LEXIE
I know that Sam has a thirty-minute break for lunch between surgeries. I find him in his office, where he’s reviewing case notes as he eats a sandwich. As soon as I step into the room, he scans my face, then he rises from his desk to pull me into his embrace. I feel anxious and fidgety, like I’m wound too tight inside. I lean into him, expecting comfort at the warmth of his body against mine, and I’m disappointed when it fails to rise.
“How did the hearing go?” Sam asks me, and he pulls me gently away from him to peer down into my face. I search for words, and when they fail me, I sigh and shake my head.
“Not good. I mean, most of it was as we expected, but the judge came down on her pretty hard. She’ll pretty much have to go to that place at Auburn as soon as she’s discharged.”
Sam’s eyes are locked on mine.
“So...what happens to the baby?”
I clear my throat, and shake my head as I disentangle myself from Sam altogether. I press my hands deep into the pockets of my jeans to keep them still, and then I stare away at the wall behind Sam’s ear as I admit, “Well, it will stay in the NICU, but once it’s discharged—it goes into foster care or...” I clear my throat. “Or it stays with me.”
“With us,” Sam corrects me with a frown. “Lexie, I keep telling you—we’re in this together. Do you want to care for the baby while Annie gets better?”
“That’s the thing, Sam...” I say, but I still can’t look at him. I let my gaze fall to the floor. “I don’t know if she’ll finish that rehab program.”
“Well, it sounds like she’ll have to if she wants the baby back.”
“It’s not that simple. It’s never that simple. There’s no better way to send Annie off the rails than to insist she do something.”
“And what happens if she doesn’t graduate the program?”
“They will arrest her immediately,” I whisper, and Sam takes me into his arms again and pulls me hard up against himself. He strokes the back of my hair as he says quietly, “That’s a pretty good incentive to play nice while she’s in there, honey.”
“It’s like there’s a switch that gets flipped inside her whenever anyone tells her what to do. She automatically does the opposite.”
“So...are you worried that if we take the baby for a few weeks, we’ll be stuck with it forever?”
“Stuck with it?”
Sam winces and shakes his head.
“That came out wrong, but you know what I mean. We are certainly capable of caring for a newborn for a few weeks—we can call it practice.” He offers me a smile, but the one I give him in return is forced. “But...if you really think she’s not going to give rehab a shot, even with the future of her kid in the picture...well, we need to sit down and talk this out, don’t we?”
I hesitate, then I whisper, “I already told her I’ll take the baby.”
“Lexie...” Sam is shocked, and I’m immediately defensive.
“She was so upset, and I can’t let my niece or nephew go into the foster system. God—that kid is already going to have NAS to deal with when it’s born—and—”
Sam interrupts—his words are sharp and I can see impatience in the stiffness of his shoulders and the hard set of his jaw.
“Look, we’ll make it work. I just wish you’d talked to me before you agreed to this. Have you even thought about your job? You can’t take indefinite time off. You told Oliver you’d be back on Monday. How are we going to juggle all of this? Especially if it does end up being for the longer term.”
“I will go back to work on Monday,” I say. “And he let Ira take three months off last year when he and his partner adopted that baby from China. I’ll look into unpaid parental leave. And if they won’t let me do that, we could get a nanny. I’ll find a way to make it work.”
“Lexie, I know you will. You are the most capable woman I know—but we are going to be in this together. That means you don’t have to deal with it on your own, but it also means—” Sam draws in a deep breath, then he groans impatiently “—well, frankly, it means that I do have to deal with it, too—and you need to talk to me before you make decisions like this. Got it?”
I feel my face flushing, but I nod silently. I hate this, and I’m completely mortified that it’s happening. I hate that Sam is inconvenienced by Annie, just as I am—just as I always am. She’s my problem, she’s my burden to bear—my responsibility. Sam is still frustrated. I can see it in the way he’s holding himself, and even in the way he’s avoiding my gaze now as he processes what I’ve done. Just as I feel defensiveness rising, he glances at me and his tone is gentler as he says, “We’re going to figure all of this out, okay? Let’s talk some more over the weekend. The baby’s not going to come for weeks. There’s plenty of time to make a plan.”
