I folded the letter, pocketed it. A problem that needed fixing—another rising difficulty I’d need to solve one of these days, whenever life revealed to me the flawless, finite answers. I crossed it from my mind: the only important thing that happened that night. The crowd was leaving. I heard Repa laughing above everything. And once I fled this scene, I believed there’d be a short time before my name and the sound of my voice would be forgotten.
But I couldn’t read Caitlin’s words as she’d intended, not just yet.
In fact, I wouldn’t open the letter again. Not until years later, once it was far too late. Then I’d read it from beginning to end for the first and only time, and it would transport me to that scrap of Ann Arbor sidewalk, beneath the November streetlight where the sweat burned my eyes. By then, everything would make perfect sense: How acutely she’d seen our lives. How well she knew me, more than I did myself. I’d see her composing those thoughts inside a coffee shop. I’d know why she’d driven there, hoping to witness whatever she imagined my music to be, hoping I’d invite her to see for herself my version of what we both felt. By then I’d know that she alone was the one who could have truly understood.
8
Caitlin knocked at the upper flat’s door on a Christmastime weeknight—three uncertain raps I might have missed had I not been waiting, more or less staring at the walls. What little I’d read of her letter had convinced me I needed to be near her, whatever that took. Over the past year it had been growing, a slowly churning awareness of how dire it was that we discover a new way to connect, to transform our sibling habits. To grow up, I guess, a task that was mostly mine. We’d been behaving shyly toward each other, but, finally, I’d invited her for dinner.
“Hey,” I said, opening the door to welcome her inside, where she stood idling in the apartment’s front room. She’d done her hair, and I hoped it wasn’t for this. A runty plastic Christmas tree sat in a corner, but there was little else in the way of holiday spirit. Will and Andrew had gone out for the evening.
“Hello,” she said.
I hadn’t wanted to make a fuss, didn’t take her coat or anything formal. She ought to feel she was casually dropping by, that this would become a regular sort of business. Caitlin took a seat on the couch, and we settled for a movie playing on one of the channels Andrew had hijacked with a satellite dish. Pretty Woman—I’d never seen it before. Caitlin eyed Will’s homemaking: The lighthouse scene, plugged in and blinking. The Jesus shrine on the mantel, which she was sure to find heretical.
While the movie played, I took breaks to tend the microwave. I’d become a wizard of the chicken sandwich, zapping the precooked fillets and dashing them with soul-food seasoning that didn’t belong to me.
“How is it?” I said, after serving the entrées on plastic dishes.
“Good,” she said. “Spicy.”
An uneasy feeling, once the romance scenes heated up. Richard Gere unhooking Julia Roberts’s garter. A hooker movie, of all things. An indirect expression of our sister-brother awkwardness—you click the remote, and there it is.
The R-rated images silenced Caitlin and me, looming larger and more lifelike than what we needed to say. One of the stranger confusions I’d felt, an unnecessary embarrassment about being unnecessarily embarrassed that certified just how dislocated she and I were. I asked Caitlin if she wanted to watch something else. She shrugged. The movie trailed on, without the respite of commercials.
The actress had tremendously long legs; the stud a chest that appeared to have been shaved as smooth as his ass, which the camera panned over as he thrust and bucked, but gently.
“You into this?” I said.
“Whatever’s fine,” Caitlin said, because the movie had nothing to do with anything. “Do you wanna turn it off?”
“Only if you do,” I said, and we continued staring at the screen as if a moment we’d been trying to take hold of was being led astray. The hooker and the tycoon plummeted troublesomely into love, threatened by contrary lifestyles; yet they found their way, in time for the closing theme.
The credits rolled and I took my sister’s plate to the kitchen. As she was leaving, I told her to come back soon. With any luck, I said, the year 2000 would not mark the end of humankind, and we’d be seeing a whole lot more of each other. Then I cracked some Pretty Woman joke, at which Caitlin laughed and said, “It’s fine, it’s all good. Sorry if I’m boring.”
