remember a cause for, some of which my teacher saw and reported to the school nurse, suspecting I was being physically abused by someone. I remember their asking me if anyone hit or hurt me, promising I wouldn’t get in trouble if the answer was yes.
If only it had been that simple.
So that is what I remember about fourth grade: missing the last three months of it, doing homework from a hospital bed, a strange visiting teacher named Ms. Rusk, who had sour breath and dark red hair cut too short for her round, fleshy face.
It had been, oddly enough, Grandma de Graas who insisted my parents take me to a real doctor and not the naturopath they used for allergies and colds and stomachaches. We went to a pediatrician in Corte Madera, who made me—a stranger to needles back then—cry by drawing blood into a syringe. Days later, she called and referred us to an oncologist.
When my parents told me what kind of doctor we had to see next, their expressions grave, I misheard them and thought they were taking me to a doctor for uncles. But I’m not an uncle, I almost pointed out, until my mother’s dark gaze silenced me.
It took me months to realize that oncologist was just a fancy word for “cancer doctor” and that leukemia was the thing that would make my life take place for the next year in the slow motion that is illness and hospital beds.
I didn’t respond well to treatment right away. Instead, I got sicker. The chemotherapy wasn’t working; I had a bad form of ALL that required more aggressive treatment. The stuff people say to you when you are sick sounds oh so much worse when nothing is working. All the platitudes—you can fight this thing, you’re going to come out on top, you can beat this, you’re a winner—made it sound to me like I was playing an Olympic sport and not lying in bed watching cartoons and doing dumb worksheets assigned by Ms. Rusk.
Meanwhile, my parents’ marriage was crumbling under the pressure of having a kid with ALL. Even then I knew it was my fault, though they insisted to us girls it wasn’t anyone’s fault.
But a few weeks after Ravi told us he was moving out of the house—that he and Lena needed to “explore other living situations” was how he said it—I did respond. It was as if my body had decided to fight my parents’ divorce and was finally going to be victorious at something.
I’d undergone a bone-marrow transplant with Asha as my donor the month before, and according to the tests, I was finally cancer-free.
It had been almost a year since that first doctor visit.
My hair, only a few inches long and cut in a haphazard pixie do, would grow back, I was assured. In another few years I would have long hair again, and ridiculously this seemed like the best news of all.
Two years of occasional doctor visits to make sure I remained cancer-free passed before I got the news that cancer liked my body so much it had returned for a second stay. It’s bad enough having cancer once, but twice? I had no symptoms and was halfway through eighth grade. So while my friends were looking forward to high school and hanging out with their first boyfriends, I was undergoing a second bone-marrow transplant.
The second round of stress was too much for Lena, who kind of stopped acting like a mother after that. From the haze of those years, I can now see just how dear a price we all paid for my life.
But what did I do with that life? Did I repay the family my cancer destroyed? Did I make the world a better place? Did I pass on my good fortune to those less fortunate than I?
None of the above.
I see the life I could have lived, the choices I could have made, laid out before me in my mind’s eye, gleaming jewels on a table. And I see the ugly, rotting thing, the wasted life, I chose instead.
Fourteen
Asha
I wake up in Sin’s bed, and it’s dark outside, the gray-black darkness of just before dawn. I hear him breathing next to me, his warm body the only thing in the room that feels real at the moment while I’m still in a postdream haze.
I was just having a nightmare about Sarah. I’ve had them before, but in the others, she was alive, doing normal stuff, or talking to me, or whatever. They always feel like nightmares because then I wake up and have to remember all over again that she’s gone.
In this one, I dreamed about her dying. I dreamed her cancer came back, and we all had to watch her waste away. But before she died, our mother decided she couldn’t keep watching Sarah suffer and took her to a cliff and pushed her into the ocean.
In the dream, I was helpless to stop any of it. I could only watch from a distance, screaming for Lena to stop, with no sound coming from my throat. I tried to run toward them, but my feet wouldn’t move.
Then I woke up.
I roll onto my side, scooting closer to Sin because it’s cold in the room. My movement, or maybe my wakefulness, wakes him.
“Huh?” he says, as if I’ve said something.
I am so glad he’s talking to me again. I successfully avoided Tristan all evening. It’s been hell. I don’t want to avoid him, but I can’t go through another day of Sin’s hating me.
“I didn’t say anything,” I whisper.
“Why aren’t you asleep?”
“Nightmare.”
“About what?”
“Sarah.”
He is silent, waiting for further information, but I don’t want to give it.
“What happened?”
I roll onto my back again and stare at the dark ceiling. Sin is facing me now, though since waking, he has adjusted himself so that no parts of our bodies touch. I wish he hadn’t. I miss the warmth.
