Every time we made a lap around the hospital, we stopped at the delivery room. The door swung open, and I could hear my mother’s insistent breath, her wails of pain. When I looked in, her face was red and wet and she was clutching the arm of my father. I was five, on the verge of six, when my sister was born. A friend of my parents walked me around the hospital while we waited for Sarah to arrive. This is different from my own beginning. My father was not there. I came into the world and settled in my mother’s arms.
On the day Sarah was born, our father was there, but there was also a problem. I was too young at the time to fully understand, but I remember the panicked look on the nurses’ faces and the persistent paging of a doctor. Sarah’s head had emerged, but her shoulder had lodged behind my mother’s pubic bone. She was, as she would spend much of her life, stuck. The doctor was brought in to put his hand inside my mother and ease my sister out. Before he could do so, in a room full of anxious hospital staff, my sister shifted her shoulder and without any help was born.
When my father handed her to me, I stared at the strange, beautiful thing in my young arms, and I thought she was tough. I wasn’t tough. I liked making magic potions in the backyard and cried when our older half brother, Jed, told me that the lizard near my foot was a baby alligator. My father’s raised voice scared me. I had a recurring dream that I would fall out of my bed and never land. I would fall, arm outstretched into utter darkness, until I woke up, terrified. At night, I had to imagine that a large wolf carried me on her back into the Kingdom of Dreams in order to fall asleep. I was unsettled and sensitive, and my sister was strong and wily.
We shared a room when we were young. Two twin-size beds, a dresser, and stacks of plastic crates filled with books. Sarah liked to watch me clean the room, and since I was older, the task fell mostly to me. Once I was finished, if I left for more than a few minutes, I came back to a hurricane of blankets, books, and toys. Sometimes I yelled at her or pinched her little arms. There were days, though, that I announced that the floor had turned to deadly lava because of her bad behavior. We leaped to the safety of our beds. We coaxed each other to venture into the hot molten carpet and retrieve necessary items for survival, making death-defying leaps from the bed to a piece of clothing crumpled on the floor.
At night, we lay in our twin beds and whispered to each other. Now, when I am trying to fall asleep, I try to recall what her voice sounded like. For a moment I have it, and then, much like trying to remember a dream upon waking, it slips away from me. In my dreams, she speaks to me, but I never hear her voice.
I liked to stick my hand under her pillow at night and poke her just as she was falling asleep. I quietly slipped my hand under her pillow and taunted her, making my fingers dance under her head. She jerked out of almost-sleep and told me, “Stop it, sissy.” Quickly, I pulled my hand back and held it up as evidence of my innocence.
“It’s probably a monster,” I said, listening to her breathe next to me, feeling the hesitation of her belief.