The Good Sister

by Jamie Kain

  “I don’t expect you to believe me,” he says. “You have to understand that after my relationship with your mother ended and Sarah had her relapse, I was so devastated, I got lost in my own sorrow. That’s not an excuse though.”

  After my parents split, Ravi had tried for a while. There has been shared custody and lots of shuttling back and forth between one house and another, and having two bedrooms and trying to remember which house I left my shoes at or my homework or my favorite pair of jeans. Everyone acts like that shared-custody stuff is great for the kids, but mostly it’s a lot of confusion and losing stuff.

  How many adults would choose to live in one house half a week and another house the other half of the week?

  But then Ravi decided to move to the city, and our visits with him became fewer and fewer. We were allowed to choose, and we chose Mom. Not because she was the better parent, but because she was there—where our friends and our school and our home was.

  Maybe six months ago, Ravi moved back to Marin because he’d started doing some kind of consulting work that allowed him to work from home, and so now here he was, promising to be our dad again.

  I think of Sarah, of how she’d so easily have welcomed him back with open arms. She never let herself get caught up feeling bitter about the way things worked out. I guess that’s the only advantage of having cancer—it teaches you every day you live with it that life just isn’t fucking fair, and there’s not a thing you can do about it, so you might as well just get over yourself and appreciate shit.

  Thinking of Sarah—and not just the idea of her—causes me to go so green I start to roll down the window in case I need to stick my head out of it to barf.

  “Are you getting carsick?” Ravi asks.

  “A little.”

  “We’re almost there. Do you want me to pull over?”

  “No. Keep going.”

  I wonder if Lena has remembered to bring the urn with Sarah’s ashes. Forgetting it is just the kind of thing she would do. But around the next bend, our headlights shine on Lena’s car parked at the side of the road, and she is standing next to it holding the urn. Standing nearby and talking on his cell phone is Ron, and I decide she is an insensitive bitch for bringing him to this event.

  All of us barely know him. He’s just the guy who’s currently sleeping with my mom—one of a long line of guys—not someone I want present when scattering my dead sister’s ashes to the wind. I consider thanking Ravi for arguing with Lena about this, even if he lost the battle, but he has parked the car and is getting out now.

  Too late.

  From the backseat, Rachel exhales an enormous sigh. “This sucks,” she says under her breath, not talking to me.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  No part of me makes a move to exit the car, but Ravi opens my door, extends a hand to me, and again I let him propel me forward into the next steps. Walking up the trail, finding a spot, scattering the ashes.

  I think now this is a stupid tradition. Why do we do it? Why not just flush our loved ones down the toilet, for all it matters. I visit the toilet a lot more often than I visit this one spot on Mount Tamalpais.

  After extracting me from the car, Ravi does the same with Rachel, and he walks with us up the trail, following Lena and Ron. He holds my hand as we walk, and I don’t remove it because I need someone else’s momentum right now or I will not take another step and another and another. Rachel has her arms crossed over her chest, not holding our father’s hand but rather watching the trail as she walks, cursing every few feet at the rocks and dips that make walking hard to do in the ballet flats she is wearing.

  With his free hand, our father shines a flashlight on the trail so that we can see where we are walking. Ron and Lena have not thought to bring one for themselves, so they are relying on the bit of light they get from us walking behind them.

  I notice Lena hasn’t dressed appropriately for the terrain either. She is wearing a black, wraparound dress with a black leather coat over it, and knee-high black boots with precarious heels. She struggles as the trail meanders uphill, and Ron has to support her quite a bit in her stupid boots.

  Why does my mom need to look hot on this of all nights? Can’t she just give it up for one stupid night and allow herself to look like someone’s mother? Like three someones’ mother?

  No, not three now. Two. We are no longer the three daughters of Ravi and Lena, that supposedly golden family we once were. What a beautiful family, I remember people saying to my parents again and again when we were younger. Now we are only the broken remains, grotesque and pointless with our missing parts and damaged leftover pieces.

