Good to See You

I’d had my choice of tables, and I chose the one from which I could view the front bank of windows but didn’t have to sit inside the ersatz greenhouse.  I ordered hot tea and waited to place my lunch order until my sister arrived.  I tapped the toe of my shoe on the leg of the table and watched the people outside, passing by to go to work, to go shopping, to go to meet their friends.  I wondered if any of them were meeting their sister for the first time in five years.

Emily was a doctor now.  She’d always been so bright.  Petite, smart, soft-spoken, calm.  Of the three of us kids, she was the one that got the grades and joined the clubs and was popular but not in a snotty kind of way- people always genuinely liked Emily. She’d met Alejandro in med school, and he was pretty perfect, too.  That was Emily- perfect job, perfect husband, perfect life.  

Not that I begrudged my little sister her happiness;  I didn’t, of course.  No college for me, but that was my choice.  At the time, the choice was  to go on the road with my band or go to CSULA with no idea what I wanted to do with my life.  I chose the road, and it paid off.  Up Citadel released eleven albums in 20 years.  We played in over 100 countries around the globe, we opened for the Arctic Monkeys, the Kooks, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Tool.  We had two top twenty five hits and one of our songs was part of the soundtrack of an indie animated movie that had been nominated  for an Emile award.  We weren’t the Foo Fighters or Weezer, but I owned my own small home in Pasadena and was in debt to no one.

Not that I hadn’t paid a price.

As I mentioned, Emily hadn’t spoken to me in five years.  In fact, no one in my family had.  When I was a touring musician, I became a virtuoso alcoholic.  I played a hell of a guitar, but I often wondered if that was the only other thing I could do well.  The coup de grace:  I missed my father’s funeral because I’d passed out in my car somewhere in Ventura.  That was five years ago.  Funnily enough, I’d never missed a single gig or rehearsal.

Nowadays, I taught at a private college for music ten minutes away from my two bed/two bath, I went to meetings twice a week, I’d quit smoking, I practiced yoga and drank juice and, most excitingly, I’d enrolled in Pasadena City College- I was finally going to get my degree!  I couldn’t wait to tell Emily.

And then there she was, sitting down at the table across from me with no greeting and no pomp and circumstance.  She had on a navy blue sheath dress with a cute little jacket over it.  Her naturally blond hair was thick and wavy and down around her shoulders.  Simple gold earrings with shiny green stones in them hung from her tiny little ears.  She hung her purse over the back of her chair and then  faced me.  She was 30 now, but still looked fresh-faced, Covergirl healthy.  I know I looked like shit; twenty-plus years of excessive drinking and smoking (and a few other things sprinkled in here and there) didn’t do much for one’s complexion.  

“Hi,” she said softly.  I watched her eyes examine me, flitting around my face like hazel butterflies.  

I was kind of glad that she’d just sat down.  I’d been fretting about whether we were going to hug or just wave or fist bump or what.

“Hi to you,” I replied with a smile.  “Wow, you look amazing.”

“Oh, thanks,” she replied, dropping her eyes.  “So do you.”

“Well, I know you’re lying, but thanks for the effort,” I chuckled.  “You know, this is where I’d usually order a bourbon, but,” I reached into my pocket to pull out my 18 month medallion and place it on the table in front of her, “I don’t do that anymore.”

The waiter came over and Emily ordered an iced tea, and I got some more hot water for my hot tea.

“That’s us in a nutshell,” I mused.  “Iced tea,” I pointed at her.  “Hot tea,” I pointed at myself.

“I suppose,” she said.  She pushed the medallion back towards me.  “That’s really great, Terri.  I’m really happy for you.”

“Yeah, I work at LACM out in Pasadena, teaching guitar.  I’ve been there for about a year.”

“That’s great.”

“Thanks, yeah, I like it, I like it a lot.”  I knew I was babbling and nervous, but I couldn’t stop.  “So, you can report back to the family that I’m fine, I’m gainfully employed, I own my own condo, and a car. I'm sober and the hardest drug I get anymore is caffeine.  Oh, and I’m in school, second year, getting my bachelor’s degree in I don’t know what the fuck, but something.”

Emily looked sad.  “That’s all great, Terri, I’m really happy for you, but that’s not why I’m here.”

The waiter returned with our drinks and took our order (soup and salad for her, French dip and fries for me) and she leaned a little bit forward.  

“I’m just here to talk to you,” she said.  

I poured more tea in my cup and mulled over that statement.  It was a weird thing to say after five years.

“About what?” I finally asked.

“About Wyatt.”

“So you’re not here to catch up with your long lost sister, you just want to talk about your long lost brother.”

“Don’t you?”

