“I wish we belonged to a pool,” I say as we dismount. Our parents have refused, not because of money, but because they think it is an idle way to spend a summer, lying around on wet towels, eating snack bar french fries.
“Uh-huh,” V says as she hastily locks our bikes up together and rushes into the cool of the building. She is acting indifferent, but I know she would like the pool as much as I would.
I watch her walk through the turnstile into the tall stacks of the adult section, which we have never entered. She looks both ways as if crossing a street and decides to go left.
I feel like a baby among the low tables and primary-colored furniture of the children’s section, even though the books run all the way up to teen, which seems light-years away, even if I will be twelve at summer’s end. I pick out two Betsy-Tacy books, and when I go to the checkout, V is waiting for me on the other side of the counter. Her head is propped on her arms, two books under her elbows, the fluorescent lights shining a glare on their plastic-coated covers.
I carry V’s library card with mine; she is always losing it. I pass the card over to the librarian who checks me out. “It’s for her,” I say, pointing to my sister, on the other side. “That’s her card.”
The librarian pauses over V’s books and can’t suppress a snide smile as she stamps them with the return date. V grabs the books off the desk without a thank-you, shoving them under her arm. She’s not dumb; she can see what the librarian thinks.
“Idiot,” she says, glaring at the library doors as she hands me her books—Getting in Touch with the Other Side and Awakening the Psychic Within—to put in my backpack. I should reprimand her for not bringing her own bag, tell her that their weight will make my back stickier, but she’s already in a foul enough mood. She swings up her kickstand forcefully.
“Go,” she says, waiting for me to lead again.
We ride home in silence. At the house, V becomes so immersed in her books that she spends the afternoon behind their covers; I don’t see her till dinnertime, after which she again disappears to our room, taking the last red Popsicle with her.
When I get into bed, she is still reading, her lips puckering in concentration. I can’t recall the last time I saw her so serious.
“What are you learning?” I ask quietly, turning on my bedside lamp.
“That I don’t need you to do it.”
“What do you mean?” A wave of warmth spreads up my back. I push the thin cotton blanket to my knees.
“Only one of us has to be psychic. It’s not about how connected we are to each other, but about tuning in to the universe, to your instincts.”
“Oh?” I’m trying not to laugh, to not be on the side of the librarian, but I stifle a smile. V is too absorbed in her reading to notice. I try to read, too, but I’m burning with heat and can’t concentrate on Betsy and Tacy lacing up their ice skates. V has the same blankets as I do but she is perfectly still. I shift my feet out, push the blanket to my side.
“You hot?” she asks me without looking up.
“You psychic?”
“Probably.”
Probably not, I think, but don’t say. V hates to be ignored. Instead, I stare at the ceiling, trying to tire my eyes out by drawing imaginary circles on it.
“I might wake up,” V tells me as she closes the book.
“Why?”
“I might have a vision in the middle of the night and have to write it down.”
“Okay. Why are you telling me this?”
“I just want you to be prepared.”
“Good night, V,” I say, clicking off my light.
“Good night, Hannah.”
She sleeps through the night soundly, as she always does, rooted to the mattress. I know because I am the light sleeper and wake several times from halfhearted dreams to see in the blue light of night her arm folded underneath her chin, where it stays till morning.
• • •
I steal the books from the top drawer of V’s nightstand the next afternoon while she is at piano. The second half of Getting in Touch with the Other Side consists of exercises and projects, like in those how-to books Grandma Oliver always brings us on crocheting and bread baking and other hobbies we don’t have. Number 17 has you write down your dreams. Number 6, an accelerated vision quest, requires two people. Skimming the chapters on precognition and channeling, I don’t know why V would want to see such things: our dead relatives at the foot of her bed, the locations of children held hostage by torturers, car crashes and heart attacks before they happen. I think of the people who must have died in this house, and the possibility of them waiting for us to deliver messages for them gives me the shivers.
I switch to Awakening the Psychic Within. V’s bookmark rests in a chapter called “The Holographic Soul.” All around the world, fragments of a shared Oversoul are embodied at the very same moment in the very same lifetime! These connected incarnations across space connect you to your holographic soul fragments throughout the world. Your soul fragments might be living as you live as a boy in Egypt or a girl in Chile or a set of brothers in Africa while also being embodied by you! This is your holographic soul absorbing the vast array of truths and pains and joys of human experience over a single lifetime. These other parts of your soul in other bodies are what some call Twin Flames, or more commonly, Twin Souls.
V’s highlighted a few lines in purple marker: The only safe way to remain open to the possibilities of these truths and experiences is through your own soul group, preferably through fusing your energies with your Twin Flame or Soul Mate. Next to this she’s written H??? in pencil.
As an afterthought that is clearly not, my mother ends the story of her and my father’s time in Africa by saying she always wondered what it would have been like to adopt one of the orphans. So many of them were sent to the States in those days as a result of the attention her book drew. I imagine a tall African boy living in our bedroom instead of us, taking part in Louisa’s backyard games, helping our father dig out his car in winter. I wonder, if V were really able to reach out and touch another person’s soul, if this is who she’d get, the unfinished business of my mother’s life.
