The Language of Sisters: A Novel

by Amy Hatvany

  “I’m not hungry,” my father said as he grabbed his coat from the rack by the door. “I need to go. I have places to be, people to see. People who appreciate me.”

  “Daddy—” I started to say. but it was too late. He was already gone.

  January 1989

  David

  That bitch, David thought as he got into his car and revved the engine. That sanctimonious, self-serving, judgmental, boring bitch. He noticed he wasn’t wearing any shoes. Or pants. His Sunday morning outfit consisted of cutoff black sweats and a bright yellow v-neck sweater. He looked like an anorexic bee. “bzzzz …” he murmured as he jammed the gearshift into drive and pulled away from the curb, tires screeching. He was sure Lydia was watching from the living room window. He threw a halfhearted middle finger in her general direction, just in case.

  The radio blared AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” The thrumming vibrations soothed him as he thought about where he could go. Cuba? Mexico? Hawaii? They’d love him in Hawaii. They were laid-back there. They wouldn’t care if he wanted to run naked in the surf at dawn or howl at the autumn moon. Hang loose, man, they’d say. Mahalo. He could learn to carve. He could sell his wares to the tourists—men in checkered swim trunks and fat women in bikinis. Or maybe he should head north, to bellingham. Close to the Canadian border. There were hippies there, he thought. I could give up painting and weave shit instead. Blankets. Or those things you put hot pans on … what are they called? Oh yeah, trivets. He’d be a trivet maker. He’d bond with the pot-smoking liberals and set up camp with them in the woods.

  Pot. Now there was a good idea. He wondered if his friend Rick was up yet, if he’d slept off the buzz from the night before and was now open for business. Rick dealt the best weed on the coast. Gave David a discount, too, since they’d gone to high school together. Used to get stoned out of their minds in the enormous tangle of rhododendron bushes across the street from the school gym. He slammed on his brakes and flipped a U-turn in the middle of the road, ignoring the horns that blared around him. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, cowboys!” he yelled. “Go to hell. Go straight to hell. Do not pass go! Do not collect two hundred dollars!”

  He was hungry. Starving, actually. A little bit dizzy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. Friday, maybe? He’d been painting for days, locked in his studio. Lost in swirls of ocher and green, swept up by the glory of blue. This morning, when Eden got up, he promised he’d take her to Shakey’s Pizza for lunch. She loved the Laurel and Hardy black-and-white movies the restaurant played. Eden. His sweet Eden. Nothing like her mother. Eden loved him. Eden loved to play, to join in on any idea David conjured up. A lemon stand instead of a lemonade stand. A midnight frolic in the front-yard sprinkler. Waking up to make cookies at two o’clock in the morning. Mmm … cookies. Maybe he should stop at a bakery and pick some up. Or maybe he should make them himself. He doubted Rick had any baking supplies. David did his cooking with Eden. She loved it. Loved the mix of ingredients and creativity. She’d be an artist, like him, for sure. Or a lawyer. His little girl knew how to stand her ground in an argument.

  God, he couldn’t focus. His thoughts pinballed around inside his head. It felt as though someone else was pulling back the plunger, sending random, rapid-fire thoughts shooting through his brain. He wasn’t the person playing the game.

  Did Eden tell Lydia that he had flushed his meds again? Did his daughter rat him out? Was she a traitor, like all the rest? Like the nurses in the hospital who convinced the doctors to inject his meds when he got caught hiding the pills under his tongue? No, Eden wouldn’t do that. Eden understood him. Eden loved him exactly the way he was. He had to go back to her. He had to. but he didn’t want to calm down. He liked himself like this. He liked the rush, the energy, the thrill of moving from one moment to the next with nothing tethered to him. If he was going to go home, he’d have to find a way to settle himself, at least to a point where he could get Lydia to forgive him. Yet another reason spending the day at Rick’s was a good idea. Weed was the perfect downer. It settled the crazy, brought on the mellow. At least until it wore off.

