Code Red

by Janie Chodosh

  “Last week I read in the newspaper about the interns coming to Santa Fe. I’m always interested in the internship program because every year I hope Amelia will apply,” she says, tightening her hold on my hands. I have no idea who Amelia is, but in this weirdly altered state, I don’t care. “When I saw your name, I thought it must be a coincidence. And then Little Timmy called me.”

  “Little Timmy?”

  “The bartender at the Cowgirl. You met him, no?”

  “You mean Griz?”

  She nods and laughs, a buoyant, cascading sound like a seedpod catching wind, and I join in. There’s nothing light or airy about my laugh, though. My laugh is loud and harsh, a semi-hysterical release of all the other emotions knocking around inside me.

  “He was little about twenty years ago,” she says with a sigh. “He said Faith Flores had been there and was asking about Alvaro, so I did some investigating and called the college. I found out you were almost seventeen, which is just the right age, and that you were from Philadelphia, just the right place, and I knew it had to be you.” She pauses, draws in a long breath, and then says, “There’s something else.”

  I’m not sure I can handle a “something else” but I glance at her.

  “It’s not just me.”

  “There are two of you?” I blurt, stupid with shock.

  “No, Mija. I have two other granddaughters.”

  I don’t comprehend what she’s saying, and I guess this shows on my face because slowly, and with the patience of a preschool teacher, she says, “Alvaro left behind two other girls. Amelia’s sixteen and Marisol’s fourteen. They live me with me. You have two half sisters.”

  Seven

  “Half sisters?” I repeat, or at least I think that’s what I say. I might have said laugh-misters or path-blisters or I might not have said anything at all and just imagined it in my head.

  “I know it’s a lot to take in, Mija, but you’ll come over and meet them as soon as possible.” She writes something on a piece of paper. “This is my phone number,” she says and stuffs the paper into my hands. “You have to promise to call and come for dinner. This week. I’ll pick you up.”

  I nod, unable to speak.

  “I’ve thought about you for so many years. I’m not going to let you slip out of my life again.” Without warning, she turns, grabs me into her arms, and hugs me. The hug takes me off guard and I receive it like a plank of wood, arms pinned to my side. “I have to go now, Faith,” she whispers into my hair. She lets go of me and slowly rises. “I wish I didn’t have to leave, but the greenhouse where I work falls apart without me.” She emits a little of her seedpod laugh. “You’ll promise to call,” she says in a firm voice, and I get that this is an order. “I don’t want to lose you again, not after I finally found you.”

  I lock the door when she leaves and don’t answer when Clem knocks. How can I answer when I can’t talk or move? I lie on my bed where minutes before Alma sat, gripping the paper she left with her phone number.

  A lot to take in? It’s like trying to swallow the Grand Canyon. Balance the Empire State Building on a spoon. Fly an airplane to a star. It’s like someone said, “No really, we made a mistake. The Earth is actually flat.” Or “Ptolemy was correct! The sun does revolve around the Earth, not the other way around.”

  Am I supposed to just waltz over to her house and say, “Hey, how are you three, oh long lost family of mine? It’s really nice to meet you after almost seventeen years.” Then I jerk back to the other major revelation. Mom conspired to keep Alma from me, which brings me to an even worse thought: Maybe Aunt T did, too. Maybe both of them united against me. I grab my phone from my pocket and punch my aunt’s number. I don’t care that it’s midnight Back East.

  “Are you okay? Where are you? Are you hurt?” are the first breathless words out of her mouth.

  “No. In the dorm. No,” I say, rattling off the answers to her questions. I tell her what happened and what I found out and then, unable to contain my anger, blurt, “Did you know about the letters? Did Mom tell you?”

  “I swear to God, Faith, I didn’t know anything about this.” She sounds genuinely horrified. I imagine her twisting a blond curl around a finger the way she does when she’s worried or upset. “I never heard of letters or a grandmother or half sisters. I would never have kept something like that from you, and I never would’ve allowed your mother to, either.”

