The Orchid Sister

by LeClaire, Anne D.

  MADISON

  After the accident, everything changed. The most visible of the transformations was the slight limp, which remained even now despite the doctors’ hopes that with therapy it would be corrected. And, of course, the scars. Some of those would fade, she’d been told, and, if she elected for more surgery, would become smoother, less vivid. At that time, the last thing in creation Maddie wanted to think about was undergoing more operations, and after the first five years had passed, she no longer considered it. The scars had become such a part of her that some mornings when she stood before the mirror, they hardly registered.

  The other wounds were less visible. Her personality, once gregarious and fun-loving, even rebellious, was more subdued now. Early on, when she had returned home from rehab, she had begun to avoid calls from friends and well-intentioned acquaintances who offered more of the sympathy she did not want and counsel she had no desire to hear again. Give it time, they advised. What you’re feeling is to be expected. You’ve been through a huge ordeal.

  You have no idea, she wanted to tell them. How could they? If they had been burned, lost the two people they loved most, did they think they could expect time to make the pain and grief fade? Burn. A soft-sounding word. But in fire, the skin did not burn. It melted. No one wanted to hear that.

  Even visitors to the burn unit, witnesses to her suffering, had only glimpses of what it was like. Pain so encompassing that even her grief had to be put on hold. The only person who really understood was Kat. Throughout the first months—in fact, for most of the first year—her sister had taken a sabbatical from her job at the magazine and had practically moved into the hospital with her. She’d been there for the procedures that went so far beyond pain that Maddie thought there were no words to describe it. “Agony” was the closest she could come. And even now, fifteen years later, she couldn’t remember the worst of it. It had been explained to her that the morphine drip masked the pain and sedated her, and the Versed prescribed to quell anxiety had induced a kind of amnesia, making it unlikely she would ever completely recall all details of the accident or the days in the hospital that immediately followed. What she did remember later had brought on nightmares. Kat, whose career depended on using language, agreed with her that there were some things that defied description. One night, Maddie had awoken to see her sister sitting by the bed, silently weeping.

  “Oh, Kat. Kat, don’t cry,” she had whispered.

  “I hate that this happened to you,” Kat had said. “If I could, I would change places with you if it meant you didn’t have to go through this.”

  Maddie didn’t for one second doubt the truth of this. Kat was twenty-nine at the time of the accident, nearly ten years older than Maddie, and had long been her protector. Unable to guard her from the plane crash that had killed their parents and nearly killed Maddie, Kat did everything else for her. She learned from the staff how to change the dressings and cover the scars twice a day with a special salve and later, at the rehabilitation center, how to assist with the physical therapy. Maddie had fretted that Carl, Kat’s husband, would resent the weeks and weeks she spent at her side, but her sister tossed this concern aside. “He knows this is where I want to be. And you know lawyers. Always busy with work. He probably barely notices I’m gone.” But later, after Carl told Kat he wanted a divorce, Maddie wondered if perhaps he had minded very much indeed and added that to the list of things she had to feel guilty about.

  But years passed and life went on, as it always does. Kat returned to DC and Maddie buried herself in her work, both achieving a measure of success in their fields, focusing on the present and knowing there was no way to prepare for a future held in the capricious hands of fate. Only much later would Maddie look back and see how much of their past was covered by the steely blueness of irony.

  KATHERINE

  Kat woke in a narrow and unfamiliar box of a room. Her brain, her mouth, even her body felt dull, cotton-swathed, and she concentrated on trying to pull up some memory of how she had come here. She lay listening, but only the faintest of sounds penetrated the walls. She lifted her head, fought against a wave of vertigo, and looked around. She remembered falling asleep in her elegant room at the spa, and this place was far removed from that. Cinder block walls instead of polished wood. A short chest of drawers next to the single bed where she lay. No rug or art on the walls. A simple globe lamp hung from one corner of the ceiling. There were two doors, one shut, the other open to an adjoining lavatory no larger than a closet. Smaller, in fact, than her closet at home. She saw a toilet and sink, a tiny open shower. A flicker of green along the floor by the closed door startled her. A gecko. Harmless.

