A Gift for My Sister: A Novel

by Ann Pearlman

  Levy picks up a pebble, softly smooth, perfectly round, and translucently beige, and shows it to Sky.

  Our concert is at an old theater with a curlicue yellow and red marquee. On this night it announces Special Intent. Jersey Boys will start playing next week.

  The five of us huddle up before we go on. “Okay y’all,” Aaron says. “We’ve been killin’ this shit so far. So lets load this clip and lay them down one last time.”

  I wonder when he got so military. . . . He wasn’t so aggressive when we left Detroit.

  “You gonna do the new one, Special?” Red Dog asks.

  “We’ll see if it pops off.” He turns to me.

  T-Bone jumps with excitement. “Let’sgo, let’sgo, let’sgo.” Being on stage feeds him in a different way than the rest of us; at last he’s real.

  I stare at Aaron. I hope this isn’t our last performance together, I think, and almost start crying.

  And then I get angry that I have to juggle all this when I was already dealing with Troy’s death, being a mom, and being a rap artist.

  I inhale. This is what you love, I tell myself. Take this moment, crowd out the sadness and anger. I raise my hand. “Let’s rock it,” I say.

  And on we go.

  We start our regular set, excited by the audience. The energy from the crowd always empowers me. All of us. Now my song is folded into our repertoire, as part of us, part of who we are. The audience warms up to it, and I’m secure enough that I bring out different aspects of the lyrics, new ways to present it, playing with the melody in unusual chord progressions. T-Bone gives me a hand signal that he’s doing the next verse and slides in. His words, about missing a father he never knew, wondering what he would be like if he had grown up with a man who cared, reveal a vulnerable side.

  And then Aaron presents his new song, “Resilience.”

  I reminisce on the test I pass

  I write of how life and death

  Contrast

  how struggle and success contrast

  Smoke plays his drum, and the crew repeats life and death, struggle and success in the background, focusing on the theme.

  But when Aaron sings the next chorus, I hear it differently than when we rehearsed it. Then the song seemed to be for Sky, a plea for her to stop making her life about Troy’s loss. But this verse removes it from her.

  Come too far to turn back

  Can’t stop

  Won’t stop

  And I refuse to quit

  No matter how hard it gets

  I’m forward with Special Intent

  Glorying in resilience.

  Now I hear his determination regardless of what happens with us. The lyrics have moved from Troy’s tragedy to our dilemma.

  As he finishes, his eyes search mine. The look he gives me, in those few seconds before the crowd starts screaming and steals him, flashes with hope and love and sorrow and anger, all at the same time. He’s as angry as I’ve ever seen him. And as sad. And, thankfully, hopeful.

  I nod to him, trying to let him know I get his message. He’s giving me the rope and the respect to make my decision. He can’t give me more.

  We talk to each other through our lyrics. It’s easier to communicate on stage than in person, alone, sitting across from each other.

  The crowd starts yelling . . . “Special! Special! Li’l Key! Li’l Key! T-Bone! T-Bone!” The stomping and screaming exhilarates and frightens me. Anything could happen. It could go either way.

  And then I get it. I, all of us, have this image that if we reach a certain level of stardom it will be a certain way. Everything will be great and I can relax and enjoy my music. But it’s not like that. A few years ago, I wanted to be where I am, where Aaron and I are. And now I look to King and want that. And King, does he relax in his position, exalting in his music and the contributions he’s made? No. Or he wouldn’t kick at the people crawling the ladder behind him. He’s scared during every concert, with every new CD, that he’ll be panned, or surpassed by someone or something younger, better, hotter. No more hip-hop. Some alternative, or a fusion between blues and rap . . . something that he missed and he’s suddenly back where he started, struggling and afraid he’ll be forgotten and poor and black.

  The antidote to this fear-driven amibition is what I always knew, but forgot. You just create the music, forget the rest, and let it out into the world the best way you can. Whether it’s on a beach playing for pennies or in Carnegie Hall, on the Internet or in a coliseum, you love it. You pour the best of you into it and give it to others.

