For Jess

Our room, and room was the right word: a barely windowed 10x12 square with a busted tap and no room at all, was disgusting. There was a small bathroom beside it with one door that opened into the hall and another back to the room itself. It was cold often and I kept a pile of sweaters and blankets on top of our bed roll. Everything else was kept in a trunk in the back corner that doubled as a bench or an easel for Howie if he needed. Our visitors, looking for any sign of comfort, would sit there and chat with us as we made tea to warm our hands. Inside the trunk lid there was a picture of my younger sister Jess taped beside a photobooth one of me and Howie. 

We took the picture since she’d been ill. My Mom convinced my dad to pay for us all to be photographed in the mall, and for a separate, solo shot of Jess that lived on the unused mantle. She thought she would die soon. In the photo Jess was dressed older than she was. Mom saw the photo as a memory. Instead it appeared as if Jess was a cutout pasted in from years prior, made up in curls and blush in her nutcracker dress, while me and Tommy sat beside her, him in a ringer neck tee shirt, and me in a long sleeve emblazoned with a large cartoon guitar smiling with a missing front tooth. My dad might have been the only one to believe that Jess was going to survive. 

There were things that, at the time, were not obvious to us as attempts to ward off acknowledging Jess’s eventual death. She got special treatment, much to the chagrin of me and Tommy, and so much of it that we didn’t even notice. We noticed when she got extra cookies in her lunch or an extra serving of chocolate cake. We didn’t when she got extra soft slippers and to sit nearest to Dad when he read us nighttime stories, or Mom when we helped her make lasagna. She even got to sit between Dad’s legs sometimes, in his chair, listening to the radio quietly while we all went to sleep. 

At night, Mom would brush her hair an extra 15 times, and I would wonder if, when Jess had really died, as I thought myself so sure of knowing, Mom might be able to push the thought of it out a few more weeks, knowing that she had bought her some extra time with all the brushing. 

Sometimes I’d watch her sleep and wonder what she’d done to deserve it all. When she went to school, Ms. Baker seemed near to song with joy, screeching greetings, and seamlessly transitioning to making no notice of her absence, as if it were an everyday occurrence. No, there were no extra assignments, or gruelling “verbal tests” that she’d been so fond of for the other absentee students, that she so gleefully required of me after my week long lice quarantine. No, there was none of that, and if there were, Jess would have taken it easily, in stride, and known the answer to each question and the right way to say it. 

She was just like that, instead of how Tommy and I were: seeing school as an obstacle to our real education, consisting mostly of outdoor play and fantasy books. Jess had time for everything, books about bugs and helping Mom with the dishes. She remembered all the things I couldn’t, like how the shoes should be ordered in the entryway and how to mix the Nequik into cold milk just right. 

When she was able, she even seemed to make friends and play better than I did. On those occasions she was well enough to go outside with me, I became upset with the knowledge that others preferred my sister to me. As soon as Mom stopped urging her to rest, or open the window, or close the window, I began to feel dread. She would come out with us to play soon, and that would reveal the truth. Nobody liked me, really, they just needed someone to play with while Jess wasn’t there. 

And when she came outside, I found myself laying in wait, watching her talk to Kate and Dylan and Lizzy and Grace, watching for the moment they would show their allegiance, inspecting the looks and their eyes and the twists of their lips and seeing if they were the same as when they talked to me. But I couldn’t remember, I hadn’t been paying attention then like I was now. I stormed off all the same. By the time Tommy found me I was sitting in the empty lot, on the great big tree stump. He yelled for me to come play. I continued crying lightly still, and followed him. It was nice to feel needed. We began our seek out. Dylan, Grace, and Jess were gone. Tommy began running as I followed.

“Come out, come out wherever you are!” he yelled. 

We ran in between the houses as dogs barked, opening doors as if they were our own, trampling through gardens and almost freeing Grace’s cat. As we ran through her Mom came out of the den.

