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My Sister’s Devil

 

“You don’t think this was given to you by God, do you?” my brother said to Sam, who sat across from us. Samantha looked down at the elegant white cloth covering her dining-room table and brushed a few crumbs into a cupped hand. I watched both of them, but mainly Jake. Where was he going with this?

            “It’s the Devil,” Jake said and tilted his head as if trying to understand her confusion about a matter so simple.

            I wanted her to storm, to chide him out of this ridiculous position the way she would have a few short months ago before the onset of her illness. “Jesus, Jake,” I said, “take it easy.” 

            Sam studied one of the landscapes on the far wall. She massaged the side of her neck with her fingers, as if soothing away a small discomfort. Finally she glanced at him. “Nobody knows what causes it.”

            “Exactly,” he said.

            “The doctors don’t even understand it.” She glanced at me. I reached for her hand, restless on the tabletop, and gave it a squeeze.

            Jake ran a finger over his bushy mustache. “The doctors need to read their Bible.”

            We were waiting for Britt, Sam’s partner of twenty-five years, to rejoin us. She’d insisted on dessert to complete the dinner and had hurried off to the convenience store a few blocks away.

            “This isn’t about religion, Jake,” Sam said. “It’s medical science.” Despite the logic of her message, her voice was a scratchy whisper. The words seemed injured, spilling out in splinters.                          

            The back screen door banged shut, startling me. Britt strolled into the room from the kitchen juggling a half-gallon of ice cream. “Mint chocolate chip. Who’s ready?”

            Jake rubbed his hands together. “My favorite.

* * *                

For six months Sam had been scanned and quizzed, prodded and stuck. The X-rays showed nothing conclusive but the MRI was troubling, so Dr. Marx had sent her to a specialist, whose lab work, mainly nerve conduction studies, supported his mounting suspicions. The spinal tap settled the question   

            “You’re in the early stages of multiple sclerosis,” Dr. Marx said to Sam during her next visit. “There’s no cure, you understand, but there are numerous treatments that are . . .”

            Sam swore, when she told me about it, that she heard nothing more the doctor had said.

                                                                              * * *

All this happened eight years ago. Sam—bold and brilliant her entire life—has forgotten I was there and repeats the story to me every year or two, each time thinking it to be the first telling. “Danny,” she says when beginning the story anew, “I can’t believe Jake’s really our brother. Must be some colossal genetic accident.”

            Her faltering memory is only one of the ways her MS has diminished her. The list extends to include, well, every bad thing. She’s able to walk crookedly with a cane on good days, though even then she wobbles like a chair with a busted leg, her connections slack and unsure, threatening collapse at any moment. Her teeth, her beautiful straight white teeth, have gapped and are beginning to loosen. “No more apples,” she says. She has changed out her reading glasses for bifocals. Her body, always taut, is sagging. Sam, who always took care of her body.

            Every bit of this by her early fifties. It’s an invisible but vicious raptor, this MS. It picks at her a morsel at a time, grips with talons that are sharp and embedded into her flesh. Even more surprising to me, embedded into her spirit, what I’d always considered her indomitable spirit. Somehow I feel reduced as well.

* * *

Sam's fifty-first birthday prompts me to call her this March morning. “How about lunch at China Buffet?”  I pick her up at her home, a gorgeous Victorian in the Cherokee Triangle area of town whose upper stories have not felt her footfall for five or six years.

            She begins telling the story again over lunch. The last time I heard it, maybe a year ago,  my wife Clare and I were sitting in her living room. Dinner was finished and we were sipping coffee topped with Bailey’s Irish Cream, Sam’s favorite. Britt had been liberal with the liqueur and we were having fun. “I hate to mention this,” Sam said suddenly, “but I can’t relax around Jake anymore. I love him, of course, but damnation, enough is enough.” The mood changed in an instant.                           

            “He gets intense at times, that’s the truth,” Clare replied and placed a hand on Sam’s arm.                                              

            “Did I tell you what he had to say about my MS?” Sam asked.

            We all hesitated, unsure where she was going with this. Was this something new or the same story we’d all heard before? I looked at Britt, but she was watching Sam. Not wanting to cut her off before she began, I waited.

            “He told me the Devil was the cause of my MS. He said God wouldn’t do any—”

            “Oh, right,” I said, “you did tell us that story.”

            "Did I?” She looked lost for a moment, as though she had emerged from a daydream while driving and didn’t know where she was. Then, quickly and brightly: “Oh, of course I did. Sorry to bore you with old stories.”