  It’s like David’s message to us. To him, it’s the planet that we get to live on and enjoy. That, too. Of course.

  But for me there’s something else.

  Now I know what I’m going to do. I just have to get back home and hope Aaron waits that long.

  One more day: the long ride home.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  No Guarantees

  Sky

  “I WAS ALONE with him when he died, you know.”

  “I thought Mom was with you,” Tara says.

  “She’d left. I forgot where. The bathroom? The cafeteria? Somewhere. It was just me. Me and him.” My voice catches in my throat. “Us.”

  Tara shifts, then turns toward me in the passenger seat.

  “It was so off and on. You don’t know when it will finally come,” I say. “Death, I mean.” I see again his blue skin, his fingertips. I reached to touch him and he was cold. Already. I squeezed his fingers and he moved them weakly, so I knew he was still there. “You just know it’s soon. By the end he couldn’t talk. It was hard for him to breathe.”

  I’m driving my Honda, Tara is next to me, and the kids are tangled asleep in their car seats.

  We’re on the way home. Eleven hours and seventeen minutes with traffic, my GPS says. Back on I-40 east and then by the time we hit 75 outside of Cincy we drive straight home.

  I don’t know if it’ll feel like home anymore. San Diego was home, but then we moved to Venice. We hadn’t lived in our rented condo long enough for it to feel like home, like we hoped our house would when we found one.

  “I remember when I last saw him,” Tara says.

  I glance at her, but she’s staring out the window at trees in the distance, blotting out whatever farms or villages there might be.

  “It got worse. He sucked in what air he could, but even with the oxygen it was hard.” Tears trickle down my cheeks. Tara shifts and places her hand on mine, on top of the steering wheel. Cruise control is on. I’m going the speed limit. There’s not much traffic and the road is gently curved, nothing straight. Nothing exotic. It just is.

  “Did he say anything?” she asks.

  “He struggled to breathe, making gurgling sounds ’cause it was so hard, and then his breath got slower and then. . . . Then . . .” I clench the wheel and lick my lips. I want to explain this thing that happens, I do, but I can’t even identify the concept, let alone choose the right words. “There’s something unbelievable, something amazing, but in the most awful way, when it happens. When life goes. There’s no mistaking it even though there’s no apparent change. Same body. Same hair. Same cold hands. Same lips. But he was gone.”

  Tara listens, but I know I haven’t made sense so I try again.

  “I see him. Him when he was struggling and fading, but still there. And then this, his last breath no different than the one before. But . . .” I twitch one shoulder. “He ended. His chest stopped. His nostrils didn’t quiver. His hand was motionless. He wasn’t my Troy anymore and wouldn’t be again.”

  Tara is quiet for a minute and then says, “At least you were together. He wasn’t alone. You shared it.”

  She doesn’t understand. She just understands the love and then being alone, but not what it felt like. “I didn’t know, he didn’t know, what was the last breath. Which one it would be. I know it now because there wasn’t any other. I can’t get the eeriness, the profundity of the change out of my mind. Sometimes it returns a
nd settles in me.”

  I’m amazed that I’m even trying to explain this to someone, let alone Tara. “It’s something about the intense difference between death and life. And the terrifying privilege of witnessing the change.” That says it as well as I can, at least now. Maybe later I’ll figure it out. Maybe I won’t.

  So I just drive. We’re on I-71 by now, past Nashville and triangulating north. We’ve changed direction. We’ve gone through much of America, and quickly enough that I have a sense of the land changing. The boulder heaps and the desert flats when we left California, the gigantic gorge of the Grand Canyon and the dry mountains of New Mexico. Then we saw the expanse of the great southern plain, flat and arid. Now we’re in lush forest, getting colder as we drive toward winter. We’ve been driving three hours today. It’s midday, the sky is clear, the weather mild. A perfect day for a drive.

  “He wasn’t alone,” she says again. “You were with him. He knew how much you love him. And do you know . . .” she clears her throat, her eyes are right on me, staring at the side of my face, “how much he loved you?”

