The Language of Sisters: A Novel

by Amy Hatvany

  Once I got Jenny settled in the living room on the couch, I sat down next to her. After her nap in the car on the way home, she was alert but quiet. The room was lit in a dim yellow mist from the fireplace; the radio played softly in the background. I put my arm around Jenny’s shoulders, my cheek resting on her soft hair, and took a deep breath. I had thought that telling Shane about my decision to adopt the baby would be my biggest challenge, but as we drove home, it dawned on me that the true challenge lay in finding out if my choice was okay with Jenny. She was, after all, the baby’s mother.

  Still unsure of exactly what she understood about what had happened to her, I didn’t want to adopt the baby only to have it remind her of the rape. I lifted my head and pulled my arm out from behind her, shifting to the floor and kneeling before her so I could see her eyes. “Jen,” I began haltingly, tucking my springy curls behind my ears. I was strangely nervous about what her reaction might be. “I have a question to ask you.”

  Her angel eyes stayed open, not blinking, her hands patted together softly just above her swelling belly. She was quiet, waiting for me to go on.

  “You know the baby inside you? The one you told Lucy was jumpy?” I smiled fondly, remembering this moment at the barbecue. “Well, when she comes out of you, she’s going to need someone to take care of her. I know you’d do it if you could…. ”

  “Ehhhh,” Jenny groaned in agreement, and her hands stopped their gentle dance and rested on her stomach. The baby kicked, lifting Jenny’s arm just the slightest bit, and my sister’s mouth blossomed into a wondrous smile.

  Baby.

  My heart jumped at the word. “That’s right—that was the baby.” I inhaled before continuing, searching her eyes for any hint of what she was feeling. “I want to be the person who takes care of your baby, but only if it’s okay with you.” I searched her eyes. “Is it okay for me to adopt her, Jen? I need you to tell me.”

  Jenny’s eyes sparked at me, her smile fading from one of wonder to content. Love. Baby. I wondered if this meant she had been waiting for me to ask, if my adopting the baby was what she wanted but she hadn’t had a way to tell me. I reached up my hand, using the tips of my fingers to brush her dark bangs away from her eyes.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I promise I will love your baby with everything in me.” I moved my gaze from her eyes to her belly, tentatively lowering my head, pressing my cheek against its soft warmth. My sister lifted her hands and set them softly on the top of my head; the gesture felt like a blessing. “Hi,” I whispered, speaking not to Jenny but to the child within her. “It’s me. I’m going to be your mommy.” Would she recognize my voice when she was born? Would the part of her that knew Jenny know me in the same way? I waited a moment longer, and just as I was about to pull my head away, I felt a sharp jab against my cheekbone.

  It seemed the baby had heard me. She gave me a blessing all her own.

  • • •

  The next day I sat on the couch in the same spot I had watched my father dance with Jenny so many years before. Outside, my mother stood next to Jenny’s wheelchair, showing her daughter the splendid summer roses that grew in the front yard, enormous as salad plates. Jenny’s eyes were closed; she absorbed the flowers through her other senses, taking each delicate petal in with the tips of her gnarled fingers and the edge of her every breath. My mother spoke to her mostly with smiles and touches, though occasionally I would see her lips move, conveying some message to my sister, who stared at her with unabashed adoration.

  When I had told our mother that morning about finding the Sunshine House and my decision to adopt Jenny’s baby, she was thrilled. “Now you’ll be a mother, too,” she said, and I felt something deep and awe-inspiring rise up between us, something that speaks to a daughter only when she joins the mystical world her mother already belongs to. I clung to this new thread of connection, fearful of severing it with more truth from the past. And yet, as I thought of what my father had done, what my mother had not prevented, a deep-rooted sorrow rose up through my belly and into my chest, where its branches spread, pricking at my tender flesh with thousands of tiny, angry thorns.

