Sister Pact

by Stacie Ramey

  She’s exactly right.

  Nick puts his hand on my shoulder. “You use color to set the mood better than anyone I know. You’ll get this.”

  I blush. It’s nice that Nick gets my work, but he can’t help me. If I’m going to be honest with myself, I wish I had some pharmaceutical backup. Because with the drugs, Leah came and lent me her colors. Even if they weren’t mine, they were a direction. And right now I feel like I’m on the ragged edge, very close to losing it all.

  “You’re not used to being patient.” He sits on the top of one of the tables. “It’s always come so easy for you. Happens in baseball too. Sometimes you lose your rhythm. You just have to get it back.”

  Is he right? Have I taken art for granted this whole time? If I relax, will it come to me? I look at my painting. I look at the pictures I brought with me. I close my eyes and remember that day. Freedom. Possibilities. Hope. What’s the color of hope? I’ve honestly got no idea.

  He winks and backpedals out the door.

  Piper stays for a moment longer. “Nick’s right. You’ll get it.”

  She leaves, and I know I should too. Because staying here, staring at this thing, isn’t helping.

  “You doing better, Allie?” Mr. Kispert sits at his desk, facing me, spooning yogurt into his mouth.

  “Honestly?”

  “You stay and work through lunch if you like.”

  I work on my painting, but the bell’s about to ring for sixth period. I’m closer to what I want but not there.

  I take my brushes back to the sink. As I’m washing them out, I look over and see Mr. Kispert looking at my work. My stomach tenses. I don’t want him to know that I’m not good enough. But I also don’t want him to tell me it’s beautiful, because if he did that, I’d know that he was lying all the other times he said I was talented. I don’t want Mr. Kispert to lie to me. In here, with my art, I’m all about truth.

  “This is a good start,” he says. “The colors are much closer than your first attempt.”

  I join him as he appraises my work.

  “The blues and whites are fine. And the gray is perfect,” he says.

  My eyes scan each color as he names them.

  “It seems as if you’re missing some though.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I’m not sure which.”

  “I know.”

  “You need to figure out your point of view for this painting. What you want it to say.”

  I wonder if he’s disappointed in me and my work. I hope he’s not sorry he put me in this class.

  “This is an excellent start.”

  I sigh, relieved. Maybe I can do this.

  “You’ve got to get to class. I can’t let you stay here all day.” He goes to help some other students set up, passing Nick, who has returned.

  “How do you feel about it now?” he asks, standing, his hands on his hips, studying my painting.

  “Better. But not great. Do you ever worry you can’t do this?”

  “No. And neither should you. Art isn’t something you can question. You need to know you’re good. Even when you’re stumbling. You need to believe it’s going to come to you.”

  “I guess.”

  “Look, Allie, watching you get where you’re going is half the fun. Your whiffs are better than most people’s home runs. It’s not a level playing field. It just isn’t.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re tough.” He pulls me by my hand, away from my painting and out the door. “Can I give you a ride home?”

  I stop. He does too. “Nick, I just can’t right now. You know. I am just in a weird place…”

  “It’s okay. Friends can walk each other to class, can’t they?”

  • • •

  We pull up in front of my house. I keep going over my painting, trying to piece together what’s already there and what needs to be added.

  “See you tomorrow,” Nick says.

  “Thanks for the ride.”

  “Sure thing.”

  I walk up the steps to the front of my house. He toots the horn. I turn to wave. I just need some time alone to work this through. I find Mom waiting for me. This can’t be good.

  “Hi,” I say, dropping my backpack on the floor.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  This is bad. She never wants to talk.

  “Okay, but I’ve got a ton of homework, so can we talk while I eat?” I try to walk by her into the kitchen, but she blocks my way, one hand pointing to the living room. What did I do? What lie will I have to explain?

  “Allie, please sit down.” She motions to the couch in the living room, the one we were never allowed to sit on. Dad’s spot.

  “You’re scaring me,” I say. True.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not doing this well.” She shifts her position and then gets up. “I need to get something.”

  I don’t know what I’m so scared of. After all that’s happened, what could she say that would make any of it worse?

  A few moments later, Mom comes in holding her painting. The one I took. “I found this in your room.”

  First, I register fear. She knows. Then outrage. How did she find it? And finally, the worst feeling of all: loss—overpowering and strong. She hid the best part of herself from me.

  “I guess…” she finally says. “I guess you found them.”

  “Guess so.” I look down so I won’t yell at her. That won’t help. But I want to ask her how she could give it up. Instead I say, “It’s beautiful.”

  Her face softens. Her eyes linger over the trees in the picture. She smiles, small but real. “It was always my favorite.”

  I stand. “Why did you stop painting, Mom?”

  “I don’t know. I just…”

  “Just what? You were good. You were incredible.”

  “It may be hard for you to understand. Sometimes in life, you have to make choices. That’s all.”

  I close the distance between us. I need to hear her explanation. My mom didn’t have to be like this: deadened and broken. She could have been the way her paintings were: beautiful and alive. “So tell me,” I say.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Was it Dad? Did he make you?” Sometimes guys make you do awful things, Emery told me. And it’s true.