I nod and take a step backward away from him.
“You should eat your lunch, and I need to get back to her.”
“I’ll come by her room when I’m done.”
“I’ll just meet you at home,” I say. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be here today.”
Sam’s brow furrows. As I register the lingering displeasure in his gaze, guilt sweeps over me and I just can’t face him any longer. I offer him a weak smile but then leave his office quickly to return to Annie.
Less than forty-eight hours have passed since Annie returned to my life, and even my relationship with Sam already feels off-kilter.
* * *
Knowing I’ll be back at work on Monday, I decide to spend the weekend with Annie. I rise early and wander quietly through the house—packing a box with things that she and I can do to fill the time over the day, and then I stop off at a diner.
“Hey...” I greet Annie warmly when I finally step into her room. I have the box under one arm, with the milkshake and coffee I ordered at the diner balanced precariously on top, and in my other hand is a paper bag full of sweet treats for her. Annie has always had such a sweet tooth.
“Oh, hi.” She stabs at the remote control on her lap and the television she’d been watching powers down. “What are you doing here so early?”
“I’ll go back to work on Monday. I thought we could hang out.”
“Don’t you have a real weekend to look forward to? I’m sure that oh-so-together fiancé of yours has some plans I’m getting in the way of. Golf or polo perhaps, or a day at the country club?”
Her barb hits closer to the truth than she realizes. Sam loves to play golf, and we joined a country club together last year.
“All I’m doing this weekend is catching up with you,” I tell her firmly, and I awkwardly angle the box beneath my arm toward her. She removes the milkshake and the coffee and rests them both on the table over her bed. I walk to the corner of the room to dump the box onto the larger table, and as I release it, I immediately pick up the untouched bag of baby clothes I brought the previous morning. My intentions were good, but Annie was simply too upset to look through the clothes with me after the hearing. Maybe today will be a better time.
I return to sit at the end of her bed and watch as Annie’s face brightens when she opens the bakery bag, but then she hesitates.
“Is this stuff okay for me to eat? They said low sodium so...”
“It’s definitely not low sugar, but it should all be low sodium,” I assure her, and once again I’m surprised by the care she’s taking. Maybe I shouldn’t be—after all, it’s natural for a mother to want to do the best by her child. Then again, this particular mother has spent the first eight months of her pregnancy injecting illicit narcotics into her veins on a regular basis. And just like that, I’m judging her again. From admiration to condemnation in two simple thoughts. It never really goes away.
“You’re feeling okay?” I ask her, and she shrugs and tears open a cinnamon bun.
“I’m feeling...scared,” she murmurs after a while.
“It’s okay to be scared.”
“I never meant to get pregnant. The baby’s father...he’s not a great guy. He’s in prison now, but he was my dealer,” she says, and then she clears her throat. “I didn’t realize I was pregnant—not for a long time. I’ve been such a mess, the days and weeks and months meant nothing until I felt it moving. Then I knew, and I’ve felt bad in my life—guilty, I mean—but never like that.”
“How are the cravings, Annie?” I ask her gently, and she laughs bitterly and shakes her head.
“Which answer do you want, Lexie? The one where I tell you what I’m supposed to tell you, or the honest one?”
“The honest one.”
“How many times a minute does my heart beat?”
I glance at the monitor beside her bed, and I say, “At the moment, about eighty-two.”
“In that case, I probably only think about getting high five or ten times every heartbeat.”
“The methadone should be taking the edge off it.”
“Oh, yeah, the methadone,” she snorts, and then takes a long sip of the milkshake. “They’re split-dosing me, so I have it morning and night. I already figured out if I’m going to bust out of here and score, the best time to do it would be in the evening just before the night dose.”
