Perfectly Undone. Jamie Raintree
you okay?” I ask.
Her wine is untouched, and her skin is clammy.
“Sit down,” I tell her and pull out a chair. “I can finish this.”
She lowers herself down and shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I feel a little nauseated. One of the kids brought ice-cream cake to class for their birthday.”
I pour her a glass of homemade lemonade from a pitcher on the table, then finish setting out the bowls.
“School good?” I ask her. “Or looking forward to summer?”
She laughs through her discomfort. “A little of both.”
A minute later, Cooper walks through the door with a casserole dish of fresh biscuits in his bare hands, cursing.
“They make pot holders for that, you know,” Megan says from behind her glass. “You wouldn’t want to hurt those precious doctoring tools of yours.”
Cooper sets the dish down on a mat in the center of the table and shakes out his hands. He pulls Megan close to him and musses her hair, then smooths it out again.
“Says the girl who used to beg me to pull things out of her Easy-Bake Oven when she lost that pan pusher.”
“Hey, you stuck your own damn fingers in there.”
“Okay, kids,” John says, coming in with the pot of gumbo. “You’re never too old to ground.”
Marilyn follows behind him, and we all gather around the table, eating, talking and laughing the night away. It’s just everyday life, but with an unwavering love that makes every moment together like snapshots in a photo album of someone else’s life. Until the clock strikes midnight, I almost forget that it’s been fifteen years to the day since I lost my sister.
* * *
Sometimes when the wind catches the front door of my parents’ house and closes it a little too hard, a little too quickly, I’m transported back to the day Abby left our lives forever. It reminds me of the sound of the door slamming shut behind my parents when they disappeared with the ambulance siren, leaving my younger brother, Charlie, and me behind. A steady breeze blows strong on Sunday morning, so I hold the same doorknob tightly, not releasing it until it clicks shut.
Inside, I hear the voices of my dad and brother talking softly in the kitchen, glasses clinking. I smell the ever-present scent of burnt coffee in an almost empty pot. My heels echo on the tile, announcing my arrival. The chatter stops, and I see Charlie’s face—eyebrows raised, the playful grin that usually curls the edges of his mouth absent—appear around the corner as he leans back on his stool. His slept-on chestnut curls are a mess on top of his head. “Hey, sis,” he says.
I enter the kitchen and spot my dad standing at the island, a bottle of bourbon and highball glasses between the two of them. It’s the only day of the year that the alcohol cabinet is open before noon, but it’s a tradition none of us has felt the desire to look at too closely. It’s a day for remembering, and a day for forgetting.
“Hey,” I say to Charlie. I wrap an arm around his neck and plant a kiss on his temple.
“Hey, baby girl,” my dad says.
“Hi, Daddy.” My throat constricts. He looks relaxed in his Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, but his eyes are bloodshot, like he’s either been crying or hasn’t slept well in weeks. Maybe both. I allow him the dignity of not commenting on it and cover my own emotion with a smile. I fall into my dad’s bear hug—the cure for every scraped knee, every worry, every broken heart since I was a little girl. The only thing it’s never been able to do is bring my sister back.
I kiss Dad on the cheek, then slip out of his arms to walk to the window, where I know I will find the one person missing from our informal memorial. My mom’s absence is as much a part of the tradition as the early cocktail hour.
The midday sun glints off the lake at the edge of the backyard, a charm on the Willamette River necklace of Oregon. When Charlie, Abby and I were kids, we used to play at the shore, throwing toy boats out as far as we could and waiting for them to wash up. Sometimes we wrote messages for each other, hidden inside on a folded piece of paper—Can we go ride bikes now?—scribbled our responses, then tossed them out again. It’s hard to believe I could drop a message in the river outside the hospital, and, under the right circumstances, it might float here, to my mother’s feet. There are so many things I haven’t been able to say to her for so long, even standing right here in her kitchen.
As expected, she’s kneeling on the grass at the base of the large porch. Her coffee mug is perched on the railing. Her purple gardening hat flops in the breeze, and she’s digging a hole in the soil with a vigor that seems to be doing more harm than good. It’s Mom’s version of bourbon. Abby was always her favorite, but gardening used to be the one thing she and I did together. I’d be in charge of the hand trowel and the watering can. She’d smudge a line of dirt down my nose and call me “all knees and elbows.” A lifetime ago. We stopped once Abby died, when there was no longer room there for anything less than perfection.
“Has she been out there all day?” I ask, noticing the pink of the skin on her wrists between where her gloves stop and her three-quarter sleeves end. The doctor in me winces. The daughter in me holds my tongue.
“Since the sun rose,” my dad says.
I try to imagine Mom as I remember her from childhood. I try to remember her flowing skirts I used to chase around the house. How she used to lie on the couch and let me braid her hair for hours. How she used to blast Tom Petty and bake cookies with us kids after school. I can’t reconcile that woman with the one I know today. The truth is, Dad, Charlie and I lost that woman long before Abby’s death. But it seems that Abby’s death was when Mom finally lost her, too.
I sigh and rejoin the men.
“Drink?” Charlie asks. He grabs the bottle and adds another finger-worth to his glass.
“I have to go into the clinic,” I say. Working on my application is a better way to honor my sister’s memory than bourbon.
“Drink?” he asks again. I roll my eyes.
“Not everyone’s boss is so forgiving,” I say.
“Neither is his,” Dad says, “but it’s not like I can fire him.” After Charlie finished college, he took a job at the family finance firm because he knew it was the only place he’d be able to do as little work as possible for the most amount of pay. If he wasn’t so charming, his lack of motivation would drive me crazy.
Charlie chuckles. His eyes are already glassy.
After a long silence where we put off the inevitable, Dad says, “She would have been thirty-three this year.”
Thirty-three.
She was two years older than me. When we were teenagers it often seemed like a decade. Abby was a contradiction of wild and wise. She would study for a calculus exam for hours, then sneak out of her room to go to a boat party on the lake, only tiptoeing back in once the sun began to rise. She’d brush her teeth, drive her VW Bug to school, ace her test. If she’d survived, she would have been an enigma amongst teen mothers. I know she had her doubts, but I always believed in her.
“She would be...pregnant with her fourth kid,” Charlie says.
“Fourth?” I sputter, then laugh.
Last year we decided that her third child had just turned two. Even though I know her first child never could have lived, even if Abby had, I like to pretend she would have been a girl—the niece I almost had, even if she only ever existed as a fetus. I think Abby would have finished high school, and then college, found a man who loved her because she was a mother, instead of abandoning her for it. Eventually, her adventurous spirit would have given way to her maternal instincts, and she would have found that motherhood was the ultimate adventure. She wasn’t the nurturing type as a teenager, but I like to think she would have grown into it, given the time. That’s how