  The curtains were pulled at Rick’s house, but that didn’t mean his friend wasn’t awake. He never let the light in, too paranoid someone would see him dealing and turn him in. David raced up the ice-cold cement walkway. His bare feet screamed in protest as they came in contact with the ground. He pounded on the door. “Rick!” he shouted. “C’mon, buddy. It’s David! It’s fucking freezing out here!” He danced on the frosty front porch, jumping from foot to foot, his hands tucked into his armpits to keep warm.

  Rick’s front door opened slowly. David pushed through the entry and a sleepy-eyed Rick stumbled back against the wall. He was in jeans and a torn white T-shirt. “Whoa, dude. Slow down. Where’s the fire?”

  “I am the fire, man. Got anything that can put it out?”

  “Sure, dude. Sure. Hang on.” Rick lumbered his thick, stubby frame over to the locked wall safe where he kept his inventory. It was covered over by one of David’s paintings—an abstract water-color of blues and greens littered with splashes of vibrant orange. Rick gently removed the painting, then hunched in front of the safe, moving through the slow clicks of the combination lock. A naked woman came out of the bedroom, her hair a wild brown nest around her face. She scratched her ass.

  “Is there coffee?” she asked, seemingly oblivious to her nudity. David felt a stirring in his groin. She wasn’t his type. She didn’t look anything like Lydia. Lydia was soft and blond; this woman was skinny and hard with a bad boob job. Her right nipple pointed off in the general direction of her bicep. He could see the puckered scars. He wanted to screw her anyway.

  “I’m David,” he said. “I’m an artist. The painting that hangs over the safe is mine. Have you seen it?”

  The woman looked at him, blinking. “Nope. Sure haven’t.”

  “That’s Ashley, man,” Rick said as he walked over to hand David a thick joint. David snatched it up and lit it using a match from a book he saw on the table. He took a deep drag and almost immediately his brain cells stopped slam-dancing against each other. “We just met last night.”

  “It’s Angel, actually,” the naked woman said.

  Rick chuckled. “Oops. Sorry, baby.”

  “Whatever,” Angel said. She sniffed. “Coffee?”

  “I’m out,” said Rick.

  Angel dropped her chin to her bony chest and gave Rick a look, like Yeah, and …?

  “I’ll go grab some.” He picked up the keys that sat by the front door and slipped on a pair of birkenstocks. He looked at David. “Want to come, man?”

  David shook his head. “Think I’ll stay here.” He took another quick hit, held it deep in his lungs. “Keep Angel company.”

  “All right. Cool. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” He winked at David, then left.

  David dropped onto the worn leather sofa and set the burning roach on the edge of an already full ashtray. He stared at Angel. “You make it a practice to screw men who don’t know your name?” He opened his legs so she could see the effect she was having on him.

  Angel smirked. “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “What’s my name?” She slid across the room and stood in front of him, her hands on her nonexistent hips.

  “Fred?”

  “Close enough.” She straddled his lap. She smelled like sex.

  “I’m married,” he said. He thought about Lydia, who by now was surely searching through his things for the medication that wasn’t there. He thought about Eden, sitting patiently in the living room waiting for him to take her out for pizza.

  “So?” Angel said, and then she kissed him, pushing her tongue into his mouth. Her breath was sour. He didn’t care. Eden would understand about missing lunch. In the end, Eden was always ready to welcome him home.

  • • •

  Angel hadn’t been worth it. David knew that now, as he drove toward home. but that’s how it was for
him. Impulses felt, actions taken, regrets endured. He was disgusted with himself. With his lack of self-control. He was weak and stupid. Why couldn’t he manage himself? He was an adult. An accomplished artist. Well, “accomplished” might be pushing it. Adequate. When he could get his shit together, the booth he kept at the North Seattle Street Fair during the summer typically sold out of his paintings. He taught classes at the community college and a few galleries had even shown interest in putting on a show of his work. but how to get his shit together, that was the challenge. Sometimes he couldn’t finish a single thought in his head. One word ricocheted off the other and his world began to spin. He couldn’t hold down a normal job. He couldn’t support his family. He was a loser. A fucked-up mess.