“You wouldn’t feel it anyway, not like you normally do—the methadone is an antagonist, it stops the high,” I tell her, and I feel my face flushing, and I wish I hadn’t asked. I don’t know why I’m so embarrassed by this discussion—perhaps it’s because I wasn’t expecting her to answer me. Annie was never this open with me about her addiction—it was always something she juggled in the shadows. I’ve spent as much time trying to get her to speak openly about it as I have dealing with the fallout of her trying to keep it secret. “And it has a long half-life. Even on a split dose, the methadone would be in your system from the morning dose.”
“I know you’re a doctor and all, but I know that much better than you do,” she tells me. “Remember when I was at your place on Wilder Street? You dragged me to the methadone clinic yourself before work each day and you watched me take it—I didn’t miss a dose. And then you’d go to work, and I’d score. It gave me no rush, no buzz... I did it out of pure, unbreakable habit. I need the rush, so even if I know I’m physically incapable of feeling it, I’ll still chase it as long as there’s breath in my body. Remember that job I had doing web content for the accountants near our house? And I quit after a week? I didn’t quit. I got fired because I took money from the pretty cash for a hit. The best you can hope for from me is that I’ll hide the cravings, because I’ll never beat them.”
“Why are you telling me this, Annie? Is it to shock me, or because you want help?”
“Neither,” she says, and her shoulders slump and she seems to shrink away to nothing in an instant. She gives a heavy, lengthy sigh, then she looks at me and her eyes are glistening with tears. “I guess I just want you to understand. They can chain me to this bed, they can give me methadone, God—they could sedate me out cold. And on some level, I’ll still be thinking of scoring. Before anything else—life or death for me or even my baby—I’ll always be thinking of scoring. That’s who I am now.”
“That is not who you are,” I say flatly. “I don’t ever want to hear you say that again. You can get well—I know you can. You love this baby, Annie. I’ve seen it in your eyes. It’s the only reason you called me at all.”
“I do. I love it so much, it terrifies me,” she admits, and her voice cracks and her face contorts. “I’m so scared I’m going to fuck all of this up.”
“You are not,” I tell her firmly, and I reach into the bag of baby clothes and I withdraw a handful. “Enough of this talk—we’re going to fix this, all of it, bit by bit, piece by piece, we’re going to put your life back together. But this weekend, you and I are going to reconnect—we’re going to put the past two years behind us, and we’re going to have some fun. Starting right now. Look at these booties, Annie. Look at them.” I thrust them toward her, and when she doesn’t reach for them, I toss them onto her belly. They are tiny—I got the premature baby size in everything because we know her baby is very small—and these booties look like they were made for a doll. Annie reaches down with shaking fingers and slips her forefinger under the tie that holds the shoes together. She gives a teary laugh.
“They’re so small.”
“In a few weeks, we’re going to slip those onto the feet of a baby. A baby. Can you imagine its little toes, all snug and warm in there? God, it’s going to be so adorable...”
I dump the handful of clothes onto the bed beside Annie’s thighs, and she hesitantly begins to riffle through them. All of the clothes I bought are white or yellow or green, except a single pink-and-blue outfit.
“Do you remember the doll we had at Winterton?” she asks me, and I frown at her and shake my head.
“Doll?”
“Never mind,” she says, and she leans forward suddenly and places her hand over mine. I look at her in surprise, and she squeezes hard and whispers, “Thank you, Lexie.”
Our eyes lock. This mess of a woman is what’s left of my baby sister. She looks twenty years older than she is, and I’ve never understood how it came to this, and maybe I never will.
I love her anyway. Near or far, broken or whole, I love my sister more than anything else in the world, and somehow, no matter what she does or what comes between us, I always will. There is no off switch to the love between sisters; no way to pause it, no way to destroy it. Even when I pushed her away two years ago, I did it only because I thought it was the best thing I could do for her at the time.
Oh, what I wouldn’t give to make her life whole. What I wouldn’t give to see her thriving and healthy and functional. What I wouldn’t give to see her at peace.
