by Karen Rivers
“I have a sister,” says Yale, and then she tells her. After a while, she’s so outside of herself, anyway, that she feels like she’s watching a movie or reading a novel. A story that’s happening around her, not to her. Which is better than being involved.
Sort of.
Someone else’s sadness feels safer to her than her own, and Yale sounds sad. Well, who wouldn’t? Michael had thought her own parents were bad but Yale’s sound downright insane.
Yale keeps talking as they scrabble over some boulders to get to the top. Michael trips, skins her knee, but she doesn’t interrupt. The wound stings and bleeds.
They get to the top and sit down, the view spread out all around them like fabric. Michael lies back on the sun-warmed rock, pressing the sleeve of her Diesel sweater onto her cut so it stops bleeding. She turns her cheek into the ground, which is gravelly and scratches her skin.
Yale is making some connection between her disabled sister, whose name weirdly enough is also Yale, and Sully.
“Sully’s not like that,” says Michael automatically. “He’s not crippled. He’s just different.”
“I know,” says Yale. Finally stopping talking. Looking at Michael lying on the ground. Then more quietly, “You’re lucky.”
“Sorry,” says Michael after a pause. “It’s just that I’m always explaining about Sully.”
“I don’t know why I’m telling you,” says Yale. “I kind of thought you’d get it.”
“I do,” says Michael. “I get it.”
“Okay,” says Yale. She sits down beside Michael. Kicks off her shoes, peels off her socks, digs her bare toes into the ground. Her toenails are painted bright green.
“I love the smell of it up here,” says Yale. “It’s so ... unpolluted.”
“It’s really fucked-up that they gave her the same name,” Michael says suddenly. “It’s like you almost don’t exist.”
Yale looks at her. “Thanks a lot,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” says Michael. “It’s not coming out right. It’s like they didn’t give you your own identity, you know? Your own tag.”
“I guess,” says Yale. “I do feel ... well, it’s stupid. I feel like I’m supposed to make up for her or something.”
“You should change your name,” says Michael. “Make up your own.”
Yale shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe I don’t mind it.”
“I’m going to call you Y,” says Michael. “Just to distinguish. Besides, it’s mysterious. Y.”
“Okay,” says Yale. “Maybe.”
“Anyway,” Michael says. “Where is she?”
“I don’t really know,” confesses Yale. “I know the name of the place where they keep her but I don’t even know what city it’s in. It might not even be here.”
“We can find it, Y,” says Michael. “On the internet. How hard can it be?”
“Yes,” says Yale. “I guess we can.”
They slowly make their way back down the hill. It’s getting cool in the afternoon, the clouds lazily drifting over the sun. When they get back to Michael’s house, they go straight to the computer and enter the hospital name that Yale has memorized. Four of them are listed, four hospitals with the same name. It’s not that hard, though — Michael is right — to figure out which one it must be. It takes less than an hour, eliminating the obvious.
It’s not that far away. Yale hasn’t disappeared at all. All this time, she’s been right there. Just a couple of hours’ drive north. She’s been right there all along.
****
Yale
Chapter 22
On our way to see Yale, we stopped at my house. I wanted Mum and Dad to ask where I was going so I could tell them, but they didn’t come up from downstairs. The kitchen was such a mess, I was embarrassed that Michael saw it. What would she think? An open carton of eggs, the peanut butter jar with a spoon sticking out of it in the middle of the table, containers of day-old Chinese food making the whole place smell like the seeping ooze of a garbage dump. She didn’t seem to notice. I guess that isn’t surprising. Why would she care about the state of my kitchen? She’s still stuck in what happened; of course, she is. A month, six weeks, it’s not that much time. I don’t expect she’ll just snap back to being happy, being free. How can she?
I grabbed a sweater from my room. A jacket. Some money. I led Michael back outside. And Tony was there.
Tony.