  Rising from the couch, I moved outside to join them. It was a warm, early August day; the fading rhododendron leaves were slightly droopy in the wash of afternoon sun. Bright red and pink bunches of fragrant sweet Williams announced themselves in the flower bed at the base of the stairs; I picked one blossom and stuck it behind Jenny’s ear so she could enjoy the scent.

  “That looks nice,” Mom commented. “Here, let me do yours.” She snapped an abundant pink blossom and slid it behind my left ear, the tips of her fingers tickling my neck. Her touch felt foreign; despite the changes in our relationship over the past few weeks, she was still so much the stranger to me.

  “Mom?”

  “Um-hmm?” She carefully turned Jenny’s chair to position her beneath the shade of a magnolia tree, then turned her attention to me.

  “I have to ask you something.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly, her tone carefully measured.

  “It’s kind of a difficult question.”

  She settled on the bottom step and adjusted the wide-brimmed straw hat Jenny and I had picked out for her because of its emerald ribbon, a perfect complement for her eyes. Then she looked up at me. After an expectant pause, she spoke. “For heaven’s sake, Nicky, just ask me. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it.”

  “I know, it’s just … ” I felt an odd kinship with her in the moment, the way I was making her drag the question out of me like she so often made me do with her stories. I tried to shake the similarity off. “Okay. I’ve been thinking a lot about Dad.”

  “Really? What about him?” She shifted uncomfortably on the step, reaching out to smooth an unwrinkled spot on Jenny’s pink paisley maternity dress.

  “I was thinking about how he used to hit Jenny.” There. I said it. My sister snapped to attention, her blue eyes suddenly intent on my face. Perhaps she knew what I was going to ask.

  Mom was silent, waiting. I plunged ahead.

  “I was thinking more about how he used to go into her room at night the times after he hit her.” I swallowed, stuck my hands deep into the back pockets of my Levi’s, and rocked on my heels nervously. “I heard him. I saw him go in. I saw you watch him do it.”

  “Watch him do what?”

  I stared hard at the ground until the slender stalks of grass began to blur together into a green ocean. I wanted her to understand without my having to say it. I didn’t know the words to use. “Go in there,” I finally said. “You had to know what he was doing. You had to. I saw you standing there, crying.”

  She looked confused. “I knew he went in there, yes. I followed him.” Her eyes searched mine. “I guess I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

  “How you could let him!” I exploded, throwing my hands up in the air and raising my eyes to plead with her. “That’s my question. How you could watch your husband sexually abuse your helpless daughter and do nothing to stop it? How you could let him come back after he left us that first time, knowing what he did to her? How does a mother do that?” My voice shook with tears, the wall in my chest rattled, threatening to disintegrate.

  “Sexual what? You’ve got to be kidding, Nicole. Your father never … How could you possibly think that?”

  Emotion thickened in my chest, rose up through my throat, and battled against my voice. “I heard him, that’s how. Jenny’s bed, the noise it made. How long he stayed in there. I heard him!” I planted my feet firmly on the ground, trying to maintain control.

  My mother’s face wore a clear mask of shock, erasing her features. “You heard the bed? So you assumed he was … ” She shook her head; I pictured words jumbled in her brain, trying to find a semblance of order. She looked at me, her green eyes soft and full of compassion. “Nicole. Honey. Your father went into Jenny’s bedroom those nights to hold her. He sat on her bed with his daughter in his arms, rocking her to sleep.”

>   I shook my head. “No … I heard the bed…. ”

  “The bed might’ve squeaked when he rocked her, yes.” She stood, grabbed my hands. “I watched him, the first few times I knew he was going in there. He felt so horribly guilty. It was his way of trying to make up for hurting her. He loved Jenny very much. He just wasn’t strong enough to stop himself. But he never did anything sexual to her.”

  I wrenched my hands from her grasp and stumbled a few steps back. “Then why were you in the doorway, crying?”

  She sighed, then sat on the stair again. “Because I ached for his pain. And for mine. Because he was weak but wanted to be better. But he wasn’t able to be. I was torn between the love for a husband and a child. And it was excruciating.”