“She died,” I say. “Lena pushed her off a cliff.”
Silence again, then he finally says, “Freaky.”
I am thinking about how it must have felt to fall. I almost can’t think about it, but I have to. I can’t let Sarah be in that awful place by herself. I have to feel it with her now, even if it’s too late.
“I want to go to the place where she fell,” I say. “I need to see it.”
“We could bring flowers.”
This is the best friend that I can’t be without.
He thinks of things like this, in the middle of the night, without any help at all. And he says we when he could have just said you.
I shift my foot so that it’s touching his. He doesn’t move away.
“What if someone really did push her?” I say.
“That was just a nightmare. No one would push Sarah off a cliff. I’m sorry I ever said that might have happened.”
“Something else doesn’t make sense to me about that day.” The idea forms in my head as the words co
me out.
“What?”
“Rachel. Why would Sarah have gone hiking with Rachel, of all people? Rachel never hikes.”
“Did she ever say why they were together that day?”
My memory of the details surrounding that whole couple of weeks is fuzzy, like a nightmare I can only half remember. “I don’t know.”
“We’ll ask her then.”
“I guess.”
“Maybe we should also talk to the people who saw Sarah last, find out what was going on that day.”
“The police already talked to everyone.”
“What about you? Weren’t you one of the last people to see her alive?”
If only. I didn’t have any significant last moments with Sarah. My last conversation with her, the last time I laid eyes on her, was the day before, a Friday afternoon after school. I’d told her we were out of vanilla soy milk, hoping she’d pick some up while she was out.
She’d said she was going to work, that she’d try to remember to buy some on her way home.
That was it, just one of those dumb, throwaway conversations.
“I didn’t see her that day because I stayed overnight here, remember? By the time I went home, she was already gone.”
“Was your mom around?”
“No. She was staying at her boyfriend’s house.”
“So Rachel’s the one who knows all.”
“I guess.”
I’d already asked her about the day though. So had the police. And our parents.
No one doubted for a moment that Rachel was telling the truth. The police hear a story of two sisters hiking on the Marin coast and one falling, and the other one hurries to dial 911, gives a frantic report of her sister losing her footing, slipping off the trail, disappearing into the ocean below, no one questions it because people die by accident on that coast so often. Falling off trails, falling off rocks, or caught by sneaker waves. It’s treacherous, and the ocean unforgiving.
Sarah was looking back at her to say something, Rachel had claimed. Didn’t see the spot where the trail had eroded away. Fell before Rachel could even call out a warning.
So said Rachel, and so said the police report, swiftly wrapped up to spare our family any further grief.
So everyone believed.
But now, in this strange postdream haze, I can’t imagine the scene my sister described ever having taken place.
Rachel would only get annoyed if I brought it all up again. But I had to. Maybe she’d recall some detail that she hadn’t before.
What was I even hoping to learn?
The answer came to me, but I could never have said it out loud. I didn’t believe Sarah fell by accident.
I just didn’t believe it.
The idea took hold of me deep down, rendering me breathless. And if she hadn’t fallen by accident …
The alternatives were unthinkable. I pushed the thoughts away.
“Can we go back to sleep now?” Sin says, yawning.
“Yeah, sorry.”
“It’s cold in here. Scoot over and warm me up.”
He pulls me closer, tucks his body against mine, and I lie there wide-awake. His arm is draped over me. We have slept in the same bed plenty of times before, but never this close, never nested against each other like a pair of matching spoons.
I listen as he falls back to sleep, his breath slowing into a deeper, steadier rhythm, and try to summon some kind of pleasant thoughts I can fall asleep with, anything but thoughts of Sarah.
I think, what if Sin liked girls?
Fifteen
Asha
The next morning, Lena appears at Sin’s house. I imagine she’s gotten the calls from school that I haven’t been showing up for classes, and she has apparently decided to play the responsible parent again. I am sitting at Sin’s kitchen table eating a bowl of brown rice with milk and sugar. Sin is across from me doing the same. We aren’t talking.
Tristan stumbled out the door a few minutes earlier without looking at us or saying good morning. Part of me is offended by this, and part of me relieved. I can’t deal with him at all when Sin is around.
When I went to pee earlier this morning, he walked into the bathroom without knocking, just as I was pulling up my pants. He flashed a little half smile and said hi.
I tried to be all casual, not embarrassed, as I washed my hands.
“I’ve got a queen-size bed, if you ever get tired of sleeping in that twin.”
Stunned, I didn’t answer. Instead, I dried my hands in a hurry and left him there. If Sin had overheard that conversation, he’d never let me keep staying here, I thought at the time.