That fresh grass smell. Dirt. I’ll never get tired of it, ever. And I don’t care that it sounds like a cliché, when I see him, something inside me just lifts up. I feel like I don’t deserve it, like it’s something that was meant to happen to someone who isn’t me, but I’ll take it just the same.
He came with us. The three of us in Michael’s red Jeep. Listening to music. Michael driving. The three of us like a team, a ragtag team, sure, but still a team. The trees slipping past the windows. The city vanishing behind us on the highway. Fast-food restaurant after fast-food restaurant giving way to farmers’ fields and a handful of lakes. A gas station that looked like the last building on earth. It felt like we’d left the planet. Like we were hurtling toward something ethereal. Something huge.
But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t fun and games. It wasn’t a lark. It wasn’t even all about me. I could smell the sweat rising off Michael, and her nervousness coming in waves, like tides washing in and out over her. It was happening less than it happened at first, in that first week (two weeks, three weeks) after it happened, but it still happened. It happened all along the drive. I could see it in the way her face would suddenly change colour, the white of her hands gripping the wheel. She was so scared, but of what? I can see the panic attacks coming over her but I haven’t brought it up yet. (Maybe I will, soon, maybe I won’t. I don’t always know the right thing to do.) I guess I’m waiting for her to say something about it, maybe it’s something she just wants to deal with alone. I reach over and touch her arm and she flinches so I pull away.
Sometimes I think that Tony must make her think of Israel. Of course, he does. The three of us together must keep taking her back again and again to that scene. Sometimes I catch her shivering, like she’s freezing, even though it’s hot in the car. I wish I hadn’t brought Tony if it’s him that’s inadvertently making her feel this way, but I couldn’t help it. I needed him to be there, too.
The hospital is more like a big old house. A country house.
By the time we got there, visiting hours were over. But I went in. I went in the only way I could. I told them to wait in the car, and then I disappeared. It was hard though. Different than all the other times. I had to really try and, even then, it wasn’t perfect. I was coming through in blotches. It took me a while to find Yale’s room. It was so much like a hospital room, it took me by surprise. The exterior of the building was so home-like, but in here it was typical: a bed with rails, linoleum floors, equipment beeping. That unmistakable hospital smell.
I wish I could say that, when I walk in, Yale opens her eyes and sits up, but she doesn’t. She is lying there, motionless. Asleep, I guess. I can hear her breathing, which is uneven, catches a bit on every inhalation.
I reappear because I don’t have the strength to stay gone and to absorb the scene at the same time.
Yale.
I say it out loud. “Yale.”
She doesn’t blink or even turn her head. Nothing. No shift in her hiccupy breathing, no change in her demeanour. The silence behind the hum of the machines is completely overwhelming. It’s like there is no one there, but I can see her. She’s there.
“Yale,” I say more sharply.
Nothing.
I know right at that moment that I’m not going to rescue her. I’m not going to take her away from here, transform her, give her some of my life for her own. Save her, and somehow by doing that save myself. What had I been thinking?
I start to cry. It isn’t her fault. She is who she is, whoever that is. But none of this is how I imagined it to be.
I make myself stop. If she’s aware of me (is she?), I don’t want to hurt her feelings. I don’t want her to think she’s not good enough for me.
“I’m your sister,” I say.
It feels funny to say it. It feels untrue.
“I am,” I insist, as if she’s argued with me by not responding. “I am your sister. We have the same name and everything.”
She is only barely there. Barely, barely. Her eyes blink, and then they are open but not looking at anything. One is brown. One is blue.
I get dizzy, nearly fall.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but this isn’t it. Not at all. I feel ripped off, and then I feel sick about it. I feel ...
Her hand twitches. But that is all. Her face is ... not like any face I’ve ever seen, not anything I recognize. (Why did I think I’d know her? That she’d be like me? Crazy.) It’s so misshapen and contorted. Unformed in some ways, overly formed in others. She looks scary, and then I hate myself for being scared. Or disappointed. Or both.