I leaned forward and suddenly wanted a drink very badly.  “I don’t want to talk about that motherfucker ever.”

Emily dropped her eyes and put her hand out, palm down, as though calming an animal.  “I know,” she said soothingly, softly, “I get it, I do.  But, Terri, I had a recovered memory about a month ago and it’s really been bothering me.  I wanted to talk to the only other person who might understand- you.  Can you do that for me, Terri?”

The anger at our older brother that had immediately washed over me upon hearing his name dissipated a little at the request of my baby sister.  I took a breath and a sip of tea and centered myself before I nodded.

“Of course,” I replied, tersely.  “If that’s what you need.”

“I remembered that night, Terri,” she whispered, studying the ice cubes in her glass.

“You know,” I chuckled, not actually feeling happy, “I thought we’d talk about our jobs and your husband and Aunt Bethany and Uncle Frank.  I thought we’d maybe make plans to get together for dinner or Thanksgiving or something.”

“We can still do that, Terri,” Emily said, her eyes pleading, “but I’ve lost sleep over this.  My therapist told me to reach out to you.  I really need your help.”

“Oh,” I replied, my back up a bit, “you cut me out of your life for five years, but your therapist--”

“And me, and me!  I wanted to see you.  Please, Terri, I know things haven’t been perfect, but we’re still sisters, aren’t we?”

We stared at each other.  She had just been a kid when I left home, just Dad and her.  I never got to see her blossom, to grow into a woman and an independent person, and I had genuinely grieved for that.  She didn’t know it, but I had a tattoo of her name on my shoulder.  Granted, it was a drunken tattoo, but I’d had the tattoo of Betty Boop covered up, but not my tattoo of my little sister’s name.

“OK,” I said after a moment of silence, “What do you remember?  You were, what, eight?”

“Seven.”  Emily took a deep, shaky breath.  “I remember Wyatt was mad, he was yelling, screaming.  I was in my room, hiding under my bed.  I’d put my dollhouse and my little chair up against the door so he couldn’t come in, like that could hold him.  I could hear Dad trying to calm him down.  I didn’t hear you, though.  Where were you?”

“I was at the kitchen table, drinking a soda.”

I really didn’t like this memory.  It was one of the reasons I got so good at drinking.

“What was he mad at?”

I shrugged and hunched over my tea.  “Who knows?  Who cares? He was always mad about something.”

“Dad was saying,  ‘Wyatt, just calm down’ over and over.  He must have said it a thousand times.”

I nodded.  Dad had been saying something like that.  

“He terrorized us, Terri,” Emily said quietly.

I nodded again.  Since the age of 10, since before Emily had been born, Wyatt had terrorized us.  He punched and kicked and yelled and screamed.  He broke my toys and threw paint at me. Once, he held my head underwater at the public pool until some woman pulled him off of me.  He just laughed, said he was just playing.  He spit in our father’s face.  He stepped on my first guitar.  He shoved me off a slide at the park so I broke my arm.  Another time he shoved me into a wall so hard I broke my nose and had a concussion.  He escalated and became more vicious as he aged.  When he was 15, he clocked our father across the jaw with a 2 x 4 and knocked him out.  He would hold my arm behind my back and threaten to break it just because he could.  Once, he actually did break it.  He took a baseball bat to our father’s car for no apparent reason. From the time I was 10 until he died, he’d slap me hard across the face for no reason, leaving me swollen and bruised with a bloody lip (only during the summer, though, he didn’t want to get the school involved.) He’d purposefully close a drawer or a door on our hands whenever he saw the opportunity.  That was one of his favorite things to do; he thought it was hilarious.  He’d spend evenings berating us until he was tired and then go off to raise hell with his friends.  He was big and a bully and his favorite hobby was menacing and victimizing his family for sport.

Our mother had died of pneumonia shortly after Emily was born.  That may have been why Wyatt left Emily alone until she was five but then he started to verbally abuse her.  Interestingly, he never laid a hand on her the way he did me, and his verbal attacks were  never as intense as they were with me.  Small blessings.

“Dad never told me,” Emily said cautiously, “he never told me exactly what happened.  What happened that night, Terri?”

It took a long time for me to speak.

“I mean,” I sighed finally, shifting uncomfortably in my seat, “it happened so fast.  Wyatt was screaming at Dad.  I truly don’t know what about, the keys to the car or something. Dad left the room, and Wyatt went to start after him, but he slipped on something on the floor, water or something.  He reached up to steady himself on that hanging pot rack over the oven, but he couldn’t.  His feet slipped out from under him and he went down, and that rack just was swinging.  And that great big cast iron skillet we had? It came down and hit him square in the forehead.  That was it,” I shrugged.  “It was over.  He was dead.”

