The Orphan Sister Read Online Free Page B

goats, I knew it was goats; we’d had to shoo them off the driveway more than once. Maybe that was the first time I thought Dad might be more than just a little forgetful. I had neither of his parents as reference of aging, so I just thought about it, patting my sleepy dogs in turn.
    We never met our parental grandparents; Dad kept the details of his family contained like internal organs, vulnerable to light and air, safe only in the confines of translucent muscle, fat, skin, and skeleton. Dad’s parents died long before we were born, late babies that we were; my mother was forty and Dad was forty-four, and Dad obscured all the rest of the family history, genetics and stories alike, as if they were valuable, volatile secrets. In third grade all three of us had to make family trees, and Dad wouldn’t even tell me whether we had any aunts or uncles on his side of the family. In our room, Odette said, “He was an immaculate conception,” and Olivia and I laughed and tried not to think about our parents having sex.

    Though my mother liked to say we were New Yorkers like her—she was Upper East Side raised with a driver and a doorman—we were actually born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in the Riverview Medical Center, because we were four weeks early and Mom and Dad were down the shore at a cousin’s engagement party. Mom’s ob-gyn had said it was safe to travel. To this day Mom says it was eating excessive quantities of shrimp cocktail that started her labor; she couldn’t stop dipping them in the spicy sauce, it was as if we craved the iodine. Even thinking about that, I imagine it was O&O, my sisters, who demanded that luxurious overindulgence in a single prenatal voice. I was probably content with cranberry-orange juice mixed with seltzer, and little toasts with red-pepper toppings. I wouldn’t have complained, even though I don’t like red peppers.
    My mother is fond of calling us her three wishes—she always said we were the first multiples in the family since before the Mayflower. Supposedly there were several sets of practically prehistoric twins, but we were the only ones in recent history. If you asked my dad whether multiples run in his family, he’d answer, “Only multiple intelligences,” and launch into a subject-garroting lecture on frontal-lobe electrical impulses or his colleagues who ignored the hand-washing mandate in favor of less effective squirts of sanitizer.
    Our first house was in Oakville, New Jersey. Before the money. The radiator covers looked like flowers if you stared at them, or like birds in flight, or the thousand disgusting geometric seeds of a green pepper. We spent hours listening to our fiverecords on a kiddie record player we received collectively for our birthday. The Jungle Book, Free to Be You and Me, Hair, which was completely inappropriate, but no one noticed, James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, and Abbey Road. When I was eight, I wanted to be a rock star, or to sing on Broadway. I wasn’t sure how these were dissimilar, but I stood in the center of our room being a powerful entity, collecting all the heat and light from the world by giving it song. Of course, in chorus at school I sang quietly, afraid to make loud mistakes.
    “Cut it out!” said eight-year-old Olivia, marching in, holding Odette’s hand as easily as one might hold a pen when writing.
    “Too loud,” said Odette.
    “I thought you two were playing four-square in the driveway,” I said, hoping they’d go away, and wanting them to stay. It was a crowded Sunday, and time alone in the room was precious. When they were with me, I felt squeezed and possessed—like a swaddling: comfort colliding with desire for freedom.
    “We’re done. We’re playing Sorry now.”
    “I don’t want to.”
    “We do. You’re yellow,” said Odette.
    “Ha ha, you can’t make me play,” I said.
    “But you want to,” said Olivia, and sadly she was right. Odette soothed me more; Olivia saw my darknesses and light. I lifted