The Secret Language of Sisters Read online

  For Audrey O’Brien Loggia

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  I’m late.

  And I’m hardly ever late, that’s the thing. I tend to be so on time it drives some people—namely my sister, Tilly—crazy. She says I make her look bad. Right now she’s waiting for me to pick her up at the river museum, and I should have been there five minutes ago.

  It is four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, bright, clear, and cold. Driving through the marshes, I see ice on the banks, sparkling on the golden grasses and the splintery old dock. The Connecticut River is nearly frozen over, but it turns dark blue in the wide-open sections where it meets the salt water of Long Island Sound, and the late-afternoon February light is perfect. I slow down to take another shot.

  I am unfashionably into landscapes; I apologize to no one. I park my dad’s old Volvo in the sandy lot behind the bait shop, shuttered for winter. Grabbing my camera, I cross the street to snap a few shots of cold winter sunlight on the broken ice.

  The phone in my pocket buzzes. I ignore it and keep taking photographs. I had set today aside to do this, but driving Tilly around has cut into my plans. I can’t help that I’m a little compulsive about getting things done, and if one thing has to slide today, it’s going to be punctuality. My portfolio for the Serena Kader Barrois Foundation Photography Contest needs more work. Although it’s not due until June, I want it to be as perfect as I can make it, and capture these winter days. I’m a junior and want to apply to Yale early decision. The award would boost my chances of being accepted at my dad’s old university, but it also includes a thousand-dollar scholarship, and that would help my mom a lot, no matter where I go.

  Just as important as the scholarship: If I win, I’ll dedicate the prize to Dad. I think that’s partly what’s got Tilly acting so mad at me. He died last summer, and to say we both miss him is a slight understatement, like saying the sun is bright. Taking pictures of nature is my way of staying connected to him, making him feel alive to me. Tilly and Dad used to go owling, searching for the owls that live in the woods at the far end of the beach. She hasn’t returned to the owls since he died, hasn’t found a way to keep him close.

  I miss him so much, glancing over at the car actually hurts. It was his before he died. There’s a shadow in the front seat, cast by the bait shack, and for one sharp instant I pretend it’s his ghost or, even better, him. I’ll get in the car, and he’ll be there, and we’ll go pick up Tilly, and none of the last year will have happened.

  Another buzz. My fingers are stiff from the cold, but I pull the phone from my jacket pocket and check. Four texts: Two are from Tilly. Where are you? And then, I mean it, WHERE ARE YOU? My heartbeat picks up—her anxiety is contagious, and I write her back: On my way, O impatient one!!!

  And she is impatient, my little sister. Two years and a lifetime younger than I am. The world revolves around Mathilda Mae. Well, it always has for me, anyway. I’m sure I had some normal sibling jealousy, being the first child, then having her come along. Mostly, I adore her and try to protect her. Sometimes I feel like her mother. Still, she can be incredibly annoying.

  The third text is from Isabel Cruz, my best friend. She’s also entering the photo contest, and she has shot me a picture of the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe in her mother’s bedroom. The photo shows the most recent addition: Her mother is constantly making offerings, and now the brightly colored doll has four dead roses, no doubt taken from one of the tables her mom had cleared that day, wedged into her veil.

  I write back, Brava, preciosa! Then I take a photo of the bait shack’s faded sign with my phone and send it to her.

  The fourth text is from my boyfriend, Newton. How can I explain what one question from him can do to me? We have been together for so long, through the best of times and the worst of times. He sat in the row behind me at my father’s funeral, and I reached back to hold his hand through most of it. So why have I been pulling away? It’s not that I don’t love him. I want to say, if anything, I love him too much.

  He’s written: How can you say being apart is better?

  Oh, Newton. That’s too hard to answer by text, and I’m late for Tilly. Or at least that’s my excuse. It’s Saturday, and he and I haven’t seen each other once since getting out of school yesterday, and to tell you the truth, I plan to avoid him until Monday.

