After the exam, as I walk down the hall, I hear footsteps approach from behind and turn to see Andrew.
“I wanted to say thank-you,” he says as he stops in front of me. He pushes his glasses farther up on his nose.
“Oh, you’re welcome,” I say.
We both step closer to the wall as another doctor breezes by.
He lowers his voice. “It’s just that...Erika doesn’t trust many people. She sort of likes to be in control of everything. I’m sure you noticed.”
I grin. “Not at all.” We both laugh.
“She was pretty scared when she found out she was pregnant. Everything that was going to happen to her body, labor, life changing. Since she’s started seeing you, she’s relaxed a lot. She trusts you, and she doesn’t trust easy.”
My chest swells, but I keep my expression in check.
“Thank you,” I say. “That means a lot to me.”
And it does. It means everything that I can be worthy of my patients’ trust.
* * *
Saturday night, it’s our weekly dinner date with Cooper’s parents, and as usual, following Cooper into his childhood home is like stepping into another world. Chatter comes from the kitchen, where I know I will find his family cooking together—a tradition, he told me, they started as a way to make the most of their visits after he and his sister moved out. After so many years with Cooper, I, too, have grown accustomed to grazing over cheeses, breads, wines and nibbles of vegetables as I help chop and throw them into simmering pots on the stove.
Cooper’s relationship with his family bears a sharp contrast to mine. Cooper still sees his parents at least once a week and talks to them on the phone most days, usually to get medical advice from his mom, a nurse who has more years of experience than Cooper and I have been alive. I join their dinners when I can. Some nights their playful banter and unbridled affection for each other—and for me—is a painful reminder of what I wish for my own family. Other times, it’s a refuge, a promise of a future that could still be if only I can find a way to make things right.
As Cooper closes the front door behind me, his mom, Marilyn, sweeps into the cramped space.
“There you two are. I thought I heard the door.”
Marilyn plants kisses on each of our cheeks. She is a small, supple woman with a bob of box-red hair and hugs like a down comforter. I kiss her in return, and the scent of her sweet pea perfume and the Cajun spices coming from the kitchen reminds me of when I first met her, the day after Thanksgiving all those years ago. Cooper and I had been dating for three weeks. He led me into their home, small but overflowing with color and life, so different from the cool angles and empty space I’d grown up in. I was greeted by his parents and his sister like they’d already sectioned off space in their hearts and had been waiting for me to fill it.
“Your father is just about to add the wine,” Marilyn says. “And you know if you don’t get a glass now, it will all end up in the gumbo.” She lets out her trademark high-pitched chuckle.
Cooper kisses her on the forehead and heads to the kitchen. I let Marilyn assess my face and skim her thumb over the circles under my eyes like she always does. They’re darker than usual, and I can see that she notices. All week, I’ve either been up late working on my application or worrying about what I’ll do if I actually get the grant. Or worrying about how I’ll forgive myself if I don’t. This research is about making amends. It’s always been about making amends.
Marilyn frowns, clearly wanting to say something.
“How can I help?” I ask. She nods toward the kitchen, and I follow her.
The wine flows, and since I’m not on call I allow myself to indulge. The alcohol dulls the sharp edges of my upcoming deadline and makes the conversation flow as I listen to Cooper’s dad, John, describe the latest architectural design he’s sketched—his heart’s work after long days spent as an electrician—as he sprinkles unmeasured and unidentified spices on the sausage I sauté on the stove. He asks about work, and I tell him about some funny moments in the delivery room, laughing along with him between sips of red wine from a juice glass. Stephen is absent, which is unusual, but Megan and Marilyn tease Cooper over a shared cutting board. His laughter pulls the strings of my heart. It’s been so long since I’ve been the one to make him laugh like that.
During our first year of med school, Cooper and I only had one class together—genetics. Our teacher, Dr. Sands, was unbelievably enthusiastic about his subject, sometimes spending an entire period marveling at how eye color wove its way through a family. Cooper and I had taken to quoting him when we were tired of doing homework or when we needed to clear the tension after a spat.
