The Good Sister

by Jamie Kain

  But I will have to get out of the car to find out, so I do.

  I recall seeing a row of dorm buildings down the path a little way. I hear a few cows lowing in the pasture at the bottom of the hill, but that’s pretty much the only sound.

  I am never awake at this time of day, unless it’s to come home from partying, and by then I’m always too trashed to notice the peacefulness of dawn or any crap like that.

  Just as I make my way up the path from the parking lot, I see two people walking up ahead, toward the main building. The one on the left looks my way, and it is Krishna. After saying something to the other person, he breaks off and heads in my direction.

  When we meet halfway on the path, he smiles. “What a nice surprise. I was hoping you might show up.”

  “You were hoping I’d show up today? Before dawn?”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  He has to be bullshitting me. But this is Krishna, and I don’t think he does that sort of thing.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I was a jerk to you.”

  “You had a hard weekend.”

  It is so good to see him, but I can’t think what else to say. He is wearing his orange sarong again, with another white shirt, this one with red embroidery along the collar. It seems a little fancy for monk clothes, but what do I know?

  His hair is pulled back in a little ponytail, and he somehow manages to look not at all tired at this ridiculous hour of the morning.

  “Have you been up meditating all night or something?”

  “Just for the past hour.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “Early-morning group meditation. Care to join us?”

  I feel awkward now. I guess I was hoping I’d have him all to myself for a while. I am definitely not in the mood to face a group of happy Buddhists, but I don’t want to say that.

  “Is something wrong that you’re not telling me?”

  I shrug, hoping like hell I don’t start crying.

  “You scattered your sister’s ashes.” He places a hand on my arm. “Would you like to talk about it?”

  Another shrug.

  I think of how Catholics have confession, a little anonymous booth where they can sit and spill all their sins. Maybe that’s why I’ve come to see Krishna—to confess to him my sins, of which there are many. I want his goodness to rub off on me, to somehow wash me clean.

  I feel filthy inside.

  “I can have someone else lead the meditation session. Come up to the center with me and I’ll get that taken care of.”

  I say nothing, but follow him up the path. A couple of cars are pulling into the lot now, the first to arrive for the class, I guess. What kind of crazy people show up here this early in the morning to meditate? Can’t they do that at home?

  But I’m here too, and with no real purpose, so who’s crazier?

  I wait next to the reception desk, still with its job posting taped to the counter, while Krishna talks to a gray-haired, hippie-looking woman about her taking over the meditation session this morning, and moments later he is leading me toward I don’t know where.

  “Would you like some breakfast?” he asks as we pass the cafeteria.

  “No thanks.” I’m afraid I’ll puke if I put anything in my stomach right now.

  He leads me back outside, where the sun is just starting to peek over the horizon. Up on the hill, we have a great view of the sunrise, a slight band orange blazing in the far distance.

  “I’ll show you one of my favorite places on earth,” he says as we walk along a path that leads away from the center, toward the woods.

  I feel oddly wired, my body buzzing from lack of sleep, my brain hyperalert. I notice every little thing, from the cacophony of the birds calling in the trees, to the feel of the crisp air on my skin, to the spongy texture of the ground where redwood leaves fall again and again. When we enter the woods, it’s much darker, and I can barely see where we are going.

  Krishna takes my hand to guide me. The contact, innocent as it is, makes me crazed with his not wanting me in any of the ways I want him. He keeps holding my hand until we come to a clearing, where a perfect circle of redwoods stands.

  “It’s a fairy ring,” he says when we are standing in the middle of it. “When one redwood died, these trees formed sprouts from the dead tree stump.”

  I think of Sarah, of course. Our family isn’t exactly sprouting new life from the remains of my fallen sister, and I wonder if it would even be possible for something good to come from all the crappiness that’s happened.

  “Look up,” Krishna says, and I do.

  Above us, the pointed tops of the redwoods form a circle. The sun blazes over the horizon somewhere beyond the woods, and a ray of light pierces the forest darkness, glistening on the branches of the redwoods. I feel dizzy, standing here looking up, exhausted, wired, aching, wanting things I can’t have.

  I start to lose my balance, and Krishna grasps my arms before I fall. He leads me to a tree stump, where we sit down.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think so.”

  “The only way you’ll get through this is to go through it.”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever heard that saying that the only way around a problem is through it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the same with grief. You have to let yourself be in it, sit with it, feel it.”

  “I just got dizzy from not sleeping.”

  “And you’re not sleeping because your sister is dead.”

  “If only it were that simple,” I say before I even realize the words are exiting my mouth.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “She’s dead because of me.” I’m too exhausted to care about hiding the truth anymore. “It was my fault.”

  “It may feel that way—”

  “No. I haven’t told you everything, but if it weren’t for me, Sarah would be alive today.”

  “That’s a heavy burden.”

  I am wildly, crazily relieved that he is willing to accept the ugly truth just like it is, without asking for details, without judging.

  But it doesn’t change things. I can’t bring Sarah back from the dead. I can’t put our lives back together. I can’t convince Krishna that he should be my latest male distraction from my stupid, pointless life. The list of things I can’t do is endless.