“Sorry Ms. Arlidge, we were just looking for Grace!” I yelled, as we continued pacing the house. 

“Is she missing?” She replied evenly.

“No, we’re just playing a game”

“Alright,” she said, walking through the room to the kitchen, “Just make sure you find her for me. I don’t want to have to pack up any leftovers tonight.” 

“Okay” we yelled, continuing to overturn cushions. Nothing. We ran into the side-yard, littered with hedge trimmers and lawn mowers and bikes and pushed rusted metal and plastic aside and around until we found her, huddled, beneath the plastic cover for her pottery wheel. 

“Gotcha!” Tommy screamed. 

Grace leaped and squealed that she had been bored anyway. We set off again.

Roving the street, it had been transformed by an intensity that matched the setting more accurately than the street itself normally did. The backyards’ perimeters were densely forested. Dad complained that he wasn’t allowed to cut down the redwoods that extended ten feet from the back of our grass because they were protected by the state. I liked them. He said they were dangerous. They could fall on the house. Sometimes I’d imagine it while I went to sleep, a great big tree, landing through our kitchen while we slept. 

Our house was the first on the cul-de-sac, flanked to the right by a busy road, which you wouldn’t notice when sitting in my room, or in the backyard in the quiet trees. In between there and the end of the street was an unassuming hill, rising up and down 250 feet despite it only containing about 10 or 12 houses on each side. At the end of the street was a wide paved circle, a winner's one, all the houses' front gates golden with gold lions on the sides, gates that only opened with a special button in the car or a correct keycode. Tommy and I had tried to guess one for a while before we got scared and ran home. We never met any of the end of the street neighbors. 

Only later, as a teenager, I did. I didn’t talk to her much either. She was very wealthy and had just rolled her Range Rover filled with teenagers down Windy Hill in the dead of night. None of them were injured despite their lack of seatbelts.  A year or so later two boys from Jess’ Sunday School class drove right off of Skyline in the dead of night. They weren’t so lucky. 

When I met her we were all together, at a party, and her friends insisted that nobody had been drinking that night, but that they should have died anyway, so it proved they were invincible. She laughed, sitting on a cold sun chair, petting her friends’ hair as they filled a pipe. Two days after they all got matching tattoos of laurels to celebrate. The girls on their lower left hipbone, and the boys on their biceps, just to the sides of their elbows. They were invincible, they claimed.

A year later one killed himself as an alternative to jail time. He got pulled over, high on mushrooms and ecstasy, in front of the sporting goods store. He’d just left Alex’s house, where he’d stolen his debit card, a bundle of pills, and a dropper of synthetic Xanax. Upon arraignment, he was charged with identity theft, driving while intoxicated, and possession with intent. He was freshly 18. He ran, and months later there was nothing, until the news. It was difficult to say what had really happened. Some people said he had been avoiding consequences, others that he had gotten back in bad with people even worse off than him. Either way he was gone, we were reminded. In the sixth grade he used to follow me around and call me names. This was during the time when that still meant something. 

Tirelessly running up and down the hill, as if Dylan were to be found simply sitting on the curbs edge, and not, as he likely was, nestled in some odd place between sticks and rocks under the foliage, we paused. 

“He’s not in the lot, I think, because I was there before the game started and I would have seen him,” I said. 

“He’s not in my house either, I don’t think” Grace said, “I would have seen him too.”

We walked into his side yard, well kept, without a hiding spot in sight, and entered the garage, looking to see if he’d hidden behind his parents' storage boxes, that would be a good spot. Nothing. Tommy went up and opened the garage fridge and pulled out a juice box. 

“I’m pooped!” He yelled, “God!”

We panted in the chalky garage. 

“Do we think he’s inside?” I asked. 

We didn’t like going in Dylan's house. 

“Probably not,” Tommy joked, “where is there even to hide?”

Dylan’s house was like a spaceship: all white marble and grey floors, big windows with no blinds. They didn’t have a comfy couch, or a rug, and he didn’t have any toys on his floor. 