• • •
Mom ruins our first dinner with Dad back in town by telling us Bob’s invited her to do a follow-up project with him in Sudan. She’ll be gone nearly three months. My father’s tan from his trip to Brazil, but I can still see the nervous flush creeping up his neck when V starts to cry.
“Who’s Bob?” V spits, infuriated.
“The writer, honey, Robert Kingsley. You met him a few weeks ago.”
“You’re going away with some guy you just met?”
“No, it’s not like that,” my mother says in a soothing tone, but V’s breathing only gets heavier.
“We decided you girls are old enough for Mom to do some more traveling again,” my father tries.
V looks at all of us accusingly before bolting up the stairs. She locks herself in our room, pressing her weight against the door to keep us out. I don’t have to fight very hard to get inside, and when I do, shutting the door on my parents, who’ve followed me, she falls right into my arms. I let her hot tears collect in the dip of my collarbone, let her snot all over my neck. As she shakes against me, I realize that she never saw it coming, and I should have told her something; I should have let her in.
• • •
It’s a surprise to see Louisa at our door a half hour later, winding her blond hair around her fingers with worry. Aaron hit his head at the pool, she explains. There was blood; it turned the water pink and the lifeguards blew their whistles and made everyone go home, before the ambulance even got there. Louisa says she saw it pull up as she left. I think I see tears in the corners of her eyes when she says, “A concussion,” and then, in a whisper, “He’s in the hospital. He has to stay up all night. So he doesn’t die.”
; V, her eyes still puffy and raw, nods as though she already knows this, and steps outside.
“I just want him to be okay,” Louisa says, and bends to scratch a mosquito bite on her left calf, I think to hide her despair. “Will you help?” She looks to us.
“Of course,” my sister says before I can protest. In the falling evening light of our neighborhood, her hair glows like something holy.
She instructs Louisa to get something of Aaron’s—the closer to him the better, so a piece of clothing or a possession would be ideal—and to meet us in her yard in half an hour.
“You want me to break into his house?” Louisa asks, her old self.
“Do you want him to pull through or not?” I ask.
I don’t say anything to V as we load the dishwasher, don’t ask what she plans on doing, just let her be in charge; I have a strange faith in her tonight, not because I think she’ll do anything miraculous, but because I feel that I owe her my belief.
In Louisa’s yard, V instructs us to put our hands on a half-deflated basketball Louisa swears Aaron touched the other day. Our fingers overlap on its dusty skin. V takes us through one of the exercises from Getting in Touch with the Other Side—or two, I can’t tell. We all imagine Aaron as the strongest animal we can, then we walk with that animal through a field, to its home, which is full of fruit. In a lull, I begin to hum a little something, and V joins in, the tune she’s been practicing in piano, just the few bars I know, over and over again. After a few rounds, we extend the last few notes, and let the silence sink in, let the crickets take over.
“Did you feel that?” V asks. “The universe shifting?”
“Yes,” Louisa and I both answer.
• • •
The day after Mom leaves, Dad gives us pool passes at breakfast, as if it were a coincidence, but neither of us is above taking the bribe. “Just promise me you won’t go running around like your neighbor the fool,” he says, and knocks once on each of our skulls. He makes sure we put on sunscreen before we leave the house; V’s hands impatiently smack it onto my back in a way I know will be uneven. He presses five-dollar bills into our palms and hands us each a hat, which we both shove to the bottom of our bags once we are outside. We are at the pool gates when the lifeguard unlatches them for the morning.
Aaron and Charlie show up with a babysitter around eleven. Excepting a little bit of hair shaved from where they put the stitches in, Aaron is walking and talking like the rest of us, and occasionally shoves Charlie’s head underwater as they play catch with a foam football.
We spend most of the day in the water, our fingertips shriveling, our eyes burning from the combination of chlorine and sun. We climb out to get hot dogs and waffle fries, which we eat atop damp towels on a shared lounge chair, licking the salt from our bleached finger pads with joy.
On the way back from the bathroom, where we hovered over the salty-smelling toilets, our rubber flip-flops slipping in what we hoped was collected pool water underneath, V stops Aaron where he’s just climbed out of the pool.
“Did you see it?” she asks him, staring right into his eyes.
“See what?”
“The light.” V puts her hand to Aaron’s wrist.
“The what?” He shivers at her touch, perhaps just from a girl touching his skin, or from the drops of pool water collecting on his shoulders. He doesn’t have a towel.
“The light, the bright white one.”
“You,” he declares, “are weird,” before propelling himself into the deep end.
Other mothers sit on chairs by the pool, resting a leg on the ground and keeping their eyes only half on their books, their whole bodies ready to make a save. When V and I float on our backs, I think of our mother, her love of the water; she’s the one who taught us to swim. She’d stand in the shallow end and make a fortress around our bodies with hers, moving as we moved down the length of the pool, always letting us think we were still connected when we weren’t.
