The Opposite of Me (40 page)

“We’re friends,” I said. “Good friends.”

“I still can’t believe you were fired,” Alex said.

“Let’s dwell on it,” I said. “I was fired. Fired, fired, fired.”

“Reverse psychology didn’t work on me when Mom told me I wasn’t allowed to eat any vegetables,” Alex said. “And I was two then.”

“Mom did that?” I asked. “Really?”

“Sure,” Alex said. “She sat there eating peas and carrots and told me I couldn’t have any. So I got cake for dinner. I remember because it was some of our leftover birthday cake. Yellow cake with white icing and pink roses.”

“You’d just turned two?” I asked incredulously. “And you remember all that?”

“Can we get back to the juicy stuff?” Alex asked. “So you’re unemployed?”

“That’s another story,” I said.

“We’ve got all night,” Alex said. “Lucky for you.”

I owed Alex the truth. She’d been brutally honest with me, and I owed it to her to do the same.

“Okay,” I said. “Let me just figure out where to start.”

Three hours later, Alex’s breathing was deep and even. We’d talked tonight, really talked, for the first time in a long time. Maybe even ever. I was surprised by how easily the words flowed between us, with no gaps or awkward silences. In the darkness of our bedroom, with the rest of the house still, it was almost like we were strangers cocooned together on a train, opening our hearts because we knew we’d never see each other again. I told Alex about May and my new job, and I learned Gary wasn’t as perfect as he looked. He lost his tem
per over stupid things like misplaced keys, and he was vain enough to have had a nose job in his twenties. “The thing is, I think his nose looked better
before,
” Alex said, and we both laughed. Was this what it could’ve been like for us all along, if only we’d been different people? I wondered. Was this what normal sisters did—stay up late together, giggling and talking and conspiring?

After a while, Alex fell asleep, but I remained wide awake. If only she were with anyone but Bradley, I thought. Why did it have to be Bradley? A dark, wormy thought started to burrow into my brain—
But isn’t that precisely the point? Maybe Alex is drawn to Bradley because she knows how much he means to you
—but I forced it away. Alex hadn’t sought Bradley out; they’d gotten stuck in an elevator together by pure chance. The wedding section of our newspaper was filled with love stories that were jump-started by coincidence: seatmates on an airplane discovering they were reading the same novel; grocery shoppers bumping into each other and chasing down runaway cans of soup together; childhood playmates unexpectedly meeting in a conference room decades later. It happened all the time.

I’d just never thought it would happen to Alex and Bradley.

Plus, Alex hadn’t known about my feelings for Bradley, I reminded myself. This wasn’t a competition for her. Accepting that didn’t make my pain go away, but it did help ease my anger.

Alex and Bradley. Bradley and Alex. Even imagining their names linked together hurt. What would it be like to see them as a couple? Would I ever be able to go to Bradley’s house and see a photograph of Alex where there had once been one of me? Could I choke down dinner at Antonio’s while Mom and Dad bickered and Bradley and Alex smiled over their wineglasses, the kinds of intimate smiles meant only for each other? Could I
give a toast at their wedding and make everyone believe I meant every word?

It would get easier, wouldn’t it? After a few months or years or decades? Wouldn’t it have to get easier?

I curled up in a ball and hugged a pillow to my stomach, hoping it would absorb some of my pain. It seemed like everyone in the world had a partner. Even Matt had Pammy now. While everyone else was pairing off, I’d spent my twenties killing myself for a job I no longer had. I’d made so many mistakes. I’d never get back that time, those lost opportunities.

I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.

The words were as clear and vivid as if someone had entered my bedroom and spoken them aloud. Right now, just a few miles away, lived a widower who made up excuses to go into the grocery store every day just so he could talk to someone. How lonely was his bed at 3:00
A.M.
? And what of the man whose fiancée had left him to explain to a church full of their family and friends that there wouldn’t be a wedding after all? Then there was Jane, who’d baked her husband a white chocolate cheesecake for his birthday and sat staring at it while she waited for him to come home from his night with another woman.

People hurt each other all the time, both wittingly and unwittingly. And some made the choice to keep moving on, through the pain and uncertainty, and others barricaded the walls of their worlds and stayed safely inside those narrow confines. Some people tried to find hope again, and others . . . well, others flew to Hong Kong for forty-eight hours and substituted dinners with clients for a social life.

Was this what Matt had been trying to tell me all along?

Alex flung one arm outside of the covers and muttered something. “No,” she whimpered. “No.” She kicked off her covers, like she was trying to escape from something.

“It’s okay,” I whispered. I rubbed her back until she stopped thrashing. Her shoulder blades felt as delicate as wings beneath my hand. I pulled the covers back up over her so she wouldn’t get chilled.

She used to have nightmares,
I suddenly remembered.

Why hadn’t I ever remembered that before? When Alex was four or five, she used to sneak into my bed in the middle of the night. I’d never wake up, but in the morning, I’d be all toasty warm and she’d be curled against my back like a baby koala bear.

