Anna
IN OUR LIVING ROOM we have a whole shelf devoted to the visual history of our family.
Everyone’s baby pictures are there, and some school head shots, and then various photos from vacations and birthdays and holidays.
They make me think of notches on a belt or scratches on a prison wall—proof that time’s passed, that we haven’t all just been swimming in limbo.
There is Kate with hair and Kate all bald; one of Kate as a baby sitting on Jesse’s lap; one of my mother holding each of them on the edge of a pool. There are pictures of me, too, but not many. I go from infant to about ten years old in one fell swoop.
Maybe it’s because I was the third child, and they were sick and tired of keeping a catalog of life. Maybe it’s because they forgot.
It’s nobody’s fault, and it’s not a big deal, but it’s a little depressing all the same. A photo says, You were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, You were so important to me that I put down everything else to come watch.
· · ·
My father calls at eleven o’clock to ask if I want him to come get me. “Mom’s going to stay at the hospital,” he explains. “But if you don’t want to be alone in the house, you can sleep at the station.”
“No, it’s okay,” I tell him. “I can always get Jesse if I need something.”
“Right,” my father says. “Jesse.” We both pretend that this is a reliable backup plan.
“How’s Kate?” I ask.
“Still pretty out of it. They’ve got her drugged up.” I hear him drag in a breath. “You know, Anna,” he begins, but then there is a shrill bell in the background. “Honey, I’ve got to go.” He leaves me with an earful of dead air.
For a second I just hold the phone, picturing my dad stepping into his boots and pulling up the puddle of pants by their suspenders.
I imagine the door of the station yawning like Aladdin’s cave, and the engine screaming out, my father in the front passenger seat.
Every time he goes to work, he has to put out fires.
It’s just the encouragement I need. Grabbing a sweater, I leave the house and head for the garage.
· · ·
There was this kid in my school, Jimmy Stredboe, who used to be a total loser.
He got zits on top of his zits; he had a pet rat named Orphan Annie; and once in science class he puked into the fish tank.
No one ever talked to him, in case dorkhood was contagious.
But then one summer he was diagnosed with MS. After that, no one was mean to Jimmy anymore.
If you passed him in the hall, you smiled.
If he sat next to you at the lunch table, you nodded hello.
It was as if being a walking tragedy canceled out ever having been a geek.
From the moment I was born, I have been the girl with the sick sister. All my life bank tellers have given me extra lollipops; principals have known me by name. No one is ever outright mean to me.
It makes me wonder how I’d be treated if I were like everyone else.
Maybe I’m a pretty rotten person, not that anyone would ever have the guts to tell me this to my face.
Maybe everyone thinks I’m rude or ugly or stupid but they have to be nice because it could be the circumstances of my life that make me that way.
It makes me wonder if what I’m doing now is just my true nature.
· · ·
The headlights of another car bounce off the rearview mirror, lighting up like green goggles around Jesse’s eyes. He drives with one wrist on the wheel, lazy. He needs a haircut, in a big way. “Your car smells like smoke,” I say.
“Yeah. But it covers the aroma of spilled whiskey.” His teeth flash in the dark. “Why? Is it bothering you?”
“Kind of.”
Jesse reaches across my body to the glove compartment. He takes out a pack of Merits and a Zippo, lights up, and blows smoke in my direction. “Sorry,” he says, though he isn’t.
“Can I have one?”
“One what?”
“A cigarette.” They are so white they seem to glow.
“You want a cigarette?” Jesse cracks up.
“I’m not joking,” I say.
Jesse raises one brow, and then turns the wheel so sharply I think he might roll the Jeep. We wind up in a huff of road dust on the shoulder. Jesse turns on the interior lights and shakes the pack so that one cigarette shimmies out.
It feels too delicate between my fingers, like the fine bone of a bird. I hold it the way I think a drama queen ought to, between the vise of my second and middle fingers. I put it up to my lips.
“You have to light it first.” Jesse laughs, and he sparks up the Zippo.
There is no freaking way I’m leaning into a flame; chances are I’ll set my hair on fire instead of the cigarette. “You do it for me,” I say.
“Nope. If you’re gonna learn, you’re gonna learn it all.” He flicks the lighter again.
I touch the cigarette to the burn, suck in hard the way I have seen Jesse do.
