by Holly Cupala
My mother’s choked gasp broke through my dream.
A murmur rose up in the crowd, and I was suddenly aware of the hundreds of dark heads watching me, listening, whispering among themselves. I heard my sister’s name spoken in the crowd. If something had gone wrong, of course it had to do with her. The gossip, the snickering never stopped. My poor mother. My poor father. And poor me, who had to follow in her footsteps.
A police officer was standing backstage with my parents, speaking in a low voice.
My dad came out on the stage. Somehow he looked splintered, like the weight of our family had finally broken him. I looked to the wings, where my mother—her face a contradiction of red swelling and white angles—hissed, “Don’t.”
He started to speak. Haltingly, with deep cracks, the sound of pipes breaking through concrete. “Folks, there has been—”
In the split second before he could say “an accident,” my mother’s face transformed, anything vulnerable having been washed over by a clean hardness that could score glass. She was so beautiful, so formidable. And she strode out on the stage like a queen and smiled at the crowd, whose murmur had risen to a tight thrum of anxiety. She held out her hands for a ripple of calm. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she announced, “we’ve had some technical difficulties, but our program will resume shortly. Please take a few minutes to get some cocoa in the lobby and enjoy the music while we get our act together.” She said this last part with a chuckle.
The crowd visibly relaxed. Crisis averted. Still, I couldn’t stop the panic flooding up through me. I inched my way closer to the wings where Dad stood, waiting for Mom.
He was not chuckling. He was crying.
And I started crying. Because a terrible fear had taken hold of me, to see my daddy cry and my mother crystallize into a diamond. She didn’t even notice me standing there.
“Pull yourself together,” she said in a low voice. “They need us to identify her.”
I didn’t even realize I was clutching my white dress in my hands, still standing on the stage with hundreds of people watching me. I couldn’t stop the flood overtaking me, filling up my lungs and throat and eye sockets and spilling over and soaking into my white dress, or the sob escaping my lips. “What happened?”
All I could see was my daddy’s red eyes, and my mother’s tight face. I didn’t hear how my voice had carried into the rafters of the church, echoing through the space and stopping everyone in their tracks. “Where’s Xanda?” Everyone waited to hear the answer.
My mother enfolded me in her grasp, and I saw how a tear landed near my shoe and seeped into the wooden cracks of the stage. “Now look what you’ve done,” she was saying to my father, all the while hugging me into her thin, cashmered body. My face scraped against the pearls around her neck.
“What I’ve done?” asked my father. He was gathering coats. Making himself useful. Ignoring the stagehands waiting to hear exactly what.
“This is all your doing, Chuck,” she spat. “You hired him, you brought him into our house, you stood by and did nothing while he was out front…out front screwing our daughter.” I felt my ears stinging, as if she had said the words to me. “And now…”
My dad stood, stunned, watching while she held me under her arm and steered me toward the back door. He meekly followed.
The words still echoed in my mind as I sat in the backseat of the car. They stayed with me when we disappeared into the white fortress of the hospital and traveled its corridors. They settled when they left me outside a door blaring NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY, where they went in as my parents and came out as people I didn’t know at all.
Andre killed her. My dad killed her. My mother killed her. I wondered if somehow I had killed her, too.
Now, in the same hospital, Lexi had escaped death. She was days away from release.
Freedom.
I could be the bird to take us both away. All I had to do was pack a suitcase and go.
Forty-four
The bus wound through the hills of our neighborhood as I made a mental list of everything I would need: money, food, clothes, cell phone charger. All of it would have to fit in Dad’s camping duffle bag, still stashed in the laundry room.
I would have to clean out my bank account, just in case they started looking for me. After saving every penny from my job, I had enough to keep us in diapers and milk for a while. Then there was Dad’s quarter collection, the bond from Uncle Brit, and the pearl necklace Mom’s parents gave me for my seventeenth birthday. Hard to believe it was nearly a year ago.
