Sisters of Heart and Snow (8 page)

S
AN
D
IEGO

1991

T
here's a Japanese saying,
Ichi-go, ichi-e
. Literally, it means “one encounter in a lifetime.” Figuratively, it means you don't get do-overs in life. Sometimes you make decisions that irrevocably send you down one path instead of another. When you're young, everything seems reversible.

But making a few wrong choices can trip you up forever.

My father was the one who taught me that phrase.

I spent my childhood on swim teams, winning meets all over town. It was the one thing that made my father really notice me. I saw his proud expression when the other parents congratulated him, how he took photos when I went up to claim my medals. If I lost, he critiqued my performance on the car ride home, telling me how the other swimmers had bested me, how I could improve my time and my form. The thing was, though he'd been a football player, he was often correct. He was not one of those parents who said that doing my best was enough. Winning was enough. I agreed, then.

And it was also what I was known for in school. I was Rachel the Swimmer. The girl who got up before dawn to swim and would surely be in the Olympics one day.

I worked harder than anybody else on the swim team. We practiced in the mornings, and I went back to the pool in the evenings to perfect my strokes, ignoring little stabs of pain shooting up to my neck. Ignoring how I'd stopped my periods and how tired I was every day in class. When my blood sugar dropped too much, I drank coffee and ate a banana and a candy bar and pushed myself to go further. I wanted to be number one.

When I was sixteen, during January of my sophomore year, I dislocated my shoulder during a swim meet. I felt a deep pop, a wrenching sensation, and then the purest pain I'd ever feel, besides childbirth. I sank, my mouth opening in a soundless scream, lifting one arm aloft to get help.

I'd never again be able to swim at the same level. At that age, it felt like the end of the world. Suddenly I wasn't Rachel Snow, Winner of Gold Medals. I was just Rachel Snow, average student. A nobody to anybody, especially to my family.

And so I found comfort in other ways.

My friends had all been on the swim team. We'd traveled to meets together, spending entire days huddled together on cold pool decks or applying sunblock to each other's backs on the hot days. Suddenly I had nobody. I could have been manager, somebody who kept score and gathered up goggles and brought out water, but I couldn't stomach the thought of watching them all do something I could not.

Killian treated me differently, too. Apparently, swimming was the only thing interesting about me. He had no reason to take me anywhere or even talk to me anymore. But what could I do about it? It's not like we had the kind of relationship where our family went to the movies together.

No longer working out every day, I put on weight and needed new clothes. I had to ask Killian for some money. He stopped drinking his Old-Fashioned to look me up and down, how my thighs strained against my Guess denim mini, my stomach pooching over the waistband. A look of plain disgust crossed his face. I shrank inside. “Better stop eating so much,” he grunted. “No boy will like you, the way you're going.”

“Thanks,” I said, in response to the cash he handed me. I'd trained myself not to respond to his barbs now, not the way I had when I was little. When somebody is like him, you expect all kinds of mean things to come out of his mouth. It barely affects you anymore. Or so you think. It's like swallowing something sharp without realizing it, the object sitting undisturbed until years later, when your insides suddenly begin to bleed.

I had no idea why Killian Snow was the way he was. He didn't tell stories about his childhood. I knew he grew up on a cattle ranch in central California that his father had lost in a drunken card game when Killian was sixteen. He had no siblings. Probably his childhood was unhappy. Who knew what had happened to him? All I knew of my father was how he was with us. And of course, in high school, I didn't spend a second of time wondering why.

At lunch one day, tired of being alone and deciding I didn't need any more calories that day, I'd wandered out to the school parking lot. Back then you were still allowed to leave school for lunch, and in the chaos some kids would hang out in their cars in the far corners of the expansive lot and smoke.

I walked slowly past a truck bed full of these students. “You're Rachel, right?” a boy with a floppy mop of dark hair said. A clove cigarette stuck out of his mouth. “The swimmer?”

I inhaled the sweet scent of the smoke and smiled at him. He had blue eyes and dimples and made my heart race like it did right before a meet. I didn't recognize him from my classes. “Not anymore.”

