The Good Sister

by Jamie Kain

  The tree has no leaves and therefore provides no shade from the harsh sun. It is a gnarled, old mission fig tree that I remember vaguely having eaten fruit from as a kid. No fruit here now.

  And since when do figs grow in the desert?

  As I come closer to the figure, I realize he is the person I am here to see.

  It’s Brandon.

  I halt in my tracks, but he looks up and spots me before I can think what I will do or say. He seems to recognize me instantly.

  He stops torturing the guitar and waves me over. I close the distance between us, trying to think what would be appropriate conversation, but before I can speak, he does.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Not really.” I’m surprised at the sound of my voice, which emerges without my having willed myself to speak.

  He squints up at me, as if trying to place my face in his memory.

  “You’re the girl who was driving the car, aren’t you?”

  His voice has a soft, gravelly quality, and his eyes … I finally get to see what they look like. Gray-blue, they remind me of the ocean where I spent my final moment of life. They contrast with his golden skin and blond hair in such a way that makes them almost startling to behold. He is beautiful.

  I’m sorry I ran over you comes to mind as perhaps what I should say next, but it seems ridiculously inadequate.

  He looks much more alive than he did the last time I saw him. He is whole. Intact. Not exactly alive, but here with me. And we are whatever we are together.

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’s me.”

  “Hi,” he says, not smiling, but not looking hostile either.

  “I…” My words freeze in my throat.

  “Yeah, I know. It was an accident, right?” He doesn’t seem angry, but …

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It happens.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is awkward.”

  No kidding.

  Slowly, I sit down beside him on the dusty ground.

  I notice bloodstains are on his clothes too. They’re dried to a brownish color, just like the stains on my shirt.

  “How long have you been here?” I ask him.

  He shrugs, looks down at his guitar, which I notice now has two broken strings, but isn’t crushed the way it was at the side of the road. Maybe it’s a different guitar. Yes, it must be. Guitars don’t travel into the afterlife, right? But then, why would our clothing come with us?

  None of this makes any logical sense.

  “No idea,” he finally says. “It’s not very easy to keep track of time here.”

  I wonder why we are in my past—the ranch—and not his. Does he see the same surroundings I do?

  He plucks at the guitar, which is completely out of tune. “I used to be able to play this thing.”

  Not sure what to say, I cross my hands in my lap and study him. He is the first dead person I’ve gotten to see up close in this … wherever we are.

  “So how did you die?” he asks.

  “Suicide.”

  A hot wind blows my hair into my face, and I push it back from my eyes. Nearby, a couple wanders between buildings, arguing about something. The woman looks as if she’s about to cry.

  “Why’d you kill yourself?” he asks.

  I shrug, not sure what to say. Will he be flattered if I admit it’s because of him? Or will I just sound like an idiot? And does it even matter what I sound like now?

  “Guilt?” I murmur, half hoping he won’t hear and won’t ask again.

  “About?”

  “Oh, you know, running over an innocent hitchhiker. Stuff like that.”

  “You shouldn’t have killed yourself on account of me. I mean, no sense in both of us being dead, right?”

  I stare at him, utterly without a response. He can’t possibly be for real, and yet, he looks serious.

  He strums the guitar one last time, then sets it aside. “This thing got trashed in the wreck when you hit me.”

  I take another look at it and see that the body of the instrument indeed has been crushed and awkwardly repaired with duct tape. So there are adhesive products in the afterlife?

  The shirt he was wearing was this stained shirt he has on now. The jeans, they’re the same too. Against the tree leans the same grungy, green backpack he’d been carrying that night. What’s in it, I wonder, that’s so important he still has it now?

  “So … this place, wherever we are. You can’t get a guitar fixed here?”

  “You don’t know where we are?”

  “You do?”

  He laughs. “My family’s Catholic. Of course I know where we are—purgatory.”

  I frown at this. “I don’t believe in purgatory.”

