The Good Sister

by Drusilla Campbell

  In the hot, murky shed, spiderwebs drooped across the corners from the rafters and the air smelled of oil and sawdust. She imagined a black widow spider crawling up between her bare toes and ran out the door, back onto the grass. She didn’t want to look behind her because she was afraid of what might happen. The world was strange and mysterious and maybe black widows could swell up to the size of her whole body and they had all those legs to chase her. She sat on the back steps, breathing hard but safe. A drop of sweat rolled into her eye, stinging.

  Ellen wished she lived at the beach.

  She heard a buzzing sound like Daddy’s electric hair clippers coming from a blue wheelbarrow tipped on its side under the pink crape myrtle. She walked across the yard and smelled rotting nectarines. Looking down, she saw a pile of squashed fruit crawling with yellow jackets, the black-and-gold wasps that buzzed against the kitchen window screens when Ellen’s grandmother made fig jam. They piled over each other, fighting their way to the sticky sweetness.

  The tangy fruit smell made the inside of her nose feel like the sound the yellow jackets made. As she lifted her hand to wipe her sweaty forehead, some of the striped buzzers boiled up off the fruit and orbited her head. In an instant they were in her ears and on her eyelids, at the corners of her mouth. Their tiny feet walked on her skin. Screaming, she ran for the clothesline and twisted herself in the wet, bleachy sheets.

  * * *

  She remembered another day, this one a few years later, a winter day after a week of slow, cold rain. A thick tule fog blanketed the Central Valley and radio newscasters reported multicar pileups on Highway 99. She stood between her mother and grandmother on the porch of the big house, looking down at her father where he stood beside Grandpa’s Hudson in the driveway, a duffel bag over his shoulder. Ellen wore woolen pants and a blue sweater and a pair of Buster Brown shoes scuffed to a dull orange at the toes.

  Daddy looked serious, but his eyes were jiggery: she could tell he was excited and trying not to show it. He had orders he told her came from Washington. Dressed in his army uniform, as handsome as Dana Andrews in the movies, he was shipping out to Japan, and then he was going to Korea to shoot some Reds. He had shown Ellen where these places were in the big map book.

  A disembodied voice in the fog said, “Wayne.” Sitting in the Hudson, Ellen’s grandfather flashed the headlights on and off.

  Ellen’s grandmother said not to drive too fast and watch out for black ice on the roads. Daddy nodded, but he didn’t look at her because his eyes were on Mommy like if eyes could eat they would swallow her up. He came up the stairs two at a time and held her in his arms for such a long moment that Ellen became impatient. Mommy started crying and he turned away and went back down the stairs. Ellen’s grandmother told Mommy to get hold of herself. Don’t make things worse!

  At the bottom of the stairs Daddy turned and held out his arms and Ellen jumped into them. He said she was his crackerjack and swung her up and then gave her a bear hug so tight his medals dug into her skin. She liked medals and it was a good hurt.

  Ellen had a lot of memories of the time after her father went to Korea, some of them bad, a few really good; but mostly they were no more than glimpses of people and events and places that mattered so little, she wondered now why they took up space in her mind: lines from songs, snapshot memories of her mother crying and staying up all night putting together jigsaw puzzles, of school and friends and Jimmy Nissen teaching her to smoke in the seventh grade, chugging Olympia beer under the bleachers at football games and in cars parked by the reservoir. She remembered driving the Hudson into a ditch in the fog; and the old man, mad as a yellow jacket, saying in his quivery voice that he didn’t know where on God’s green earth Ellen had come from. Sure as holy hell not my family.

  Her father went to live in Texas and got a new wife and other children; and after a long time, Ellen’s mother stopped crying. From then on all she thought about was ranching and stretching pennies and organizing the breath of life out of Ellen. The fights they had were worse than the ones Ellen grew up hearing between her mother and grandmother.

  One Sunday morning Ellen stood in the kitchen and screamed, “I hate you! When I grow up I’m leaving this dump and I’ll never come back.”

