The Secret Language of Sisters Read online

  My breath caught in my chest, and it came out in a sob.

  “Listen to her,” I said.

  “It’s bad,” he said.

  “My mother and Isabel are in there talking to her as if she can hear. Do you think she can?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, very quietly, and I appreciated him for not pretending things were more okay than they were—or at all.

  “So what’s going to happen?” I asked.

  My sister’s boyfriend stared into my eyes. He was at least a foot taller than I was and, aside from Roo, the smartest kid at school. His eyes filled behind his glasses, and his lower lip began to wobble. With one finger, I touched his bare, gangly wrist, jutting out from the sleeve of the same sweater he’d been wearing since Roo’s accident.

  Then, with his right index finger, he touched the top of my head. We stood there, in the hall of Shore Hospital, the two people who love Roo most, not counting my mother and Isabel, locked in a dorky circuit of pain and index fingers and the unspoken answer we both feared most: that Roo was going to die.

  I backed away. Everywhere I moved in this hospital was destined to rip my heart out. In the hall with Newton, in the room with Roo: Either way, I couldn’t take it. Every time I breathed, I thought of Roo, of how she couldn’t do something as simple as breathe. If she wasn’t going to live, I had to spend every last second with her. So I walked back to her room.

  I was totally immobile, wrapped in sheets and blankets and bandages; that’s what it felt like.

  I was in a tomb, in ancient Egypt, surrounded by funerary objects, scarabs and baskets and amulets.

  Okay, I am dreaming about a history project. What are those dreams where you know you’re asleep, you’re fully cognizant of that fact, but you’re swept along in a strange world?

  Lucid dreams, that’s what they’re called. I was having one of those.

  And it had been going on forever, days at least. Ever since I first figured out that I’m in a hospital.

  Time to wake up now, come on! Wiggle your fingers, kick your legs!

  I commanded my limbs to move, but they didn’t. How bizarre. I was trapped, mummified. That word was so weird, mummified; just try to say it in a regular sentence, not homework, with a straight face. Especially when talking about yourself.

  My head itched, and there was a cold breeze blowing. Where’s my hair? I had a sharp memory of someone shaving part of my head, stitching up cuts. I’d hit my forehead on the steering wheel, and there was a gash behind my ear. I felt the stiches pulling now and wanted to raise my hand to touch the scar, but I couldn’t move my arm.

  Here is my mother leaning over me. Here is Isabel holding my hand, whispering in Spanish.

  I recognized the phrases, a prayer, similar to one she said for my father when he died.

  Don’t pray for me, you’re scaring me, I said, but the words didn’t come out. Isabel kept praying, her lips moving. She looked so pretty, a little blush on her angular cheeks, the tiny gold cross necklace her grandmother gave her mingled with the tin milagros, the Mexican charms she wears on long chains. All that metal catching the light.

  Light came in through the windows. I was on heavy medication, I knew that much, because I felt so confused and thick, and my stomach was upset. Am I dreaming or am I awake?

  My dream of an Egyptian tomb wouldn’t contain light, it would be pitch-dark in there, and it wouldn’t have my mother and Isabel, and a sense of Tilly and Newton nearby. I thought I could hear their voices out in the hall.

  And through the drugs I also thought: crash.

  One little word, and a whole lot of sound, the loudest noises I’d ever heard smashed into my memory.

  Glass breaking, metal crunching, a dog yelping, water splashing. No, wait, that’s blood rushing. My blood running down my face, upside down, from a cut in my head into my nose and mouth. I’m choking, I can’t breathe, I’m drowning in my own blood.

  It terrified me, and I thrashed around, but my limbs didn’t move, and that made me panic even more.

  Did a crash really occur? … Was I in a car wreck? Or was that a different dream?

  The old lady and the dog. I remembered them, and the horror I felt at hitting him, the dog. It happened. It was real. I was in an accident.

  “Sweetheart,” Mom said now. “We have some good news. Lucan, the dog, is fine. He’s going to recover. Tilly said you would want to know, and it was in the paper, he’s really okay.”

