The Wrong Sister

by Caroline Leavitt

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  Copyright © 2014 by Caroline Leavitt

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

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  “The Wrong Sister,” Copyright 1999 by Caroline Leavitt, was originally published in the anthology Forever Sisters (Pocket Books).

  “The Last Vacation,” Copyright 2000 by Caroline Leavitt, originally appeared in the anthology Father (Pocket Books).

  Table of Contents

  The Wrong Sister

  The Last Vacation

  Reading Guide Questions

  About the Author

  The Wrong Sister

  In the summer of 1974, when I was 14, I lost my older sister Rose to love.

  We were living in a suburb of Waltham back then, a green, leafy new development, full of scrubby trees and mowed lawns and clapboard houses painted pastel, just a half hour bus ride away from Boston. We were a family of women, my father having died four years before. He had had a heart attack, falling in the very garden that had been a selling point when we had bought the house. He left my mother enough insurance so that the house was hers, but not enough that she didn’t have to work long hours as a legal secretary, forcing my sister Rose and me to tend to ourselves, often well after dinner.

  I didn’t mind. There was no other company I wanted to be in than my sister’s. She was beautiful back then, 16 and reed slender, with my mother’s same river of black hair, only hers wasn’t tied up into a corporate bun but skipped to her waist. She had luminous pale skin and eyes as blue and clear as chips of summer sky. I was almost everything Rose and my mother were not—studious and shy, shaped like a soda straw with frizzy hair the color of rust.

  Before Rose fell in love, she adored only me. We had grown up inseparable, a world unto ourselves simply because we didn’t like anyone as much as we liked and needed each other.

  Tagging along with Rose, anything was possible. We roamed the woods behind our house looking for the secret landing places of flying saucers. We walked two miles to the Star Market just to steal fashion magazines and candy and cheap gold-tone jewelry we wouldn’t be caught dead wearing, for the pure shocking thrill of doing something dangerous. We ate ice cream for dinner with my mother’s wine poured over it as a sauce. We dialed stray numbers on the phone and talked enthusiastically to whoever picked up, pretending we were exchange students from France looking for a dangerous liaison or two. “Adventure is the code we live by,” Rose declared, hooking her little finger around mine to shake on it. We were always going to be together. We were both going to be famous writers, living in the same mansion in Paris, scandalizing everyone by the hard, fast way we lived. We plotted out our books together. They were always about young girls like us on some quest or another, for stolen diamonds or lost love, and the only difference between my books and Rose’s was that Rose’s heroines always ended up riding off on the backs of motorcycles with any boy she felt like kissing, and mine were always teaching school in some quaint little town in Vermont, with two Persian cats warming themselves at her feet.

  And then Rose met Daniel, and everything changed for all three of us.

  Daniel Richmond was a senior in Rose’s high school, a science major who loved cells and combustions, who said words like mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum as if they were poetry. Rose had met him the first day she started tenth grade, when she had wandered into the wrong room and found him there peering into a microscope. The first time Daniel saw her, he looked stunned. “I’ll take you to the right room,” he said, and by the time he got her there, going the longest way he could manage, he had her phone number, and a date for the following night.

  He was Rose’s first boyfriend. She was giddy with the incredulous joy of it. She walked with a new bounce. She brushed her hair a hundred times every night and stared dreamily at herself in the mirror. Daniel called her every night before their actual date. She curled protectively around the phone. She whispered into it and even after she had said goodbye to him, she held the receiver up against her cheek. “Wait until you meet him, Stella,” she told me, out of breath. “You’re going to die.”

  The first time he came over, I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to dress up, to shine the same way my sister did. Both Rose and I tried on three different outfits. We both braided our hair and took it out again, put on perfume and washed it off, and when the doorbell finally rang, we both went to the front door together.

  Rose was beaming. She seemed lit from within. “I told you about each other,” she said to both of us, and pushed Daniel toward me. He was taller than she was and the handsomest boy I had ever seen, with shiny brown hair so long it fell into his collar and lashes so lush, they seemed to leave shadows across his face.

  “Stella, so you like science fiction,” he said, and handed me a book, Brave New World. I had never read it, had never even heard of it back then, and I took it gratefully. “I’ll be careful with it.

  He shook his head. “No, it’s yours.”

  Astonished, I turned the book over and over in my hands. It was brand new. The spine hadn’t even been cracked and broken in the way I liked, the pages hadn’t been stained with fruit juice or chocolate, torn by my own two careless hands. A virgin book, I thought, and blushed.

  “See, Stella, I told you you’d like him,” Rose said. Her hands reached out to touch Daniel’s shirtsleeve, his hand, the bare back of his neck, and could only let go to reach on for another part of him. My mother came in, still in her silvery corporate suit, her makeup, and Daniel handed her a bottle of wine. “Rose said you favor red.”

  My mother smiled. She undid her top button and gave Rose an approving glance. “You come for dinner tomorrow,” she ordered. “Late dinner. The way they do in Europe. Say around 9:00.”