  The day after high school graduation, Ellen boarded the Greyhound to Los Angeles. In school she’d been a mediocre student except in the business courses, where she won the Future Executive Secretary Award three years running. By the time she went looking for a job in LA she typed almost ninety words a minute on an IBM Selectric and took shorthand fast enough to get hired at a Pontiac dealership on Pico Boulevard even though she was only eighteen. There were boulevards all over Los Angeles, streets lined with skinny palms like giant swizzle sticks, stoplights at every intersection, department stores and movie theaters with towering neon marquees. Boulevard. Sometimes Ellen repeated the word aloud, loving the luxurious, Southern California sound of it.

  Being around a car dealership was a great way to meet men. But she never lost her preference for a uniform.

  Years later, when Ellen was a grandmother and twice a widow, she started meeting men online and hoped for a retired officer, a colonel maybe, a commander or a captain. San Diego was full of retired military, and it seemed a reasonable expectation. Instead she had met a chief and a couple of master sergeants and each with the disheartening look of years and hard work on them. She knew BJ would tell her that the world needed machinists and plumbers, but she didn’t.

  She had been about to give up on the whole enterprise when Dennis Dwight responded to her online message. He said he was fifty-two which probably meant he was close to sixty. (No matter how fit and good-looking, sixty was the border no one crossed in the online dating world.) Ellen had told Dennis she was forty-eight, an age she thought she could pull off when she made an effort.

  Though not a military man, Dennis had much to recommend him. He knew the Central Valley and had grown up in Modesto, which was bigger than Daneville but just as much a dead end. Like her, he couldn’t leave home fast enough. He spoke in a vague way of having worked overseas and mentioned Kuwait, Istanbul, and Saigon. She interpreted his cryptic answers as meaning he did government work he wasn’t at liberty to talk about. After a few weeks of e-mailing, they had begun to speak on the phone, often late at night in the hours when Ellen would otherwise be lying awake, missing BJ. On the phone Dennis had a deep and reassuring radio voice, and a wonderfully quick and easy laugh. He told her jokes that were just a little bit dirty, but never offensive. He asked her what she was wearing when they talked, and she began to dress for their calls. She bought a white silk nightgown at Neiman’s, backless and sheer.

  She thought BJ looking down from heaven would understand if she lied about her age. And he would forgive the nightgown and the things she said things to Dennis on the phone that made her blush when she remembered them the next morning.

  They had made plans to meet this evening for the first time. Tuesday was a strange night for a date, but never mind. If things worked out, they would have all the Saturday nights in the world. With other men she had insisted on a quick coffee first, what she thought of as a tryout date. It didn’t seem necessary with Dennis. They had talked so much and about so many things that she knew they’d be compatible.

  Even so, she was nervous and had gone to some lengths to make the right impression. That morning she’d had her hair cut and colored, a manicure and pedicure. She held up her hands and admired the new polish the color of raspberries. In the salon that morning, the Vietnamese woman who did her nails had told her it was a very nice color, very pretty. The women in the salon talked constantly in their complicated language as their thin white hands filed Ellen’s nails and massaged her feet in a way she wasn’t sure she really liked. She tried to ignore them, but she suspected they were gossiping about her. When she tried to imagine their San Diego lives away from the salon, ordinary lives with husbands and children, what came to mind was the stretched and puckered s
car where BJ had been shot in the shoulder.

  * * *

  Sometimes Roxanne forgot that there was a time before everything about Simone became so fraught. She made an effort to remember the endearing tyke who collected round white stones for a snow garden and, when she couldn’t find enough of them, painted any round stone she could find with white-out from BJ’s desk, the three-year-old who wouldn’t eat her ice cream until it “got warm,” who climbed into Roxanne’s bed in the morning and whistled in her ear to wake her up.

  In college, she and Elizabeth once snatched Simone out of school—where she never seemed to learn much anyway—and took her up into the Laguna Mountains, where five inches of snow had fallen, the local equivalent of a blizzard, closing roads to all but vehicles like Elizabeth’s truck. Simone had never seen snow and bounced on the bench seat between them, excited as a five-year-old though she must have been eleven or twelve at the time. For a sled they used a hubcap Elizabeth had found somewhere. On the downhill Simone squealed so long and loud, that whole winter they’d called her Piglet.

