Sister’s Keeper
Victoria Rowlett
Le Boudoir, Henri Matisse
Word Count 1716
My sister comes to visit me on the bus every Saturday morning, 40 miles down the interstate, looking forward to it with the relish most would reserve for a Bali vacation. She loves the bus ride, the fact that, as she proudly tells the other group home residents, she’s going to visit her big sister. This makes her special; few of the others have any diversion from the sitting and smoking that comprises their days.
She was the smartest in a family of brains, student body president, a gifted pianist who could sit down at a lobby piano and play the Moonlight Sonata or Bela Bartok even after she was diagnosed with schizophrenia at eighteen. She battled addiction to meth, then alcohol, married a disturbed man who knocked her around until our father and brother threatened to beat him up if he ever touched Kathy again, struggled with the weight gains and losses of anorexia nervosa and, her last decade after losing her husband, walked at least three and often six miles a day to quell the voices in her head. When I’d try to join her I’d have to jog to keep up, when I’d try to talk, she’d ignore me. “Slow down, Kath,” I’d call.
“I don’t like to talk when I’m walking, Vicki, I like my own thoughts” she’d answer then tuck her head and power on.
The instant she arrives at the bus stop, she reveals her mood, moving toward me with purpose, head down, full steam ahead, a freighter cutting a deep wake through the sea. She wears a riotous array of colors. A hot-pink t-shirt beneath a blue shirt over red knit pants three inches short of her pink tennis shoes, a red and yellow wool scarf around her neck, a pink Sherpa hat covering all but a few strands of her cropped salt and pepper hair. Over one arm, hangs a 1950’s Naugahyde handbag, her Marlboros peering over the side; her other hand clutches the Starbucks coffee mug that is her equivalent of a comfort dog.
The author, on right, with her sister
“Vicki!” she calls. “VICKI,” more demanding this time. Kathy can only see the shape of me because she refuses to wear glasses. She says they reveal the outside world too clearly. She stumbles over a tree root sprouting up out of the pavement. She lacks a center-front tooth and spews spittle in her greeting. “I need to go to the emergency room. I’m having a panic attack and I need to get some Clonazepam. I had to go to the bathroom on the bus and I couldn’t wait and my pants are wet.”
My Happy Birthday smile devolves into a tight frown as I open the passenger-side door and lean in to place a shopping bag on her seat. Kathy smells of urine, a sign that she refuses to do what she knows will arrest her incontinence. “Just don’t drink anything after 3 pm,” I tell her and she says nothing. I’ve given up, concluding that she’s chosen to make a stand on one of the few things she can control in a life otherwise dominated by uncontrollable inner voices and hallucinations. As we pull away from the curb, she squares her bottom on the bag and I steel myself for the next move.
We’d talked earlier in the week about celebrating her birthday. “Birthdays, Birthdays, Birthdays—they never seem to go right. Looking forward is the best part. During and after is a letdown,” she’d said. Her birthday carried the freight of past melt-downs.
On Tuesday, Kathy called. “There’s somebody here saying they’ve been with you, that you’ve been here when I’m not here. Have you been coming here and taking Jennifer out for coffee without me?”
“No, Kath. I don’t even know a Jennifer.”
On Wednesday night, she left a message. “Hi Vicki, it’s Kathy. I heard a dog outside that sounded like True. I’m sorry, it just seems to be starting up again.”
Half an hour later she left a sharper message. “Vicki, it’s Kathy. There’s someone here wearing your tennis shoes and somebody went by in your pants. Why are you doing this to me? You’re supposed to be my sister but you’re hurting me deeply when you make fun of me like this. You pretend to be a good person but they know all about you…”
An hour later, she started to leave another message and I ran to pick up the phone. “What do you want?” I asked without greeting, frustration shoving patience aside.
“They’re doing it to me again, they’re wearing your shoes and your pants. Why are you doing this to me?” Kathy began, but I interrupted. “Kathy, get a grip, go to bed, it’s late and you’re tired.”
“I’M NOT TIRED” her voice rose. “IT’S WHAT YOU’RE DOING TO ME, MAKING FUN OF ME AND THEY’RE ALL LAUGHING.”
“Kathy, STOP. Don’t call me again tonight.” I hung up before she could respond.
The next day she left me alone.
