Home Leave: A Novel

by Brittani Sonnenberg

  Therapist: Leah, you’re making progress, trust me. But I’m a little concerned about how the session ended. How are you doing?

  Leah nods, not answering, shrugs on her sweatshirt, dreamlike, walks slowly to the door, pauses.

  Leah: Why did you ask me to listen to her if you didn’t want me to see her anymore?

  Therapist: It’s hypothetical, Leah. I asked you to consider what she would say.

  Leah: Did you ever lose a sister?

  Therapist: I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to get into my personal—

  Leah: No, you didn’t. So don’t try to kill mine a second time.

  Safety

  Singapore, 1995

  Singapore’s torrential downpours make the thunderstorms Leah and Sophie loved in Atlanta look like light rain. They come out of nowhere, clouds gathering suddenly, inexplicably, with the fury of a borderline personality. From a bright blue sky outside and intense, unremitting sunlight, the room is abruptly cast in deep shadow, and rain descends with the finality of a stage curtain, the angry pounding distracting Leah from Mandarin class and, if lightning is present, calling a quick end to Sophie’s soccer practice.

  Shanghai’s storms had been moody, whole-day, drizzly affairs that occasionally gathered enough momentum to actually rain, at which point garbage flowed freely in the streets. Ponchos blossomed in every color on the city’s millions of bike riders, and the dirt of construction sites turned to sludge. Even the brightest of Shanghai’s blue fall days had been compromised by a thin line of haze, like the giveaway bloodshot eyes of an alcoholic. Nature, throughout the city, had been subdued and beaten to an unrecognizable pulp. The Suzhou Creek had run black and reeked blocks before you arrived. The leaves of plane trees in the French Concession were gray with dust.

  Singapore, by contrast, is verdant everywhere the Kriegsteins look, even in the city center. Fuchsia bougainvillea tumbles from pedestrian crossovers, sidewalks smell of the lemony gardenia trees towering above, and the sprawling grounds of their colonial villa boast papaya, mango, and jackfruit trees.

  Shanghai’s dirty air had caught in their throats and given them perpetual colds. In Singapore the air is warm and moist, rich with the oxygen of the island’s exhaling trees. Singapore is the safest city in the world, they are told, over and over, by the real estate agent, when they look at apartments, before settling on the villa; by the school counselor, when they first check out the American school; and by Chris’s colleague, who takes them all out to dinner with his two daughters, who are Sophie’s and Leah’s ages.

  But black spitting cobras are also endemic to Singapore, which was an island covered in virgin rainforest less than two hundred years ago. At night, in the bedrooms of their colonial villa, the Kriegsteins hear the remains of the jungle, shouting, creaking, arguing with itself. By day, the sounds disappear, aside from the clicking of a gecko in the kitchen and the grumble of thunder outside.

  After moving to Singapore, the family quickly falls into the rhythm of American expatriate life like somnambulists, dressing in blue and white uniforms for the American school; playing soccer, basketball, and softball for the American Eagles; swimming in the body-temperature water of the American Club pool. Only Elise remains leery, put off by the city’s gleaming surface. English is the national language, but Elise finds the hidden meanings in polite Singaporean speech harder to decode than the broken English in Shanghai. A month after their move, Elise begins working as a science teacher at the American school, grateful to abandon herself to the periodic table, or to explaining the water cycle to sixth graders. It’s the only time of day that the foreboding lifts.

  In Singapore, Sophie is overjoyed that no one is trying to touch her hair, and Leah is relieved that the boys at school are generally taller than her. True to Chris’s promise, the girls quickly acquire a yellow Lab puppy imported from Australia, who waddles up and down the small strip of sidewalk with Sophie and Leah in the mornings. Elise mysteriously christens the dog Robo Cop. The rest of them are so relieved to see Elise enthusiastic about something that they don’t question the choice of naming the dog after a cyborg.

  * * *

  They all undergo small, barely noticeable changes. Their white skin burns and turns darker. Sophie goes from being a tomboy to painting her toenails and hanging out by the American Club pool with her new friends. Their mouths catch fire as they sweat through bowls of fish-head curry. Their consciences sting, a little, now that they have a live-in maid: a smart, beautiful Filipina woman named Myla, who irons their laundry and cooks and then cleans their dishes. But all the other expatriates around them are doing the same thing, so they silently tell one another to relax. Relax.