Even though I am sitting right there, on her bed, feeling the smooth white cotton of her sheets, she can’t see me. That’s what hurts the most. She doesn’t know how to look.
I sit there for a long time. I wonder what Michael and Tony are doing but I can’t bring myself to leave. I want to say more but talking out loud feels dumb, too loud in the stillness of the room. Too intrusive.
Then I realize that there is something. Something about the way she smells. I put my face close. I breathe in the air from her exhalation. I sniff between her neck and shoulder.
She smells like me. She smells like pumpkin.
The lump in my throat is choking me. I want ... I need ...
I don’t know.
I kiss her cheek. Her skin is freckled like mine, but not. It is also rough and red. Dry. She sighs, or seems to. It might just be a quirk of the machine. She is looking around, past me, through me, her eyes darting like fish in a bowl.
“I’m here,” I say. “I’m here.”
There is motion in the hallway. The door opens. I disappear but stay in the room. The shadows are getting long. A nurse comes in with a clatter of trays, talking on a phone that she hangs up when she sits down. She feeds Yale. It is really slow going. Yale opens and closes her mouth like a baby bird, sometimes getting food, sometimes not. The nurse is gentle and so patient. She reminds me of Michael with Sully, just the way she’s looking at Yale, the way she’s touching her hand. She talks to her the whole time, quietly, about stuff I wouldn’t know how to begin to bring up. Stuff about her own life. Like she’s thinking out loud. It seems so easy when she does it, not like the awkward blurting that I was doing.
I guess maybe I just don’t know how to be with Yale. Not yet. Maybe I’ll come back. I will come back. I’ll have a chance to figure it out. She’s my sister. This isn’t like a one-shot deal where I need to figure it all out in just one quick visit. There’s no Hollywood ending here.
My sister.
I’m unexpectedly sobbing again. Hard. It’s not even that I’m sad; I’m just so full of emotion I can’t figure out how to get it out other than tears. The nurse’s kindness is tearing me open. I guess if that’s what the money is buying, is it wrong?
The bank won’t miss it.
I don’t know what I feel. I swallow and swallow and try to stop. I feel so confused. I thought I was going to take her away with me. Take her home. Put her in front of Mum and Dad and make them look. Make them see her. But that obviously isn’t going to happen. It was obviously a dumb, naïve idea.
But the thing is, something more than that has happened. Something else that’s changed me. I’ve seen her. I’ve seen that she’s okay. And it’s kind of like I can exhale now, like I’ve been holding my breath since the moment I heard about her and now I’ve finally stopped.
I understand something suddenly that I didn’t realize I needed to understand until just this minute: she’s not me.
Yale is not me.
I wait for the nurse to go, and then I reappear and go say goodbye. I press my nose against her cheek, breathe deeply. I hold my own cheek against her face, just so maybe she can recognize me, too.
I walk back to the car slowly; through my shoes the grass feels softer than anything I’ve ever felt. I smoke one of my clove cigarettes. Exhale it out my nostrils so that it burns and hurts. The smell fills in everything. The air is so warm and it is dark, but in the sky there were millions of stars. Way more than you ever see in the city. The blackness is freckled with them, so many they look fake. They look like someone spilled a can of light. I sit down on a bench and finish my cigarette. I try to make my hand disappear, just because, but I can’t.
I can’t.
I feel like screaming at first, and then I feel like whooping at the sky. Like something has broken inside me, but that maybe it broke right. Something that had been waiting to break for a long time. Something that had been blocking me up and it hurt to remove it, but now it’s stopped.
I am jittery with it. My hands, my trembling hands, are still the same but somehow the trembling looks less like fear and more like what I used to long for: feathers, fluttering. And it’s from excitement. And also from nerves. It’s like suddenly I realize that everything is just starting.
Everything.
It seems like a long time ago that I had a crush on Tony’s skin. Now it’s so much more than that. I want to unsee all the things about him that I saw that I shouldn’t have seen, that he’ll never know that I know until (if) he wants to talk about them to me.