  I get back into the car; my father’s ghost is gone. I throw my phone and camera on the passenger seat, and head north on Shore Road. Now I really need to hurry to Tilly.

  My sister’s not that strong, academically. She’s having senior slump, and she’s only a freshman. So the fact she spent hours at the museum doing research for a school project deserves praise and encouragement. Our mom is grading papers, so I am Tilly’s designated chauffeur. I’ll make up for being late by taking her out for hot chocolate.

  Long shadows fall across the road, dappling the two-hundred-year-old stone walls with black and silver. Everything is a photograph. I want to stop here, see if I can capture the spare and haunting beauty, but my phone buzzes again. It’s on the seat beside me, right against my camera. The metal on metal sounds loud and jarring. It’s Tilly, of course.

  If she could just wait, I’d be there soon, and we could take the long way home, listen to the radio, and when we stop for cocoa, I’ll make sure she gets extra marshmallows. But my phone is exploding with texts, little Tilly-isms: Whatcha doin that’s more important than your ONLY SISTER? Followed shortly by Um, I’m still here. Then, Just here killing time while the MUSEUM is trying to CLOSE! You are keeping people from their DINNERS. Maybe I’ll take the passive-aggressive route and ignore her. SO TEMPTING. Instead, I speed up.

  And here she is again: At least tell me how long you’ll be.

  My hand hovers over my phone; I’m a bit torn about whether to just keep going, or to waste time pulling over to respond.

  She sends another, all caps, as if she’s screaming at me, so obviously agitated she misspells: ANSERE ME!

  That makes me laugh, which she would hate.

  I’m heading down the long straightaway toward the bridge. The two white church steeples that mark the town of Black Hall rise above bare trees scoring the low hills. It’s a sleepy little town in wintertime—summer people come from New York and Hartford, with fancy cars and lots of money—but in February it’s just us locals, and the roads are empty. So I grab my phone.

  Everyone knows: Don’t text and drive. And I don’t! I swear. Well, I do. But only when I am sure it’s safe, when there are no other cars, no bends in the road, only in daylight, and only when it’s a quick reply.

  I see our town’s single traffic light half a mile ahead. The bridge is on my left; it arches over the Connecticut River, a simple span with the most beautiful views in the world. Fields and wetlands, winter brown and crisscrossed with frozen tidal creeks, glisten on the right. I am going forty-three miles an hour, just slightly over the speed limit. I pump the brakes as I approach the light. Forty miles an hour.

  Phone in my right hand, thumb hitting the keys as my eyes dart from the road to the keyboard
. There’s a pickup truck coming toward me, but still far off, on the other side of the traffic light, and even from this distance, I recognize it: the Johnson family’s farm wagon, bright red with wooden slats around the truck bed.

  Plenty of time, slowing more, thirty miles an hour, and I press the numeral 5, and I look down directly at my phone to quickly type the next part: mins away. And I hit SEND just in time to look up and see that I have veered off the road onto the shoulder, where an old woman is walking her dog in the shadows, and I am going to hit them.

  I see it all: She is wearing a black coat, and she has gray hair and glasses, and I don’t know her name, but I have seen her in the grocery store, and her dog is a Labrador retriever with a red collar and has darted after a blur that might be a squirrel, and the woman’s eyes are wide open and so is her mouth. I can read her lips: Oh, NO! And I have dropped the phone and I am yanking the wheel left as hard and fast as I can. The car turns, the bumper misses the lady by an inch, no more, and I feel a thud and my heart sickens because I know I have hit the dog.

  I scream out, and I would do anything if I could turn back time just eleven seconds, just thirteen seconds, to save the poor dog, and the car spins around so fast, one circle, then another, and I remember my father saying steer into the skid, which makes no sense, especially because now the car is somersaulting down the bank, the windows are smashing and glass is flying, and just trying to breathe I gulp a piece of it down and have time to wonder if it will cut my insides, shred my throat and stomach, when the car lands in a place no car should ever land, nose down, on its roof, in the frozen creek.

