Two Sisters Times Two

by Jeffrey Anderson

4

  Brooke’s kidneys were failing. This fact was quietly acknowledged by Sheila during her shift starting patient assessment, echoing what the family (Garrett had arrived late that afternoon, Brent was flying in tomorrow morning) had heard from the resident earlier in that night. And her crouching, cautious eyes that had been so open and forthcoming twenty-four hours before, announced more graphically than the resident’s blunt and unemotional phrasing that if they didn’t gain control of this infection soon the damage to Brooke’s organs would be irreversible, possibly fatal.

  Oddly, Leah felt sorrier for Sheila than she did for herself or her unconscious sister—whom she assumed, perhaps wrongly, was beyond the reach of pain or fear. “This must be difficult for you,” she said, looking up at the nurse while holding Brooke’s cool hand on the far side of the bed.

  “What?” Sheila said, an angry edge to her word.

  Leah flinched but persisted. “Watching this. Getting caught up in the struggles of your patients and their families.”

  “My patients are almost all unconscious. And I work graveyard.” She hesitated, regretting the inapt use of professional slang. “I have very little interaction with family on this shift.”

  “I guess that’s easier.”

  “Maybe for me, but not for the patients.”

  Leah tilted her head. By now her fingertips had found their way to Brooke’s fingertips. She felt there on the pad of her sister’s left middle finger the ridge of the scar from the time they’d used one of Momma’s sharp knives in an effort to cut off a candle tip they’d burned without permission or oversight. The knife had slipped and left a deep gash in Brooke’s finger, adding lots of blood to the already fretful scene. They’d managed to clean it all up, and Leah had played nurse—cleaning the cut with antiseptic (she was glad that time to be deaf and oblivious to Brooke’s screams) and wrapping it tightly with a double layer of adhesive bandages. “How so?” she asked.

  “My patients without family wither away. Most could make it, but they don’t try. The ones with family do try, and it makes a big difference in the results.”

  “Why?”

  Sheila smiled, her eyes finally shedding their anger. “You know why, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

  Leah nodded. She knew it mattered and she knew why it mattered.

  After Sheila left she launched into her quiet monologue without the prior night’s hesitation or uncertainty of subject. She’d known since her dream earlier in the day what she needed to tell.

  “When you first wrote to tell me you were taking a leave of absence from college to live on Shawnituck Island, I thought it was one more of your power plays—Brooke proving to herself that she, not Momma or Father or society or the world, was in charge of her destiny. That is to say, I figured it as a passing self-indulgence, like one of your hobbies in junior high (remember rollerblading? you must still have the scars on your knees and elbows!) or crushes in high school (what ever became of Bradford Harrington? I recall you contemplated eloping even to the point of asking if his brother would drive you); and you’d either rush back to Center a few weeks late and just under the deadline for maintaining enrollment or, worst case, resume school the next semester after a boring and lonely fall on the island.

  “Then I got your letter telling me you were pregnant. It was my second week in school and it really knocked me for a loop. I think I must have walked about ten miles around the perimeter of the campus that night. You know how I hated walking alone in the dark back then. I was always on edge, fearing someone would run up behind me and scare me half to death. But that night I don’t remember anything except just walking and walking along the path that ran just inside the stone walls of Drewry. During the day, there’d be joggers on that path; but that night it was deserted, which pretty well matched my heart at that moment. To that point I’d adjusted quite well to college life, had none of the homesickness I’d heard about and feared. But your announcement stirred it all up. Not only did I acutely feel the distance between us, I began to wonder if the Brooke I knew had ceased to exist. Pregnant? I couldn’t fathom what that meant to your life. Worse, I couldn’t fathom what it meant for mine.

  “I wonder how things might have been different if I’d been able to pick up the phone and call you that night. Letters had served us well the previous two years, allowing us the freedom to dig deeper into our daily activities and all the passionate feelings that surrounded those events. But with something big like this, the delay of days or longer kept the confusion and fear locked inside. I thought of catching a bus home, but then I just would have been sitting around with Momma and Father, and how would that have helped? I quickly realized that you would not have told them yet, were testing the announcement on me. So I would’ve been left to explain why I’d ridden through the night just to be with them, and wouldn’t that have been a fun challenge?

  “What I really needed was to be with you, talking this through or more importantly just lying beside you. Somehow your presence in my sight would have made everything all right. That physical presence and reassurance had got us through so many scrapes before. Why shouldn’t it resolve this one?

