The Language of Sisters: A Novel

by Amy Hatvany

  I spent the rest of the morning unpacking her few belongings while she sat in a nearby chair, watching me. Her ankles were crossed, and she rocked in a small forward and back motion, her hands clenched. She seemed uncomfortable; again, I wondered if I had done the wrong thing in bringing her here. Wellman had been her home for ten years. Despite what had happened to her there, maybe she felt the same way I did: displaced, the way you feel when you drive down an unfamiliar street in a city you thought you already knew by heart. Maybe she missed her routine and the familiar faces that had surrounded her for the past ten years. I experienced a stab of guilt knowing my face was not among them.

  “Do you want your things folded or hung in the closet, Jen?” I asked her, carrying on a one-sided conversation as I sorted through the few bits of clothing she had. I was definitely going to need to find her some maternity clothes.

  “Uhhn … ,” she groaned, a low, unhappy sound.

  I squatted down in front of her, resting my rear on the backs of my heels. I took her callused hands in mine. “What’s wrong, hon? Are you tired?” I reached up with one hand to straighten her dark hair.

  “Uhhnnn … ,” she groaned again.

  “Not tired, huh?” I surmised from her tone. “Are you hungry?”

  She stopped moaning and stared at me, her blue eyes round and wide.

  “What do you say, Sis?” I prodded. “Do you want to eat?”

  “Ahhh!” came her happy reply. We had figured this game out as children: I would ask her questions, and when I finally asked the right one, her low, negative moans would suddenly escalate into a lilting, positive exclamation.

  “All right,” I said, clapping my hands together. “Let’s eat and then we’ll head down to the salon. It’s about time you and I had a sisters’ day out.”

  • • •

  The Filigree Day Spa was only a few blocks from the house, and since the cornflower sky held only the promise of a beautiful spring day, I decided to walk Jenny to her appointment. After a quick lunch, I transferred her into her wheelchair, then carefully maneuvered it out the back door and down the ramp that led into the yard.

  As I pushed Jenny up the driveway to the sidewalk, I noted how the yard had been carefully tended in a way it never was when I was a child. Mom had always been too busy with Jenny to bother, and Dad hadn’t seemed to care if the lawn was overgrown or if dandelions were the main flowering plants under the trees. But now, the enormous lilac bushes that lined the entire property appeared ready to burst, bunches of tiny and sweet lavender knots swimming in the potential of their amazing perfume. A clematis vine wove wildly through a trellis along the south side of the house; its mauve buds were swollen with life, about to give birth. The rest of the yard overflowed with other plants and flowers, most of which I couldn’t name but appreciated for their sheer abundance. As we headed down the street, I considered that perhaps with Jenny at Wellman, Mom had channeled her caretaking tendencies into the land. Or then again, maybe she had just hired a gardener.

  I pushed Jenny along California Avenue, one of the main strips that ran through West Seattle. The faces of the buildings looked familiar to me; as a child I had walked this maple-tree-lined street countless times with Jenny, forever aware of the heads that turned in cars, trying to catch a glimpse of the drooling, dark-haired girl in the wheelchair. I felt the curious eyes on us now, too. I sighed as we approached the front door of the spa, wondering what it was that drew people to stare. It drove me crazy when we were younger. “Take a picture—it lasts longer,” I’d whisper under my breath. I quashed the urge to do the same now.

  A light-tinkling bell announced our entrance into the spa. The night before, when getting a brush through her matted hair proved to be an impossible task, I had decided Jenny needed a trip to a professional. I had thumbed through the phone book until I found a few salons nearby, and the Filigree had been the only one that could take us both on such short notice. I explained to the woman I spoke with on the phone that Jenny had special needs but was assured that it wouldn’t be a problem. We were both getting our hair done, as well as pedicures.

  The receptionist greeted us, then led us to the back of the salon, where two empty black barber chairs sat waiting. The walls were sponged in feathery terra-cotta paint, and the mirrors were all edged in scrolled black filigree, the fancy wrought-iron detail found on the buildings in New Orleans’s French Quarter. We appeared to be the only customers. “Your stylists will be right with you,” she said, then gestured toward Jenny without really looking at her. “Do you—I mean, does she need anything?” She was obviously uncomfortable.

