"I just--"
She holds up her hand like the privacy partition in a cab. She shakes her head.
On the backseat, I slide sideways and curl my feet up, facing to the rear, so that all I see is black.
"Brian," my mother says. "You missed it again."
*
When we walk in, my mother steams past Kate, who opened the door for us, and past Jesse, who is watching what looks like the scrambled Playboy channel on TV. In the kitchen, she opens cabinets and bangs them shut. She takes food from the refrigerator and smacks it onto the table.
"Hey," my father says to Kate. "How're you feeling?"
She ignores him, pushing into the kitchen. "What happened?"
"What happened. Well." My mother pins me with a gaze. "Why don't you ask your sister what happened?"
Kate turns to me, all eyes.
"Amazing how quiet you are now, when a judge isn't listening," my mother says.
Jesse turns off the television. "She made you talk to a judge? Damn, Anna."
My mother closes her eyes. "Jesse, you know, now would be a good time for you to leave."
"You don't have to ask me twice," he says, his voice full of broken glass. We hear the front door open and shut, a whole story.
"Sara." My father steps into the room. "We all need to cool off a little."
"I have one child who's just signed her sister's death sentence, and I'm supposed to cool off?"
The kitchen gets so silent we can hear the refrigerator whispering. My mother's words hang like too-ripe fruit, and when they fall on the floor and burst, she shudders into motion. "Kate," she says, hurrying toward my sister, her arms already outstretched. "Kate, I shouldn't have said that. It's not what I meant."
In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do. Kate covers her mouth with her hand. She backs out of the kitchen door, bumping into my father, who fumbles but cannot catch her as she scrambles upstairs. I hear the door to our room slam shut. My mother, of course, goes after her.
So I do what I do best. I move in the opposite direction.
*
Is there any place on earth that smells better than a Laundromat? It's like a rainy Sunday when you don't have to get out from under your covers, or like lying back on the grass your father's just mowed--comfort food for your nose. When I was little my mom would take hot clothes out of the dryer and dump them on top of me where I was sitting on the couch. I used to pretend they were a single skin, that I was curled tight beneath them like one large heart.
The other thing I like is that Laundromats draw lonely people like metal to magnets. There's a guy passed out on a bank of chairs in the back, with army boots and a T-shirt that says Nostradamus Was an Optimist. A woman at the folding table sifts through a heap of men's button-down shirts, sniffing back tears. Put ten people together in a Laundromat and chances are you won't be the one who's worst off.
I sit down across from a bank of washers and try to match up the clothes with the people waiting. The pink panties and lace nightgown belong to the girl who is reading a romance novel. The woolly red socks and checkered shirt are the skanky sleeping student. The soccer jerseys and kiddie overalls come from the toddler who keeps handing filmy white dryer sheets to her mom, oblivious on a cell phone. What kind of person can afford a cell phone, but not her own washer and dryer?
I play a game with myself, sometimes, and try to imagine what it would be like to be the person whose clothes are spinning in front of me. If I were washing those carpenter jeans, maybe I'd be a roofer in Phoenix, my arms strong and my back tan. If I had those flowered sheets, I might be on break from Harvard, studying criminal profiling. If I owned that satin cape, I might have season tickets to the ballet. And then I try to picture myself doing any of these things and I can't. All I can ever see is me, being a donor for Kate, each time stretching to the next.
Kate and I are Siamese twins; you just can't see the spot where we're connected. Which makes separation that much more difficult.
When I look up the girl who works the Laundromat is standing over me, with her lip ring and blue streaked dreadlocks. "You need change?" she asks.
To tell you the truth, I'm afraid to hear my own answer.
JESSE
I AM THE KID WHO PLAYED with matches. I used to steal them from the shelf above the refrigerator, take them into my parents' bathroom. Jean Nate Bath Splash ignites, did you know that? Spill it, strike, and you can set fire to the floor. It burns blue, and when the alcohol is gone, it stops.
