Jessica Chiarella - And Again

“What if you want to have more?” I ask.

“I swear, three is enough. Too much, probably. The next one won’t get breastfed at all, I’ll need a cocktail so badly,” she says. “But what about you? How are you feeling, honey?”

“Good, I’m good. Sam is taking excellent care of me.”

“Of course he is.” Lucy’s smile is always genuine when she turns it on Sam. “I knew he would.”

I try to ignore the private bit of affinity that passes between them. I think of being twelve years old and watching from the living room on Friday nights as Sam waited for Lucy at the bottom of the stairs. Of looking at their prom photo, sitting in its frame on my mother’s desk. Of waking up cold and gasping in my hospital bed, and finding Sam gone. It was Lucy who told me Sam had the flu, that the doctors wouldn’t let him in the ICU. Lucy blinks a lot when she lies.

Thinking of that morning sours my stomach. It is the source of all of my doubt; it makes me wonder what sort of secrets remain between the two of them, the ones that linger from their time together, all those years ago, and the ones that are as fresh as a new wound.

“Mom has been calling,” Lucy says.

“Here, too,” I reply. “Sam talked to her. Something about the water purification systems getting caught up in customs?”

Lucy lets out a little huff. “It’s the Sudan, honey. You know they would be here if they could. So many people are depending on them out there.”

“I know,” I say, nodding. Trying to remember the last time I spoke to my parents, in between one of their Africa trips for Clean Water First, the nonprofit they founded when I was a teenager. We were angry when we spoke, I’m sure. We always seem to be angry at one another, because they’re off putting their wealth to good use saving lives, and I’m in Chicago painting pictures. They are good people, the way Sam is a good person, the way I have never been. I try not to wonder if their anger, their disappointment, is part of the reason they didn’t come back when I got sick.

“I mean, they didn’t come back when either of the boys were born,” Lucy says. “It would take an act of Congress to get them out of there in the middle of a project.”

“I know,” I say again. Lucy straightens.

“Did you get the flowers Roger’s firm sent?” she asks, glancing around the room, its flat surfaces crowded with a kaleidoscope of bouquets and balloons and miniature stuffed animals.

“Yeah, the ones by the window. Be sure to thank him for me, they’re lovely,” I reply, as Lucy gets up and walks to the overflowing bouquet.

“You would think his secretary would know better than to order anything with baby’s breath. It’s like sending carnations. Jesus,” she says, turning the vase a bit. I can almost see the flowers wilting under her scrutiny. I feel the same way when she glances back at me. “Your face looks so different. You know those reality shows where people lose all that weight and they show before and after shots? It’s sort of like that.”

Sam winks at me over the screen of his laptop. It’s impossible to have a conversation with Lucy that doesn’t somehow wind its way toward the topic of her lingering baby weight. I try to keep from grinning. “Hey, thanks.”

“Have you set a date for the wedding yet?”

My desire to smile evaporates. “Lucy, it’s only been a couple of days.”

“But that was the deal, right? That if the transfer went well…” she says. Sam’s face is impassive. His eyes track over the screen in front of him.

“I can’t even walk down the hall on my own, Luce. I think planning a wedding is a little beyond my reach right now.”

Lucy perches on the edge of my bed. “I’m not saying you need to start planning. Just set a date. Something to look forward to. Anyway, you know I’ll take care of whatever you don’t feel up to dealing with.” She takes a curl of my hair between her fingers, pulling it lightly until it straightens. “You’ll make such a beautiful bride,” she says. I take her hand and kiss the back of it. She clears her throat, blinking fast, and turns to Sam.

“You enjoy that new body of hers while you can, because once you two start having babies, it’s nothing but stretch marks and flab everywhere, I swear.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sam says, nodding sagely, as if he’s taking her seriously.

“You remember what I looked like in high school,” she says. “Believe me, no amount of Pilates will get my ass back to where it was back then.”

“Well you can always hope you have the gene for metastatic lung cancer too,” I say, because I can’t stop myself. Lucy looks like she might begin to cry again, and I press my fingers against my lips, just in case there are any more choice words threatening escape.

“That’s really not funny,” Lucy says.

“I’m sorry,” I say, catching Lucy’s hand as she tries to extricate it from mine. “Cabin fever, you know? It makes me a total ass.”

“Right,” Lucy says, looking at our intertwined hands. Hers is puffy and worn, her fingernails short and utilitarian despite their bright pink polish. A mother’s hand. Mine might as well be a child’s for how delicate it appears. She notices the contrast, I’m sure. It’s a terrible feeling, Lucy’s unhappiness. I’m always the one to apologize, the one who requires forgiveness. The one who brought her curly fries and ice cream and rubbed her back for hours when Sam broke her heart in high school, as if it were my crime to atone for instead of his. As if I knew, somehow, that his crime would become mine, in her eyes, years later.

“How are the boys, Luce?” Sam asks, and Lucy’s face lifts and reforms into something more serene. Even her eyes smile, when she looks at Sam.

“A handful,” she replies. “They think my new sectional couch is the best jungle gym they’ve ever seen. And Roger just encourages them, of course. I’m all by myself, trying to keep the barbarians at bay.” Sam has a marvelous talent for handling my sister. Somehow, what would take hours or even days of pandering and groveling on my part, he manages in a matter of moments. Lucy pulls her hand from mine and moves toward him, as he promises that we’ll be by for dinner soon, that he’ll bring the boys some of his old baseball cards to trade. I watch the two of them, reminded so well of the days when I lived on the periphery of their vision, when being five years younger made me all but invisible to them. And I wonder, again, about the morning I woke to find Sam gone, and the sort of secrets they’re keeping from me now.

I’m able to beg a pair of tweezers off of one of the nurses before my first support group meeting. My eyes water as I pluck my eyebrows into something close to arches, the pain of it more acute than I remember. Everything is fresh and vivid in this body, nothing dampened by time or wear or damage. I shudder to think of what my first bikini wax will be like. There’s really nothing to be done about my hair, which is lank and flat and unwashed, but I find an elastic band in my purse and pull it back into a knot at the crown of my head. And there she is, the woman with no history. Helen of Troy. The face that launched a thousand ships.

It’s not hubris, or at least not just hubris, that informs my opinion of myself. While I was growing up, my mother was a connoisseur of beauty. A failed actress/model/dancer herself, she raised me to be a passionless appraiser of aesthetics, and I was always an eager pupil. Together we would paw through fashion magazines and critique the women on the shiny silk of the pages, or watch a continuous loop of barely clothed dancers in music videos. She would hold a mirror in front of my face and demand that I contort my expression into a whole slew of emotions, correcting each flaw she witnessed, smiling her prim little smile when she was pleased. Now my reflection is just as flawless as it was then, at twelve, before the world had a chance to work at it.