  Up ahead, as if on cue, Lena stumbles and nearly falls. In slow motion, I watch in horror as the urn sails out of her gasp and goes crashing to the ground. The metal vessel makes a clunking sound as it hits the ground.

  I stop dead still, watching with a growing feeling of nausea as the lid tumbles off and the urn rolls down toward us, bits of … of, stuff, falling out as it goes.

  My sister, falling out as it goes.

  “Oh, God!” I hear Lena cry out as she turns and watches the urn. “Get it!”

  My heart lodges in my throat. Ravi, letting go of my hand, springs forward and stops the urn from rolling any farther with his foot. He bends down and begins scooping up what looks like bits of bone and a sort of crumbly stuff that doesn’t look at all like ash, putting it back in the urn.

  I stand there, so stunned I can’t move. A sense of shame rises up next. Like, if this is us at our most solemn and dignified, what hope do we even have?

  “Fuck me,” Rachel says. “This is un-fucking-believable.”

  For once, she’s managed to sum up the situation perfectly.

  Finally able to move, I bend over and pick up the flashlight Ravi dropped as he went for the urn and shine it on the place where he is working to fit my sister back into her semifinal resting place.

  “Well, I suppose we just got the scattering started a little earlier than planned,” Ron says with forced merriment in his voice.

  I want to hit him with the flashlight, but instead I just look at Rachel and we simultaneously roll our eyes—the one way we can communicate without fighting.

  “I don’t want my daughter getting stepped on by goddamn hikers,” Ravi mutters.

  Everyone is silent as he scrapes up the last bits of Sarah and puts the lid back on the urn. I think she is probably going to get stepped on wherever we put her. Those bone chunks are going to be chewed on by coyotes, maybe even picked up by big, dumb golden retrievers and played with like a fetch toy.

  This thought makes me totally want to retch, but then, isn’t the whole point of scattering the ashes about letting go of the physical body? Letting it sail away on the wind and go back to nature or some shit like that?

  And why isn’t the stuff in the urn—Sarah—all burned to ash? Why is she just chunks of stuff now? This is not going to make the romantic ashes-on-the-wind picture we all had in mind, but it is too late to go back now. Inside the urn, Sarah is now mixed with bits of Mount Tam trail dust and gravel that Ravi scooped up into the vase along with her, so we might as well finish the job.

  A few minutes later, we find a spot marked by a large, mossy boulder that, I guess, is supposed to help us find the place again if we want to go back and feel shitty about Sarah’s being gone forever.

  Lena takes the lid off the urn, flashing a dark look at Ravi when he reminds her to be careful, and I think I might pass out. I get all dizzy, and my mouth goes dry. Almost two months since Sarah’s death? Is that how long it’s been? I don’t know, and I am not ready to say good-bye to her. I will never, ever be ready. I think I will lie down on this spot and die with her.

  “I brought something I want to read,” Ravi says, and he clears his throat as he takes a folded paper out of his pocket and opens it up. “I wrote this a few days after I learned of Sarah’s death, and but it was too personal to read at her memorial.”

  My throat tightens
, which along with the dizziness and the dry mouth is not a good sign. I edge over to the boulder and lean against it, trying to breathe. After all the drama of the night, me passing out is a cliché I’m not going to let happen.

  Ravi reads, “‘Dear Sarah, my beloved first child … First children are the ones we must practice upon. Our mistakes becoming small scars on your once-flawless souls, but you bore no marks in spite of all I did wrong. You glided through life as if carried by wings, your smile the most startling beauty I have known. Once you asked me to toss you high into the oak tree in our front yard, and when I jokingly tossed you a few feet, then caught you midair, you said, “No. Higher, Daddy, higher.” I told you—’”

  He stops reading, his voice choked off by tears, and we all stand awkwardly watching my dad begin to bawl like a baby. It feels like minutes pass as we wait for him to pull himself together, but he doesn’t. Finally he chokes out that he can’t keep reading, and I think maybe I should volunteer to read for him, but I am still so dizzy and choked up I am afraid any little bit of exertion will have me flat on the ground.