  After the chaos of Shanghai, Singapore feels easy, and they rely on one another less than they did in China. They are lulled into a feeling of security, despite the occasional news story of a python found lurking in a swimming pool, looking like a hose.

  August 22, 1996

  Singapore

  The day Sophie dies the sky is perfectly clear. No hunching clouds, no uneasy breeze. Just a hot, late August afternoon.

  Part Four

  Sophie and Leah

  Singapore, 1996

  Before they moved to Singapore, before they moved to Shanghai, before they moved to Madison, back in Atlanta, Leah and Sophie played four square on the porch in front and basketball by the garage out back. They pulled onion grass up from its roots in the yard, stuck it in microwaved water, and tried to sell onion soup on the sidewalk. They invented games with ghost runners and unlimited points, then taught the rules to their babysitter. When the neighborhood kids decided to put on a production of The Princess Bride, it was Sophie who got to be the princess because she had blond curls. Leah got cast as the giant.

  When Leah misses Sophie now she tries not to think about things like that, things like wanting Sophie’s curls so bad. Leah tries to remember safer things, like Atlanta summer nights, nights she stayed awake, with Sophie asleep in the other twin bed. And even though it’s been five years since they left Atlanta, Leah can still picture her floral comforter bunched at the foot of the bed; she can still see nine o’clock shadows stalking the purple street outside. But she can’t picture Sophie’s face on the pillow. Only the memory’s noise remains whole: the hum of an old attic fan through the house. The summer heat trying to quiet the hum and the hum keeping Leah awake.

  * * *

  One week after Sophie’s funeral in Indiana, Leah boards the first leg of the flight back to Singapore. The flight attendant leads her to an aisle seat. A few minutes later the same woman appears with a blanket, slippers, a kit containing toothpaste, a toothbrush, mouthwash. Two seats away, Chris and Elise are taking their own kits from a different flight attendant, already removing the plastic wrapping from their slippers. Leah accepts the toiletries wordlessly, stuffs them under the seat in front of her.

  The plane lifts. A swift jerk in Leah’s stomach reminds her of what happens now, of what has happened. The plane is diagonal and she watches the aisle angle irreversibly. She turns on her Discman, finds the songs she has listened to since Sophie’s death. She closes her eyes against the cabin’s sickly tilt.

  Later, the stewardess pushes a cart slowly down the aisle, smiling. Leah picks at her chicken. In the front of the cabin, a movie begins. Leah glances up from buttering her roll to watch. Suddenly the plane is filled with jungle, soaked deep in green light. It reminds Leah of the Botanic Gardens in Singapore, of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, of watching HBO with Sophie this summer at Grand Ada’s, glassy-eyed. Curly haired. Glassy-eyed.

  Curly haired. Leah lays the dinner tray on the seat beside her, unfastens her seat belt. She stumbles to the toilet through slight turbulence, sits on the toilet seat, and sobs until she thinks the German man waiting outside might hear her. She bites her fist to keep from screaming. She looks at the mirror for a long time, then lets the hot water run over her fingers. When she returns to her seat the movie has changed colors fro
m jungle to expensive hotel room. She falls asleep amid heavy beige curtains, late afternoon light.

  * * *

  Three hours later, Leah wakes and holds herself in the rent of remembering. The screen now displays a simple map with a small white airplane moving pixel by pixel across fake blue sky. Leah shudders to see the airplane like that. It is terrible to watch the plane not move.

  Snores gather around her like barking dogs. Across the aisle, a man in headphones is laughing out loud in abrupt, three-second peals. Leah glances at her mother. The blue light from the screen falls on her mother’s cheek gently, like sun resting on warm brick. Leah’s father’s back is to her, and she watches it jolt like a kid’s ride outside of Kmart. The day that Sophie died, Chris had collapsed on Leah, a seven-foot human skyscraper demolished in a single blow. She had leaned into his weight, like trying to prop up a crumbling cliff.