Once, Anna walked in on me when I was in the bathroom. "Hey," I said. "Check this out." I dribbled some Jean Nate on the floor, her initials. Then I torched them. I figured she'd run screaming like a tattletale, but instead she sat right down on the edge of the bathtub. She reached for the bottle of Jean Nate, made some loopy design on the tiles, and told me to do it again.
Anna is the only proof I have that I was born into this family, instead of dropped off on the doorstep by some Bonnie and Clyde couple that ran off into the night. On the surface, we're polar opposites. Under the skin, though, we're the same: people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong.
*
Fuck them all. I ought to have that tattooed on my forehead, for all the times I've thought it. Usually I am in transit, speeding in my Jeep until my lungs give out. Today, I'm driving ninety-five down 95. I weave in and out of traffic, sewing up a scar. People yell at me behind their closed windows. I give them the finger.
It would solve a thousand problems if I rolled the Jeep over an embankment. It's not like I haven't thought about it, you know. On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive--the sum of the parts equals more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart.
To my dismay, though, I get all the way to the exit without a scratch. I peel off the ramp and tool along Allens Avenue. There's an underpass there where I know I'll find Duracell Dan. He's a homeless dude, Vietnam vet, who spends most of his time collecting batteries that people toss into the trash. What the hell he does with them, I don't know. He opens them up, I know that much. He says the CIA hides messages for all its operatives in Energizer double-As, that the FBI sticks to Evereadys.
Dan and I have a deal: I bring him a McDonald's Value Meal a few times a week, and in return, he watches over my stuff. I find him huddled over the astrology book that he considers his manifesto. "Dan," I say, getting out of the car and handing him his Big Mac. "What's up?"
He squints at me. "The moon's in freaking Aquarius." He stuffs a fry into his mouth. "I never should have gotten out of bed."
If Dan has a bed, it's news to me. "Sorry about that," I say. "Got my stuff?"
He jerks his head to the barrels behind the concrete pylon where he keeps my things. The perchloric acid filched from the chemistry lab at the high school is intact; in another barrel is the sawdust. I hike the stuffed pillowcase under my arm and haul it to the car. I find him waiting at the door. "Thanks."
He leans against the car, won't let me get inside. "They gave me a message for you."
Even though everything that comes out of Dan's mouth is total bullshit, my stomach rolls over. "Who did?"
He looks down the road, then back at me. "You know." Leaning closer, he whispers, "Think twice."
"That was the message?"
Dan nods. "Yeah. It was that, or Drink twice. I can't be sure."
"That advice I might actually listen to." I shove him a little, so that I can get into the car. He is lighter than you'd think, like whatever was inside him was used up long ago. With that reasoning, it's a wonder I don't float off into the sky. "Later," I tell him, and then I drive toward the warehouse I've been watching.
I look for places like me: big, hollow, forgot
ten by most everyone. This one's in the Olneyville area. At one time, it was used as a storage facility for an export business. Now, it's pretty much just home to an extended family of rats. I park far enough away that no one would think twice about my car. I stuff the pillowcase of sawdust under my jacket and take off.
It turns out that I learned something from my dear old dad after all: firemen are experts at getting into places they shouldn't be. It doesn't take much to pick the lock, and then it's just a matter of figuring out where I want to start. I cut a hole in the bottom of the pillowcase and let the sawdust draw three fat initials, JBF. Then I take the acid and dribble it over the letters.
This is the first time I've done it in the middle of the day.
I take a pack of Merits out of my pocket and tamp them down, then stick one into my mouth. My Zippo's almost out of lighter fluid; I need to remember to get some. When I'm finished, I get to my feet, take one last drag, and toss the cigarette into the sawdust. I know this one's going to move fast, so I'm already running when the wall of fire rises behind me. Like all the others, they will look for clues. But this cigarette and my initials will have long been gone. The whole floor underneath them will melt. The walls will buckle and give.