  He came for late dinner the next night, and almost every other night after. It became a sort of ritual. We’d all eat late dinner, huge lavish spreads my mother was delighted to cook for all of us. She loved the way Daniel would engage her in conversation, the way he’d sometimes bring her books he thought she’d like or flowers. “You’re over here so often, we ought to charge you rent,” she said, but she smiled at him. She told him he’d have to taste the beef Wellington she was planning to make the next night.

  One day, though, I came home to find the house quiet. “Where’s Rose and Daniel?” My mother shrugged, she put hamburgers into a pan. “They’re out on their own tonight,” she said.

  “They are?”

  We sat down to dinner, to fries and burgers and a salad, and although my mother put on the radio to make the meal more festive, although she chattered brightly about her new boss, who had taken her out to lunch and flirted with her, who she was sure might not be married, something felt wrong. I kept looking at the two empty seats and I was suddenly not hungry anymore. My mother tapped her fork against the table. “It’s not a tragedy, Stella,” she said sternly. I put my burger down. “I had a big lunch.”

  Daniel and Rose began spending more and more time alone. I watched them walking away from our house, and away from me, their hands so tightly clasped, I was sure they must be leaving marks. They couldn’t seem to be together without touching, hands or shoulders or heads. They couldn’t seen to talk but instead were whispering, as if everything they shared were some g
reat, perfect secret, as if they were in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language or know the customs. That summer they sat out under the peach tree in back, a thermos of lemonade between them, and every time I walked by the kitchen, I peered out the back window until I saw them lying on the ground, entwined as if they were one body, kissing, so still, I thought for a moment they were dead. I watched them when they were sitting across from each other at our table for dinner, how Daniel couldn’t pass Rose the salt without touching her shoulder. And even when he brought her home, I peered from the front window and watched them in his car, rolling together, kissing, taking their time before Rose would run back upstairs, back to me.

  “Where did you go? What did you do?” I perched on the edge of her bed, but she was suddenly dreamy and distant.

  “Stella, it was unbelievable,” she said.” No one’s ever loved me the way Daniel does.” And then she was silent.

  They were almost never apart. They even began dressing alike, in the same black turtlenecks and blue jeans, the same white high-top sneakers. She wore his tweedy jackets; he borrowed her oversized Harvard sweatshirt. He sent her love letters that flopped in through our mail slot almost every day, letters she read in astonishment, one hand flying to her face. She kept them hidden so well that even I couldn’t find them. He bought her flowers and windup toys. By the time Rose was a high school senior and Daniel was at Boston University, he was at our house by 7:00 every morning and he sometimes didn’t leave until well after midnight. The neighbors got used to seeing him sitting reading on our front porch, not wanting to wake anyone. They got to know his bruised-looking green car parked in front of our house for hours on end. He didn’t care that Rose never got up until 10:00; he’d talk to my mother and make her breakfast, he’d talk to me. He didn’t treat me like a younger sister meant to be tolerated. “How could I be mean to Rose’s sister?” he asked. Instead, he asked me what I was reading, who I was listening to. We’d be in conversation so deep, he sometimes didn’t even see Rose until she was right there in front of us, and then he would jump up, electrified, kissing her, touching her hair, her face, the tips of her fingers. The two of them would move together, joining like a seam.

  I frittered away my time waiting for Rose, waiting for my mother to get home by reading or watching old movies on TV until my eyes hurt. If I were lucky, I could grab bits of Rose’s time, parts of Daniel’s.

  One day, while waiting for Rose, Daniel decided to teach me to drive. “I don’t even have my learner’s permit yet.”

  He laughed. “I thought you and Rose liked to live dangerously.”

  I sat in the driver’s seat. He moved close beside me. “Turn on the ignition,” he said. “Power up.” He put his hands over mine on the wheel. “Here we go.”

  I drove around the block, stupefied, once, twice, and the third time, Rose was standing out front, in a sheer summer dress, her hair frilling out, her face pinched with an annoyance I had never seen before. She ran to the car and leaned over. “Where were you? I’ve been waiting.” She glanced over at me. “What are you doing in the car?”

  “Daniel’s teaching me to drive.”

  “We’re late.” She opened my door pointedly, waiting for me to get out.

  “Another time-—” Daniel said to me, and then Rose slid into the car, so close to Daniel she could unbuckle his seat belt. She moved closer and slid the belt around herself, buckling them both in together. “There. That’s better.”

  They drove off, leaving me on the hot sidewalk, and when I went back inside, I roamed around Rose’s room. I picked up the perfume on her dresser and opened it, daubing it along my neck, behind my knees the way she did. I slid out of my clothes and went to her closet and put on her blue minidress and stared at myself in front of the mirror. I lifted an imaginary wineglass in a toast. “There. That’s better,” I said.