Friday, she called to apologize. “I know it’s your illness talking, Kath, but I get really tired of your imagining I’m persecuting you.” I expected her to fold, contrite in the apologetic ritual that typically follows the florid imaginings, but because I’ve broken script by not categorically forgiving, she came back with a hard right. “I'm not imagining anything,” she said.
I didn’t want to have the conversation. “Good bye, Kathy,” I said seething, with nowhere to put it because she’s mentally ill and can’t help herself. But I was surprised at the vehemence of her response and that she was ready to fight. Did she truly believe what she accused me of? I could make myself crazy trying to interpret her psychosis as if it were rational thought.
On the drive to get coffee and panties, I try to untangle the threads of my sister’s thinking. “What’s going on, Kath, why are you so anxious? It’s your birthday, we’re going to have a good day.”
“Somebody took my meds and when I told the staff person she wouldn’t give me more, she said I had to wait until tonight.”
“Who took your meds? Are you sure you didn’t take them and just want more because you were feeling anxious about your birthday? Besides, you don’t take Clonazepam regularly, do you?”
“No, but I NEED SOME TODAY,” Kathy says. “My heart is racing and I don’t think I can wait until tonight. I need a cup of coffee. I had to wait in line to talk to the staff person and I haven’t had any coffee.”
“All right, Kath. Why don’t we go get coffee and carrot cake? We’ll start our day with cake. And then we’ll go to the museum, or for a walk, or a movie, whatever you want to do. And if you’re not feeling better after that, we’ll go to the emergency room. Ok? I’m here, we’re together, let’s try to have a good day.”
Kathy squirms, then looks out the window, considering her next move. “I need a cigarette, can I smoke in the car?” she asks, knowing I hated her smoking. Knowing also that if she compromises on her demand to go to the emergency room to get drugs, then concessions were owed to her. “Let’s go get coffee and cake,” she says.. “I don’t have any money, Vicki, but if you’ll pay I’ll pay you back.”
“Kathy! It’s my treat, it’s your birthday. Where do you want to go?”
Aware her birthday is the trump card, she digs into her purse for her cigarettes and pulls out a wad of paper bag. “I brought you some banana bread. They didn’t have any blueberry muffins.” She lights up, blows smoke out the open window and settles into her seat.
Seventeen days after her birthday, a Dodge Ram truck slammed into Kathy in a crosswalk, catapulting her up onto the hood, slamming her back down head first onto the pavement. Later, in the ICU, she managed to say “Hi Dad,” as he held her head for a CT scan, “I made a mistake.” She never spoke again. The ten days I sat beside her before she died, I watched her pear-shaped body and spindly legs for the slightest twitch to prove her brain was alive. As the fluids moved through the long tubes connected to her body and the mechanical respirator delivered air into her lungs, I thought about my sister.
If you asked me if we were close, I would not know how to answer. Her mental illness was a barrier between us, a carapace that protected her, the voices and hallucinations both a solace and a defense against intolerable feelings of vulnerability and aloneness. Her unpredictability left me wary, perpetually on guard. I also felt guilty that I resented her illness, and ashamed that I longed for a ‘normal’ sister. Sitting beside her bed reflecting on the dance dictated by her illness, the to-ing and fro-ing between her paranoia and her manifestations of appropriateness, 45 years struggling to connect as sisters through the barriers, I realized her soul was a mystery to me.
Years later I discovered a letter, apparently read, then filed away and forgotten a long time ago:
To Vicky Jan (my only sister)
Well, the time has come for me to admit that my life did not work
out. It’s not that it’s bad or that I feel like a failure, but I have a very committed feeling that I don’t really fit into this world at all. It used to
feel kind of nifty to be different, but now it has become a completely
alone experience. I mean completely alone. I have no friends at all
though I live around lots of people. Doesn’t it just hit you how you can
be so solitary surrounded by everybody? I’ve come to believe that
everybody and now see myself as nobody.
But Vicky, you are somebody to me. You’re one of the only
people that has any real meaning to me. I deeply hope that you can
succeed because you are truly a good person. Whatever it is you want
I hope it comes true. I’m offering any amount of strength I can fill you with.
And, believe me, that’s a compliment.
With all my love, Kathy.
Victoria lives in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, enduring the infernal cauldron of summer in order to pursue her passions for horses and writing. The world comes clearer with a pen in her hand; horses have given her the courage to write. She’s been published in the Washington State Bar News.