  “No, we’re fine,” I assured her, and she went back up front. I slid Jenny’s wheelchair in between the two barber seats and sat down next to her, smiling at her in the mirror. She appeared slightly dazed. Her eyes were glazed over and her bottom lip drooped; her hands were clenched together but motionless in her lap. “This will be fun, Jen,” I told her. “I promise.” She didn’t respond. Then I looked at my own reflection in the mirror and cringed a little. My red corkscrew curls frizzed wildly about my makeup-bare, freckled face. I usually managed to at least swipe on some lipstick, but as I’d been so focused on getting Jenny home and busy with her since, I hadn’t even showered since arriving in Seattle. I glanced around self-consciously, then gingerly lifted an arm to see if I was obviously ripe. Not too bad, I thought, lowering my arm and crossing my legs under the floral print skirt I’d chosen to wear. At least I’d remembered to put on deodorant.

  In a few minutes two women appeared behind us. The stylist who was going to work on Jenny inquired if she needed to be careful of anything while doing my sister’s hair. “Keep your hands away from her mouth,” I joked, in an attempt to put her at ease. “She bites.” A horrified look popped up on the woman’s face. “I’m kidding,” I relented, reaching out to wiggle my fingers in front of Jenny’s wet lips. “See? Completely harmless.”

  She laughed a bit awkwardly, her palm to her chest. “Jeez, you scared me,” she said. “I’ll just work on her in her own chair. Is that all right?”

  “Sure.” I settled back and let my stylist begin the unenviable task of untangling my hair. Jenny remained quiet while her hair was washed, deep-conditioned, and trimmed, her expression still fairly blank. I wondered if she was overstimulated, if bringing her to the spa had been a mistake. Maybe I should have just kept her at home to help her get readjusted to being there. When the stylists moved us to the pedicure station, I took Jenny’s hand in mine. “You doing okay, Sis?” I asked. “Your hair looks great.” Though not as long as they used to be, her dark waves shined softly around her face again, the layered bob complementing the new round curve of her jawline. I glanced around until I found a handheld mirror and put it up in front of her. “Look at you! You’re gorgeous!”

  The fog over her eyes seemed to lift, and a light began to fill her face as she stared at herself in the mirror. A small smile tickled the corners of her full, rose-petal lips, and she ducked her chin down to the left in the tiniest motion, flirting with the image she saw reflected back at her. Pretty, I heard her say, and I smiled in relief.

  The rest of our visit went by quickly. Jenny giggled the entire time her feet were in the bubbling footbath, and since she was extremely ticklish, the poor pedicurist had a heck of a time getting a pale pink polish on my sister’s tiny, round toenails. But all in all, the appointment seemed a success and I was glad I had brought her. I paid the bill and tipped well, promising to spread the word about the service we had received.

  As I pushed Jenny back to our childhood home, I thought more about what drove people to stare at her. It suddenly struck me that perhaps it was the same phenomenon that caused commuters to slow down as they passed a fiery crash on the freeway, the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I syndrome. They looked at Jenny and counted their blessings. So did I, I realized, looking at the dark cap of my sister’s head as we turned the corner that led down our street. My heart ached with emotion I had for
gotten I was capable of experiencing. I counted my blessings, too, but for entirely different reasons.

  • • •

  Three o’clock in the morning and she was moaning again. Every two hours; I could almost set my clock by the noise. The thin wall between our rooms did little to mask the sound. It reached into my chest and twisted my heart, pulling me from a fitful rest. “Jenny, please,” I groaned into my pillow. “I need to sleep.” God, I was tired.

  The first two weeks of her waking in the night had not bothered me too much. My body was used to being active in the dark and I had immediately run to soothe her, to adjust her pillow, to turn her over so she wouldn’t develop sores. But the long hours awake with her during the day—feeding her, walking her around, changing her diapers, giving her her medications—had drained me. I longed for a four-hour-straight block of sleep like a starving man longs for bread.

