Brooke managed to continue ambulatory—that is, getting out of bed and dressing in something other than pajamas for increasingly briefer stints each day—for another sixteen days. In the last of these days she could no longer trust herself to remain upright in the shower and asked Dave to help her in and out of the big soaking tub in its tile surround. “I’ll do you one better,” he said with an old gleam and proceeded to bath gently with natural sponge and lotion soap brought back from the South Pacific her still lovely and thrilling body. Brooke purred with her head cushioned on a towel and her eyes shut, “If I’d known about this, I wouldn’t have waited so late.”
Three days after she stopped getting out of bed, Leah arrived. Dave set her bag on the guest suite luggage rack and said, “Yours as long as you want to stay.” Leah said, “Long as needed” then followed him back downstairs to the master bedroom.
He pushed open the slightly ajar door and golden sunlight flooded the hallway along with the odor of drying leaves. The many tall south and west-facing windows of the large room were unshaded and open on the warm fall afternoon. Dave said from the threshold, “You have a visitor.”
“Whatever she’s selling, I’ll take one of each,” a thin but still recognizable voice said from beyond.
“Sisterly love,” Leah said as she walked past Dave.
“I’ve already got plenty of that.”
“Never enough,” Leah said as she crossed the room to the bed.
Dave pulled the door shut as he returned to preparing dinner.
Leah was shocked at how wasted Brooke appeared. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes sunken in, and her skin flat. Leah had not fully appreciated till just then that Brooke’s skin had always radiated vibrancy in its warm color and tone, even when comatose in the hospital. That color had been for Leah proof of life and future, not only for Brooke but also for her. The two conditions were inseparable. Leah tried to hide her terror as she bent to hug her collapsed sister. “I love you,” was all she could think to whisper.
Brooke kissed her sister’s cheek with cracked lips. “A home delivery,” she said with an attempt at a chuckle that ended as a hoarse croak. “Hard to get these days.”
Leah stood back up with a grin taped across her face. “Not for you.” She dragged the Queen Anne armchair to within reach of the bed and sat down.
“How bad do I look?”
Leah’s grin twitched.
“That bad, huh? I had Dave tape over all the mirrors a week ago, but I still caught a glimpse in the windows when I was still walking. Now it’s stuck in my mind. You don’t have a memory eraser, do you?”
Leah laughed. “If I did, would you use it?”
“Selectively, yes.”
Leah thought about that for a minute. “I’d be afraid of erasing something I’d want back later.”
“If it was erased, how would you know?”
“I would.”
Brooke nodded from the pillows. “Yes, you would.”
Leah gazed at her sister, the default grin back in place, but could think of nothing to say. More accurately, she thought of too many things to say but all of them fraught with risk. So she pulled her eyes off of Brooke’s misshapen face and looked toward the bright day beyond the screens and glass. “I never realized how open and airy your bedroom is.”
“Always our secret sanctuary.”
“Our?”
“Me and Dave, silly—where we did our best work.”
Leah blushed despite herself.
“Now he’s been banished to the pullout couch in the old nursery, poor baby.”
Leah had noted the disarray like a dorm room through the open door just down the hall.
“We stopped sleeping together after I had an accident and he rolled in it—kind of dampens the romance, so to speak.”
Leah faced her sister again with a neutral stare.
“So now he sleeps down the hall and I sleep with an absorbent pad and a plastic sheet under my butt. Want to see?”
Leah shook her head. “I’ll take your word for it.” Then she added quickly, “Unless you want me to change it.”
“Dave checked it just before you arrived. Save your nurse’s duties for later.”
“Whatever you need me to do, Brooke.”
“I know. We’re counting on it.” She now looked unabashedly at Leah.
Leah gazed back, powerless to break the stare.
A smile lit Brooke’s eyes. “Who are you fucking?”
“Brooke!” Leah wondered for the briefest of moments if the body’s emaciation had gone to her sister’s brain.
“Fess up, girl.”
“What?”
“Who’s the lucky guy?”
“Only Whitfield,” Leah said under her breath.
Brooke laughed, a sound that morphed into a series of shallow hoarse coughs.
Leah handed her the plastic cup of water from the nightstand.
Brooke took a sip then returned the cup to the nightstand. “I like Whitfield. He’s been a good husband to you and father to Jasper. But that old man couldn’t handle the fire you’ve got blazing.” Brooke had long teased her sister about her husband being ten years her elder. “He’ll be in the nursing home and you’ll be banging the male nurse in the linen closet” was one of her jokes while they were waiting in the church’s parlor before Leah’s wedding. At the time it seemed only a Brookism to calm her nerves.
“Whitfield’s fine, thank you very much,” Leah said with a glint of anger.
“Glad to hear it, sis. Give him my regards. Now who are you fucking?”
Leah saw there was only one way out of this line of questioning—straight ahead. “Billy Erwin.”
“Johnny Appleseed?” Brooke had christened Billy, whom she’d never met, with this nickname after Leah had given her an overly enthusiastic description of her project manager in a phone conversation last fall. “Way to go, girl!”
“It’s not something I’m proud of, Brooke.”
“You should be. It’s done you wonders.”
“And Whitfield?”
“Leah, dear, whether you want to admit it or not, Whitfield is taking care of himself.”
“So what do I do?”
“Keep letting Johnny plant his seeds.” Brooke, as usual, enjoyed her crude wit, all the more so because it made her sister squirm.
“Till when?”
“You’ll know when and how to stop. You’re better at that than anyone.”
“Right now I can’t.”
“You’ll know,” Brooke nodded with sage confidence.
From beneath Leah’s lingering embarrassment and inner turmoil, she couldn’t help but notice the color that had returned to her sister’s cheeks, running down from inside her dancing eyes.