JOEY

My little sister is the one who taught me that ammonia and newspapers clean glass and mirrors better than Windex and paper towels. When a putrid smell huddled around the dish-filled sink and dissolved food moved like amoebae in the water, she was the one to reach in and unclog the drain. She found logic where I found panic, and a straight path where I saw an ominous pit. So when my sister and I learned that our mother was going to die, I knew my sister was going to be with her. I was going to college.

When I got to college, I left my sister behind. Through two states and eight foster families, our sense of home lay only in the dusty and glorified memories we shared. Would they dissolve as I drove three hours away?

Joey wasn’t there to kiss goodnight. I couldn’t hold her soft hands with long fingers and beautiful nail beds. I couldn’t hear her voluptuous belches or her thrown-back laugh - open, free, hollow. I called her several times a day from this new space. I asked her to visit. Her grin greeted me at the bus station; her dark eyes, full of home, calmed me. I felt safe and no longer alone in a place I could not recognize. We caressed each other’s emotions with undivided attention. Then she turned eighteen.

My sister moved in with our ill mother. She began a new life that required far more work than the already bruised life we had behind us. This time, however, she was going to live it alone. Without me.

I was petrified.

Her nights were wracked with the guilt of wanting a normal twenty-year old life. Instead, she was working to support my mother. She was cooking and cleaning. She was listening to my mother’s years of guilt, self-righteousness, pain and “let’s talk about my funeral” at two in the morning.

I knew Joey’s heart hurt. I could see she was tired. I cried for her, and I cried for me. I became a flimsy scrap of fabric with frayed seams.

I repeatedly called our foster mother Ellen. Ellen and our foster father Phil are the first people I trusted. I left Joey with them, seeing that they would take care of her; they would nurture her, fight for her, love her. Oh, I was scared, but I let them take hold of what I treasured.
On the phone, I told Ellen that I had, again, asked Joey to live with me. Ellen told me, again, that she asked Joey to move in with her. I told her how I felt like an old piece of fabric, my future wayward. Ellen reminded me how Joey came to her decision. She retold the story as if it were a myth to be trusted and relied upon for comfort.
“It was the first time you had seen your mother in three years.”

#

We weren’t visiting her in a park for two hours. We weren’t going to a restaurant. We were actually going to her house, where she lived with a cat. We were going to spend the entire day with our mother. Joey was elated, but I held quiet anger in the back of my throat, upset that her mistakes had taken us so far away from her and our family. The memory of family is all I’d ever known. Drugs, abandonment, sexual abuse, cocaine-addled ghosts in the bedrooms of our various apartments – memories, all dusty. But when I saw her smile, the bones beneath her skin holding her cheeks, I decided to start fresh. I swallowed my fear and resentment. When I opened the car door: singing before bed, dancing in the living room, earaches and hugs.

My mother smelled like make-up. Only two people in the world smelled that way: she and my Aunt Sissy. They both wore lipstick, foundation, eyeliner, blush and cheap CVS perfume. I loved it. My mother was the ratty green couch in our living room from the Salvation Army; the Smurfs and the Gummi Bears and the Mighty Mouse I watched on television; the warm soup and the hard bread I ate at the soup kitchen on Saturdays; the hot tea I sipped while trying to write in cursive on a yellow pad of legal paper. She was the unattainable, and she was right there.

I showed off my long hair and the muscles in my legs. I showed her my report card and a picture of my boyfriend. I showed her the various cartwheels I could do, how fast I could run. While Joey and I vied for attention, each of us wanting it all, I imagined I was doing the better job.
Before I could consider my future, I forgave my mother for everything.

I don’t know what Joey did; I wasn’t paying attention to her.

On the way home, I thought about my reaction when she said, “I’m HIV positive.” I looked at her lamp, at Joey, at the lamp. I looked at its yellowed lampshade with yellowed tassels and yellowed cord coming from a glass vase, like tumblers for scotch. It looked heavy and old, like something you might pick up at goodwill. It looked like it could use a new shade to make the room brighter. I felt watched, as if I wanted to describe this moment in a story some day.

Joey cried. Her chin quivered, her lips sagged and drool came in thick pools, fast like water. She was beautiful. My mother was crying quietly, lips pressed, eyes hurt. I was looking at the lamp. Then I looked at Joey. I wished my grandfather had cancer instead. I wondered if I should cry. Joey’s crying made my throat shrink away and my ribs feel sharp and covered in spikes. My stomach was gone, a detachable part that bounced. I wanted Joey to scream; to shout that it wasn’t fair. We just got to see her again and now she was going to die?

“Were you tested more than once?” I asked.

#

Trees swiftly ran by us, white mile-markers sprinted backward too quickly for me to count them. I sat in the backseat of the Jeep with my sister and looked out the window at things that would never stand still. I was hot, but kept the windows up. I wanted to be hotter. Joey said, “I can’t wait till I turn eighteen.”

