Pieces of My Sister's Life Read Free Page A

wanted to ship me to ballet school. Which of course he didn’t, so the only type of dance I knew was Modern Movements, which tended to make one look like a flat-footed hippopotamus. But I was painfully sure that dancing stardom was one of those things I would’ve had, if only.
    “If she dances, it’s in a strip club,” Eve said.
    I didn’t react to this, so she added, “On men’s laps.”
    “You’re so full of it,” I said, but the image of our mother (still in ballet shoes) doing a lap dance was now lodged firmly in my mind. “I have this dream sometimes,” I said to shake it, “Mom out on a boat somewhere, and she’s writing in a journal about everything that’s going on, and she’s thinking about when she’ll come back and show us.”
    Eve pulled my hair so tight I felt strands popping from my scalp. “Don’t be an ass, Kerry.”
    I bit the inside of my cheek. It was dumb, sure. Obviously. But part of me still believed it, since it upheld the two basic tenets of childhood, that mommies don’t leave, and daddies don’t lie. Daddy told us when she first left that she was sailing round the world and would be back before we knew it. And for years we’d believed him, had stood for hours at the New Harbor dock waiting for her to emerge from a ferry with a book’s worth of stories and piles of exotic gifts (castanets! berets! jalapeño condiments!). We’d speculated on what she was seeing: African tribes with bongo drums, beautiful geisha girls wearing red kimonos and chopstick-fastened buns.
    But even though we never talked about it, inside we knew something darker. We remembered fractured images of spat words, a thrown vase, and darkest of all, bloody sheets washed in a sink, red water spiraling down a drain. We didn’t know what they meant. We had chosen not to know.
    I squinted out over the horizon, focusing on the wake of a returning speedboat, the folding and unfolding of water. “There’s a reason she hasn’t come yet. Even if we don’t know what it is, there’s some kind of reason.” In my mind I’d come up with a dozen maybe-plausible excuses, from abduction by aliens to an intricate story involving her association with satellite spy technology, leading to her kidnapping by the KGB. The Book Nook carried a magazine I bought every month called
Untold Truths,
full of stories about conspiracies and UFOs and the mysteries of Atlantis. It gave clear evidence that essentially anything was possible.
    Eve stopped braiding and followed my gaze out to the ocean. When I glanced at her she pulled away and my hair fell in my face. “If she gave a damn, how hard do you think it would be to find us? You want to know what I dream? I see her on Times Square, and she’s wearing a glossy orange miniskirt and fake eyelashes, asking men if they want a good time.”
    I gripped the edge of the jetty, stone grating against my palms, and said nothing. Eve gestured with her head as Daddy’s boat approached the dock, then turned to me. “And when she thinks of us she cries.”
    I watched her a moment, then rested my head against the bony ridge of her shoulder.
    “C’mon,” she said, pulling herself to her feet. She held out her arms to help me up, and we walked down to the dock where Daddy was helping two giggling middle-aged ladies from the boat. They were the good kind, the kind with flowery cotton pantsuits, so charged up on adrenaline that they always pressed bills into my father’s hand when they shook good-bye. (
I got so excited I almost peed!
I’d once heard one of these ladies say.) Sometimes I felt a little bad looking down on grownups, but really sometimes there was no helping it.
    Daddy grinned when he saw us, and the two ladies widened their eyes. “These are your twins?” one said. “Aren’t they beautiful.” The other gave a closed-mouthed Betty Rubble giggle and reached to touch Eve’s hair. “Two peas in a pod,” she said. “Bet you’re having to chase the boys away.” Something