  Oh, that sweet dog, black Lab, red collar, and I hit him, my car went off the road. I drove it straight at him. I remembered the sound of the car’s bumper striking his hip, the thud, and the old lady’s scream, and then my own screams.

  I tried to flinch, but I couldn’t do that, either.

  Mom? I said. Please help me. I have a million questions; why won’t you listen?

  Mom just kept murmuring in a flat, zombie tone about the dog. She seemed not to notice that I was frantic. She couldn’t hear me. I was stuck, a leaf in just-poured concrete. Pull me out before it hardens.

  Isabel, can’t you help me?

  She and Mom, the two of them sat there doing nothing, just talking, soft voices, prayers and stories. I was here, but they weren’t paying attention.

  GET TILLY! I screamed. NEWTON! They will understand! Tilly and Newton will know what’s going on immediately and get me out of here.

  Where is here?

  Here is the hospital, I realized.

  Tubes and needles dosed me with pain medication. How many days had it been since the accident? How many hours? Did it matter?

  I remembered my seizure, Tilly standing there—the worst feeling I’ve ever had, thrashing around with no control, hearing her scream just before I passed out. I woke up being restrained—or at least that’s what I thought. I thought they had tied me down. Then I realized, No, there are no straps. It’s me—I can’t move. I can’t speak. I can’t get anyone to hear me.

  I must have looked like a lifeless lump, but inside my mind I was wild, alive, in agony, going crazy.

  The worst part, beyond any pain, was not having my family realize that I was awake and completely conscious, hearing everything. How could they not know?

  Mom? You’re right here, and you can’t hear me. Tilly! Get in here, come into my room. I need my sister! She’s the one.

  Of everyone here, all these people I loved, Tilly spoke my language. She got me. One look and she’d know.

  Hurry, Tilly, I need you.

  The nurse entered, saying hi to my mother and Isabel, blocking my view of everyone.

  Nurse, I see you holding that needle, tapping the IV. I can’t make you hear, but will you look into my eyes? Please, no more medication, not now. I need to stay alert, to make my family know I am here.

  I could see out the hospital window. The sky was blue, and there were big fluffy white clouds moving past, just outside. I could see their shadows on the brick wall opposite the window.

  Help me help me help me.

  The nurse bustled around me.

  No, stop filling the syringe from that little bottle of clear liquid. Please, no, don’t inject it into my IV. You know it’s going to make me go to sleep, don’t you? That’s what keeps happening, that is why I have to begin again, to remember all over again, to get through the grogginess of the medication. I need to stay awake, to get you to notice me.

  And this was my favorite nurse, an older, African American woman. I saw her before, today and yesterday and the day before, but it was like encountering her for the first time again and again, remembering and forgetting, a horrible cycle.

  Right now I decided to call her Pearl because she wore a necklace with three pearls on a chain, and I heard her telling Mom, “Each one represents one of my daughters.”

  “My baby, my Roo,” my mother said, starting to sob. She clutched Pearl’s hand. “What am I going to do?”

  “You stay strong for her,” Pearl said. “Her doctor is the best there is, you can count on that. Dr. Danfor
th is taking good care of her.”

  “Will she wake up? Will she come out of the coma?”

  “It’s early days yet,” Pearl said. “We live with a different clock on this floor. We don’t keep time the same way. You just be with her when you can. And we’ll be here with her when you can’t.”

  “My baby,” my mother said again. “I can’t stand to see her this way.”

  But I’m okay, I wanted to scream. I am here! Please see me, talk to ME.

  The tall, thin neurology intern who always brooded and studied me and took notes and looked into my eyes came into the room. I always hoped he would see, but he never did. He’d done test after test, but he didn’t know I was there. And he said very little. I named him Dr. Quiet.

  “Mrs. McCabe has questions,” Pearl said to Dr. Quiet.

  So do I—talk to me. I am freaking awake!

  But they didn’t.

  “The stroke caused damage,” Dr. Quiet said. “And as long as she’s in the coma, we have to watch and wait.”

  Watch and wait? That’s what they teach you in med school? It’s not a coma—I am awake and shrieking; can’t you hear me?