  For her fourteenth birthday they took her to LA to see a production of The King and I, and afterward she made them buy her a DVD of the movie. And because she wanted to watch it all the time, she was motivated to finally learn how to use the DVD player BJ and Ellen had bought her the year before. After The King and I she begged to see any play that had words and music and learned the scores to all of them. She couldn’t memorize the times tables but she could sing every song from Phantom of the Opera.

  She was ten and Roxanne was in college when Ellen could no longer ignore Simone’s mental impairment. For a while she dragged Simone to doctors and specialists of all kinds who said variations on the same thing. Simone had neurologically impaired balance and coordination and a borderline mental disability. In other words, her intelligence was subnormal. Later they added manic-depressive to their diagnoses.

  School had been a challenge requiring special classes and tutors in most subjects, but in due course Simone learned to read and write and add a column of figures. Teachers passed her from grade to grade despite the gaps in her learning. Ellen and BJ wouldn’t have it any other way. As far as Roxanne knew, her sister had never read a book from beginning to end, although she devoured style and entertainment magazines and had subscriptions to eight or ten of them. Recipes, directions of any kind, confused her. If she couldn’t do something right away, she didn’t want to take the time to learn. No one had any idea what she would do with her life until she met Johnny Duran.

  Behind Roxanne the screen door slammed shut, and Ty called out from the tiny bedroom they had made into a joint office.

  “Hey,” he said, and taking hold of her hands, he pulled her down onto his lap for a kiss, surprising her. He was using the computer; pictures of windows were on the screen.

  “What are you working on?”

  “Fenestration,” he said.

  “Fena-what?”

  “Windows for the addition.”

  This, like the surprising kiss, was a good sign. Since Chicago they had stopped talking about the remodeling project.

  “See these?” He indicated the windows on the computer screen. “They open out, they’re vinyl, double-paned with blinds between the panes. Expensive as hell but I think we ought to go for broke on this addition. If we don’t we’ll regret it.”

  “You’re not mad at me anymore?”

  “I’ve been a bastard, Rox, and I’m sorry, I really am. The last month’s been a bitch, and then the weekend… I gave you a hard time, didn’t I?”

  “You’ve hardly even spoken to me. For weeks.” And when you did you were barely civil or alert. “You were mad because I didn’t go to Chicago. If I’d been there you would have gotten the job.”

  “That might be true, but it doesn’t really matter because, bottom line, they were right, I didn’t want it that much. I’ve been going over the whole business ever since I got the call and then this weekend, it was like the last puzzle piece fell into place.”

  She realized that he was going to tell her something important, something wonderful that would make her happy, make them both happy; and then she would have to ruin a perfect night of reconciliation, a night they both needed, by running back to Simone’s.

  She needed to say it and get the worst over with. “I’ve been at Simone’s and I’ve got to go back and babysit. She fired the nanny.”

  She waited for him to be angry. Instead he reached his arms around her waist and pulled her close. Against her body his heart beat and his chest rose and fell. They breathed the same air and she could not distinguish the beat of his heart from her own. In that moment she understood that she had already made the break with Simone. It would take time to convince her sister of this, but the hardest part was over. She wanted to tell him this but stopped herself, aware that there had already been too much talk of Simone in their house. He was a scientist and wanted proof of change. Well, she would give it to him.

  “You don’t mind that I’m going?” She pulled back and looked into his eyes.

  “Of course I mind.”

  “Then what…?”

  “You have to do it your way, Rox. I’ve been trying to force you to make this break with Simone for me. Because it’s what I want. And I finally figured out that you’ve got to want independence for yourself as much as I want it for you.”

  Now was not the time to applaud his insight.

  He said, “After the call came from Chicago, I couldn’t understand why I basically didn’t care.”

  “You barely spoke to me. You were furious.”