ON THE CORNER OF Telegraph and Ford hung an ominous banner above the entrance to Harry’s Army Surplus: GET YOUR Y2K SUPPLIES HERE. Angela said her father had for months been stocking his basement with nonperishables and weaponry for just this occasion. At the upper flat, Andrew had taken precautions by storing gallons of fuel in the garage and making sure there were enough rounds for the rifle he kept hidden from Will in the apartment attic.
“Andy Dandy’s ready,” Will said, and the three of us laughed.
New Year’s Eve 1999. We were huddled on the apartment’s miniature balcony, staring down Michigan Avenue to where Detroit’s skyline was a dusky apparition. A crisp evening, warm for Michigan, the final minutes of December. I eyed the twenty-four-hour Farmer Jack across the street, imagining the windows blacked out and looters shattering glass to ransack the aisles. It must have been nine o’clock, and we’d each swallowed a hit of ecstasy while sipping bottles of piss champagne Andrew had bought for the holidays. Beneath us cars chugged along and streetlights changed on cue, as if to defy whatever catastrophe was about to begin.
The weeklies had been advertising end-of-the-world parties, urging Detroit to let it all hang out, one last time. Around ten, Andrew made his way to some such event. Angela had returned to Kalamazoo, where I was to meet her the next day, leaving Will and me alone with the agreeable option of blasting off to a private celebration.
He’d wired up a surround-sound system in his bedroom, a speaker in each corner, in the middle of which we sat blitzing ourselves with music. Every so often, we regrouped in the bathroom to swallow another pill, and in this way the year’s change passed without our knowing. We didn’t hear the ovation, the guns going off in the city—bullets shot at the moon. It was well after midnight when we realized we’d lived to see the new millennium. By then we’d gobbled our entire stash but for one tablet, which we cut in half with a razor in honor of the future.
“Happy two thousand,” Will said, tucking his portion between his gums.
“How many have we eaten?”
“Your eye,” he said. “It’s all messed up.”
I glanced in the bathroom mirror to see a contorted visage resembling what I might look like if I’d regressed to some prehuman species. The flesh around my left eye sagged lifelessly. The pupil was dilated and deadened, a fish eye peering through aquarium glass. I poked at my nose and flexed my cheeks. I’d never again reached the high of those first autumn doses, yet this buzz was exhilarating, making it impossible to worry at length.
Will stood behind me, seeing what I saw. “My god,” he said. For a minute, he couldn’t turn away. Then he returned to the music, and I called Angela to wish her a good year. Next, I called my mom. I said the same things to both of them, jabbering while massaging the flesh below my eye—speaking of love and all the great things ahead. And next came a stretch of minutes so spectacularly oblivious I might as well have lived them in a place like heaven, but one thing I’m sure of is that the sun hadn’t yet risen when Caitlin knocked at the door.
By then I’d polished off the champagne. Sweat slicked my lower back, and I’d changed into a white T-shirt because my black one had attracted vicious energies. There was no name for the ride I was on as I danced toward the door, swinging it open with an insane, impersonal friendliness.
“Happy New Year,” I said, before I could really comprehend her.
It seemed impossible to view my sister entirely. I took in square inches: Blonde locks. Deep-red lips with that blotted end-of-the-night smear. For months she’d been holed up studying, but this evening Caitlin
had hit the town wearing her finest nightlife clothes. Black pants, a white blouse. Heels. She was wrapped in a peacoat as I hugged her into the room. I might have asked her to dance. From Will’s bedroom music blared down the hallway, and in this late phase we’d reached for the funky sounds: James Brown. Curtis Mayfield. I’d been dancing away the scary ideas that began to creep in each time I stood still. I was afraid to stop.
“Are you rolling?” Caitlin said. “Your eyes are all weird. Why are you grinding your teeth?”
Hearing this sobered me for an instant, realizing my sister could identify ecstasy’s teeth-gnashing effects.
“No way,” I said. “I’m drunk. We’re Irish, you know?”
She took a seat on the couch as I continued a soft shuffle about the living room.
I did the Travolta. I fluttered my hands, clacked my heels. The funk was still thumping when Lauren showed up with a HAPPY NEW YEAR badge pinned to her sweater. Caitlin had asked Lauren to meet her at the apartment—for what purpose I had no mind to consider. A year had passed since I’d seen Lauren, yet without a word I took her hand, prancing to the backbeat as she shimmied along, smiling as if nothing had changed. The tenants below arrived home to pound on their ceiling, but the music was in Will’s hands.
