My Sister Rosa

by Justine Larbalestier

  ‘Want to see something?’ Rosa says right into my ear.

  I startle. ‘What?’

  Rosa’s grinning, which is never good. I am all the way awake.

  The window next to her is open a crack, spitting in rain.

  ‘Close the window, Rosa.’

  She slides a small book out of her backpack, turning it so I can see the front.

  An Australian passport. She opens it to the photo page: the horrible drunk from the plane.

  I lunge as Rosa pushes it out the window.

  ‘I win,’ Rosa says.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rosa is a ticking bomb.

  I don’t think it matters what you call it: psychopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder, evil, or the devil within. What matters is how to prevent the bomb from exploding.

  It would be a lot easier if the parentals believed Rosa is a bomb. It would be even easier if she wasn’t a bomb. I would give anything for her to not be the way she is. Rosa ticks off everything on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist except for promiscuity, driving too fast and other adult sins. Give her time.

  The checklists – there are different versions – each have dozens of questions designed to fit into different factors. The four that make sense to me are:

  Callousness: Rosa doesn’t care about anyone but herself.

  Disinhibition: Rosa is an impulsive thrillseeker. Her risk assessment is terrible because she doesn’t believe anything can happen to her. If she wants something she takes it.

  Fearlessness: Nothing scares her. She’s never worried.

  Charisma: She has way too much. She can charm most people and get them to do what she wants.

  Rosa is a ticking bomb and she’s my responsibility.

  My sister Rosa was born in our Sydney home when I was seven years old. I watched the whole thing, though David’s parents, Nana and Papa, worried it would traumatise me. There was much shouting at David, Papa in the lead as always.

  ‘He’s a seven-year-old boy! You’ll be paying his psychiatric bills for the rest of his life! Was it not bad enough that you make him call you by your first names? That poor boy doesn’t even have his father’s surname! This is not what our parents survived the Holocaust for! Making that poor little boy watch his own sister being born! I’ll cut you out of my will!’

  Rosa’s birth didn’t traumatise me.

  It was beautiful and kind of boring. I fell asleep on a bean bag the midwife brought. When I woke Sally was leaning with her forearms on the bed, with David’s hand gripped tightly in hers. On the floor between her feet was a mirror.

  The midwife smiled at me. ‘Do you want to see, Che? She’s crowning.’

  I crept closer, scared of getting in the way. In the mirror I could see something dark and slimy between Sally’s legs. It didn’t look like a baby’s head, it looked like a monster.

  ‘Here she is!’

  Rosa shot out so fast she was a blur. The midwife caught her. David and I gasped.

  She was so little, so perfect, with the biggest eyes I’d ever seen, looking straight at me. I couldn’t stop staring.

  The midwife put Rosa on Sally’s belly and Sally cradled the tiny baby in her hands. They were almost bigger than Rosa.

  David patted Rosa’s back. I had this huge tight feeling in my chest. Love. I was full of love for this tiny little creature person.

  ‘She’s gorgeous,’ the midwife said. ‘Congratulations.’

  She gave David scissors to cut the umbilical cord, which looked like a pink and blue rope. It pulsed.

  Sally smiled at me.

  Tears were pouring out of my eyes, but I wasn’t sobbing. It felt like the tears had nothing to do with me. ‘Can I touch her?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I reached out to touch her tiny hand. Her fingers curled around my index finger. My heart hurt.

  ‘You’re going to have to look out for Rosa, you know,’ Sally told me.

  ‘Protect her from the world,’ David said. ‘You’re her big brother.’

  Protect the world from her, he didn’t say.

  ‘How patriarchal of you,’ Sally said, with no heat. She blew David a kiss and bowed her head.

  We were all staring at tiny Rosa.

  The New York apartment is huge. The plans and photos we’ve seen didn’t make it seem so big. The McBrunights picked it out for us, which is fair, since they’re paying for it. I don’t want to know how much they’re paying. It’s like the business class of apartments when all our lives we’ve lived in economy.