  Almost a year ago when Mom died and I didn’t trust anyone, I wouldn’t have believed Aunt T. After living with her, though, after knowing her better than I even knew my mom, I believe what she’s saying.

  “Maybe your mom never got the letters,” she suggests. “You two moved a lot, right?”

  Aunt T, always rational. When Mom was puking up her guts and I called my aunt for help, she stayed calm. When I crashed her car last winter, she never lost her cool. Still, although what she says is a logical suggestion, I don’t buy it. “I always went to the post office and left a forwarding address.”

  “Always when you were old enough, but not when you were little. You guys started moving around when you were just a kid, so it’s possible your mom just never got them,” she says. She doesn’t push me to accept her theory—which I don’t—and doesn’t say anything else on the topic. She leaves me with the question of the missing letters to consider, asking only if she could have Alma’s number and if she has my permission to call her. I tell her she does, give her the number, and we say good night.

  ***

  I meet up with Clem the next morning at breakfast after a restless night’s sleep. Feeling bad about blowing off dinner last night, especially after my behavior earlier in the week, I sit down next to him, about to apologize for not opening the door when he came to get me, when he beats me to it.

  “Sorry I didn’t come by last night,” he says.

  “Huh…oh…you didn’t?” I’m off the hook, but now I’m pissed at him for breaking his dinner promise, and besides, who knocked?

  “I’m just having a hard time with Paganini,” he says, sighing at his breakfast tray. “I’ve never tried to master something so difficult so quickly. I’m a soloist. Did I tell you that? It’s a benefit concert, and…” He stops talking and looks at me when he realizes I’m not listening. “I can tell this is really meaningful to you.”

  “It is. Sorry. I’m just distracted.” I apologize again and pick at my cereal.

  “Distracted because?”

  I sigh, put down my spoon, and without looking up, tell him what happened last night.

  “Wow, there’s never a dull moment in your life. I’ve known you for one week, and in that time you’ve lost a father and gained two sisters and a grandma. That’s crazy.”

  “I know,” I mumble and turn my attention from my cereal to my toast, letting my hair sweep across my face and hide my eyes.

  “My dad remarried and had two kids with his new wife,” he says, picking at the crumble top of a blueberry muffin. “I never wanted to know them, but when they got older I decided it was stupid to pretend they didn’t exist.”

  A memory creeps up as Clem tells me this, something I haven’t thought about in years. Mom passed out drunk. Me alone, sitting on the couch next to her, wishing more than anything I had a sister. Even though I’d never been taught to pray or seen anyone do it—and I had no idea who or what I was praying to—I remember praying and asking for a sister.

  “We have nothing in common,” Clem goes on. “They’re total jocks, but still. It’s cool having brothers. Like knowing there are other people around with the same messed-up dad, and maybe that means they’ll get you more than other people do. And then there’s the fact we’re related and that has to mean something, right? Like when the world sucks and there’s nobody to turn to maybe I can turn to those guys. My bros, you know?”

  Just then Dahlia scoots by the table with an empty tray. She stops whe
n she sees me. “Hey, Faith! I came by last night to see if you wanted to have some dinner. I knocked, but you didn’t answer. Everything okay?”

  So it was Dahlia who knocked, I think, feeling guilty for ignoring her and happy now to see her. “I’m fine,” I say. “Sorry I didn’t answer. I must’ve fallen asleep. How’s Free Ranger?”

  “Oh, she’s great!”

  “How do you know it’s a she? Can you sex a chick?” I tease.

  Dahlia considers this with all the serious weight of gender politics. “She just seems like a she. Anyway, I’m helping out at the Farmers’ Market in town the next few Saturdays. I’m heading down there when I’m done eating. We sell eggs and goat milk and goat milk cheese. You should totally come by.”

  I beg out of going today, but promise to check it out next week.