  “But you were a ten-hour bus ride and a one-hour taxi ride (if you could even find a taxi in Siler Sands) and a two-hour ferry ride away, and that trip wasn’t going to be tackled by shy little deaf girl who to that moment had thought the current biggest challenge for her life was learning how to sign what she wanted for lunch in the cafeteria line.

  “After I recovered from my initial shock, I became angry with you. At first my anger was all directed at the letter. How could you divulge something like that in a letter my second week at school? Didn’t you know how upsetting it would be to me, and that I couldn’t do anything about it and wouldn’t have anyone to lean on? I’d long taken your selfishness for granted, had seen it as the essential flip side of your boldness. But this latest example was off the charts. You had with one word turned my more or less stable and orderly world into chaos.

  “But what could you have done differently? Not tell me till we were next together? That probably would’ve been Thanksgiving. Or made the long trip down to Drewry to tell me in person? That would have been nice, but at that point you were anchored to Shawnituck and Onion and your life out there. And I also think you secretly feared that if you left the island at that time, it might cause you to question the life-changing events you’d set in motion. And you never could handle self-doubt. Brooke with a head of steam could be a formidable force. Brooke with misgivings was a recipe for disaster, for herself and those around her.

  “I then grew angry with your willfulness. While you could pretend to Momma and Father and anyone else who would listen that your pregnancy was an accident, I suddenly realized you’d planned it, planned it at least since your eye and heart had fallen for Onion, maybe since you’d decided to spend that summer on Shawnituck, maybe at some level all the way back in childhood when you set your eye on Shawnituck as your Eden. None of this had been an accident, right down to your scheming to get me out there as your chaperone while Aunt Greta was away then get me out of the house so you could spend that night with Onion. I think I had known of your plan all along—I knew you that well, Brooke. But I’d suppressed this knowledge because I didn’t want to have to deal with it, had my own adolescent tempest to endure and survive.

  “But once I accepted my foreknowledge, I began to feel somehow responsible, or at least complicit. You know me—the one charged far back as I can remember to watch over you and keep you from messing up too bad. And boy had I dropped the ball on this one. How could I let you go out to Shawnituck? How could I let you settle in there so comfortably, writing those letters that suggested you’d found your life’s calling? Why did I go out there in implicit endorsement of all your actions? And most of all, why did I let you convince me to go out to Windsor’s Cove with Paul so that you might spend the night with Onion? Why did you include me in your plan, Brooke? You could’ve snuck off with Onion to Lord
knows how many secret hiding places available across the island. I’m sure you knew them all by then. But you had to include me in your plan, and I let you do it. Why?

  “That was the worst part of your shocking news—my acceptance of direct responsibility. It took a while for me to come to that understanding—all those dazed circlings of Drewry’s walls. But once I reached that conclusion, I set about to undo my mistake and make it right.

  “I was, as you so often reminded back in those days, largely ignorant on the subject of human sexuality. But I knew about abortion from the chapter on human reproduction in senior-year Biology and from the discussion of the Supreme Court’s decision during ‘Current Events’ in Civics. That is, I understood the concept of abortion from a detached intellectual standpoint—how it was done and why it was legal. I also had been told rumors that several girls in our graduating class had had abortions, to no visible damage or side effects. From all I could tell, and as much as I’d thought about it (which, to that point, was very little), abortion was a safe and harmless and relatively inexpensive procedure. More importantly to me at that moment in my life, it was a means of reversing your catastrophic mistake and my participation in it.

  “Looking back on it now and given the vehement debate that has raged around the topic for decades, I find it amazing that the subject of the morality of abortion never occurred to me back then and was never discussed, either in class or at church or with the few friends who brought the matter up in passing. I can only assume that for me, and probably for most people, the topic was still too fresh and fraught with emotional uncertainty and peril, to even begin to contemplate. I’m guessing that, left alone, we would still be avoiding the shoals of that debate had the issue not been forced on us by radical outsiders on either side of that moral divide. I’ll only add that in retrospect the understanding that I assiduously endeavored to plan a process that would have culminated in terminating the seed of life that grew into Jodie sends a shiver of terror down my spine.

  “Yet endeavor I did. I contacted a local family-planning clinic near Drewry and got them to send me all the relevant information. I could cover the costs from my savings, so we would not have to approach Momma and Father for assistance and you couldn’t plead poverty on me. That had been a common excuse for you at the time—that you had no money to do what I suggested you do, and you refused to ask Father for help. Well, this time that excuse wouldn’t work. As for the scheduling of the procedure, the clinic would not perform an abortion on an initial visit; but in special instances they would make an appointment for the following day. That meant if I could persuade you to visit for three days, four tops, we could schedule a preliminary consultation one day, have the procedure done the next, and send you back to Shawnituck or Center or wherever it was you wanted to on the third.