  Our less than half-empty shipping crate, which we sent off many weeks ago, sits in the middle of the living room. I’m not sure you can call a room this big a living room. It’s bigger than any apartment we’ve lived in. At one end is the kitchen, which gleams, all metal and marble, with a giant island and two stoves.

  At the other end are stairs, leading up to mine and Rosa’s bedrooms. In between there are two enormous couches, with side tables at each end and a coffee table in between. The giant TV is on the same wall as the entrance to the apartment. Watching it will be like being at the movies. I didn’t know TVs came that big. There are four plants in giant pots against the wall of glass overlooking Second Avenue. They’re real. I wonder who’s going to water them. We’ve never managed to keep any plants alive.

  The shipping crate doesn’t belong in this shiny new place. It makes me feel a little better about being here. Every other move we took only what we could carry. This time we haven’t had to leave any clothes, or books, or posters, or Rosa’s chess sets behind.

  I can’t remember what else is in the crate, it’s so long since we packed it. There’s definitely no furniture. That’s languishing under David’s parents’ house in Sydney. Every so often Papa threatens to throw it out if we don’t come home. Almost as often as he threatens to cut us out of his will. Papa changes his will like most people change their bed sheets.

  In ten minutes it will be midnight in New York City and I’ll turn seventeen. I don’t have any texts from Nazeem, Georgie, Jason, or the aunts. Normally on my birthday my phone lights up. But we won’t have new sim cards until tomorrow. There’s no wifi, David tells us balefully, promising it will be operational in the morning. David is a computer genius. Making the tech work is always his job.

  ‘Help me get Rosa to bed,’ Sally says.

  I pick up Rosa and follow Sally up the stairs. It’s hard not to love Rosa when she’s sleepy like this, both eyelids drooping, her limbs floppy. She looks the way she did when she was a baby.

  ‘I killed a butterfly,’ Rosa says softly.

  ‘You…’ I say before I notice her eyes are shut and she’s heavier. She’s asleep.

  Sally opens the door to Rosa’s room. ‘Put her on the bed.’

  I do.

  ‘Doesn’t she look darling?’

  Rosa does. Her blonde curls form a fluffy halo. I kiss her forehead. If only she was the way she looks.

  We go downstairs. My legs don’t feel like part of my body.

  ‘Well, we’re here. New York City,’ David says, sitting on a couch. ‘For a while there I thought this was never going to happen.’ He looks at his watch. ‘Midnight!’ He jumps up and pulls me into a hug. ‘Happy birthday, Che! Seventeen at last.’

  ‘Happy birthday. I thought it’d never get here,’ Sally says, joining the hug. ‘I can’t believe it. You’re seventeen.’

  And a long way from home, I think. Great birthday present. I don’t say that. No point in starting a fight. I think about sleeping on the stairs.

  ‘Wow. You look terrible, Che,’ David says.

  ‘Thanks,’ I mumble. ‘Youse aren’t exactly looking…’ But the words dribble away. David looks like he’s woken from a restful sleep in his own bed. It’s not fair.

  ‘Bed. Sleep,’ Sally says, kissing me, pushing me towards the stairs.

  I drag myself upwards into my room, strip off my clothes, put my phone on charge so it’ll be ready for wifi and a new sim card in the m
orning, unplug the clock radio that glows too bright, and crawl into the bed, realising my backpack is downstairs with my pyjamas and toothbrush and acne cream and books and everything else. Too far. I close my eyes, ready to fall into oblivion.

  I don’t.

  I lie in my new room, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. Light streams in from the wet, brilliantly lit city outside. I left the blinds up. Sirens sound, getting louder and louder, then fade away. I hear the rain against the window again before it’s lost in the roar of a helicopter.

  I stagger out of bed, pull the blinds down, and the curtains across. The only light now is a thin sliver creeping in under my door. When I lie down I can’t see it.

  I close my eyes.

  More sirens. I wonder what the emergency is.

  It’s more than two years now since we lived in Sydney. I miss home with a sharpness that feels like appendicitis.

  I used every argument to persuade them. That everything since I was twelve has been chaos. Different homes, different cities, different countries. New Zealand, Indonesia, Thailand and now the USA. Which has meant different schools and sometimes haphazard homeschooling.