  “Sure,” she says, and takes off with a peppy wave, leaving Clem and me to finish our food. Once we’re done he disappears to practice, and I head to my room. Despite Clem’s advice and my obsessive wondering about Alma and my two half sisters, I don’t call them. I pick up the phone three times during the day, but every time, I lame out and hang up.

  I do, however, call Jesse. I tell him about The Situation, as I’ve been referring to the arrival of my long lost family, a euphemism that helps me distance myself from the reality of their flesh and blood existence. As expected, Jesse is all Go for it! Meet them! Cool! Wow! Amazing! and Did I hear the story of the long lost family reunited after sixty years despite living two streets away from each other? Our conversation curdles inside me, leaves me feeling empty, like his words are more of a performance than a real understanding. Again, I try and persuade myself that being so far away makes it hard to relate, hard to have the same intimacy as you get in person. Like with texting and Facebook and Twitter—all that connecting and I just feel more alone.

  Going for walks isn’t really my thing, but when we hang up, I take myself out for one anyway. I need to clear my head, and my room’s starting to feel like a prison. I wander down the hill to town, with no particular destination in mind. The weird thing is I see sister duos everywhere—in the gelato shop, the card shop, the organic, healthy juice shop—and grannies? Forget it, they’re like popping out of the woodwork. Were there always so many sisters and grannies hanging around, or am I just noticing them now that they’re on my mind? Like when someone says don’t think of a pink elephant, and that’s all you can think of. Even YouTube’s gotten in on it. When I get back to the dorm, sweaty and tired from the walk, I flop onto the bed and watch a mind-numbingly stupid video called “Famous Sisters.” Stupid, yes. But do I turn it off? Do I find something more meaningful to do? No. I watch the whole thing, then go back to the beginning and watch again.

  Would I be friends with my half sisters, I wonder as I watch a third time. It’s possible, but then again, what if we hated each other? What if they’re awful? What if we have nothing in common and can’t stand each other? I tell myself I shouldn’t complicate my life. Aunt T’s all the family I need. My life is simple. Clean. Streamlined.

  But.

  The truth is what Clem said really resonated with me. The thing about there being someone else in the world who gets you in a way others can’t. The fact that swap spit and 50 percent of our DNA’s the same. And then there are a million questions I’m dying to find out. What do they look like? What do they like to do? What are they like?

  As a new YouTube video loads (“Things Only Sisters Would Understand”) I can’t stand it anymore. I don’t think. I just act. I pick up the phone and call.

  Eight

  All day Monday I’m jumpy and preoccupied with the fact that Alma (can’t quite get used to calling a stranger grandma) will be picking me up after work and taking me to her house for dinner. Jonah teases me about too much caffeine. Esha also seems distracted, which is good for me because it means her distraction negates noticing mine. I try to focus on bioinformatics, lining up sequence reads from one genome to another, checking the output files to see how the data’s accumulating, but I can’t concentrate.

  When five o’clock finally comes, I shoot up from my desk and race outside as a light blue pickup truck pulls into the parking lot and Alma gets out. I’m relieved it’s just her, and I have some time before meeting the girls.

  “Your aunt is very nice, Mija,” she tells me as we leave SCPG. “We had a very nice conversation. Over an hour.”

  I don’t respond to what she’s saying because nerves have glued my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Alma thankfully doesn’t force a conversation and instead turns on the radio and hums along to Spanish music. About twenty minutes later, the truck coasts down a steep dirt hill, takes a sharp left, and pulls up to a shoebox-shaped house plunked down on a stretch of red-hued earth dotted with squat green-needled trees. An assortment of gardening tools and bikes in various states of disrepair, along with recycling bins and garbage cans are strewn along the side of the house.

  “Here we are,” she says and opens the door to two barking dogs that come barreling up the driveway to greet us.

  The second I step out of the truck, both dogs are on me, paws on my thighs, tongues lolling, tails wagging. The smaller of the two whines and moans while I stroke her pointy ears and rub my hand down her surprisingly soft mottled fur.

