Sisterland Read online

  Rosie curled toward me then, tapping my arm, and I turned—awkwardly, because of how I was holding Owen—to look at her. She said, “Rosie wants a banana.”

  “In the morning, sweetheart.”

  Jeremy had gone to the window that faced the street, and he parted the curtains. “Everyone’s lights are on,” he said.

  “A monkey eats a banana peel,” Rosie declared. “But not people.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “It would make us sick.”

  Jeremy was typing on his phone. After a minute, he said, “There’s nothing about it online yet.” He looked up. “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s more asleep than awake, but will you get an extra binky just in case?” Surely this was evidence of the insularity of our lives: that unless otherwise specified, whenever Jeremy or I said he, we meant our son, and whenever we said she, we meant our daughter. On a regular basis, we sent each other texts consisting in their entirety of one letter and one punctuation mark: R? for How’s Rosie doing? and O? for How’s Owen? And surely it was this insularity that so irritated Vi, whereas to me, the fact that my life was suburban and conventional was a victory.

  Jeremy returned from Owen’s room with a second pacifier, handed it to me, and lay down before turning off the light on his nightstand. Then—I whispered, because whispering seemed more appropriate in the dark—I said, “So if there are aftershocks, we just stay put?”

  “And keep away from windows. That’s pretty much all I could find on the FEMA site.”

  “Thanks for checking.” Over Owen’s head, I reached out to rub Jeremy’s shoulder.

  I felt them falling asleep one by one then, my son, my daughter, and my husband. Awake alone, I experienced a gratitude for my life and our family, the four of us together, accounted for and okay. In contrast to the agitation I’d been gripped by before the earthquake, I was filled with calmness, a sense that we’d passed safely through a minor scare—like when you speed up too fast in slow highway traffic and almost hit the car in front of you but then you don’t. The argument with Vi, inflated prior to the quake, shrank to its true size; it was insignificant. My sister and I had spent three decades bickering and making up.

  But now that several years have passed, it pains me to remember this night because I was wrong. Although we were safe in that moment, we hadn’t passed through anything. Nothing was concluding, nothing was finished; everything was just beginning. And though my powers weren’t what they once had been, though I no longer considered myself truly psychic, I still should have been able to anticipate what would happen next.

  Chapter 2

  Our routine in the morning was that we’d awaken around six-fifteen either to Owen’s squeaks on the monitor on my nightstand or to Rosie chatting with herself on the monitor on Jeremy’s nightstand. I’d go nurse Owen while Jeremy showered, then he’d take both children downstairs to eat while I showered. When I joined them, they’d have moved into the living room, which was also our playroom, and I’d be only halfway down the steps before Rosie began making excited announcements about my appearance—“Mama has a blue shirt!”—or describing her own activities. As I reached the bottom step, she’d fling herself into my arms, as if we were reuniting after many years apart. (How flattering motherhood was, when they weren’t smearing food on my clothes or sneezing into my mouth.)

  On this morning, Rosie squatted by the bookshelf and shouted, “Rosie’s driving a school bus!”

  Jeremy, who was holding his phone and Owen, said, “The earthquake had a magnitude of 4.9, and the epicenter was in Terre Haute, Indiana.”

  “Have you talked to Courtney yet?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I’ll wait until I see her at school. I’m guessing she’s already fielding calls from the media.”

  As soon as I sat on the couch, Owen began kicking his legs and reaching for me. I lifted my arms, and as Jeremy passed him over, he said, “By the way, your dad just called. He wants to know if you can take him grocery shopping tomorrow instead of today.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Well, he said he felt the earthquake, but he didn’t seem worked up about it.”

  “Since when does my dad call at seven A.M.?”

  “Go call him now if you’re worried.”

  I held Owen back toward Jeremy. He began to cry, and as I walked to the kitchen, I heard Jeremy say, “Really, Owen? Am I really that bad?”

  From our cordless phone, I called my father’s apartment. After he answered, I said, “So you felt the earthquake, too?”

  “Just enough to know what it was,” my father said. “I’m afraid I have to postpone our trip to the store this afternoon. Will tomorrow work for you?”