  She returned to her survey of the room. There were no mirrors. No clocks. Nothing for her to differentiate night from day except the small square of blue above the single skylight. Pale light fell onto the walls, the faded candescence of either dawn or dusk. The air smelled of fresh paint and another slightly earthy aroma.

  She propped herself up on her elbows and swallowed against the threat of nausea. She wore pale blue pajamas. Three words were embroidered on the pocket flap in a darker blue. The sight triggered a slice of memory. So she was still at the spa in Mexico. But what was she doing in this cell? Another wisp of memory floated just beyond her reach, and with it came a fluttery fear. She swung her feet to the floor, felt the cool tiles beneath her toes, then rose and walked to the door, bewildered at the unsteadiness of her legs. She twisted the knob, pulled, but the door didn’t budge. “Hello,” she called, her voice weak. “Hola? Is anyone there?” She twisted the knob and pulled harder, but the door still did not give. The flutter grew to a steady pulse. Where the hell was she?

  “Hola?” she called again. She tried to concentrate, to piece things together, to remember how she had come to be in this space, but her brain was too foggy to process anything, and she could only remember going to sleep on the soft mattress in a beautiful room. The short walk to the door had left her spent. She made it back to the bed, and although she struggled to resist, again sleep claimed her.

  She woke to her name.

  “Katherine?”

  She opened her eyes, saw, in the shadow of the light cast by the globe fixture, a man. Recognition surfaced. Dr. Verner. She searched his face for reassurance but found it as carefully unrevealing as a mask.

  “Where am . . . ?” The words were cottony in her mouth. Had she been drugged? Her unease spiked and she struggled to conceal the first frisson of real panic.

  He held a glass to her lips. “Drink,” he said.

  She hesitated. If she had been drugged, it would explain her weakness, the haze of memory. Thirst overcame caution. She took a sip. Water. Tasteless. She drank deeply.

  “How do you feel?” His tone was soothing, confident.

  Stalling for time, she drank until the glass was empty.

  “Katherine?” He placed a hand on her shoulder.

  At the touch, as if a sun had appeared, dispelling mist, full memory returned. She cringed from his hand, still cupping her shoulder, and closed her eyes, as if such a simple act could turn the clock back five months, could change the choices she had made.

  She had made her first trip to the spa in December. Curiosity had brought her here and had led her to return every month since then. Eventually it had caused her to nose around the one building Verner had said was off-limits to guests. The same building, she realized, where she was now being housed. Held.

  He reached for her hand, felt for her pulse. She steeled herself to keep from shrinking back from his fingers and the touch she had once naively believed would save her. She forced herself to meet his gaze.

  “Are you hungry? Can I have something sent in for you? Perhaps some soup?”

  She thought of the spa’s elegant dinner room where she had last eaten, entrées that, though simple, would have been the envy of any chef back home, platters of melons and pineapple, fruit so fresh they still held the warmth of the sun. “Why is the door locked?”
She hoped her voice would reveal nothing but mild inquisitiveness.

  He did not answer immediately, and then, just as Kat decided he wasn’t going to, he said, “For your protection. Only for your protection.”

  She compelled herself to continue looking steadily at him. “I want to leave,” she said.

  He stared at her with eyes so blue they appeared transparent. “Oh, what am I to do with you?”

  The question chilled her. Her meek act was not fooling him. She had been an idiot to confront him with what she had learned. “I want to leave,” she repeated. She started to rise, but he laid a hand on her shoulder and held her back.

  “For now, you need to rest. Try to sleep. I’ll be back to check on you again.”

  He switched off the light as he left. The darkness pressed through the pane of the skylight. She lay still, listening, heard the click of the door being locked. She lifted a hand to her face, felt the crepiness of her skin as if for the first time.