  “How long will the coma last?” my mother asked.

  “You’ll have to discuss that with Dr. Danforth,” Dr. Quiet said.

  Right. My main doctor was Dr. Sarah Danforth. She was a specialist in pediatric neurovascular disease. I remembered that she introduced herself by name, looking me in the eyes, and even though she thought I couldn’t hear, I appreciated her treating me as if I were real. She was brilliant but kind; she made rounds with a little teddy bear pinned to the lapel of her white lab coat. She had a Boston accent. Would a coma patient you have to watch and wait for know that? But I hadn’t seen her today.

  Or had I? It felt so blurry. I was used to having my mind sharp and clear.

  Isabel wiped something sticky from my eyes. I tried to blink, to capture her attention, but I couldn’t get my eyelids to move. She seemed focused on her task, cleaning gunk from my eyes, then my mouth. This was awful, gross, having my best friend attend to me this way.

  Isabel came from Mexico when we were in fourth grade, and it was best friends at first sight. Back then she spoke very little English—her family hung out mainly with other Mexicans who had immigrated here, her cousins and a group of family friends who had come from the same Mexican town to the Connecticut shoreline to find restaurant work.

  Isabel credited me with how quickly she learned English, because I was a pedantic little thing with a tiny blackboard and a bunch of storybooks, and I’d go through them with her, word by word, nearly every day after school, and teach her the names of things as we walked the tide line and picked up smooth beach stones. She called them piedras de amistad: friendship stones.

  “Well, you’re a sweetheart,” Pearl said to Isabel now.

  And she was and I loved her, but right now I was yelling at her—Why can’t you help me, why won’t you see me?

  My throat was raw from strain, and my heart was tired. I wanted to stay awake, but I couldn’t. The medicine was rushing through me now; I felt it in my tissue, in my bones. I heard Isabel’s milagros rattling—she had a nervous habit of grasping the charms she wore around her neck. Among them was the glass locket containing two white violets I gave her for her thirteenth birthday, the flowers symbolizing two best friends.

  “Hail Mary,” she whispered, starting to pray again. She was Catholic, very devout.

  Isabel—look at me. Don’t pray, talk to me.

  “Full of grace,” she continued, the milagros clanking against my bed rail.

  When she kissed my cheek, I smelled her lemon shampoo, and I just wanted to cry. I heard the rest of the prayer, and then she stopped speaking.

  I love the smell of lemons, I wanted to say. I want to go outside with you and run on the beach. I want to go home. I am so scared, I wanted to tell her. And I also wanted to push her away, as hard as I could. Get Tilly, I wanted to say. You don’t see me, you don’t love me like Tilly. Get me my sister. She’s the only one. The only one who can help me. Oh, Tilly.

  And it worked, because Tilly finally came through the door. She barreled right past my mother and Isabel and Pearl. And Newton was behind her, and my heart felt liquid with love for him.

  Tilly, I said, but of course she didn’t hear me.

  No one heard me. The medication filled my system yet again, and I fell asleep.

  My first day back at school, walking up the stone steps, knowing Roo wasn’t going to be there, I felt the heat of everyone’s mad curiosity.

  Eyes on me as I walked down the hall, stopped at my locker. All through morning classes, I kept thinking, Who cares about equations, about Ralph Waldo Emerson, about minerals in the soil of Chile, about the first submarine, when Roo could die any minute? I need to be back at the hospital.

  At lunch I met TEN in the cafeteria. Emily and Nona know I call them my quasi-besties, and they get it, because of course my real best friend is my sister. But put the first initials of Tilly, Emily, and Nona together and there you have it—the childhood name of our club, TEN. We’ve known one another our whole lives, even before we were born because our mothers had sat together on the beach back when they were pregnant with us.

  “How is she?” Nona asked.

  “The same,” I said, scrunched down in my seat, wearing Roo’s Nantucket hoodie with my jeans and boots.

  “Holding her own,” Emily said, always so loving and positive. She and I were about the same height, i.e., short. She had silky, light-brown hair and unusual amber-colored eyes, and she wore glasses: Today’s pair were cat eyed with blue frames. Her dress—probably made by her mother, who was a seamstress—had tiny red and blue flowers all over it. On anyone else it would have been reminiscent of a tablecloth, but Em pulled it off with a chunky silver-link belt and made it look country chic.