I remember a family vacation we took to Florida a few years before, how happy Mom looked coming up from the Atlantic, how she held V by her waist as the ocean lifted and settled them down again and again. They were singing, their mouths open to the sky, but neither my father nor I could hear their song. We watched from a beach chair, my back up against his knees, burrowing our toes into the sand. His arms were slung over my shoulders. He whistled low and sweet, never taking his eyes off Mom or V. “Those two,” he said then, and though he was laughing softly, there was a kind of sadness in his voice, too.
In the pool, I hear V breaking the water next to me, then feel her fingers tickling the sole of my foot. I flip over and see her underneath me, holding her back to the floor of the pool. Smiling a goofy smile, she shakes her shoulders in a mermaid’s boogie.
Through that wavy, aqua light, in my bathing suit from last year, my sister looks to me the way she will look the first time I take her to the airport with an open-ended ticket to someplace she has to touch with her own two hands. She’ll never outgrow the belief that there is something to see beyond this world. That first trip will be to India, but later it will be Vietnam, Iceland, Mali, Kenya, among others. Like my father, she’ll always send postcards, which he says my mother reads to herself first before she repeats them aloud for him; he says she’s always smiling when she does. The first time V goes, she is twenty; I am a fresh twenty-two, and my instincts will tell me it’s a miracle we managed to hang on to her so long, though knowing that won’t make it any easier to watch her shut the car door and load her pack onto her shoulders, to see her smile as she walks away from me, for me to start to learn how to pass the time with something other than worry. On the way home from the airport that day, I’ll feel the faintest weight of her beside me in the passenger’s seat, like a ghost waiting for a message we never learned how to deliver.
Landscape No. 27
Remember when we hiked where we weren’t supposed to? We missed a trail mark and didn’t notice for a good half mile. The distance between the rocks got wider as we climbed higher, you in front, humming, and then not. I saw you thinking about turning around and offering your hand to me, but you knew I wouldn’t take it, and neither of us wanted to say we had gone off course, because it would sound like a bad metaphor and the idea that it might be true was too much for either of us to admit.
And then you just stopped going forward, or sideways it was, really, at that point, both of us hugging the face of a boulder, the river a good two or three apartment stories beneath us. “I don’t remember this,” you said. I hadn’t even seen the map. Once we were on the other side of the rope for the closed-off section we had ended up in, you tapped your knuckles against the sign that read: DANGEROUS! SLIDE AREA!
Neither of us slipped on our way down either, but by the time we got to your car at the trailhead, I couldn’t stop shaking, the way I had after childbirth, a giddy involuntary convulsion, my body smarting at its survival. You wouldn’t know this because you weren’t there. You have no children, and we agreed early on not to talk about mine, to pretend my entire family didn’t exist.
We sat in the open hatch of your car, smacking away the last of the bugs from the woods, my knees rattling, though you didn’t notice. I had to show you a crazy smile that chattered and you gave me a look as if you hadn’t been the one to insist we turn around. As you rubbed my shoulders, mistaking it for chills, I thought of my midwife cooing at the baby thirteen years ago, the boy, as she pushed my knees apart again and again so she could examine me, apologizing, both of us laughing. “Just a few stitches,” she said, and promised I wouldn’t feel them. I had no drugs in me, only adrenaline, more than my body knew what to do with. This was the way I wanted to feel when I was with you—my body running clear over my mind.
I have two kids, the boy and a girl, and neither of them likes to go hiking. Their labors were slow and long and mostly silent, which isn’t a metaphor for anything. That
morning my husband had kissed me good-bye so lightly it was as though we hadn’t touched at all.
I have never worn a wedding ring and you never asked why. My husband and I couldn’t afford rings at first, and later when we could, they still seemed an unnecessary expense. Neither of us would have bought into that kind of illusion anyway, had you invited me to your studio with one on my hand, had I had to remove it, or catch you looking at it, wondering what it meant.
In those days, I needed a secret. The sex was fine but not that exciting. After the first few times, it was just sex, just acts with bodies that felt good at the time. Different than with my husband, but it didn’t tie me to either of you more or less. How simple that would have been, to have been driven by wanting. Led. One time in the shower you licked the water off my breast, and I thought your smile meant something interesting was still ahead for us, but then you complained about the taste of the water and asked me to go into the bedroom.
When I cut my hair you thought it was for you—you were always moving it off my neck because it fell in your face when I was on top of you. I loved my hair then: It was long and thick and the color of a honey jar on a sunny windowsill, and I liked it too much when you pulled it away, the grip of your hands, your assured possession of my body in that moment. When I came home from that haircut my husband said I looked cute, and kissed my newly exposed neck. This, too, was the first place you put your lips when you saw me next. The cut made my face look tired, serious. It reflected those hate-filled days. It gave you nothing to grab on to, my childish attempt to dull the pleasure I couldn’t decide I wanted or deserved.
I was annoyed by the collective failure of your imaginations, by your inability to follow me into the hard place I was going with anything other than an offer to fuck me anyway. You both liked my hair better long; most men do. You want safety and familiarity as much as any of us. I’ve bought that bullshit of men’s wildness, the story of your ease in recklessness, as much as anyone else. A painter, for chrissakes.
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