“Isn’t the human body exciting?” Cooper would mumble against my belly button after tickling me and pinning me to his bed.
“You can’t make stuff like this up,” I’d intone as we shared the mirror after the shower, and in his reflection, I’d see Cooper melt a little, looking at me looking at him.
One day, Cooper and I made a bet on whether Dr. Sands said “literally” or “super” more often in class. By the time we were tied at ten, we were both laughing through our tears, and Dr. Sands had kicked us out. We went back to Cooper’s car in the student parking lot and made love on the backseat, the rain our only cover. Even before I could admit it to myself, it was always Cooper and me against the world.
When the sausage is done, I follow Megan to the dining room with my glass of wine. Cooper catches my gaze over the cutting board and seems to read my mind. He gives me a tight-lipped smile, then returns to chopping.
“Do you want me to help set the table?” I ask her.
“Sure,” she chirps and passes a handful of spoons. She smiles, but she looks pale.
“Where’s Stephen tonight?” I ask.
“Work,” she says, but the word is hollow. And though her glossy blond hair is pulled back into its usual ponytail, and her light makeup is so smooth it could easily be mistaken for the perfection of her own skin, the sparkle that lights her eyes is missing. She looks like she’s lost a few pounds, too. The end of the school year must be taking its toll on her.
As I watch her from the corner of my eye, she picks up some bowls for the table but sets them back down quickly. She steadies herself on the table and places her other hand on her petite abdomen, letting out a long, slow breath.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
Her wine is untouched, and her skin is clammy.
“Sit down,” I tell her and pull out a chair. “I can finish this.”
She lowers herself down and shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I feel a little nauseated. One of the kids brought ice-cream cake to class for their birthday.”
I pour her a glass of homemade lemonade from a pitcher on the table, then finish setting out the bowls.
“School good?” I ask her. “Or looking forward to summer?”
She laughs through her discomfort. “A little of both.”
A minute later, Cooper walks through the door with a casserole dish of fresh biscuits in his bare hands, cursing.
“They make pot holders for that, you know,” Megan says from behind her glass. “You wouldn’t want to hurt those precious doctoring tools of yours.”
Cooper sets the dish down on a mat in the center of the table and shakes out his hands. He pulls Megan close to him and musses her hair, then smooths it out again.
“Says the girl who used to beg me to pull things out of her Easy-Bake Oven when she lost that pan pusher.”
“Hey, you stuck your own damn fingers in there.”
“Okay, kids,” John says, coming in with the pot of gumbo. “You’re never too old to ground.”
Marilyn follows behind him, and we all gather around the table, eating, talking and laughing the night away. It’s just everyday life, but with an unwavering lo
ve that makes every moment together like snapshots in a photo album of someone else’s life. Until the clock strikes midnight, I almost forget that it’s been fifteen years to the day since I lost my sister.
* * *
Sometimes when the wind catches the front door of my parents’ house and closes it a little too hard, a little too quickly, I’m transported back to the day Abby left our lives forever. It reminds me of the sound of the door slamming shut behind my parents when they disappeared with the ambulance siren, leaving my younger brother, Charlie, and me behind. A steady breeze blows strong on Sunday morning, so I hold the same doorknob tightly, not releasing it until it clicks shut.
Inside, I hear the voices of my dad and brother talking softly in the kitchen, glasses clinking. I smell the ever-present scent of burnt coffee in an almost empty pot. My heels echo on the tile, announcing my arrival. The chatter stops, and I see Charlie’s face—eyebrows raised, the playful grin that usually curls the edges of his mouth absent—appear around the corner as he leans back on his stool. His slept-on chestnut curls are a mess on top of his head. “Hey, sis,” he says.
I enter the kitchen and spot my dad standing at the island, a bottle of bourbon and highball glasses between the two of them. It’s the only day of the year that the alcohol cabinet is open before noon, but it’s a tradition none of us has felt the desire to look at too closely. It’s a day for remembering, and a day for forgetting.