  Then he does something I am absolutely not expecting.

  He slips his arm around me, pulling me close, and presses his lips against my forehead.

  I melt into him, let my body mold against his, allow his weight to be what holds me up.

  Though just when I am thinking this is one of those brotherly types of embraces, he cups my face in his hand and looks at my mouth as if he’s about to kiss me for real.

  But instead, he says, “You know I can’t—”

  I shut him up by kissing him, leaning in and covering his mouth with mine. It’s only a short distance, that space between us, and the kiss happens so fast I’m not sure he or I saw it coming. I just knew I had to do it, and I did.

  For the briefest moment, I feel him kiss me back, but then he is grasping my arms and pulling away.

  He sighs, and I feel so stupid I don’t know if I can ever look him in the eye again.

  “I’m sorry, Rachel. I shouldn’t have brought you here.” He sounds genuinely pained, as if he’s committed some crime.

  As if we both have.

  I stand up and stumble back toward the path, turning away as fast as I can so I don’t have to see that look of pity in his eyes.

  Then I run, hard, fast, stumbling through the woods, as far away as I can get as fast as I can. I don’t know if he even follows me because I never look back.

  Twenty-Four

  Sarah

  I am falling.

  Falling fast.

  I know from the blur of hillside and brush speeding past as I tumble over it, my body skipping and bouncing like a stone. Pain is a vague abstracti
on, second to the astonishing truth of gravity pulling me down fast, faster.

  This is what I remember of those last moments. And then the cold, stinging slap of the ocean coming up to meet me.

  I was conscious until then, but the impact of the water knocked me out, I suppose, and my last few memories are either unconscious dreams or the final death throes of my brain. Having never died before, I can’t say which.

  Next thing I know, I am floating up, up, up. It’s a dizzy, weightless sensation.

  Not a sensation at all, actually. More of a disembodied consciousness, I guess you might say. I am here, but not here. Present, but not able to touch or feel. Somehow watching myself come unhinged from life.

  I see my body floating in crashing surf, bobbing over waves, bumping against rocks like a discarded toy.

  It all seems so impossible, and yet I see it, while removed from the realness of it. I am a nameless, faceless audience member.

  How many others are watching?

  I don’t know, because I am here alone. This, perhaps, is the most disturbing part of my nonlife. I’ve never liked being alone for long. My whole life, or at least the parts I can remember, I’ve had Rachel, and, more important, Asha, always near. We were a giggling knot of sisters as small children, never more than a breath away from each other.

  Then, after the cancer diagnosis, we started losing the glue that had held us together as a unit of three. Asha grew even closer to me, afraid of our parents’ strained expressions and short tempers, afraid to let me out of her sight.

  And Rachel drifted further and further away, the closer Asha and I became.

  I now understand Asha and Rachel so clearly. It’s like that hindsight’s twenty-twenty saying, except in death, it’s a million times more true. As if a light has been shined upon all the dark, murky corners of my life.

  Wherever I care to look, I can now see. No matter how hard I worked to avoid the truth in life, it’s all laid out before me now, facts glaring like neon signs. Here, a sister scared and lonely, there a sister jealous and forgotten, and there again, another sister starring in her own drama, complete with pitiable medical condition and suitably tragic ending.

  Except it didn’t end the way anyone expected at all.

  Twenty-Five

  Asha

  Next morning, I am lying on my bed, fully dressed, rereading my favorite book in the world, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. This is probably the fifth time I’ve read it, and I am only reading it now because it’s easier than thinking about what comes next.

  If I put down the book, get up, and go downstairs, I’ll have to face my mom or Rachel. And when Sin gets here, I’ll have to go with him. I can’t not go to the spot anymore. Every day I stay away, it takes on more significance, more mystery, fueling more of a sense of dread.

  I have to go, and the whole idea is scaring the hell out of me.

  When I hear the sound of an engine outside, I sit up and look out the window next to my bed. Jess’s Westfalia is in the driveway, so I close the well-worn book, an old school-library copy that I’ve never returned, and reacquaint myself with the shaky feeling in my stomach.

  It’s a good thing I haven’t eaten breakfast or I might throw up now.

  I hear Sin knocking on the front door, then Rachel’s voice saying something to him. I get up. Go down the stairs.

  “Hey,” Sin says, looking ridiculously perky for this occasion.

  He’s wearing a gray cable-knit sweater that probably belongs to his mother, the most conventional thing I’ve seen him wear, like, ever. He’s paired the sweater with jeans and a white thermal shirt underneath. Without any wacky clothes, tattoos hidden, hair unspiked, he looks completely respectable, like the kind of guy normal parents might be happy to see show up at their door to pick up their daughter.

  I’m happy to see him too.

  Rachel is slouching on the sofa in the living room now, staring at her laptop computer as she puffs on a cigarette. She’s not allowed to smoke in the house, so this must mean Lena is out already. Sin looks from me to Rachel in the sort of significant way that I guess is supposed to urge me to talk to her about the day Sarah died.

  I sigh and enter the living room. Rachel doesn’t look up until I sit down on the love seat across from her and Sin does too.