Emily nodded.  “Then what did you do?”

“I sat there.  I just sat there and waited for him to get up.  But he didn’t.  I was just, I don’t know, glued to my chair.  I was afraid if I woke him up he’d be angrier than he was before.  After a while, Dad came in and saw Wyatt lying there and checked his pulse.  Then, and I remember this very distinctly:  Dad was sitting on his knees and had his hands on his thighs and he took, like, this huge breath and blew it out, like he was relieved. Then he called the cops and that was it.  I went up and checked on you, you were asleep under your bed, so I just left you there.”  I shrugged again.  “That’s it.”

Emily nodded.  I hadn’t been looking at her, but I had felt her eyes on me the entire time I told the story.  We were silent for a few minutes.  Eventually the waiter came and brought our food.  I was no longer hungry; it looked like Emily wasn’t hungry either.  I wanted a drink so badly I thought I might pass out from need.  I would have to find a meeting right away once Emily and I parted ways.  I focused on my breathing.

That day was, as it stood, the single greatest day of my life.  However I didn’t take  advantage of my bully and mortal enemy being dead.  Rather, I started drinking and skipping school.  The only thing I did with any dedication was practice my guitar.  I often thought that the guitar and my band were the only two things that kept me alive.  Emily was only seven, she was sweet.  And Dad was a single parent dealing with being a widower and the loss of his son.  He felt extraordinarily sad about one death, and couldn’t admit that he was happy about the other.  

“Were you happy that he was dead?”

I took a very long breath through my nose.  “I don’t know if happy is the right word.”

“Why not?  Dad said you were Wyatt’s main target, even more so than he was.”

“What’s your point?”

“Well,  I mean, your tormentor was gone, yet you went into a 20 year spiral of self-abuse.   I just want to know why.”

I cocked my head to the side.  “I guess I should go to therapy, too, then, huh?  Sorry, AA is all I can handle right now.”  I pulled my wallet out to retrieve some cash.  “I’m sorry, but all these memories are making me really need a meeting, so--”

“We kept the cast iron in the cupboard.”

“What?”

“We kept the cast iron in the cupboard.”

My head spun, trying to follow her line of conversation.  “What do you mean?”

“We kept the cast iron in the cupboard, not hanging from the rack.  So the cast iron skillet couldn’t have fallen and hit Wyatt in the head.”

Emily was staring at me so intently.  She was so very still.

“So maybe it was the regular skillet then.”

“The aluminum skillet?”

I rubbed my face, feeling pent up and frustrated.  This was not exactly the reunion with my little sister I’d envisioned.

“What is your point, Emily?” I hissed.

“We kept the cast iron in the cupboard, not hanging on the rack,” she said, leaning her forearms on the table, “so it couldn’t have fallen and hit him in the head.”

“Then how did it?” I spat impatiently.

“You tell me.”

Plopping backwards in my chair, I stared at her.  What was she getting at? I asked as much.

“I had come out of my room, I was at the top of the stairs.  I couldn’t see you, but I could hear you.  I could hear both of you.  Wyatt said, ‘OK, come on, bitch.’”

Blinking like smoke had gotten in my eyes, I shook my head.

“He never said that.”

“I heard him, Terri.”

“He was yelling at dad, that’s all.”

“Wyatt said, ‘OK, come on, bitch,’ and then I heard like a clunk, and I heard him moan and fall to the floor.”

My head was shaking back and forth.  “That’s not right, Emily.  He was yelling at dad, he slipped, he got hit in the head.  That’s it.”

Emily opened her mouth as though she was going to say something, then stopped and just looked at me for a moment.  I looked back.  She dropped her eyes.

Realization settled on me like a damp, cold fog.

“Do you think I…?” I whispered.  

Emily just looked at me, a little paler now.  This is what she wanted to talk about.  She didn’t want to find anything out about me or how I was, was I healthy, was I OK?  She didn’t want to try to salvage a relationship with her only sister and sibling.  She didn’t want to know how often I thought about her, how much she meant to me, how I thought she was the best member of our entire family. She just wanted to accuse me of murdering our despicable brother.  My heart broke and my eyes filled with tears.

“How could you think that I…?” I croaked.

“Dad thought so, too.”

That was like a kick in the gut.  It took a moment for me to catch my breath.  After long moments, I planted my feet under me and my hands on the table, then I stood very deliberately, pushing the chair back with my legs.  

“Well, he never said anything to me about it,” I said softly.

“You were his drunken savior, how could he?”

A tear ran down my cheek.  I tossed two twenties on the table.  

“It was good to see you, Emily.”