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Clouds

A. A. Garrison

    “I was in the neighborhood,” Rachel said to herself, again, rehearsing. The building’s elevator was broken, and the stairs were long enough that she was beginning to sound believable.
    Her sister’s apartment was in a rundown part of the city, where you drove with the windows up and no one was proud of their address. It had been a while, and the visit felt right — or, rather, it felt wrong not to. Still, Rachel insisted she wasn’t guilty, really she wasn’t, even as she climbed to Samantha’s shoebox apartment, inventing excuses for her visit. She carried a shameless box of chocolates, in the crook of one arm like a Bible. Sam liked chocolate, or had at one time.
    Outside the door, Rachel took a deep breath and squared her shoulders: it was just Sam, her little sister, the giggly brunette who had once shared her wardrobe. She knocked diffidently, and it went unanswered — odd, considering Sam didn’t leave her place anymore.
    Rachel had time to be alarmed, then a late “Come in” struggled through the door.
    Rachel opened it to Sam herself, small in the sill of her apartment’s foggy window. It was open halfway, as far as it went, a draft teasing Sam’s oily hair. Rachel had never seen her there before, nor had she seen the window open. Sam stared into space.
    “Sam?” Rachel said, and took mincing steps inside, as if her sister were sleeping. Rachel at once felt like an intruder, as she always did in Sam’s presence. Since getting sick, the girl did that to you.
    “Hey, Rache,” Sam sighed, feeble as ever, perhaps a little more. She looked to be having one of her “days,” all slumps and wiry limbs, resembling an insect splattered over a windshield. She projected a serenity, but one somehow grotesque, like Alzheimer’s patients Rachel had seen.
    Rachel snuck into the combination living room/foyer, pulling the door to. “I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d drop by,” she lied. She’d been across town, lunching and laughing with her friends, when she’d remembered Sam, sick and alone in her stuffy welfare apartment, whiling away her days like an old widow. It was a guilt-visit, no way around it — thought it wasn’t just guilt, not this time. Rachel had been ... compelled, that was the word, pushed, by an invisible hand. The guilt could be rationalized away, but that push was ruthless.
    Sam regarded Rachel, finally tearing herself from the city. It stopped Rachel in her tracks: Sam looked horrid. Her face long and vacant, shoe-polish smudges smothering her eyes, her hair in a mussed pageboy. She was lost in her jeans and tee-shirt, and pale wasn’t the word. There was a misplaced age to her, Rachel thought, like a new tool left out in the rain.
    “Come, sit,” Sam said, her voice cracking. She indicated the sill with a cadaverous little hand. Rachel sauntered over and filed beside her sister. Though the sill was very small, there was plenty of room.
    “I brought chocolates,” Rachel chimed, forcing a smile. She offered the shopping bag a tad too eagerly.
    Sam took it, her arm buckling as though handed a dumbbell. “Thanks,” she said, making no move to open it.
    An awkward silence threatened, so Rachel said, “How ya’ feeling?” It always came to this. They’d never been too close, on account of their age gap, but there had at least been the old staples: bad dates, male inadequacy, their parents. But not now, when Sam’s love life was about as active as a nun’s, and Mom and Dad kept their distance like Rachel (no one would say shunned). After Sam had taken ill five years ago, when she was twenty and Rachel was twenty-nine, the two had drifted, as the sick and the healthy do. You could drive a boat between them.
    Sam said she was fine, meaning I feel horrible but don’t want to burden you. This was a game of hers, playing coy about her condition. Rachel could hate her for it if she let herself.
     Rachel almost nodded and let it go, playing along, but instead said, “You don’t look fine.” It surprised her as much as Sam. Their conversations typically involved rhetorical questions and monosyllabic responses, as dutiful as the visits themselves.
    Sam’s face registered this, knotting a little. Rachel was supposed to say “Good” and change the subject, not acknowledge the elephant sitting betwixt them. “You know how it is,” Sam said guardedly, her eyes returning out the window.
    Rachel started to say more, but this time did let it go, if only to avoid those eyes. There was an agony written there, a secret apocalypse, something outside Rachel’s experience. No, she didn’t know how it is.
    “I’m sorry ...” Rachel said, sincerely. She felt suddenly criminal; her health was peachy-keen, excepting PMS, and cystitis after sex. Sam’s eyes were indicting, so much pointed fingers.
    “No, I’m sorry,” Sam said. Then, after a pause that felt too long: “I’m not unaware, you know. I know how I make people feel. And ...” Another lazy pause. “And I’m sorry.”
    An exasperation opened in Rachel, and she sighed into a slouch. This was another of Sam’s games, the “it’s not you, it’s me” game, and it helped none that it was true. However, Rachel caught herself before she could say something regrettable: it wasn’t Sam’s fault, after all. She was only being considerate, a leper with a bell. Rachel supposed it was better than before the sickness, when Sam hadn’t given a shit. It had changed her, broken her of liquor and drugs and men, and Rachel supposed that was what she hated in Sam, her chastened air, something Rachel couldn’t find within herself.