I looked down at Alex’s long, slender fingers. Earlier today I’d noticed her ring finger still bore an imprint from the engagement ring she’d taken off. A few days ago, I’d gone with Alex to Gary’s house and we’d filled up three of her suitcases and brought them back to my parents’ house. While Alex was sorting through her jeans and underpants and makeup, I’d looked around and realized something. Alex was walking away from French-country-inspired interior decorators and country-club memberships and jewelry boxes pulled out of breast pockets for no reason, so she could walk toward a middle-class photographer with a giant heart.

I thought I’d known my sister, but I hadn’t. She’d been as much a stranger to me as I’d been to her. I hadn’t known
Alex
, the person I’d spent every waking second with for the first few years of our lives. We’d learned to crawl on the very same day. Mom still had a photo on the mantel of me with a bowl of spaghetti dumped over my head, and Alex laughing in the next high chair over.

In my old baby book with the pink cover, Mom had recorded the first word I’d ever spoken: my sister’s name.

Right here, right now, I had a second chance to have a relationship with my sister. I could choose to move on through
the pain and hurt. I could hope I’d reach the other side instead of drowning. Maybe Alex and I would never be close—maybe we’d always be too different for that—but at least I could give it a chance. Give Alex a chance.

When I finally fell asleep, my cheeks were wet, but my hand was over my sister’s.

Twenty-five
 

 

I COULDN’T BEAR TO wait in the hospital while the neurosurgeon opened my sister’s skull and cut into her brain.

I left my parents sitting hunched together on a couch in the waiting room with Bradley by their side. They’d aged ten years in a week. For once, Dad wasn’t complaining about the lack of a nougat-based candy like Mars in the vending machine or the fact that the parking garage charged by the full hour even if you left your car there for ten stinking minutes. He was just staring into space, his thin shoulders slumped. Somehow that made me sadder than anything else.

There was only one thing Alex wanted, one thing she’d said would comfort her. It was crazy, but I wanted desperately to get it for her, right now. I couldn’t stand to sit there, staring at my watch. If I hurried, I’d have time to get it and come back to the hospital before she woke up.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I told my parents, hugging them tightly. “Everything’s going to be fine, okay? I researched this doctor, remember? He’s one of the best.”

It was as though they hadn’t even heard me.

“Take care of them,” I said to Bradley. “I have to get something for Alex.”

He nodded, his eyes dull and worried.

I raced to the elevator and jumped inside, impatiently jabbing the button for the parking garage even though I knew it wouldn’t get me there any faster. I leapt into my parents’ car and rushed to their house, barely tapping the car brakes at stop signs. I tore inside and yanked down the pull stairs leading to the attic. It had to be up there; it was the only place I could think to look.

I climbed the creaky steps and began searching through the mounds of boxes Mom stored up here, pushing aside baby shoes and containers of Christmas tree ornaments and the piles of photos Mom had never gotten around to putting into albums.

Mom couldn’t have thrown it away; she never threw anything away.

I was going to find Alex’s Magic 8 Ball and get someone to remove the little answer pyramid inside. I’d have them replace it with a new pyramid, one with only good answers. It was an insane plan—where was I going to find a Magic 8 Ball restorer?—but I couldn’t stop my frenzy. I had to do something; I’d go crazy sitting in the waiting room, staring at my watch reluctantly dragging around its hands.

The day of Alex’s diagnosis, I’d spent hours on the computer. I’d researched her illness as thoroughly as I could. What I’d learned took my breath away. First, Alex would lose her hair when the neurosurgeon shaved her skull. Then the steroids designed to reduce inflammation in her brain would have the side effect of bloating her body. One woman on a website I’d found said she gained thirty pounds in a month from steroids. If it turned out that Alex needed radiation, it would sap her strength and might leave bald patches after her hair grew back.

How many times had I wished my sister would fade away, that she’d stop drawing admiring glances? Soon she’d be unrec
ognizable; her beauty stripped away. In a week, my sister would be a completely different person.

It wasn’t my fault;
of course
it wasn’t my fault. But the guilt was consuming me.

You wanted this,
a cold voice whispered.
She took Bradley and you wanted her to pay.

“I didn’t,” I said aloud, fighting the shame that threatened to engulf me. “I didn’t want
this.
”

I ignored the tears flowing down my cheeks and tore through another box, tossing aside old report cards and scribbled childhood drawings and the smiling teddy bear Dad had won us at Hersheypark one summer. Alex and I had fought so bitterly over who got to hold the bear that Dad spent thirty dollars winning another one, I suddenly remembered. Next I picked up a photograph of our family vacationing in Ocean City when Alex and I were babies. Our diapers stuck out from underneath our bathing suits, I was chewing on a plastic shovel while Alex sucked her thumb, and we were both squinting into the sun and looking extremely annoyed. I put the photo aside; I’d frame it later.

Suddenly I found it in a shoe box along with some yellowing old papers. I yanked out the Magic 8 Ball, and an envelope that was stuck to its side with some unidentifiable sticky substance came with it.

I’d take the Magic 8 Ball with me back to the hospital, I decided as I pulled off the envelope and automatically glanced down at it. It was a legal-size one, bearing an official county seal.