Hide.

Jennifer Tem

                                                                                The Sisters                                                                          pg 1

I roll off of the comforter, struggling for air. Water, I need water. Everything is blurry and for a moment I think I’ve lost the ability to focus. When my eyes do decide to work, nerves and synapses quickly follow and I’m caught in a depression so outstanding that it cripples me and I fall to the floor. I’m in my parent’s house. Mom’s house. I’m 29. I’m in my parent’s house. I’m in their living room. It’s ok, I tell myself, it’s ok. It’s fine, you are fine.

- Marion- my brain screams. I find myself staring at a picture of my sister and I that adorns the beige and brown wall. Marion. Where is she? I ask myself.

Sunday, July in the park. It’s hot and sunny and I need water. My cousin is there, and my aunt, and my mother. My sisters and I pose for the picture. Marion on my left with her daughter in her lap and my youngest sister, Christine, next to her with her daughter in her lap. I cradle a coke in my hands.

Christine, never next to me, always next to Marion. She’s not even in the picture on the wall. Our lives are so divided from each other, just because…oh! Because I did what I did…I left when she was pregnant. I came back and she was someone else, a mother, a wife; and we couldn’t laugh like we used to. We used to laugh secret laughs, same humor, endless laughs. I did what I did because I couldn’t love her..…I couldn’t forgive Christine for getting pregnant at 17.

We were in the same downward spiral. Only Marion survived it; perhaps because she spent more time with him. Perhaps because she was the one who was there when he fell to the ground, the one who called 911, the one with him in his final moments. Christine and I were 10 miles away, and she was only 15..only 15! I packed my 15 year old sister in my car and drove like a maniac to the hospital…all the while assuring her that it was going to be ok, that he’s ok.  “He’ll be ok, right?” she asked me, over and over. “Yes, yes” I assured her, fighting back tears of my own. “He’ll be ok.”

When we got there the lady at the entrance asked our name and when I told her she said they had a “special room” set up for us. I have never in my life felt such panic and despair. He’s dead. I thought, tears falling.  SPECIAL ROOM, the words still cause my heart to skip beats. They were there already,  Marion and my mom, like some kind of conspiracy. I wanted to scream at Marion…”WHY DIDN’T YOU CALL US FIRST???” But that would come later, in the full blown anger stage of grief. For now I just collapsed on the seat and a divide was created  that night that would separate all of us into our own individual hells and last for many years.

Christine lived hers by getting raped and later having a baby from a convict who was almost twice her age. The little girl who was my sister was gone.  I wanted to kill him, the man. My mother asked me to, and I almost had him killed. I wanted to kill myself too, because I introduced her to him one day when she visited the drug house I was occupying.  I was a shit role model because my own hell was so encompassing. I drank every night, all night. I got kicked out of bars, got in fights, had sex with men I didn’t even like. My best friend told me he didn’t know me anymore and left me on the floor of a bar.  My hell was real and I couldn’t help her with hers. She still had the horse they rode together, her and Dad. She wouldn’t even go to see it. I couldn’t understand.

I acquired a ticket to go to Turkey while she was pregnant. I remember the night before I left. She begged me not to go. “I’m pregnant Jen” she said, tears in her eyes. “You won’t be here for the birth.” “I’ll be back in two weeks” I said. We both knew I was lying. Two weeks wouldn’t cure my suffering.  Two weeks turned into two years and even Marion was angry when I returned. She didn’t talk to me for months. They didn’t ask any questions. Why would they? I deserted them.

I sobbed into my parent’s wooden floor, hands over my eyes. Christine, I’ll call her. I’ll tell her I’m sorry, I’ll tell her I love her. I stumble for my purse, for my phone. I go through the conversation in

my head and it’s not the wife, the mother I’m talking to, but that 15 year old girl who needed her oldest sister to tell her everything was all right. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t all right and he died and I lied to her.  Five minutes before Mom called us with the news that dad was in the hospital Christine and I were laughing so hard at Trogdor. It would be the last time I ever heard her laugh like that. I closed the phone.  I couldn’t make the call. Too much time had passed and nothing had changed for any of us, we just became better at hiding.