  Five hours pass. Leah reads the in-flight magazine. What to do for twenty-four hours in Seattle; how to stay hydrated midflight. She dreads her family’s return to Singapore. She remembers how the other Americans descended on 59 Cairnhill Road the day after Sophie died. The smell of their lilies filled Leah’s lungs like water. Trying to sleep now, Leah thinks she can already hear geckos clicking in the storage bins above.

  The intercom announces that Tokyo is one hour away, just as day breaks through the greasy airplane windows. Breakfast comes from the same stewardess who gave Leah the blanket. Leah orders cereal, like her father, and her mother asks for an omelet. When the food comes they all smile weakly at one another and rip their cutlery from its plastic wrappers. Her mother holds up a little cream packet.

  “Remember how Sophie used to drink these?” She laughs, tipping the unopened packet to her lips. Leah looks away, clenching her fork tightly in her hand. On her left, she can see clouds flecking the cobalt sky outside, which grows hazy as they land.

  * * *

  Their layover in Tokyo lasts two hours. Leah leaves her parents by the gate and walks through a long, gaunt hallway. She watches an old Chinese woman in a blue chipao waiting in line with her husband, gripping his palsied hand tightly. Leah meets five uniformed officers at the security check. The two women have pale hidden faces and slight frames. The three men stand erect, unsmiling; they wave her through silently. The fluorescent light throbs overhead and Leah steps onto the travelator, moves to the beat of the bilingual flight announcements, walks towards the United Airlines terminal.

  She remembers the Seoul airport at midnight, where she and Sophie sprinted down empty travelators, when there was no one else but their parents in the giant hallway and the lighting was dim, orange-yellow, economical. Leah on the travelator in Tokyo now walks faster and faster and faster until she is nearly running again, racing no one, no body, no sister, no thing. She slows down after catching looks from a French couple dragging their toddler behind them.

  At Gate 73, Leah watches a Japanese family fall apart. The daughter is leaving for San Francisco. The father stands by, looking at his watch. The mother and daughter cling to each other: the teenage girl sobbing, the mother holding her. A little boy quietly plays a handheld video game near the father’s feet. Other passengers brush by the family, brandishing their tickets and passports, ending cell phone calls.

  * * *

  Leah nearly cannot board the last leg of the flight to Singapore. She pauses outside of the plane and touches the surface of it, recoiling at the memory of a tradition that Sophie started on the family’s first trip home from Shanghai three summers ago. “Touch the plane for good luck!” Sophie had said, slapping the white metal as if it were her hundredth time. Unthinking, utterly confident: that was what Leah had always envied the most in Sophie, what she had wanted so badly.

  Now Leah’s mother, waiting behind her, taps Leah on the shoulder, then touches the plane. “Touch the plane for good luck!” she says, and behind them, Leah can hear her father’s hollow laugh. Leah takes a large step forward to lose her mother’s grip. She feels the hand fall away accusingly. Leah walks onto the plane, holds out her boarding pass to the next smiling stewardess.

  Twenty minutes before the plane lands in Singapore, as the movie is ending, Leah closes her eyes and sees Sophie splayed on the ground again, under the frangipani trees.

  * * *

  It is mid-August, the first soccer practice of the season. Leah and Sophie are with the rest of the high school team on a soccer field in Singapore, midafternoon. Along with a few other promising middle-schoolers, Sophie has been asked to join the high school tryouts. The sun beats down on the girls’ ponytails. The air is thick with newly cut grass and pig manure. The girls stretch in a circle and then break into pairs to warm up. Leah and Sophie sprint to the end of the field and begin passing the soccer ball they brought from home. The ball comes at Leah fast from the inside of Sophie’s cleated foot. Leah kicks the ball back, watches it go wide, sees Sophie sprint after it, performing a smooth turn to reverse direction.

  The coach blows his whistle and the girls gather around him again in the center of the field. They tease each other, gossip, suck on plastic water bottles. Sophie stands slightly apart from the others, her foot tapping the top of the ball impatiently. The coach points to the cones set up around the field, orders four laps.