  He sighed heavily as he turned the car toward his street. Toward Lydia and Eden. The sex with Angel had been bad, awkward and unfulfilling, but things improved after she had her coffee, put on some clothes, and left. David sat with Rick for several hours, finishing off joint after joint, shooting the shit. Not having to do anything. Not having to be anyone. The pot turned down the volume on what seemed to be a thousand radios blaring in his head. David hated his brain. How it forced him to seek relief from himself. Lydia didn’t understand why he wouldn’t stay on his meds if they helped calm the storms that raged inside his mind. He didn’t know how else to explain it to her. The meds not only erased his spinning thoughts, they erased an essential part of his soul. The very center of his being became fuzzy and disconnected. Would Lydia like that? Would she enjoy her life if she had to live it trapped inside a vat of wet cement?

  It hadn’t always been this way between them. They had met and married young—both only eighteen—but blinded by physical passion and youthful optimism, their adoration for each other knew no end. Even with a baby on the way, even with Lydia’s conservative family screaming that she was making a mistake marrying David, they couldn’t imagine their relationship failing. As a result of her strict upbringing, Lydia was a little reserved, so she was instantly attracted to David’s more daring, flamboyant personality. His openness thrilled her. It drew her out of what she called her “tiny soap bubble of a life.” Marrying him was her first blatant act of rebellion.

  From the moment they began dating, David lived for entertaining Lydia. He loved to make her smile. He thrived on the dramatic, taking his behavior to whatever extreme was necessary in order to hear her laugh—frolicking around their tiny apartment wearing only his underwear, or singing the beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” to her as they shopped for groceries. but he soon learned it was the little things that pleased his wife most. A bunch of wildflowers swiped for her from an open field, or a quick sketch of the parts of her body David worshipped—her hands, her lips, the curve of her back. He would ask her to lie naked on the bed in the late afternoon sun, gently coaxing her limbs into the image he wanted to capture. He untangled her blond braid so her hair fell wild and loose over her shoulders. “Lie still,” he’d whisper against the thin skin of her neck.

  “How am I supposed to lie still when you do that?” she’d groan, exhaling a low, husky breath, looking up at him with her exceptionally clear blue eyes.

  “Art is suffering,” he’d tease. And then he sat back and drank her in, pulling her beauty out of the real world into the one he could only see in his mind. The world he traced onto the page.

  Even with the birth of Eden when they were only nineteen, David and Lydia’s early years had a glowing, easy lightness about them. Lydia worked at various office jobs while David stayed home to paint and take care of their daughter. This had been Lydia’s idea—she was dizzied in the best way possible by David’s creative energies and talents; she wanted nothing more than to support him in his dreams of being a respected artist. While they were in their early twenties, she helped him find galleries that might show his work; she set up the interview that found him his first job teaching a watercolors workshop. Their love appeared unique, impenetrable. And until Eden turned four, it was. That was when the impulses began, at first just a faint, broken echo in the distant corners of his mind. You’re trapped, they said. Run. He could ignore them, then. Gradually, they became louder, irrepressible—a faster and faster beating drum. Live, they said. Escape. Spin. Love. Fuck. He felt stifled by his simple existence. The drugs Lydia and his doctors wanted him to take muffled the inspired rhythms that danced in his head, snuffed them out until he lost himself completely.

  But hadn’t today been another kind of loss? Running from his family? Having to apologize to Lydia, to beg for her forgiveness and understanding yet again? As each moment passed, he felt himself slipping down deeper. blackness pulled at his thoughts, shadowing over any hope that he would escape this life unharmed. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be there anymore. He wasn’t sure if any of it was worth it.

  He pulled up in front of the house and put the car into park but left the engine running. If he didn’t have his studio set up in what used to be their garage, he could have just pulled right in and shut the door. Leave the car running and let the fumes overtake him. It would be quick and silent. No one else would have to get hurt. A quick flash of light glimmered in the front window as the curtains opened. Eden. She saw him. He might as well go in. He turned off the car and walked up the steps in the too-small slippers he’d borrowed from Rick.

  “Daddy!” Eden squealed as she opened the door and jumped into his arms. “I was so worried about you!”