  Thoughts spun in my mind like tops, dizzying me. I dropped to the grass, cross-legged, and moved my eyes to Jenny, who had been watching the conversation like a tennis match, her gaze a pendulum. She was thirty-three weeks along now; the baby twisted beneath her flesh every day, visible to us all. I could not believe I had been wrong about my father. “But I was so sure … ”

  “I guess I can understand that. But I swear to you, if that had been happening, I would have known it.” She smiled wanly. “I know you might not believe this, but your father had a great capacity for tenderness. He cried like a baby over his violence. I used to believe I could change him, erase the ugly side. If I couldn’t cure Jenny, I could cure him.” She laughed, a dry, barking noise.

  I blinked heavily, still pummeled by the weight of my error. “Is that why you finally agreed to place Jenny at Wellman?”

  “Yes. Fixing whatever was wrong with Jenny was just not going to happen. I eventually admitted that. I gave up. I gave in to his proclamation that there was nothing more we could do for your sister. I moved my hope onto him.” She rolled her eyes more at herself than at me. “Not the smartest decision I ever made.”

  I looked at her accusingly. “Then why didn’t you bring Jenny home from Wellman after he left for good?” My sister’s gaze moved from my face to our mother’s; she wanted the answer to this question, too.

  Mom let loose a heavy sigh, full of despair. “At first, I wanted her home so badly I could taste it. But then, after your father left … ” She trailed off, looking up to the sky, perhaps believing the answer lay hidden behind the clouds. She swung her gaze back to me. “I just didn’t know how I’d do it, Nicky. I had to work; your father sent some money but not enough to pay for private care. It just wasn’t possible.” Her green eyes softened. “It still isn’t.” So she had thought about keeping Jenny with her after the baby was born. And yet I was right; she couldn’t go back to a life limited by what caring for her daughter demanded of her. After months of caring for Jenny myself, I was beginning to understand why.

  We sat in silence as I absorbed these new truths. My mind expanded and stretched, trying to wrap itself around all she had said. “Are you okay?” she asked after a while. “You look a little peaked.”

  “Well, this is all very hard to deal with. I’ve assumed for so long that he … ” I trailed off, made a face of confusion. “I guess it’ll just take some getting used to.”

  “Life takes getting used to,” my mother said wisely, and she stood, urging me with outstretched hands to do the same. And there in our front yard, for the first time in years, I went willingly into my mother’s arms, the love I felt there stronger than the distance that had pulled us apart.

  • • •

  I could not sleep that night, the discovery of my father’s innocence nipping at my thoughts, cutting through the base of my entire belief system. So much of my life, my history, was built on a foundation that suddenly no longer existed. I did not know what to do with my feelings, the slow-burning embers of anger and disgust and guilt that had tainted every memory of my father, good or bad.

  If he had gone into Jenny’s room only to comfort her, to try to make amends for the sting of his open palm, if his fist was the only physical weapon he brandished against her, was he still a monster? Did he deserve as much hatred as had flowed in my blood for almost fifteen years? Or was he simply a man, disarmed by feelings of inadequacy and helplessness, a man, like so many others in this world, who was taught that the solution to overwhelming emotion is violence?

  He loved Jenny, my mother had said. He had held her and wept, rocking her and begging for forgiveness. And then he had left, never calling or visiting, saving us from his fury, perhaps showing his love in the only way he knew how.

  I sighed, rolled over in bed, and hugged my covers to the curve of my body like a small child. The moonlight spilled through my bedroom window and lay over me like a gentle hand, but did nothing to comfort me. It was as though my father were a puzzle I had put together all wrong, and now had to take apart and rearrange to make the pieces fit in a way that would make sense. And though I could not completely absolve him of his sins, at least I knew now that they were not as vile as I had imagined.

  Nor were mine, as Nova had pointed out when I spoke with her earlier, relaying the conversation I had had with my mother. I hadn’t failed to protect Jenny from his sexual abuse; the abuse had not occurred. The relief in this discovery was deep, an unexpected gift.