“Hey,” I say to Charlie. I wrap an arm around his neck and plant a kiss on his temple.
“Hey, baby girl,” my dad says.
“Hi, Daddy.” My throat constricts. He looks relaxed in his Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, but his eyes are bloodshot, like he’s either been crying or hasn’t slept well in weeks. Maybe both. I allow him the dignity of not commenting on it and cover my own emotion with a smile. I fall into my dad’s bear hug—the cure for every scraped knee, every worry, every broken heart since I was a little girl. The only thing it’s never been able to do is bring my sister back.
I kiss Dad on the cheek, then slip out of his arms to walk to the window, where I know I will find the one person missing from our informal memorial. My mom’s absence is as much a part of the tradition as the early cocktail hour.
The midday sun glints off the lake at the edge of the backyard, a charm on the Willamette River necklace of Oregon. When Charlie, Abby and I were kids, we used to play at the shore, throwing toy boats out as far as we could and waiting for them to wash up. Sometimes we wrote messages for each other, hidden inside on a folded piece of paper—Can we go ride bikes now?—scribbled our responses, then tossed them out again. It’s hard to believe I could drop a message in the river outside the hospital, and, under the right circumstances, it might float here, to my mother’s feet. There are so many things I haven’t been able to say to her for so long, even standing right here in her kitchen.
As expected, she’s kneeling on the grass at the base of the large porch. Her coffee mug is perched on the railing. Her purple gardening hat flops in the breeze, and she’s digging a hole in the soil with a vigor that seems to be doing more harm than good. It’s Mom’s version of bourbon. Abby was always her favorite, but gardening used to be the one thing she and I did together. I’d be in charge of the hand trowel and the watering can. She’d smudge a line of dirt down my nose and call me “all knees and elbows.” A lifetime ago. We stopped once Abby died, when there was no longer room there for anything less than perfection.
“Has she been out there all day?” I ask, noticing the pink of the skin on her wrists between where her gloves stop and her three-quarter sleeves end. The doctor in me winces. The daughter in me holds my tongue.
“Since the sun rose,” my dad says.
I try to imagine Mom as I remember her from childhood. I try to remember her flowing skirts I used to chase around the house. How she used to lie on the couch and let me braid her hair for hours. How she used to blast Tom Petty and bake cookies with us kids after school. I can’t reconcile that woman with the one I know today. The truth is, Dad, Charlie and I lost that woman long before Abby’s death. But it seems that Abby’s death was when Mom finally lost her, too.
I sigh and rejoin the men.
“Drink?” Charlie asks. He grabs the bottle and adds another finger-worth to his glass.
“I have to go into the clinic,” I say. Working on my application is a better way to honor my sister’s memory than bourbon.
“Drink?” he asks again. I roll my eyes.
“Not everyone’s boss is so forgiving,” I say.
“Neither is his,” Dad says, “but it’s not like I can fire him.” After Charlie finished college, he took a job at the family finance firm because he knew it was the only place he’d be able to do as little work as possible for the most amount of pay. If he wasn’t so charming, his lack of motivation would drive me crazy.
Charlie chuckles. His eyes are already glassy.
After a long silence where we put off the inevitable, Dad says, “She would have been thirty-three this year.”
Thirty-three.
She was two years older than me. When we were teenagers it often seemed like a decade. Abby was a contradiction of wild and wise. She would study for a calculus exam for hours, then sneak out of her room to go to a boat party on the lake, only tiptoeing back in once the sun began to rise. She’d brush her teeth, drive her VW Bug to school, ace her test. If she’d survived, she would have been an enigma amongst teen mothers. I know she had her doubts, but I always believed in her.
“She would be...pregnant with her fourth kid,” Charlie says.
“Fourth?” I sputter, then laugh.
