My Sister's Keeper Read online

  "I just--"

  She holds up her hand like the privacy partition in a cab. She shakes her head.

  On the backseat, I slide sideways and curl my feet up, facing to the rear, so that all I see is black.

  "Brian," my mother says. "You missed it again."

  *

  When we walk in, my mother steams past Kate, who opened the door for us, and past Jesse, who is watching what looks like the scrambled Playboy channel on TV. In the kitchen, she opens cabinets and bangs them shut. She takes food from the refrigerator and smacks it onto the table.

  "Hey," my father says to Kate. "How're you feeling?"

  She ignores him, pushing into the kitchen. "What happened?"

  "What happened. Well." My mother pins me with a gaze. "Why don't you ask your sister what happened?"

  Kate turns to me, all eyes.

  "Amazing how quiet you are now, when a judge isn't listening," my mother says.

  Jesse turns off the television. "She made you talk to a judge? Damn, Anna."

  My mother closes her eyes. "Jesse, you know, now would be a good time for you to leave."

  "You don't have to ask me twice," he says, his voice full of broken glass. We hear the front door open and shut, a whole story.

  "Sara." My father steps into the room. "We all need to cool off a little."

  "I have one child who's just signed her sister's death sentence, and I'm supposed to cool off?"

  The kitchen gets so silent we can hear the refrigerator whispering. My mother's words hang like too-ripe fruit, and when they fall on the floor and burst, she shudders into motion. "Kate," she says, hurrying toward my sister, her arms already outstretched. "Kate, I shouldn't have said that. It's not what I meant."

  In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do. Kate covers her mouth with her hand. She backs out of the kitchen door, bumping into my father, who fumbles but cannot catch her as she scrambles upstairs. I hear the door to our room slam shut. My mother, of course, goes after her.

  So I do what I do best. I move in the opposite direction.

  *

  Is there any place on earth that smells better than a Laundromat? It's like a rainy Sunday when you don't have to get out from under your covers, or like lying back on the grass your father's just mowed--comfort food for your nose. When I was little my mom would take hot clothes out of the dryer and dump them on top of me where I was sitting on the couch. I used to pretend they were a single skin, that I was curled tight beneath them like one large heart.

  The other thing I like is that Laundromats draw lonely people like metal to magnets. There's a guy passed out on a bank of chairs in the back, with army boots and a T-shirt that says Nostradamus Was an Optimist. A woman at the folding table sifts through a heap of men's button-down shirts, sniffing back tears. Put ten people together in a Laundromat and chances are you won't be the one who's worst off.

  I sit down across from a bank of washers and try to match up the clothes with the people waiting. The pink panties and lace nightgown belong to the girl who is reading a romance novel. The woolly red socks and checkered shirt are the skanky sleeping student. The soccer jerseys and kiddie overalls come from the toddler who keeps handing filmy white dryer sheets to her mom, oblivious on a cell phone. What kind of person can afford a cell phone, but not her own washer and dryer?

  I play a game with myself, sometimes, and try to imagine what it would be like to be the person whose clothes are spinning in front of me. If I were washing those carpenter jeans, maybe I'd be a roofer in Phoenix, my arms strong and my back tan. If I had those flowered sheets, I might be on break from Harvard, studying criminal profiling. If I owned that satin cape, I might have season tickets to the ballet. And then I try to picture myself doing any of these things and I can't. All I can ever see is me, being a donor for Kate, each time stretching to the next.

  Kate and I are Siamese twins; you just can't see the spot where we're connected. Which makes separation that much more difficult.

  When I look up the girl who works the Laundromat is standing over me, with her lip ring and blue streaked dreadlocks. "You need change?" she asks.

  To tell you the truth, I'm afraid to hear my own answer.

  JESSE

  I AM THE KID WHO PLAYED with matches. I used to steal them from the shelf above the refrigerator, take them into my parents' bathroom. Jean Nate Bath Splash ignites, did you know that? Spill it, strike, and you can set fire to the floor. It burns blue, and when the alcohol is gone, it stops.

  Once, Anna walked in on me when I was in the bathroom. "Hey," I said. "Check this out." I dribbled some Jean Nate on the floor, her initials. Then I torched them. I figured she'd run screaming like a tattletale, but instead she sat right down on the edge of the bathtub. She reached for the bottle of Jean Nate, made some loopy design on the tiles, and told me to do it again.

  Anna is the only proof I have that I was born into this family, instead of dropped off on the doorstep by some Bonnie and Clyde couple that ran off into the night. On the surface, we're polar opposites. Under the skin, though, we're the same: people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong.

  *

  Fuck them all. I ought to have that tattooed on my forehead, for all the times I've thought it. Usually I am in transit, speeding in my Jeep until my lungs give out. Today, I'm driving ninety-five down 95. I weave in and out of traffic, sewing up a scar. People yell at me behind their closed windows. I give them the finger.

  It would solve a thousand problems if I rolled the Jeep over an embankment. It's not like I haven't thought about it, you know. On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive--the sum of the parts equals more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart.

  To my dismay, though, I get all the way to the exit without a scratch. I peel off the ramp and tool along Allens Avenue. There's an underpass there where I know I'll find Duracell Dan. He's a homeless dude, Vietnam vet, who spends most of his time collecting batteries that people toss into the trash. What the hell he does with them, I don't know. He opens them up, I know that much. He says the CIA hides messages for all its operatives in Energizer double-As, that the FBI sticks to Evereadys.

  Dan and I have a deal: I bring him a McDonald's Value Meal a few times a week, and in return, he watches over my stuff. I find him huddled over the astrology book that he considers his manifesto. "Dan," I say, getting out of the car and handing him his Big Mac. "What's up?"

  He squints at me. "The moon's in freaking Aquarius." He stuffs a fry into his mouth. "I never should have gotten out of bed."

  If Dan has a bed, it's news to me. "Sorry about that," I say. "Got my stuff?"

  He jerks his head to the barrels behind the concrete pylon where he keeps my things. The perchloric acid filched from the chemistry lab at the high school is intact; in another barrel is the sawdust. I hike the stuffed pillowcase under my arm and haul it to the car. I find him waiting at the door. "Thanks."

  He leans against the car, won't let me get inside. "They gave me a message for you."

  Even though everything that comes out of Dan's mouth is total bullshit, my stomach rolls over. "Who did?"

  He looks down the road, then back at me. "You know." Leaning closer, he whispers, "Think twice."

  "That was the message?"

  Dan nods. "Yeah. It was that, or Drink twice. I can't be sure."

  "That advice I might actually listen to." I shove him a little, so that I can get into the car. He is lighter than you'd think, like whatever was inside him was used up long ago. With that reasoning, it's a wonder I don't float off into the sky. "Later," I tell him, and then I drive toward the warehouse I've been watching.

  I look for places like me: big, hollow, forgot