There was so much I would have to leave behind—drawings, photos, letters. I touched the safety-pin necklace around my neck, wishing I could take the dress. If I had time, I could plop my portfolio onto a disk so I’d at least have something to show when I looked for a job. Painting movie sets? Coloring sci-fi eyes? Whatever I could do that would keep Lexi and me afloat. If we could get there, find someplace to sleep, I could figure the rest out later.
I asked the bus driver the time. Eight forty-three. Perfect—they would have just left for church, giving me a good three hours.
Our house looked the same, but infinitely different. Same driveway, same car, same door, same windows, same bars. I wondered if my key would work.
It did.
When I caught a glimpse of the foyer mirror, I barely recognized the pale, haunted person I saw, except for the eyes—like Xanda’s, Mom’s, and now Lexi’s. If only I could find another path, Lexi would be different.
I hurried to find the duffle bag.
The carpet on the stairs felt familiar under my feet, though the art on the walls had changed completely. My drawings, gone. Erased. Just like Xanda.
My door stood closed and Xanda’s room—the office—was open a crack. My bedroom was exactly as I’d left it: maternity clothes draped over the chair, shoes cluttered in the bottom of the closet, books stacked on the desk next to a binder full of class notes. Here was life before Lexi, splayed out like that corpse.
Everything looked the same, except for a small, pink bundle placed neatly on the bed. A package of fluffy pink baby sleepers. As if that was supposed to make up for everything.
I stuffed them into the duffle bag and got to work—underwear, jeans, hoodie. A dress, for interviews. A blanket, for Lexi. I’d have to get her some real clothes, and diapers. I plugged in my phone and it blinked to life. Carefully, I gathered the photos from my bulletin board—me and Essence. Me and Kamran. I would call him once we got there, if he would still talk to me. Maybe his parents would like to know they had a grandchild.
I surveyed my room one last time, the briefest of goodbyes to my old life.
Next stop: the office, where I would transfer my files and erase my electronic existence. I’d be giving my parents a head start.
The office would always be Xanda’s bedroom to me, no matter how the furniture was arranged. Her purple walls had been painted a nice celery green, to draw attention to the view. But when I stood in the doorway, I wasn’t taking in the view.
Instead, I took in the hundreds of photographs spread across the floor, the couch, the desk—pictures traveling the length and breadth of the Mathison family. Photographs I thought my mother had destroyed. Every one of them was a window, a chronicle of lost time and space.
I went into the room and picked them up one by one—Mom and Dad, about my age, holding up a squashed, purple baby who looked exactly like Lexi, only bigger. Mom and Xanda the toddler, playing tea party. Xanda as a little girl, missing her two front teeth and clutching a baby, perilously balanced on her spindly knee. Me, looking half delighted and half terrified.
Someone sniffled behind me.
My mother stood in the doorway in her robe, eyes red and puffy and hair gathered into a loose ponytail. “What are you doing here?”
There would be no disk now.
I knew what I looked like to her—hair ratted, swimming in this yellow First Washington T-shirt, getting my fingerprints all over her secret stash. The duf
fle bag lay open next to me, clothes and sketchbook stuffed inside.
“I came to get a few things.”
Mom’s eyes sealed up.
“Going to stay with your dad?”
I gave her a blank look. “Dad’s gone?”
She shrugged. “He left. Cleared a few things out while I was at opening night and you were running around Seattle.”
“I was hospitalized!”
“Not on my watch. You left my car. You got out, just like—”
She stopped. Her eyes fell on the picture I held in my hand. I remembered when it was taken—when we’d all taken a car trip down the coast and Xanda had disappeared into the redwoods at the Trees of Mystery with some boy, and when she’d come out a half hour later, Mom had come unglued. We thought somebody grabbed you. If you ever do anything like that again, Dad’s going to chain you up in the trunk, understand? But before she’d disappeared, someone had shot a picture of the four of us, smiling, on Paul Bunyan’s ginormous shoe. I’d forgotten that picture existed.