  How had she allowed this to happen? How had she been seduced into believing his promise that age could be forestalled? When had curiosity and her excitement about finding the story of a reporter’s lifetime glided into vanity? A quote teased at her memory. Something about vanity. Not from Shakespeare or the Bible, those two fonts of quotations. She was quite positive of that. No, something she read long ago. In college? Perhaps in Professor Durham’s philosophy class. She recalled the separate notebook for quotes she’d kept then. Suddenly the full quote surfaced, as these things did when one stopped trying to remember. Provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of every folly but vanity. Well, it was vanity that had brought about her present condition. That in itself had proved a kind of madness. She stroked her cheeks, her jaw and chin and neck.

  Not her.

  Rousseau. That was the author of the quote. She still had her mind, at least. Verner and his “revolutionary procedures” hadn’t taken that from her.

  She had meant no harm, intended no offense. Jesus, what had gone wrong? Worse than wrong. A moan of animal anguish slipped from her throat because she understood that Verner wasn’t keeping her confined here because her treatments had inexplicably gone wrong.

  It was because she had discovered the truth behind the treatments—secrets that, like her, he couldn’t afford to let leave.

  MADISON

  Maddie came awake slowly, arched her back in a deep stretch, and reached over toward the solid warmth of Jack, but instead of his shoulders, her hand slipped over bare sheets, cool beneath her fingers. Coming fully conscious, she skimmed the room with a quick glance, found his blue shirt on the bench at the foot of the bed, his trumpet on the chair by the window, its velvet-lined case propped open on the floor.

  “Jack?”

  The silence of the house answered her. She remembered that the previous night, before they had fallen asleep, he’d mentioned he was scheduled for an early charter. She rose, pulled on a pair of jeans, and, on impulse, reached for his shirt and slipped it on. The brushed fabric slid over her breasts, her shoulders and ribs, and her stomach contracted, warmed.

  It wouldn’t take much convincing to take the day off. Blow off work. Paint her toenails. Condition her hair. Eat chocolate chip ice cream straight out of the carton and moon about waiting for his return. In short, do all the things women in love were supposed to do. Or she guessed this was what women in love did. Her experience in the area until now was almost nonexistent. Instead, the habit of discipline took over.

  She scooped kibble into Winks’s bowl, and as if the sound were his own personal alarm, the Russian blue appeared. “Breakfast for you, coffee for me,” Maddie said to the cat, who was already munching on the dry food. She poured a cup of coffee—thank God for K-cups—grabbed a tin of cookies, and headed to the studio. She saw the paper swan as soon as she walked through the door. Ornate with many folds in the wings, it sat in the middle of the smaller of her two worktables. She hadn’t noticed it last night, so Jack must have made it earlier that morning while she slept. She pictured him sitting in her studio, mug of coffee at his elbow, bent over and concentrating as he created the bird, and she smiled at the image. She carried the swan to the shelf and set it with the growing collection of origami. The first and least complicated of all was a crane he had created during dinner on their first date. Over the following weeks she would come across others around the house. A star on the sill over the kitchen sink. A rose on the coffee table next to the TV remote. A turtle on the bench in the hall. A sword atop the novel she had been reading. The last had puzzled her. Such an odd object. “Think Amazon,” he’d explained. “Think warrior woman. That’s what I see in you.” If he only knew, she had thought. She was full of fears. Kat was the warrior in the family.

  She opened the window to the green May air. Sirens sounded somewhere in the distance, surging then fading away, off toward the east end of town, past the strip mall and Town Line Condos. Absorbed in thoughts of Jack, she paid no real attention to them, although later she would have a hazy half memory of them and wonder how she could not have paid attention. After the accident that had claimed her parents, every time she’d heard sirens, memories of the crash were triggered.

  As she moved, she was aware of the scent of him rising from the fabric of his shirt, an erotic blend of early spring, Dial soap, and cigarettes, although he said he was trying to quit. And risk, too. For it smelled of that, as well. Of the vulnerability of love. She knew how dangerous it was to give your heart; the plane crash had taught her well the inevitability of loss.