  “I know—it sounds crazy talking about it now, like I was planning a surprise pedicure or something. But it didn’t seem crazy then. I even went so far as to ride the bus downtown to the clinic to check it out in person. It was part of a new strip mall in a nice part of town, tucked off to one end and marked only by lettering on the door. But there were no bars on the windows and no protestors outside. I walked right in and handed the receptionist a note explaining that I was deaf and would like to consult with a doctor. Within five minutes I was sitting across a desk from a middle-aged woman with a kind and gentle face and impeccably clean hands with the long fingers and close-cut nails. I’d written out my questions one per page, and handed them to her in sequence. At first she started writing her responses. That was an oversight on my part. I handed her one of the cards I always carried explaining that I could read lips if one spoke slowly and directly to my eyes. She gave me a big smile and said, ‘What a marvelous skill.’ It was the first time in my life anyone had praised my lip-reading; and I was convinced at that moment that this woman would take good care of you, and me. She patiently answered all my questions about ‘my friend’ wishing to end an early stage pregnancy, explaining that the risks were minimal and ‘infinitely less’ (I remember that phrase exactly) than the risks of continuing an unwanted pregnancy. I felt at that moment that she had endured those ‘infinitely greater’ risks earlier in her life, and had set as her cause relieving other young women of that traumatic burden. At the end of our interview, she had the receptionist schedule an appointment for a Thursday two weeks out, and allowed that she could perform the procedure the following day if there were no complicating circumstances.

  “All that remained was for me to get you to come visit. So I wrote you that letter, my slightly delayed response to your shocker. Part of me is glad you’ve lost my letters, so that no one will ever read that one. But part of me would like to see it again, try to understand the person who wrote it. I recall responding with neutral calm to your news, but all the while gently but firmly pushing for you to come visit so that we could discuss the matter in person, and to delay announcing your condition to anyone until we’d had a chance to talk about it. I was of course assuming you hadn’t yet shared that news with anyone else, knowing that if you had my plan would be greatly complicated. But something told me that it was still our secret. I ended the letter with a line I’d never used on you—You owe it to me!

  “And, wonder of wonders, you agreed, undertook that long journey to visit me at school for four days. Because I was deaf, they’d granted me a private room. And I requested a rolling bed from building maintenance and set it up adjacent to mine in the cramped space. And then I waited. Though it was only about a week between your response and your arrival, I recall it as being the longest week of my life to that point.

  “I was early to the bus station or your bus was late, and while sitting in the small and grungy waiting room in one of those awful plastic chairs the weight and the stress of the previous two weeks must have finally caught up to me because I dozed off amidst the silent bustle swirling. This was certainly a first—me falling asleep in a public place while alone and vulnerable. But then everything that had happened in my life over the last couple months starting with my trip to see you on Shawnituck was unprecedented.

  “And my first impression when I opened my eyes to see you sitting beside me beaming with some new radiance was that I had been transported to some better world—your glow was that profound and transformative. My second thought, clear as a flashing neon sign after you leaned over and kissed the side of my head and mouthed ‘I guess you were counting on me to watch over you’ was that your life didn’t need correcting, that you were doing exactly what you wanted to do and needed to do, pregnancy and all. And with that understanding I was totally absolved from responsibility for contributing to a catastrophic mistake. Come to think of it, maybe I had awakened in some better world.”

  Leah paused and looked up to Brooke’s face for the first time since beginning her monologue. Though her sister was still fully unconscious and had not moved in the interim, she now saw in her repose a beatific calm that she was certain hadn’t been there before. In her mind she understood that this impression was likely a reflection of her own feelings being projected on Brooke’s blank features. But whatever the reason, she suddenly felt certain in her heart that Brooke would survive this current crisis, and that somehow the words of her confession had critically aided that survival. The intuition, whether baseless or accurate, lifted her heart and released her from the dread she’d felt for days.

