The Good Sister

by Jamie Kain

  I imagined the stories read on warm laps, the diapers changed, the first steps taken, the meals of spaghetti and meatballs or grilled cheese, the baseball games, the first kiss, first awkward date, first time with a girl, family movie nights and camping trips and all the imperfect moments that make up a childhood, and a life.

  Then I had come along.

  What loss could I ever feel now that would make up for the life I’d taken away?

  I should have known when Rachel slowed down the car and glanced over at me as we passed the cross that something was not right. She was not the type to notice or linger over roadside memorials.

  “That must be for the guy who died in the hit-and-run,” she said oh so coolly, as if she had no idea about the truth.

  Oh, had I ever learned the dangers of arguing while driving, so I kept my mouth shut. Easy enough when I was coiled so tightly inside, breathing was all the effort I could manage.

  The farther from the spot we traveled, the more I itched to get out of the car, to get away from Rachel. It was a mistake to have come with her, I knew already.

  David was lost to me, Rachel was lost to me, and Brandon was dead. Brandon, whom I didn’t know but so desperately wanted to have known, was a beacon of light I couldn’t see through the fog. I could only imagine his brightness in the distance, a point I blindly traveled toward.

  Everything about my life felt stolen.

  As if poking at an open wound, I pictured Brandon hitchhiking that night. Tried to imagine what he had been doing in the hours and days before his death. In a news article I had perilously, stupidly saved, he was said to have been traveling up the California coast, camping and hiking and wandering. He’d been a college student but had dropped out for a year to travel, said his parents in the article. His major had been premed. So he was like me in that way, interested in medicine. He might have gone on to save many people’s lives, if he had lived.

  Why had he been hitching a ride so late at night? The articles never mentioned. He could have been out at a bar or a party—maybe even the same party we’d attended. I tried to remember if I’d glimpsed his face in the crowd of people, but I couldn’t. I would never know if he’d been there, or if things could have been different if somehow even one moment before the accident could have been changed.

  I recalled the crushed guitar that had been strapped to his back lying by the side of the road, and I wondered if he’d been a good guitar player.

  I tried to imagine what it would have been like to kiss him, allowing myself to believe for a moment that I could breathe life back into him with my slow molasses lungs.

  In the dark, lonely cave of my mind, a whole living Brandon took shape. Particular details of him, vivid to me as the day outside. The rough stubble of his unshaven cheek against my skin, the oily male scent of his hair, the salt and sweat taste of him when we kissed—this is what I focused on, as if imagining him could undo all the wrong I’d done on this dark road.

  How would Rachel react if she knew my thoughts? But of course I didn’t dare speak. Couldn’t speak. Wouldn’t break this spell even if I could have.

  Instead, I closed my eyes and tried to lose myself in these memories that weren’t.

  “Where do you want to hike?” Rachel asked sometime after we’d turned south.

  I knew the trails from countless hikes, and she didn’t. I had a favorite trail that wound north along the coast, overlooking the ocean. “Keep driving this way,” I said, my voice a strange artifact of my old self, the one who got into the car a half hour ago. “There’s a place we can go that I haven’t been to in a while.”

  At the end of a long gravel road was the trailhead, populated by a few parked cars and marked by a couple of signs explaining where we were and how long the trail was. I had been here a few times before with David, in what felt like another lifetime, and the almost-forgotten memory of his leading me into a tuck-away meadow and laying me down on the grass was nearly enough to trap me in the car.

  But there was Rachel, standing outside, looking at me through the windshield with the expectation that we would do what we’d come here to do. And for the first time I thought to wonder, what is it really that we have come here for?

  Between the dark deeds that lay behind us and between us, I could not see any good that would come.

  Yet I got out of the car, and for that I have only myself to blame.

