My Sister, the Sin Eater

I sat down on the side of the stinking, brown-stained mattress and opened my sister’s diary. It wasn’t like I was expecting to learn much about her or her life or the tortured thoughts that had led her to a lifetime of her prioritizing her addiction to chaos over me, her only sister and last living relative.

But I was wrong. As I have been so many times before about my sister. By the time I read the last pages, the afternoon light had dimmed to a root-beer brown, and I had a whole new take on her particular demons – the ones that went bump in the night on this same disgusting mattress. The ones whose intentions were to use her for a good time, when all she ever got out of it was a bad time . . . along with maybe some drugs, some money that could have never-ever compensated for what she had offered in exchange, or the black eye and cracked ribs that she had received by the hand of someone named Derek. She even wrote about the time that the landlady had had to call 9-1-1 – such was the crash of tables and bottles and bodies against the walls. My sister had to be escorted to the ER and then on to some state-funded detox center after that go around.

She wrote about these things in the slim black volume like she was recalling items she needed to add to a grocery list. Milk, eggs, and, oh yeah, I had the crap kicked out of me last night by an asshole.

To say that my sister had her share of troubles is not even beginning to pick the scab that had been originally torn open by our “stepdad” Trent. Lydia, being older and always on the lookout for me, was the one who stood between Trent and me, putting the target on her chest. It makes me sick to think about how my mother defended Cretin Trent after Lydia had gone to her sobbing.

It was pointless to try and tell my mother anything contrary about Trent. Her concerns were elsewhere: Trent paying the rent, Trent stocking up on vodka, Trent buying cigarettes by the carton. After my sister had told my mother to go fuck herself, Lydia then reported Trent to a caring counselor at school and we had ended up separated in temporary foster care. Which is probably just as my mother had secretly hoped. She was in no shape to be raising brave young women anyway. Fuck her.

My sister had a coarseness about her – in her personality and in her appearance and in her spirit. Her language was so frequently peppered with the words fuck and shit, you just didn’t hear any distinction anymore between swearing and non-swearing. It was as if her native language was Fuck-ese. She had no problem with telling someone off if she thought they were looking at her sideways. Just one little look and she would tell them to Go fuck off! Her outbursts were alarming to not only the person who had happened to look her way but to anyone who happened to be within hearing. It was this random shotgun approach to life that, I think, ultimately killed her.

Lydia’s skin always had an off-color to it that could best be described as more “greige” than olive – a tint caught in the netherworlds of grey and beige. It could have been the cigarettes or it could have been the booze or it could have been the pills or the meth or the weed. There was no singular cause, as all of these variables were so muddled into a singular slurry of solution, there was no way to determine any independent or dependent variables. I guess, given her lifestyle, you could say that she, herself, was ultimately the dependent variable – the effect – caused by her mélange of drugs and alcohol and smokes and men.

Yes, men. Like our mother, she had horrible taste in men. If there was one thing about my sister that was predictable, it was this: Imagine the old joke of three men walking into a bar. One is a priest, one is a rabbi, and one is a derelict cowboy. She had this uncanny ability to cozy up to the one independent variable that would treat her like shit. And I’m not saying that the derelict cowboy was a ringer in the experiment. She could bring out the co-dependent dark side in anyone she brought home at the end of the night.

Her place was an utter disaster – the kind of mess that had me wondering if I shouldn’t have brought a mask and a pair of latex gloves with me to clean it out. I was there to take care of her personal effects and clean up the apartment she had been renting – if you could call it renting. She had been evicted so many times that she was in perpetual moving mode. Her landlady, never able to secure a new renter for such a dump, would rent it right back to my sister when she showed up with a wad of bills. The landlady would begrudgingly let her back into the room with yet another warning, “And this will be the last time, ya hear me, bitch?” My sister would push past her without saying a word, dumping her assortment of duffels and black garbage bags on the floor.

The logistics of moving her collection of artifacts from place to place always puzzled me. Lydia didn’t have a car, as she had lost her license several DUIs ago. It was unlikely that she would ever drive a car legally again. She had crashed into light poles, parked cars, dumpsters, and once through the plate glass window of Brewed Awakenings – a hipster coffee hangout on the corner of State and Holly.

How she had survived these crashes, I’ll never know. A police officer once unkindly explained to me that it was the drunks who survived car crashes, not the sober victims. I could never know or prove the veracity of this, but I can only assume that he had seen his share of unseemly tragedy. I only had the evidence that my sister had miraculously survived another accident with her broken-up, breathing body to account for the miracle. I think the officer was channeling his anger and frustration on me, the sister who showed up at the hospital wearing Lucas Hugh leggings, authentic UGGs, a Balmain cropped hoodie, and carrying a Louis Vuitton. I guess haute yoga must have been a little out of context with someone who was lying there in a hospital bed with two black eyes and a broken arm and mumbling, Occiferr, whassss you do with my stash? Whassss you do?? What can I say? I have worked my ass off to earn my degree and to be earning a top salary from a company that respects my brain.

I know. I should sound sad, act sad, be sad about the disparity between my sister and me. I just . . . couldn’t. Sadness was not a word that had survived intact from our childhood growing up, what with my mother’s lack of care and the man-of-the-month that she insisted that we call "Dad." Sadness implied a weakness that neither my sister or I could afford. While Lydia had been the sin eater and had solemnly eaten the piece of paper with the word sadness written on it, I had been spared.

Having a sister for a sin eater was both a blessing and a curse. It meant that I had been saved from the reality that would come to eventually permeate the heart, mind, and soul of my sister. I intuited, even as a little sister, that something wasn’t right after the nights that my mother had worked a late shift. But I had been powerless to do anything that would make it right.

