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It could say, You and your family will make it through this.
At the same time it said, Of course, you will die.
The first time I saw the pupil, I believed every word. My sister Rica would try to swing her head, and that brutal pupil of hers, the eye on the side that was paralyzed, the pupil seemed to spread wider. As if inviting the surrounding light to disappear inside it.
Go ahead, it seemed to say, get lost.
So I did.
Now my mother is asking me to help her get Rica out of the car and into the house. This feat involves a series of moves, a strategizing that my mother has mastered since my sister has come home from the hospital. Moving my sister around is a chore my mother endures without question or resentment. If anything, my mother is pleasant in the way she undertakes what has become for her routine. If anything, it is almost inhuman.
Sometimes I get quiet in their presence, as I do now, and my mother simply looks at me. Not in a reprimanding way, nor does she allow for any pity, whether from her or for her.
Help me with your sister, is what she says.
I open the car door and immediately smell the sharp, bitter stench to which I am already growing accustomed. I lift my sister's feet off of the floorboard and position them just so. Her calves are moist to the touch. This makes my stomach turn. I want to gag, but I know if I do, I will offend her.
She is starting to slide slowly onto her side. The emergency brake is already digging into her ribs. Standing up quickly I grab her under both arms and pull her to me. She could be one of our father's duffel bags filled with clothes.
Buh . . . buh, she says, the word never fully forming on her lips.
Stand her up, our mother says. I try. I step in and shift my hips.
Now that I'm on the wrestling team, I think about the hip toss, any other move for gaining leverage on your opponent. But I'm also barely eighty pounds. I don't know if I can move her without my mother helping me some. She outweighs me by at least sixty pounds, if not more.
I don't know if I have what it takes to hold onto her.
It spoke to me.
Who will you let tell your story?
I didn't answer, afraid of what I'd admit.
Outside, Glen, Timmy, and the others were kicking up dust in an empty fi eld where some of the older kids sometimes rode their dirt bikes, launched airs from one dirt clod mound to the next, each mound tamped down with tread, sprigs of weeds leveled. I could hear my friends yelling, cussing up storms in the warm evening.
I stared out the window screen and then back to Rica. Back to the pupil that had a say in both of our lives. Why are you still here? it said.
Because Mom took the boys up to the store to get dinner, and Tinah's still at work.
I watched Rica's mouth. Oh, she mouthed, but no sound.
Outside, the boys were colliding. Looking back, I think of James Wright's poem of the high school players in the stadium, galloping across the torn football field, wrecking one another. Do you wish you were dead? I said out of the blue.
She smiled. She signed No with her good hand, but kept smiling, as if I should understand. I watched her smile. I searched her face for the sister I once knew, but she wasn't really there. I found, instead, the downy black hairs fuzzed above her lip.
The hair was a side effect of the medications she took. And her smooth skin, the light tan complexion that rarely held blemishes, it was no longer smooth but blotched now. As if a burn had graft ed itself to her cheeks and would allow no part of her face to be consistent in tone. Even her eyebrows mocked the ghost of who she had been, leaving little chance that a stranger might see her for the first time and find any trace of the meticulous care she had once been able to take in herself.
Our mother, of course, took her to beauty salons, and sometimes our cousin Judy, who had once been trained in hair and makeup, would come to the house. People cared for her, but it was different now. Each hairstyle was a version of what someone else wanted. Their intentions were good, but even if they asked afterward if she liked it, it was always afterward. She never had a true say in what direction they would take, my sister who just the year before would cut out pictures of models from issues of Cosmo and tape them to her mirror.
I went to the dresser drawer, dipped a cotton swab into the frosted plastic container of Vaseline. I spread it over her chafed lips.
Buh, she said, buh.
It's okay, I said. I could smell her now. I wanted to let her know it was okay. Mom will be home soon, I said. I don't know why, but I sat there next to her with my eyes closed. I'd seen my mother do this countless times, as if she were a monk meditating. I opened my eyes when I felt her hand squeeze mine.
What are you doing? I said.
She was taking my hand and trying to put it between her legs.
Stop it, I said. I know. Mom will be home soon. Just wait.
She smiled again, especially because I was standing up now.
I can't change you, I said.
With her hand, she signed Yes.
No, I can't, I said.
Yes.
No.
Yes.
I can't!
Yes. As she signed this, she smiled, though this time, it seemed menacing to keep responding this way, like she was trying to play a trick on me. Her eyebrows, those whiskered curves constricted, furrowing.