The Geometry of Sisters

by Luanne Rice

  “Where have I heard that before?” he asked.

  He slipped out the front door. The October night was brisk, and when he started to jog, he saw his breath. Ally would be coming to Newport this weekend. He wanted to have a great game for her, push away the doubts he'd been having about their relationship. But right now he felt weighted down, as if his sneakers were filled with water.

  Halfway across the grounds, between his family's cottage and the main building, he tried to figure out what he'd say to Lucy. How could he even get into the girls' wing of the dorm? Maybe he could just wrap the earring up in notepaper, leave it by the dorm master's door asking that it be returned. Just then, he saw Angus patrolling the cliff path on his cart. Ducking behind some rhododendron bushes, Travis saw a shadow. Right there—through the glossy green leaves. He jumped, scared out of his wits. Someone else was hiding in the same bush.

  “This is very strange,” a voice said. “I was just on my way to your house…”

  “Pell?” he asked.

  “Yeah…”

  He inched left, branches and leaves rattling, to get closer to her. When they were side-by-side, he saw her wide blue eyes glowing, a big smile on her face.

  “What were you coming over for?” he asked.

  “It's a delicate matter,” she said.

  “This?” he asked, reaching into his pocket, holding up the earring.

  “So you know?” Pell asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “How do you know?”

  “I saw her do it,” Pell said. “And she saw me see. It was almost as if she was sleepwalking. And I know sleepwalkers—my sister does it. It was as if Beck couldn't help herself.”

  “That's what the shrink said,” Travis said.

  “The shrink?”

  So Travis told her. Their mother had taken them to family therapy, and Dr. Mallory had explained that the trauma of being onshore while their father drowned, the inability to stop Carrie running away, had caused such despair in Beck, made her feel so helpless, that she was afraid of losing everything. She started stealing to make herself feel safe, surround herself with “things” because she'd lost what really mattered to her.

  Pell listened intently. Once Angus was out of sight, Travis and Pell began to walk. Travis poured out the story. Why was it so easy? Most of his friends hadn't heard a fraction of the details; it was private, and they wouldn't understand. Even Ally had judged Beck. But Pell, who'd actually witnessed her stealing, just walked silently beside him, her arm touching his, listening to the whole thing.

  “She stopped, we thought,” Travis said. “Back in Columbus, before we left. She got caught. Not just once, but a few times. Taking stuff from a mall, books from school, but also things from her friends' houses. People started turning against her. After she lost one of her best friends, she seemed to get it. And stop… or so we thought.”

  “She steals from her friends?” Pell asked. But the question didn't seem sharp, or accusatory. Travis could tell she cared.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That's the worst part. She sees people who have what she wants, and they're the ones she takes from.”

  “What could she want from Lucy?” Pell murmured as they walked. And her voice sounded so sad, so full of despair, Travis stopped. He gazed down at her, into her thoughtful blue eyes. “Our father died too,” she went on. “And our mother is thousands of miles away, wants nothing to do with us. Our grandmother… she tries, but she didn't sign on to raise us. Even when my mother was young, she had a full-time nanny. So Lucy and I are here, on our own … Lucy's fragile; she can't sleep. What would Beck see in that?”

  “Lucy has you,” Travis said. “Her sister.”

  “What about Carrie?”

  “That's the question we all ask. We don't know. She came ashore after the canoe accident—my mother rode with her in the ambulance to the hospital, to get checked out. My mother was filling out papers in the emergency room, and Carrie ran away.”

  “I'm so sorry,” Pell said. “I can only imagine how it is for Beck, worrying and wondering.”

  “Yeah,” Travis said. “They were practically joined at the hip, even though Carrie was older. They talked to each other in a way I couldn't even understand. Only they could.”

  “Sister language,” Pell said.

  “You have it with Lucy?”

  “All sisters do.”

  Pell's face was tilted up, her eyes gazing up at him. Travis felt a jolt go through his body; he had to hold himself back from kissing her. The sea air surrounded them, damp and cool. Fog had rolled in, thick as a gray blanket. No one could see. He felt as if they'd gone to their own private world. Bending close, he wanted to put his arms around her, pull her tight.