    Sam took to the chocolates then, discarding the bag and fussing with the plastic wrapper. She was having a time of it, Rachel noticed, Sam’s fingers sliding drunkenly. Another effect of the illness, presumably, though this one was new.
    “Why’d you come today?” Sam asked without looking up.
    Rachel began to get defensive — what guilt? — but Sam’s voice held genuine curiosity. It reminded her of Sam’s ninth birthday, when Rachel had by chance picked out the precise Barbie Sam had been wanting. “How’d you know?” Sam had asked then, in that same guileless tone. Rachel, who’d felt a push when selecting the toy — the same that had seen her to Sam’s, today — had proclaimed herself psychic, and they’d joked about it over the years. Sister’s intuition.
    “Oh, just seemed right,” Rachel answered. She saw herself driving across town, that hidden hand bullying her along, threatening fire and brimstone in the face of denial. Yep, just felt right. The miracle of guilt.
    Sam gave her a look — there was some suspicion now, though it didn’t seem aimed at Rachel — and returned to the wrapper. With some effort, Sam unclothed the box and lifted the lid, sending up the chocolates’ burnished odor. She picked one out, again with that droll sloppiness, then passed the box and took a dainty bite. Even her jaw seemed funny, like it needed oil.
    Rachel selected one, a truffle, and swore she wouldn’t take another (she had to watch her waistline, unlike the skeletal Sam). The two sat chewing, and Sam surprised her by speaking: “It clears sometimes, you know.”
    Rachel nibbled. “What does?”
    “The sick,” Sam said pensively, again withdrawn beyond the window. “Sometimes, out of nowhere, it’ll just ...” Another of her new pauses. “... just clear away, like clouds blowing from the sun, and I’ll be normal again. Me again.”
    Sam turned to Rachel wearing a sunny expression unseen in years, almost a smile. Then a shadow fell over her, striking her another person entirely. “But it always comes back. Clouds always do. Always ...” She trailed off, again lost in the city’s panorama.
    Rachel stopped chewing: Sam was rambling. Why was she rambling? Rachel had thought to say something — what, she didn’t know — when Sam’s half-eaten chocolate tumbled from her hand and puttied over the floor. Sam seemed not to notice. Rachel picked it up and held it out, but Sam only stared, the ambience bouncing off her pale face.
    Rachel straightened, Sam’s chocolate flagging in her hand. “Sam,” she said sternly, not liking her sister’s demeanor. This was off, even for her. “Sam, you okay?”
    Sam turned slowly, vacantly from the window, and said “Yes” in a way Rachel liked even less. She gazed at Rachel long after speaking, her eyes glassy and faraway.
    Rachel had once had a bad flu, in college, and there had been a loud party the next apartment over, people a million miles from her condition. This was like that, she and Sam right now, except Rachel was the party.
    Rachel forced herself calm, setting down Sam’s abandoned chocolate. “You’re scaring me, Sammy,” she stuttered, and closed up the box, fitting it on wrong and not caring.
    Sam said nothing, once more absorbed in the view.
    Rachel heard herself say, “Would you like a glass of water?” Sam looked like she needed a lot more than water, but it was all Rachel could think of.
    Sam blinked and nodded, dreamily. Her breath was silent, coming in shallow puffs that didn’t raise her chest.
    Rachel made for the kitchen faster than was polite. She tossed the chocolates on a table and went for the cupboards, on the verge of tears. Sam had never been this bad, not even when she first got infected and there was talk of ending it. The pain just radiated from her, like heat from a furnace. Rachel wanted to scream.
    Then, as she filled a glass at the tap, she almost did: pill bottles littered the counter, nearly a dozen, like felled bowling pins. All empty.
    It brought a morbid shock. Then Rachel was back at the windowsill, kicking herself in the ass for not putting it together sooner. Sam followed her with those consumed eyes, too much like a corpse. Her mouth moved but nothing came of it.
    Rachel froze before her overdosing sister, perhaps seeing her for the first time. Then she was skating across the apartment, saying “Oh shit oh shit oh shit” and blurring for the phone, her curves jumping salaciously. However, Sam managed to catch her arm, devilishly fast, and Rachel stilled. Though feeble as crepe paper, the hand arrested her like a vise.
    “No,” Sam wheezed, her eyes pleading. “Don’t, Rache. So tired, the clouds. Don’t. Please ...” She mouthed more — clouds clouds clouds — then went limp, her eyes distancing. The hand fell like sloughing skin.
    There was such bald exhaustion in the voice, such an appeal for mercy, Rachel almost complied. But then she was dialing an ambulance, though she knew it was too late, in the same way she knew her sis’s favorite Barbie, or that she should come here today, or that she had a lot to be grateful for. She stayed with Sam after hanging up, holding a hand which didn’t hold back. Sam wore that broken happiness Rachel had glimpsed earlier, even as her breath stopped, her fingers uncurling.
    The clouds leaving her sun.
    The expression remained, still, when the ambulance took her away, its lights off.

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