Sister Sister
I was born on a Friday, before the overworked nurses’ first morning coffee at Elyria Memorial Hospital in Ohio. Elyria is much too far from Cleveland to be considered a suburb but close enough for me to claim that it was when dealing with outsiders. I was my mother’s first child and my father’s second.
Dad’s first daughter, Adrianne, was nine years old when I joined the family. Adrianne was the epitome of cool, she was the Dean Martin to my Sammy Davis Jr. I’d go with her anywhere if she’d let me, I’d mimic her doing anything. I did not understand the complexities of halves.
How is this beautifully whole creature a half of a sister? Why is she not here all the time? I longed for her when she wasn’t around, and didn’t understand her extended absences. I knew she had a different mother, but it never occurred to me that that somehow made everything different.
Once, Adrianne ran away from home. Our home, the only one I knew.
The rest of us piled into the car well after my my bedtime to search for her. I clenched and unclenched my chubby fists, legs swinging anxiously from my booster seat eyes frantically searching for my big sister.
My big sister has run away from home.
I understood that this was a bad thing because my dad looked as if he had wilted. Like a plant that had gone unwatered for too long, his usual self-possessed demeanor took on a deflated air. But Adrianne didn’t just run away from home I thought, as my head swiveled from side to side scanning sidewalks and side streets for my hero, she ran away from me too.
We pulled into the unlit parking lot of Northwood Junior High, it felt as though we had been driving forever. My legs slowly stopped swinging. My head slumps backward to the seat’s headrest. My eyes droop closed. I’m shutting down from overwhelm, but I’m also wired, frightened, worried, but so tired- where is my sister?
I’m awaken by the cabin light illuminating my face. Adrianne slides into the seat next to me. I’m so happy to see her, so relieved that the confusion I felt trying to parse the “why” of it all faded. I cautiously extended my fat fingers to wiggle my way beneath the hand she had firmly planted into the suede. She snatched her hand away, I felt my cheeks burn hot as my eyes traveled from my slighted hand to her face, searching for a sign that she simply ran away from home, but not from me.
Adrianne moved out and in with her mother full-time not too long after that night. Dad scheduled weekly phone calls so that I could talk to her, so that I wouldn’t feel as abandoned or betrayed by her as I did.
I coiled the cord of the kitchen phone between my fingers as I stood excited to hear my sister’s voice but the line was silent. “Hello?” I asked unsurely.
“I’m here” my big sister said to me. And there I stood in silence holding the phone straining to hear the sound of her breathing through the deafening silence on the line. A few more weeks of these weekly silent dates passed before the both of us stopped coming to the phone when summoned. It was only then that I knew what it meant to have half a sister.
I had another sister though, Christina, who was just two and a half years younger than I. My earliest memory is only from a few hours before her birth.
In our little green house on Keys Drive our family of three hustled about the house. My godmother, Saundra pulled up and parked her large Buick parallel to the curb. My god sister, Candice makes her way to the front door where a little bag packed with my belongings awaits. My father greets them, and both of my parents hug me goodbye and we go our separate ways. I’m headed to my godmother’s house for a sleepover. My parents are headed to the hospital, Christina is coming.
The night passes for me with the same anticipation thirsty plants have smelling rain in the air before an oncoming storm. Everyone keeps asking me if I’m excited to be a big sister, if I’m happy to be a big sister, if I’m ready to meet my little sister. I don’t have an answer but I think the answer is “no”. I already had a sister, “half” of one- what’s a whole one going to be like? I had more questions than answers, but there was one thing I knew for sure, no one actually cared what I thought. Nobody was really asking me.
Morning arrives and I’m hustled about another house, my bag of belongings packed and parked next to another front door, I’m hurried into another car and whisked away to the hospital. It was time. Time to meet my baby sister. But what I wanted most was to see my dad. I needed his steadiness to counter the unnamed, unsettling anxiety coursing through my toddler body. In the hospital now, the waiting room smells funny, clean but lifeless. Plastic flowers, rugged, damaged children’s books. I slid back into a wooden chair, legs swinging back and forth, hands gripping and releasing the chair’s arms, waiting.
I see my father. I run to him. I missed him. He scoops me up in his arms and I bury my face in his neck consuming the smell of him. He’s talking to me, but I can’t hear him so I lift my eyes to meet his.
He’s so happy. Tired, but happy. So I’m now happy too. He asks me if I want to meet my sister. His eyes tell me that the correct answer is yes. I say yes. And we leave Saundra and Candice in the waiting room as we approach and pass through a set of swinging doors.
He’s talking to me, but I don’t hear him. The hospital is strange. It smells weird, and I don’t understand why some people are moving so quickly, and some shuffle along attached to cords, and wires, and beeping machines like shuffling zombies. I tighten my grip on my dad’s shirt, I don’t like it here and I’m starting to get frightened.
“We have to wash our hands now” my father says to me. “They have to be really really clean before we see the baby.” He gently takes my little hands into his labor-hardened palms. He tests the temperature of the water with one hand and inspects my tiny dirty nails. He gives me a look that asks where have you been little girl? As he scrubs my hands and fingernails to his satisfaction.
We enter a room. My mom is there, and she’s holding what looks like a bundle. Positioned on his hip I lean as far as I could to peek into the bundle my mom was holding. The baby looked alien. And off-color, and hairy. But they said this was my sister, and they asked if I wanted to hold her. Frozen with intrigue at the strangeness of this tiny thing, dad places me on a chair just like the one in the waiting room. I shimmy backwards until my body touches the back of the chair. They tell me to hold my arms just so, to make sure I’m careful about supporting Christina’s head. Dad places my baby sister in the cradle of my arms. I freeze staring into her face. Saundra and Candice are now in the room excitedly congratulating my parents on a job well done. I try to make eye contact with my father, I want to give my sister back. My father gathers the bundle that is my baby sister into his arms and returns her to my mother’s.
Perhaps he didn’t see me reach for him. I let my stubby arms fall back to my sides as earth seemed to wobble on its axis and begin to revolve around my brand new little sister.