A Lullaby in January or A Portrait of Sisterhood

 
I’m in first grade and the bus drops me off at the bottom of our steep driveway. Jamie waits for me at the top. She has forgotten her house key in her locker at school.

There is ice and snow on the ground, and it will be dark soon. She holds my hand to walk through a patch of woods to the neighbor’s house to use their phone to call Papa.


III

It’s brown powder with tap water sitting in a plastic cap. I don’t know what I expected, but I guess not that. I thought poison would look more alchemic, like a simmering cauldron of black ink.

Jamie asks me to hold her cigarette while she mixes it up with her needle. I steal a few drags, leaning against the doorway of the bathroom, and watch like she’s putting on mascara.

Neither side of her forearm has a good vein, so she goes through the thin skin on the back of her hand. She doesn’t so much as wince as the needle goes through.

“I’m done with this shit,” she says. “I’m so glad you never picked it up.”

When her blood runs, I imagine snakes fleeing from the tiny caves she has made in her limbs. She rinses the syringe in the sink and asks me what I want to order for food.


III

My lips are turning blue and my feet have gone numb inside my sneakers. The garage is just a cement box underneath the house with dim fluorescent lights.

Jamie wraps me in her only jacket. She keeps her arms tight around my small, shivering body, and sings me a lullaby in Spanish about little birds chirping for their mother when they are cold or hungry.


III


bond

noun.
a relationship between people based on shared feelings, interests, or experiences

verb.
join or be joined securely to something else, especially by means of adhesive substance, heat, or pressure

join or be joined by a chemical bond

lay bricks in an overlapping pattern so as to form a strong structure


III

When you think of a bouquet, you think of roses, lilies, orchids, daisies, daffodils. My sister stands before me, barefoot, and her face is a bouquet. Her mouth and lower jaw, a pitcher plant, burst chlorophyll, veins like scarlet tendrils reaching for the sun. Her eyes are petaled by deep violets. On her temple are tulip bulbs, red and balled so tight they resemble the fist who planted them.

Someone is dead. I know that because the homicide detective is here and I want her eyes to stop smiling at me from over Jamie’s shoulder. The man responsible didn’t kill my sister, only burned and sucked the remnants of her through a glass pipe and took off running to New Hampshire.

She once beat a man so badly with cast iron for following her at a party that he fell into a seizure. I have answered phone calls where she was rushing her boyfriend to the ER because she had put a hole in him during a fight for the second time. One of my father’s girlfriends poured bleach on her favorite jacket, and was met with a smashed laptop and promises of concrete while she slept.

What I mean is, my sister is the most frightening adversary I know and whom I cannot be afraid because I am of her the way blood is of marrow, and she is of me the way we sing lullabies in grief. What I mean is, when one of us is split open then the other must swallow what falls out. What I mean is since cancer took the blood, bone, and breath from our mother she has carried them both everywhere, and now she stands in my doorway hollow. It is uncanny, and I am frightened. I do not know if I can swallow the rage of the three of us.


III

Papa comes home in the middle of the night to a broken window. I awake in Jamie’s daybed to her smaller, defiant voice volleying against his angry exasperated one.

There is the sound of a dull snap of his open hand against the crown of her head. She just passed her 12th birthday. She does not cry.
She comes into her bedroom and sees me looking at her dark silhouette.
“Papa’s home,” she says. “Go back to sleep.”