  Still on the front porch, David wrapped his arms around Eden and buried his nose in his daughter’s silky black, apple-scented hair. Would Lydia smell Angel, even beneath the earthy funk of the weed smoke he was drenched in? He needed to clean up before they talked. The last time he took off she’d seen the telling purple bruise on his neck when he returned. She knew right away what he’d done. Even though the doctors told her his impulsiveness might spill over into sexual behaviors, she hadn’t believed them. David hadn’t believed them either. Not until he was naked in a bathroom with Cerina, the manager of Wild Orchid, a gallery that had bought a few of his paintings. He threw up after the first time it happened. And yet later, he went back for more.

  “I’m sorry, bug,” he said to his daughter. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  Eden rubbed her father’s back and squeezed him tighter before sliding back down to the floor and looking up to his face with her almost violently blue eyes. “It’s okay,” she said. “We can always go another day.” She smiled bravely, a thin, false happy mask resting over the disappointment David sensed beneath it. His brave, loving girl. He wasn’t sure how he could have helped create something as perfect as she seemed to him. None of his paintings even came close to expressing her kind of beauty. It wasn’t something he could capture on a canvas. It was something he lived and breathed.

  “I’m going to shower,” he said. He blinked a few times upon fully entering the house. Rick never had more than a tableside lamp on in his house. Lydia loved her brightly lit chandelier. David felt as though he were a mole emerging from the damp, dark earth. A stranger in a strange land. He didn’t belong here. He didn’t belong anywhere.

  He took the stairs slowly, one at a time, feeling Eden’s eyes on him the entire way to the second floor. The door to their bedroom was open. Lydia was sure to be inside, lying on their bed, a cold cloth over her swollen eyes. She cried when he left, though she tried to hide it from him when he returned. Lydia was so strong. Too strong, maybe, for the likes of him.

  When he entered the room, he was surprised to see his wife sitting calmly on the edge of the bed. She eyed him. “Glad to see you’re alive. Your daughter was worried.”

  He dropped his chin to his chest and looked up at her from beneath his eyebrows with a questioning look. “And you? Were you worried?”

  “I don’t know,” she said flatly. “I don’t know what I am anymore.”

  “That makes two of us,” David said. He ran a nervous hand through his hair. It felt greasy. He didn’t want Lydia to know about Angel. He didn’t want
to hurt her any more than he knew he already had. “I’m going to shower, okay? And then we can talk.”

  “I’d like to talk now.” Lydia shot him a cold stare with the same transparent blue eyes that had drawn him to her eleven years before. She had the kind of radiant beauty men felt compelled to write songs about and a soft, inviting nature that called out to his broken soul. The first time he saw her, he wanted her to be his safe harbor. His home.

  “Can I have five minutes, please? Just five minutes? I smell like shit.”

  “You smell like pot. Do you think Eden doesn’t know what it is? With how often you’ve come home reeking of it?” She twisted a strand of her long blond hair around her index finger, then let it unwind.

  “Jesus, Lydia,” David said as he took the three steps to their bathroom. “I already feel bad.”

  “Not bad enough, apparently. What was her name this time?” Her words dripped with disdain.

  David slammed the bathroom door behind him. He looked in the mirror and saw an old man. He was twenty-nine years old and his face was haggard and lined. His dark hair was a wild, matted mess around his head. After four days without sleep, he looked like a corpse.

  “David?” Lydia stood outside the bathroom door. Her voice was muffled.

  “What.” David stated it rather than asked.

  “It’s getting worse.”

  “What’s getting worse?” he asked her, knowing full well what she meant. He wanted her to say it aloud. Wanted her to tell him to leave. If she did, maybe he’d have the courage to do it.

  “The … cycles,” she said. “How quickly you move up through the highs and slip back down. The doctors said this might happen. They said if you didn’t stay on your meds—”

  “I know what they fucking said!” David snapped. “Don’t you think I know? I’m the one they talk to.”

  She sighed. “They talk to me, too. When you’re strapped down to a bed having sedatives shot into your arm, they’re talking to me. They told me it’s possible this could keep getting worse and worse if you don’t control it.” Her voice elevated and then caught in her throat. “I don’t want Eden to see this. I don’t think she’ll survive.”