  I feel bad for him though, alone in his effort to make this moment perfect. Lena doesn’t have the grace to read for him, I can tell by the set of her mouth.

  Then, surprising me, Rachel takes the paper from his hand.

  She begins to read so quietly I can barely hear her over the wind. “‘I told you, I can’t make you fly like a bird, darling. But you kept begging me to toss you higher, as if you believed you could soar up into the tree and beyond it, straight to heaven. Now, sweet girl, you finally can. Yours always, Dad.’”

  Rachel’s hand shakes as she reads. Maybe it’s the wind, maybe it’s because she is cold, but it’s the first hint I have that she might be feeling as wrecked right now as I am. I study her face for some hint of emotion, but Rachel is a master of revealing nothing but contempt for us.

  I grip my father’s left hand as he wipes at his eyes with the right, and for once I feel closer to him than anyone else in my family. He, the absent one, all of a sudden is not Ravi. He is just Dad, a word I haven’t been comfortable with in a long time.

  Rachel hands the paper back to him, and he takes a lighter from his pocket and sets the letter on fire. He bends to pick up a small rock, then places the letter on the boulder to burn, pinning it down with the rock. We stand there watching it for a moment, and Lena begins tossing the ashes of my sister out into the darkness beyond the rock, toward the Pacific where Sarah died.

  I am standing between Rachel and our father, and I reach for Rachel’s hand. I don’t remember the last time we’ve held hands. Probably she will shake off my grasp. But I glance over at her, and she is staring out into the darkness, tears streaming silently down her cheeks. She doesn’t pull away.

  Our father holds my other hand. The urn is empty now, I guess, because Lena puts the lid back on and grips it against her chest. For those few moments, we are there silent in the dark, the remains of my broken family.

  Twenty-Two

  Asha

  Ravi drives us home, all three of us unwilling or maybe unable to talk now. When we are coming up on the turn for our house, he asks us if we’d like to stay at his house tonight. We haven’t stayed there since he came back to Marin, our memories of the back-and-forth of shared custody too unpleasant and our estrangement from our dad too solidified.

  “No thanks,” Rachel says from the backseat, her voice suddenly full of sarcasm.

  I guess we couldn’t have hoped those few moments of Rachel’s having a heart up there on the mountain would last.

  “I’m, uh, supposed to stay at a friend’s house tonight,” I lie, not wanting to admit to my dad that we aren’t quite familiar enough to do that kind of thing anymore without its feeling weird.

  “Maybe some other night soon?” he says, sounding hopeful.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Maybe.”

  I don’t imagine it will happen, since he will probably go back to being his formerly aloof self and I will go back to being one of the two remaining daughters who reminds him too much of everything he’s lost.

  He pulls into the driveway, and Rachel climbs out fast, saying bye as she goes. Ravi leans over to hug me awkwardly, and I let him linger there. I am trying to get into the spirit of things. He’s my father, I tell myself. Not Ravi. Dad.

  Rachel has already unlocked the front door and gone inside by the time I get there. Lena’s car is not in the driveway, but it might not be for the rest of the night if she goes home with Ron the Dick. I go to my bedroom, feeling sick and restless and horrified at the thought of being alone right now, even though the thought of hanging out with Ravi sounded just as bad.

  I have only allowed my thoughts to tiptoe around what happened at the party last night. I haven’t been able to face the humiliation head-on. But now, with pieces of Sarah drifting around on Mount Tamalpais, I feel as if I am coming apart so completely, what does it matter now? So I made out with Tristan. So Sin hates me now. So my big chance with Tristan is probably gone forever.

  So what?

  It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Well, except Sin.

  I hate the way he treated me, but I did promise him I’d stay away from Tristan. I broke the promise, so I guess he has the right to hate me. I just wish he understood how good it felt to forget for a while, to be distracted by some kind of feelings more real than the feeling of Sarah’s being gone, to be consumed by something other than the questions surrounding her death.