The first engine reaches the scene just as I get back to my car and pull the binoculars out of my trunk. By then, the fire's done what it wants to--escape. Glass has blown out of windows; smoke rises black, an eclipse.
The first time I saw my mother cry I was five. She was standing at the kitchen window, pretending that she wasn't. The sun was just coming up, a swollen knot. "What are you doing?" I asked. It was not until years later that I realized I had heard her answer all wrong. That when she said mourning, she had not been talking about the time of day.
The sky, now, is thick and dark with smoke. Sparks shower as the roof falls in. A second crew of firefighters arrives, the ones who have been called in from their dinner tables and showers and living rooms. With the binoculars, I can make out his name, winking on the back of his turnout coat like it's spelled in diamonds. Fitzgerald. My father lays hands on a charged line, and I get into my car and drive away.
*
At home, my mother is having a nervous breakdown. She flies out the door as soon as I pull into my parking spot. "Thank God," she says. "I need your help."
She doesn't even look back to see if I'm following her inside, and that is how I know it's Kate. The door to my sisters' room has been kicked in, the wooden frame around it splintered. My sister lies still on her bed. Then all of a sudden she bursts to life, jerking up like a tire jack and puking blood. A stain spreads over her shirt and onto her flowered comforter, red poppies where there weren't any before.
My mother gets down beside her, holding back her hair and pressing a towel up to her mouth when Kate vomits again, another gush of blood. "Jesse," she says matter-of-factly, "your father's out on a call, and I can't reach him. I need you to drive us to the hospital, so that I can sit in the back with Kate."
Kate's lips are slick as cherries. I pick her up in my arms. She's nothing but bones, poking sharp through the skin of her T-shirt.
"When Anna ran off, Kate wouldn't let me into her room," my mother says, hurrying beside me. "I gave her a little while to calm down. And then I heard her coughing. I had to get in there."
So you kicked it down, I think, and it doesn't surprise me. We reach the car, and she opens the door so that I can slide Kate inside. I pull out of the driveway and speed even faster than normal through town, onto the highway, toward the hospital.
Today, when my parents were at court with Anna, Kate and I watched TV. She wanted to put on her soap and I told her fuck off and put on the scrambled Playboy channel instead. Now, as I run through red lights, I'm wishing that I'd let her watch that retarded soap. I'm trying not to look at her little white coin of a face in the rearview mirror. You'd think, with all the time I've had to get used to it, that moments like this wouldn't come as such a shock. The question we cannot ask pushes through my veins with each beat: Is this it? Is this it? Is this it?
The minute we hit the ER driveway, my mother's out of the car, hurrying me to get Kate. We are quite a picture walking through the automatic doors, me with Kate bleeding in my arms, and my mother grabbing the first nurse who walks by. "She needs platelets," my mother orders.
They take her away from me, and for a few moments, even after the ER team and my mother have disappeared with Kate behind closed curtains, I stand with my arms buoyed, trying to get used to the fact that there's no longer anything in them.
*
Dr. Chance, the oncologist I know, and Dr. Nguyen, some expert I don't, tell us what we've already figured out: these are the death throes of end-stage kidney disease. My mother stands next to the bed, her hand tight around Kate's IV pole. "Can you still do a transplant?" she asks, as if Anna never started her lawsuit, as if it means absolutely nothing.
"Kate's in a pretty grave clinical state," Dr. Chance tells her. "I told you before I didn't know if she was strong enough to survive that level of surgery; the odds are even slighter now."
"But if there was a donor," she says, "would you do it?"
"Wait." You'd think my throat had just been paved with straw. "Would mine work?"
Dr. Chance shakes his head. "A kidney donor doesn't have to be a perfect match, in an ordinary case. But your sister isn't an ordinary case."
When the doctors leave, I can feel my mother staring at me. "Jesse," she says.
"It wasn't like I was volunteering. I just wanted to, you know, know." But inside, I'm burning just as hot as I was when that fire caught at the warehouse. What made me believe I might be worth something, even now? What made me think I could save my sister, when I can't even save myself?