  “What?” she says.

  “We’re going out to the coast today,” I say. “I was hoping you could tell me if you know anything about…”

  “Where Sarah fell,” Sin finishes for me.

  “Why should I?”

  I wasn’t expecting this question, and I don’t have an answer.

  “So Asha can see it for herself,” Sin answers. “She needs some closure.”

  I almost laugh at this, but my revulsion over the topic at hand keeps me straight-faced.

  “Oh. Well, I don’t know. You should probably check the police report, I guess. I don’t remember exactly where it happened.”

  “Didn’t you have to go back there and show the police the spot?”

  She blinks, exhales some smoke. “Yeah, but I was freaked-out. I don’t remember that much.”

  “Was there, like, some landmark or something? A tree or a plant that marked where it happened?” Sin asks.

  She frowns and thinks about this. “I remember walking through some eucalyptus trees, and then we came out on the other side of the woods, and there weren’t any trees around.”

  “About how far from the trailhead?”

  She sighs, put out by the inquisition. “I don’t know. Just a while. Like after the eucalyptus trees, it wasn’t far. Just maybe from here to that house across the street.”

  Sin and I both look through the front window at the distance she’s described, and I try to memorize it.

  “Anything else you can remember?”

  “What’re you, like detectives now?” Rachel takes another drag on the cigarette and exhales at us.

  “I guess that’s a no.”

  Sin looks at me, seeing if I’m ready to give up and leave. But I’m not. Rachel always has more to say than she lets on, and I don’t mind pissing her off.

  I just stare at her for a few long, awkward moments.

  She tries to turn her attention back to the computer, but I ask, “Does the spot look like a place someone might fall?”

  “Sure, if you get too close to the edge like she did. The hillside was, like, eroding there or something.” She frowns again.

  My stomach twists into a tighter knot at the thought of Sarah’s frail body slipping, falling, crashing into the surf. My eyes sting. Why wasn’t I there to protect her? She liked to go hiking with me, not Rachel. Why wouldn’t she have asked me to go that day?

  It all made no sense.

  What were we missing?

  “Do you remember anything she said that morning before she left that made her sound like she was depressed or something was wrong?”

  Rachel takes her time putting out her cigarette on the rim of a Coke can that sits on the end table next to her. “I don’t know. I mean, she seemed like she was normal, I guess. She maybe was quieter than usual.…”

  “Maybe?”

  Rachel shrugs. “I can’t really remember that well. I’ve tried, but at the time I just thought it was like any other morning.”

  “How could it have been like any other day? You never go hiking,” I say.

  She aims her glare at me, and I see some sort of calculation taking place.

  “She asked me to go with her, so I went.”

  “But why did she ask you?” I say before I lose my nerve.

  I am treading on dangerous ground now, speaking aloud things we just don’t say to each other—that in the pecking order of sisterly affection, Rachel has always been the distant third. That it’s hard to believe she would be the one invited anywhere.

  Rachel’s gaze narrows. “She needed to talk to me,” she says mysteriously, and I know she’s not going to tell me about what before I even ask.

  “About what?”<
br />
  “About none of your business, little sis, so shut the hell up and go away.”

  “We you guys drinking or something? Getting high?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, me and perfect Sarah were getting our buzz on. That explains everything. Now go away!”

  Her sarcastic tone isn’t enough to convince me they weren’t drinking, but … the only thing I have a harder time imagining than Sarah and Rachel going for friendly hike in the woods is them doing it while intoxicated.

  A horrible feeling settles in my belly, but I don’t know what it means. I look over at Sin, and he shrugs. I take this as my signal that we’re done.

  I go to the foyer closet and dig around, looking for my hiking boots, but they’re not there. Which is weird because I always put them in this closet. Knowing the perpetual wetness on the coast, I don’t want to ruin my regular shoes on a muddy trail, so I go upstairs to check my own closet, and there they are, tucked away in the back under an old pair of black Converse sneakers.

  The boots are already dirty, the soles caked with a light coating of dried mud from a previous hike, so I carry them downstairs and put them on by the front door.

  Sin is still in the living room talking to Rachel, but I don’t bother trying to listen in because he’ll tell me every detail of what she’s said as soon as we’re alone again.

  I peek in the doorway. “Bye, Rach. We’re going out there now.” I’m not sure why I feel the need to report in to her, especially after our not-so-friendly talk.

  Instead of answering, she begins typing on the laptop again. Sin follows me out of the house. When we’re on the road, heading west out of town, I feel some of the tension drain from my body.

  I know I’ve been stressed about making this trip, but I didn’t realize just how much until we go over White’s Hill into the San Geronimo Valley, where the last vestiges of city life fade away and the landscape turns to one of alternating redwood forests and cow-dotted hillsides, and the headache I didn’t realize I had vanishes.

  Sin has some kind of Brazilian instrumental music on the radio, and he’s being oddly silent, but I don’t feel like talking now either. I don’t know what to do with Rachel’s claims about Sarah, and I also don’t have the mental energy to attempt solving any sort of emotionally fraught riddle. Instead, I sit there with my feelings of dread and stare out the window.