Last year we decided that her third child had just turned two. Even though I know her first child never could have lived, even if Abby had, I like to pretend she would have been a girl—the niece I almost had, even if she only ever existed as a fetus. I think Abby would have finished high school, and then college, found a man who loved her because she was a mother, instead of abandoning her for it. Eventually, her adventurous spirit would have given way to her maternal instincts, and she would have found that motherhood was the ultimate adventure. She wasn’t the nurturing type as a teenager, but I like to think she would have grown into it, given the time. That’s how I like to imagine her anyway. Dad and Charlie let me lead the first time we played this game and have continued to elaborate on my initial idea. Probably because they think I need it more than they do. They’re probably right.
“She’s decided to have her tubes tied after this one, though,” I say, giving them and my sister a break. “She recently rediscovered her passion for writing, and she’d like to go back to school once the baby stops nursing.” In high school she always said she wanted to write for a magazine. She would have been good at it, too.
Dad grins, and tears form in the corners of his eyes. “I like that.”
I picture her in a natural-lit room in a big white house on the other side of the lake, by a window that overlooks the water, notebook in hand. She would have stayed here in Lake Oswego. She would have married a guy who knew her in high school, but had gone unnoticed by her. In their midtwenties, they would have met at Mrs. Collins’s yearly barbecue, and they would have fallen in love across the perfectly mowed grass. He would have admitted weeks later that he’d loved her since he first laid eyes on her. All the boys did.
It’s a morbid game and we all know it, but it’s better than hiding from it. Mom wants to remember her little girl exactly the way she was. I force myself to remember, even when I want to forget. Though truthfully, on the bad days, I wish I’d never had a sister at all.
It took many years after moving out of my parents’ house to unearth who I was. I say unearth rather than find because it wasn’t so much a process of adding layers as shedding the grief and confusion of my teen years. After Abby’s death, I buried myself in guilt, sear
ched for solace in the arms of the opposite sex when I couldn’t find comfort at home and, at the same time, put up a wall between me and everyone I loved, or ever could love. Cooper is the only one who ever broke through, who ever made me feel worthy of being seen. I’m still working on showing him all of me. When I push through the anger that my best friend and my mother were stolen from me, I can almost see that honest version of myself—bullheaded out of love, steady enough to lean on, an unapologetic dreamer.
The layers I couldn’t shed have thickened like an outer shell, covering the weaker membranes. I am fiercely defensive of the person I turned into after Abby’s death, tiny and rubbed raw at first but, over the years, with the safety of Cooper’s unwavering love, grown strong and powerful in my own way. I have feared the day someone in my life would crack that shell, and I’d fall to pieces again. And because I love Cooper more than I’ve ever loved anyone—maybe even more than I love Abby—he alone holds the power to break me. It’s why I’ve never told him the role I played in my sister’s death. If he knew, I would never be able to look at him without seeing the pity in his eyes. I would never be able to hide from that constant reminder, and I’d be robbed of my only comfort. So I let it smolder inside of me, and I foolishly allow Cooper to keep lifting me up, the friction of it eroding my shell.
Every year around the time of Abby’s anniversary, I feel that urge all over again—to leave and lose myself in someone who knows nothing about me, someone with whom I can pretend to be anyone but me. And because Cooper foolishly loves me, he doesn’t push, doesn’t question me, knowing from the first time we met that forcing me to open up when I wasn’t ready would make me run. I never hid from him how many men I’d run from before.
I find myself drawn to the window. I raise my hand to place it on the glass but think better of it. Mom hates fingerprints. She’s moved to some still-dormant rosebushes farther down, pulled out her pruning shears. I fear what the poor shrubs will look like when she’s done with them. I don’t remember much from the days when we used to garden together, but I do remember there’s such a thing as too much love. It seems that after Abby’s death, she put all the love she had into that garden, and since then there hasn’t been any left for us. Losing my sister broke each of us in our own way, but it was the way Mom pulled away from us afterward that broke our family as a whole.
Perfectly Undone: A Novel Page 3