Echo's Sister

by Paul Mosier

  “The tea?”

  “No, your slogan. I think it’s nice.”

  He sits up straight. “Thank you. So, I was hoping you could make a sign. Something to motivate us as a family and remind us that we’re in this together. And I thought you could do it since your lettering is so good. Like, we could get a chalkboard, and you could write that slogan, and all the other things we need to do. Like eat right.”

  “We already eat right.”

  “Well, we can eat even more right.” Dad gestures to the plate in front of him. “Like, this breakfast doesn’t have any color in it.”

  I yawn. “Sleep right.”

  “Yeah, and exercise. And what else?”

  I raise my cup for another sip but pause before it hits my lips. “Laughter.”

  “Ha! Yes, laughter. Laughter is the best medicine.”

  “Good luck with that one.” I take another sip. “Maybe we need a bunch of funny movies.”

  “That’s not a bad idea. We can ask everyone for their favorites.”

  “And funny books.” I try a bite of the pancake.

  “We’ll get a chalkboard sign from the art supply store,” Dad says. “And you can write all these things down and make it look fancy.”

  “I can use different-colored chalk.”

  “Yes!”

  “And four colors of chalk will defeat cancer and restore Echo’s health.”

  Dad’s smile disappears. He reaches over to me and touches my arm. “Stay positive. That’s the most important thing to put on the chalkboard. Stay positive.”

  “Okay.”

  “And pick each other up when one of us is down.”

  “Okay.”

  The room gets quiet, except for the sound outside of concrete being beaten to dust and wood being shredded and splintered next door.

  “I’m kinda down right now,” I say.

  Dad pushes away from the table and kneels beside my chair, his arm around me.

  “Everything is going to be okay,” he says.

  The room is blurry with my tears. “I don’t want everything to be okay. I just want Echo to be okay.”

  But he can’t tell me Echo is going to be okay. He can’t tell me because he’s terrible at lying, or saying things he isn’t sure are true. So he just hugs me tighter, and that’ll have to do for now.

  After breakfast we go to the Jefferson Market Library. It’s my favorite, but it’s a little less my favorite without Echo. She loves the children’s section and the spiral stairs, and her love is contagious. We get a couple of new books for her, to help her pass the time in the hospital.

  Then we go to the art supply store to get a small chalkboard—which is also magnetic—and colored chalk, and some extra magnets so we can hang pictures on the board. We gather it all and bring it to the register.

  “Tate!” says the man at the register, a guy my dad’s age. “How is Echo?”

  Dad smiles. “She’s hanging tough. She’s a brave little girl.”

  The man looks at me. “Hello, El!”

  “Hello,” I say. I can’t remember his name, but he always remembers mine.

  The guy leans toward Dad and lowers his tone.

  “We’re all thinkin’ about Echo. Listen, you’ve spent so much money on paint here over the years, back in the day. Let’s say this is on us. Our way of saying thanks.”

  “You sure?”

  The man puts our stuff in a bag. “It’s nothing. Hey, you know what, we’ll put out a jar for people to put their change in. Or whatever they can. To help with expenses.”

  Dad puts his free hand on his heart. “That’s very thoughtful of you.”

  “We’ll keep Echo in our thoughts.” He looks at me. “All of you guys. You’re some of the good people in the neighborhood. Everyone knows that.”

  “Thank you.” Dad smiles. “See you soon.”

  I don’t frown until we’re outside the store. I think of my new status—Echo’s sister, the other kid in the charity case family—the whole way home.

  When we get to our apartment I do the chalkboard sign, and it sort of cheers me up even though it makes me cry. I’m not sure how that works.

  ALL FOR ONE—ALL FOUR ONE

  eat right—sleep well—exercise—

  laugh—pick each other up when one

  of us is down—stay positive!

  Dad asks me to pick some fun photographs for the board, which I put in the corners.