  She had met Jack in the spring on one of those false late-March days, a morning that pulled frost from the earth and held the promise of summer. Overnight, purple and yellow crocuses had flowered, and in sheltered spots of south-facing houses swollen forsythia buds threatened to bloom. One week later there would be a surprise dusting of snow—Cape Cod in the spring—but on that day, schoolchildren ran outside without jackets, and people considered the wisdom of taking down storm windows. On this perfect day, she met Jack.

  When the doorbell rang, she had been in the studio working on the preliminary sketches for a commissioned series on women and myth. She’d been expecting a shipment from her supplier and so opened the door without hesitation. A stranger stood there, tall, just the right side of bony, and holding a black helmet tucked beneath one arm. A motorcycle stood in the drive.

  “Hi.” Deep voice. Hazel eyes, clean-shaven chin. Good bones. A grin her sister Kat would rate “drop dead.” Cowboy, she thought. That lanky archetype of American masculinity. A young Sam Shepard. Her defenses rose, shutting him off as if a stage curtain had been drawn. Unconsciously, she tilted her head so that a wing of hair fell forward, shielding the damaged side of her face.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Madison DiMarco?”

  “Yes.”

  “The sculptor?”

  “Yes.” She scowled in puzzlement. How did he know her name?

  “I was at the gallery and Lonnie gave me this address.” He wore jeans and a knit shirt. No jacket. “Jack Moroni,” he said, extending an arm. His sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, revealing blond hair curling on his forearms, broad capable wrists. And just like that, looking at his wrists and forearms of all things, she felt the first surprising spark of desire. No. Not surprising. Shocking. She had thought that possibility, if not dead, then close to it. She drew a breath and allowed him to take her hand, felt the strength of his.

  He’d come, he said, to look at her work, hoping to purchase a piece. She drew another breath and steeled herself against that potent and unexpected hit of desire. In the fifteen years since the accident, there had only been one man, Gil, the salesman from whom she had bought a car. The very brief affair had not ended well. She accepted that that part of her life was over. She cut Jack Moroni off with a curtness that bordered on rude. “You need to talk to the gallery that handles my sales. It’s the Gallery on Main. The owner is Lonnie Pearson.”

  “I just—” he began, but she clo
sed the door before he could say more.

  She returned to the studio, but the brief exchange—no more than a minute or two—had disturbed her. She was distracted, too, by the memory of how it had felt to have her hand enclosed by his. Get a grip, she told herself. Eventually, she became absorbed in her work, so deep into it that the phone startled her. She glanced at the caller ID, saw it was Lonnie.

  “I heard you turned Jack away,” Lonnie said without preamble.

  “Who?” she said, although she knew instantly.

  “Good golly, Maddie.” Good golly? She remembered what Kat had said the first time she’d met Lonnie: Look at her and you think: Goth. Listen to her and you think: someone’s great-aunt. Maddie had laughed. Someone’s bossy great-aunt, she’d replied. “The guy I sent over this morning,” Lonnie said.

  “Oh, right.” She allowed a note of irritation to creep in. “I told him you handled sales.”

  “I explained that to him, but when he described what he was looking for and why, I knew he needed to see everything you’ve done.”

  “Well, I don’t run a gallery here. I leave that to you.”

  She heard Lonnie draw a long, patient inhale. “The thing is, he wants to find something special for his sister. Olivia used to be a yoga teacher at the Earth Center.”

  She knew the center. It occupied a space next to a shoe store on Sea Street.

  “Jack’s devoted to her,” Lonnie said.

  Maddie recalled the sight of the rangy guy at her door, the jolt of desire that had taken her, and felt a strong need to protect herself. “I don’t care if he’s Gandhi and the Dalai Lama packaged in one. I still don’t see why you can’t take care of this.”