  “You don’t have to believe in it to be here. You can call it whatever you want, but we sure as hell aren’t at the pearly gates of heaven.”

  “No.” I look around again at this eerie setting, this scattering of trailers in the desert with the too bright sun and the wind and the heat and us wandering, lost souls.

  I don’t know what to call this place, but it’s a ghost town for sure. Or something like one.

  “So what do you do here all day?”

  He shrugs. “Not much. There aren’t any cars that seem to work, or if they do work, they break down after a mile or two. And we’re in the middle of this desert without another town for I don’t know how far—maybe there aren’t any other towns.”

  “But—” I can’t even think what I want to ask next. I am still consumed with the horrible feeling I’m stuck in a dream that I can’t wake from. And then I think, oh, no, what if he’s here only because I’m here. What if he’s just a figment of my dead imagination? Is that possible?

  What isn’t possible in this weird place?

  “What did you do to end up here?” I ask. “You know, instead of heaven or hell?”

  “You think we’re being punished?” He seems to be considering the idea for the first time.

  “Aren’t we? You’re the one who’s Catholic.”

  “I said my family is. We never went to church, and I didn’t really believe in any of it until … well, until this.”

  Brandon stares at me for a moment, as if debating whether to tell me something. Then he stands up from the dusty ground and offers me a hand to do the same. “Come with me,” he says as he helps me up.

  He sets the broken guitar aside next to the backpack. Then he takes my hand again and leads me across the courtyard, toward a building labeled 3013-C in black block lettering done with a stencil. This is not something I remember from the ranch days. It’s new.

  I’m a little freaked-out by the feel of Brandon’s holding my hand. It’s oddly intimate for two dead people.

  “What is this place?” I ask as we enter a side door and stand in the darkness.

  He doesn’t answer, and slowly my eyes adjust. I look around and see that we’re in a room full of bookshelves. Rows and rows of them. Brandon leads me across to a shelf and pulls out what seems to be a random notebook.

  “Open it to any page,” he says.

  I do, and I find myself staring at a report I wrote in the sixth grade about ancient Egypt. It takes me a minute to recognize it, but when I see my name in the upper right-hand corner, in that loopy, unsure script of an eleven-year-old girl, I know.

  “Try another page,” he says.

  I flip to the back of the book and find a picture I drew a couple of years ago in life-drawing class. A woman sits with her knees pulled up to her chest. She’s naked, but in profile; the most obscene thing about her is the rolls of fat that form at her rib cage. Nothing else is much visible in her position.

  “Oh, God,” I whisper. “I hated this drawing. What’s it doing here?”

  He pulls another book from the shelf. This one I even recognize the cover of. It looks like a diary I kept when I was maybe fourteen and fifteen. A purple paisley pattern decorates the cover of the journal.

  “Recognize this?”

/>   I am sick with recognition. I don’t want to revisit this part of my life, these intimate details, in front of a stranger. It all feels too surreal to have presented to me right now, when I am reeling over so many things at once.

  “Too much to take in?”

  “Yeah, sort of.” I put the journal back on the shelf. “But how did you know this would be my stuff?”

  “It belongs to whoever picks it up. If I pull one off the shelf, I see whatever is from my past. Somebody else does, they see their stuff.”

  “But … this is the exact journal I used to have.”

  “It only looks like that to you, not to anyone else.”

  “But … why?” Why any of this? Why us, here, together now?

  “That’s the question we all have to answer. Right?” He looks at me as if I must know.

  Do I know anything? Did I come here to find Brandon, or to ease my guilt?

  Maybe both.

  Maybe.

  It’s the new yes and the new no.

  Thirty-Eight

  Asha

  I have not been in a hospital since Sarah was sick. The antiseptic odors that don’t quite hide the smell of sickness give me a queasy feeling that I instantly associate with Sarah. I keep reminding myself that I am here because of Rachel.

  Rachel.

