Angi Becker Stevens
Every afternoon after school, my little sister Francie dies on our couch.
The cause of death is different every day. Sometimes it’s from cholera and sometimes it’s a drug overdose or a gunshot wound. She does her research. She clutches at the right parts of her abdomen: kidneys, liver, heart. Sometimes she’s just delirious, but usually she screams and moans and I go in my room and turn the music up really loud to try and drown it out.
When she had the plague, I said, “Shouldn’t that take longer?”
“I’m taking poetic license,” she said. “I have to be done dying by the time mom gets home.”
Francie knows it would upset mom to come home and find her dying.
Some days she freezes to death and the house is nice and quiet so I can pretend I’m home alone.
No one knows why Francie is obsessed with death. A lot of people we know are gone, but as far as we know they’re all still alive.
“What if your father is dead?” Francie asks me sometimes.
My father and Francie’s father are not the same father.
“He isn’t dead,” I tell her.
“How do you know?”
Sometimes I lie and tell her he sends me birthday cards with a hundred dollars in them. The truth is I don’t know if he’s dead.
Sometimes I think about how it would make me feel if he was dead, and I think that probably it wouldn’t make me feel much of anything.
Before Francie started dying all the time, we used to try to figure out some way that her father could have also been my father, even though our mom didn’t meet him until I was almost three years old. We used to say that maybe they secretly met before that, but mom couldn’t tell anyone because she was still married. We just thought it made more sense for us to be whole sisters instead of half, because we’re more alike than me and my brother, and me and my brother have the same father.
I knew it was just a game, though. Me and Peter have the same nose and it isn’t our mom’s nose. I don’t know if Francie knew it was just a game. She was just a little kid then, before she started dying.
My mom works really hard all the time. She’s the receptionist at a dentist’s office, which I guess isn’t hard work, just sitting behind a desk and answering the phone, but she has to do that all day and then come home and be our mom without anyone around to be our father. And she takes a class here and there at the community college, too. She’ll finish her degree someday, she always says, even just taking one class at a time. Mostly, when I try to think of a word to describe my mom, the word I think of is “tired.” If we really get on her nerves, the worst she ever says is that we make her tired.
Mom doesn’t know that Francie dies on the couch every day, but she knows that Francie talks about dying a lot because Francie drew pictures and wrote stories about dying in school. Mom made Francie start going to therapy, once every two weeks because that’s as often as we can afford.
Francie wants her therapist to be our new father. I tried to tell her it would be against doctor-patient confidentiality or something like that, but she said she didn’t think he had the same rules as a normal doctor.
Me, I’m pretty much done with fathers.
On talk shows, some girls are already pregnant when they’re my age. I can’t imagine being naked in bed with a boy. My mom was only nineteen when she was pregnant with Peter. Now Peter is nineteen. Sometimes I wonder if Peter will ever be anyone’s father.
Peter is the only one Francie never says is dead. Even though we haven’t heard from him in three months, Francie never asks me, “What if Peter’s dead?” Sometimes I secretly worry that might mean that he actually is. But then another postcard comes eventually, with a strange stamp in a language I can’t read, just one postcard for all of us that never says as much as I want it to say.
Our house is a perfectly nice house. It’s small, but it’s not like we’re in a trailer or something. It’s a nice little house in a nice neighborhood with a lot of trees and a lot of bigger houses. It’s not like we’re poor. We’re just okay. I go to a nice school. I get new school clothes every year, from Target mostly, but still. Francie only gets stuck with hand-me-downs for the more expensive stuff, like winter coats and snow boots. A lot of people are just okay.
You’re probably wrong about my father, too. He wasn’t some drunk deadbeat. He was a scientist. He was a rocket scientist. You probably think I’m making that up, but I’m not. He was six years older than my mom, just finishing his PhD when she got pregnant with Peter. He worked at the university after that, but what he really wanted was to go work in the actual space program. Peter said that our father would have taken us with him to California when he got work out there, but our mom wouldn’t go and he wouldn’t stay. I was too young to remember any of it, but I’ve never quite believed him. I’ve always figured that if our father had really wanted us around, he would still call us once in a while or something, maybe fly us out there for Easter break. Half the time there’s still snow here in April, but in California it’s probably warm enough to swim in the ocean. I’ve never even seen the ocean before. Sometimes I stand in the backyard out by our wood pile where the grass is always too long and everything is always damp. I stand there and wonder what makes my mom belong here in the musty Midwest, and what makes some other people belong in places that are dry and bright. I wonder which one I’ll turn out to be.
One night after Francie was sleeping, I went out to the kitchen where my mom was sitting with a cup of coffee and her textbooks spread out on the table, and I asked her, “Do you think Peter is dead?”
“Of course he’s not dead. Why would you even say something like that?”
“We haven’t heard from him in such a long time,” I said.
“He doesn’t always have phones or computers,” my mom said. She laughed, “I don’t even know what country he’s in!”
“Why did he have to go walk around the world?” I asked her. “Why couldn’t he go to college like everyone else?”