Kate's eyes open, so that she's staring right at me. She licks her lips--they're still caked with blood--and it makes her look like a vampire. The undead. If only.
I lean closer, because she doesn't have enough in her right now to make the words creep across the air between us. Tell, she mouths, so that my mother won't look up.
I answer, just as silent. Tell? I want to make sure I've got it right.
Tell Anna.
But the door to the room bursts open and my father fills the room with smoke. His hair and clothes and skin reek of it, so much so that I look up, expecting the sprinklers to go off. "What happened?" he asks, going right to the bed.
I slip out of the room, because nobody needs me there anymore. In the elevator, in front of the NO SMOKING sign, I light a cigarette.
Tell Anna what?
SARA
1990-1991
BY PURE CHANCE, or maybe karmic distribution, all three clients at the hair salon are pregnant. We sit under the dryers, hands folded over our bellies like a row of Buddhas. "My top choices are Freedom, Low, and Jack," says the girl next to me, who is getting her hair dyed pink.
"What if it's not a boy?" asks the woman sitting on my other side.
"Oh, those are meant to be for either."
I hide a smile. "I vote for Jack."
The girl squints, looking out the window at the rotten weather. "Sleet is nice," she says absently, and then tries it on for size. "Sleet, pick up your toys. Sleet, honey, come on, or we're gonna be late for the Uncle Tupelo concert." She digs a piece of paper and a pencil stub out of her maternity overalls and scribbles down the name.
The woman on my left grins at me. "Is this your first?"
"My third."
"Mine too. I have two boys. I'm keeping my fingers crossed."
"I have a boy and a girl," I tell her. "Five and three."
"Do you know what you're having this time?"
I know everything about this baby, from her sex to the very placement of her chromosomes, including the ones that make her a perfect match for Kate. I know exactly what I am having: a miracle. "It's a girl," I answer.
"Ooh, I'm so jealous! My husband and I, we didn't find out at the ultrasound. I thought if I heard it was anot
her boy, I might never finish out the last five months." She shuts off her hair dryer and pushes it back. "You have any names picked?"
It strikes me that I don't. Although I am nine months pregnant, although I have had plenty of time to dream, I have not really considered the specifics of this child. I have thought of this daughter only in terms of what she will be able to do for the daughter I already have. I haven't admitted this even to Brian, who lies at night with his head on my considerable belly, waiting for the twitches that herald--he thinks--the first female placekicker for the Patriots. Then again, my dreams for her are no less exalted; I plan for her to save her sister's life.
"We're waiting," I tell the woman.
Sometimes I think it is all we ever do.
*
There was a moment, after Kate's three months of chemotherapy last year, that I was stupid enough to believe we had beaten the odds. Dr. Chance said that she seemed to be in remission, and that we would just keep an eye on what came next. And for a little while, my life even got back to normal: chauffeuring Jesse to soccer practice and helping out in Kate's preschool class and even taking a hot bath to relax.
And yet, there was a part of me that knew the other shoe was bound to drop. This part scoured Kate's pillow every morning, even after her hair started to grow back with its frizzy, burned ends, just in case it started falling out again. This part went to the geneticist recommended by Dr. Chance. Engineered an embryo given the thumbs-up by scientists to be a perfect match for Kate. Took the hormones for IVF and conceived that embryo, just in case.
It was during a routine bone marrow aspiration that we learned Kate was in molecular relapse. On the outside, she looked like any other three-year-old girl. On the inside, the cancer had surged through her system again, steamrolling the progress that had been made with chemo.
Now, in the backseat with Jesse, Kate's kicking her feet and playing with a toy phone. Jesse sits next to her, staring out the window. "Mom? Do buses ever fall on people?"
"Like out of trees?"
"No. Like . . . just over." He makes a flipping motion with his hand.
"Only if the weather's really bad, or if the driver's going too fast."
He nods, accepting my explanation for his safety in this universe. Then: "Mom? Do you have a favorite number?"