  “I thought that too but this weekend I realized I never really wanted to leave Salk.”

  “The experiment—”

  “It was a mess, but it’ll work next time. I’ve got a great team and the science is good. The main thing is, I realized that Chicago would have been a big mistake.”

  “Then why did we go through all this?”

  “That’s what I kept asking myself last night. And then—bam!—it hit me. I wanted Chicago because I thought it would get you away from Simone.”

  “Oh, Ty, I’ll do it on my own. We don’t have to leave our home.”

  “But you have to go away tonight.”

  She nodded. “I do.”

  “Call them up. She fired the nanny and forgot to hire a babysitter. So? Let her figure out how to solve the problem. It’s not exactly Schrödinger’s Cat. I think even your sister’s got the brain power to figure it out.”

  “I’ve got to do this my way, Ty.”

  “I guess I just said that, didn’t I.”

  “Stay awake for me, okay?”

  “Don’t take too long. We don’t have forever, Roxanne.”

  At bedtime Valli and Victoria demanded a story but were asleep before Hansel and Gretel discovered the witch’s cottage. Olivia fussed and cried, twisting her small body left to right, arching her back like a gymnast. Roxanne walked the floor with her until her digestion settled down, and she could lie back, propped on a pillow sucking her binky until she fell asleep. Merell was still awake when Roxanne closed the nursery door. She popped up out of bed, talking nonstop.

  “Just let me show you this one thing, okay? It’s really special. Okay? I promise I’ll go to bed after.” She crossed her heart. “Anyway it doesn’t matter when I go to bed. It’s Tuesday and there’s no school until next week and besides sometimes I stay up until midnight.”

  “Not when I’m here you don’t.”

  “Just fifteen minutes?”

  Roxanne pointed to the face of her watch, trying not to smile. “Fifteen minutes and that’s the limit.”

  Merell ran through the house and into the garage. Johnny had driven his Porsche to the dinner that night, and the two cars remaining were both Simone’s, a black Cayenne van parked beside a big Mercedes sedan, also black, with darkly tinted windows. They looked like mob transportation.

  As if she were conducting a tour for visitors, Merell said, “Daddy b
ought the Cayenne so Mommy could take us to the beach and the zoo and stuff, but she’s too nervous.” She ran across the garage to a far door with a window in it. “I bet you didn’t even know we have two garages. It only got finished three weeks ago. We aren’t supposed to go in so Daddy keeps it locked.”

  A set of keys hung on a hook by the door, just beyond Merell’s reach when she stood on tiptoe. “We can look through the window, though. It’s okay to do that.” She clicked a light switch, illuminating the second garage. “But we gotta remember to turn the lights off when we go back because did you know lights make heat? This garage has a controlled temperature so it never gets really hot or really cold. The air-conditioning makes it always exactly sixty-five degrees.”

  The first thing Roxanne noticed, looking through the twelve-inch square of window, was how clean the new garage was. There were no stacks of plastic bins full of old clothes and Christmas ornaments. No skis or surfboards bridged the rafters; no open shelves cluttered with tools lined the garage perimeter. Near the back wall the garage floor was carpeted—pale blue—but most of the expanse appeared to be polished hardwood on which five vintage automobiles were parked, lined up with their headlights facing the back wall, the overhead lights blindingly reflected in their mirror-finished bodies.

  Merell went on, telling Roxanne some things she knew but some that she didn’t. “Before he got the new garage, Daddy kept his cars in a warehouse. I bet you never saw them, did you? Daddy said it wasn’t any fun when they were across town, and besides he didn’t trust the man who owned the warehouse. He left the doors open. There’s gonna be a special air filter so the air’ll be really pure and if any dust gets in on accident, there’s special, super-soft rags to clean them with.” Merell waited a second for her words to sink in. “Mommy likes the yellow one best. Daddy let her drive it once when he first got it. He calls it the Yellow Bird. Mommy says she’d be the happiest woman in the world if he’d give it to her but he says it’s too valuable and she’d probably wreck it.”