  What if she dies too, and I am an only child? What kind of crazy hell would that be?

  I texted Sin during the ambulance ride, and now he comes shuffling down the hallway, looking more bewildered than I feel. The fluorescent, overhead lights make his skin look pale green, and his hair looks as if it hasn’t been washed in a while.

  “So what happened?” He sits down in the hard plastic, brown chair next to me.

  “She took a bunch of pills.”

  “Suicide? Rachel?” He frowns. “I thought she loved herself too much for that.”

  I am not in the mood to laugh, so I sigh instead. I will explain it all later, maybe in the light of day.

  I don’t know where Lena is. And I don’t know where Ravi is. I have tried to call and text them both, but they forget to turn their phones on, or forget to charge their batteries, or whatever.

  Why is it when there is a crisis, only one person is sitting beside me? How did a sixteen-year-old cross-dresser become the most responsible person in my life?

  Anger makes my chest tighten. I don’t want to be here right now. I don’t want to lose another sister.

  When I found Rachel, she was so knocked-out, I knew something was wrong. No way she’d just decided to curl up and go to sleep after everything that went down tonight.

  I tried to wake her up and couldn’t, and then I called 911. Then I found the pill bottle while I was on the phone with the operator.

  I felt so numb, like this was just the kind of stuff that happens to the Kinsey girls now. We kill ourselves. It’s a thing we do.

  Later, in the ambulance, I watched the EMTs monitoring her vital signs, and I wanted more than anything else I have ever wanted for them to make Rachel live.

  She is the piece of our family that never quite fit, but now I see everything everyone could have done to make her fit in. and I want to do my part of it.

  Sin puts his arm around me and I lean over on his shoulder and close my eyes.

  I don’t know how long I have been like that when I hear the click of heels hurrying on the tile hospital floor, and I can tell by the footsteps that it is Lena. I look up and watch her approach, her designer bag bouncing at her blue-jeaned hip. Her face is pale, and she seems to look past me without seeing me at first, until she stops and sits down on the chair next to mine.

  “When will they let us see her?” she asks.

  At first, I don’t know who she’s talking about. See who? I almost ask.

  Which is stupid. How could I not know? But events are slow and jumbled in my mind, and I feel as if we are living in a hellish loop of Kinsey girls dying. Am I next? Should I want to be?

  Rachel. Of course. She’s talking about Rachel. But then I realize I’ve been asleep, because when I look at the wall clock, it’s just past two in the morning now, and I don’t know why my mother’s hair looks so good, why her lipstick is perfect. What has she been doing that’s she just now heard my messages?

  “Where were you?” I blurt without answering her, angry at her for not looking as if she has stumbled out of bed like a normal mother would have at this hour.

  “I was at Ron’s.”

  This explains nothing, and she knows it.

  “He was having a party, for our engagement. I was going to invite the two of you after dinner. I tried to call you but the cell reception is bad at his house.”

  As I sit up, peeling myself off Sin’s shoulder, I try to imagine what a party at Ron’s place would be like. A bunch of aging hippie types trying to pretend they’re still twenty-one. I’ve seen it before. My parents used to have such parties, at which no one minded when us kids got drunk too. At which couples who didn’t belong together disappeared into bedrooms and emerged later, rumpled, still drunk, maybe to find a spouse waiting, maybe not.

  My mom is not rumpled, and this brings me some vague sense of relief. I want to believe she’s past all that crap. But why should I care now, at this late date?

  I realize with a jab of pain in my gut that she’s nearly the only family I have left.

  “Rachel’s sleeping,” I finally say. “They pumped her stomach. We’re supposed to wait out here, but I can probably take you in to see her.”

  I don’t mention that I’m terrified of the hospital room, that it reminds me too much of the years we spent in them with Sarah, that just the smell makes me feel like I’m going to throw up. She probably knows. She was there too.

  “God,” she murmurs. “What was she thinking?”