  How am I going to get into medical school without stability? I didn’t bother to mention how hard it is to not work with my Sydney boxing trainer, Natalie. My parents aren’t thrilled by my boxing.

  What about Rosa? I asked. She only had five years in the one home. You’re keeping her away from our extended family, from our aunts and uncles and cousins, grandparents. She needs to be looked after by family, not strangers. How can she make friends when we move so often?

  She’s dangerous, I didn’t say.

  I talked about how much I missed my friends. How much I missed being surrounded by people who sound like me. How sick I was of being a foreigner.

  Friends and family make us who we are, I argued. Everyone needs a community. Rosa especially, I didn’t say.

  You can make more friends, they argued. We’re moving to New York to make the world a better place. Sometimes you have to put the greater good first.

  You care more about the world than me and Rosa, I yelled.

  Which was when I lost. Sally and David have no respect for anyone who resorts to emotion. You have to be calm and rational to win an argument. You have to be an adult even if you aren’t one.

  I hate you, I didn’t say.

  Instead of home: yet another city, another country, another unfamiliar bed, listening to unfamiliar sirens, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling with eyes so tired they feel as if they’re melting down my cheeks. My right calf starts to cramp. I flex my foot, a trick Natalie taught me. Then my left calf starts in.

  I’m not going to look at what time it is.

  Should I have told the parentals? The passport is gone. Rosa will say there was no passport. They know she lies. They know I don’t. Yet Sally will ask if I’m sure that’s what Rosa threw out the window. After all, I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours.

  I add it to the list of things I haven’t told them. Worst of all being Apinya’s guinea pig.

  I can’t think about any of that.

  I do what Natalie had us do at the end of every training session: I run through every muscle, starting with the lumbrical muscles of my foot and working my way up to the galea aponeurotica on the top of my head. Natalie wasn’t that specific, but I want to be a doctor, specifically a neurologist or a psychiatrist. I know the names of all the muscles.

  I am not asleep.

  Should I embrace it? Go on a no-sleeping strike until the parentals agree to go home?

  Best birthday ever.

  My eyes burn.

  An electronic chime rings out, echoing between buildings.

  I can hear the shush of car tyres on the wet avenue, the squeal of brakes, people yelling. How can I hear them on the seventh floor? Through the rain?

  Will my brain shut the fuck up?

  My brain provides the answer to the question I didn’t know I was pondering: What was Rosa talking about when she said she killed a butterfly? I’m pretty sure it was at Changi Airport in Singapore. Two years ago? The butterfly garden there is gorgeous. Rosa stood quietly with her hands extended until a butterfly rested on her palm, wings pulsing.

  She smiled – a genuine smile – crushed the butterfly, then dropped its body into the greenery, wiping her hand on a fern.

  Natalie would be disappointed: a fighter is always able to shut out peripheral thoughts.

  What if the new boxing gym is nothing like the one back home? What if we never get working wifi? What if it never stops raining?

  What if Rosa…I don’t want to think about the worst she could do.

  A police car screams down the avenue. The siren is so loud the windows shake, rotating through a series of increasingly annoying sounds, one of which makes my bed vibrate, one that sounds like a flock of zombie birds being tortured, and another that’s close to a normal police siren, followed by a rumbling earthquake sound. An amplified voice calls a car to the kerb. The siren sounds again and the order is repeated.

  I’ve never heard so many sirens. New York, city of angry police and constant emergencies.

  Rosa will be delighted.

  CHAPTER THREE

  At five a.m. I give up on sleep. The sun isn’t up. I do my morning stretch and work out crappily, with some Muhammad Ali-inspired footwork so lead-footed and inelegant the great man would be horrified.

  Then I creep downstairs, not wanting to wake anyone, but the parentals and Rosa are sitting at the island eating muesli and drinking coffee and orange juice, as wide awake as I am.

  Sally’s red-eyed and haggard.

  ‘Happy birthday, Che,’ the parentals say in unison, jumping up to hug me. Rosa joins in the hug.

  I forgot it was still my birthday.

  ‘Seventeen, eh?’ Sally says, hugging me again.