  “Tomorrow’s your birthday dinner, Dad.” My father still drove—he wasn’t supposed to at night but was fine during the day—but even so, since my mother’s death ten years before, I’d taken him grocery shopping once a week. We’d get deli meat and sliced cheese for his lunches and plan out his dinners, for which he’d buy himself only the cheapest cuts of beef and pork.

  “I hope you’re not planning anything fancy,” my father said.

  “I promise it’ll be very low-key. What do you have to do this afternoon?”

  “I’ll be giving a lift to your sister. I’m sure you know she has a date.” Though my father didn’t sound like he was complaining, irritation gathered in me. About a year before, around the time my father’s doctor had told him he could no longer drive at night, Vi had stopped driving period. She said she’d had enough of all the jackasses jabbering on their cellphones while going eighty miles an hour; also, not driving was greener. But Vi rarely recycled an aluminum can of Diet Coke, even when a bin was two feet away, and it was obvious that the real explanation was that she’d developed a phobia. I’d meant to get online and do some research, but many months had passed without my doing so. I did get online on a daily basis, usually in the afternoon when Rosie and Owen were both asleep, but once in front of the computer, I’d forget everything I’d meant to do and end up either on Facebook or reading about pregnant celebrities. Meanwhile, Vi showed no inclination to start driving again, and socializing with her and my father, especially during the evening, continued to require elaborate planning.

  “Dad, she can take a taxi to her date,” I said. “She’s not destitute.” Vi was always thousands of dollars in credit card debt, as I had once been, too, but surely she could scrape together cab fare.

  “I don’t mind,” my father said. “She doesn’t think they’ll be more than an hour.”

  “They’re meeting in the afternoon, not at night?”

  “At three o’clock, at a Starbucks in Creve Coeur. Not too far off 270, I believe. Vi said I’m welcome to come in and sit at another table, but I’ll just bring the paper and make myself comfortable in the car.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much fun for you.” My father had also said nothing to suggest that Vi had revealed the gender of her date to him. It was so like my sister to have our almost-seventy-four-year-old father drive her, even to be okay with him following her inside, yet not to bother explaining to him either online dating or her nascent lesbianism. (The first I’d ever heard of Vi being involved with a woman was two summers before, when she’d met someone named Cindy at a spirituality conference in Illinois. Cindy was our age but wore a long gray-and-green batik skirt with a matching flowing shirt and the kind of sandals you’d go river rafting in, and thirty seconds after meeting me, she said in a faux-sympathetic tone, “You give off a very, very tired energy, and you need to make more time for yourself.” When of course I was tired—I had a six-month-old baby! Vi hadn’t introduced Cindy to our father, and a few weeks later, Vi had told me she and Cindy were no longer on speaking terms. Since then, Vi hadn’t, to my knowledge, dated anyone.)

  I said to my father, “I have a question for you about tomorrow. It’s just as easy for Jeremy to grill salmon or steak, and since it’s your birthday, you should decide.”

&n
bsp; “Oh, heavens, I’m not picky.” He was quiet before adding, “Vi seems well these days, doesn’t she? She’s come into her own.”

  My father tended to speak in code, which had to do, I believed, with his midwestern decorum, a discretion so extreme that it precluded direct mention of a wide range of topics. Perhaps the worst thing Jeremy had ever said to me, when we’d been together about six months, was that my father was cold. Jeremy had made this remark after we’d invited my father to hear the symphony and he’d declined without giving any reason, and the way Jeremy had said it had been as if this view was a shared understanding we had instead of a scathing observation on his part. “Well, I’ve never heard him say ‘I love you,’ ” Jeremy had added. “I’ve never heard him give you a compliment.” When I began to cry, I think Jeremy was shocked. But to me, my father had always been the kind, warm parent. He was reticent, yes, but he wasn’t cold.

  In this moment, however, I truly had no idea what my father was talking about when he said Vi was doing well: Her job, which I had long assumed was as much a source of discomfort for him as it was for me? The fact that she had a date?

