The Secret Language of Sisters

by Luanne Rice

  “Roo,” I said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “I want to ask you something,” I said, but my throat ached so much it was barely a whisper. “Are you here because of me? Was the accident my fault, for making you come pick me up that day? Do you hate me?”

  “She doesn’t hate you.”

  At the sound of Newton’s voice, I jumped about a mile. It was one thing to talk to Roo, but it was another to have someone hear me. I looked out the window so Newton wouldn’t see, and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. He and Isabel must have driven to the hospital together. I could hear Isabel talking to my mother in the hall.

  “Don’t ask that again,” Newton said.

  “What?”

  “If she thinks it’s your fault.”

  “It was.”

  “Shut up, Tilly.”

  “If I hadn’t needed a ride, she wouldn’t have been on that road when it was so icy.”

  Newton sighed. “She’d have been out taking photos no matter what. It was an accident. That dog ran out. If it was anyone’s fault, it was hers. She shouldn’t have swerved like that.”

  Suddenly the fury I’d been holding inside, from Dr. Danforth and the nurse, exploded. I hurled myself straight at Newton, both fists pumping, socking him right in the nose so blood sprayed out of his face. I heard my knuckles crack against his jawbone or a tooth, I didn’t know which, I didn’t care, and the crazy thing was I really loved Newton, I appreciated him staying in Roo’s life through it all, but I was yelling at the top of my lungs, “SHUT UP, IT’S NOT HER FAULT! TAKE IT BACK, NEWTON! NOTHING IS HER FAULT, NOTHING!”

  And then the arms of the nursing staff or hospital security encircled my waist from behind and hauled me out of Roo’s room, kicking and screaming, and then I went limp as a dead jellyfish.

  Oh, Tilly. She came so close to knowing. She even asked the blink question, but I can’t blink. If she had just looked at me longer, maybe she would have seen me fix my gaze on her.

  Since they’ve started cutting back on my medication, I feel a lot more conscious. I saw and heard exactly how hard Tilly smacked Newton. I knew she’d pay the price for attacking him. No one can ever punish Tilly the way she does herself. She was a girl of passion and regrets. She always had been, but it had gotten worse over the last year, since our dad died.

  Mom and Tilly came back into the room, followed by Isabel and Dr. Danforth. Mom and Tilly were crying so hard, they had to support each other. My arms ached to hug them, and my voice wanted to scream, I am in here, I love you, help me! Newton walked in, too, an ice pack pressed to his lip.

  My mother kissed me good-bye and hustled Tilly home for some combination of love and punishment. Isabel wanted to stay, but Newton told her to go. Pearl and Taylor Swift, the twentysomething blond nurse who always wore red lipstick and did little dance moves while she sang to herself, rolled me onto my back and splinted my hands around foam grips, to keep my fingers from becoming rigid—this had become normal treatment, but it felt so strange to have them doing it in the midst of my family drama.

  When the nurses left, Newton sat close to my bed. My skin tingled. I felt like exploding, I wanted to touch him so badly.

  I felt as if I was behind a screen, watching everything close-up but unable to be seen or heard. I was a prisoner in a tiny cell. Tilly’s rage was as ferocious as my own. Her scream echoed in my chest as if it had come from my own throat. I felt it in my ears, shattering my eardrums, and I could almost feel the impact of her fist hitting Newton.

  It killed me that she hurt him, the boy I had loved so long, but finally I got Tilly in a way I never had before: the heat of her emotion, the way she reacts. I was always the calm one, but just then I wanted to punch the walls, tear down the curtains and the ceilings and all these tubes and wires connecting me to the IV and heart monitor. I wanted to run out of here faster than I’d ever run before. I wanted to act wild, like Tilly, instead of calm and logical, like me.

  My mind raced instead of my body, but it continued in the same circles. I wondered if I was going crazy. What if I was? Who would know? My mind chased itself, told me to move my fingers, inch my arm across the bed, and curl my toes: But my body wouldn’t obey the commands. My mind repeated itself, went through the same thought processes, the same impossible challenges, and each time my hand refused to lift, my toes failed to move, I felt more helpless and insane. My heart was going to jump out of my chest.