“Mom, I know what happened to her.”
“Andre,” she spat. “I saw you with him. If it wasn’t for that boy—”
“Stop blaming Andre! Stop blaming Dad!”
We both jumped at the sound of my voice.
Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t know how you think you can judge me. You’ve spent the last year doing everything possible to decimate your life and head down the same path as your sister. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
My baby had spent the last three months in the hospital, her life dangling by a thread while everyone looked to me, the teenage train wreck. I had every idea.
“And you have no idea,” she continued, much more softly now, “what it’s like…” She broke off, not willing—or maybe able—to finish the sentence.
Instead, she took up one of the photos—the one of her and dad in the hospital with baby Xanda. I knew where this was going. Xanda was the preemie, the reason we were all here now.
“That was the day your sister was born,” she said. Seven months after the wedding, as my mom’s parents were quick to note. Xanda peeked out of the blanket like she was already sizing up the world. If anyone could survive preemiehood, it was her.
“But she looks huge,” I gasped, and Mom frowned. Where was the IV? “She looks so…healthy, for a preemie.” I thought of Lexi, fighting her way out of the tubes and wires in order to come home. Only two pounds at birth, now up to a fighting weight of just over five.
Mom bent over the pictures until her hair covered her face and her shoulders bounced, hugging herself to keep from bursting. Laughing. At me? At Lexi?
“What?” I snapped. I didn’t have time for this. I had a bus to catch.
She put her hand on my arm, about to tell me where I could go. I’d tell her I didn’t care anymore about her judgment. She could heap coals of fire, and they wouldn’t even touch me. I had Lexi now.
I looked at the photo again, and I realized I’d never seen it before. Seven months after the wedding. And Xanda looking as fat and healthy as the hematoma baby, who could have eaten Lexi for a snack.
You know—rich girl and the construction guy, Andre had said.
Xanda wasn’t a preemie. She never was.
“You were pregnant when you got married? Pregnant with Xanda?”
Mom’s hair parted as she nodded. And I could see all at once that the mask of her face, always seeming too tight, covered a vast sorrow—maybe even as vast as my labyrinth—and a terrible secret. The blame she doled out so easily grafted over a deeper, quieter voice.
Shame.
“I’ve been…I haven’t felt like myself for a long time, wondering what I did or didn’t do, what I could have done to change what happened to your sister. I wanted to do better with you.” I thought of Shelley in the hospital, how she said sometimes sadness only looked like anger and judgment. Maybe fear did, too.
Her eyes met mine. “Do you think it was my fault she died?”
If someone had asked me yesterday or even ten minutes ago, I would have known the answer. But now I wasn’t so sure.
My thoughts raced back through the tangle of events to the moment of why. It was easiest to blame my mom for Xanda’s death and everything that had happened since, because then I’d never have to look too closely at myself. At what I had done to Essence. Kamran. Shelley. Blaming Essence for what happened to our friendship. Using Kamran and then Shelley as a means of escape. Maybe you think this baby is going to make up for everything, Delaney had said.
Was I doing the same to Lexi? Would my choices now affect the pattern of her future?
My breath caught as the thought sunk in. I thought of the time Xanda let me try on her safety-pin ensemble. “You don’t want to be like me,” she said. “You’d be better off being like Mom than me.” I had spent so long trying to act like Xanda that I didn’t notice myself acting like Mom—feeling shame and blaming everyone else.
Mom’s question still hung in the air, and I thought of the last thing Shelley said. We try to learn to forgive. Blame was not forgiving other people. Shame was not forgiving yourself. We each had a little of both.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think it’s your fault.” It felt like a part of me flew up into the sky and away like the bird in my drawing—the part carrying around a weight for a long, long time.
“But it is. Xanda died, your father left, you…” She didn’t finish, but I knew she was going to say something about Lexi.