  “One whistle means jog, two means sprint,” he yells as the girls take off. Leah runs to catch up with Theresa. Sophie falls back to join Ang-mi, a friend her age. Then two long whistles. The coach’s faint shout from the other side of the field. “Sprint!”

  Leah passes Theresa, Heather, Joon. She nears the first corner of the field alone, then runs past the goal, watches the coach flash through the orange net. She stretches her stride a little, enjoying the pull on her calves. As she nears the second goal post, Leah sees a circle of girls and the coach standing under a cluster of frangipani trees by the sideline. Then Leah sees the rest of the girls behind her breaking away from their laps, running to the sideline. Leah follows at a cautious jog. Under the trees a girl lies on the grass, gasping. Her familiar face foreign with spasms.

  “Move Sophie to the shade. Don’t worry, Leah, it’s just sunstroke, she just—”

  Blond hair splayed over thick jungle grass. Sophie’s jerking face.

  “Get back. Come on, Leah, we need to—”

  Sophie.

  “She’ll be fine, Leah, don’t worry.”

  Under the branches. Sophie.

  “Back up, girls, so she can have some room.”

  Under clotted braches of frangipani sky. In the middle of their whispers, an ambulance wail. Then out of the burning afternoon into a freezing hospital iron white lips no smell Sophie.

  Leah’s mother. “Sweetie, come here for a second.”

  * * *

  It was a mistake, Leah knows. She was the one who should have died. Leah with her stumbling hesitation, her heavy thinking, her uncertain smile. She was always nearer to death than Sophie, who was not afraid of other people or of living, like Leah was. The worst part: before her death, Leah was sick of Sophie. Her perfection, her lithe body, her effortlessness. Leah wanted her gone and then she was.

  When Sophie sank to the ground on the soccer field, most of Leah lay down, too. She had always been a good older sister. Sophie died and Leah followed, assuming that the dark shape in front was Sophie. They had always traveled to foreign places together, relying on each other to navigate Shanghai’s alleyways, Phuket’s roiling surf, Singapore’s tangled vines. Death would be no different.

  The silent figure ahead of Leah now looks like Sophie, but she never speaks. Her motions are smooth, methodical. Where Sophie ran, this figure glides. Where Sophie laughed, this figure purses her lips, assumes a haughty, distant look. Leah does not pause to consider whether the figure in front might be her own death, a new sibling. In life, Sophie had always been there to remind Leah of her shortcomings. In death, Sophie’s shadowy shape, always just out of reach, reminds Leah that she does not deserve to survive.

  * * *

>   The Singapore airport is empty when the flight from Tokyo arrives with Leah and her parents at two a.m. The three of them go to separate customs officials, who whisk through their documents. They drag their suitcases to the taxi queue. Leah’s father gives the taxi driver brief directions; then they all fall silent. Each winces privately at the bougainvillea on the overpasses: too familiar, too tiny a detail to have steeled themselves for.

  When they enter their home, a moldy old smell coats the walls. It is the house’s smell, nothing unusual for an old colonial bungalow, but it seems to have strengthened in their absence. The odor gets in Leah’s clothes even as she unpacks. She removes T-shirts mechanically, taking long steps across the pale rose-colored carpet. She puts all of the shirts in drawers, doesn’t fold any of them. She falls asleep sweating, unaccustomed to the tropical climate after four weeks in autumn America, after the cool nights that followed Sophie’s funeral.

  Leah remembers the weight of her grandmother in the bed beside her in Indiana. Moonlight leaking past faded curtains onto her grandmother’s pale wrinkled skin, onto a blue silk nightgown cut for old women. Her grandmother’s careful grasp over Leah’s horrified clutching one. Words falling from her grandmother’s mouth, dropping slowly to Leah like sinking coins. Words that wouldn’t fall during daylight, with her grandmother dressed, midwestern emotional restraint keeping her face as tidy as the daily-vacuumed living room.

  But in the dark, the words came quiet, slow, with an understanding born of bitter farm winters and of other lives cut short. Words that Leah’s great-great-grandmother, Mechthild, would have whispered to her son, Tomas, in Plattdeutsch, which slipped out to Leah that night in Lutheran-American English. The sturdy old bed barely holding both of their pain.