  I said, “I guess she does seem good.” That she and I had had a fight wasn’t worth burdening my father with. “All right,” I added. “So Jeremy will get you tomorrow at five o’clock.”

  Back in the living room, I said, “My dad is driving Vi to her date, but I don’t even think Vi’s told him it’s a woman.” The night before, I had recounted to Jeremy my disagreement with Vi at Hacienda, including the part where she’d declared that children were a problem people created then congratulated themselves for solving, at which point Jeremy had laughed and said, “She’s right.”

  I said, “I assumed the woman was picking her up, but they’re meeting this afternoon at a Starbucks in Creve Coeur.”

  “How romantic,” Jeremy said.

  “I know, right?” Even though I wasn’t exactly rooting for a thriving lesbian romance for my sister, she’d be better off meeting the IT consultant at night for a drink. How could you possibly fall in love off Interstate 270, on a Thursday afternoon? As I dropped to my knees and began picking up blocks that were strewn across the rug, I said, “So I think for his birthday dinner, my dad wants steak.”

  A few minutes after twelve, Rosie pounded on the Wheelings’ door while I unfastened the various harnesses keeping Owen strapped into his half of the double stroller. From the porch, I could hear the television in their living room, which was never on in the middle of the day. Hank had an odd expression—both perplexed and amused—as he held open the door. “So do you know or do you not know that your sister was just on Channel 5?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you ever feel like there are only six people in St. Louis?” Hank said. “And we’re either married or related to half of them?”

  “If you think that, try having grown up here. Why was Vi on TV?” Although Hank didn’t seem perturbed, my pulse had quickened. Please let it just be a man-on-the-street interview, I thought. Something about the Cardinals or the Highway 40 construction. I followed Rosie inside with Owen in my arms.

  “Hey, Rosie the Riveter,” Hank said, and Amelia, who was Hank and Courtney’s three-year-old daughter and who was standing on the couch, called out, “My mom is on TV!”

  I turned back to Hank. “What’s going on?”

  “Courtney and Vi were in the same news segment about the earthquake.”

  “Why would Vi be—” I started to ask, and Hank said, “I think it’s better if you just watch. I DVR’d it for Courtney.”

  “Is it good or bad?”

  On the wall in one corner of their living room was a large flat-screen TV, and Hank held the remote control toward it. “It’s not that it’s bad,” he said. “But you’ll think it is.”

  I tried not to grip Owen too tightly as I faced the screen. The segment began with a young brunette reporter describing the earthquake that had occurred during the night and providing an overview of the region’s geology. “San Francisco gets more attention,” she said, “but heartland dwellers know that one of the strongest continental earthquakes ever recorded in the U.S. had its epicenter in the Missouri Bootheel, just a few hours south of St. Louis.” Courtney then appeared on-screen, Courtney as in Hank’s wife and Jeremy’s colleague, sitting behind the desk in her office. “In fact, it was a series of between three and five seismic events, the first of which was in December 1811 and the last in February 1812,” she said, and she sounded calm and authoritative. COURTNEY WHEELING, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF GEOPHYSICS, it said in black letters at the bottom of the screen. “At this point, we don’t know if the second and third events on December 16, 1811, were quakes or aftershocks. As for the question of whether we’re living in an active seismic zone right now—”

  Before Courtney could finish, the reporter said, “According to one area woman, the answer is very much so.” Hank laughed, presumably because it seemed obvious that Courtney had been about to say the opposite, and then Vi filled the screen. Seeing her, I flinched. The big, loose purple tunic she wore had seemed unnoteworthy at Hacienda but now appeared garish, and even if she hadn’t been in the same clothes, I’d have guessed she hadn’t slept the night before: There were shadows under her eyes, her face was puffy, and she didn’t have on makeup. I had never been on television myself, but I knew you at least needed foundation.