If only there was a way to free up all of that beautiful mental energy that she expends thinking constantly about that fucking high. She could change the world with the potential wasting away in that mind—that wild imagination, that crisp creativity. Annie Vidler was never meant to become this disaster. She should have been a poet or a novelist or a philosopher or a journalist, and instead of sitting by her bedside now lamenting the world she inhabits, I should have been watching her win awards and enjoy a life of space to create.
It’s too much and it’s too heartbreaking. I wrestle my thoughts back to the present, and I point to the cinnamon bun that Annie is holding.
“Eat it,” I tell her after I clear my throat. “We’re going to play Monopoly.”
* * *
We weren’t allowed to play board games in the community—someone had decreed them as worldly at some point—but in the years before, Annie and I played all of the time. I usually threw the game for Annie because if I didn’t, she didn’t stand a chance of winning. She had this terrible habit of buying every property she landed on—no strategy, always relied on luck.
Typical Annie.
I had a strategy for Monopoly, one honed over years of games with Dad after Annie went to bed. Dad played an ad hoc game much like Annie—and I never got tired of the way he would throw his hands up in surrender and grumble about losing, but there was a gleam in his eye, as if he secretly loved losing to me.
That’s exactly how I felt about playing with Annie. I wanted her to win, so every move of the game was the opposite to my winning strategy: I’d buy single properties and pass up opportunities to get the whole color; I’d never buy the railroads or the more expensive properties; I’d go to jail and sit there trying to roll double figures and I’d tell her it was because I wanted to save the fifty dollars.
Annie still approaches the game as if she’s six years old. She squeals with delight when she gets a chance card, and she grins mischievously when she enforces the rent charges.
But the game doesn’t matter. It’s just a vehicle—something to focus our attention on. The important part of the morning is our conversation between turns.
“So, tell me about Sam,” Annie asks at one point.
“What do you want to know?”
“Where’d you meet him?”
“At a lecture on keyhole surgery. I held back after to ask him a question about a particular patient, and we started chatting...” I smile at the memory. I had no ulterior motive when I approached Sam, but it was only moments into our chat that I started to wonder if there was something there. “He asked if I wanted to meet up with him for coffee later that day. Things kind of fell into place from there.”
“Do you think it’s a coincidence that you found your first long-term partner as soon as you threw me out?” It takes a moment for me to recognize the guilt in her voice, and when I do, I glance at her in surprise.
“Of course it is, Annie,” I say gently.
“Hmm. Not so sure.” Annie shrugs, and she rolls the dice in silence as I ponder her simple statement. She lands on yet another random property and immediately reaches for her cash. Annie now owns a good portion of the board, but still no complete color sets, and she’s still excited to be adding still another color to her collection.
“How could it be anything other than a coincidence?”
“I’ve taken a lot of your energy over the years, Lex.”
“So has my training,” I point out.
“Yeah,” Annie concedes, then she passes me the dice.
“Plus...you know, there’s something about Sam...” I say softly. “I’d never met anyone who fit me the way Sam does. He gets me. We have the same tastes, the same interests, the same patterns and routines and habits and... I mean—we have plenty of differences, too, trust me, but—we fit perfectly on all of the key things, you know? I never really believed in ‘the one,’ but... Sam makes me happy, and I think I make him happy, too. I dated a bit when I was studying, but no one ever checked the boxes the way Sam does.”
“That’s nice, Lex. That’s really nice.”
I can hear her jealousy, and it feels awkward to acknowledge it to myself. When we argued over the years, she’d always accused me of thinking I’m perfect, but she’s wrong about that—I don’t. I’m achingly aware of my flaws—my need to control my own life was a huge barrier to my relationship with Sam in the early days. I felt like he was too perfect for someone like me—like my baggage was immense enough to be an insurmountable wall between us. It has taken two years of very hard work to get my relationship with Sam to the place it is now, and two long years to convince myself that I do deserve happiness. The guilt I feel at having failed to help Annie until now has been like a creeping vine, winding its way through my entire life at times.
I roll the dice and buy the electric company I land on, then pass the dice back to Annie as I ask hesitantly, “And...you said the baby’s father was in prison...?”
