Good Sister (9781250047786)

by Kain, Jamie

  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.

  Outside, I see Asha standing at the stoplight waiting to cross the street. It’s not a terrible walk, the two miles back to our house from here, unless you are wearing freaking four-inch platform heels like I am.

  “Asha, wait!” I call out.

  She turns and stares at me, no particular expression on her face. But when the light turns green, she does wait as I hurry over to her. I stop at the corner and take off my shoes, figuring it will be easier to walk barefoot.

  “I hate Lena,” she says quietly, not one little bit of emotion in her voice.

  I wish I knew how she did that. “I’ll walk with you.”

  “I can’t believe they’re doing this.”

  “I can. We’re not exactly the perfect fucking family, now are we?” My voice sounds all choked up, which is embarrassing as hell.

  Maybe this is the first time I am admitting to myself that my big sister is truly gone. There is not going to be a Sarah around for me to resent ever again. There is not even going to be the memory of her getting in our way if Lena just leaves behind our family home and goes to live with some new guy.

  Whatever we were, whatever shaky, fucked-up little bit of a family we made, will be gone for good.

  We are walking along a side street headed back toward what will soon no longer be our home, and I realize that I want to tell Asha what happened. All of it. It doesn’t matter anymore anyway. There’s nothing for me to hide now that I don’t have a family left to protect from the truth.

  I am so much worse than any of them think, but Asha, who doesn’t give a damn, I can tell. She’ll understand, I think, after the way she glared at Lena in the restaurant.

  “I need to tell you something,” I say.

  She doesn’t respond. Just keeps walking, staring straight ahead.

  “Remember when you asked about how Sarah died?”

  It is easier to say this in the dark, her walking beside me so that I don’t have to look into her eyes and see disgust.

  “What?” she says so softly I can barely hear her.

  “She didn’t slip,” I say, for the first time aloud. “She jumped.”

  Asha stops, so I have to turn and look at her. I see the devastation in her gaze and feel all of a sudden like the biggest shit in the world. I never realized until now, I was sort of protecting her by not admitting that part of Sarah’s death.

  “What do you mean she jumped?” she says with such vehemence, she sounds like a different person.

  “I mean, she jumped. On purpose.”

  Asha’s expression is utter confusion. “How can you be sure? You saw her?”

  “I was watching. I didn’t expect her to do it, but she … She stood for a long time watching the surf, and then she dove off the cliff. On purpose.”

  Asha’s face crumples in a way I’d never before seen. She clutched her hand against her stomach, and then, seeming to regain herself for a second, she says, “You’re just saying this to hurt me. Sarah had no reason to commit suicide.”

  Before I can explain any more, Asha turns and starts to run. Not wanting to go where I’m going, and not wanting to return to Lena and Ron, she chooses a third direction, down into the drainage ditch that lines the side of the road. It’s a steep drop though, and after only a couple of steps, she cries out as it sounds like she loses her balance and falls the rest of the way down.

  My stomach falls with her. I’m not ready to lose another sister, and while she’s probably fine, I feel crazy panicked.

  “Asha?” I call. “Are you okay?”

  I start to make my way down to her, but it’s pitch-dark and I can’t even see where she has landed or where to step on my way down. “Asha?” I call again, holding my arms out for balance and cursing every time I take a step, as brush pokes into my bare feet.

  I hear nothing from down below, and I start thinking of snakes and bugs and shit. I hate nature, in spite of my hippie upbringing, or maybe because of it. Now Asha is rustling in the brush, or at least I hope it is her.

  “Please just say you’re okay.”

  “Fuck you,” she mutters.

  With the sound of her voice, I am able to make my way over to her. Thank God I didn’t slip, because I would fucking cry if I ruined my dress, but when my shin bumps against something solid, I lose my balance before I realize it’s my sister I’ve fallen on.

  “Shit,” she says as I fumble to climb off her. “Get the hell away from me.”

  “Let me help you out of here.” I reach for her.

  I don’t usually touch my sister, not if I can help it. But now I am all of a sudden realizing she is the only one I’ve got, maybe the only family I’ve got, and I need to start figuring out how to get along with her without being a bitch all the time.

  “I said get the hell away from me,” she shrieks, and starts clambering out of the ditch. I try to stand up to follow her, but I’m beginning to think this is a bad idea.

  Yet, I don’t want to be left alone here in the dark, so I start crawling back out as best I can without dragging my dress on the ground.

  “I need to talk to you,” I call after Asha, but then I can hear footsteps on the pavement and I know she is running in the direction of home—or at least the place we once called home.

  I chase after her for a while, but she disappears into the night, and I eventually give up and walk the rest of the way home. Finally I find her at the house. She could move a lot faster than I could in my bare feet, and she has already gotten a bag mostly packed with her stuff by the time I walk into her bedroom.

  “Asha. Please just listen for a minute. I did something to Sarah. I have to tell you so you’ll understand.”

  She stops and looks at me then, her face expressionless.