It makes my chest explode, and I cough so forcefully that for a minute I actually believe I can taste my lung at the base of my throat, pink and spongy.
Jesse goes to pieces and plucks the cigarette out of my hand before I drop it.
He takes two long drags and then tosses it out the window.
“Nice try,” he says.
My voice is a sandpit. “It’s like licking a barbecue.”
While I work on remembering how to breathe, Jesse pulls into the road again. “What made you want to?”
I shrug. “I figured I might as well.”
“If you’d like a checklist of depravity, I can make one up for you.” When I don’t reply, he glances over at me. “Anna,” he says, “you’re not doing the wrong thing.”
By now he’s pulled into the hospital’s parking lot. “I’m not doing the right thing, either,” I point out.
He turns off the ignition but doesn’t make an attempt to leave the car. “Have you thought about the dragon guarding the cave?”
I narrow my eyes. “Speak English.”
“Well, I’m guessing Mom’s asleep about five feet away from Kate.”
Oh, shit. It is not that I think my mother would throw me out, but she certainly won’t leave me alone with Kate, and right now that’s what I want more than anything. Jesse looks at me. “Seeing Kate isn’t going to make you feel better.”
There’s really no way to explain why I need to know that she’s okay, at least now, even though I have taken steps that will put an end to that.
For once, though, someone seems to understand. Jesse stares out the window of the car. “Leave it to me,” he says.
· · ·
We were eleven and fourteen, and we were training for the Guinness Book of World Records.
Surely there had never been two sisters who did simultaneous headstands for so long that their cheeks went hard as plums and their eyes saw nothing but red.
Kate had the shape of a pixie, all noodle arms and legs; and when she bent to the ground and kicked up her feet, it looked as delicate as a spider walking a wall.
Me, I sort of defied gravity with a thud.
We balanced in silence for a few seconds. “I wish my head was flatter,” I said, as I felt my eyebrows scrunch down. “Do you think there’s a man who’ll come to the house to time us? Or do we just mail a videotape?”
“I guess they’ll let us know.” Kate folded her arms along the carpet.
“Do you think we’ll be famous?”
“We might get on the Today show. They had that eleven-year-old kid who could play the piano with his feet.” She thought for a second. “Mom knew someone who got killed by a piano falling out a window.”
“That’s not true. Why would anyone push a piano out a window?”
“It is true. You ask her. And they weren’t taking it out, they were putting it in.” She crossed her legs against the wall, so that it looked like she was just sitting upside down. “What do you think is the best way to die?”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” I said.
“Why? I’m dying. You’re dying.” When I frowned, she said, “Well, you are.” Then she grinned. “I just happen to be more gifted at it than you are.”
“This is a stupid conversation.” Already, it was making my skin itch in places I knew I would never be able to scratch.
“Maybe an airplane crash,” Kate mused. “It would suck, you know, when you realized you were going down . . . but then it happens and you’re just powder. How come people get vaporized, but they still manage to find clothes in trees, and those black boxes?”
By now my head was starting to pound. “Shut up, Kate.”
She crawled down the wall and sat up, flushed. “There’s just sleeping through it as you croak, but that’s kind of boring.”
“Shut up,” I repeated, angry that we had only lasted about twenty-two seconds, angry that now we were going to have to try for a record all over again.
I tipped myself sunny-side up again and tried to clear the knot of hair out of my face.
“You know, normal people don’t sit around thinking about dying. ”
“Liar. Everyone thinks about dying.”
“Everyone thinks about you dying,” I said.
The room went so still that I wondered if we ought to go for a different record—how long can two sisters hold their breath?
Then a twitchy smile crossed her face. “Well,” Kate said. “At least now you’re telling the truth.”
· · ·
Jesse gives me a twenty-dollar bill for cab fare home; because that’s the only hitch in his plan—once we go through with this, he isn’t going to be driving back.
We take the stairs up to the eighth floor instead of the elevator, because they let us out behind the nurse’s station, not in front of it.
Then he tucks me inside a linen closet filled with plastic pillows and sheets stamped with the hospital’s name.
“Wait,” I blurt out, when he’s about to leave me.
“How am I going to know when it’s time?”
He starts to laugh. “You’ll know, trust me.”