  Jenny’s needs were constant, their strength coaxing me to her even as I tried to pull away, tried to take a shower or finish a cup of coffee. My lower back screamed from lifting her swollen pregnant body. A dull ache had settled in behind my eyes. My sister woke several times a night and rose early; she needed to be fed, showered, diapered, and dressed. Then there was her medication schedule, which I had scrupulously charted out and stuck to the refrigerator but often passed by without consulting. Take her back to Wellman, a small voice within me cried. You can’t do this. It’s too much. I felt inept, lost in the wilderness of what caring for her demanded of me, afraid I might never return to the freedom of the life I had known.

  I wanted to leave, to go back to San Francisco. I missed Shane. I missed Barry. I missed the simple, solitary pleasure of taking Moochie for his afternoon walk. I wanted to be able to go to the grocery store without having to think about the logistics of pushing a wheelchair and the shopping cart, or whether I had packed enough diapers for an hour away from the house. I wanted to be able to take more than a five-minute shower without worrying that Jenny had fallen out of her bed and cracked her skull. I wanted to take back all my lofty promises, to take back what had happened to Jenny and return to the life I’d lived for the past ten years.

  My mother wasn’t helping stem these feelings of regret. I watched her move around Jenny and me as though we were polite but uninvolved acquaintances. I did not understand her. Putting aside my own complicated issues with my mother, I had truly believed that having Jenny home would soften her, bring her back to the mother she had been to Jenny before Wellman. “Help!” I longed to plead. “Help me do this! She’s your daughter. What’s wrong with you?”

  She seemed to float above us like a balloon attached to our wrists, tied to us forever but distant, inanimate. She slept at the other end of the house, in the same room she’d shared with our father when we were children. She wore earplugs, something she said she had done since Jenny moved to Wellman. “After she left,” my mother told me, “even the tiniest sound would wake me. I’d be sure it was Jenny crying, needing me.” She shook her head. “A woman’s hearing becomes supersonic when she becomes a mother. Intently tuned to the sound of her children’s cries. Even the illusion of them. If I didn’t wear these”—she held up the earplugs—“I’d never sleep again.”

  But despite her words, the first time Jenny had woken up in the middle of the night, I’d stepped back into the hallway after comforting my sister and sensed my mother’s presence nearby. I also smelled something burning. I caught her sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, smoking. Her legs were crossed, and her dangling foot wiggled furiously. “What are you doing?” I asked. I was sure she had come to check on Jenny, but I wanted her to be the one to say it. To admit she cared.

  She looked at me, her pale, angled face suddenly illuminated pink by the glowing tip of her cigarette. Her expression resembled a rubber band that had been stretched to its limit. “I was hungry,” she said. There was nothing to eat on the table in front of her, only a saucer filled with ash and two spent cigarette butts. She jutted her chin toward the hallway to Jenny’s room and tapped her cigarette with her finger. “Everything okay?”

  I wanted to say, “No, everything’s not okay. Jenny’s knocked up and I’m exhausted.” But I bit my tongue, unwilling to share how I was really feeling. After her refusal to visit the salon with us, I hadn’t reached out to my mother. I sheltered my emotions under deep cover, unwilling to let her hurt me again. “When did you start smoking?” I demanded, ignoring her question.

  “I’ve always smoked.” That explained the still-yellow walls in the living room.

  “I thought you hated that Dad smoked.”

  “I hated that he smoked in front of you.” She looked at the end of her cigarette as though it might have something to tell her, then squished it in the saucer. “It’s not something I do every day,” she said without looking at me, and I left her there in the dark, wondering what else there was I didn’t know about my mother.

  But now, Jenny’s cries worsened, tightening their hold in my chest. I trod out my door and into her room, the rancid stink of fresh excrement attacking my nose with its fist. I flipped on the light. She lay on her back, her hands clawed and in her mouth, fat tears rolling from the corners of her eyes to the pillow, mixing with the drool there. The long hairs around her round face were damp with sweat. I covered my mouth with a hand and pulled back her covers. The dark stain spread out from her diaper to the edges of the twin bed. “Oh, Jen, what happened? Are you sick?” I felt her forehead; it was cool. Then I remembered. Last night’s botched enema. I didn’t know what I was doing, and look what it had done to her.