  “What about you?” she whispered.

  “Me?”

  “Beck lost your father and Carrie, but so did you. Do you steal too?”

  He shook his head. Her eyes were glistening—tears or something else? He felt heat pouring off her skin. He couldn't hold back, told her everything. She was right; after the drowning, Travis had had some problems. He stopped talking, or almost. He barely had anything to say to his mother or Beck; all he'd wanted to do was practice and play football, pound the hell out of his body. He'd run around the track at school, tell his father how sorry he was. Talking to a person who wasn't there; luckily no one ever saw him.

  “I was standing right there by the lake. If I'd swum out, I might have been able to save him,” he said now, to Pell.

  “Or you might have drowned too,” she said, making it sound as if that would have been the biggest tragedy in the world; he held back from telling her there were times he wanted that, to have died not with, but instead of, his father. Suddenly they were holding hands. He wasn't sure who reached first, but there he was on the cliff in the fog, holding hands with Pell Davis.

  “Beck never gives up on Carrie coming back,” he said.

  “Lucy thinks if she excels at math, studies proofs that deal with infinity, she'll be able to go into the world of the abstract… time travel or something, visit the afterlife and find my father's ghost.”

  “Wow,” Travis said, not just because Pell might have been describing Beck, but because the pressure of her fingers felt so good against his. He never wanted to let go. They listened to waves smashing down below; the mist was too thick to see the white surf break.

  The night itself seemed full of ghosts. He looked at her, wanting again to kiss her, and suddenly remembered Ally. He pulled away.

  “Thanks for returning the earring,” Pell said. “I'll get it back to Lucy before she notices.”

  “You mean you'll keep this between us?”

  “Of course,” Pell said.

  “Thanks,” Travis said, backing away. He had to turn fast, start running. The huge mansion glowed in the fog, lights shining in all the students' rooms. His hand burned from where he'd held Pell's. The warmth spread from his skin into his bones, to the mended knuckles from where he'd punched out his grief and rage. His hand throbbed, old pain coming back. He ran home, feeling Pell with him.

  Okay, I know I'm bad. Terrible, actually. If you think I'm kidding, or trying to get you to say I'm not so awful, you don't know me at all. What I'd rather have you say is: Beck, now you're stealing jewels? Real emeralds? Nice going, you loser.

  I'm not one to blame my troubles on oh what a hard life it is, even though it is. I do these things on my own. But this feeling is driving me crazy right now, and I can't stand it. I can't take being so mad.

  The time has come for me to tell you what happened to my sister.

  It starts with this: we used to be the happy family everyone wants to be. We were one sweet year-round Christmas card picture, all five of us beaming into the camera. Dad coached baseball at Savage High, Mom stayed home with the kids, Carrie got straight As and had artistic talent, Travis got awards for being an excellent student-athlete at James Thurber High, and I made honor roll at Putnam Middle School four semesters in a row.

  Until t
hat August day last year, just about the only bad thing ever to happen to us was two years ago: Carrie got into a car accident. Justin, her boyfriend, was driving, and they went to play mini-golf, and got broadsided by an old man who went through a stop sign, and Carrie got cuts on her face and head, as well as internal injuries. She had to have her spleen removed. Thurber High School had a candlelight vigil for her. She could have died. Justin walked away with a few scratches.

  Carrie started taking lots of photographs after that. She began by taking pictures of the nurses. Then her hospital roommate, a girl who'd been hit by a car. The girl had lost her leg but dreamed she still had it. That got to Carrie, her roommate's phantom leg. I won't even go into the fact that now I feel as if I have a phantom sister.

  Anyway, when Carrie got home, she started taking pictures of me, self-portraits of herself, shots of Mom. Girl power.

  Soon after Carrie's accident they started fighting. Mom and Dad. They'd do it behind closed doors, like we weren't supposed to know or hear the arguments. But parents don't realize, and if you're a parent, take my word, any time kids hear a stressed-out whisper, their stomachs clench and they know it can't be good.