  A heavy fog had settled over the coast that day, keeping the air cool and damp. Around us, pine, redwood, and eucalyptus trees towered like silent, grasping giants. I could smell the ocean but couldn’t see it yet, and I longed for a view that wasn’t socked in by fog. I had hoped to be able to look out at the ocean and see a dazzling blue horizon, something vaster than my own problems. Instead, I had only this silent, looming gray that felt too much like the feeling in my chest.

  Underfoot, the trail was soft and a bit muddy from a rainstorm two days before. I inhaled the scent of eucalyptus and sea air, trying to calm myself and find the sort of peace that hiking in this quiet wilderness had always brought me. But Rachel’s presence did not invite calm. I could hear her tromping along behind me, breathing heavily even though we weren’t moving fast or uphill.

  I led the way along the trail until we were well past a man and woman who’d been headed in the opposite direction. My heart thudded in my chest, its beat somehow feeling too fast and too slow. When we were alone on the trail again, I could feel Rachel dragging like a weight behind me, and I slowed down until she was by my side.

  In the cold, dank forest, I could no longer see any reason to hide from the truth. And maybe, if I was honest with her, I could make some kind of good come of all this bad. Maybe I could make things better with Rachel, if nothing else. Maybe that was the universe’s reason we were here alone together now.

  “David told me about the two of you,” I said carefully, forcing the words out in an even stream in spite of myself, not wanting her to know how much she’d hurt me, or at least the former me who had cared.

  “Oh.” She looked at me with a flash of defiance. “I figured he would. He never was interested in sneaking.”

  This little shared intimacy—Rachel’s knowing what David was or wasn’t interested in doing—should have hurt more than it did. Instead, I felt as if the fog all around us had seeped into me, leaving my emotions blurry and muffled.

  “We broke up. Did he tell you that?”

  Her expression gave away nothing. “I heard all about your fight.”

  The fight.

  We had only one argument—that night in the car.

  He wouldn’t have told her. But then, I’m not sure I knew anymore what David was and wasn’t capable of doing. Maybe he would have.

  I felt myself speeding up on the trail, a cold truth chasing me.

  “I know all about it,” Rachel said, struggling to keep up.

  I glanced back at her and her calculated indifference.

  When I said nothing, she continued, “I even know about Brandon.”

  I stopped. Let the cold truth catch me where I stood, let it seep in and fill me with a new kind of numbness. My life as I knew it was ending right here in the forest. No, it had already ended, but I was only now fully understanding.

  Rachel knew.

  She knew.

  What could I do with that knowing except obliterate it?

  She gazed back at me with contempt. Rachel hated me, and I deserved it. I was exactly the kind of person she knew I was.

  “What did he tell you?” I asked in a voice I didn’t even recognize as my own.

  “You killed that guy, Sarah. He told me you were driving the car.”

  This was the moment I deserved. I knew it. When I left Brandon there on the side of the road, I gave up the right to ever feel good about myself again. I knew that then as I know it now.

  I couldn’t think what to say in my own defense.

  “You killed him, and if the police find out, you’ll go to prison.” She said it all calmly, m
atter-of-factly, as if we were discussing my having gone to the store to buy milk and bread.

  For a second, I considered lying and saying David had been the driver. I wanted to believe he deserved it, for betraying me not once but twice with Rachel. But I couldn’t. I just stood there, defeated, filled with loathing for myself.

  It was a relief to have someone else know the truth. I got to see how it felt to be accused and to be convicted of a crime of which I was guilty. It made my decision easier, that’s for sure.

  But Rachel didn’t stop there. She kept on talking about the accident. She wouldn’t let it go. She took pleasure in knowing how thoroughly I’d ruined my life, and I began to feel a creeping sense of wanting to exact my own revenge.

  There. I said it. It’s true.

  Even my death was a cruel act. Not to myself, but to my sister. To everyone I loved and still love.

  Is there any greater shame than that?

  But there is also comfort in being able to stand at a cliff’s edge and feel no fear. There is a sense of freedom I have only known in that one brief instant before death. Perhaps cancer prepared me for the eventual reality of death, but only this total annihilation of my former self freed me of fear.