“His name is Dale. And yes, there was a sting...just after I became pregnant I guess. He was with a bunch of guys we know...they had a shitload of gear on them, splitting it up to sell. I don’t think he was actually the kingpin the DEA said he was, but he got twenty years.”
“Does he know? About the baby?”
“I did send him a letter...he didn’t write back. But the thing is... Dale has a bunch of kids he pretty much ignores already, and we weren’t exactly in love, so I think I can say with reasonable confidence that his interest level in this baby is bound to be low.” Annie snorts as if she’s angry, but her eyes fill with tears. “I should have had an abortion, maybe. But I knew it was probably too late anyway and... I don’t know. I was kind of excited. I just thought everything would work itself out better than it has. I’ve gotten off the smack before, you know. I thought this time I could stay off if I was doing it for the baby. I tried a bunch of times to get clean, but the sickness seemed to come earlier and it was more intense than I’d remembered. I tried again last week, that’s when my feet swelled up—I thought it was just the withdrawals, but then I took a hit and it didn’t get better...that’s when I called you.”
“And...about the baby...were you imagining that you’d raise it alone, then?” I ask her, then add hesitantly, “In the...in that trailer?”
Annie raises her eyebrows at me.
“Like this would be the only kid in Alabama raised in a trailer.”
“It’s not ideal.”
“Nothing in life is ideal, Lexie. I thought if I could get my shit together, I could get a job and we’d be okay.”
I decide to drop the subject, although the urge to point out to her how unprepared she seems is almost overwhelming. What I’ve just gleaned from this conversation is that Annie does not have a plan—that she is just assuming things are going to magically get better—and she’s probably expecting that I’ll be the magic bean that solves all of her problems. I clamp down the resentment I feel. I want to connect with her today—I can’t let my indignation get in the way of that.
“Do you hear from Mom much?” Annie asks me now, and I shake my head.
“No. I call her every few months.” We both ponder this quietly for a moment, then I ask her, “So, given everything, have you thought more about when you might want to call her to talk to her about the baby?”
“Maybe soon. Next week, maybe, once the dust settles.”
“Okay.”
“You know this hospital has its own entertainment system in the TV...like a fancy hotel.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Last night I was flicking through it and I saw they have Back to the Future. Remember when we watched that with Dad?”
I laugh softly.
“I remember we had an argument over which one of us was going to marry Michael J. Fox when we grew up.”
“Oh, yeah.” She laughs. “I forgot about that. Let’s watch it again when we finish this game. For old times’ sake.”
The TV is mounted to the ceiling above Annie’s bed and hangs at an angle, so that someone lying close to flat could still see the screen. It’s hard to see the TV from the visitor’s chair. About ten minutes into the movie, Annie glances at me and notices the awkward way I’m sitting, and she shuffles awkwardly to the edge of her bed and pats the mattress.
“Sit up here,” she says.
“I can see fine,” I assure her.
“Suit yourself.” She shrugs, then adds a little bitterly, “I’m sure you can afford a fancy chiropractor to fix it if you fuck your neck up sitting like that. You’d probably rather hurt yourself than actually share a mattress with a filthy junkie like me.”
“Annie,” I groan, and I stand and slide onto the bed. I lean into the pillows and stretch my legs out, then I slide my arm around her shoulders, pulling her close. She sits stiffly, still offended. “Don’t do that. Don’t assume I think those things about you. You’re my sister.”
“Those things are true, though,” she mutters, and I contract my arm around her.
“Would you stop jabbering for five minutes so I can relive my childhood fantasies about Marty McFly?”
“Hands off, bitch,” she says lightly. “You’ve got Sam. Marty McFly is all mine.”
We both chuckle, and then she drops her head, resting it against my shoulder. Eventually she falls asleep like that, and as her breathing deepens, I feel myself start to relax, too. I press my cheek against her hair, and I rest, too—somehow complete again, as if a part of myself has been missing for all of this time.