“Lexi isn’t a punishment,” I said gently. “If you could see her…” My duffle bag lay in my lap, sketchbook tumbled at an angle. In the hospital, I’d drawn Lexi over and over until her face was as natural to my pencil as labyrinths had ever been. “I took pictures. And…I could show you my drawings.”
“Lexi,” my mom echoed. I held my breath, waiting for her to pass judgment. “It’s beautiful.” Another part of me took flight, the one waiting to hear those words.
As we looked at the drawings together, she held her breath, too—first at the tiny creature dwarfed by the blankets and monitors, then as she grew each week. The only labyrinths were the tubes and cords, which gradually disappeared as she made huge steps toward self-sufficiency. In the last one, she wore the pink hat Essence brought from my mom, her head swamped in the soft cotton and her eyes bright.
“I know why you did what you did,” my mom said softly. “I wouldn’t have given Xanda up, either.” She sighed as she looked over the photos and picked up the one of her and Dad at the hospital with baby Xanda. “You probably won’t believe this, but everything I’ve done, I did because I was trying to protect you and your sister—from making the mistakes I made. Maybe you can understand, after what you’ve been through. Andre is so much like…”
“Like Dad? Mom, you act like he’s spent the last fifteen years drinking beer on the couch instead of working so hard for all of us. Don’t you see who he is? He’s not Chuck. Chuck doesn’t even exist.”
Mom nodded, her eyes shining. “It’s funny. I didn’t think your dad would be the one to do the leaving. But now that he’s gone…” She sniffed, shaking her head. “I just…didn’t think I would miss him this much.”
“You have to talk to him.” Even as I said it, I felt a pang of guilt about Kamran. I hadn’t been fair. I hadn’t talked to him about anything, especially about what was most important. Even if it was wrong, I could understand why he’d broken up with me. Just like Dad did to Mom. Was it even possible to make things right?
Mom nodded. “Things have been so different, since…” She paused, looking to me before continuing. “Since Xanda died. I don’t know how it will go.”
I closed my sketchbook. “Maybe you can tell him what you told me.” Maybe there was a chance to start over—with Lexi. I knew forgiveness wouldn’t be simple, but if anyone could help us with it, she could.
I picked up one picture, then another, and Mom joined in. Together we gathered the scattered threads of our lives.
&
nbsp; Forty-five
I became an older sister the day I turned eighteen.
It felt strange to finally leave Xanda behind, frozen in memories and photographs. After we sorted pictures in the office, Mom and I framed and hung them in the stairwell—Xanda, me, my parents, our friends, and she added more of Lexi every day. Is this what forgiveness looked like? I didn’t have much time to think about it, with Lexi crying on one side and Mom making suggestions on the other.
“You’d better hurry up—your dad’s going to pick you up any minute for the Cornish tour.”
I assessed my reflection in the bedroom mirror. Totally sleep deprived. Too thin for my skinniest jeans after staying up with Lexi and running on nothing but fingernails and adrenaline, wearing Xanda’s fuzzy red sweater in an attempt to look like a serious student. I didn’t have to try too hard. I already looked like I’d lived a whole life.
I shifted my satchel away from my stomach, still not quite used to being only myself. Sometimes I even felt a phantom baby kicking as I was falling asleep—a notion that burst the second I heard Lexi’s snuffling through the darkness, a cry holding the power of a thousand tiny electrical currents connected to my nervous system. In all the fantasies I had about Lexi before she was born, the connection between us now—invisible and excruciating—never crossed my mind. That, or the way she would have no sense of time, if she should be asleep or awake at any given hour. Especially at night.
“It’s all par for parenthood, Miranda,” Mom would say. “It’s what you signed up for, remember?” Smug. But not so smug that she didn’t give me two seconds of sympathy and maybe even pancakes after a particularly long, wakeful night.
Things had been difficult in the hospital, but bringing Lexi home was something else altogether: putting her on a strict two-hour feeding schedule to keep her from losing precious ounces; monitoring her for signs of jaundice; listening to her breathing, waiting for the skipped gasp that would send us back to the NICU.