Then one day I realized that I had been completely wrong about all of it. Your autism was nothing special. Nor was the chaos it brought into our family. It was just life. We had it worse than some, better than others. There was nothing to wait for. This was it.
Considering how long I’d clutched that other flag, I surrendered it with surprising ease, tossed it aside like an old newspaper, brushed my hands together, and got on with things. In my case, getting on with things meant claiming my life for myself, the life I’d put on hold for so many years while I was waiting for the grand finale. I’d spent years worrying about what I was supposed to do to save you, never realizing there was nothing I could do. I kept a corner of my mind so busy with worry that it felt like I was doing something important, but it was just static. I wasn’t actually doing anything for you. Just worrying away the time, my life, yours.
I had to face the fact that whatever became of me would come from me and noplace else. My interests, talents, and inclinations finally claimed my life for their own and began to marshal my days and years with meaning. I’ve had to sort out my desires and motivations to construct my own compass, replacing what had been there before—an empty sense of obligation—with the everyday reality of my own, ordinary life. I find that if I trust myself and take my time, I tend to move in the right direction, and I don’t seem to keep running off three ways at once.
And then here you are. Now that I don’t have to spend all that time worrying about you, I have begun to see you more clearly. There is our history—your life, my life, and the interwoven patterns of our shared past with its joy and pain. But mostly there is just you—very alive and in the present. You are a living, breathing woman, who is also trying to make her own way in the world. It has become apparent that there is this opportunity, this new endeavor. After all this time, I have the strange and simple challenge of trying to learn how to be your sister.
WE ARE RIDING together in the car. I’m thirty-five and I’m driving. You are thirty-nine and silent. We are traveling at top speed down the Columbia River Gorge as I drive you back toward your home in eastern Washington. We’re listening to classic rock, because that’s the only station we can get on this highway cut deep into the basalt canyon dividing Washington from Oregon. We have water on one side, cliffs on the other, and we are racing east.
You’re tapping a balled fist softly against your knee. I look at you, my big sister, your short brown hair the exact color of mine. As I’ve aged, my brown eyes have lightened to match your hazel ones.
We can’t offer each other much. I’ve always wanted to make your life better, but I don’t know if that is even possible. I have no idea what you would want for me or if you are even capable of such an estimation. But I do know at least that you wanted to come visit me, that you wanted to stay, and you are happy, now, to let me drive you home. My heart is full of all I can’t say to you, because you wouldn’t understand, because you would rather ride in silence. Still, I see you there.
“Hi, Margaret,” I say.
You look at me. “Hi, Eileen.”
We are quiet again. I’m watching the ribbon of the road racing toward us through the windshield.
“Hi, Eileen,” you say again.
“Hi, Margs.”
I’m listening. I wonder what you are thinking, where your mind goes as you lean your head against the window and watch the white line on the side of the highway as it glides past the car.
“Hi,” you say.
I look at you. You point to the radio.
“That’s Aerosmith, Eileen.”
This makes me laugh.
What would Steven Tyler say? You can’t call me on the phone or tell me you love me. You can’t even tell me what you did last week, but you can recognize Aerosmith anywhere.
“Yep, that’s Aerosmith, Margs,” I tell you.
“That’s Aerosmith.”
“Yes, that’s Aerosmith.”
“You’re listening to Aerosmith, Eileen.”
“Yes, Margaret. We’re listening to Aerosmith.”
We pass this piece of information back and forth between us like a bit of magic. It’s a piece of treasure, a soap bubble catching all the colors of the rainbow. And, working together, we keep it up in the air.
I’ll think of this moment in years to come when we are suffering through a rough spot brought on by one of your moods. When you don’t want to talk to me, or when you want to go home early even though I just drove three hundred miles to see you.
I will think of it during the times when you are quiet and happy, when you reach out to take my hand as we walk up to the house, when you sit next to me in a bar listening to a blues band, when you call good night to me from my guest room.
I will feel it reverberate—our own hard-won and fragile joy, the thrum of the undeniable bond that links us. It’s a fragile borderland between hope and change. I cling to that and try to believe that it might bleed over into the rest of my life.
You have made my life indescribably different from what I could ever have imagined. I may have given up expecting much from you, and I know things could fall
