* * *
The next morning, after half a pot of coffee and three Advil, I sucked it up and called my sister. She didn’t answer. I left a message, apologizing for not getting back to her sooner. I lied and said I’d been away overnight and had just gotten home. I had a cover story figured out—a conference in Seattle on mood disorders. I probably wouldn’t need it—Lexie didn’t ask questions about my life, especially not when she was manic; she was too caught up in her own drama.
“Call me back when you get this,” I said. “I’d love to catch up.”
I let myself imagine it: How easy it would be to fall into the familiar patter of conversation with her; how comforting to slip back in like there had never been a rift.
But it wouldn’t be like that, not really. Lexie was off her meds, and I’d be thrust into the role of coaxing her to get back on them, to go see her doctor, to seek help. I could already hear Barbara’s advice: “Boundaries, Jackie. Remember your boundaries.”
I went through my usual Saturday routine: the gym, grocery shopping, a trip to the dry cleaners. I called her again before lunch. Then in the afternoon. I imagined her at Sparrow Crest, looking at the ringing phone, too wrapped up in her own mania to answer. Or, maybe she was being petty. You don’t pick up for me, I don’t pick up for you.
Touché.
“It’s me again,” I said to voice mail. “If you’re mad at me, I get it, but do me a favor and call me back anyway, okay?” My words were clipped, annoyance coming through loud and clear. Around three, I was actually worried enough, or maybe I was just pissed off enough, to call Aunt Diane.
“Lexie is off her meds again,” I said instead of hello.
“Is she? I haven’t heard a peep from her. Not a single message.”
Odd. When my sister had a manic episode, she called everyone, starting with my father and Diane. “I guess that makes me the lucky one,” I said. “She’s left me over a dozen, none making sense. And now she’s not answering her phone.”
“Do you want me to go check on her? I’m heading out that way this evening. There’s a poetry reading in Hanover.”
“Poetry reading?”
“I’m not getting all hoity-toity intellectual. Are you imagining me all beatnik with a black turtleneck and beret? I’m actually in hot pursuit of a woman—a poetry lover.”
“Really?” I snorted into the phone. Our fifty-six-year-old aunt had divorced our uncle Ralph ten years ago, come out of the closet, and now seemed to be with a new woman each week, “making up for lost time.” Diane usually called me at least once a week to check in, but it had been over two weeks since I’d heard from her. I figured either she was super busy at work or caught up in one of her brief, feverish flings.
“Nothing like wine, a bookstore, and a little poetry to open one up to the powers of love.”
“I’m not sure how much love has to do with it,” I said.
“ ‘What’s love got to do with it?’ ” she sang, doing her best Tina Turner. Then she stopped, chuckled. “Are you calling it a secondhand emotion? Speaking of which—” She paused, seemed to hesitate, then plunged ahead. “Have you heard anything from Phil?”
I blew out an exasperated breath. “Phil and I have been officially over for nearly a year now.”
I closed my eyes, saw his face when I’d told him it was finally over. His normally ruddy cheeks went pale, his lips turned blue like he’d forgotten to breathe. We were in the grocery store, of all places, and he had been pointing out for the millionth time how much easier it would be if we moved in together, so we wouldn’t need to buy things like separate toothpaste and bags of coffee and toilet bowl cleaner. We were in the toothpaste aisle when I told him that I couldn’t ever be the person he was asking me to be, the person who would share everything with him.
“I know,” Diane said. “But you said he was still calling. I thought maybe…”
“Maybe what?”
“You’d decide to give him a second chance, Jax. You’re far too young to be playing old maid. He was a good one.”
This was too much.
“You never even met him!”
“And whose fault is that?” she asked. “You two were together what, like three years on and off, and you never once brought him home.”
I stiffened. This was one of the many ongoing arguments I’d had with Phil before I finally had the sense to break things off. I wouldn’t let him meet my family. I was too closed off. Not willing to commit or make myself emotionally vulnerable.
I wouldn’t even let him come with me to Gram’s funeral.
“Don’t you think that’s more than a little fucked up, Jackie?” he’d asked. “How are we supposed to move forward with this relationship with all these careful walls you build around parts of your life? Jesus, you know everything about my family, and I know next to nothing about yours.”
But these were learned behaviors, as Barbara aptly pointed out in our weekly sessions. Defense mechanisms after a lifetime with Lexie, when I had no room in my life for friends or boyfriends. I learned at a young age not to bring anyone home because she might lash out, do something awful, or tell them an unbearable secret or an out-and-out lie. When I was in fifth grade, I made the mistake of having a slumber party and inviting four girls from school. Lexie took over the evening and ended up confiding in the guests—quietly thanking them for coming. “You must be real friends to risk your own health for her,” she said. The poor girls, including my then best friend, Zoey Landover, sat wide-eyed while Lexie told them about some horrible, incurable, possibly contagious disease I had. She threw out a bunch of medical-sounding terms, and implied that it was something embarrassing that affected private parts. I tried to argue, to tell them it was all a lie, and Lex gave me a look of pity and said, “If they’re your real friends, shouldn’t they know the truth?” All four girls were calling for rides home before it even got dark.
“How can you be so mean?” I asked Lexie later, when it was just the two of us alone in the little bedroom we shared.
She smiled sweetly, stroked my hair. “I did you a favor, Jax. It was a test. To see who was really a true friend. And not one of them passed.”
Lexie always made me choose between my friends and her, and in the end, I’d always chosen Lexie.
Even after moving all the way across the country to try to distance myself, to focus on my own life; even after years of therapy and the boundaries I’d worked so hard to develop, Lexie still had that strong of a hold over me.
“I’m happy on my own, thank you very much,” I told Diane. “Besides, work is crazy. I don’t have time for romance. I can barely keep my plants alive, much less a relationship.”
“Sure. Keep telling yourself that. All work and no play makes Jax a dull girl.”
“Anyway, back to Lexie…” I said.
“I was just at Sparrow Crest two weeks ago. Your sister seemed fine. Happy.”
“Have you spoken to her since?” I asked.
“No,” Diane admitted with what may have been a tinge of guilt in her voice. “I’ve been crazy busy with work. And like I said, she was doing really well when I last saw her.”