Chills ran over my skin, like a cold gel suddenly slathered on, the blood replaced with ice cubes, my heart replaced with grass, my eyes — coals.

Joey didn’t talk much. I talked for her. When Joey was sad or angry or confused, I would say, “I don’t think that’s fair to Joey,” or “I don’t understand what you mean,” or “I think it’d be better if . . .” When she spoke for herself, what she had to say didn’t include me. I wanted to insist that she didn’t know what she wanted and had to think about it more —

“I can’t wait till I turn eighteen so I can move in with mom.”

— but she did think about it. She said it and I felt it on the toenail of my left foot that was a little too long and always scratched the inside of my sneaker. I felt it all the way to the tips of the hairs stuck in the corner of my mouth, collecting saliva.

As Phil’s eyes bored into mine from the rearview mirror, I turned my eyes to the blurred, sprinting world outside, wanting to grab hold of one of those mile markers and never see the future. My armpits were wet. “Well?”

Well. Well.

I looked at him briefly before turning away again. I approached Phil’s questions like challenges or dares. When he asked how hungry I was, I ate three times more than I could swallow.

Ellen turned to face me.

I don’t know how they did it. I suppose it’s what makes them great foster parents. With a look, you knew that the cover you were attempting to build around your emotions was nothing more than a layer of suffocating saran wrap. While you thought you were hiding your feelings, what they saw was a wracked body struggling for breath.

“I love my mother,” I said quietly. “With all my heart.” I continued to deflect my gaze out the window, wishing for that one reachable mile marker. Be quick. I tried to speak casually and confidently despite the rock, the crags, the deep pit, the hollow scream. Be quick, be quick. “But I can never live with her.” It was anger, as if anger were the only explanation I could offer. The air outside enveloped my head while my body quivered behind it.

#

Ellen finished the story with a satisfied, “And that was that.” I didn’t feel better.

I had always thought this moment in the backseat of the Jeep was a crystallized moment; the point in the novel that is always referred to; the point from which the title came, because for the first time, I was alone and Joey didn’t need me. I needed her. When I was saying, “Joey is sad, angry, confused,” I was really talking about me. I had always envisioned me as being the stronger of us. She leaned on me; I cared for her. But Joey, my Jojo, was never afraid enough to rely completely on me. She dives in the snow with short-sleeve shirts and shorts; she swims in the fifty-five degree ocean, head-long into the waves; she gets tattoos and goes snowboarding. I find adventure in books.

When we were children, Joey insulted my mother, who chased her through the house with a spatula in her raised hand. Joey ran ahead of her, laughing. My mother meant business but her voice failed to convey it. Her face, mocking frustration, belied the humor she felt. Her arm waved wildly like a weak mast in the wind, the flab swishing back and forth like a loose sail. When Joey had nowhere else to go, she hid beneath the covers of her bed, her laugh turned into spittling wheezes. My mother collapsed in tickling frustration, directly on top of Joey, who screamed, “You’re suffocating me! Get off! You’re fat! You’re so fat!” — the comment that had gotten her in trouble in the first place.

When I see my sister now, I hold her beautiful hand in mine and sit back. Her skin is always cool. We play with each other’s fingers, bending them this way and that. We used to play dead, lifting each other’s limbs from the floor and dropping them down again, suddenly. The only problem was that we both wanted to be the dead person.

Occasionally, I touch the back of her neck. She has such a little neck, her black hair breathing on it just so. I love to feel how soft and delicate she is. I miss the immediacy of that comforting skin in the palm of my hand.

She took care of our mother, who drained every kindness Joey could produce until Joey declared that to take care of my mother, Joey had to first take care of Joey. My guilt didn’t subside. It pooled under my chin as I continued to not help, afraid I’d lose myself. But I was proud of Joey. And I could hold my chin higher when I looked at my sister’s dark brown eyes and see in her a big sister I couldn’t be. She left our mother on her own, and now she has a daughter of her own whose eyes have only a wonder to adore.

Four weeks into that first year of college, Phil died unexpectedly, tragically. Ellen learned of the accident in the middle of the night. She woke Joey to tell her. Joey looked at Ellen and said, “This is to see if I really love him or not, isn’t it?” When the truth of it was clear, her only response was, “He was supposed to be here for me when my mother died.”

We could only watch. And she was always okay.

I know that home wasn’t always in the makeup smell of my mother or the soft flesh I loved to hug. Somewhere along the line of our lives, I found a home in my sister. As sure as a familiar floorboard with a creak, I can poke her with one finger in a certain spot and she’d break down in tears of laughter. I can say “umm” a certain way and she knows something is wrong, or funny. She is the nest I crawl into. She is the one I call to say, “I’m sad,” “I’m angry,” or “I’m confused.” She doesn’t have answers, but she takes good care of me.

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