  Carrie used to write to Aunt Katharine, who is definitely the black sheep in our family. Just because my mother and she had a “falling-out” didn't mean Carrie couldn't be in touch. She's an artist and an ironworker, Aunt Katharine, and my father seemed worried that Carrie wanted to be an artist herself. A photographer. My father said she'd never make any money doing that, never be “secure.” He was a loving, supportive father, but he believed in doing things a certain way.

  “There's a right way and a wrong way to do everything,” he used to say. He taught us the right ways. To hammer a nail, to rake leaves, to swing a tennis racket, to throw a football. He liked life to be a straight road: right through the center of town, because everything you needed was right there.

  Mom likes side roads, the scenic way. She meanders. If life was a Saturday, Dad would spend it fixing up the house. Mom would go antiquing, getting lost in dusty shops and finding strange, wonderful things. Think about it: could there be a better couple? They complemented each other.

  Our mother's classes were all at night, so Dad would sometimes drive her to the university and wait for her to be done. Sometimes I'd go with them. I heard them argue about Aunt Katharine. After the car accident, Mom sent some of Carrie's pictures to my aunt, and she wrote inviting Carrie to visit for a week. Carrie was begging to go. I've already told you that Aunt Katharine was an artist renegade type. Also, there'd been the big breach in the family, a tear in the relationship between her and Mom before I was born.

  That bothered me—more than you can imagine, because even though they were in touch sometimes, like distant relatives, my mother and her sister didn't really speak. What could possibly have been so bad to cause that? I'd look at Carrie and try, in my wildest wonderings, to imagine what could make me spend my life without her two seconds away. I tried hating Aunt Katharine. Because I could only dream that it was her fault. But I couldn't despise my aunt. I could only feel sad for her, as I did for my mother. Carrie did too. Now I wonder if Carrie didn't learn from the best—how not to speak to her family. Estrangements R Us.

  Anyway, in the car that day, Dad blew up: “It all comes down to Newport, I always knew that, and now I'm supposed to agree to send Carrie there?” And Mom whispered, “Stop now. It doesn't matter anymore; it never did. I love you, Andy….” And Dad just kept shaking his head as he drove along saying, “Of course it matters. No wonder you kept her out of our family all this time. She knew.”

  “Sshh …” Mom said, with a tilt of her head toward me. My thoughts were on fire. What had caused the distance between her and her sister? What came down to Newport, and what did Aunt Katharine know? I'd always heard of family secrets; I just never knew we had any.

  “Hey how come Aunt Katharine wants you to visit her in Rhode Island and not me?” I asked Carrie, just before we went to Mackinac Island.

  “She wants you too,” Carrie said. “But I'm older, so I'd go first.”

  “Why haven't we ever met her?” I asked.

  “I wish I knew, Beck. But I've gotten to know her through her letters,” Carrie said. “She's… different, that's for sure. But she likes my pictures, and tells me to express myself….”

  I couldn't exactly complain about their correspondence—Carrie wanted to be an artist, a photographer, so it was only right she'd get more attention from our sculpting aunt. But still, I felt a little left out. Newport had sounded cool. I will confess that right now. But it sounded a little like Oz—over a rainbow we weren't meant to cross.

  Carrie pointed out that Newport was full of kids from the rich side of town, whose parents belonged to the yacht club and wore cashmere sweaters and drove fancy cars, not people like us, whose dad coached baseball and wore sweatshirts and drove an old station wagon. That weekend before we went on vacation she'd started sounding reluctant, said maybe it would be disloyal to our dad if she insisted on going. So she didn't.

  I kept wondering what had changed with our father. Did you know that kids feel happy, as if nothing could ever be wrong, when their parents love each other? My father would bring my mother coffee in bed every morning. He'd come home with her favorite ice cream. Every Mother's Day he'd buy her another lilac bush, plant it along the fence. We had the most beautiful lilacs in Ohio.

