The Good Sister

by Jamie Kain

  This drive out to the coast is the only time I ever get a sense of what it feels like to meditate. Slowly, it lulls me into a more peaceful, thoughtless state as I take in all the beautiful trees and soaring views, and I begin to feel as if none of the crap in my life matters.

  But finally, Sin interrupts my passenger-seat meditation with “So do you want to hear what Rachel told me while you were gone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She said if we think we’re going to find out what happened to Sarah, we’re not going to unearth any amazing clues on the coast.”

  I let his words settle in my thoughts, processing their full meaning one little bit at a time.

  What happened to Sarah?

  We won’t find any clues on the coast?

  “So, she’s hinting that something besides an accidental fall happened, and that there are clues to be found somewhere.”

  “Or she might just be fucking with us.”

  “Maybe.”

  This is a real possibility. Probably the most likely one, given what I know about Rachel.

  But …

  But I fear I am letting the most convenient conclusion prevail.

  The truth is rarely convenient, I know. It’s often messy, difficult, even unfathomable.

  “I think she’s just messing with us, honestly, but I thought I should mention it.”

  “Yeah.” I want to return to that place where I feel nothing, so I go along with Sin’s assessment of the situation.

  “It’s hard to believe you have such a bitch for a sister when you and Sarah were so normal.”

  Were.

  I consider pointing out that Sin and his brother aren’t exactly two peas in a pod, but I don’t want to bring up anything even remotely about Tristan now, not when Sin is actually speaking friendly to me.

  “Rachel did kind of get a raw deal,” I say, defending her yet again for her bad behavior. “You know, being the third-wheel sister and all.”

  But Sin has already heard my lame defenses of Rachel’s bitchiness too many times. I can tell he’s bored by my not jumping in and trashing her with him.

  I’m not sure why I ever bother to defend her. I guess because I know what it’s like to be forgotten by our parents. Only I had the advantage of being so close to Sarah, no one could come between us. Except, what if someone or something had? If she’d been having problems, I want to believe she would have talked to me about it. She’d have told me. I can’t imagine her keeping anything big a secret.

  We reach Highway One and make a left, winding our way through more idyllic farmland, past the bizarrely tiny village of Dogtown, through a eucalyptus grove that, in spite of the lovely familiar scent, I’m supposed to think is evil because it’s a nonnative species. Just over the coastal ridge, a wall of fog looms, and I wonder if we’ll even be able to see down the cliffside. I halfway hope we can’t.

  “Don’t worry,” Sin says, reading my mind. “It’ll be sunny closer to Bolinas.”

  And he’s right. When we near the Bolinas Lagoon, the fog has faded into a thin mist lingering over the water.

  When we finally reach the gravel road that leads to the trailhead, I feel the tension creep back into my shoulders, my neck, my temples. I try to breathe it away, but it doesn’t work. With each breath, my chest feels tighter.

  I don’t want to see how my sister fell to her death.

  I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.

  “Stop the car,” I say as we bump along toward what I know is the final turn before the trailhead parking lot.

  Sin, not the world’s best driver, hits the brakes too hard, and we both are jerked forward into our seat belts.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  Only weeks ago, Sarah was here. Alive. She’d ridden on this same road.

  But why? Why come all the way out here when she could have taken a hike only a few minutes from our house on one of her favorite trails? Maybe she was just in the mood for a change of scenery, but something about that idea leaves me just as unsettled as the other details I know about that day.

  Sin is staring at me, but he says nothing. He’s waiting for me to get my nerve back, I know. He doesn’t believe my little freak-out.

  “Let’s leave. This is stupid. We’re not going to figure out anything by going out there. All we’re going to see are some trees and rocks and water.”

  Sin reaches over and takes my cold, clammy hand in his. He leans in close so that I have no choice but to look away or look at him. I meet his gaze, and I blink away tears.

  “We’re going,” he says. “We have to go.”

  “I meant to bring flowers or something. I can’t go without anything to put there at the spot.”

  “I remembered. Everything’s in the back—flowers, candles, a poem she had in the school newspaper.”

  I’m so stunned I can’t think of anything to say. While I was busy trying not to think, Sin was thinking for me. He remembered to do what I should have done, even though I’ve been an utter shit of a friend lately.

  This sullen, weird drama queen who gives me whiskey and tattoos is the one who remembered the flowers.

  We, he’d said in his bed with me when something between us shifted, unbalancing our friendship.

  Now I know he meant it.

  He presses the gas pedal again, moving the van slowly forward as if easing me back into the idea that we are proceeding.

  A few minutes later the van stops, and I look up to see the trailhead right in front of us.

  “I’m scared.” I need him to somehow pry me out of my seat if we’re going to go any farther on this stupid journey.

  He sighs, but not exactly in an exasperated way. “Do you believe maybe Sarah is somewhere that she can see you? Or, like, know what you’re doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do.”

  This is news to me. In all the time I’ve known Sin, I’ve never heard him say anything remotely spiritual unless he’s being ironic. “What makes you think that?”

  He shrugs. “It’s just the way it has to be. What’s the point of our ever being conscious if we eventually stop being conscious? It would make our whole lives meaningless if we’re just here and gone again.”

