2.
“DUDE, IT’S THE CRACK OF DAWN HERE.” MY SISTER’S sleepy voice on the phone gave me a sudden unexpected hope. Like rose petals in the rain. Like maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all. It was just cancer. Families handled this kind of thing all the time. The two of us would think of something. Maybe we’d even bond over it.
“Sorry,” I said. “I forgot the time difference.” I sat on the front steps of my house, watching the overcast autumn morning. Two months earlier I would have called my Gammie for advice. Two years earlier I would have called my stepdad. Death was relentless, but I still had my sister.
If we’re mostly water, DNA, and memory, then a sister is something. We shared the same blood – the same biological parents, anyway. We’d grown up in the same old house with the same mother and the same stepdad and the same brown rice and apple juice potluck dinners. We’d stood side by side against the same wall when we were in trouble for a B on a report card or a stain on a flowered rug; we’d waited there for our mother to bash our heads together or into the plaster wall.
Yes, if anyone could understand the exact nature of my ambivalence, it would be my sister.
“How’s the retreat going?”
“It’s all right,” Leslie sighed. “I’m in this little hotel near the volcano. Palm trees. What’s up?”
I felt like a jerk calling my sister before my mother wanted me to, but it seemed weird to keep the secret. “It’s bad,” I started. I took a breath and counted to three, but when I finally blurted it all, about the lung cancer and the year to live, Leslie didn’t seem surprised.
“That explains the dead birds in my dreams,” she said.
I heard the flick of her lighter and all at once remembered my loneliness. My sister’s ambivalence had always been a different color than mine.
“I totally dreamed this,” she said. I could hear her sucking on her cigarette. “Anyway, don’t worry about it.”
An androgynous Portland hipster biked past my house, balanced a huge cup of coffee between a free hand and the handlebars.
“I am worried,” I squeaked. “I’m the one who has to take care of her.”
Leslie cigarette-exhaled into the phone. “You don’t have to do anything. Anyway Mom won’t get sick. She’ll take herself out.”
A few cars passed. Fat raindrops started to fall. One of my cats purred against my leg.
“Listen,” my sister said. “I’ve been doing this spiritual work here on the Big Island and I’ve been in contact with one of our unknown ancestors. It’s a Cherokee woman who was raped and murdered and beheaded. I’m just now realizing that this woman is the reason we don’t trust men. She’s the reason there are hardly any men in our family.”
I nodded like my sister could see me. I didn’t think of myself as someone who didn’t trust men, but I wasn’t going to argue. “That sounds about right,” I mumbled.
Maxito tapped on the window behind me, giggled as he pressed his nose against the glass and made it fog with his breath.
The sight of him made my tits swell with milk.
“Well anyway, listen,” I said. “Maxito’s up. I gotta go. Talk to you soon?”
I heard my sister’s lighter flick again. “I’m flying home in a couple of days,” she said. “Talk then?”
I clicked the phone off, tapped the windowpane in front of Maxito’s face. “Morning, baby.”
I craved salted chocolate, craved so many things right then, but settled for nursing my toddler on our soft red couch. I could hear Sol in the kitchen steaming coconut milk for my second cup of coffee and I felt like such a brat. I wondered if this was a pattern for me – this always craving something I didn’t have. People’s mothers got cancer all the time. People without sisters or money or health insurance or sex lives or salted chocolate. They didn’t whine about it. Women all over the world were caregivers even if they were breadwinners, too. They dealt with it.
I balanced Maxito on my knee as I nursed him, reached for the Sharpie pen on the coffee table in front of me, wrote on the inside of my wrist: Behave in a way you’re going to be proud of. I didn’t know what I meant by that, exactly, didn’t know what I’d be proud of, if anything. But the words seemed important.
Sol set my coffee in front of me.
“Thanks, honey,” I said. And I meant it – wanted to mean it – wanted to appreciate Sol even if all she could do was make me a cup of coffee with steamed coconut milk. “Can you take Maxito to preschool? I have to pick my mom up for an oncology appointment.”
“Sure,” Sol smiled sad. “Whatever you need.”