Humans logo

Sky Inside

An older sister is a strange thing - always a few steps ahead, just around the corner no matter how fast you run.

By Elizabeth KirkpatrickPublished 3 years ago 9 min read
Like

An older sister is a strange thing - always a few steps ahead, just around the corner no matter how fast you run. Alma has always been like that, just out of my reach. For a while, I’d look at her and think I caught a glimpse of who I’d eventually be, but it doesn’t work like that.

Growing up, Alma was the smart one, the serious one. I remember the look of barely concealed disgust and disappointment - and maybe a little bit of satisfaction - when I came home for Thanksgiving break my Sophomore year of college with the news that I wouldn’t be returning that semester. I’d been suspended, drunk again. I went back in January and finished the rest of my degree without incident, but nobody really seemed to care about that part. Our roles had been firmly decided. I cause problems and Alma doesn’t; it’s just one of many family agreements none of us remember making but all silently abide by. I had imagined that as young adults the space between us would fall away, but age seems to only have amplified our distance.

It was Alma I was thinking of in my kitchen when the call came. Her long blonde hair, her elegant cheekbones. Her practical job and the little black book she carries with her, full of facts and figures she says I wouldn’t understand. It’s like scrap paper for my mind, it’s just things I have to work things out for my job, she tells me.

She says for my job in a certain way to imply that she does not think I have one, or not a real one anyway. I’m an artist and I work at an art supply store near my apartment. I make extra money by stretching canvases and building stretcher bars for painters I meet in the shop. I like that kind of work. I like to feel I accomplished something that took both mind and hands.

The phone rang. Mr. Edgars, the upstairs neighbor in my rent stabilized New York City apartment building, had fallen. And it had killed him. It was hard to wrap my mind around this. Here one day and laying in a morgue the next. He still feels close enough to touch, the momentary phantom flame after you blow a candle out. The lawyer managing his estate requested a meeting with me.

I helped Mr. Edgars, Henry as he let me call him, whenever I could - small things, groceries and occasional chopping of onions or preparing something simple for dinner when he wasn’t up for it. We never ate together but we’d often have a drink side by side. He thought artists were important, vital to society. We had long talks on the stoop outside our building when the weather allowed. Mostly he talked, he shared stories from his life. One story was ten stories, leading from one decade to a book he read to his mother to the war that gave him that little scar by his left eye. He was a good man. He’d had a beautiful, hand painted kettle on his stovetop that I’d admired on many occasions - he had joked it would be mine one day. I wondered if he’d really given it to me. I knew he didn’t have much family left but certainly there would be someone.

I rode the 6 Train down to the office as instructed and sat in the clean, cheaply decorated room. The man across from me was straight faced, pale, and balding. As it turns out, I was the recipient of the kettle, and of everything in the apartment. And $20,000 in cash. I didn’t know what to say. Where were all the people who mattered?

Henry had left me a note the lawyer passed across the table to me. My name on the outside in Henry’s shaky handwriting. Inside it just read:

Thank you, Addy.

I nodded and signed where I was instructed and left. I wandered around the rest of the day, confused and humbled and thinking of Henry Edgars, a good man.

In the middle of it all, my mind kept wandering back to Alma. Beautiful Alma in her far away house. She has a husband and a job that makes her wear a blazer. I have six unfinished canvases in my studio and two to four hangovers a week. I wonder if she ever thinks of me.

It wasn’t always like this though. There was a time when we were a team under the cover of night, where we built castles out of toilet paper rolls higher than my head. Alma strung paper garlands from the towers and one December, it snowed torn construction paper across the whole town, and in my hair too. I remember Alma laughing and playing in the basement as our parents’ feet stomped above our heads. My mother had walked in on an awful, unforgivable thing in their bedroom and in the middle of a weekday, Fred, and after that, they’d drink about it every night and the yelling never really ends. There’s just the one fight that seemed to go on and on.