  I tried to control my mind. To test myself, to see if I could still think. My father used to tell me I had a good mind. He meant that I used reason and logic, like a scientist or a mathematician.

  So I tried to map the stars. It was the very end of February, I knew, but I chose a spring date: April 1. Because this really did feel like a bad April Fool’s joke.

  Although it was broad daylight, and I was stuck in a hospital, I tried to enlarge my mind, zoom out. I imagined the night sky over Hubbard’s Point.

  There was Gemma in the small constellation Corona Borealis, hiding behind Boötes, with Arcturus blazing bright. Ursa Major would be almost straight overhead; if I were standing in my yard, the Big Dipper would be just above our tallest oak tree, peeking out of the crown of branches as it rose in the sky. And because it was imaginary April, it was almost time for the Lyrids, with twenty fast meteors an hour at its peak, the meteor showers radiant somewhere between Lyra and Hercules.

  Okay, I could still map the star chart, I could still remember the night sky. Did that mean I wasn’t crazy? Did I still have a good mind or was my brain slowly turning to mush, like the rest of me?

  I stared at Newton. His lip was bleeding, but he wasn’t paying attention to that. He was watching me.

  What did I look like to him? I hadn’t seen a mirror, but I knew from the feeling of air on my scalp that they’d shaved part of my head. And from the feeling of stitches pulling my forehead and the skin behind my ear, I knew I had stitches. I knew I looked terrible, but when he gazed at me, he had the same old look in his eyes.

  He just turned seventeen, yet he spent so much time here with me. He was that rare tall boy who doesn’t play basketball, or any sport. He still hadn’t grown into his arms and legs, and it used to kill me, the way kids nicknamed him Gawk, when they weren’t calling him Fig, à la Fig Newton.

  We met when we were ten, the year his family moved to Hubbard’s Point from Chicago. His father was a biochemist, and he had come to work at Drysdale, the big pharmaceutical company in Easterly. His mother, as if to counteract the chemicals her husband put into the world, had an incredible organic garden.

  Our dads were both scientists, and that’s what made me and Newton become friends at first. My dad not only taught at Yale, he worked at the Peabody Museum and sometimes took groups of people, including me and Newton, on deep-sea trips called pelagics, on oceanographic vessels out to the Atlantic canyons beyond Montauk, to Stellwagen and Georges Banks, to see humpbacks, minke whales, and even critically endangered North Atlantic right whales.

  Newton’s dad worked in a lab, developing drugs, but he taught us how to use chemistry sets and let us use his Bunsen burners. We made homemade sparklers when we were twelve, gave them to our families for Fourth of July, and got in tons of trouble for working with dangerous chemicals without his dad there.

  Both Newton and I grew up paying attention to nature and the way things worked. When we were eleven, a nor’easter blew wildly off the Atlantic and drove a few lobster pots onto the beach. He and I salvaged one and took it apart, figured out how it was made, where the bait went and how the lobsters were lured in, how the metal mesh doors were tied to the trap with fine twine, designed to decompose so if the buoy line was cut, the trap wouldn’t stay on the bottom of the ocean, catching lobsters until the end of time.

  Newton, I miss you. I wish you could hear me.

  And oh my God! It was as if I had willed him to come closer to me. He scraped his chair across the floor, leaned his elbow on the bed. I could smell his soap, and my t
hroat ached with the beautiful familiarity.

  Newton picked up my right hand and looked at the spot where the splint had chafed my wrist. There was a raw patch of skin, red and oozing. I stared at him. He had long, dark-brown hair and, behind his black-rimmed glasses, green eyes the color of Four Mile River at dawn. Those eyes were fixed on my wrist. And he let go of my hand, and I wanted to cry. Don’t leave, I wanted to say. Don’t let go.

  But he walked to the tray where there was a stack of gauze pads, and he ripped open the sterile package.

