Free The Language of Sisters by Amy Hatvany Page A

life I had known.
    I wanted to leave, to go back to San Francisco. I missed Shane. I missed Barry. I missed the simple, solitary pleasure of taking Moochie for his afternoon walk. I wanted to be able to go to the grocery store without having to think about the logistics of pushing a wheelchair and the shopping cart, or whether I had packed enough diapers for an hour away from the house. I wanted to be able to take more than a five-minute shower without worrying that Jenny had fallen out of her bed and cracked her skull. I wanted to take back all my lofty promises, to take back what had happened to Jenny and return to the life I’d lived for the past ten years.
    My mother wasn’t helping stem these feelings of regret. I watched her move around Jenny and me as though we were polite but uninvolved acquaintances. I did not understand her. Putting aside my own complicated issues with my mother, I had truly believed that having Jenny home would soften her, bring her back to the mother she had been to Jenny before Wellman. “Help!” I longed to plead. “Help me do this! She’s your daughter. What’s wrong with you?”
    She seemed to float above us like a balloon attached to our wrists, tied to us forever but distant, inanimate. She slept at the other end of the house, in the same room she’d shared with our father when we were children. She wore earplugs, something she said she had done since Jenny moved to Wellman. “After she left,” my mother told me, “even the tiniest sound would wake me. I’d be sure it was Jenny crying, needing me.” She shook her head. “A woman’s hearing becomes supersonic when she becomes a mother. Intently tuned to the sound of her children’s cries. Even the illusion of them. If I didn’t wear these”—she held up the earplugs—“I’d never sleep again.”
    But despite her words, the first time Jenny had woken up in the middle of the night, I’d stepped back into the hallway after comforting my sister and sensed my mother’s presence nearby. I also smelled something burning. I caught her sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, smoking. Her legs were crossed, and her dangling foot wiggled furiously. “What are you doing?” I asked. I was sure she had come to check on Jenny, but I wanted her to be the one to say it. To admit she cared.
    She looked at me, her pale, angled face suddenly illuminated pink by the glowing tip of her cigarette. Her expression resembled a rubber band that had been stretched to its limit. “I was hungry,” she said. There was nothing to eat on the table in front of her, only a saucer filled with ash and two spent cigarette butts. She jutted her chin toward the hallway to Jenny’s room and tapped her cigarette with her finger. “Everything okay?”
    I wanted to say, “No, everything’s not okay. Jenny’s knocked up and I’m exhausted.” But I bit my tongue, unwilling to share how I was really feeling. After her refusal to visit the salon with us, I hadn’t reached out to my mother. I sheltered my emotions under deep cover, unwilling to let her hurt me again. “When did you start smoking?” I demanded, ignoring her question.
    “I’ve always smoked.” That explained the still-yellow walls in the living room.
    “I thought you hated that Dad smoked.”
    “I hated that he smoked in front of you.” She looked at the end of her cigarette as though it might have something to tell her, then squished it in the saucer. “It’s not something I do every day,” she said without looking at me, and I left her there in the dark, wondering what else there was I didn’t know about my mother.
    But now, Jenny’s cries worsened, tightening their hold in my chest. I trod out my door and into her room, the rancid stink of fresh excrement attacking my nose with its fist. I flipped on the light.She lay on her back, her hands clawed and in her mouth, fat tears rolling from the corners of her eyes to the pillow, mixing with the drool there. The long hairs