  “Dad had his reasons.”

  Fire builds inside me. He did it. I knew it. He’s always doing things like this. And now I know he killed my mother.

  “I was obsessed with it. I got carried away…” She rubs her hands on her legs.

  “Of course you did. I saw how good you were.” Does she think I wouldn’t get that? I’m on her side. She’s an artist. Like me. We get lost sometimes. It happens.

  “You don’t understand. It was too much. I couldn’t paint and watch you two…”

  The world closes in on me. It wasn’t Dad who stopped her. It was me. And Leah. “What are you talking about, Mom?”

  “It was so long ago. Why should we talk about it now?”

  “Tell me.” I need to know. I need to hear the truth. Did Leah and I kill Mom?

  “I was painting. I was working on a scene. I was really into it. You were a year and a half old. Leah was almost three. You were sleeping in your crib. I guess you were crying, and I didn’t hear you.”

  I nod to keep her going.

  “Leah went to help you. She got you out of your crib.” Mom lifts a hand to her forehead and rubs her brow. “And she couldn’t find me. I was in the garage looking for one of my paints. I couldn’t find it, and I needed that color. Just then.”

  Like me earlier today—sometimes when you’re locked in, you can’t pull yourself out. For anyone. Mom’s telling the truth.

  “It’s okay, just say it.”

  “Leah took you outside.”


  “Oh, Mom…”

  “I was crazy looking for you by the time your father came home. Jessica from down the street…” Mom makes a face. She used to call her that Jessica when she was talking to Dad. “She walked you back. She said she found you two in the street…”

  “But we were okay.”

  “But you might not have been. Something could’ve happened to you, and it would have been my fault.”

  I see Mom’s struggle, and I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking she doesn’t deserve us. But she’s wrong. Everyone makes mistakes. She shouldn’t have to pay forever for one mistake. “But we were okay,” I say again.

  “He told me I had to get a grip. Be a real mother to you two. He wasn’t wrong. So I let him pack up my paintings and put them in storage.”

  “You know what, Mom? He’s a bully.” I can envision how that whole conversation went down. Dad scared. Then mad. Then nuclear. Dad did this. Mom screwed up, but he could have handled it a different way. Hired help. Gotten her a studio. Instead he killed her a little at a time. Because when you’re an artist, every day you don’t paint or sculpt or draw kills you.

  “I didn’t want you to know. Or to think I loved art more than I loved you two.”

  “We would never…”

  “But you know, I think Leah remembered. After that, she always looked at me like she didn’t trust me. Like she was waiting for me to screw up again.”

  “That was just the way Leah was.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Mom, whatever happened, you need to start painting again.”

  “You’re not mad at me then?”

  “For making a mistake, no. For giving up, yes.”

  Mom smiles a little.

  “Can I ask you something? Why did Leah start going to Dr. Gates to begin with?”

  Her face falls, and she shakes her head.

  “No more lies, Mom. I need to know.”

  “Do you remember winter break two years ago? You went skiing with Emery’s family for the week?”

  I nod.

  “That was her first attempt.”

  “What?” I sit down on the couch and put my head in my hands to stop the world from spinning around me. I know we talked about it, but I never thought she’d really do it, and I kind of thought she was doing it for me, like it was a sister thing. A bond or a promise, not a threat. How did I not know Leah was that sick?

  “She begged us not to tell you.”

  “Why?” I mumble through my fingers.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did she try to do it?”

  Mom sits beside me and slides her arm around me in a hug. “Leah was depressed. She wouldn’t take her medication. And breaks were hard for her. It was like the minute she stopped dancing or working or studying, she got incredibly sad. Like, the minute she stopped moving, it took her over.”

  I lift my head. “I didn’t have to go with Emery. I could have stayed home.”

  “Were you going to be her bodyguard her whole life? Leah didn’t want that. Neither did we.”

  And once again, my whole world feels like it’s crumbling. I didn’t know. They didn’t tell me. Leah lied to me. “How did she do it?”

  “She took one of my bottles of Xanax. Took all the pills. We found her in time.”

  Anger covers me in a suit of armor. “So let me get this straight: my sister tries to kill herself, and nobody thinks I deserve to know about it?”

  “You’re right. We should have told you. But Leah insisted. And we thought it was a good idea.”

  “Because suicide is contagious?”

  Mom looks at me. “No. Of course not.”

  “And you kept the medication around after that? After all that?”

  “No. I got a safe for it. I kept it locked up. And Dad bought drug test kits for her. For a while we made her take them.”

  I think about how stressed Mom and Dad were when I got back from the ski trip with Emery’s family. I remember thinking Mom and Dad were stressed because of their marriage, but it was really about Leah. She was the one who told me Dad was making Mom take drug tests. When she was angry at Dad, it was because he saved her and was making her take drug tests rather than punishing him for what he did to Mom. Leah lied again. Why am I surprised? I need some truth to balance out the lies. My head needs a due north. So does my heart.