He offered me his hand to help me into the truck.

My mother tried to warn me. I was on my way out one evening, my pockets clinking full of mini booze bottles I'd stolen from my father's collection, when she materialized before me in her white bathrobe, like a ghost. “Rachel, you have to stop. Your father won't forgive you.” Her face was lined, worried. “Some . . . boy's mother called. She said you got him drunk.”

I stopped, wondering which boy she was talking about. Because there had been more than one. At parties in strange houses, buzzed on watery beer, I'd hook up with almost any boy who'd wanted me. Which, since they were teenagers, was pretty much all of them. “Do you think I'm pretty?” I would say, standing naked before each one. I felt powerful, wanted. “Yeah,” each boy had said.

I stood in front of my mother and recalled all of this and felt nothing. Numb. Little pieces of my soul were getting chipped out and thrown away, and I didn't care anymore. Being numb was better. “He wanted to,” I said. “It's not a big deal.”

My mother rubbed her temples and looked at the floor. We hadn't known, but she was probably already experiencing the first stages of dementia. Sometimes she struggled to find words, used the wrong ones—I just thought it was because English was her second language. Looking back, I think that's why she had so many unfinished quilting projects. But I was young then, and not searching my parents for signs of illness.

I waited for my mother to speak. I wanted her to forbid me to leave, to order me back to my room. To tell me I still had some worth, even if I couldn't swim. I could not articulate any of this. Couldn't even think it consciously. Instead, I pushed past her and she clutched onto the railing. My mother had no power. She knew nothing about my life. She was a figurehead, not a parent. “Just leave me alone.” I knew she'd do as I asked, because it was easier, and she did.

The following week, another kid reported he'd seen a bag of weed in my locker. My father stood in the principal's office stone-faced as the principal asked if I had anything to say for myself before I was expelled.

I said nothing.

“It's not hers,” my father said. “She told me her friend gave her a paper bag, said it was a sandwich. Asked Rachel to hold on to it until lunch. How was she supposed to know? Her friend probably saw the dog coming.”

The principal furrowed his gray-white brow. “And who is this friend?”

My father shrugged his big shoulders. “You want her to be a pariah on top of everything else? Tell you what.” He stood up. “You should decide what'll be more expedient. You can expel Rachel and get a lawsuit that you'll end up settling for a lot of money, maybe with your job—or you can give her a one-week suspension.”

I hadn't told him any such thing. For a second I had the urge to tell the truth. Yes, it was my weed. Yes, I deserved anything thrown at me. But that would make it worse. My father would flip out. I held my tongue. My stomach churned and I began to cry.

The principal didn't answer. I wondered what power my father had that my principal knew about.

Killian gestured to me. “Come on, Rachel.”

The principal looked right at me. I remembered him shaking my hand after I won a CIF championship. Saying hello to me in the hallways. All the wrinkles of his face seemed to drop to the center of the earth. “Is this true, Rachel?”

No
, I whispered in my head. I nodded.

“Tell him, Rachel,” my father prompted.

They were waiting. I swallowed. “I guess somebody stuck it into my locker while I was getting my books out. I didn't even see it.”

The principal sighed. “Well, you're a good kid. I'm inclined to believe you.” He shook hands with my father. “Too bad about the swimming.”

“It is too bad.” My father smiled his easy Cheshire Cat grin, the one nobody seemed to see through but me. “She'll find something else. She's a great kid. The best.”

I followed him out to the car, tears streaming down my face. I was shaking and I wasn't sure if it was because I'd narrowly escaped punishment, or because I hadn't gotten it.

When we got in the car and shut the doors, he turned to me, his eyes burning with fury. “What do you have to cry about?” he said. “I just fixed it for you. You're a damned idiot, Rachel. First the swimming. Now this.”

Through my tears, I was stunned. “I couldn't help the swimming.” Then I realized. Oh my God. He was right. I'd worked out too hard.

It was all my fault.