But now my mother is staring at me through the door, and I know it’s all over.
“Aren’t you going to let her in?” Sin says around a mouthful of rice.
“I thought you were.”
Sin’s own mother, Jess, never gets out of bed before eleven, and we’re supposed to be extraquiet in the morning to keep from waking her. So when my mom lifts her fist to knock, which is kind of ridiculous since Sin and I both already see her, he jumps up from the table and opens the door for her.
“Hi, Lena.”
“Hi, Sinclair. Do you realize you’re harboring a wanted fugitive?”
Lena is wearing a pair of jeans I could never fit into, the expensive, skinny kind that hang in the windows of boutiques where I don’t shop, the kind with $200 price tags. Probably a size two (my mom is thinner than I am, and this somehow seems wrong). Along with the jeans, she has on a green top that has all sorts of wraparound things happening and ties on one side, along with a pair of brown, high-heeled boots. Her hair is fresh from the salon, a lighter blond than what grows out of her head naturally, long and silky from probably some kind of chemical treatment.
She is a hippie only in spirit now, not appearance. This change has happened so fast I haven’t even noticed it until now. I think she is trying to be upwardly mobile and wants to look the part. There isn’t any other way to explain the way she looks now. If I didn’t know she was broke, I’d also suspect from the lack of creases in her forehead that she’d been getting some Botox treatments. And yet, how could she afford the new outfit, or the salon hair?
Sin has slumped back into his chair.
My mother rounds the table to stand next to me. “Asha, I’ve been worried about you.”
I don’t believe her. Worry doesn’t sound so calm, so rational. I savor the feel of her neglect. Poor me, no longer a useful daughter.
“I’m fine.” I take my time scooping up the last few grains of rice floating in milk.
“You need to come with me now. You can’t keep skipping school.”
“I can’t go back there. You can make an excuse for me. Tell them I’m still grieving.”
She pulls out a chair and sits down next to me, placing a hand on my back. This is Lena being soulful, being real. Thinking if she can make physical and eye contact with me, she’ll reach me.
This is when I notice a flash of sparkle on her other hand, the one resting on her lap. I look down and see a diamond ring there. It’s a big one, a solitaire. On her ring finger.
“I don’t want this to turn into a battle, darling.”
“I don’t either.”
“Sin, could you give us a moment?”
Sin, a pro at dealing with my mother, ignores her and stares intently at his rice. I silently thank him for not leaving me alone. She glares at him for a moment, then gives up because she knows he has a stronger will than she does.
“I know this is the hardest thing our family has ever gone through, but we need to stick together. We’re going to scatter the ashes Sunday night, and I want you to be there.”
This news comes to me as if she’s kicked me in the chest. I am stunned and say nothing.
Scattering ashes. It can’t be so. I am not going to scatter my sister in the wind.
“Asha, this will give you some closure. You need it, and I need my daughters there. This isn’t easy fo
r me either, you know.”
“No. I’m not going.”
Her lips get all thin. “Fine, if you’re going to be a spoiled brat about it, I don’t want you there ruining things the way you did at the funeral, but if you aren’t going to be there, you will come to a therapy appointment with me next week.”
“No way.” I have been to mom’s therapist exactly once. There will not be a repeat performance.
“This isn’t up for debate, Asha. You can’t keep staying here—you’re going back to school, and you’re coming home to sleep at our house tonight, and you’re going to therapy with me. Do you understand?”
I think, if I relent on the school thing, which will at least be a distraction and will keep me from flunking out for the semester, she’ll give in on the other two means of torture.
“I’ll go to school. Just leave, okay?”
She sighs loudly. “Is that a real tattoo on your ankle?”
I ignore the question. I want to ask her about the ring she’s wearing, but I’m afraid of the answer.
“That alone is reason enough not to let you stay here. You shouldn’t be getting tattoos from your friends without my permission.”
She knows about Sin’s tattooing hobby from the tattoo of a bluebird he put on his own foot. It’s a beautiful piece, especially for someone with so little experience.
I say nothing. Her hand drops from my back. I look at her then because for a moment I wish I could bury my face in her chest and cry until her expensive new top is soaking wet. I want her to be the kind of mom who comforts me with kisses and cookies and commonsense advice, not therapy appointments.
“Our family is in crisis, Asha. It’s not just you who’s suffering. You should be home, not here.”
She stands up, and I watch her leave. Something about her now is different, and it’s not just the expensive clothes and the salon hair. She’s walking with purpose, like she knows where she’s going, for once.
Why couldn’t she drag me out of here if it matters so much? Why couldn’t she have showed up when I first disappeared?