Lauren and I grooved awhile longer, until the wallops beneath the floorboards began rattling the windowpanes. Then she headed toward Will’s bedroom to see about the noise while I sat beside Caitlin, petting her shoulder with an undivided concentration.
“Something bad happened,” she said. “I just wanted to see you.”
Christmas had been unmemorable in an alleviating way. Easy. We needed to keep everything smooth and easy, but Caitlin curled into herself and began crying hard.
I actually don’t know what I said next, or how long we carried on that way. By morning, Lauren and Caitlin were gone. Will and I awoke spooned on my mattress, dressed in ski hats and winter coats, and throughout the apartment every window had been opened wide. Apparently we’d decided that an evil had been turned loose; our only hope had been to cleanse the air as we lay shivering beside each other, awaiting the first light of the century.
TWENTY-THREE DAYS LATER, I walked into Oakwood Hospital’s psych ward with only a book to offer, an Oscar Wilde novel Angela had given me for my birthday, encouraging me to read. Will said of dud records that they made him “throw up in his mouth,” and I’d lasted mere pages with Dorian Gray before feeling similarly. Yet of the books on my narrow shelf, it seemed most precious, the safest one to hand Caitlin as she lay in a hospital bed on suicide watch.
“These people are terrible,” she said, giving the novel a courteous once-over.
If she in any way expressed relief at seeing me, I do not remember. Others things are crystalline, but not that. Though I wasn’t surprised to be there, or couldn’t feel the surprise, and whether that was a mistake or a failure or a lapse of heart, it was the worst of my life. “You might like …” I said, yet to speak a full sentence. I meant the book.
It was a late-January afternoon. I’d just punched out at the rug shop. The night before, Caitlin had swallowed a month’s worth of her antidepressants and passed out in her car after calling Mom, who’d rushed her to the ER in time to have her stomach pumped. Mom had been at my sister’s side all morning. Dad was the one who’d called me, saying, “Your sister. I don’t understand.”
Hospital policy was that attempted suicides were to remain under psychiatric evaluation for two weeks. Caitlin would spend the days lounging in a paper gown, doing arts and crafts and group therapy with junkies and neurotics. Needles stuck out from her hairless arms, held in place by strips of surgical tape. Bags of fluid dangled from a rack next to her bed. Her heartbeat was displayed on a monitor that glowed silently above, but I saw no dark circles beneath her eyes or any obvious signs of agony.
“Everyone here’s a freak,” she said, when I hugged her. “Can you get me out of here?”
I felt her shame and her near-total surrender to it. A shy, becoming twenty-year-old girl locked in a nuthouse that demanded she announce her every trip to the restroom. Only later would I consider the mealtime slop being served or what crossed my sister’s mind as she showered, her nightly routine, before laying her head against the hospital pillows.
“These doctors walk in with their students,” she said. “They talk about me like I’m not right here in front of them.”
The supremacy of doctors—I still trusted that they must know what’s best.
“Can you relax?” I said. “Get some sleep?”
“Sleep,” she said. “You try it here.”
She then went on to tell me what had happened on New Year’s Eve. That a friend’s brother had dragged her into the bathroom at a party and sexually assaulted her. Caitlin spoke in an even tone, as if reading aloud a police brief, warning someone that life was full of danger.
“Who?” I said. “What friend?”
“I don’t ever want to see them again.”
I kept a gentle voice, prodding her until she explained that two days earlier she’d finally confronted the guy and his sister, Sheila, who for the past year she’d been calling her best friend. Sheila had eaten dinner at Mom’s house. She’d taught Caitlin how to dress for the clubs and made her tapes of booty rap, club bangers. Nice enough, but I’d never had much to say to her. One of those Dearborn lost girls who seemed beyond the scope of my social graces.
“I just wanted an apology,” Caitlin said.
Sheila and her brother had thrown Caitlin out of their house.
They’d called her a liar.
“They had the audacity to yell at me.”