  There’s one of Echo on the Central Park carousel, on a summer day when she was five and finally agreed to ride the carousel without Dad standing beside her, only because he bribed her with the promise of ice cream afterward. There’s one of her on her first day of kindergarten, standing by the door with her first-day-of-school dress, smiling with tears in her eyes. The third photo shows her wearing a party hat on her sixth birthday, just before she locked herself in the bathroom after she got scared by the ventriloquist doll, Splinters, that entertained the guests. The last one shows all four of us—Mom, Dad, Echo, and me—sitting on a bench at Rockefeller Center with the giant Christmas tree behind. It’s the picture we used for our holiday greeting card last year.

  By the time I’m done looking through pictures, remembering everything as I choose which ones to use, I feel really ready to see her. Being away from Echo makes my heart ache.

  Dad fixes each of us a grilled cheese for lunch. I remind him that we’re supposed to eat right, so he adds sliced tomatoes and avocado, which makes it taste amazing. He cuts it diagonally, and I have it with a cold glass of hemp milk.

  After lunch, we walk down into the subway station, where again we see the piano guy. He’s playing an old jazz song called “Let’s Get Lost” as we walk onto the platform. Getting lost—as the song suggests—sounds like a great idea, but I’m stuck in the real world.

  Dad looks down the track like the train is gonna come roaring in and we’ll have to jump on it as it passes. He’s pretending not to notice the piano guy.

  “I love this song,” I say.

  He turns to me. “So do I.”

  I nod my head to the tune. “He plays it really well.”

  Dad smiles absently. “He certainly does.”

  I try laying on the guilt. “It’s nice to hear a piano, since we don’t have one in our living room anymore. Well, except that little keyboard in the closet.”

  Dad looks away from me, back down the track into the tunnel to the south. When his gaze returns to me, I’m snapping my fingers. Dad rolls his eyes and reaches for his wallet.

  “Honey, this has gotta be the last time for the near future.” He hands me a one-dollar bill. “We have to start being very careful with money. It’s just . . .”

  I wait, but he doesn’t finish his thought. So I run to the piano guy and fold the bill twice before dropping it into his jar. Again he smiles, and when he smiles I know this is the best I’m going to feel all day. At this moment everything is right in the universe. But then the train roars into the station and its brakes scream, drowning out the tune, and it’s time to run back to Dad and jump on.

  The subway door slides shut and we roll away into the dark. I look at my illuminated reflection in the window across from me and think of a time when Echo was small, maybe two. Dad gave her a dollar to tip a saxophone player at Washington Square, but she was always so shy she just wanted to keep the dollar herself. She finally summoned the courage to approach him, but after dropping the dollar in she reached in and grabbed a handful of bills and toddled away.

  I was really embarrassed by Echo, but I wasn’t too much older than she is now. The sax player thought it was funny, but only because he eventually got his money back. Now, rolling in the dark tunnel, seeing myself reflected in the train window, I look sad. I look like I wish my biggest worry about my little sister was being embarrassed by her.

  “So, Echo had a procedure this morning.” Dad’s words bring me back from my reflection in the train window.

  “A procedure?”

  “A small,
minor surgery.”

  “Did they remove the tumor?”

  “No, they installed a port in her chest. It connects to her bloodstream so they can put the medicine in every week. They want to shrink the tumor for about twelve weeks with the chemotherapy, and then do surgery to remove the tumor.”

  “So, everything is gonna be okay?”

  He smiles, but again it isn’t convincing. “The medicine will make her feel really sick. It’ll make her hair fall out and some other nasty side effects. But it’ll work on the tumor. Shrinking it before cutting it out means a smaller hole in the roof of her mouth and hopefully fewer teeth missing.”

  That hits me like a punch in the stomach. Then he tells me that as an added bonus the medicine will make her immune system very weak, so she will get sick easily and not be able to get better easily when she does get sick. So we all have to wash our hands constantly to keep germs away from her, and if any one of the rest of us gets sick, that person will have to stay somewhere else until they get better. He says a flu shot is the first thing on the menu when we walk out of the hospital.