After all, it wasn’t mine to see in the first place.
I get back in the car and Tony says, “So?” And I shrug.
I say, “It’s okay.”
Michael says, “Are you sure?”
And I say, “Yes, I really am.”
And it’s true, I am. I am okay. We’re all okay. Or okay enough for now, anyway. Even Yale, in her own way, is okay. Michael starts up the car and pulls out onto the road. Tony reaches through the seats and turns on the radio. His hand rests on my shoulder, lightly, so that I can barely feel it, and I turn my head so it rests against his skin. And that’s that.
We head for home.
****
####
THE XYZ TRILOGY
by Karen Rivers
Don’t miss the next amazing title in the XYZ Trilogy...
What Z Sees
Sometimes you have to listen to the voices in your head…
My whole life seems different now. It's as though every key on the piano is being played at once. It's awful. It's both awful and incredible, if I'm being honest. It's easier to just think of it as awful, but it has a good side, too. I'm mesmerized by it, even though I also want it to stop.
This thing.
I was confused when I woke up in the hospital. I just thought that was normal. Everyone is confused when they come around after being unconscious, right? Only it didn't pass...
I opened my eyes and I was in a room painted the colour of powdered lemonade, and all that stuff about" too bright" was too true…
I wasn’t alone for long before the curtain shifted and Maman appeared in her chair. Something was different, though. She was different. At first, I didn’t realize what I was seeing: a brightness around her so saturated it was like watching a colourful glass tile mosaic being thrown through the air, in slow motion. She was thinking blurrily and I automatically read it, interpreted it: My baby, my baby girl, ma jeune fille. She was thinking, Thank God for this, that she’s okay. I’ll never ask for anything again.
Oh no, I thought. No no no.
But that thought was interrupted by a nurse bustling in, blood pressure cuff in hand, chirping happily, How are we feeling? While thinking, Two more and I can go home. If that pig hasn’t eaten the whole pizza maybe I’ll have some of that and take a bath. Maybe I’ll eat it in the bath, have a glass of wine, paint my toenails. I never paint my nails any more. I wonder when I stopped. Her sadness drifted around her like a mermaid�
�s hair underwater, even while the whole time she smiled at me with artificially bright white teeth.
How could I be seeing that?
I both was and wasn’t. It was different than with Axel, where it was all crystal clear and obvious. This was like seeing someone’s thoughts through a fog, through glass covered with a film of steam. I couldn’t help squinting through the blur. It was like I had to see it, a compulsion, I couldn’t stop it…
I tried to think about songs. My song. I kept my eyes glued shut and repeated some lyrics over and over again in my head. My own lyrics. Absolutely, I repeated. Absolutely feeling like I absolutely know. Absolutely everything and still I absolutely go.
The words felt wrong, though. I felt like I was thinking in someone else’s language. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I must be dying. Because somehow it felt almost celestial, to see everything. It felt surreal to be so disconnected from myself.
And it also felt like the worst thing in the world. It was so much. Too much…
****
Author’s Note
What happens in this book is rape. I want to be really clear about it, because the character of Michael in this book does not necessarily make the choices afterwards that I would advocate. Rape is rape. No matter what you’re wearing, no matter how much you’ve had to drink, now matter how much flirting has taken place no matter what: if you have said “no,” clearly and repeatedly, and someone doesn’t stop, it’s rape. Rape is a crime. It is not your fault when it happens, it’s the rapists fault. It is never okay.
Michael clearly said “no.” Israel didn’t stop. I wish this never happened, I wish “no” was enough, but it isn’t always, and scenes like the one in the book are happening every day, all over North America and beyond. So what I ask of you is this: if you are thinking “no,” says “no.” Say, “I do not want this.” Do not leave it unsaid or unclear. Do not ask yourself later if you really said “no.” Do not leave the door open for second-guessing yourself. Do not let other people try to convince you that you didn’t really, did you? And didn’t you really want it, after all? Be true to yourself.
