Chapter 1 My Name Is Greta #2
Once Lucy came into the world, the Petersons were the perfect little family.
But then, the word cancer made a hole in their lives and the first cracks started to show.
When I was born, the damage was still reparable.
But as my sister’s health deteriorated, the breach grew deeper, and Mom went from being the star employee to just playing Monopoly at the hospital when Lucy had a bad day.
She stopped working. She stopped singing in the mornings while she made coffee.
She stopped seeing her friends. She stopped looking in the mirror. She stopped everything.
As I said earlier, at school they sometimes asked us to write an essay or draw a picture about a special day with our family.
The most important figure in my artworks was always my grandfather: I drew him bigger than my parents because that’s how big the role he played in my life was.
I often depicted Lucy with a sun on her head, lying there inert in a bed.
And next to her was me: little, almost an afterthought, a smudge of ink you could easily overlook.
When you have a sick sister, you learn to do things for yourself. You don’t wait for your parents to read you stories before bed or watch your next ice-skating competition because probably they’ll be busy trying to keep their other daughter from dying of an infection.
I don’t remember at what point they realized that feigning some degree of normality in our family was a ridiculous put-on.
There were still occasional good times, times when Lucy could even go to class, and all of us felt as if we were frozen inside the perfect Edward Hopper painting that reflected an absurdly mundane moment that never lasted too long.
The relapse always came and the hospital turned into the battle outpost, with my mother standing at the foot of the cannon and my father working more and more hours to pay the medical bills and get away from the pain.
Where was my place in this equation?
At my grandfather’s house, a few blocks away.
If I think of my childhood, I think of the dark gable roof, the bird’s nest in the tree you could see from the living room window, its leaves falling to the ground from one day to the next as autumn came; I know this because I loved jumping on them and listening to them crunch.
Crack, crack, crack. A little farther off, Henry Tallon, as everyone in the neighborhood knew my grandfather, would watch me in silence, drinking coffee on the porch steps.
He’s never been much of a talker, he firmly believes that yes and no are enough to answer any question, and he doesn’t like to waste his words.
He’s got that practicality about him that my generation has completely lost. He only goes out to buy shoes if the ones he wears are worn-out, and when pumpkins are in season, he just accepts them because he feels obligated not to turn down whatever his generous neighbors offer him, and so it’s pumpkin cream, pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, pumpkin beer, meat stuffed with pumpkin, pumpkin pancakes with honey, even spaghetti with pumpkin.
But I also see, when I think of him, the way he would take me to the ice rink or the bus stop for school. Fixing my first camera. Showing me how to ride a bike. It went something like this:
“Do I put my feet on the pedals?”
“Yeah.”
I did it. I managed to advance three feet, then fell down at the end of the street. My grandfather grabbed me by the elbow and helped me stand up.
“Did I do it right?”
“No.”
“I’ll try again.”
“Yep.”
“Is this the brake?”
“Yep.”
“Okay.”
And with a few more yeses and noes, I learned to keep my balance.
Since then, I’ve ridden my bicycle around Ink Lake rain or shine.
I owe this to him, just as I owe him so many other things.
It’s not that my parents didn’t want to be part of that moment; it’s just that they had more important stuff to do.
I suppose you have to decide between spending the afternoon with your dying daughter who just got intubated for some new complication or riding around on a bike with the other one.
The scale was tipped even before my name was written on my birth certificate.
So I got used to living in the shadows behind the curtain.
If you don’t make noise, if you learn to walk on your tiptoes, a moment comes when you turn invisible even when you try to look at yourself in the mirror.
Who are you? I asked myself sometimes, looking at my reflection as a twenty-two-year-old.
The answer echoed in my head one night when I returned home and found the house empty, or maybe Dad was there but he didn’t even bother to chew me out.
I was never alone: I had my constant companions, two drinks too many plus a loneliness that wouldn’t let me breathe.
When I fell into bed, that certainty revolved around me.
“My name’s Greta Peterson and I was born…
” I hunted the words that flew around me like dragonflies.
“I was born to…” I wrote them on Post-its, looked for tacks, pinned them to the walls so they wouldn’t get away.
“…save my sister.” And finally sleep embraced me as the sun rose on the other side of the window.
I slept easily. I did so because the emptiness in me receded when I remembered that, despite it, I was the girl who’d managed to change a life, defy destiny, be the heroine of the story.
In the world of illusions, I was on a stage filled with spotlights, the public was applauding enthusiastically, and Lucy was looking at me with a joyous smile while she stretched out her arm to take my hand.
But right when her fingertips grazed mine, the fantasy turned to a nightmare and she began to vanish as though she were made of smoke—purple spirals quivered until they suddenly disappeared.
“My name’s Greta Peterson, and I was born to save my sister.”
So what happens when the reason for your existence ends up beneath the earth with a gray granite stone weighing more than two hundred pounds looming over it?
What happens is you find yourself out in the middle of the ocean. What happens is you float but you’re wearing a backpack full of stones. What happens is the world distorts around you like waves of heat in summer. What happens is fear wins the battle with reason. What happens is everything stops.
So now Lucy is dead.
And I no longer know who I am.