  This all sounds so awful. But part of me is anxious for it to begin, because the tumor is growing so fast I’m afraid it will take over her whole head. And what would that mean? If there has to be a fight I want it to begin now. I want them to let Echo take her first swing at her foe.

  I think all of this as we walk from the subway to the hospital, and after we arrive, watching her lying in her hospital bed. The IV is still hooked up to her arm for now, and her head is lolled to the side. Every few seconds I glance to the monitor to watch her heart beat, beat, beat.

  I remember when Mom was pregnant with Echo, and Dad and I came with her to a doctor’s appointment. The doctor had a wand held against Mom’s belly and moved it around until the sound of Echo’s heart beating filled the room. I remember seeing Dad smile.

  There it is, he said. Long may you run.

  Now it’s less than seven years later, and already there’s a worry.

  Echo hasn’t been allowed to eat since last night at midnight, or drink any water, because of the surgery to install the port in her chest. It’s just below her collarbone on her right side. When she wakes up she’ll be starving and thirsty. And in pain.

  I can hear Dad talking on his phone by the window. He’s got his back to me, but I can hear his side of the conversation.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. What good is a network if there isn’t anyone capable of doing that surgery in the network?”

  He turns from the window to look at Mom, who sits with her sketch folio in the stiff-backed chair. She stares at him hopelessly.

  Dad turns back to the window. “What are we paying for every month, then?”

  He puts his hand to his forehead. He looks defeated. “Well, you people need to figure it out. Get it in front of the person who makes the exceptions. The reason for exceptions is that if you don’t have someone in network who can do it then you get someone out of the network. And this—this isn’t something that can wait.” He hangs up his cell phone and puts it in his pocket, then turns to Mom. I look to the TV screen, but it isn’t on.

  “Have you talked to Ingrid today?” He’s referring to Mom’s boss.

  Instead of answering him, Mom speaks to me. “El, can you do me a favor and run down to the first floor and get me a cappuccino? You can get something for yourself, too.”

  I act happy. “Cool. Do you want anything, Dad?”

  “No thanks.”

  Mom gives me a ten-dollar bill. “Four-shot cappuccino, please.”

  I smile and head out the door. The nurses’ station is right across from the door, so I can’t stand and lurk in the hallway to eavesdrop, but I can kneel down to tie my shoe, and that is what I do.

  Mom speaks quietly. “Ingrid left me about ten voice messages while Echo was in surgery.”

  I untie my left shoe and slowly redo it with big bows.

  “What did she say?” Dad asks.

  “She said I needed to decide if the job was important to me.”

  I untie my right shoe, slowly.

  “Did you call her back? What did you say?”

  “I told her that caring for Echo was what was important to me right now.”

  Slowly I make the bows for the right shoe.

  “I take it that didn’t end well?”

  “No.” Mom sounds stricken.

  I pull the laces tight and hurry quietly away.

  Down the hall I wait for the elevator. I look out the big window at midtown Manhattan, at the tall buildings of this strange, scary city. It’s the same city I’ve always known, but now it seems sinister and deadly.

  If Mom doesn’t have a job, that leaves us with Dad working part-time as an after-school art instructor, teaching five-year-olds how to paint. That’s what he’s been doing while working on getting a master’s degree so he can teach college students how to paint for much more money.

  I remember when everything changed. We were having pancakes at the breakfast table on a Saturday morning. We call it the “breakfast table” but it’s the only table in our tiny apartment, and we eat every meal there. It’s in the kitchen, which is so small you can practically reach the silverware drawer without getting up from your chair.

  Dad took a sip from his coffee cup and set it down. “Mommy and I have some exciting news.”

  I looked from Dad to Mom and swallowed my bite of pancake. “What is it?”

  “We’re getting a dog!” Echo shouted.

  I looked to Echo, then Mom. “Are we?”

  Mom smiled. “No. Meowzers would have none of that.”

  “A rabbit!”

