Six Going on Seven, Chapter 9 ~ My Sister’s Keeper

Sunday night marked the end to a very long week.  Liseli felt drained, but relieved that her family was still in one piece.

This year Elly’s birthday and Mother’s Day fell on the same day, and while Elly received presents from everyone, Dori and Jake and Kiki included (who wanted to know where Russ had been, and were given vague and misleading answers) Liseli got a bouquet of flowers from Russ.  It was supposedly from “the children” but she knew he’d bought it when he went out on Saturday to get a new faucet for the kitchen sink.  He always bought her different kinds of flowers each Mother’s Day; this year it was lilacs and tiger-striped roses.

He’d been watching her all weekend, closely, and she knew he was waiting for her to break down.  It made her uncomfortable.  She did not like him looking at her with the knowledge of the Lost One in his eyes.

And now she knew that Elly had, perhaps, always looked at her through those eyes.

She had not spoken to Elly about the Lost One, though she did not forget what Russ had said.  That it was Elly who told him of the secret, a secret she should never have known.  How and why she did know, Liseli knew she must someday find out.  But it wouldn’t be this weekend.  Being confronted by Russ was distressing enough for one lifetime, much less one weekend, and so she told herself that talking with Elly would be a task for another time.  A time when she did not feel so fragile.

She hugged Elly when she put her to bed, though she told her she was seven, getting to be such a big girl, now.  Elly whispered to her that she was sorry, and Liseli asked “What for?” in surprise.

“For scaring you.”

“Oh sweetheart, it’s alright, I was just a little worried, that’s all.  Just don’t play hide-and-seek without telling me or Daddy first, okay?”

Elly nodded, looking serious, and there was something in that look which told Liseli she did not only mean the episode from Saturday morning.  Her apology was earnest, searching, almost begging to be forgiven for some unforgivable wrong.  So Liseli just hugged her again and told her not to worry, that everything was going to be alright.

On her way to bed she paused in the dark to smell her flowers, which stood in a vase on the living room table.  She was sure that everything would be alright.  Even if she couldn’t give Russ what he wanted, which was the showy catharsis of weeping on his shoulder, she felt they would be alright.  Not that she thought he wanted her to cry, but he kept looking at her as if he expected her to and worried that she wasn’t.

Truth be told she felt no desire to weep and lament the Lost One.  Not anymore.  Now it was out and with it went something . . . something she could not quite define.  There was a strange emptiness where the guilt and turmoil belonged, an emptiness where tortured thoughts of the Lost One should be.  Perhaps it was nothing more than being freed from the burden of keeping the secret.  But she felt it must surely be more than that.

She went into their bedroom, where Russ was waiting for her, and got into bed.  She’d known that he was watching her last night, when they both pretended to be sleeping; watching and listening to see if she might try crying to herself in the dark of the night.  But she didn’t, and he’d eventually fallen asleep waiting.  She hadn’t cried even then.  Maybe it was because she’d spent too many years crying.

He was going to monitor her sleep again tonight, she knew.  She snuggled up against him and said, “You have to stop staring at me all day and night.”

“Can’t help it,” he replied.  “You never tell me what’s wrong.  How else am I supposed to know?”

She just shrugged.  She didn’t know the answer.  The weight she’d been carrying all these years, the weight that Russ wanted her to share, that was gone.  She didn’t know where it went, she didn’t miss it, and she didn’t want to invite it back with tears and regret.

Elly lifted her face to the breath of damp air from the open window.  The room was dark and still, but she knew she was not alone.  The beads around her neck were cold and clammy against her skin, but she didn’t take them off; they were her birthday present from Dad.  She reached up to touch them, running her fingers back and forth along the swoop, lifting the strand away to look at it.  It was no more than a dark line of round black circles in the shadows of the night.  The only light filtered down from the moon, and Elly sat on the center of her bed in the patch of silver.

In a ring around her she had laid out her other presents, and these she touched gently every now and then, feeling them like a blind child.  There was the fashion Barbie Dori had given her — a redheaded Barbie with a blue sundress.  She was all hard plastic points.  Jake and Kiki had even given a present this year . . . well, Kiki really, but the card had been signed from Uncle Jake and Katherine.  A ten dollar bill and a package of multi-colored scrunchies had been the gift.

Mom’s gift lay scattered in halves all around.  She had bought Elly some new clothes for summer, in shades of blue and green.  Mommy always dressed her in blues and greens.  Elly liked the turquoise jumper, but had set it aside and nearly forgotten its existence (and the Barbie and the scrunchies) when she saw the nesting dolls.

They were a pair, two sisters, pale white faced and oddly shaped, like pears instead of people.  Identical save for their hair and clothes — though they did not really have clothes; their bodies were elaborate patterns from the neck down.  One had hair painted yellow and the other a deep bluish black.  The blonde doll was painted in a design of blues and greens, the other bright splashes of reds, oranges, and yellows.  They were each bigger than her hand, but they split around their middles and revealed smaller versions of themselves, which split and split and split until there was nothing.

Elly had seen nesting dolls before.  She’d seen plastic ones and wooden ones, but none were as beautiful as these.  And yet there was something more.  They did not just seem like pretty hand painted wooden novelties, their carefully detailed faces stared back at her like things alive.  But that was silly.  They didn’t move or speak or do anything but sit there, paint and wood.  But she needed to touch them, to sit with them and take them apart, put them back together, and do it all over again.  Every time she cracked them open she thought she was close to finding something inside, but every time she was met with empty space and she put them back together, feeling strangely guilty, like a magician who botched the trick of cutting his lovely assistant into pieces.