  I don’t answer. Instead, I glance over at Sin, whose expression is totally neutral. He is like Switzerland sitting there in the queasy glow of the fluorescent lights. Then I rise and lead Lena across the hall to the room where Rachel is hooked up to a heart monitor and an IV drip of something. She is asleep.

  Lena’s face goes white when she sees Rachel. Her mouth is stained black from whatever they used to pump her stomach. She hardly looks like herself. Rachel, always the prettiest, the tallest, the curviest, the shrewdest, is lying there limp and half-dead looking, and it’s very, very real. It’s not a bad dream.

  Lena places a hand on Rachel’s arm and sighs, but instead of feeling comforted that Lena is finally here, I want to slap her hand away. I want to scream and rage and break the expensive hospital equipment surrounding us.

  “Excuse me, are you a parent?” a nurse says as she enters the room.

  Lena, with a more official audience now, visibly crumples. She nods, her shoulders sag, and her face transforms into that of a grieving mother. Only now do I think to question her lack of emotion before. Would it have been wasted on me? I wonder.

  The nurse glances at the monitor Rachel is hooked up to, then at me. Her expression carefully neutral, she places a hand on Lena’s arm. “Your daughter is going to make it through this, Ms. Kinsey.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She took what looks to be about thirty tablets of Vicodin.”

  Lena gasps, but it sounds fake to me. Probably she is registering that it was her Vicodin, that she will have to buy more from wherever she gets her endless supply.

  “We can’t know for sure about liver damage until test results come back, and it’s possible there may be some mental impairment if the brain was deprived of oxygen for any length of time.”

  “When will you know?”

  “She should be waking up soon, and then we’ll have more information. Let me know if you need anything—just ring the buzzer there.”

  When we are alone again, Lena wipes away the dampness on her cheeks and settles into a chair next to the bed. She stares at Rachel’s sleeping form for a few moments, then digs her iPhone out of her bag and checks it for messages.

 
Rage fills my chest, so that I can barely breathe. “How can you just sit there and look at your messages? Did Ron send you a text to see how your kid is doing in the hospital? Why isn’t he here too, if he’s supposed to be marrying you?”

  Lena blinks at my outburst, then drops her phone back into her purse and sets it on the floor. “What is the matter with you?”

  “Rachel nearly killed herself tonight, and you act like she just sprained her ankle. What’s the matter with me? What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m not going to talk to you when you’re being so hostile.”

  “Yes, you are—”

  “Why don’t you go outside and cool off. Rachel doesn’t need this kind of energy when she’s trying to heal.”

  “You’ve barely looked at her since you got here.” I feel tears coming now, but I’m not going to fall apart. Coming faster than the tears are all the things I’ve failed to say for way too long. “Do you even care how screwed up she is? Do you?”

  “Asha, now isn’t the time—”

  “Do you know she slept with David? She knew it would kill Sarah, and she did it anyway.”

  “You’re being hysterical.” Lena’s face is a calm mask, and I want to say something that will shatter the calm.

  I think of telling her the rest of it, about the argument between Sarah and David, the accident with the hitchhiker, Rachel’s cruelty on the hike, Sarah’s suicide, but I can’t. That’s Rachel’s story to tell now.

  My voice must have gotten louder than I realized, because the nurse appears again. “Is something wrong in here?”

  “No,” Lena says.

  “Yes,” I say too loudly.

  “You’ll have to keep it down. If you can’t, I’ll need to call security.”

  “Call security,” I say, my whole body shaking. “Tell them she’s the problem. Tell them it’s her fault Rachel took all those pills.”

  The nurse takes my arm with her cool, strong hands and attempts to lead me from the room. At first I won’t budge, but she applies a gentle pressure to my lower back, and I allow her to take me into the hallway, away from Lena, who is only staring mannequin-like from her place in the bedside chair.

  “I know it’s very upsetting to find your sister like that,” the nurse is murmuring, but she doesn’t know the half of it.