  When I stood at the precipice, I looked down at my toes. Only a step farther and I would be in the air, a sheer drop so far down to the ocean below. It was a very high tide, because from the other times I’d been to this spot, I knew the ocean was concealing a narrow, rocky beach. Wind whipped my hair, and I felt Rachel’s presence nearby on the trail. When I glanced over my shoulder, she was sitting on a rock and tightening her bootlaces, seemingly oblivious.

  It was the perfect moment, I decided there and then. Rachel deserved to see this happen. She would be my witness, and at least in that way, in my death, I would exact the tiniest bit of revenge. Let my death be permanently imprinted on her memory. It was only fitting.

  So you see? I am reprehensible.

  I closed my eyes and thought of Brandon, and the light of him began to take shape.

  I looked back at Rachel one last time, making sure she saw me. “Good-bye,” I said, so softly she might not have heard.

  Good-bye, sister, good-bye, trees, good-bye, rocks and ocean and breeze. Good-bye, everything.

  I’d never been confident about diving into pools, but this time, I let myself fly free. I simply dove. Down, down I fell, as the water rushed up to meet me.

  Thirty-Four

  Rachel

  I can’t believe Lena has managed this. We are at an actual family dinner, which she of all people has orchestrated. Asha, the new rebel in the family, is here. She seems to have taken a shower, combed her hair, put on clean clothes, even. I try to imagine what Lena could have said to get her here, but I can’t. I will have to drag Asha into the bathroom later and get her to tell me.

  I didn’t have a lot of choice. Lena told me she’d buy me the boots I’ve been lusting after in the Anthropologie catalog if I showed, so okay, fine. I can sit through a one-hour dinner for a pair of boots that would cost me a paycheck and a half working at Sacred Grounds.

  We sit in the dim yellow light of La Table, a new restaurant that tries hard to be hip and local and fresh, with a menu that has stuff like organic, artisanal feta cheese made of milk from a goat down the street named Bacchus, or whatever. There’s shit like microgreens on the menu too. Does that mean we’ll need a microscope to see our salads?

  I have never been here before but have wandered by and viewed through the window middle-aged couples looking either bored or engaged in conversation and well fed. It’s the kind of place our mother does not take us.

  To my left, Asha has the edgy energy of a meth addict aching for her next hit. I doubt this is her problem though. She is too fleshy to be on meth. Also too steadily morose.

  Tension is in the air, like something is about to go down, but I don’t know what. We are all being stiff and polite, and when we have placed our orders, Lena clears her throat and my eyes land on the huge-ass diamond ring she is wearing.

  This, she hasn’t explained.

  “Ron and I have some big news for everyone, so we wanted to bring us all together tonight to celebrate.” She pauses and smiles at everyone. “We’re getting married!”

  Somehow, I thought this would never happen. There have been boyfriends, sure, but no one stupid enough to take on a woman with three daughters, one of whom had medical bills out the ass. But now that daughter is gone, and everything has changed so much I can hardly recognize us.

  When we say nothing, she continues, “We’re planning a wedding for early fall, but in the meantime, I know you’ll want to hear how this all affects the two of you.”

  She’d better not expect us to change our names. I don’t even know what Ron’s last name is, and I sure as hell am not going to call him Dad. I stare daggers at Lena.

  “Maybe you should have talked to us about that before you decided to get married,” Asha says under her breath.

  “I’m sorry, what was that?” Lena asks.

  “Nothing.” Asha sighs.

  “I’ve thought about this a great deal, and I don’t think I should go on living in a house that reminds me so much of Sarah. It’s not good for my healing process.”

  Oh my fucking God. I eye the fork, wondering if I have the nerve to fling it at her head.

  “So what? We’re moving?” Asha says, her tone making it clear exactly how she feels about that idea.