  If Rose were lost to me with a boyfriend, I began to think of getting a boyfriend of my own. I was finally in high school. It was the fall, the beginning of a whole new term when anything might happen. Rose and Daniel had been in love a year and I was 15 and there was nothing to stop me from falling in love, too. There was a dance that September, held in the school gym, and so I went, wearing a blue dress of Rose’s, her long dangling Indian earrings.

  The gym looked funny without the usual equipment, the ropes, the volleyball nets. Neon-colored balloons floated from the ceiling. Red and gold crepe paper hung along the walls, and the entire floor was sprinkled with silver glitter. There was no food table, no punch bowl, nothing but too many people for one room and the pulse and beat of an out-of-town band called the Paradox. I leaned against the wall in the sweating heat, my hair pasting along my neck, watching the couples gliding by, pretending I was too interested in the terrible band to care that no one was asking me to dance. Sweat prickled along my back, and I was finally about to leave when a boy stood in front of me. I had never seen him before. He was wearing dark glasses and he smelled of cigarettes.

  “Dance?” he said and took my hand. “Happy Together” was playing and he repositioned his grip, clutching me. I was in heaven, right up until another couple danced beside us. The girl was pretty, with a flash of white blonde hair. “Hey, Bobby,” she smirked. The boy with her laughed and nodded at me. “New girlfriend, Bobby?” he said pleasantly. Bobby glowered, and pressed me closer, his hands scuttled along my back like a crab. “So, uh, having a good time?” the other boy said, and the boy let go of me. “Thanks for the dance.” He bit off his words and turned, leaving with his friends, leaving me standing in the middle of the dance floor.

  I kept dancing, by myself, as if it were a deliberate choice, as if I were too cool for a partner, as if I were one of Rose’s heroines from the books we used to write. I smiled until my teeth ached, and then I danced myself to the doorway, and stumbled down the stairs and out into the night.

  I walked home to an empty house. I took off Rose’s dress and put it in her closet and by the time I went to my room and closed the door, I was crying. My mother was out, Rose was with Daniel, and I banged my hands on the bed, when suddenly I heard a noise in the house.

  Footsteps. I bunched the pillow over my head.

  The door opened. “Stella?” Rose’s voice. I didn’t move. “Daniel’s here with me. Is it OK if we come in?”

  “No. Go away.” I heard their footsteps. I felt her sit on the bed beside me, and then for the first time in a long while, she put one hand on my back. I felt the heat of it through my blouse. “You have to get up,” Rose said quietly.

  “Why.”

  “Because you’re going out with us now.”

  Nobody ever really understood the relationship we three had. Every evening, when Daniel showed up, he showed up for me, as well as for Rose. We three went to movies and concerts and restaurants. We walked around Harvard Square, Daniel in the middle, one arm looped about my shoulders, the other around Rose. “Man oh man, two of them!” a boy called, passing us on the street. “Lend one to me, would you?” I flushed, pleased, telling myself that I might have been the one he wished to borrow.

  I told myself that you really couldn’t tell who was with who, not until late at night, when Daniel dropped us off. I always got out first, running up the front walk, letting myself in to my mother’s confused questions. Rose stayed behind with Daniel, sometimes for as long as an hour, the two of them talking. Sometimes he drove off again with her, not coming back until 3:00 in the morning. Then Rose would creep into my room and wake me up and I would relive her life through her. “We went skinny-dipping,” she breathed. She smelled of chlorine. “We broke into the pool at BU and swam. No one else was there.” She laughed. “Guess what?” Rose moved closer. “We’re going to get married. When we’re through college. We went to Sudbury. It’s exactly like living out in the country, only it’s close to Boston. We’re going to have two dogs and three kids, and he’ll do research and I’ll write books.”

  I plucked at the sheets, pushing her away. “You’re
getting my bed all wet.”

  Rose looked startled. “I am?” She turned to leave, but even after she was gone, my sheets smelled of chlorine. I held them up against my face.

  And then, when I turned 16, Rose went off to college herself. She didn’t get into BU, where Daniel was, but she got into a school 30 miles away. She lived at school because she said she wanted the experience of living in a dorm, but I thought it was just because she wanted to spend her nights with Daniel. The day she left, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I walked to the Star market and stole a magazine that I threw out as soon as I left the store. I walked to the Dairy Dip and got a cone, and then I walked back home, where the house seemed so empty I was drowning in it. “She’ll be home weekends,” my mother told me. She sighed. “Do you want to go shopping?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should get some new clothes. You look like a ragamuffin.” I turned away from her. “I have studying.”

  Rose didn’t come home that first weekend or the next. “I have a paper,” she claimed. “I have studying.”

  “So do it at home,” my mother said, but Rose was immovable.

  With Rose gone, you would have thought Daniel would be gone, too, but that wasn’t really the case. He was up at Rose’s school almost all the time, but he still came by for dinner once a week, he still called, and as soon as he walked in our door, we asked him for news about Rose, news we were sure that he, of all people, would surely have.

  “Something’s wrong,” Daniel insisted. “That school is bad for her.”

  “How is it bad?”

  Daniel hesitated. “She’s not herself anymore. She’s confused.”