  I smiled at her and tried to eat my sandwich, but it tasted like sawdust.

  “What happened?” Nona asked. “You hardly told us anything.”

  “I was slightly busy,” I said.

  “Too busy to tell us what’s really going on? All you had to do was text.”

  I was ticked, but this was quintessential Nona. She always pushed, and sometimes leaned close to the edge of being slightly offensive. She occasionally made me feel she wasn’t completely on my side—the opposite of Em, who was always caring, and often the peacemaker.

  Today, Nona was wearing a black leather jacket in her ongoing attempt to look older and tougher than she was. She had turquoise eyes and white-blond hair that had started turning a little darker—still blond, but more yellow than white—once she turned fourteen. This year, she gave herself an asymmetrical haircut: buzzed the left side of her head, and tragically the hair underneath was almost brown. The overall effect, as Em and I had discussed on the phone a few days before the accident, wasn’t quite working.

  “Uh, her car flipped,” I said, as if I hadn’t already told her, and as if the news hadn’t reported it a hundred times.

  “It just seems so random,” Nona said. “That’s, like, the straightest part of the road.”

  “Yeah, it was icy.”

  “I know, but it’s crazy she lost control.”

  “She didn’t want to hit the dog.”

  “I was just thinking, it had to be the brakes, or the steering. Maybe there was a malfunction with the car. Your mother could sue.”

  “That’s gross. You sound like a lawyer on TV,” I said, even though I had similar lawsuit thoughts when reading that awful article.

  “I try,” Nona said.

  But the weird thing was, she’d gotten me thinking, and NOT about lawsuits. Roo’s accident did happen on a straightaway. And if the dog was all the way off the road, on the shoulder, why would Roo have had to maneuver at all?

  The toxicology report had come back negative—of course Roo hadn’t been drinking or taking drugs. But did the newspaper print the update? No. The cops had returned her camera and
backpack to us. They checked the digital photographs, which provided a map of the last half hour before the crash: gorgeous shots of the saltwater marshes and tidal flats, ones she obviously planned to submit to the contest. Her phone was missing, which was weird. They figured she must have lost it at one of her last stops.

  It had probably slipped out of her jacket pocket; she wouldn’t even notice, the way she got so involved in her photography. The rest of the world disappeared when she had her eye on the viewfinder. If I’d been there, I’d have teased her the way I always did.

  “Hey, Roo, photograph this!” I’d said to her a week ago, walking on my hands along the high tide line.

  She had been crouched down in the sand, photographing the way the February wind blew the soft, creamy white tops off the waves. She had wanted to capture the delicate saltwater lace foam against the powerful, almost solid-looking steely-gray waves.

  “Over here!” I called. I was upside down, skittering through the nasty dry seaweed on my hands, and gravity had pulled my jacket and shirt down over my face. My bare midriff was all goose bumps.

  “Hang on a minute, Tilly,” she called back. “I want to get this set.”

  “No, check this out!” I clamored as annoyingly as possible, but she stayed focused on those waves. I wished I had a talent like hers, but I took the worst pictures, when I even bothered trying. I couldn’t seem to stay still long enough, and my photos always looked like blurs of movement, caused by me whirling around or getting too excited and jumping up and down.

  I wound up doing somersaults down the beach, getting my hair all sandy. Finally, when Roo had gotten the shots she wanted, she turned and I did one last triumphant handstand. She chuckled—I could always make Roo laugh—and clicked a photo of me.

  The next morning, at breakfast, I found she’d printed out the photo and propped it up in the fruit bowl. She thought it was hilarious. Our mother was not amused. I sat there eating my cereal, staring at the picture. Roo had caught me at the exact perfect moment—my hands in the sand, my feet straight up in the air, my bare belly winter white, my pink striped bra the only bright spot in the frigid beach landscape. But my shirt hadn’t quite covered my face, and you could see me smiling with total love at my sister.