This book is for
Miki Frances & Ida Akiko,
two sisters
It all started when I noticed the way my sister was walking. It was late in the afternoon and I was upstairs in my bedroom, watching her out the window. I'd wedged myself between my bookcase and the wall so they both pressed against me, holding me tight. Below, outside, at the edge of our backyard, I saw Audra.
Her hands were on her knees and she slowly lifted one bare foot, still crouching, then set it down, a small step, and lifted the other. Her body was doubled over so she had to bend her neck back to face ahead, to see where she was going. She was moving very slowly, out from under the trees.
This was not so long ago—a few months ago, when she was seventeen. I was fifteen then and I am sixteen now. Some months can go by and nothing changes, and then everything suddenly becomes different, and all the days get fast and tangled. That's what began when I watched Audra from my window.
She moved slowly around the side of the house, where I couldn't see her. A little later, I heard her voice in the kitchen, downstairs, fighting with our mother. I pushed the bookcase out and went out of my room, down the hall, toward the stairs.
"I'm tired of talking about Thursday," Audra was saying. "That was almost a week ago."
"And you still haven't explained it." Mom was turned away, standing at the sink, peeling potatoes. Five smooth orange carrots were lined up on the counter next to her. "I just don't know when you're telling the truth," she said, "and when you're making things up."
"Why don't you just try believing me," Audra said, "instead of telling me what to do? Also, the way you're shouting is making Vivian upset."
"Are you okay, honey?" Mom said, turning toward me.
"I'm not upset," I said, standing by the kitchen table. "I don't feel agitated."
Audra turned back toward Mom. "And why should I listen to you?"
"Because I'm your mother."
"Right," Audra said. "Of course."
"You don't answer your cell phone. You don't even have it with you, when we paid for you to have it."
"Like I want a machine attached to me all the time," Audra said.
"Is that a tattoo on your arm?"
"No. Someone drew on me with a marker."
"What does it say?" Mom said.
"I can't tell, and I can't remember. A tattoo? Get serious."
Just as Audra held up her arm, showing the blurry blue lines, something from outside struck the window. A terrible, flat sound. The window vibrated and settled and everything became still.
"What was that?" Audra said. "A bird?"
I stepped closer to the window. I could see something moving, through the bushes, on the ground.
"Is it dead?" she said. "Did it break its neck?"
"I don't think so," I said. Now I could see the bird, small and gray, hopping in a kind of circle. It tipped over and flapped its wings against the ground until it could get itself standing up again.
When I turned around, Mom was peeling potatoes, hard, into the sink. She was shorter than Audra, who stood in the middle of the kitchen with her eyes closed and her hands held out in front of her, like she was holding some invisible thing. Audra's hair was dyed black without any shine. Normally it would be the same dirty blond as mine.
Dad's voice called from the basement, then—"What's happening up there?"—but no one answered him.
I noticed how Audra's fingers were trembling a little, as she stood there with her eyes still closed. And then I looked down, out the window again, and I couldn't see where the bird had gone.
"I saw you out there," Mom said. "Whatever you were doing, walking crazy like that. And barefoot, in March."
"You didn't have to watch," Audra said, opening her eyes. "And I can walk however I want—if we always walk the exact same way, we don't see what's around us, we're like robots."
"Robots—I'm tired of hearing that word from you." Mom turned with the peeler in hand, which was not a knife but seemed like a knife. "Are your pants too tight or something, they make you walk like that?"
"What? Jesus, no." Audra's voice rose higher as she unsnapped her camouflage pants, jerked them down. She pulled one leg out and they caught on her other ankle. She almost fell down and then kicked until the pants flew off and hit a kitchen chair. The chair slid into the table, but didn't tip over.
"Audra Hanselman," Mom said.
Audra's legs were pale white and her underwear was yellow. She didn't say anything else, and she didn't pick up her pants. She turned and went up the stairs. I could see the black soles of her feet, going, climbing, and then she was gone. Upstairs, her bedroom door slammed.
"Vivian," Mom said, close to me now. "I was asking if you're all right."
"Fine," I said. "I just need to go outside, to check on something."
"Dinner's in half an hour."
Outside, it was cold, but it wasn't raining. I walked around underneath the window. The bird wasn't there. I looked under the bushes, zigzagged out a little, then started walking around the side of the house, sweeping my eyes back and forth across the ground.
In the front yard there was a rope swing. The black tire hung from a tree branch and the rope was long, so long that Audra could get it going so she swung out over the street and then back again, all the way to the house. High up on the walls of the house, up above the picture window, there were dirty footprints, the marks of where Audra had pushed and kicked off.