  “It’s quite a lot bigger than that,” Dad said. Then he looked to Mom.

  “A bear!”

  “Echo, stop!” I said. She didn’t really think we would be getting a bear, but she’s always being ridiculous.

  “Not a bigger pet,” Mom said. “Bigger news.”

  I looked from her to Dad and back. “Are you having a baby?”

  Mom smiled but shook her head. Neither of them seemed to be dying to spill the news, whatever it was.

  Finally Dad took another sip of coffee and spoke. “Ingrid, who is Mommy’s biggest customer, has offered Mommy a position.”

  I sat against my chairback. “What do you mean?”

  “That means,” Mom began, “that instead of selling her the dresses I’ve made, I’m going to be designing dresses for her, which will then be made by other people. And that means better pay. And security.”

  “And benefits,” Dad added. “After six months.”

  Echo looked extremely disappointed. She returned to eating her pancake.

  “What else?” I asked. Because I knew that wasn’t everything.

  Mom took a bite of pancake and spoke to her plate. “Remember when your dad and I showed you where we went to school for junior high and high school? The Village Arts Academy?”

  “Yes.”

  I watched her. She continued to act like the pancakes were the most important thing on her mind, but I knew they weren’t.

  “Well,” she said, “now that we’ll have a bigger income, we’ll be able to send you there.” She finally met my eyes. “If that’s still your wish.”

  “Yes!” It was definitely still my wish. At least I thought it was.

  Dad cleared his throat. “As long as they give the legacy discount to children of former students who got kicked out the week before graduating.”

  My jaw dropped.

  “Don’t worry,” Mom said. “One of us left the school in good standing. Meaning me.”

  Mom looked to Dad, who quickly put a forkful of pancake into his mouth.

  A worry entered my head. “What about Maisy? What about all my other friends?”

  Dad threw his hands into the air. “You can make new friends!” He said it like it was a glorious idea.

  “What your father means,” Mom said, “is that you can still be friends with all the girls
you know from your current school, but you can also meet new friends at the academy.”

  “And what about tennis?” I asked. “You said they don’t do sports at the academy.”

  “No problem.” Dad dismissed my concern with a wave of his hand. “We can sign you up for a city league.”

  Then Mom looked directly at me and put a pleasant expression on her face. “Also, instead of making dresses in the living room and selling them to Ingrid and other boutiques, I’ll be going to her studio in the Garment District every day.”

  “What about Meowzers?” Echo asked. “He’ll be lonely!”

  “Meowzers is gonna love having the apartment to himself!” Dad turned in his chair. “Look at him! He heard us talking about it and came in to say how excited he is!”

  We all looked to Meowzers, who stood stiffly by the refrigerator. We watched as his stomach convulsed, and he made a terrible hacking sound as he threw up a hairball on the kitchen floor.

  Of course everything hasn’t turned out great. My beloved tennis is now once every week at the tennis center instead of every day at school. My other favorite activity, playing the piano, hasn’t gotten any easier. Even with Mom’s dress forms stored away now that she’s working at Ingrid’s studio instead of in our living room, the keyboard still has to go back into the closet every time I finish playing. Our piano teacher moved to France at the beginning of summer, and Mom and Dad were talking about finding a new one. But I’m sure that will never happen now.

  Worst, over the summer, after I found out I would be going to a different school, the friends I had became the friends I once had, because people prefer friends they get to see every day. I feel like when they reach out to me with texts they’re doing it because they feel sorry for me or because their moms made them. My mom says I’m imagining it, that of course they still want to be friends with me. And now, with Echo being sick and getting this terrible diagnosis, answering texts and talking about my miserable new life is the last thing I want to do.

  As if on cue, my cell phone buzzes in my clenched hand. I look from Echo’s heart monitor to the screen. It’s another text from Maisy.

  Can’t wait to hear about your new school! Does Echo like first grade?

  I text back a quick lie.

  Everything’s great! So busy. Talk soon!