  ‘It’s a prime number,’ Rosa says. ‘If you add up the first four primes you get seventeen.’

  ‘Can’t believe it. Seventeen. That’s how old we were when we met,’ David says, kissing Sally’s nose.

  ‘Yes, when you were my wild man. Remember the first time I had to bail you—’

  I hold up my hand. ‘My first birthday wish is that you not reminisce about the early days, or any days, of your eternal true love.’

  David nods. Sally makes a zipping-her-mouth gesture.

  ‘Actually, I think I’m going to make that a birthday week wish.’

  ‘Can I offer you some birthday breakfast?’ David asks, ignoring me. ‘Did you know in this city you can buy the essentials and quite a few non-essentials at any hour of the day? Makes me almost forgive the nonstop rain.’

  ‘We only just got here,’ Sally says. ‘The rain will stop.’

  ‘I like the rain,’ Rosa says.

  ‘Banana?’

  I nod and David slices one into a bowl and hands it to me. I add yoghurt and muesli. ‘Birthday first breakfast of the gods,’ I declare, digging in. The banana manages to be both slimy and mealy at the same time.

  ‘This banana’s disgusting.’

  ‘Sorry. Tried three different shops. Seems to be the only kind available.’

  In Bangkok I lost count of how many different kinds of bananas there were – all of them amazing. ‘This is hell,’ I mutter, grinning to show I don’t mean it. I do mean it.

  ‘Orange juice?’ Sally asks.

  I nod.

  ‘When can we give Che his presents?’ I feel a little ping of pride in Rosa for asking such a normal question.

  ‘You know he can’t make any decisions until he’s had the first of his million meals of the day,’ David says.

  ‘It’s my birthday. You can’t tease me.’

  ‘I withdraw my comment. So, when do you want your presents?’

  I look at the giant shipping container, at our piles of luggage. ‘Can you find them?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘I can wait,’ I say, though I kind of want a present now. Some sign of
birthday-ness in the absence of a functioning phone and messages from my friends.

  ‘Can I have internet access for my birthday?’

  ‘I can’t fix it until business hours,’ David says. ‘But it will happen today or heads will roll.’

  ‘I have my present,’ Rosa says. ‘Can I give it to Che now?’

  ‘Sure,’ I say.

  She darts up to her room and returns carrying it. ‘I wrapped it myself.’

  No, she didn’t. It’s too well wrapped for Rosa. ‘Pretty big,’ I say. ‘This was in your luggage?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I undo the elegant black ribbon and carefully remove the silver paper. Inside the plain wooden box is a plastic teaching model of the human brain. I hold it up. ‘Look, there’s even a brain stem.’

  ‘It comes apart,’ Rosa says.

  I pull the frontal lobe out, then the parietal, occipital, temporal and limbic lobes.

  ‘Mmmm…brains,’ I say in my best zombie voice.

  Rosa smiles. It isn’t her real smile. That doesn’t matter, I remind myself. It’s an appropriate smile. So is this present. More than appropriate, it’s perfect. Sally and David have internalised that I want to be a doctor, but Rosa knows that I want to be a neurologist or a psychiatrist.

  ‘Can I hold one?’

  I hand her the frontal lobe. ‘You’re holding conscious thought in your hands, Rosa. That’s the part of the brain that makes us most human.’

  She turns it over. I wonder if she thinks as much about her own humanness as I do. Does she ever wonder what parts of her frontal lobe are missing?

  ‘It’s so detailed,’ I say, peering at the parietal lobe. I’m looking at the lateral sulcus. Within it is the anterior insular cortex, where empathy might lie. I put my finger on it. It feels like plastic.

  ‘I love it,’ I say, smiling at Rosa, then hugging her. ‘Thank you.’

  She hugs me back. She’s a lot better at that.

  ‘That’s going to be hard to top,’ David says, as if he didn’t know what Rosa was getting me. ‘Is there anything you’d like to do today, birthday boy?’

  ‘Um.’ I feel wide-awake yet tired. All I want to do is retreat to my bedroom with a functioning phone, tablet or laptop and reconnect with my friends.