The bird was not in the front yard. I looked up, but there were no birds in the sky that I could see. Only the bare branches and then the tall, metal antennas on top of our house. Some kids call it the "Helicopter House" because it looks like the antennas could start to spin and the whole house would lift up. If it did, the basement would still be in the ground, opened up, and looking down into it you'd see my dad's radio outfit, all the wires and lighted dials where red needles lift and jerk back and forth, where voices talk in the thick round padded ears of his headset. You'd see my dad, sitting there, talking to people who live far away.
At first I didn't see Audra, because her hair and her black sweatshirt blended into the shingles. She was sitting there on the rooftop, outside her bedroom window. When she saw me looking up, she didn't say anything. She just slowly lifted her hand and waved. I waved back, then looked away, down again.
I went in the front door, through the living room. Mom and Dad were in the kitchen, talking at the table, and when I picked up Audra's pants from the floor, my parents looked over at me.
"Tell your sister she can stay upstairs until she's ready to apologize," Dad said.
"And bring down your pills, Vivian," Mom said. "So you can take them with your dinner."
Upstairs, Audra's door wasn't locked. I opened it, stepped over the books on the floor, stood next to the open window with the cold air blowing in. Audra turned her head to see who I was. I stared at the left side of her face, with the seven little silver hoops on the edge of her ear.
"I brought your pants," I said, holding them up, but already I could see she'd put on some black jeans.
"It's all right." She didn't turn around. It was quiet for a minute, and then she said, "I didn't expect you to say anything."
"What?" I said.
"Before," she said. "Downstairs. You did the right thing, just watching. I can't help it, and then it's just the same thing, over and over."
"I'm on your side," I said.
"If I can just change the way I do things," she said. "The way I walk and listen and talk and touch—but if I keep trying to change then even that trying starts to be the same, like a rut, a robot trying not to be a robot, and I spend all my time watching myself, you know?"
Now Audra did look around at me, and smiled like I should step through the window and sit on the roof with her. I reached out and felt the grit of the shingles. It felt slippery, like I would slip. I stayed standing where I was.
"I met someone," she said. "Someone who knows all kinds of things, better than the way we're living, here. Closer to how we're supposed to be."
"Who?" I said.
"Soon you'll know," she said. "Everything's going to change."
Two houses down, at the Haydens', a white van that said BEE EXTERMINATOR on it was parked. Across the street, Jimmy Newman was kicking a ball up the hill in his front yard. It was a red ball, and he'd kick it up, and it would roll down, and he'd kick it up again.
I tried to slow down my breathing, but as Audra slid back, closer to me, I felt a trembling start inside me. Strong and too quick for me to get between something and something else, before I could get to my life jacket in my closet in my room across the hall. My arms rose up and my hands were shaking. They reached out and took hold of Audra's arm, of her shoulder where it turned into her neck.
"Vivian," she said, "it's all right. It's fine. I'm here."
And then I could hardly hear her because the blood was roaring around in my body and racing in my ears and all I wanted to do was hold on.
I pulled Audra through the window, onto her bedroom floor, half on top of me next to the bed. She was saying something, over and over again, stroking my hair with her hand that wasn't twisted back under her.
"Klick-i-tat. Klick-i-tat."
That was a game we used to play, when we were younger, that I'd almost forgotten. If we were in trouble, or Mom and Dad were arguing, we'd say that name. "Klickitat," back and forth to each other, to help us feel better, to know that we were always sisters, always together. We got it from Beezus and Ramona, the name of their street—a block away from our street, Siskiyou, here in Portland—and we said it because they are sisters and we are sisters, and because we liked the sound.
"Klickitat," Audra said, whispering, her voice close to my ear. "Klickitat."
It was the word for how we felt together, understanding each other. My fingers began to loosen. A "vise-like grip" is what I've heard it called, where a doctor wrote it in my file, and they've always pried me off people—it's only Audra who let me hold on until it passed, even if the doctors or Mom and Dad tried to pull us apart.
"I'm sorry," I said to Audra.
"It's okay." It was quiet for a moment, and then she said, "Are you getting worse, do you think?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Don't be sorry," she said. "We'll figure out ways to make it better for both of us, for everyone."
Audra sat up, stretched her arms above her head, turned her head from side to side like she was checking to make sure her neck still worked. She smiled at me, and just then Mom started calling that dinner was ready.
Audra did not come down to dinner. Instead, she went back through her window and stayed out all night, later than anyone could stay awake waiting.