We wouldn’t have really cared if our parents didn’t remind us of its strangeness. They talked a lot about other people's houses in general, never saying disparaging things unless the person was richer than them. This one was too big, this one too expensive, this one just right. Dylan’s was not. 

The houses at the end of the block were more like mansions and there wasn’t anything to say about them. We couldn’t see past the hedges and were never invited in. My friend Kumiko lived a 10 minute drive away and her house was more like a property. Their pool deck was bigger than our house. It had a TV and its own fridge and shower. It was amazing. Mom thought so too even. They had a ballroom! She exclaimed. What kind of person even had a ballroom anymore, she said. What kind of person ever had one? But Dylan’s house was something else entirely. It wasn’t tacky, assuming, or self-imposing. It was more that it was an affront to their own houses, their own lifestyles, and the adults treated it that way. Its mere existence, in their midst, signaled something to them, their own lack of harmony with it something else. 

Dylan's parents were something else too. They moved from San Francisco, and had lived in other places too, like China and Lebanon and Zurich. Dylan’s Mom cooked us snacks we didn’t know were snacks, or food at all, and for one of his birthday parties even made us virgin martinis with real glasses. She wore grey, and their house was grey, and her car was grey. My mother would mention their new house, off-handedly, during dinner, saying that she didn’t know that the city was allowing the construction of prisons so close to the residential areas. It was a threat.

Our house was yellow. When we bought it, it was yellow, and mine and Jess’ room was too. Our couch in the TV room was brown and leather and we had beige carpeting and yellow hardwood floors. The living room had a wall of gridded windows facing the backyard. When you walked in the front door, you were in the living room, dining room, and kitchen all in one, which my Mom told me was modern. To the left, there was a separate TV room, with the room next to it used as a laundry room, and a half bath behind it. To the right of the living room there were french doors leading to a hallway. Then there was me and Tommy and Jessica's bathroom, with a separate shower and tub. Then me and Jessica's room, then Tommy's room, then my parents' room, which had a bathroom with a shower that had a bench in it. They had a sliding door that led out into the backyard, where they could see the trees, and a port in the wall that you could use to vacuum. They had a lot of stuff under their bed and it was easy to hide there, I remembered, maybe Jess had shown Dylan, we should check. We ran from Dylan’s garage to our house and through the front door, running past my Mom into her own room and lifting up the bed-skirt. 

“Gotcha!” I screamed. Nobody there. “Shoot!”

We split up in the house to cover more ground. I went outside, bored now, by the game, and how long it had taken, and picked up the basketball, lazily throwing it in the hoop. I heard something, creeping, and looked in the redwoods. Jess and Dylan! They were laying there, on the ground, on top of each other, hugging through the trees. 

“Gotcha!” I screamed, laughing. 

“Gotcha gotcha gotcha!” Tommy screamed, running up from behind me. 

They looked mad. “Why would you hide together!” I realized, “Now nobody won! You don’t even know the stupid rules to hide and seek!”

I ran back to the kitchen. Dylan told Tommy that he told Jess it would be more fun to hide together anyway, since he got bored during hide and seek. Jess was quiet. 

Grace told me it was okay, since they had hidden together, we wouldn’t count either of them as winning. That meant that everyone except for them had won, including me. 

“It’s okay!” she clarified, “It’s alright!”

It was uncomfortable for her since I was crying. 

I was known to become inconsolable when others talked about Jess to me. I cried often, and in secret, though quite loudly, in the bathroom, and then took to looking at myself in the mirror a while until I calmed down. I would turn, from one cheek to the next, lifting and downturning my chin, inspecting my face, and wondering what it meant for me to feel this way. I rubbed my eyes, over and over again, feeling the eyelashes fall and stick to the grease on my face. I felt disgusting, I thought, my parents didn’t love me as much as her and they didn’t even care to cover it up. They had albums of pictures of her, and only one of me and my brother. They made her special clothes, and hemmed and embroidered and stitched them, even though she hardly ever wore any of them outside. 

