SUMMER 1977
Rotting fruit—that was the image that curdled Martha’s thoughts. Misty’s body shriveling, her skin bruised, her breath sour when she spoke. Within a couple of months of the diagnosis Martha was sleeping on her sister’s couch, helping Misty to shower and dress, driving her to the clinic. During Martha’s shifts at the Tahitian she called Misty every hour, and when there was no answer she rushed back to the apartment, blowing through traffic lights and stop signs, fumbling with her keys at the door, steeling herself for the worst and then almost sinking to her knees in relief when she heard a cough from the bedroom or water running in the kitchen sink.
Every time she raced in or out of the building she passed a fig tree, its rotting fruit strewn across the sidewalk, their leathered skins burst and their insides spilled out, wet and red, covered in ants.
Martha moved a cold washcloth along Misty’s forehead, held Misty’s hand as she fell into a brittle, troubled sleep. Her strong, beautiful sister was falling away, sliding down a hole inside herself, leaving this burning husk behind.
At night, Martha left the TV on while she tried to sleep. She had never cared much for TV, but the glowing screen was a comforting presence, the only light in the dark room while she drifted on the couch.
Sometimes she woke in the night and didn’t know where she was until the flickering image reminded her. Heart pounding, she watched whatever was on-screen until the program ran out and the national anthem began to play, the flag rising up the pole, flapping in the prerecorded wind. And then nothing, just static, and those were the worst hours, the world gone quiet except for her heart and head. After those nights Martha had never felt so grateful to see the first bright curl of sun in the purpling windows. She wasn’t religious, she couldn’t remember ever saying a prayer, but Oh thank God was what she thought when those nights finally turned over into morning.
She didn’t tell Izzy these stories. That first night in her kitchen Martha told happier stories, summer mornings back in Florida, she and Misty jumping off the bridge into the river by their house, holding hands as they fell. Or Vegas stories, those early days of parties and shows, seeing Misty’s costumes onstage for the first time—gowns with plumage that spread like peacock feathers, starbursts of sequins and rhinestones, dazzling in the spotlights.
“My sister never performed, but she looked like a showgirl. All legs and gorgeous skin. Turning every head.”
Martha couldn’t bring herself to say Misty’s name. Instead, in every story she said, my sister. She hadn’t said Misty’s name since her death. She thought that if she did she might break apart, or sink completely into herself, or maybe even become infected, as if somehow Misty’s name also carried her disease.
The shame of this thought blocked her breath. She imagined one of those rotting figs lodged in her chest.
“What’s wrong?” Izzy asked.
Looking across the kitchen table, Martha saw Izzy’s concern. It was the first time the girl had moved outside of herself. Martha imagined finally opening up, sharing everything she was holding in. But she was still too afraid and ashamed, so she managed a smile and said she just had too many stories and memories.
She looked out the window and saw Misty standing under a streetlight looking back.
“I’ve got to get away from this place,” Martha said.
“The trail cuts across the northeastern corner of New Mexico. It doesn’t have a name,” Misty said, “or it has a lot of names, but nothing official. People think of it as a pilgrimage. Some go west to east and some east to west. There’s no right or wrong direction, but you start at one end and by the time you reach the other you’ve changed. Here. Look.”
For as long as Martha could remember Misty kept journals full of articles cut from newspapers and magazines, photocopied pages from library books. Around these pieces she wrote her own notes and thoughts and little poems. The journals were different colors and sizes, but they all grew equally fat over time, swollen with the clippings taped to their pages.
Misty slid the journal across the table. They were eating breakfast, oatmeal and sausage links. Or rather Martha was eating and Misty, with no appetite, worked her way down the row of vitamin bottles lined up beside her plate, shaking tablets into her palm, swallowing each with a sip of ginger ale.
The article was from one of Misty’s New Age newsletters. Two or three of these arrived in the mail every week. She had abandoned the clinic’s treatment plan, becoming increasingly obsessed with the idea of a cure outside the realm of what she now called Western medicine’s very limited imagination. This was the reason for their most intense arguments—that Misty was spending the last of her money on newsletters and vitamins instead of real medicine and doctors, throwing away her chance for survival on a bunch of voodoo bullshit. Martha couldn’t stand to see Misty looking for some miracle in the mimeographed pages, or rambling about how time was nothing but a phony construct and a real cure would require transcending the idea of time, returning to a past moment of health and carrying that moment into the future.
“The pills make me sick,” Misty would shout during their fights, shaking one of her prescription bottles in Martha’s face. “Why should I take something that makes me sick?”
Martha looked over the article on the pilgrims’ trail. A black-and-white photo sat at the top, the view from the middle of a wide dirt road. A mountain range stood in the far distance. Just visible, eclipsed by the tallest peak, was a bright white sliver of either the rising or setting sun. The land on either side of the road was nothing but sand and scrub. To Martha it seemed a lonely, desolate place, until something in the photo caught her eye: a pair of tiny figures far down the trail, backlit into silhouette.
“See?” Misty said. “That’s us. We can go back to whatever time we want. We can go forward.”
Misty sounded so hopeful that Martha didn’t have the heart to argue. She smiled, covering Misty’s hand with her own.
“We’re not stuck here,” Misty said, “if there’s no reason to stay.”
They poured Misty’s ashes into an urn and handed Martha the plain copper container. Holding it felt obscene. Her sister wasn’t there. This was another lie, comfort as home decor.
Driving back from the crematorium, Martha pulled over to the side of a highway overpass and threw the urn as far as she could, off into a large construction site, a flattened plot of land crawling with backhoes and bulldozers. She watched the ashes fly, catching for a moment in the wind before falling back to earth.
When they were kids, Misty had claimed she was a twin, but that her other sister had never been born. They had been together in their mother’s belly but Misty was the only baby who made it out. She repeated the story when she was angry with Martha, and Martha understood that it was intended to wound her, to imply that there was some spirit or ghost with whom Misty felt a deeper connection. Martha was too afraid of the possible answer to ask their mother if the story was true. So it hung over her childhood, a presence that was most likely a lie but that at times felt real enough, a nameless girl following at a slight distance.
One evening before the diagnosis, driving back from an AA meeting, Martha brought up the missing-twin story. Misty swore she couldn’t remember ever saying such a thing. “That would have been so awful of me,” she said. “I’m sorry if I did that.”
After dropping Misty off at her apartment, Martha sat in her car and tried to feel if that presence was gone now, finally banished. But no—it was still there, she was still there, the other sister. Indistinct but nearby.
Martha stood in the stale, hot dark of her bedroom and looked down at the sleeping girl curled into a comma on top of the sheets. Was that what she had felt earlier in the casino, when she first saw Izzy losing at a blackjack table? That the unnamed ghost who had been with her for so long had finally stepped through? And if that was true, then what else was possible? Could she step through the other way, as Misty had claimed throughout those final months?
No borders, Misty had written in her journal, on the page behind the photo of the pilgrims’ path.
no lines on the map,
no walls,
no time or space that cannot be
joined together,
world without end—
Martha lay on the bed, mirroring the curve of Izzy’s body, leaving a small gap along that line between them. She smelled her own smoke and Izzy’s sweat and the cheap fruity shampoo found in nearly every hotel bathroom on the Strip.
World without end. Wasn’t that a line from a prayer? Had Martha heard it on one of those nights waiting in her car for Misty’s AA meeting to finish? Had it come from inside the church, the deep vaulted room glowing in the night?
Over the last year she had seen Misty everywhere, but now she finally felt her, far off but present, waiting.
For the first time since the crematorium, she whispered her sister’s name.