  As I tossed and turned beneath the sheets, watching blob-like shadows ooze across the wall, my mind wandered from my father to Shane. I had not yet worked up the courage to tell him about my decision to adopt Jenny’s baby. Our conversations only skimmed the surface of our growing separate existences: he told me about his cases, I told him about the adorable things Nova’s kids did or said each day. Something inside me was beginning to let go.

  The reasons I was drawn to him and the predictable life we led together no longer seemed important. I didn’t need his organized nature to stabilize me; I had stabilized myself. I no longer saw things through his eyes; I was seeing them through my own. I didn’t want what he wanted: money, success, notoriety. I wanted peace. I wanted family. I wanted to go deeper. I could feel again; coming home had allowed that part of me to blossom. I felt ripe with emotion, and suddenly life on the surface wasn’t enough. It struck me that perhaps I didn’t love Shane for who he was; I loved him for how he made me feel about myself.

  I sighed again, rolled over onto my back, wishing I could talk to Jenny about all this. I needed a sister’s advice. I longed to hear her voice the way I used to long for it when I was a child, aching for a sister who not only listened to my stories but told me hers as well. There is a mourning that comes along with having a sister like Jenny, the loss of the relationship that might have been. Because of her disabilities, I knew the connection between us was immeasurable, something rare and precious and strong, but there were always those moments, moments like tonight, when I would have given anything to be like other sisters I had known. I wanted a sister who could tell me what to do.

  As the minutes passed slowly on the clock, I felt edgy and loose; my heart pounded in my chest like a jackrabbit’s foot. Even though she was quiet, my body urged me to check on Jenny several times. When she finally did cry out, around midnight, I went to her, but I was distracted by all the thoughts that were trying to find a place to rest in my head and could not seem to settle her. I wondered if she sensed the stress I felt after that afternoon’s conversation with our mother and couldn’t go back to sleep because of it. “Hold on, Jen,” I told her as she looked at me with tired eyes. “I’ll get Mom.” I moved through the dark house to our mother’s room, rapping softly on her door. She appeared a moment later, her dark hair tangled; creases in her pillow had left sharp red lines on one of her cheeks.

  “What?” she mumbled. Her slanted green eyes sagged with fatigue. “It’s not my night with her, is it?”

  “No,” I said, feeling guilty for bothering her, but knowing I was in no shape to give Jenny the attention she needed. “But could you please come take care of her? I need to go for a drive or something. Clear my head.”

  Mom sighed, holding the doorknob with one hand. “All righ
t,” she finally consented. It was still difficult for her getting up with Jenny; sometimes I had to remind her it was her turn. I don’t think she resented doing it. I think it was more that she had fallen out of the habit. Feeling another stab of guilt, I quashed the urge to tell her to go back to bed, knowing I desperately needed to take this brief escape.

  I followed her through the house. “Are you sure this is okay with you?” I asked her as we stepped into the bedroom hallway.

  She moved past me to my sister’s door. “I’m already up,” she pointed out. “Go.”

  I went back into my bedroom, pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, grabbed the keys, and headed out. The night was still; only a few cars moved along the streets, their headlights bright eyes in the dark. I drove down California Avenue through the Junction, marveling at the changed storefronts. I wondered if the drugstore on the corner still handed out a wooden token good for a small ice-cream cone at their fountain while you waited for your prescription.

  I found myself changing directions to head toward the beach. Nova’s house was dark, and though I craved a conversation with her, I thought better of disturbing a rare moment of family peace. A glance at the stars might do me some good, I thought, so I drove slowly toward the strip, parked right on the beach, and looked for hidden messages in the sky. Messages that would tell me what to do about Shane, how to make him understand my choice to adopt Jenny’s baby. I barely understood it myself. It wasn’t something I felt I could explain, but the decision was firmly rooted within me. It was instinct—a voice in my heart that was not my sister’s but my own. A voice I hadn’t heard in years but recognized in the deepest levels of my soul. A voice I knew spoke the truth.