  “So the four days of your visit were spent sharing your elaborate plans for your happy future—that is, you shared and I listened. You would marry Onion later in the fall in a quaint but beautiful ceremony in the island’s Methodist church with a reception at his family’s restaurant. The two of you would live in the small cottage next to his parents’ house that was usually vacant in the off-season anyway. You’d convert the small second bedroom of that cottage to a nursery, decorating it in a seaside theme to match the views outside the window. You’d deliver your little girl—you already knew it was a girl even before your first obstetrics’ ex
am and long before ultrasound was used in pre-natal care—and would name her Jodie. I wondered if the androgynous name you’d chosen was a hedge against being wrong about the baby’s sex; but you said no, that in your mind Jodie was the name for an adventurer and would inherit from birth the adventure of her creation and fulfilled through her life on Shawnituck. You had it all planned out, to the color of the umbrella you would plant on the beach to protect your infant daughter in your long days out there the following summer—and the summer after that, and the summer after that. I think even then, that early, I was aware that these elaborate plans were your attempt to remake your staid and cushioned childhood into something exotic and thrilling through this as yet undifferentiated cluster of cells dividing in your uterus.

  “I know. That last sounds like retroactive rewriting of history. Surely the girl who had just days earlier unilaterally arranged the termination of your pregnancy could not have seen her way through to such a clear-eyed understanding of her own complex motivations, let alone yours.

  “My point is only that your visit was an epiphany for me, opening my eyes to the irreversible changes that had occurred in our relationship. I’d wanted to, indeed needed to, cling to our former total dependence and bond, when we were two appendages of the same body, the same heart. But that condition had not existed for months now, maybe years—at least since you’d packed up and headed off to Shawnituck and maybe since you’d gone off to college over two years before. I’d continued to pretend that it was in place for my own sake, to spare me the trauma of separation. But now you were an adult, with your own life and dreams. And so was I. And I discovered during that visit, our last sisters’ weekend off by ourselves, that not only could I survive this separation but I could possibly even thrive out on my own. And I discovered this not in myself but through your excitement and enthusiasm for your new life. As usual, you led the way. It just took me a little while to catch up.”

  By now the beatific contentment Leah had seen on Brooke’s resting face had transferred itself to her own, so much so that Sheila stopped in her tracks when she entered the cubicle and exclaimed, “What savior have you seen?”

  Leah could grin at that. “The one that says Brooke will be O.K.”

  Sheila looked at her patient and, despite her persistent doubts regarding Mrs. Redmond’s prognosis, had to grant that she did look better—the skin of her face had more color and had lost some of its tautness and strain. As one familiar with such subtle changes and their implications, she marked this as an auspicious turning point. “What happened?”

  “Life won.”

  Sheila nodded. Clearly Leah was correct. But she could not help but add the disclaimer of an ICU nurse. “This round.” She was sorry soon as the words leaked out.

  But Leah was unfazed. “And others.”

  The nurse nodded then went to record the readings she knew would confirm her, and Leah’s, intuitive assessment.

  Later, as Leah was reading her worn paperback of To the Lighthouse she’d pulled off her study shelf just before leaving home, her phone jiggled with the two-pulse vibration of a text message from Jodie’s cell.

  Should I come?

  Leah typed back Do you want to?

  Davey said Mom’s worse.

  She was. But better now.

  That’s fast.

  Sometimes.

  Who’s there?

  Davey, Garrett, Brent on the way.

  Ugh!

  Leah laughed.

  Jodie’s retraction followed almost instantly. But I didn’t say that.

  My lips are sealed.

  Is Mom awake?

  No.

  When will she be?

  I do not know.

  There was a long pause. Last night a similar pause had produced anxiety in Leah, fearing for her niece alone and confused a continent’s width distant. But tonight she had no anxiety. She knew Jodie was weighing her options and making her decision.

  Let me know when Mom wakes and the shock troops go back to their barracks.

  K.

  I love you, Aunt Leah.

  I love you too.

  Give Mom a kiss.

  Done.

  Thanks.

  Leah dropped the phone back in the pocket of her open and loose sweater. By then Sheila had completed her rounds and quietly left with a smiling two thumbs up. So Leah stood and made good on her promise to Jodie, leaning forward over the bed with her hands on the guardrail and kissing her sister on the cheek. That close she thought she saw Brooke’s eyeballs shift beneath her closed lids. She took that as a sign of some level of awareness (had it been there all along, as Sheila had suggested the night before?) and let her face slide a few inches father down till her lips were just above Brooke’s ear. She whispered, “I’m always with you” then added the qualifier “Even if I’m not.”

  She stood upright, half-expecting Brooke to sit up in the bed and rail against her conditional vow—Which is it, Leah? Are you always with me or not? Don’t rein in your heart with pedantry, Girl. Let it sing!

  She laughed out loud, the sound startling in the silent cubicle, the whole quiet overnight ward. Brooke’s face gave no sign, but still Leah knew—her vow of permanent presence was reciprocated, no strings attached.