  He turned on the water at the sink in the corner of the room and let it run until I saw steam. Then he soaked the pad and tested it on the back of his own hand, and when it was cool enough, he came to me. He loosened the splint’s Velcro strap and removed it, and then he washed the pus off my raw wrist.

  “There,” he said. “Does it feel better?”

  Yes! I wanted to say. So much better. Don’t let go, Newton. Just stay with me.

  And he did.

  I let my mind drift to another night sky. Back in November, one school night when my mother had parent-teacher conferences and Tilly was sleeping over at Emily’s, Newton and I bundled up, grabbed beach blankets and my camera, and headed out. My house sits on a low granite cliff overlooking a crescent bay, and steep steps lead down to a footbridge that crosses a saltwater creek. It was dark, but that didn’t matter. Newton and I knew every inch; if we were blindfolded, our feet could find the way.

  We ran down the beach, wide-open sand with the Long Island Sound lapping at our boots, the wave crests white and rippling in starlight. The tide was coming in. I stopped to photograph the waves’ lacy froth, and then I snapped Newton silhouetted by blazing stars.

  At the end of the beach, we climbed up a rocky hill, onto a secret path; it led into the woods, but just for a short way. At night the darkness was total—scrub oaks surrounded us, and pure instinct drove us along. Within five minutes we emerged onto Little Beach—the most beautiful and romantic place on earth.

  Newton spread one of the blankets while I set up my camera to take time-lapse shots of star trails. We lay down, pushed the sand around beneath us, carving out a nest, and tugged the second blanket over us. The November air was cold, but we slid our hands up under each other’s sweaters.

  We kissed, his glasses bumping my cheeks. I reached up and gently took them off.

  “Now I can’t see you,” he said.

  “But I’m right here.”

  He kissed me again, slow and tender, and I saw stars—literally, little white sparkles inside my eyelids. My body was firing on cylinders I didn’t even know I had. There was a scientific explanation, but for once I didn’t stop to consider it.

  Overhead, the Leonids cast a skein of glitter in the sky. Meteor showers were our thing, Newton’s and mine. We had seen the Perseids on Nantucket last summer, and now we were kissing beneath November’s Leonids. Sparks showered overhead, falling to earth. My father was buried a mile away. Since summer I had been held captive with thudding grief.

  “Where are we going to go to college?” Newton asked, holding me.

  “That’s what you’re thinking about?” I asked, laughing.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Because I want this to last forever, and college is coming up fast, and we have to apply to the same places next year.”

  “Well, I already know,” I said.

  “Yale,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  I nodded, my face pressed into his shoulder.

  The idea of going to Yale had started out being for my dad—he had gone there and later taught there, and he’d been so proud of my test scores, all the academic stuff, and we’d planned on driving into New Haven together, if I got accepted, if I got in.

  He died of a heart attack, my dad. It happened last summer, August 4, a perfect summer day. He had driven home from his office in New Haven, dropped his briefcase by the kitchen door, where he always did. He kissed my mother, my sister, and me hello. He had brought me a bunch of pamphlets, brochures, and forms from the admissions office.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said.

  “No problem, Yale girl.”

  “Not yet,” I said, and laughed. “Don’t jinx it.”

  “As if I could.” He stretched, gave me another hug. “We’ll go through them later, okay? I’m going to lie down for a minute before dinner.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “See you later,” he said.

  Then he went upstairs for a nap and didn’t wake up.

  That last minute in the kitchen was his last minute with us. See you later were the last words he said to me.

  He was only fifty. He had a heart attack in his sleep. And he’d been healthy—he ate well, he ran on the beach with my mom, we hadn’t known anything was wrong. It would have been unbearable, no matter what. But losing him so suddenly was a nightmare. I still can’t believe it.

  Now, going to Yale meant even more to me. It meant everything. I had read through every single paper he’d brought me the day he died. I had already started filling out forms that weren’t due for a year. I was all set to make appointments to see admissions advisors, and his friend in the dean’s office, and I was working harder than I ever had at school to get straight As in AP classes, to complete my portfolio and win the Serena Kader Barrois Foundation Photography Contest, and to get into Yale early decision my senior year.