Sometimes, I wondered if she was doing something wordlessly special, some saintly or mystical acts, while Tommy and I were away, powerless, at school. I figured there must be a reason they preferred her to me. 

Mom started keeping Jess out of school at the drop of a hat. If it was windy, or cloudy, or if her knees hurt and she thought it might-just-rain, Jess was not going to school. But we were going, me and Tommy, we had perfect attendance! On those days Jess missed school I tried to slam the door on the way out, as if to say, to show her, how really wrong she had gotten it all, how much I deserved to be treated the way she was, and how much she needed to be treated the same as me. I wouldn’t speak, the whole time in the car, as my Mom drove me and Tommy to school. We would play music and Tommy would idly chat and sometimes Jess even got to stay at home, in bed, while Mom drove us. 

I’d convinced myself of two thoughts, of equal weight: that I was better than Jess because of how poorly I was treated in regards to her, and that I was better than Jess in how I was able to bear the burden of the things that she could not. It would fill me with rage, the entire time walking into school, and wouldn’t be lost until some other incident made me more upset.

I’d be so lost in this anger, at times, that I’d be called out, in front of the class, so obviously was my attention elsewhere, and prodded to recite an answer to a question that had just been explained, the year of a war or the color of a type of fish. I was unable to, Ms. Baker knew, and she knew that the instant she even asked the question I’d be brought to tears, and she did it anyway. And so it came to be that I thought of Ms. Baker as my parent too, the one who didn’t even care to lie to me about how much she preferred Jess to me, Jess, who, so riveted by class, due to her lack of ever actually being there, was “a joy to have,” “a special flower” with “unique talents.” I boiled, just thinking of it, the words of praise, over the years, of Jess’s accomplishments over mine, accumulating to a point which was no longer bearable. 

There wasn’t anything I could do, I felt. I was hopeless at school, or not good at least, even though I earned good grades. Never the prize winner, despite my mediocre efforts, and suddenly I became handicapped by the mere participation in any sort of modicum of effort towards my studies as I grew, that Jess might surpass me despite them, and prove, once and for all, what a mere pretender I was, and how much I strived after only one thing—to be her! To be as good as her!

And she did it all, all this grandstanding goodness, without even lifting so much as a finger. She’d spend days in bed, long nights and mornings and late afternoons asleep, and if anything, preserve all the goodness she did outside those hours, and even “sleep like an angel.” I, in comparison, woke up on the floor or with my head turned opposite the headboard, having kicked and moved so much. 

Her periods of inactivity seemed to only further deify the actions she partook in during her waking, lively ones. That she had spared her only leisure hours helping Mom rinse the dog with flea wash, or finding a perfect four leaf clover, whereas Tommy and I had hours, days, where mistakes and spankings and hopeless cleaning efforts and even more hopeless cleaning coverups were made and Moms’ voice could be heard, not far off, already scolding us for our inability to do anything right for once. There was no possibility, really, of either of us surpassing Jess in anything, especially so because she already did everything while hopelessly ill. 

We did so much, Tommy and I, and it seemed as though we were punished for it, just us being more alive than she was, more able to make mistakes. Jess was so good at everything and we were just there, taking up space in the interim, while she was asleep, dancing and talking and not washing our plates or putting our clothes in the hamper correctly.

It seemed hopeless, really, to try to be anything at all other than ordinary with a sister like Jess. On Sundays for church sometimes Mom would stay home with her and I worried again that, while I was gone, they might discover something about me, or be talking about me. I wondered if they were secretly happy to be free of me during the day when I had something to do. 

One summer I stayed home for three days with a fake cold just to see what it was like to be Jess. Mother treated us the same, for once, attending to our bedsides, helping us bathe, bringing us lunch in bed and letting us read Nancy Drew after Nancy Drew, but something was different, it seemed, still. It seemed as though I were an outsider to this indoor world of theirs, finally invited in for lack of a better place to go, and that, if anything, I was holding them back from their usual day-to-day lives, from their little inside jokes about lost books, and how they must be somewhere very difficult to find, and how they’d help each other search, eagerly, allowing me to join, when they were really just underneath the bed, every time, felled in that crack between it and the wall, every time, nowhere else but under the bed. 