  “Another earthquake is coming soon. A powerful, powerful earthquake.” In voice-over, as footage showed Vi giving a tour of her living room—the iron candelabra set on the windowsill and the Tibetan prayer flags strung across one wall and the little fountain in the corner, with water bubbling over a pile of stones—the reporter said, “Violet Shramm, a self-described psychic medium living in Rock Hill, claims that the tremors St. Louis residents felt earlier today were a prelude to a much bigger earthquake. No, she doesn’t have proof, but in 2004 she helped Florissant police find nine-year-old kidnapping victim Brady Ogden, she publicly predicted Michael Jackson’s death in June—and she says she had a hunch about the quake that happened early this morning.”

  “I did a reading for a group last night,” Vi told the camera, “and the last thing I said to them was, ‘Be careful, because Mother Earth is very restless right now.’ ”

  I glanced at Hank. “I thought you said it wasn’t that bad.”

  “Well, I wish they weren’t pitted against each other. I’m sure Courtney had no idea.”

  “She looks deranged,” I said, and added, as if it were necessary, “Not Courtney.”

  “Shramm knows she’ll have her skeptics,” the reporter was saying, “but she believes that staying quiet could do more harm than good.”

  “If I can save just one life,” Vi said, “that’s what’s important.”

  The shot shifted to an image of a map with a pulsing red circle over the border between Missouri and Arkansas on one side and Kentucky and Tennessee on the other. “No doubt about it, we’re in a hot zone,” the reporter said. “But according to Washington University’s Wheeling, the Big One could come tomorrow—or never.”

  “It’s no likelier to happen next week than fifty years from now,” Courtney explained, and she looked, I noticed this time around, impeccably tasteful in a gray blouse, a black suit jacket, small silver earrings, and well-applied foundation; her short blond hair was neatly brushed. “Does it hurt to keep emergency supplies in the basement? Not at all. But in terms of daily threats for St. Louisans, I’d say something like obesity far outranks earthquakes.”

  “Oh, God,” I said, and Hank said, “Yeah, she could have chosen a different example.”

  “Every year, GPS instruments record hundreds of instances of seismic activity on and around the New Madrid fault line, yet we feel virtually none of it because it’s not that strong,” Courtney was saying on-screen, and she sounded serene and wise and not sleep-deprived. “The reality is that if you’re using seismometers, you’ll see earthquakes occurring.” She smiled. �
��The earth is always busy.”

  The brunette reporter reappeared in front of Vi’s house, though blessedly without Vi herself anywhere in view. “For St. Louisans rattled first by recent events and now by future predictions, let’s hope not too busy,” the reporter said. “Back to you, Denise.”

  Hank paused the screen, and I turned to him and said, “That was awful.”

  “So Vi’s eccentric,” Hank said. “It’s not illegal.”

  “Kate, Owen spit out his binky.” Amelia was pulling on my hand. “He spit it on the floor.” She held the pacifier up toward me, and I rubbed it against my shirt and stuck it back in Owen’s mouth. I glanced at Rosie, who was setting a blanket over a row of Amelia’s stuffed animals, and I wondered if she realized her aunt had just been on television.

  “Vi must have called the station herself, right?” I said. “I mean, how else would they have found her? It’s not like she’s an expert on earthquakes.” No, the earthquake expert—that was Courtney. The feeling that gripped me in this moment was similar to what I imagined the relatives of an alcoholic must experience when they learn that their parent or child or sibling has gone on another bender: that mix of anger and disappointment and lack of surprise, a blend so exquisite, so familiar, it’s almost like satisfaction. Of course. Of course Vi had had a premonition about something big, and of course, instead of taking the time to think it through, she’d called a television station, and of course she’d let herself be interviewed while wearing no makeup. Why did she always get in her own way? I was embarrassed, yes, but my embarrassment was mostly for her, not me. After all, we no longer had the same last name, no longer looked identical. People I was close to knew I had a twin sister, but acquaintances—my former co-workers, or our neighbors other than the Wheelings—wouldn’t connect me to this strange woman in her purple shirt, with her weird prediction. I said, “I’ll never understand why she likes drawing attention to herself.” After a beat, I added, “And the reason you think Vi is delightfully eccentric is that you’re not from here.” Hank, Courtney, and my husband had all grown up on the East Coast: Courtney outside Philadelphia, Hank in Boston, and Jeremy in northern Virginia.