  I shake my head. “It’s beyond love. Beyond everything. That slipping away of the human being to something else.” I stop talking. Then, I remember what I did next. I got in bed beside him. Put my cheek on his shoulder and held him. It was our familiar pose—one we had assumed every night and morning all those years, cuddling together. My place, I called it. “I want to get in my place,” I’d say, and he’d put his book down and open up his arm for my head. So I lay there for a minute, but then the buzzers started ringing—on his monitors—and I knew nurses would come running, so I kissed his cheek and got up.

  Tara doesn’t know what to say. She turns around and checks the kids. “They’re sleeping so peacefully,” she reports. “Levy’s arm is over Rachel’s leg and her head is on his blanket. He’s holding Rachel’s bunny, Maddie.”

  I guess that’s her way to say life goes on, life is still good. I watch the road and we don’t talk. There’s nothing anyone can say to make it better. She can sit with me and listen. Let time pass. But I’m tired of talking now.

  So we drive the rest of the way up I-71. The tour bus and the U-Haul are in front of us. I feel comfortable with Tara, which surprises me. We stop for gas and coffee and buy peanuts, cheese and crackers, and apples.

  Tara shakes her head at my artificial sweetener. “Why don’t you put in real sugar? Don’t tell me you’re watching your weight?”

  I don’t defend myself.

  We’re back in the car, in Kentucky, driving down a clear road under a clear sky when I hear brakes squeal.

  An SUV flies across the meridian. It flips over completely.

  I slam on my brakes, watching it fly.

  It lands in front of us. The doors pop open.

  I use all my strength, arms straight, pressing on my brakes. The car beside me swerves and drives off the shoulder and down a small ravine. I miss it by inches, tires screeching. My Honda tilts on two side wheels, and then rights itself. My heart pounds.

  “Ohmygod, ohmygod,” Tara says as we jolt to a stop.

  In front of us, in the middle of the road, lies a person. I can’t move forward. Tires scream all around us.

  In the rearview mirror I see a blue car careening toward us. The man’s eyes are wide, his mouth open. He stops inches from us. He closes his eyes, tilts his head as though he’s giving thanks. And then I watch helplessly as he’s hit by another car. His head jerks, and finally movement stops. Unbelievably, he wasn’t knocked into me.

  My neck thumps, sweat pours down me. I inhale deeply. Tara screams next to me. The kids are awake.

  Across the median, traffic has halted too.

  A woman lies on the ground. I glimpse just her leg, jeans, a bronze sandal, painted red toenails. Through the tinted windows of the SUV, I make out a shadow of an adult, and a child in a car seat in the rear.

  A red van from behind us switches to the right, drives on the shoulder, and disappears down the highway.

  “Are you okay, is everyone okay?” Tara looks back. The kids are awake, Rachel rubs her eyes.

  “Rachel, you okay?” I try to reach her with my hand.

  “I’m okay,” she says shakily.

  “What happened?” Levy asks.

  “There was an accident, but we’re okay. Now we’re in a little traffic jam.”

  Tara jumps out of the car, cell phone in her hand, pushing numbers as she runs toward the woman. Tara leans down over her, kneeling on the highway. Her back is to me, so I can’t see what she’s doing.

  “Where’s Mommy?” Levy asks.

  “She’s helping somebody. She’s okay, sweetie.” But I don’t like her in the traffic. I want her to get back in the car, where she’s protected.

  Levy pushes himself up in the car seat, but he can’t get high enough to see over the seat and the car’s hood to the highway. “Moooommmyyyy,” he calls.

  A man from the car next to us runs toward Tara and the woman. Other people surround the SUV. Tara stands, still talking into the phone as she walks toward our car. She gets back into the passenger seat. “I called 911. They should be here soon to help.”

  “How is she?”

  Tara shrugs. “I think she has a concussion.” She turns back to the kids and passes them cheese and crackers. Her hands tremble as she punches straws in their juice boxes. “I love you guys,” she says and hands them drinks.

  The kids are busy with the food. They don’t even look out the windows. But we’re safe, together inside the car.