  “How did Leah get the drugs this time? I saw the bottle. They were yours.”

  Mom sighs. “She picked them up at the pharmacy that night. Walgreens called and left a message on our machine that day. Maybe she heard it. Maybe she knew I’d seen my therapist the day before. I don’t know. It was at the twenty-four-hour one. She picked them up that night. I never thought she’d do that. Went through the drive-through. They should’ve asked for her license to confirm it was me, but the guy working was new and didn’t do that.”

  Leah always had a plan. She did. Our battle plan may have been bogus, but hers was always solid. Those pills plus the alcohol equals suicide.

  “There is nothing you could have done to stop her,” Mom says.

  I stare at the painting on the coffee table. Mom’s painting. She’s right. I know she is, but the lies haven’t helped either. I think of the biggest lie I told Leah and then Mom and Dad, and all of a sudden, I feel like a big fraud.

  “I was never going to do it,” I tell her.

  “I know, honey.”

  “No. I mean, it was just something we talked about sometimes. I mean, I know you know about it, but I only went along with it because I never thought she would either. I would have stopped her if I’d thought she was serious. And my ‘attempt’ wasn’t that. I messed up. I was trying to stop the hurt, but I never wanted to kill myself.”

  We both sit there with the knowledge of all we wished we’d done and didn’t, knowing none of it makes a difference now. None of that would bring Leah back. I need a change of conversation. We all do.

  “Did you ever get stuck? You know, when you were painting?”

  “Of course. Everyone does. When you first start, it’s so easy. You find what you need almost like magic. But as you get better, it gets harder.”

  I nod. That’s exactly it.

  “And you’re going through a very hard year…”

  I blink back tears. She’s right. But that doesn’t help.

  “You know what I used to do when I was stuck?”

  I shrug, not trusting my voice.

  “Sometimes the canvas seemed too confining. So I’d paint on other surfaces.”

  I think about my room. Leah’s ring. Maybe that’s what I was doing. Trying to become unstuck.

  “I drove my mother crazy. I painted on everything and anything—clothes, my wall, the bathroom counter.”

  “I can’t imagine Grandma being okay with that.”

  “She was actually. She knew I had to get whatever I was working out out of me. You do too. Especially after Leah…”

  “So I can paint on every surface in the house?”

  “Everything but the dog.”

  “Won’t that piss off Dad?”

  She reaches in her pocket, pulls out a shiny new key, and puts it on the table. At first I don’t believe what I’m seeing. She waits for her bombshell to register and then says, “He doesn’t have a say in how we live our lives in this house. I’m going to make dinner. It’ll be ready in an hour.”

  She leaves the room, and I’m almost tempted to clap, except I’m totally floored—in a good way. How I always felt after watching Leah dance. I want to stand and yell brava! But she’s already gone. Cue the curtain. Karen Blackmore has left the stage.

  The key looks like a magical object, as if it will open a doorway to another life, and it kind of will. If Mom can stand up to Dad, maybe I can stand to do something equally spectacular.

  I go
upstairs, my hand gripped around the key, feeling good. When I open the door, the replica of the ring I painted lights up with the sun sitting low on the horizon, just as it did the first time Leah came to me. I blink and rub my eyes. I know she’s not coming. She never actually did. But that doesn’t mean I can’t tell our story. We were sisters with secrets, that’s true, but we were sisters first and foremost.

  I turn on my music and start to paint—small, big, and medium-sized flowers. All the same simple shape. Some I just outline and others I fill in. I try my best to match the colors of my memories of us together. I mix my palette to match the colors of Leah’s favorite nail polishes, the ones I always borrowed. I’m a Pisa Work red for when we went to see Scream 4. Shatter Me for the time she and I went shopping for New Year’s outfits. Hyacinth blue, my favorite Cape Cod color. When I’m finished with my creation, I stand back and look at what I’ve done. I’m happy with my new work in progress.

  I’m just finishing up one of the flowers when my phone vibrates.

  Hey. John Strickland. Can you meet me? I have something for you.

  Why would he want to meet with me? Is meeting him really a good idea? But it’s not like I can turn him down. He knew Leah even better than I did. If he wants to meet, I’m there.

  Yes. Where?

  I’m at the end of your street.

  I race down the stairs. “Mom?”

  She looks up from her cutting board. “Yeah?”

  “I’ll just be a few. Need to get some homework from a friend.”

  She pauses her chopping. “You want me to drive you?”

  I give her a kiss on the cheek. “Nah. I’m good.”

  I walk down my street to his waiting Jeep. The beginnings of a cold drizzle are starting to fall. I pull my hood up and my jacket closed.

  He puts his hand out the window and waves me over.

  “Hey, Allie.”

  I walk over and lean in his window.

  “Get in?” He nods to the passenger-side door. I almost hesitate. Who am I to get in a car alone with John Strickland? When I climb in next to him and shut the door, he says, “I want to give you something.”

  I put my hands up. “I’m not really doing that anymore…”

  “I’m not talking pills, Allie. I’m never going to give you pills again. Seriously, don’t ask. Not for you.”