  “Cattle dogs,” Alma says. “They’re supposed to live on a ranch, but instead they live on the couch.” She laughs and pets the larger one. “The little red one’s Biscochito, and the large bluish one’s Sopapilla.”

  “Mom wanted to change his name,” says a girl of about fourteen who’s just appeared. She has an unruly mane of long, dark curls and big brown eyes. She’s wearing cut-off jean shorts, a blue tie-dyed tank, and too many string bracelets to count. “She said that non-Spanish speakers around here would see the name and pronounce it the Anglo way—Soap-a-pill-a,” she says, pronouncing the l sound of pill, instead of the Spanish ee sound. “But after she died, the name stuck, and so there you have it.”

  As I fumble for words and try to take in this information, I notice an older girl with an aggressively slumped posture lurking in the doorway. Her mutilated pixie cut has a chemical burn look to it. Her right eyebrow is pierced with three silver hoops, and she has an expression that manages to look both bored and pissed off. The younger girl goes to the doorway and nudges the other girl in the rib cage. She scowls and reluctantly joins us on the driveway.

  “Girls,” Alma says, turning to my two half sisters and making the introductions for us. “This is Faith.” She nudges the one with the curls forward. “Faith, this is Marisol.”

  “Call me Mari,” she says. “Everyone does.”

  I have no idea what the protocol is for meeting the half sister you just found out about, so I reach out to shake her hand. Instead of taking my hand, she pulls me in for a hug. The hug takes me off guard—again—but this time I return the embrace.

  “I have a shitload of things to ask you about!” she exclaims, releasing me and reaching down to pet Sopapilla.

  “Mari, language!” Alma scolds.

  “Sorry, Gran.” She stands and clears her throat dramatically. “I have many interesting questions to which I’d like the answers, Ms. Flores,” she says, laughing in delight at herself—a contagious laugh that has me joining in.

  Alma turns in the scowling girl’s direction. “Mia,” she says pointedly to the girl. “Introduce yourself to Faith.”

  “Hey,” the scowler says with a chin jut in my direction. “My friends call me Mia. You can call me Amelia.” And with that, she turns and walks back into the house.

  “Don’t worry about dork-butt,” Mari says once Alma finishes apologizing for Amelia. “She’s just mad that Gran won’t let her go out tonight with her pot-head boyfriend.” She turns to the door and shouts when she says the words “pot-head boyfriend.”

  “I heard that!” Amelia calls from inside. “And he’s not a pot h
ead.”

  “Oh. Excuse me! Cannabis cabeza!” Mari fires back, rolling her eyes at me and air quoting the words.

  Amelia flies back outside. “Don’t mix Latin with Spanish. You sound like a nerd.”

  “You’re just jealous because I speak Spanish and you’re so busy getting high with your wastoid vato boyfriend you never bother going to class and tu sabes nada!”

  “You’re one to talk about getting wasted,” Amelia snaps.

  Mari starts in on another comment, but Alma interrupts, hands out, separating the sisters as if they might come to blows. “Girls,” she says, giving them each a look. “Enough. We have a guest. Let’s all go inside.”

  Verbal disarmament. Cease-fire. Enter house.

  The room I enter is amazingly cool compared to the outside temperature. With the low-beamed ceiling, white tile floor, and thick earth-toned walls, there’s something timeless about the space. Even the long wood table has an ageless quality about it, not fussy like over-priced antiques, but worn, like old work boots. The kitchen and living room are one big room, so I see Amelia go to the stove and pick up a skillet. I see the pissed off look melt from her face and a more tranquil expression move in to take its place.

  Mari plops onto the couch and pats the cushion, indicating I should join her. I sit down and she stares into my eyes. Yep,” she says, after studying my face. “You definitely have his eyes.”

  “Whose?” I ask, stupidly.

  “Dad’s.”

  The statement leaves me tongue-tied with a million questions, but all that comes out is, “I do?”

  “Totally. They’re like so dark they’re almost black. Mine are much lighter, see?”

  She leans forward and widens her eyes, so I can inspect the color.