  I’m too sick to my stomach to ponder anything this heavy, so I open my door and start to get out. My mouth tastes like I’ve been sucking on my house key. The scent of ocean and eucalyptus hits me, carried on a cold breeze, and I’m thankful for it.

  “She knows you’re here to say good-bye to her,” Sin says, and for a few seconds I freeze.

  I haven’t once thought of Sarah as with me, or watching me from a cloud above, since she died. Thinking about such things would require totally accepting that she’s gone, and I’m not sure I’m there yet.

  Or maybe that’s why I’m here.

  Sin is on my side of the van now. He opens my door some more, takes my hand, and says, “C’mon. Let’s go.”

  Twenty-Six

  Sarah

  Some truths

  we cannot bear to know

  and we cannot bear to reveal.

  Some truths are the ocean,

  and I,

  a grain of sand.

  My first memory of Asha: she’s a baby, maybe eight months old, just getting good at crawling, and soon as Mom puts her down on the floor in our living room, she smiles at me and comes crawling in my direction, giggling wildly all the way.

  I’m not quite four, and in my memory I have conflicted feelings about this little bundle of flesh barreling toward me. She’s cute, but I almost hate her for that because so far she’s taken from me my mom’s scattered attention. I remember resenting the way Lena watches Asha as she crawls, smiling like an adoring mother.

  “She loves you so much,” Lena says to me, and in my little-kid head I am both flattered and disbelieving.

  Then Asha reaches my legs where I am sitting on the couch, playing with a doll. She plops back onto her f
at baby bottom and grins up at me her gummy, toothless smile. She is delighted.

  And I see it’s true. It’s really true, this little sister of mine loves me like no one else does. Unlike Rachel, who is just as likely to pinch me and take my dolls as anything, this newer sister, from this moment on, is my ally.

  Years later, I got my big, bad diagnosis, and the Kinsey family started falling apart, but not me and Asha.

  She continued to be my loyal sidekick, and I her doting big sister. I savored the little ache in my chest that came with having someone I loved so completely.

  But now I can’t take care of Asha, and I am powerless. That ache I once savored is gone, replaced by a cold, horrible understanding of how little we can control.

  I like Sin. I like that he’s a good friend, that he carries the flowers for Asha, that he’s there to see this horrible trip of hers through to its sad end.

  I only wish I could be there to help her grow up, guide her away from the ugly, and toward the beauty she might find if she looks hard enough.

  Twenty-Seven

  Asha

  Sin is holding my hand as we make our way along the trail. This would be way too syrupy for us under normal circumstances, but the unspoken rules of our friendship seem not to apply right now. Over his shoulder, he has a backpack filled with flowers and the other stuff he remembered to bring that I didn’t.

  The air here so close to the ocean is cold and wet, and I wish I’d worn another layer under my sweater and jacket. I’m trying not to think about anything except putting one foot in front of another as we enter the grove of eucalyptus trees Rachel described, but my mind won’t stop.

  This is the last place Sarah was alive. The idea won’t stop assaulting me. I look around, half wanting and half not wanting to imagine what she saw and felt. She always walked around in nature as if seeing trees and birds and water and earth for the first time. But I can’t imagine her being like that the last day. If she was happy, or scared, or hopeless—I might never know, and this is the hardest thing to contemplate.

  I don’t know how Sarah felt at the end.

  Sin lets go of my hand and puts his arm around me. “You’re shaking.”

  “I’m cold. And scared.”

  “I know.”

  We reach the clearing, but it’s too awkward to keep walking with his arm around me, so he lets go, but keeps his hand on the small of my back, and I focus on this. I feel a tiny bit of comfort knowing he’s there to catch me if I fall.

  Sin stops again. “Okay. We’re in the right area.”

  I look out at the ocean. In the distance, the fog layer is creeping in, but here, the sun is still shining through, and only tendrils of fog reach out over the water. Seagulls screech somewhere nearby, and I see a trio of pelicans swooping low, gliding just above the waves in search of their next meal.

  We don’t need to guess where Sarah fell because up ahead, on the ocean side of the trail, someone has set up a small altar with her picture in a wood frame. There is a pile of smooth, round rocks, Zen-garden style, some dried-up flowers, and a little votive candle that’s already been lit and burnt out.

  I kneel down in front of the altar, and my stomach feels as if I’ve just dived over the cliff myself. It rises up, gets caught in my throat, and I have to try hard to breathe.

  The small photo of Sarah is a recent snapshot. She’s standing next to a tree trunk, smiling serenely, and whomever she’s looking at behind the camera, she loves. I think her boyfriend, David, must have made this altar. The pile of rocks is his kind of thing.

  I reach out and touch the photo. The glass is cold, and I don’t know why this surprises me. Sin sits down on the ground next to me and unzips his backpack. He hands me a bouquet of mixed flowers, a riot of bright colors that don’t seem solemn enough for the occasion, but, I realize, are exactly what I’d pick out if I had been presented with a choice of flowers for no reason at all.