She mixed them together, putting the top halves of the blonde doll on the bottom halves of the raven haired doll, and vice versa.  They were one doll, one little wooden person, broken in halves and divided in two.  That’s what they wanted her to know, she felt.  She kept putting them together in different ways — as many different ways of combining them as she could manage.

Her parents thought she was being kind of odd, she could tell.  They kept looking at her funny.  But they said nothing.

Mom had gone out and rented one of Elly’s favorite movies, The Little Mermaid, but Elly didn’t watch.  She sat alone in the corner of the living room, after her birthday guests had gone home, and played with her nesting dolls, fingering the beads around her neck, ignoring the Barbie and the scrunchies and the clothes.  She wasn’t even thinking about what she could spend the ten dollars on.  There was only the girls, the little wooden sisters, who needed to be put together, who had nothing at their centers, nothing at all.

She’d eaten ice cream and cake and gone to bed, but never slept.  She just sat on the bed, the beads growing colder, the dolls still empty and frustrating.  She kept the other presents around her and ran her hands over them to remind herself, fleetingly, of other things, but all she could really see in the dark were her parents’ strange gifts.

Elly heard the trickle of water over stones and smelled the midnight water smells — the damp grass, the wet dirt, the night.  The night had a smell, it was chilly and clear like mint . . . or was it all in her head?  Why did everything seem so alive, the dolls, the beads, the moonlight, the nighttime . . . was it because she was older now, seven not six?  Her first night of being seven . . . would they all be like this?

Or would it never be like this again?

She had the dolls together again, mixed up, and she began to take them apart.  The wood felt cold now, too, as cold as the string of ice around her neck.  Her fingers shook and her teeth chattered, but she didn’t stop or take the necklace off.

The doll had to come apart.

The thing inside had to be freed.

It stood on her palm now; the Lost One, a little doll sized Lost One, looking up at her from dark, lost eyes.  Elly felt no surprise, no nothing.  That’s what had belonged at the center of the dolls, the sisters, all along.  She curled her fist closed over the miniature spirit, and looked up to see it now transplanted, sitting on the bed beside her, life-sized, but not alive.  Elly shivered, feeling the cold curling itself around her mind.  This must be what it’s like to be dying, the thought came to her for the first time — the first time ever she really thought about dying.  About herself dying.

“I’m a part of you, whether you like it or not,” the ghost of a child said.  “So you can send me away, but you won’t be able to live with that.”

“I know,” Elly said, but she wasn’t afraid this time.  She felt sorry, again, for the broken child, the doll in halves, the Lost One with nothing at her center.  “But I don’t know what to do.”

“Just promise me that you will.  Someday.”  Something almost like a smile passed over her face.  “I have forever to wait.”

Elly regarded this thing, her sister, for a long moment.  In that moment she felt herself becoming older, truly older.  Older than seven, older than the Lost One, many years older, as if she had been flowing on and on and on between the banks of her world for eons before the humans, the animals, the birds all came to drink and swim in her waters . . . .

She blinked, shaking her head.  What had happened?  What had she become, for that moment?  Now she was just Elly again, seven and old for her age, but still only a child, and she cried.  The tears were strangely warm against her cold cheeks, but even as they trickled down they reminded her again of the glimpse into a different place, a different identity, a different age.

“I don’t know what to promise you,” she said, sniffing as she wiped the saltwater away.  “I know you’re lonely and you wish you were alive, but I don’t know what to do about that.”

“You will.  Just don’t forget me, that’s all.  She has buried me in her mind and wants me to stay that way.  I’m lost to her.  It’s no use anymore.  You’re the only one, don’t bury me, too.”

“I won’t.”  Elly didn’t need to be told who the Lost One had been referring to.  “But you have to leave my mom . . . and my dad . . . alone.  It makes her too . . . too unhappy . . . and so it makes them unhappy.  That’s just the way it is.”

A shadow passed over the Lost One’s face, a black patch as if she were fading away.  “I know.  Your mother won’t ever see me again.”  One white hand reached to touch Elly on the head, but all Elly felt was chill.  “She’s not my mother anymore.”

She was gone then, disappearing without Elly needing to ask.  She left Elly feeling cold and alone, the room dark, the moonlight faded, the strange scents and aliveness of the night all gone.  Elly slowly reached up and caressed the necklace, fingering each smooth bead.  Then she gathered up the pieces of the nesting dolls and carefully fitted them together.  When she held only two heavy pieces, one in each hand, she looked between them, seeing only their vague shadowy outlines.  “Leave,” she whispered, “I don’t know what to do with you.”  Then they, too, disappeared.

Elly was slightly startled.  She hadn’t expected them to disappear completely.  Her hands were empty, truly empty, instead of merely holding two invisible dolls.  She searched the bed, thinking they had fallen, but she felt nothing, saw nothing.  And she had to admit what she already knew — she had told them to leave, and they’d left.  She felt, in a way, that she’d killed them, and in a way, she knew that she had, because they didn’t exist anywhere anymore.

Elly lay down, and though she felt very tired, she couldn’t sleep.  She wondered why she had ever wanted to get older.

end Volume 2

The story continues in Volume 3: Sweet Sixteen