Free The Language of Sisters by Amy Hatvany Page B

around her round face were damp with sweat. I covered my mouth with a hand and pulled back her covers. The dark stain spread out from her diaper to the edges of the twin bed. “Oh, Jen, what happened? Are you sick?” I felt her forehead; it was cool. Then I remembered. Last night’s botched enema. I didn’t know what I was doing, and look what it had done to her.
    She moaned again, her eyes pleading with me. She could not stand this, I knew—the horror of lying in her own waste, unable to move, unable to do anything but wait for someone to come. How could anyone stand it? I imagined her at Wellman, her cries muffled by thick walls and other patients, how long she must have lain there, helpless.
    “Come on,” I said, swallowing, as best I could, the rolling wave of nausea that traveled up my throat. I bent down and slid my arms under her back as levers, sitting her up and swinging her to the side of the bed so I could get her to the bathroom. She’d need a shower, and I’d have to change the sheets—the white, lace-trimmed sheets I’d picked out as a child for my baby sister’s new big-girl bed. My mother had tried to get me to choose a darker color, perhaps foreseeing the impractical nature of my first choice, but had relented when she saw how excited I was to give them to Jenny. I wondered how many times Mom had been stuck doing laundry in the middle of the night, running these ridiculous sheets through the bleach cycle.
    I pulled Jenny into an upright position, and she stood, shaky, a pitiful cry hiccuping from inside her: “A-huh, huh, huh.” The stench reached down my throat, and I gagged, once, twice, but managed to keep from throwing up on the rug and making the situation worse.
    Again, I had to stifle the urge to call my mother for help. This is her job, I thought petulantly. I shouldn’t have to do this alone. I just didn’t understand why she was holding herself away from Jenny when she obviously loved her. Maybe it was me she was keeping away from. Still, I didn’t think that was enough to justify standing by and watching me do this alone.
    But you said you wanted to, a voice reminded me. And I knew it was true: I did want to. But I honestly didn’t know whether wanting to would be enough.
    It took about an hour to get Jenny cleaned up and the bed changed. She stood patiently in the shower as I washed her, her fleshy belly slightly raised and hard beneath my touch. I wondered if the baby was moving yet, if Jenny felt it tumble inside her. If she knew what had happened to her. What was going to happen to her. We had an appointment in the morning with an obstetrician who had agreed to take Jenny as a patient—one of the doctors Dr. Leland had recommended to me. Dr. Ellen Fisher had worked with developmentally disabled patients before, though never one as severely handicapped as Jenny. She had been businesslike in our brief conversation, so professional in her tone that I almost felt chastised for not having dressed better for the call. I was a little apprehensive about meeting her.
    It was after four when I tucked Jenny back into her bed, lying on her left side. I kissed her and smoothed her hair, making sure she was adequately propped up by pillows so she wouldn’t roll onto the floor. Exhausted, I stumbled back under my own covers and slept, mercifully, until the moon faded away and the sun took its turn at lighting the world.
    •  •  •
    “Did she always wake up like this?” I asked my mother over a huge mug of industrial-strength coffee that morning. “I don’t remember.”
    My mother smiled a little wistfully. “Yes. Not every night, but often enough.” She sat down carefully at the table, wiping away invisible crumbs from the front of her dove gray, pin-striped suit. She glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. The bank didn’t open until nine, but since she walked the eight blocks to the Junction’s Washington Mutual, she needed to be ready to leave by eight-thirty. Her dark