Our childhood wasn’t unusual, I realize that now that we are older. When I was younger, I thought we were the only people with problems. I wonder if Alma still gets nervous when she’s on the phone that someone will hear the screaming voices in the background. I still feel that way some days. Maybe she’s hidden away the time we shared a room, when she would bring me milk late at night, braid my hair and rub my forehead. It’s like somewhere along the way she forgot that the same awful nights that made her made me too.

And when Alma came home from school and told me she was reading The Odyssey and she’d learned of a place called Crete and a country called Greece, our imaginations went wild. We talked every night of the blue seas and the white roofs, how we’d eat fish until we were sick, and swim, and dance, and sing. She taught me about Greek gods and we drew endless pictures of Aphrodite and Dionysus and hung them on the old, wood panelled walls with scotch tape.

The summer we split apart, I became the bad child and she, the good. We took on these roles easily. Maybe I left her no other part to play. I was caught drinking beer and wine coolers weekend after weekend, sneaking out, stumbling home. I got lost in something and Alma didn’t follow.

After my college trouble came and went, it started to feel like I was invited to family holidays just for show. Nobody asked any questions about my life, nobody seemed to care about my paintings or my apartment. I was in the way, like I was invited just so I wouldn’t ask why I wasn’t. We all became very good at avoiding confrontation.

And three years ago when I found out Alma’s husband had cheated on her and she had decided to stay, I felt betrayed. Wasn’t that part of our identity - hating men like this? Being better than what came before? How could she? It felt like something she had done to me and I couldn’t look at her the same after that.

I wonder if maybe she thought the same of me the summer I went bad.

Now she lives in the middle of the country in a plastic house where you can’t see or smell the ocean.

I call her and ask her if she can take time off, if she wants to fly to Greece with me. She sounds vaguely surprised to hear my voice at the other end of the line, which turns briefly to panic (is mom okay? Is dad? Why are you calling?) and finally she lands on just silence as I explain. I tell her she wouldn’t have to pay for anything. I feel like I have something to offer her for once. We could go to Athens then Spetses, Ikaria and Mykonos. Crete and Delos, Rhodes and Andros.

You’ve done your research, she says with a light laugh I don’t recognize.

She says yes, she will go. I have the overwhelming feeling she felt forced to, like it would’ve been too decisive to say no. I buy the tickets and we set the date. I approach the trip with a mix of heavy dread and nervous excitement. I know what is at stake for me, our whole relationship culminating in these summer moments. Was the person I used to know still there?

At the airport, she is her usual practical self. We hug mechanically and she thanks me. It is all very polite. She wears jeans and a button down shirt. I am dressed in a white linen sundress and blue sandals. I thought it made me look very Greece; I feel sort of silly now sitting between a McDonalds and Gate 51.

She gets up to go to the bathroom, asks me to watch her bag. There, sitting in her purse in plain sight is the little black book she’s kept so secret from me, full of numbers and problems she thinks I could never understand. I remember when she used to let me inside her head so easily. I glance up and see her reaching the front of the line and turning into the bathroom. I open the small leather book.

Inside, pages and pages of sketches. Greek architecture, the ocean, the sun, the moon, a sketch of my face, another of our mother and father. There is something in the careful lines she used to build my face; tears rise in my eyes. I feel something inside me break and come together at the same time.

When she returned, she had the same tired look on her face she’d had all day but it was new to me, like seeing her at age 12 again.

Outside the hotel, it is all as we had imagined. Better even. The smell of the ocean everywhere, the laughter in the streets, the unfamiliar language dancing in our ears. To me, everything seems new and full of endless possibilities, especially my quiet sister.

After a dinner full of seafood and wine, we sit on the beach, side by side, made of the same long nights and screaming but also of the same steamed vegetables our mother used to cook, of the same visions of Greece, of the same skies, of stardust and drawings, of blood and of love.

I’ve been waiting a long time for this, Alma says, looking only out at the ocean and not at me.

Me too.

For the first time in a long time, Alma turns and smiles at me and I catch a glimpse of myself reflected in her eyes. We’ve made it back home.

family
Like

About the Creator

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick

NYC.

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.