  This is probably as much attention as I’m ever going to get, so I start. “That shirt you found in Sarah’s closet, and the newspaper article?”

  Asha stares at me, says nothing.

  “She was in the car that hit the guy. She was driving.”

  “You’re lying,” she says, but she sinks onto the edge of the bed as if I’ve pushed her.

  “I was sleeping with David, and he was so freaked about the accident, he told me about it. I’m the only person besides them who knows.”

  “Maybe David was driving. Maybe he lied.”

  “I thought of that too. But here’s the thing—I went hiking with Sarah to confront her about it, and she admitted everything.”

  Asha just continues to stare at me, silent.

  “I don’t know why I wanted to confront her. Now I wish I hadn’t.”

  “You were sleeping with David,” she whispers as if she’s just now finding that part out.

  “David is a douche bag. He didn’t deserve her.” I don’t know where these words have come from, but I know they are true the moment they’ve escaped my lips.

  “You did it to hurt her,” she says.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then why?”

  “I guess I just did it because I could.”

  “Great reason.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, the words flat and so profoundly inadequate I almost laugh.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Asha stands up and shoves the last of her clothes into her bag and zips it up.

  “Because you want to know what happened.”

  “It’s not like you.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  Asha says nothing, but she sinks back onto the bed beside her bag.


  “She was depressed,” Asha finally says slowly, as if she’s figuring this out for herself. “That’s why she didn’t talk to me.”

  I shrug, a spike of jealousy shooting through me. And I, the evil-bitch sister who practically pushed Sarah off the cliff, if not with my hands then at least with my words.

  “It’s my fault,” I say for the first time out loud. My voice kind of cracks, and I start to cry.

  Big sobs escape my throat, but Asha just watches me, silent.

  “It is your fault,” she then says. “If you hadn’t slept with David, if you hadn’t gone with her on that hike just to make her feel worse, she’d still be alive.”

  And with that she stands up and leaves the house, leaving me to my pathetic sobbing.

  Thirty-Five

  Sarah

  Deserving is a strange idea, or at least that’s what I used to think. Who ever gets what they deserve? And how much of our lives do we spend expecting the deserving to get their due reward? I used to be at peace with the idea that it rarely happens, the reward thing. Did I deserve to have the combination of genes and bad luck that meant I would have cancer?

  Maybe I did.

  Maybe fate works backward, and what I was being punished for hadn’t even happened yet. The more I think about it, the more I think that’s just how it is. We never know if we’re going to get our good luck now or later, or bad luck later or now or yesterday.

  Thirty-Six

  Rachel

  I thought saying it out loud would help, but it doesn’t. I thought seeing Asha hate me, despise me, know me for the horrible person I am, would start to set things right. But instead I see that I am only crushing her too. She doesn’t have the strength to hate me the way I need to be hated. She’s already broken.

  I stare out the door that Asha has slammed. After a minute or two or three, my phone buzzes, and I see through the shattered glass on the screen that it’s David sending me a text: I left a package of your stuff in the mailbox. I guess this is good-bye. I throw the phone against the door. It breaks into pieces and falls to the floor.

  I stand up and go to the door, lock it. I go to the front door and lock it too. I am alone here now, and I hate this house. I have hated it ever since our dad moved out. It reminds me of everything bad that has ever happened. I wander from room to room, not sure what I’m looking for. In Lena’s room, the curtains are pulled aside and light from a streetlamp pours in. The bed is unmade, and I sit down on it, where I can smell the faintest scent of Lena, something that once comforted me. The sheets are pale green and soft, Egyptian cotton. Expensive sheets, because Lena spares no expense on herself. I try to remember the last time I ever slept in her bed. It had to have been before Sarah got sick. I was little, had a nightmare, and crawled in with her, between her and Dad, and felt safe there.

  Some part of me wishes I could do that now. I want Lena—the old Lena—to hold me tight and make me feel safe again. This is the stupidest thing I could ever think, because she is long past seeing me as one of her children, as someone to take care of. I learned long ago that if I wanted to survive, I would have to take care of myself.

  On her nightstand is a book of Buddhist meditations, with a piece of yellow paper sticking out. I open the book to the marked page, and on the paper is scrawled Ron’s phone number and address. She has only been with him a few months, and already she is rearranging her life, pushing us away to allow space for him, pretending our past didn’t happen.

  That’s probably where she is right now—still with him, making sure he doesn’t forget her before they say their vows of for better or for worse and all that. She’s at that age where she knows she won’t be attractive to men much longer. She’s still pretty, but so many younger women, girls like me, are waiting to take her place.

  I go into Lena’s bathroom and open the medicine cabinet, where bottles of Percocet and Vicodin—Mother’s Little Helpers—wait in their orange prescription bottles. I take the Vicodin bottle, open it, and fill a glass with water. I should have a more creative idea than this, but I dread the thought of pain. I don’t have Sarah’s courage to dive off the nearest cliff I can find. I just want right now, more than anything else, to go to sleep and not wake up.