  I am hanging by my seat belt. I look around, and everything is quiet except the sound of rushing water. Only, the stream is solid ice; it isn’t moving at all. The only liquid is the hot river of my blood, and then the world goes away.

  Roo is taking forever. She sent me a text, 5 mins away, and that was over an hour ago. Forever, right? She is usually so on time it makes you want to jump out a window. But in this case, what’s up?

  With sisters, everyone always says, “She’s the pretty one, she’s the smart one,” and yes, Roo is both. I, according to my teachers, parents, and even Roo, am impatient to a fault.

  It’s why I’m here in the first place, at the Hawthorne River Museum, amassing material for my American history project, due next week. Nona and Emily, my two best friends, have already finished theirs, and I’m feeling the pressure. I feel like plagiarizing, I swear. But my dad was a Yale professor, my mother teaches earth science in middle school, Roo is a genius, and I Know Better Than to Copy. But it’s tempting.

  Roo suggested I do my report on the Turtle, the world’s first submarine used during a war, built right here in Connecticut and used to spy on the British in the Revolutionary War. I’ve spent the afternoon sketching and learning about the museum’s scale model. Mostly, I’ve been getting crushes on the sub’s inventors, David Bushnell and Phineas Pratt. Hot guys of history.

  Still: 5 mins away. Now it’s been an hour and a half, and it’s dark out. I look at my phone again, a little worried. Being so late is most un-Roo-like.

  She doesn’t know it, but I had wanted her to drive us to the pine trees where the owls live in the graveyard. The same graveyard where our father’s buried. There would be a chance the owls would fly out for their nightly hunt, and I could see them for the first time since our dad died. Also, I know the ice dripping off the needles would look cool and mystical in the sunset, and Roo could take photos that would be good for her portfolio. We could say hi to Dad while we were at it.

  I was doing her a favor, trying to get her to rush. But now the sun is down, and it’s too late.

  So I’m mad. I’m about to blow, standing by the museum door, with the staff shooting me looks because they obviously want to go home, when I see my sister’s boyfriend’s car drive in. Was she hanging out with Newton when she should have been getting me? Were they laughing at me, making fun of all my texts begging her to hurry up?

  That makes me even angrier. So instead of running out the door, I pick up a museum brochure and pretend to read. I’ll make them come inside for me.

  But out of the corner of my eye, I see that Newton is alone in the car. No Roo. My sister is not in the car. I drop the brochure. I can’t explain the feeling that goes through me. I’ve never felt it before, but it’s a panic that I can taste, as if I’ve bitten down on tinfoil. I leave the museum, step into the cold.

  Newton gets out of the car. He is tall and so gangly and awkward the kids at school call him Gawk behind his back, and sometimes I do, too, but right then we walk toward each other and he puts his hands on my shoulders and the tinfoil taste gets worse.

  “Where’s Roo?” I ask.

  “She was in an accident,” he says. “Come on.”

  “What do you mean, an accident?”

  “Tilly, just hurry up.”

  So we rush. Driving out of town, he tells me the basics: Roo flipped her car, my mother called him to ask him to pick me up, we are heading for the hospital in New London.

  Flipped her car?

  That’s a sentence that belongs on the news, in the paper, on the lips of kids talking about their juvie drinking-and-drag-racing friends—not Roo, not my perfect, made-for-the-Ivy-League sister. In fact, it can’t be possible—Newton has made a mistake. Or he’s pulling a cruel joke on me. That in and of itself would be funny, because Newton is such a dork, jokes are not his thing. He’s a tad on the humorless side for me.

  I glance over at him: He has both hands on the wheel in the suggested ten-and-two position. His brown hair is long, but not cool long—he just needs a haircut—and his black-rimmed glasses are slipping down his nose. Without thinking, I reach over to push them up for him.

  He doesn’t say thank you. He is a laser aiming down the highway, Route 95. His phone beeps. I glance around, but it’s not in sight. What if it’s Roo? What if she’s texting to ask how the joke on me is going?