  She moaned again, her eyes pleading with me. She could not stand this, I knew—the horror of lying in her own waste, unable to move, unable to do anything but wait for someone to come. How could anyone stand it? I imagined her at Wellman, her cries muffled by thick walls and other patients, how long she must have lain there, helpless.

  “Come on,” I said, swallowing, as best I could, the rolling wave of nausea that traveled up my throat. I bent down and slid my arms under her back as levers, sitting her up and swinging her to the side of the bed so I could get her to the bathroom. She’d need a shower, and I’d have to change the sheets—the white, lace-trimmed sheets I’d picked out as a child for my baby sister’s new big-girl bed. My mother had tried to get me to choose a darker color, perhaps foreseeing the impractical nature of my first choice, but had relented when she saw how excited I was to give them to Jenny. I wondered how many times Mom had been stuck doing laundry in the middle of the night, running these ridiculous sheets through the bleach cycle.

  I pulled Jenny into an upright position, and she stood, shaky, a pitiful cry hiccuping from inside her: “A-huh, huh, huh.” The stench reached down my throat, and I gagged, once, twice, but managed to keep from throwing up on the rug and making the situation worse.

  Again, I had to stifle the urge to call my mother for help. This is her job, I thought petulantly. I shouldn’t have to do this alone. I just didn’t understand why she was holding herself away from Jenny when she obviously loved her. Maybe it was me she was keeping away from. Still, I didn’t think that was enough to justify standing by and watching me do this alone.

  But you said you wanted to, a voice reminded me. And I knew it was true: I did want to. But I honestly didn’t know whether wanting to would be enough.

  It took about an hour to get Jenny cleaned up and the bed changed. She stood patiently in the shower as I washed her, her fleshy belly slightly raised and hard beneath my touch. I wondered if the baby was moving yet, if Jenny felt it tumble inside her. If she knew what had happened to her. What was going to happen to her. We had an appointment in the morning with an obstetrician who had agreed to take Jenny as a patient—one of the doctors Dr. Leland had recommended to me. Dr. Ellen Fisher had worked with developmentally disabled patients before, though never one as severely handicapped as Jenny. She had been businesslike in our brief conversation, so professional in her tone that I almost felt chastised for not
having dressed better for the call. I was a little apprehensive about meeting her.

  It was after four when I tucked Jenny back into her bed, lying on her left side. I kissed her and smoothed her hair, making sure she was adequately propped up by pillows so she wouldn’t roll onto the floor. Exhausted, I stumbled back under my own covers and slept, mercifully, until the moon faded away and the sun took its turn at lighting the world.

  • • •

  “Did she always wake up like this?” I asked my mother over a huge mug of industrial-strength coffee that morning. “I don’t remember.”

  My mother smiled a little wistfully. “Yes. Not every night, but often enough.” She sat down carefully at the table, wiping away invisible crumbs from the front of her dove gray, pin-striped suit. She glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. The bank didn’t open until nine, but since she walked the eight blocks to the Junction’s Washington Mutual, she needed to be ready to leave by eight-thirty. Her dark hair was pulled into a tight French twist, and she wore a pastel pink lipstick that did little to brighten her already pale face. She needed to find a new shade.

  “How come I never used to hear her?” I asked, my eyes heavy with lack of rest. And the unasked question: How did I hear Dad go into her room and not you?

  “I was quick. I could hear her before she even started.” My mother patted my hand, then leaned forward to tighten the laces around her too-white tennis shoes. When she sat back up she looked at me, obviously considering something. “Nicole,” she started, but didn’t go on right away.

  “Yes?”

  “What does Shane think of your being here?”

  I bristled at the inquiry. “He’s fine with it. He supports me.” At least, that was what he had said the last time we’d spoken. But then again, he hadn’t called me since then; the few messages I’d left for him had gone unanswered. I felt hurt and a little angry at his lack of concern, but I wasn’t about to tell my mother that.