  The crazy thing is, I miss Sarah. I want to go wherever she is, be there with her in the nothingness. Why did it take my sister’s dying for me to realize I love her?

  My whole family had been shaped by the ugly deformity that comes from knowing a young person is about to die. Life reveals itself then to be the unfair, cruel, relentless joke that it is. When our family first found out about Sarah’s leukemia, I didn’t understand for a long time. I remember being vaguely titillated by the drama of it, even wishing I were the center of that drama. Life, I thought at first, was made all the more meaningful by big stuff happening, like death.

  In a way, my first instinct had been right. But that wasn’t the only truth.

  I carry the pills and the glass of water into my bedroom because I don’t want the scene of my last moments to be in Lena’s dingy, orange seventies bathroom. I want to be in my own bed.

  I lean against some pillows, sitting up so I can down a few pills at a time, gulping water between each palmful of pills. Maybe thirty are in the bottle. Enough to do the job, I hope.

  When I’ve taken all the pills, I hide the bottle under the bed so that no one will see it right away and call an ambulance. Better if they think I’m just sleeping and leave me alone. I’m not one of those lame, half-assed suicidal girls who just wants to be found, to get lots of attention, to have my “cry for help” heard.

  This is not a cry for help. Let’s be clear on that, at least. My death may not be as dramatic as Sarah’s, but we have already established that between us three sisters, I am not the good sister, or the brave sister, or the strong sister. I am the cowardly one.

  Asha

  When I am halfway to Sin’s house, the shock of Rachel’s words has started to wear off, and I begin to accept that what she’s told me is true. It makes more sense than I want to admit. Sarah had grown quiet, I think, in the weeks after that hit-and-run. I thought it was just one of her withdrawn periods that she went through now and then, but now I see what it must have been.

  I try to imagine how horrible and alone she must have felt, but my anger at her for not telling me what was going on gets in the way. Then I think how she would never have wanted to burden me with such an awful secret, and I know exactly what she was going through. Sarah always tried to be the big sister, even when she was the one who needed caring for.

  Unlike Rachel.

  Rachel. Stupid, selfish, vindictive …

  And yet, she told me the truth. She sounded sorry.

  Sorrier than I’ve ever heard her sound.

  I shouldn’t have left her like that. I shouldn’t have left at all, not now. It’s not what Sarah would have done.

  I turn around and go back.

  Thirty-Seven

  Sarah

  What does forever look like?

  If you vanish from the earth but are still a part of the universe, what does that mean?

  Do you wonder?

  My whole life I wondered, how do we know the difference between reality and a dream?

  And what if our dreams are a window into another world, an afterlife that exists even as we live?

  As if I have been trapped in a nightmare and begin to awaken, a world starts to take shape around me. It is a universe of my own making, a place of dreams and memory.

  No longer am I suspended in that white, San Francisco fog of a dream.

  I begin to sense myself becoming.

  Becoming what, I don’t know. Not at first. I only know I am lying in a bed in a dark, familiar room, and bright light pours in from a window nearby. From where I lie, I can see blue sky, and my heart leaps at the idea that perhaps …

  Perhaps it was all just a terrible dream.

  Perhaps I have been made new by that hellish sleep, given a second chan
ce to do it all again. To live a life illuminated by the mistakes I almost made.

  I sit up and a familiar cover falls away. It is a pale blue blanket I loved as a child, a blanket that feels a lifetime apart from me. I grasp its satin edge and marvel at the presence of it for a moment, before turning my attention to the rest of me, whole again.

  Or perhaps always whole. Perhaps still the Sarah who almost jumped but didn’t.

  I am wearing the blue tunic I bought at Second Chance, the local thrift shop. Bloodstains streak the front of the top, marring its once-delicate perfection, and I only observe this, feeling no sense of its ultimate meaning. It is blood I recognize, but I simply note its presence.

  The room too I begin to recognize. It is the bedroom I shared with my sisters in the earliest years of my memory, right before we left the commune. On the wall is a small painting of a bird that feels like a fossil of the girl I once was. My heart aches now to see it.

  In the far corner is Rachel’s bed, and just to my left, Asha’s crib, that she rarely uses with its giraffe-print sheets. Neither of them is here though. I am alone in the room, and I have a feeling I should be getting up, finding someone now.

  I stand up and marvel at the fact of my body. I am whole. My chest moves in and out with each breath. My limbs feel strong and whole.

  Here I am. Wherever this is.

  I go to the door, then down a hallway I remember only vaguely, passing one closed door after another. I feel only slight curiosity about what I might find behind each door, because the one I am truly interested in is straight ahead. It’s the front door of the trailer that my family once shared with another family.

  I grasp the cool brass handle and turn it, memories dancing at the edge of my mind of other times I opened this door long ago.

  Outside, the light is blindingly bright, so bright that at first I can’t see.

  I squint and cover my eyes, waiting for them to adjust to the brightness, and after a few moments, I can see that I am, perhaps, on the ranch where our commune was once located. It is more of a desert than I remember, but some buildings are familiar.