Whatever her troubles, my sister was not oblivious. In a way she saw things too distinctly and felt them too immediately, without filter, without defense. So susceptible to heavy feelings that she was bound to endure many, sometimes at the hands of people whose nature it was to prey on all things fragile. Her face wasn’t sufficiently angry, just burdened, like she’d been told it was entirely her fault for letting people treat her this way.
“But what happened?” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
Months later, I’d investigate the incident from numerous angles and be told that Sheila’s brother had pulled Caitlin into a bathroom, that he may or may not have shoved her to her knees. Unzipped his fly, wagged his thing in her face. Almost certain is that a crowd of drunken Dearbornites gathered at the stall door, chanting, “Suck it!” Mom would tell me that Caitlin had described the way her heels slipped across the bathroom’s tile floor as she tried to struggle free—a detail that would become the crystallized, indisputable bit of evidence I’d cling to when I began stalking Sheila’s house in the early morning, devising ways to murder her brother without being caught.
In the hospital, Caitlin elaborated no more than to say the guy had done something “messed up.” When I said the word “rape” she said, “No, he’s just a jerk because his mother left when he was young.” I didn’t yet know his name or what he looked like, only what I’d heard: he was a trained boxer and a male stripper across the border in one of Windsor’s male entertainment clubs. I knew Caitlin had bought him a gift that Christmas and that her checking account was overdrawn.
“Sheila wasn’t even there,” she said. “She was off with some guy.”
A nurse observed us, seated feet away, half engaged with a magazine. She appeared to be assigned to Caitlin. A privacy curtain hung on metal rings, clamped to a track in the ceiling, separating us from the activity of the ward. The lights were dimmed. If there were windows somewhere, you couldn’t tell. Other people were nearby, but I couldn’t see them—could only hear their shoes clomping on the linoleum. The sounds of footsteps and televisions surrounded us. Who in their right mind would get well in a place like that?
Caitlin said, “I just want to start over.”
“You can,” I said, having no idea what that meant.
But I knew it wasn’t just New Year’s Eve that had delivered
her there. Trouble sniffs out people who are lost the way we were; or else we’d marched toward it, expecting to find ourselves.
Caitlin had gone pale, or I’d just noticed.
I’m not sure I even took her hand in mine, which is the kind of thing you spend the rest of your life trying to forgive. What did I know, barely twenty-two? Absolutely nothing about anything in that very moment, or what the moment itself meant.
I said, “I love you.” I said, “You just have to make it through.”
Caitlin looked anywhere but at me.
My senses were shot—the adrenals, the emotion cells. Just then I was vaguely sober, but there’d been a hazy run since New Year’s Day. Instead of calling Caitlin that first morning of the century, I’d met a dealer at 7-Eleven. My wonky eye had snapped back to form, but ever since, my face had felt like mashed tinfoil. There was a sickness in my mouth that could not be rinsed away. A few days into the millennium, a pain vibrated through my chest, radiating up my neck as my organs ceased manufacturing whatever mojo I needed to be sane. I’d wedged a chair beneath my doorknob so that Will and Andrew wouldn’t catch me bawling with an unspecific dread that felt as permanent as the sky. I’d driven to see Angela twice, to hide in her bed. I’d slept five hours at a rest stop on I-94. Nothing had helped until I saw a doctor at a walk-in clinic, who, with a glance, wrote a script for a tranquilizer called Ativan. Enough of those, and the days had passed as dreams, because the thing about being in a spin like that is how quickly the world blurs on by like some bogus marvel you’d had no desire to see.
“Are you all right?” Caitlin said.
“Me?” I said. “I’m always all right.”
Standing beside her in the psych ward, I remembered little about having been alive the past weeks. And I’ll never recall exactly how I left my sister in Oakwood Hospital, or where I went next, only that she sat propped on a stack of thin pillows, thanking me for the book.
WHEN I ENTERED THE rug shop the following morning, there was a look I’d never seen before in the eyes of the General’s wife. She hovered near the doorway, her dainty figure electrified as if expecting a visit from a saint. She stammered through our routine: “Good morning, how are you?” Then she walked to her desk and sat down. Will wasn’t around. He must have been on delivery with the General.
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