  Getting in, attending my dad’s school, knowing that he had spent the last day of his life gathering information for me to apply, became the most important thing. It was a way to stay close to him, to be inspired by him, and to follow in his footsteps. Nothing in life, even loving Newton, compared to this. If only we’d had longer than that last minute in the kitchen, maybe I could have adjusted my goals. But life doesn’t let us plan that way. So for me it was Yale or nothing.

  “You’re number one in our class,” Newton said that night on the beach. “Your test scores are off the charts, and your dad taught there. You’ll get in, no problem. But I won’t.”

  “Stop it, boy genius,” I said.

  But I knew what he meant. Anything to do with math or science, Newton got top grades. But he was so absorbed by those subjects, he tended to neglect English, history, and art, and his grades reflected it. His advisor had told him he could get into a great college but that the Ivies in general and Yale in particular would be long shots.

  “Could we try for somewhere else?” he asked.

  I felt this awful swooning, as if I were going to fall off the world, into space, and leave him behind.

  “Newton, even if we go to different colleges, we’ll still stay together.”

  “But we won’t be together.”

  “We will as often as we can.”

  “It will be too different,” he said. “I don’t want to be apart from you.”

  “I don’t want that either,” I said, feeling sad and troubled, because I knew that no matter what, I was applying to Yale, and if I got in, I was going to go.

  “Hold me, okay?” I asked.

  “Always,” he whispered, wrapping his arms around me even tighter. “No matter what, forever and ever.” Then he paused, and added, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I whispered. And even though we had known each other forever, even though we had loved each other since we were twelve, it was the first time we had said those words.

  And then he kissed me.

  I felt split in half that night. My feelings filled the sky. I wanted life to stop, go backward, I wanted my father to still be alive. Science is about how things are, not how we wish they could be. Newton and I were meant to be together in the long run—to me, that was a scientific truth as clear as gravity. My heart ached because I knew we’d have to be apart for a while—for college. But that night, I tried to forget that messy reality and just live the laws of heaven—the beach, the ocean, a kiss, and the fact we said we loved each other.

  Newton was my tall boy with the geeky glasses and sweaters whose sleeves neve
r quite reached his wrists, my friend who loved meteors and astronomy as much as I, who shared my dream of outfitting a boat and turning it into an oceanographic research vessel and sailing every one of the world’s oceans. How could I ever find anyone more perfect?

  It was funny. That night my camera was pointed at the sky, but it might as well have recorded our words, our feelings. The series of time-lapse photos I hoped would anchor my portfolio for the photography contest came out really well. They showed star trails written on the sky, and for me, it was a digital record of that night, that moment when Newton and I said I love you.

  But the photos also showed that everything passes.

  Stars pass through the sky. Minutes pass through the night. Flowers bloom and die. You can try to hold fast to the people you love, but everything changes. Newton and I were changing. He told me how he felt about applying to the same colleges, and I realized I couldn’t wait to be at Yale.

  Now, in the hospital, he finished dabbing water on my wrist, he cleaned off the nasty leaking fluid, and he stood by my bed, holding the wet gauze in one hand and my wrist in the other. I watched him look down, his fingers encircling my wrist bone, possibly measuring how much smaller it was becoming. It was atrophy. My flesh was shrinking away, and with it went the girl I had been, the girl Newton had loved.

  Then he did something that killed me. He lowered his head, pressed his lips to the inside of my wrist. I felt his breath on my skin. I felt his tears. His lip was bleeding from where Tilly had hit him. It must have hurt. I wished I could make it better.

  He gently replaced the splint, doing a much more careful job than the nurse. He made sure the Velcro wasn’t too tight, and that the edge of the fabric didn’t chafe the sore.

  Then he picked up his backpack and, without looking at me again, left my room.

  Always, he had said to me that night on the beach. No matter what, forever and ever.

  I would call to him if I could. Or maybe I wouldn’t.