Lydia eventually escaped from our flat and my mother, being a class-A lush, no longer possessed the energy or motivation to lure any more Trents back to our shitty apartment. Still, I didn’t trust her. I had a part-time job after school at a soap and candle store in the mall, and I saved up for three deadbolt locks that I installed myself inside my bedroom door. If you could see my apartment door now, you would count nine – yes, nine – dead bolts. Some things die hard, I guess.

As I was shoving another pile of dirty clothes from her bed into a garbage bag, I found the slim black journal that was wedged between her sagging mattress and the chipped-up plaster wall. Upon opening it and riffling the pages, I could see that she preferred to write with a Sharpie. And not a fine point Sharpie. One that had a bold tip – the kind you would use to label boxes when you are moving. Her penmanship was made of up of bold, choppy up-and-down strokes that veered diagonally across the pages. Amazingly, it was legible. Call it a sister thing, but I was able to decipher her entries.

I felt sick as I read through the pages of her diary. The haphazard nature of the entries were random, yet there was a theme –a thread – that spoke of her hope for a different, better life. Yes, she had even written about the time she asked (begged) to move in with me. I lived in a neighborhood with luxury apartments that boasted doormen and added security. I tried letting her live with me at one point in time when she was in freefall, nearing the bottom of her well. But the situation had ended badly with Pete, the doorman, calling the police. My sister had accosted someone in the elevator for “sneering” at her. Her conclusive diary entry for this saga of having to leave my apartment was: Emily is such a bitch. I hate her.

I loved Lydia, but I just couldn’t deal with it at the time. I was just starting my dream job doing research that required all of my attention. It was implied by the generous signing bonus and salary that the company owned me, body and soul. I didn’t have any time to distill Lydia’s random acts of randomness. After a lifetime of my mother’s yin and yang, comprised of indifference and abuse . . . and then the added burden of my sister’s unpredictability?

I couldn’t keep it up, no matter the price of the guilt. I found an apartment for Lydia and covered the first three months’ rent. I hoped that this would give her enough time to get her life figured out, find a job, maybe even want to thrive. It didn’t take, this new attempt at starting over. The apartment got trashed, and I was left with paying over $4,000 in damages.

I’m not proud of myself, but I gave up on Lydia. Gave up, gave in, caved, tried to stop caring as much – I don’t know what to call it. I quit taking her calls and, after one night of her leaving me over 80 text messages asking for money, I blocked her number. It is as if I had been forced to crawl inside a protective bubble to stop me from caring about her. It makes me sick to admit this to anyone, but there you have it. I guess I’ll never be a very good sin eater.

My sister died in a motorcycle accident. Strangely, she was the one who had been driving the bike and her new-found boyfriend had been the passenger. And it just goes to show that that police officer’s empirical evidence was wrong: a stoned driver can get killed. I received the call at 3:23 am . . . a time that I will forever have stamped into my internal body clock. I can’t count the nights when I have awakened from a deep sleep at the very minute that Lydia died. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, a comforting thing or a scary, ghosty thing. It will take time to unknot my feelings and decide if I like this call to enjoy a little Soul’s Midnight reverie.

I paged to the back of my sister’s diary and there . . . I found the letter taped to the last page. I squinted to make out the postmark and was surprised to see that it had been sent on the day of my 18th birthday, nine years ago, from a town called Medford, Oregon.

The letter was addressed to my mother. It started out with an apology in advance, should the contents of the letter be insensitive or unwelcome. I read the pages, dropping them one by one onto the matted brown shag carpeting. I learned that I had been given up at birth by a woman named Connie and then adopted by my mother and father. I had no idea why someone as unfit as my mother would be allowed to adopt anyone, but it gave me pause. What had happened to her? Maybe she had loved us?

When I read Connie's letter, it all made a lot of sense – not the logistics of the adoption or how I came to be adopted by Pearl and Frank, but the utter disconnect I had felt throughout my entire childhood. It explained why I had felt like a changeling through my entire childhood.

Connie was asking my mother if she felt it would be okay if she, Connie, met me. That she would like to meet her daughter – me. That she and her new family would welcome me with loving, open arms. Connie included her phone number, along with her email.

As I read, I could actually understand why my mother hadn’t shared the letter with me. She had likely decided that Connie’s request was of no relevance to me or my life. I had no way of knowing if Connie ever received a call or a letter back from my mother, but now? Knowing that Lydia had known for the past nine years? How could she have known and never told me?

The letter concluded with Connie saying that they would love to meet me. And if I didn’t feel comfortable meeting them, they had been setting aside some savings for me in the event that I wanted to attend university or travel after graduating or start a business. She said that there was a little more than $20,000 in the account.

Scrawled across the bottom of this paragraph, Lydia had written with her bold tip Sharpie, “Screw you, Emily.” It was like the final slap. Lydia, like my mother, had no intention of ever sharing Connie’s letter with me. My birth mother lived in Medford, Oregon. I lived in Seattle. We had been so close to one another all of these years. The enormity of this secret being kept from me vaporized the bubble I had spent a childhood preserving to keep my emotions in check. A flood of sadness washed through me, making me realize that maybe Lydia hadn’t been such a good sin eater after all.

I stood up and, taking a page out of Lydia’s lexicon, said, “Fuck it.” Called an Uber. Stuffed Connie’s letter in my handbag. I left everything belonging to my sister behind to the care of planet Earth, including her black streaked scrawl of messages in her black diary. I didn't even bother to lock the door behind me.

It wasn’t the money in the account that had me typing Connie’s email address into a new message as I sat in the back of the Uber on my way home. I didn’t want it. That money could be donated to some women’s shelter or addiction-based social services. What I wanted was to meet my birth mother and see if it wasn’t too late to build a relationship. I would eventually have to mourn Lydia and thank her for watching out for me through our growing up years, but first I had my family to meet.