  “I’m going to move into Ron’s house,” Lena says. “It’s a two-bedroom though, and he uses the second as his office, so we were thinking, perhaps…”

  “Perhaps,” Ron cuts in, “you’d like to strike out on your own, either at the current rental house or elsewhere.”

  I blink at this, none of it making any sense. My brain hasn’t caught up with the meaning of the words.

  “Or,” Lena adds, “you could move in with your father now that he’s back in Marin.”

  “Those are our choices? Ravi or the street?” Asha says, her voice rising, and I can tell she’s very, very close to making a scene.

  My feral cat of a mother is kicking me out of the house. That’s what I finally realize.

  I am not sure who to hate more—Lena for making this decision or myself for not being thrilled at the idea that I am set free. No option of living at home now, so that should be a good thing, right?

  Then why do I feel like total crap?

  I look over at Asha, who is seething. What does she care? She doesn’t want to live with us anyway—and she manages not to half the time.

  Lena is saying something about starting a new chapter of our lives or some shit, but I can’t focus on her words. I want to push the table over and storm out of the restaurant like the star of some reality-TV show, but it feels like lead weights are holding me down, pressing me into this chair.

  I look over at Ron, who is busy texting on his phone. Texting? Right now, in the middle of our big family moment? I’d expect that of myself or one of my friends, but not of a guy my former-hippie, antitechnology mother is about to marry. I feel like everything I thought I knew is suddenly wrong, like all the rules of this stupid universe have been rewritten.

  My gaze falls again to the huge diamond sparkling on her ring finger, and I see a glimmer of the truth. Lena has full-on sold out. She has been bought for the price of a two-carat rock, and she doesn’t need me anymore. I’m not a part of the new Lena Kinsey–de Graas life story. I’m only going to get in the way, like one too many hyphenated names she will need to drop to make room for the new.

  “What if I don’t want to move?” Asha says, her eyes darker than usual as she glares at Lena now.

  “Darling, we all have to make adjustments to this new situation. I simply can’t continue living in a house that reminds me so much of Sarah.”

  Ron looks up then. “Like I said, there is the possibility of you and Rachel remaining at your mother’s house, if the two of you can pay the utilities and half the rent. I’
d be willing to chip in the other half. It would be cheaper than remodeling my current house.”

  Something about this idea makes me want to puke.

  Me and Asha, living on our own? A sixteen-year-old and an eighteen-year-old? Even I think this idea sounds stupid. Neither of us knows how to cook anything besides a grilled-cheese sandwich. Lena’s selling us out for this moron?

  “Oh, right. I’ll just quit school and come up with a thousand dollars a month, no problem,” Asha says as she lets her fork clatter to the plate.

  “I don’t even earn enough to buy groceries,” I squawk, sounding like an idiot.

  The rent on our house is two thousand freaking dollars a month, and that’s a bargain in our town from what I can tell.

  “It could be a good education in money management,” Lena says. “Now that you’re eighteen, you can work full-time. It’s a chance to learn what it takes to budget and plan.”

  I can learn what it takes to live in a homeless shelter is more like it. Already I am regretting having lost both David and AJ in one fucked-up day. At least I could have lived with one of them, maybe, and then I start calculating what it would take to get either of them back in my life in a serious way. Except I don’t want to move to Oakland, and I don’t like David enough to live with him.

  “I’m moving in with Sin,” Asha announces. “And you don’t need to call me your daughter anymore since you have no idea how to behave like a mother.”

  With that my little sister stands up and sends her chair flying backward, startling everyone around us in the restaurant. She heads for the door, and I watch her for only a moment before I realize I want to follow. For once, I feel nothing but admiration for Asha and her relentless anger.

  I stand up, and Lena looks at me with thin, pinched lips. “Sit down, Rachel. We will discuss what your options are.”

  I feel a giant Fuck you hovering on my lips, but I don’t say it. Instead, I drop my napkin in my plate of pasta and walk away.