  If only he knew how hard it was not to know for sure what happened to my sister, maybe he’d understand.

  Or not.

  From my bedroom window, I hear a car pull up outside, and I see a lowered, black Mercedes in the driveway, its rims shining against the porch light. It’s AJ, Rachel’s wishes-he-were-black, wannabe-rap-star boyfriend, whom she must have texted on the ride home to tell him to come get her.

  A white guy who grew up in Marin, to distance himself from his whiteness he has moved to Oakland, traded in his white middle-class speech for street slang, and his scruffy liberal attire for what he thinks is hip-hop. What Rachel sees in him, I don’t know. He’s even got a couple of baby mamas, from what I hear, at the ripe old age of twenty.

  Maybe it’s wrong for me to assume he’s a drug dealer, except I’ve seen him down at the park on two separate occasions leaning into car windows and taking money from people.

  Maybe he’s selling Girl Scout cookies for one of his two little girls back in Oakland, or collecting money for the homeless, but I doubt it. I watch out the window as Rachel gets in the car, and then they speed off.

  I don’t know how or when Rachel and AJ met. I started seeing her with him a couple of months ago, but I give them two more months max before they have a screaming argument in the front yard, he punches her in the face, and they are no longer an item.

  Why do I think he’ll punch her in the face? She will surely say something awful and stupid to him, probably about his kids, revealing her true nature, and she will kind of deserve it. Also, AJ forever has some kind of rap song about bitches and hos and clockin’ the bitch and on and on with antifemale rhetoric blaring from his car windows. I’m not sure you can listen to that stuff day in and day out without its seeping into who you are and what you do.

  Once they are gone, I feel so completely alone I think the weight of it might crush me. I get up off my bed and pace the room, anxious to be anywhere but this haunted house.

  It finally occurs to me that I have to apologize to Sin. I know this, but I don’t know if he’ll accept it. I don’t know if he’ll stop being mad. I only know I have to try before I lose my nerve. So I go downstairs and slip out into the night.

  I knock on his door sometime before midnight, but no one answers. I know someone in the house is awake because plenty of lights are on, and besides, they’re all night owls. Sin never goes to sleep before twelve.

  I knock again, then try the doorknob, which turns out to be unlocked. I nearly live here, so no one
will care if I just walk in. I ease the door open and call out a “Hello” because I don’t want to surprise Jess, who can be volatile.

  Her Westfalia van isn’t in the driveway, but this doesn’t mean she’s not home. She sometimes claims she’s forgotten where she’s parked it, but Sin and I have our own recreational-drug-related theories about why she occasionally returns home without the van and the next day seems confused about its absence.

  “Hello?” I call out again now that I’m inside the foyer.

  No answer. A light in the family room is on, but no one is there. The house is quiet, until I hear a movement from the darkened hallway and I look.

  Tristan emerges from his room. “Hey. It’s you.” He’s turning off his iPod and removing the headphones from his ears, which explains why he didn’t answer the door.

  I’m instantly torn between wanting to get away from him before Sin walks in, and wanting to see what will happen next. We didn’t exactly part on good terms Saturday night, but he doesn’t seem to be holding a grudge.

  “Where’s Sin?” I ask, sticking to the safest topic I can think of.

  “Mom needed his help setting up a show in Sausalito.”

  Oh.

  So we’re alone.

  “Do you know when they’ll be back?”

  An almost-smile plays on his lips, and I notice the slightest bruise under his right eye were Sin’s fist must have made impact before it went on to bloody his nose. “Nope. It’s just you and me.”

  I glance at the door without meaning to.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll only bite if you want me to.”

  I have no witty comeback for that, but some little frozen part of me melts. I still can’t quite believe Tristan Tyler is interested in me. At school, I am no one. I am known only for being the sister of a girl who had cancer, and now the sister of a girl who died in an awful accident.