“Some people, especially boys, feel like they need to go find themselves,” she told me.
I didn’t understand what it meant to find yourself. I didn’t know how Peter could possibly find himself anyplace we weren’t in. I thought losing yourself was a better phrase for what he was trying to do.
I stood there for a few minutes longer. I wanted to say that Francie dies on the couch, that I don’t know what to do with her anymore, that I get tired sometimes, too. But I saw the way her brow creased and she rubbed at her temple and I thought how I didn’t even know when she found any time to sleep. So instead of saying anything I just gave her a kiss goodnight and went to bed.
Stacey McDaniels has been in my class at school for three or four years at least, but she just moved to my street a couple months ago. She has hair the same brown as mine, only hers is stick straight and super shiny. In the past year, she’s gotten rounder in all the places where I’m still boxy and flat. On the days she stops by after school, I always find excuses to stay outside until I’m sure Francie is done dying in the house.
Stacey teaches me to smoke out behind our garage. She steals Virginia Slims from her mom. In school we’re both good, not really geeks or suck-ups, but the type who are just quiet and don’t make any trouble and get mostly Bs. I like the way it feels to secretly do something I’m not supposed to do. After we stub out our butts, we bury them in the dirt, and Stacey sprays us both with sick-sweet raspberry body spray. We always have dirt caked under our fingernails when we finally go in the house, so it seems like our secret is that we’re some kind of animal, that out behind the garage we become something earthy and primitive.
“Look,” Stacey said one day, pressing her fingertip into my arm. “We have birthmarks in almost the exact same spot.” She slipped her hand quickly into mine and we stayed sitting there in the grass and dirt not moving for a long time. When we kissed, I could taste the smoke in her mouth even though the taste was in my mouth, too.
One time, Peter and I looked for our father on the internet. We found proof of his existence, his name on a few boring reports from the lab out in California, but we couldn’t find anything that would tell us the things we wanted to know: Who was he? What was his life like? Did he think about us? Why did he go?
I told Peter that someday when I had the money to buy a website, I’d buy one and use it to ask our father questions. I’d use his full name and ours, so if he ever googled any of us, he’d find it. Peter said it was a stupid idea, but Peter thinks spending a year walking around with a backpack and sleeping outside is a smart idea, which tells you how much he knows.
Peter has all the power now. By the time we get a postcard from some tiny country we’ve never heard of, the date on it is three weeks old. He’s already moved on to someplace else. There’s nowhere to write him back. His computer is still in his bedroom in the basement. I write him letters there and save them all to a folder on the desktop. He can read them if he ever decides to come home.
Francie told me the other day that in a fire, your eyes pop first, though you’re probably already unconscious from the smoke inhalation at that point. I thought, someone has got to take away this kid’s internet access. It’s not just child molesters lurking out there. It’s all that information, all the things you never need to know.
On Tuesday it was raining, so Stacey and I didn’t go sit behind the garage. I took her down to Peter’s room and turned the stereo up really loud so she wouldn't hear Francie dying. The walls in our house are pretty solid, the old plaster kind. I closed Peter’s door. I locked Peter’s door. We lay down in the bed, on top of the blankets. Her face was a few inches away from mine.
“Aren’t you glad we’ll be in high school next year?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“There are so many more people there,” she said. “It’ll be easier to be someone different.”
“What do you want to be?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just want to start over somewhere new.” Her fingertips were cold on my stomach. They climbed my ribs like a ladder. “Maybe I’ll cut all my hair off. Maybe I’ll dye it black.”
“I like your hair,” I said.
“Matt Cunningham asked me out today,” she said. Her hand slid around to my back. I swallowed hard.
“Did you say yes or no?”
“No, silly,” she said. “Of course I said no.” She popped the clasp on my bra open. Her hand moved up onto my barely-there breast. While we were kissing, I slid my hand up her shirt, unhooked her bra. Her breasts were soft and hard at the same time, firm doughy things.
“Can I sleep over Saturday night?” she asked me.
“Sure,” I said. She rolled on top of me and just stayed there, not moving, just breathing. I liked the weight of her on me, how when she inhaled and her body filled up with air, I thought my ribs would break.
We only have one picture of my father and me. There are other pictures of him and my mom, him and Peter, even of all of us together. But there’s just the one of the two of us, at least that I’ve seen. In the picture, he’s tossing me in the air. I’m maybe ten months old. I’m laughing and he’s laughing. In the picture, he looks like someone you would think was a great dad, but it only makes me uncomfortable, like I’m someone with amnesia, like people are showing me pictures of my family and that even though I believe they’re my family I can’t feel any of the things I’m supposed to feel.
It also makes me uncomfortable when I think that wherever he is, my father remembers me even though I don’t remember him. He changed my diapers and held my hands when I was learning to walk and zipped up my coat for me. It doesn’t seem fair that he gets to remember all that. It’s like having someone watch you when you were sleeping, they get to remember you in a way you can’t remember yourself.
