How to Be a Sister by Eileen Garvin (icecream ebook reader .TXT) 📗

and never find the way to deal with it, never feel like what I was doing was the right thing to do. This continued failure weighed on me.

Objects had always anchored my sister. The chair went here. The hardback copy of Heidi went on the table at an angle. The Ella Fitzgerald Porgy and Bess record was always in precisely this spot. And the winter boots were in the front closet in a row. The Ravel tape case was important for some unexplainable reason. But that reason, unknowable to the rest of us, kept the car from sliding off the road, kept the sky from falling, and kept the sea off the shore. Without it, there was no hope. That much I could see from where I was sitting.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, I unfroze and unlocked my door, opening it into the other world outside the car. I felt the rush of cool, salty air from Puget Sound, and we all suddenly remembered to breathe. Rob, Brendan, and I started hunting for the tape case. We searched the backseat and floor several times, with no luck. “But it’s a car, for Christ’s sake, not a football field,” I said. “It’s got to be in here somewhere.” Then suddenly Rob plucked it off the floor with two fingers and held it up in front of him, marveling at it like it had fallen from the sky. Margaret snatched it from his fingers, and the screaming stopped like a turned-off faucet. “It was just lying down there,” Rob said with wonder in the quiet car.

We all breathed in and then out, and then in again. Our hearts slowed their racing. It had begun to rain, and I shut the car door and cracked the window. We sat there for a moment, all of us quiet, and the sound of the rain on the roof was clear and beautiful. Margaret popped in the tape, and Ravel’s Bolero began its tentative way, the delicate melody dancing its way into our hearts. We put on our seat belts, and nobody said anything for a long time.

After a while Margaret, still half sobbing, exclaimed, “There he is! There’s the tape case, Mom! There’s Bolero!” She was so joyful. “Okay! That’s good manners, Mom!”

We all laughed a little hysterically and agreed with her. Then my mother drove us to dinner at a restaurant on Lake Union, where everybody, except for Margaret, had way too much to drink.

SUCH WAS A typical visit from my big sister. And the Bolero incident, I remembered, had happened early in the trip. Things hadn’t gotten any easier after that. The visit included more panic, more screaming, more failure, and my growing anger. Those were the years before I had learned how to treat Margaret’s outbursts like the weather, to be like a passerby caught in a storm: get inside out of it. Sit and watch from a safe place. Do what you can to help the person caught in it, but don’t get too close, or you’ll get dragged into the raging river.

That visit had happened years ago, but the tracks were still fresh. So what the hell was I thinking, I asked myself, by inviting my big sister to come visit me for a couple of days in Oregon? Even as I hung up the phone after talking with Clifford, her caregiver at the group home, I wondered if I was crazy. The plan was to have her down for three days and two nights, just the two of us. Like normal sisters.

“I’ve told Margaret the plan, and she is very excited about it,” Clifford told me. I’d met him several times. He was a tall, friendly man in his forties who made his living by helping care for my big sister and her three housemates. He’d told me that he thought it would be really good for Margaret to take this trip. His enthusiasm made me feel worse. Shouldn’t I, the family member, have been more excited? I mean, this was, after all, my idea. What did I think I was going to gain, realistically, by inviting my sister to come visit? And if I didn’t know, why had I suggested it in the first place?

Brendan had asked me the same question, in a different way, the first and last time Margaret had visited me in Hood River, when she’d breezed through with her housemate and two staff members on the way home from the coast the summer before. “What did you expect, Eileen?” Brendan had asked, not unkindly, as I recounted events, weeping. “Pretty much what happened,” I said, laughing. He smiled at me and shrugged, but when I came up with this harebrained idea, I had his full support—theoretically, that is. During the actual visit, he would be out of town.

The week before Margaret’s visit, I got organized. I caught up on work, cleaned the house, and planned our activities. I also made sure I had food in the house that I knew she would eat; that meant several boxes of macaroni and cheese, spaghetti, and Cheerios. I was nervous. I was making lists of things she might like to do. I told myself not to have grand expectations, to just accept what came. But underneath all this optimism was the current of the past pulling me back into the way things had always been, a hole in the river that threatened to suck me under and keep me in a place of uncomfortable sameness. As much as I wanted to move forward, to create a new frame of reference for us as sisters, as a family, I feared that we would remain stuck in the eddy that had held us for so long.

As I drove to the store to pick up the Margaret-specific items on my list, I reminded myself that people could change. Our visit could actually be different from the days of Bolero, the years I had