  “Someone is trying to get in touch with you,” I say.

  “I hear that.”

  “Aren’t you going to check?”

  “I’m driving, Tilly,” he says. And I think: Duh. He would never check a text while at the wheel. That gives me a weird shiver, but I don’t follow it to a specific thought.

  “Where’s your phone?” I ask.

  “In my pocket.”

  “Okay, excuse me,” I say, and reach into the right-hand pocket of his dark-blue fleece with the words WOODS HOLE YOUNGER SCIENTISTS BIODIVERSITY CAMP embroidered in gold on the chest. I pull out his phone and see the message. It is from my mother’s number: Come directly to the 3rd floor—she’s in the ICU.

  I gasp. My heart stops, then starts faster than ever. It is smashing into my ribs. I am only fourteen, but I feel I’m having a heart attack. The taste of aluminum floods my whole mouth, nose, and head. It’s like an extrasensory signal that Roo is in major danger.

  “It’s not a joke?” I ask.

  “A what?” he asks. The concept, that someone would kid around at such a time, is so alien to him, he can’t even grasp my question.

  “Oh my God, oh my God!” I say. “I can’t breathe.”

  “You’re hyperventilating. Put your head between your knees.”

  It’s weird that my sister’s boyfriend knows how to deal with my freak-outs, but I tend to have them even when my sister is not in the ICU. Roo is the calm, logical one. I am the emotional, reactive one. Breathe, Tilly, my father used to say. Just breathe. He always knew how to calm me down, and just then my thoughts jump to him, and how he should be here for this, to help Roo, and I start to cry.

  Newton actually takes one hand off the wheel and pats my head. Strangely, it helps a little. So by the time we turn off Ocean Avenue into the hospital parking lot, my eyes are dry. We hurry in, take the elevator to the third floor, tell the nurse at the desk who we are visiting, and my mother sees us and ushers us into a little room off to the side.

  My mother is wearing a b
lack sweater and beige wool pants; she must have come straight from school. She looks at me with a slight smile in her blue-gray eyes, and in them I see that it’s going to be okay. After what we went through with my father, I know how to read my mother. She hugs me.

  “Where is she?” I ask.

  “Now listen,” she says. “They have to do a lot more tests. But everything looks good so far, and they’ll move her to a regular floor as soon as her vital signs stabilize. She’s alert, wide-awake. She’s very upset, though. She hit a dog, and she’s worried about how he’s doing.”

  “A dog?” I ask, and for the first time, hearing that Roo is awake, I start wondering about the actual accident, where she was, how it happened. “Can I see her?”

  “Yes, she’s been asking for you nonstop. You too, Newton. Typical Roo, worried about everyone else. The doctor is limiting her visitors right now, so you first, Tilly. Five minutes, no more. She’s right over there, the third cubicle down.”

  So I go.

  The ICU has beds arranged around the nurses’ station, each partitioned from the next by curtains, and filled with machines that are humming and beeping. I tiptoe, not wanting to disturb anyone, but then I can’t help it and I run the last few steps and stand breathless at my sister’s bed.

  “Oh, Tilly!” she says the second she sees me. She is pale, bruised, bandaged, forehead stitched. She is stuck all over with needles and tubes. I crack in half and spill all over the floor and into her arms.

  “Ouch,” she says weakly. I realize I have jostled a needle in her forearm. It is attached to a tube that runs up to a bottle of clear liquid hanging on a bracket over the bed.

  “I’m sorry.” I jump back and stare at her. How is it possible she looks even more beautiful than usual? Milky white skin, almost translucent, that spill of dark hair, the bandage on her head making her appear more vulnerable and delicate, a princess who has fallen from the tower. She is tall, willowy, and black Irish with long mahogany hair and blue eyes, and I am anything but: three inches shorter, ten pounds heavier, with garden-variety reddish-brown hair and “hazel” eyes. Roo used to tell me they were green, but she was just trying to make me feel more special—trust me, they’re mud brown.