“Doesn’t it make you mad?” Stacey asked me the other day. We were sitting in Peter’s car because it was cold outside and the lock on the passenger side is broken. He always said it didn’t really matter because it was such a piece of shit, whoever wanted it could have it. It’s so old, there are ashtrays even in the back seat. I like using the car lighter, the way you have to press the tip of the cigarette onto the hot red coil.
Stacey is the only person my age who’s ever asked me anything about my father, stuff like what Francie’s therapist would say. I’m not used to anyone my age talking like that, even though I know they all secretly wonder about my father. With me, they act like I’m missing half my face but they don’t want to ask how it happened.
Stacey isn’t like anyone else. Stacey says whatever she’s thinking, without worrying if it will upset someone or not. Sometimes it makes me want to smack her and hug her at the same time.
I know she thought I was just trying to change the subject when I shrugged and said not really, that it didn’t make me mad. But the thing is, you have to know someone in order to be mad at them, and I don't know my father.
What I don’t know how to explain is that when I think about my father, it’s Peter I feel mad at. Because our father stayed until Peter was almost seven. Because Peter remembers him. When we talk about our father, Peter calls him “dad.” My mom probably knew my father better than anyone, but Peter’s the only one who can tell me what it was like to be his kid. But he’s never told me enough. Maybe there’s no such thing as enough. Maybe there just aren’t words for some things.
Now Peter is gone, too, and what I still want to know won’t fit on a postcard.
“Don’t you ever want to find him?” Stacey asked me. “Aren’t you curious?”
I shrugged again. “How much would I ever really know about him, anyway?” She didn’t say anything, then, and I felt glad and sorry that I said the right thing to shut her up. She pushed the car lighter in again, and I grabbed it when it popped out. Looking at the bright coil made me want to push my fingertip into it, not to burn myself, just the same way you want to reach out and touch shiny things. But I just lit another cigarette instead.
Last night, my mom and I stayed up late, like we do sometimes on Fridays after Francie goes to bed. We watched one of the old Cary Grant movies she loves, My Favorite Wife. In the movie, Cary Grant is married to this bitchy woman because he thinks his first wife is dead, but really she’s just been shipwrecked for years and she comes back. It sounds all serious, but it’s mostly funny. I always wonder, though, if it reminds my mom of her husbands, even though my father probably isn’t dead or even shipwrecked.
After the movie, we were sitting there on the couch still watching the black TV, and I asked her “Did you love my father?”
And she said, very plainly, “Yes.”
Then I asked, “Did you love Francie’s father?”
That time she was quiet for a bit longer. “Yes,” she said again. “I loved him. But…” she stopped. I could see her looking through a file cabinet in her head, trying to find the words for what she wanted to say. “I loved him, but not the same. I don’t know if I was ever in love with him. Do you understand?” I nodded, even though I wasn’t completely sure. “I think maybe everyone has one great love,” she said. “The one you never get over.”
“Then why didn’t we go with my father to California?” I asked her.
“Love isn’t always as simple as that,” she said. “Even great love.”
“Do you know where he is now?” I asked.
“Kind of,” she said. “Not really.” I wondered how you could kind of know where someone was. I thought about Peter. She patted my knee. “What makes you so interested in love all of a sudden?”
“Just the movie,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Oh,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if there was a boy."
“No,” I said. “There’s no boy.”
Stacey told me that people have auras, and that some people can see them, that different colored auras mean different things. I don’t really believe in that kind of stuff, but some days I feel like there’s something around me that gets snagged up on the corners of things, that gets caught on every sharp edge.
Earlier this morning, I went downstairs and sat at Peter’s computer. I opened a new document and sat there looking at the blinking cursor for a long time. I started typing a line, deleted it, started again, then deleted it again.
I typed: There are things I wish I could tell you. There are things I don’t think I would be able to tell you even if you were here.
I’m going to be fourteen next week.
I think I’m starting to understand why you left.
I stared at the screen, then deleted it all.
I typed: I feel like the older we get, the less we can say to each other.
I hit save and walked away. I laid down in Peter’s bed and pulled the blankets up to my chin. I turned my head and smashed my face into the pillow and thought how it smelled kind of like Stacey, and kind of like Peter, and kind of like me.
In my head, I’m trying to imagine myself as separate from the rest of them, from my brother and my sister and my mom and even my father, even though I can’t remember what his voice sounded like or how it felt to rush back toward him when he tossed me in the air. But they’re like parts of my skeleton. My brother is my ribs and my sister is my collarbone and my mom is my ankles and my father is my tailbone, that useless part of you that hurts like hell when you fall on it. Sometimes, I think I understand why Peter felt like he had to put oceans between us. I like to picture him waking up in his cramped tent somewhere and stretching his arms and legs and knowing that his aching bones are all his.
One time, Francie was pressed to death, like what they used to do to people sometimes back in the witch trial days. Flat board on the chest, and then they’d keep adding weight. I picture cinder blocks, but that can’t be right. I guess they must have used stones. And even though I don’t want to, I already know that’s what I’m going to think about tonight when Stacey lays her body on top of mine, when I let myself give way.