I got sick of it, so sick that I gave up my illness and went back outside. I could tell they were grateful, really, the moment I told mother, after her fourth check in of the day, to the two of us, splayed out in our identical twin beds, that I was finally feeling better. 

As we became older I was grateful for the things Jess remembered, either by the simple virtue of time spent with my mother, or by my mother’s opening to her. She remembered that Mom put mayo inside our grilled cheeses and carefully measured out how much ice cream each family member would get, according to need (of which Jess’s was always the greatest), before she sliced it in its carton and served it with forks on plates. She remembered that Mom sometimes took us all to a bagel shop faraway and let us all get egg salad on dutch crunch, leaving us in the backseat as she met her friend in the parking lot to get Stanford tickets. “She was buying weed.” Jess would later tell me. How could we have never figured that out?

What I missed then was how riveted she was, by the smallest things, and how people responded to her, with fear, because they were afraid and she reminded them that they were going to die. 

She was even more startling to adults because she reminded them that their children will die too. That it would happen in the most cruel and unnatural ways, like a young girl with perfect black hair and unmarked white skin being unable to do as much as a pirouette before needing to sit down. My Mom had been warned of the side-effects of every medication she ever took: hair loss, open wounds, dry-eyes, nausea, vertigo, insomnia, hallucinations, fatigue. She lived out the possibility of Jess having every one of them. They were all better than her dying, she convinced herself. They had to be. She sat there, open to her, completely, in a way that she could not have been to us, because she had hopes and dreams for us, but not for Jess. It was almost as painful to be her mother, as to be Jess at all, at least, at the time, but they both knew, somehow, how admirably beautiful life with Jess in it was. 

Our mother let Jess in in ways she never would with us, or ever again, even after her own health declined. They seemed perfectly in step, through all of it. She witnessed scenes of Jess that she would never allow the rest of us, her slips from grace, the look on her face, on those days, when her whole body had ached and her brain had pounded but she'd been unable anyway to sleep, or eat, and she sat there quietly, no longer angelic, but in wholly human form, wishing it to be over, finally, barely whispering that it was enough, it was too much, that she just wanted it to stop. We’d all thought she’d spend the rest of her life in it, until the end even, if they wouldn’t give her some drugs, but we never could have guessed how long it’d be, the pain, how it would get better, noticeably even, but remain pain still, under the surface, to be managed.

Mom would do the same, some days, other days, and be unable to get out of bed at all. She’d sleep through the morning and afternoon, and Jess would tell us that she had been up all night attending to Jess and instruct us to pour our own cereal and milk. In reality Mom had been asleep, for an impossibly long time, never to be disturbed. 

Quite soon after puberty it became clear to all of us, except our mother, that Jess’ death was no longer a certainty. “She will be in pain still,” the doctor clarified, “she will always be in pain.” Jess cried. Mom did too. “But medicine is advancing always. There is hope. This is proof!” He said, unconvincingly.

After that Jess’s life still had rules, despite their lack of relation to her newfound health, and she followed them to the letter, in accordance with some angelic, god-given right that she knew she had for being alive and making people happy. No swimming, no soda, no bike riding, no playfighting. The childhood times remained, the ones where I stood, watching her sleep from the crack in the door, and wondering what would happen next week, or the one after, if she would really lose her hair, or be unable to swallow anything but baby food. 

While she sat in bed or on the couch or in the backyard, my father listened to me cry, again and again, telling him the story: you love her more than me. He’d assure me not, and I’d make him promise to never tell Mom. I don’t know if he ever did. I’m not sure she would tell me. I still think, sometimes, that she must have known and been unable to tell me, unable to lie and tell me that it wasn’t true.