  After a while, I turn off the engine. We can’t move. Behind us, a line of cars stretches over the hill. Beside us sit two yellow vans with the sign FIRE WATER CLEANUP AND RESTORATION. A woman sits behind the wheel of the one closer to us. Her fingers tap the window frame and hold a lit cigarette trailing blue smoke.

  “What happened?” she asks, pointing across the median with frosted pink nails holding the cigarette.

  I relay the story shakily, as best I can.

  She clicks her tongue and presses her lips together. “Luckily we were able to stop in the nick of time. Or we’d have been in trouble. Both of us.” She shuts her eyes and shudders. “There’s still a baby in the backseat. And a man in the car.”

  Tara doesn’t say anything.

  “My husband tried to help, but . . . there was nothing he could do. Those poor people.”

  Maybe the car was trying to avoid tire pieces strewn over the highway, I think. Maybe they were having a fight. Maybe their tire exploded.

  After five more minutes, three police cars, lights and sirens flashing, drive down the median next to us. Two come from the other direction and cross the grass. People leave their cars and walk toward the accident. A man climbs to the roof of his truck and takes pictures.

  I get out of my car. Two red ladder trucks stream down the grass, sirens piercing.

  Now I see the baby strapped in his car seat, in the back. The woman . . . the mother? . . . hasn’t moved. Oh God. An entire family.

  “Ow! Ow!” Rachel covers her ears with her hands.

  My heart beats in my neck, in my wrists, I feel it pounding in me. A helicopter’s huge wings shush the air, obliterating all other sounds. Its wind twists the grass. Almost delicately, it sinks in front of us, nestling on the highway. A fire truck parks behind the SUV, another in front of it. Firemen surround it.

  In the median, people cluster together.

  A flutter of blue sheet flies in the breeze, floats down, and shields the vague mound on the road.

  The woman is covered now. A mother. A wife.

  I turn to Tara. “You knew, didn’t you.”

  Her face is very pale as she slowly nods.

  She tried to protect me.

  Once again, cars on the other side move. Then a cop asks us to drive across the median and head south. He tells us how to make a loop so we get back to 71 going north.

  I get back in my car, turn it on, bump across the grass, and push south. A cut
off goes to Nashville. My heart still beats fast but is returning to its regular pace. Tara calls Aaron and explains the situation.

  “This will take us an extra hour. At least,” she says. Then she turns to me. “They’re already seeing signs for Cincinnati.”

  I steer through a subdivision called Plantation Estates. McMansions with split rail fences and lanterned porches sit smugly on streets named after flowering trees. Magnolia. Azalea. Cape Myrtle.

  “They’ll park the U-Haul at Mom’s. Tomorrow, Aaron and I will help you unload it into storage. Okay?”

  I can’t even think about that.

  And then I find the ramp for the highway, 71 north. The two yellow vans drive ahead of us.

  “At least the baby will have his father,” I say.

  Tara doesn’t say anything. Maybe I’m wrong to presume only the woman died. “Isn’t it weird that we were talking about death and this accident happened?”

  “What do you mean?” Tara straightens and then crosses her arms.

  “I don’t know. Like we put out bad vibes.”

  “We didn’t make that accident happen by talking about Troy. It’s just a coincidence.”

  I don’t say anything, but I wonder if we somehow sensed it, or the universe warned us. The conversation made me drive slower. Otherwise, I might have hit the SUV. I never used to think this way. “I guess I’m just looking for a way to make everything connected. To make it make sense again.”

  “I miss him, too, you know,” she says when we’ve passed the yellow vans and see signs for Dayton.

  “How can I be happy without him? I mean, how can I let myself?”

  “You think he’d want you to suffer, be unhappy the rest of your life?”

  “It feels like a betrayal.”

  “Troy told me not to let you make a monument of him by your mourning, but by being free to be happy. Maybe even love another man someday.”

  “He did?” I think she said something like this to me before. I didn’t understand it then.

  “That night at the hospital. The night before he died.”

  “Oh.” As soon as I start being a little bit happy, I get scared.