Perfectly Undone. Jamie Raintree
They’re probably right.
“She’s decided to have her tubes tied after this one, though,” I say, giving them and my sister a break. “She recently rediscovered her passion for writing, and she’d like to go back to school once the baby stops nursing.” In high school she always said she wanted to write for a magazine. She would have been good at it, too.
Dad grins, and tears form in the corners of his eyes. “I like that.”
I picture her in a natural-lit room in a big white house on the other side of the lake, by a window that overlooks the water, notebook in hand. She would have stayed here in Lake Oswego. She would have married a guy who knew her in high school, but had gone unnoticed by her. In their midtwenties, they would have met at Mrs. Collins’s yearly barbecue, and they would have fallen in love across the perfectly mowed grass. He would have admitted weeks later that he’d loved her since he first laid eyes on her. All the boys did.
It’s a morbid game and we all know it, but it’s better than hiding from it. Mom wants to remember her little girl exactly the way she was. I force myself to remember, even when I want to forget. Though truthfully, on the bad days, I wish I’d never had a sister at all.
It took many years after moving out of my parents’ house to unearth who I was. I say unearth rather than find because it wasn’t so much a process of adding layers as shedding the grief and confusion of my teen years. After Abby’s death, I buried myself in guilt, searched for solace in the arms of the opposite sex when I couldn’t find comfort at home and, at the same time, put up a wall between me and everyone I loved, or ever could love. Cooper is the only one who ever broke through, who ever made me feel worthy of being seen. I’m still working on showing him all of me. When I push through the anger that my best friend and my mother were stolen from me, I can almost see that honest version of myself—bullheaded out of love, steady enough to lean on, an unapologetic dreamer.
The layers I couldn’t shed have thickened like an outer shell, covering the weaker membranes. I am fiercely defensive of the person I turned into after Abby’s death, tiny and rubbed raw at first but, over the years, with the safety of Cooper’s unwavering love, grown strong and powerful in my own way. I have feared the day someone in my life would crack that shell, and I’d fall to pieces again. And because I love Cooper more than I’ve ever loved anyone—maybe even more than I love Abby—he alone holds the power to break me. It’s why I’ve never told him the role I played in my sister’s death. If he knew, I would never be able to look at him without seeing the pity in his eyes. I would never be able to hide from that constant reminder, and I’d be robbed of my only comfort. So I let it smolder inside of me, and I foolishly allow Cooper to keep lifting me up, the friction of it eroding my shell.
Every year around the time of Abby’s anniversary, I feel that urge all over again—to leave and lose myself in someone who knows nothing about me, someone with whom I can pretend to be anyone but me. And because Cooper foolishly loves me, he doesn’t push, doesn’t question me, knowing from the first time we met that forcing me to open up when I wasn’t ready would make me run. I never hid from him how many men I’d run from before.
I find myself drawn to the window. I raise my hand to place it on the glass but think better of it. Mom hates fingerprints. She’s moved to some still-dormant rosebushes farther down, pulled out her pruning shears. I fear what the poor shrubs will look like when she’s done with them. I don’t remember much from the days when we used to garden together, but I do remember there’s such a thing as too much love. It seems that after Abby’s death, she put all the love she had into that garden, and since then there hasn’t been any left for us. Losing my sister broke each of us in our own way, but it was the way Mom pulled away from us afterward that broke our family as a whole.
I feel my dad’s presence over my shoulder.
“You should go out there,” he says.
“No,” I say. “Not today.”
“Dylan...you can’t expect your mom to move on from it if you never do.”
“I have moved on,” I whisper. But we both know it isn’t true.
After the anniversary of Abby’s death, I throw myself into my grant application with more fervor. I leave before Cooper in the morning. I close myself in my office during lunch and stay at the clinic until long after Cooper is asleep. The looming deadline pushes me, but also the painful reminder of why I need this grant and why medicine needs this research.
Because my sister, at the age of eighteen, died of pregnancy.
Abby never shared the details of her sex life with me, but by the time she was sixteen, I was sure she had one. I was too embarrassed to ask. She was a good girl at heart, but she had a wild streak that pushed her further than having a drink or two at a lake party or spending eight minutes in the closet with a boy during Seven Minutes in Heaven.
When she got pregnant, I never doubted that she’d keep the baby and that she’d somehow make it look easy. She’d do it all—raise a child and continue on to college. Somehow she’d still be more successful than any of us imagined possible. More successful than I would be.
And then she died.
When it was over, the doctors told my parents it was an ectopic pregnancy, a rare but dangerous condition when the fertilized egg embeds into the fallopian tube or the abdomen instead of in the uterus. If caught early, the pregnancy can be terminated and the mother can be saved. If it goes undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, it’s a ticking time bomb. The egg that would have been my niece or nephew ruptured, and Abby died of blood loss before anyone knew what happened.
Sitting in front of my computer the night before Vanessa’s deadline, my fingers on the keyboard, I think of the pain and fear Abby must have suffered that night, alone. I think of all the women who have suffered similar fates and how I can help them. I connect to that deep need inside me to fix it all. Before I leave the clinic, I put the final touches on my application, and I email it to Vanessa.
A few days later, after I’ve received Vanessa’s response, Cooper walks into the kitchen, startling me with his “Hey.”
I look up, then back to the counter, where potting soil is spilled across the granite, and I’m scooping it into ceramic seed pots with my hands. I’m home early and in the only pair of sweatpants I own—the ones I wear when I’m sick—and a glass of red wine is within reach, soil granules clinging to the stem in the shape of fingerprints.
“Hi,” I bite out.
“Whatcha doing?” he asks.
“I found these seeds,” I say. I thrust the dirty, rain-puckered packet at Cooper, and he takes it, stepping back to avoid my hand before it brushes against his untucked work shirt. “Do you think they’ll still grow?”
Cooper shrugs. “I don’t really know anything about gardening.”
“I know. But just... What do you think?”
He examines them more closely. “I don’t see why not. I think it would take a lot more to damage them than a little water and dirt.” His mouth quirks up on one side, obviously entertained by my state, but I take his joke seriously.
“What’s going on, Dylan?”
The concern in his voice drains the energy from me as quickly as a plunger into a syringe, and I stop. The kitchen is a mess. My hands are shaking.
“Vanessa called me into her office today. She isn’t going to support my grant application,” I say.
Cooper’s head drops forward. His hair falls down around his eyes. I can’t tell if he’s upset for me or himself. He knows the process doesn’t stop here—this is just a roadblock that makes it take even longer.
I open my mouth but nothing comes out.
Vanessa’s exact words were that my goal was too