One night it was Brother’s turn to sleep outside, but he cried to Father. “I’m scared, I don’t want to sleep in the camper, I wanna sleep inside,” he said. As usual, Father could not resist his only boy.
“Fine,” he said, “Girl can sleep outside again.”
“But it’s not my turn! I slept there last night!” Girl protested. Her lower lip stuck out and her face melted into tears. It was so scary outside alone. It wasn’t fair.
“Stop your blubbering!” Father yelled, scooping up Girl and throwing her across the room. Her small body thudded against the couch, then was still. Juli ran to her sister’s ragdoll body, not sure if she should touch her, shake her, pick her up—willing her to cry, to speak, to breathe. Finally, Girl opened her eyes and put her arms around Juli’s neck.
“She’s sleeping with me tonight,” Juli said, and that was the end of it. She wasn’t going to let anything happen to Girl, not if she could help it.
juli and sebrina
Juli loved Girl more than anything. When Girl’s mother got pregnant, Juli knew she would have a sister because she had prayed for a sister every night since God took Sebrina away. The first time Girl’s mother was pregnant she had a boy, which was fine and all, but Juli already had two half-brothers from her own mother’s first marriage. This time, she knew God would give her a sister, and He did.
Juli was eight when Girl was born, and she flew from Seattle to Rochester to see the baby. Juli was short—she hadn’t outgrown her clothes in three years, but her parents didn’t seem to notice—and she had coarse red hair and baby blue eyes behind thick glasses. She couldn’t wait until she was old enough for contact lenses.
Juli didn’t remember much about Sebrina. She had only one memory, really, of them sitting together in a red wagon. Juli reached back to hold her big sister’s hand. Small hands sticky-warm, heads together, giggling. Knowing she was safe, because her big sister was behind her.
June 1967—Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” was top of the charts. The Six-Day War came and went in the Middle East. And Juli’s sister Sebrina died of brain cancer. Blond hair falling out in long strands on the floor, leaving her naked head always cold—she never wore her little blond wig.
Sebrina was on morphine but it made her face itch and she scratched her nose raw and bloody, so Father and Sharon tried not to give her the drug unless they had to. Sebrina couldn’t swallow very well and could only drink from a straw. Sebrina was not allowed to play with friends because the neighborhood kids would stand around gawking and hoping she’d die in front of them so they could watch. “Do you think she’s gonna die today?” they whispered, but not quietly enough to keep Father from hearing—children poking each other, giggling, talking too loudly. Sebrina, scab-faced, shorn head, blue eyes looking hopeful.
Father was given a blank death certificate to fill in when the time came, which was not exactly legal, but a professional courtesy between doctors. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time.
Sebrina slept in bed between her parents. One night she awoke and asked for a glass of milk. This time, Father chose not to give her a straw. He gave Sebrina the cup of milk and watched her drown as she tried to swallow. There was no law that allowed mercy killing, and it seemed pointless to make her continue to suffer. Father did not wake up his wife when their daughter struggled and sputtered and died.
After Sebrina died, Juli escaped her bedroom every night to look for her missing sister. Sometimes they found Juli outside in the street, trying to find Sebrina.
Sebrina’s body was donated to the local medical school. “Few kids have cancer, it seemed selfish not to,” Father told Girl. “They would call us when they were done with this bit or that, and ask if we wanted it piecemeal. So we didn’t bother to claim her body,” he explained. Had Sebrina’s mother wanted to donate her little girl, or had Father insisted on being pragmatic and she was too despondent to fight him?
Why didn’t they at least claim her bones? What did the university do with her four-year-old skeleton when they were done dissecting Girl and Juli’s sister? “We didn’t bother to claim her body.” No body, no grave, no headstone. The little four-year-old blond girl came and went with nothing to remember her by. She was the first child given chemo at the University of Washington. She’s probably in a textbook somewhere.
But God gave Juli another sister, and this time, she would not let anything happen to her. When Father and Girl’s mother got divorced, Juli refused to visit Father until he agreed that Juli could stay for a week in the trailer with Girl. She didn’t mind getting up at 6:00 a.m. when Girl woke up. When Girl came riding up on her Big Wheel and gave Juli her found treasure—a dehydrated frog that had been run over by a car and was as flat and hard as a potato chip—she thanked Girl and told her what a wonderful present it was. She held the carcass between two fingers and only threw it out when Girl wasn’t looking.
joyride
The carpet in the trailer was 1960s vintage, already a decade old and filled with musty smells and the stains of someone else’s history. Mother and Bonnie, her first girlfriend, were still asleep, their bedroom door locked. When Girl and Brother woke up, Mother had carried them to the living room and sat them in front of the TV, then went back to bed, the same as always. Today, Bonnie’s son, John,