He turned on the car. “If you'd listened to me about form, you wouldn't have gotten injured. Very simple. You've never listened to me.” He started backing up. “Just do me a favor. Keep out of trouble until you're out of school. I have business in this town, and I don't need you fucking it up with your antics. Got it? No more, or you're out on your ass.” He slammed his palm on the steering wheel, beeping the horn. “No more!” he screamed.

I nodded mutely and bit my tongue, concentrating on that pain so I'd stop crying. I swallowed down the hard lump in my throat. I didn't worry about getting kicked out because I was going to be good from now on. “I won't mess up again. I promise.”

•   •   •

We didn't speak of it again.
I stopped going out to the parking lot at lunchtime, knowing that the principal would be specifically watching for me, waiting for me to mess up. I ate lunch alone, in a far shady corner of the campus, behind the P.E. building, where couples went to make out. At nights I lay awake, imagining creatures out of the dark shapes in my bedroom, wondering what I was going to do with my life. Wondering what the point of it all was. My grades had dropped so much this semester I doubted any college, even the local state school, would take me. I wasn't able to bring myself to care anymore. I'd have to live at home and go to the community college. And what would I do after that, marry somebody, end up like my mother?

I longed to talk to her, to cry into her shoulders, and several times I almost did. I went to her quilt room where she sat sewing, sewing, sewing, like she was in some kind of factory with an imaginary deadline. As I stood in the doorway, watching her head bent under the orange yellow desk lamp, I knew two things to be true. She had her own demons. And because of those, she'd be unable to be a mother in the way I needed a mother.

Mom looked up at me and if she'd invited me in, maybe things would have been different. She didn't say anything, just waited, blinking blearily. The sewing machine hummed. She frowned as she searched my face. As if I was a door-to-door salesman bugging her.

I reached out and grabbed the doorknob and shut the door. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a bottomless canyon, looking down, and very much wishing I could jump.

I retreated into my room and locked the door. All I could hear was the sound of my own breathing. I longed to cry, but nothing would come. I felt like I was inhabiting some permanent dream world, where I'd never be the slightest bit happy again, or even sad.

I went to the window, imagining what would happen if I leaped out onto the concrete driveway. It was only two stories. With my luck, I'd probably just break my neck and need to live with my parents forever. I went to my closet, looked at the clothes bar, wondering if it'd support my weight. I pushed down on it experimentally. Maybe. I picked up a belt, made it into a loop. Would suffocation be quick?

Somebody pounded on my door. “Rach?” The sound of Drew's still bell-sweet little girl voice jolted me back into reality. My heart restarted. I gasped, tears springing into my eyes. I threw the belt down. “Do you want to watch
Jeopardy!
with me?” We used to watch that together as we did our homework, each of us shouting out answers, usually a few seconds too late.

•   •   •

This was not what I wanted.
It would most likely be my sister who'd find me. I couldn't do that to her. I sank to the floor, shaking uncontrollably. I took several breaths. I made my hands into fists until the nails cut my palms, the pain giving me something else to concentrate on.

“Rach?” Drew knocked again, rattled the doorknob.

“I'm busy,” I said, my voice sounding more brusque than I'd intended. “I have homework.” I couldn't talk to Drew about any of this. She was still an innocent little kid. I needed to protect her.

I heard her shut the door to her room. The strains of Stravinsky's “Elegy” floated through the walls. Drew bought the sheet music for it almost two years earlier, when she was just ten. It'd been too difficult for her at the time, but now here she was, performing it perfectly.
Holy shit. When did my sister get so good?
I wondered, listening to the low, sad melody.

Then Killian pounded on Drew's door. “No playing after nine,” he shouted. I touched my shirt. It was soaking wet from the tears I hadn't realized I was shedding.

I wouldn't admit what I was thinking about that night to anyone, ever, I promised myself. Drew had saved me, jarred me out of my lowest point, and she would never know. It was too shameful and too burdensome to confide. So I just kept managing my pain as badly as I knew how. At least I knew for certain I'd never leave my sister. Not like that.