  He’s taken the time to remove them from the florist’s plastic wrap and tie them together with a piece of twine. I place the flowers in front of Sarah’s picture, on top of some old ones that have dried up and started to decay.

  Then he hands me the poem, which he’s written out on a piece of nice parchment paper.

  “Want me to read it to you?” he offers.

  I shake my head. Sin has seen me at my absolute worst, drunk and puking and looking like hell, but for some reason I can’t bear for him to see me fall apart right now.

  “I’ll give you some time alone, okay?”

  I shake my head harder this time. “No, don’t leave.”

  I can hardly look at the poem at first. It’s one Sarah wrote a few years ago for English class, called “Take Me Away from Here.”

  I see the first line, They call this a place of unbearable beauty, and I look away. I can’t read it. Instead, I tuck it under the flowers so it won’t blow away.

  Sin sits quietly staring at the altar, and then he stands up and peers over the ledge a few feet away. I haven’t looked down there yet, but his doing so compels me to do the same. I cannot stand, so I crawl to the edge and peer down, my stomach doing another tumbling maneuver, bile rising in my throat. Just as Rachel described, halfway down a black rock is jutting out.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” I edge away again, feeling suddenly exhausted but desperate to get away from this spot.

  I was expecting this moment to release all the bad feelings I’ve bottled up, but it hasn’t. It’s just screwed up. Why doesn’t anything make sense? Why don’t I feel some wonderful sense of resolution, like I can finally say good-bye and all that crap?

  Too many questions, not enough answers.

  I’m not sure anything will ever make sense again.

  Sin bends over and picks a tall piece of grass, then twirls it absently between his fingers as he stares out at the ocean. I can see he’s feeling pretty useless right now, doesn’t know what to do with himself.

  I sit on my knees again, not wanting to see over the edge any longer, or to imagine how her body might have looked bobbing around down there.

  Sarah’s picture smiles at me still. I pick it up and look into her eyes, silently ask her to tell me something. What happened? And why? Except she’s nothing but a piece of photo paper now. She can’t talk.

  The person who took this photo can talk though. What does David know? Anything? I haven’t seen or talked to him since the funeral, and I don’t want to, because he reminds me too much of Sarah when she was happiest, but I will. If anyone knows more about her state of mind before she died, it’s him.

  “Want to walk a little?” I say as I put the picture back in its spot.

  “Sure, if you’re up for it.”

  Sin takes my hand and helps me to my feet, and I follow him north on the trail, away from these questions that have no obvious answers.

  Twenty-Eight

  Rachel

  Stupid boy. He doesn’t get the obvious truth that is clearer to me every day. He doesn’t understand that without Sarah, there is no us. This seems so apparent to me, but to David, it’s like I’m the cure to whatever ails him.

  He shows up at my work, looking like a lost puppy dog, right at the end of my shift. I am tired, cranky from dealing with rude customers, and David is way down on the list of people I want to see right now. Like maybe at the bottom.

  “We need to talk,” he says from his position at the coffee bar.

  I have been avoiding him, and he knows it. He reminds me too much of me sometimes, the way he could just wreck Sarah’s life and go on living like everything’s pretty much A-fucking-OK.

  I wipe up a spilled bit of cream from the black countertop and don’t look at him. When I am finished with the counter, I turn and try to look busy with the espresso machine. I will make one for myself and pretend it’s for a customer. I will do whatever I can to keep him from thinking I can leave now.

  “Don’t you get off work at three?” he calls over my shoulder.

 
I shake my head no and continue with this all–important task.

  “You can’t ignore me forever.”

  He underestimates me. He really does.

  “What can I get for you?” I hear Lindsey, my shift replacement, ask him, and then I know my gig is up.

  “Actually, I’m just waiting for Rachel,” David says.

  “Oh, she can leave now.”

  I want to strangle Lindsey with my apron ties. She smiles at me when I turn from the espresso maker, and I glare.

  Why must I work with such freaking idiots?

  I take off my apron and have an idea. Maybe it’s a good thing David has shown up today. I can catch a ride home with him, and with any luck Lena will be there, and she can experience the joy of seeing us together.

  She doesn’t know about me and David yet. Not that I have been trying to hide it, but she’s been so caught up in her own fabulous problems she hasn’t been around enough to notice anything about my life.

  This could be sweet.

  I am picking at the scab again, and I don’t know why I do this shit. Half of me doesn’t want anything to do with David, or with what happened before Sarah died, and half of me can’t turn away from it.

  “Give me a ride home?” I ask, and David nods.

  I flash a smile, which I can see immediately confuses him. Even better if he thinks there’s still a chance between us.

  I never expected him to fall for me so hard, which is why this whole extended breakup thing has been so difficult. I mean, if it was just sex for me, then how could it have been more for him? Stupid question, but still the idea intrigues me.

  When we are in the car alone together, he doesn’t start up the engine. Instead, he clears his throat and turns to me. “I’m beginning to feel like you were just using me.” His handsome cheeks redden a bit.

  “Why would you think that?” I’m not ready to give up all my cards. I don’t know when David’s thinking I love him might come in handy. And using is a harsh word. I don’t think I was, exactly.

  “Were you?”