Dead Sister by Brian Phillip Whalen

[Stories]

I’m sitting at my kitchen table in a six hundred dollar ergonomic desk chair drinking store-brand cola in a tee shirt I’ve been wearing since last week. I’m writing poems about my sister. In Kunderean fashion [the non-sexy kind], my body has betrayed me. Which is why the expensive chair [herniated discs will cost you]; the cola [these days coffee gives me heartburn]; the generic brand because my chair cost more than I make in a month [adjunct teaching]; and the dirty shirt because I watch my infant daughter all day long [I teach at night]. As for writing poems—my sister is dead. I should have written her letters instead, before she was dead, but life went on, and when she died, we hadn’t written or talked in years. [A white lie: we emailed a handful of times, but nothing soulful, nothing to carry to the grave, which is why I behave this way at three AM, sitting in the dark of a rental house I hope my daughter will never call home. When I land a full-time job, one day, we’ll move.]  My sister never moved away from Richmond, Virginia. Where her boyfriend Zeb died; where her dealers and churches and service-workers were; her home the way I’ve never had a home, not really—a place you never quit on, a location fit for dying. [My sister had dreams before she had drugs. “I’ve got stories,” she said to me once. “Together we could make a million dollars.”]

§

[Flood]

I’ve got soup on the stovetop and my daughter in her high chair. It’s raining sheets and pillowcases too—one of my father’s jokes. He thought it up one summer when the bridge overflowed. When the river is high he takes the back way home, down a bend of the Shenandoah rarely traveled, except when the river spills over.

 The baby screams like it’s her job. A piece of duct tape would do the trick. My father owns a shirt that reads: Silence is golden, but duct tape is silver. He’s a man good at fixing things. [Mechanical things. Not so much people.] It’s true I’ve mowed my share of lawns, and taped my share of ducts. I even dug and tended a garden once—but never with satisfaction, not the pleasure I remember on my father’s face, his shirtless torso gleaming over cut-off jeans, his hands black with oil and dirt [God, the smell of Goop grease-remover, in that old tin he kept in the shed]. The day’s work done, he’d be sitting in a folding lawn chair in the yard drinking Foster’s from a can chilled in the freezer, watching the sky shift over the elm trees, waiting for rain.

Here I sit, thirty years later, in a kitchen with my daughter, who is quiet now [she’s eating ricemeal], watching the rain outside my open window; a clap of thunder and a spritz of cool mist return me to old lawns, and my father’s body, and my voice [a boy’s] calling him in to play.

§

[Dark Night of the Soul]

If ever I was feeling anxious, my doctoral chair told me: “No news is no news.” No snow is no snow, of that I’m certain. This is our first winter in the south, where we relocated out of desperation. I have a child, a wife. There are choices in life, and then there’s life itself. It was this contingent full-time gig in Alabama—or bust. [It’s raining, she said, and later, when the weather changed, she said, “Look—it’s snowing.” It was April, near Ithaca, NY, decades ago, in my car in a pull-off on Route 96, not far from where the albino deer congregate at night inside the fence of the military base, half-way to Geneva. It was the last time my first girlfriend and I made love, meeting half-way between our colleges. In the backseat of the car she spread her long, slender arms, her palms pressed against each window; her wingspan was impressive, like an eagle’s. All the rest of that year her handprints reappeared in the car, like apparitions, when the glass fogged.] I keep writing about my sister, and the snows of our childhood. The games we’d play—towing one another on a plastic orange sled, grasping one another’s hands as we slid down the ice-sheathed roof of our father’s garage. My sister is dead and I’ve moved to Dixie, where it feels like autumn in December. Down here, home is a northern star in the sky of another man’s dream. [My sister slept under sky, on park benches, in makeshift tents, under bridges, in abandoned buildings, in shelters, in churches, in strange men’s hotel rooms, in cars, in hospitals, in jail. It was unbelievable at the time, but true. Which brings me to a fact about my girlfriend that you won’t believe. Her brother-in-law—who I’d met once or twice when I was seventeen—was the doctor—twenty years later—who performed my wife’s emergency C-Section. How he and I each ended up in Albany, at that moment, in my wife’s particular crisis, in that hospital, is beyond imagination. I hadn’t thought of him in decades, yet there he was, removing a surgical glove from the hand that had just been inside my wife’s body. “Did you ever date—?” he said, and before he said her name, I placed him. All I recall is an Easter or two, and his daughter’s second birthday [the first—he informed me that night, before delivering my child—of seven kids]. Some events are inexplicable, and wired. I talked about it for days, how random the encounter, how strange. All my wife said was: “Am I ever going to escape your past?”] In rain or in snow, my sister knew where to score, holding faith that her ritual coldness would end before dawn, when garbage trucks and buses would lull her to sleep, and the burden of sobriety slide from her shoulders like snow off an evergreen branch. O but for me—no news, no snow, no signs of letting go, at three AM in the deep south on Christmas.

Someone tell me when the green night ends. Tell me when I’ll sleep again.

§

[The Hurt]

I gave a reading at a university—more stories about my sister’s overdose. Shimmers of a migraine came on before reading [bright lights of aurora migrailus], time enough to pop an oxycodone and pray. I had to abscond from the meet-and-greet early, on account of my nausea; on the long trip home, I threw up five times in front of my colleague—a poet—who drove my car. She was a cancer survivor, more than at ease with illness. “Just do your thing,” she said each time I said I’m sorry. My sister, who suffered from migraines, never said I’m sorry. [When we were kids I’d hear her screaming, like a victim of crime, if she had strep throat or the flu; her pain was her hell, and she wanted the world—and God—to know it.] My sister described her headaches as a knife-blade balanced by its tip on her eye, and the slightest movement sliced straight to her brain. I’d describe my headaches as grief squared; as hell-water on a seraphim’s heart; as if Jesus himself were being nailed to a cross in my left temple. But that’s me. [Shunryo Suzuki, Zen master, was said to be a crooked cucumber. I’m a plate of egg shells, cracked and ready to compost.] I met a woman at the reading who is the wife of an alcoholic. “People who don’t know, don’t know,” she said, and I knew that she knew—and she that I did too.

§

[Letting Go]

One summer, long ago, my father taught my sister how to ride a bike. He’d jog beside her, his hands on her seat, while she wobbled along, uncertain and scared. Don’t let go, she’d cry. I’ve got you, he’d tell her, I won’t let you fall.

One day near summer’s end, my sister said, It’s OK to let go now, and my father, waving his hands, said, I already did. My sister laughed and pedaled away, faster than he ran.

[This memory came to my father in a dream, six months after my sister was cremated.]

Brian Phillip Whalen’s debut collection of fiction, Semiotic Love [Stories], will be released in November (Awst Press). His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Creative Nonfiction, North American Review, the Flash Nonfiction Food anthology (Woodhall Press), and elsewhere. Brian teaches at The University of Alabama.