  One summer night when I was six, the windows were open, and I heard laughing in the backyard. I pushed the white curtain aside and looked out. There, under the moon, my parents were dancing. Barefoot in the grass, my mom standing on my dad's toes, twirling around in the silvery darkness. Her arms were around his neck, and holding on, she arched her back to look up at the moon. She smiled, and for a second I thought she'd seen me.

  But then I realized she was looking up at my father. She balanced there a long minute, and then he leaned over to kiss her. It was the kind of kiss kids weren't supposed to watch, and even though I prided myself on spying, I ducked down and tiptoed away from the window. I drifted off to sleep to the sound of my parents laughing and singing softly, and knew I was the happiest kid in the world.

  That changed after Carrie's accident. No more laughing, no more singing, no more dancing under the moon. No more lilac bushes.

  So. The day it happened. Last summer, a year and two months ago, we'd gone to Mackinac Island, this beautiful paradise way up north in Lake Michigan. The sun was bright, hitting the lake as if it were a mirror. We rented the same cabin as far back as I can remember. This was our summer place. There was one canoe. We had to take turns. Travis took me out first, early our second morning there.

  The air was heavy, muggy with August heat. The sky was soft blue, veiled by haze. Easterners obviously think the ocean is the only thing, but they should see the Great Lakes. They are magnificent, endless, too wide to see the far shore. But there were little islands nearby. Sweet little islands that we sometimes saw deer swimming to. And the magic lighthouse.

  That's what Carrie called it.

  It had appeared the year before that last vacation. After all our summers on Mackinac Island, years of looking out at the tiny islands, suddenly one had a lighthouse on it. It had grown just like a tree in a fairy tale—tall, powerful, graceful—sprung from the island soil during the spring, after the dark winter months. I remember driving down the dirt road, hearing Carrie gasp with joy.

  “A lighthouse!” she said. “Where did it come from?”

  “The state must have built it,” my father said. “Or the Coast Guard.”

  “It's so beautiful,” my mother said, sounding stunned.

  “Maybe it's magic,” Carrie said. “And only we can see it. It's a lighthouse just for us.”

  Our last two summers there, we watched the lighthouse at night. The beam would sweep twice, then go dark, then flash twice again. The light traced the bare wood ceiling in the room Carrie and I shared, bisecting all the angles. I'd look over at her,
see her waiting for the beam to come again, a soft smile on her face as if someone was looking over us. We always wanted to paddle out to it, but our parents said it was too far for us to go alone, and we only had the one canoe.

  So Travis and I hugged the banks, paddling west. I kept looking at the magic lighthouse, wondering how far away it was, imagining that this year Carrie and I would go out there. She was sixteen, old enough to take me on our own. My brother and I could smell the bacon frying on shore, Mom cooking breakfast for everyone. But paddling along, Travis and I got distracted by this cool thing: a stream heading into the woods just around the bend, a beaver dam across the stream, and a big fallen tree that made a bridge we could walk on.

  We missed breakfast.

  We beached the canoe around that bend, crossed the tree bridge, watched the beavers nibble logs into pencil points. It was so cool, we just couldn't stop watching. Finally, when we got home, we ran to tell everyone what we'd seen.

  But something was wrong. Carrie was quiet, and our parents weren't speaking. The bacon and eggs were just sitting there on the picnic table, flies landing, as gross as you can imagine. Mom and Dad fighting had gotten to be kind of common, and each time it felt like a knife in my heart.

  What bothered me most this time was Carrie. She looked pale.

  She was clutching her stomach, as if she'd eaten something that was making her sick. And tears were rolling down her cheeks—not in a sobbing, gulping way, but in a scary, silent way. I almost cried just to see her face.

  “What's wrong?” I asked, scared.

  “They fight because of me,” she said. “I just figured it out.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, gesturing toward the cabin. “Dad looks as if he can't stand me.”

  “He loves you. And they don't fight because of you,” I insisted, positive. Kids always think it's their fault when parents argue. And maybe it sometimes is—if you fail a test, or punch your brother, or stuff your face with the last piece of chocolate cake. But Carrie was perfect. That was the truth, and we all knew it and loved her for it. “It's not because of you. You're the most wonderful girl in the world, and they know it. We all do.”