            But I knew she had not remembered: I’d seen the moment of fear in her eyes and hated that I had inadvertently created it. Stranger than that, though, was that Sam glanced at Clare and me, letting her gaze finally rest on Britt. “Who am I anymore?” she asked.

            Now, as she broaches the topic once again over egg drop soup and chicken lo mein, I sit and listen.

            Here is a woman who has helped organize an international peace conference in the Middle East, a woman whose memory for faces and facts I always marveled at. Now, details from several years ago—or several months or weeks—can vanish. Little wonder, her fear. And anger. It has never occurred to me before that she might be angry. I would be.

            I tell myself to be patient. I can’t know how exactly how she feels. But at the same time I fear that this story will keep returning to haunt her. And us. I want to do something. So I nod my head at the appropriate spots as we relax over lunch. Something happens, though, that I don’t anticipate. When she ends the tale with the entrance of Britt with the ice cream, I feel a surge of anger. “Does Jake know how upset you are about this?” I say.

            “That was a long time ago. I’ve never mentioned it after that night. Not to him.”

            I wonder if that’s true, if she’s remembering correctly, but an instinct makes me trust her on this. “Why don’t you?”

            Sam’s lips extend into a little pout. She never indulged in these silly affectations before her illness. Damnit, don’t do that, I want to say.

            “You know how Jake is. He might not even remember what he said.”

            “You remember it.” Of all the things to remember. Incredibly unfair.

            Her fingernails tap the table. “He still goes to church twice a week, Danny.” She pauses and for a moment seems lost in a memory before looking up. “I think I’ll let it drop.” She smiles at me in that tired way she has of late. Her blue eyes gleam in the lights of the restaurant and her body, flaccid—unbelievable after all those years of jogging and swimming and cycling—sags toward the earth more than usual.

            On the way home that afternoon, I promise myself that I’ll talk to Jake about the situation. But what does someone say to a person who knows he’s never wrong?

            Later that week I get an e-mail from Jake’s only child. Peggy is a freshman at the University of Kentucky. When Clare and I went to Sam and Britt’s house for dinner this past Christmas Eve—an event Jake has refused to attend for ten or fifteen years now—Peggy sashayed up to us and said in that sweet, sassy way she has, “When are you guys going to invite Dad and me to dinner?” I offered her an ambiguous promise, but now the e-mail is prompting a formal invitation. Going to be in Louisville this weekend. Would that be a convenient time for dinner? Her persistence makes me smile.                                                                       By Thursday we’ve all agreed on the day and time. On Saturday afternoon Jake telephones. “Tomorrow isn’t going to work out for me,” he says. “I have a function at church.”

            “Would it help if we made it earlier or later? We’re flexible.”

            “No.”

            “No?”

             “Peggy hasn’t been able to find a ride back to school. We have to cancel.”

             I tell him that Peggy seemed excited about the visit. “Can’t you let church slide this once?”

            A long pause.

            “God won’t mind,” I say.

            Another pause, but I decide to wait for him. Finally he says, “You spoke to Him personally about this issue, did you?”

            I laugh. “You got me there, Jake. I have to admit I didn’t.”

            “We can’t make it.” A silence follows. I expect him to say something, maybe offer up an apology, but after a second or two he hangs up.

            “I can’t believe my brother is such a prick,” I tell my wife. “No wonder Sarah divorced him.”

            She puts her hand on my arm and tilts her head, as if to remind me that this is how he’s always acted, this is who he is. Of course she’s right. He lives on an ocean of his own creation. And though I’ve never stopped loving him, I’m also never quite able to find my sea legs when dealing with him.

            Nine or ten years ago, a time before the diagnosis of Sam’s MS, Jake phoned to ask if he could meet me at the university where I’ve been teaching American and English lit for almost twenty-five years now, a school Jake has attended, off and on, for art or astronomy, philosophy or physics. He was in the midst of a religious rebirth at the time and was given to testifying. I was not interested in being saved by my brother and told him so over the phone.           

            “It’s not about that,” he said.

            We met in my tiny office in the Humanities Building. There was room for my desk and computer, two floor-to-ceiling bookcases, my work chair and a single student chair. Essays waiting for my attention languished in several untidy stacks.

            “I’ve been reading some short stories by Saki,” he said as he sat and stretched his long legs in front of him.

He considered himself a great reader of the world’s great literature. “Have you ever read Saki?” 

            “H. H. Munro. I like him.”

            “He has a really neat story about a nervous guy who visits the country. Let’s see . . .”   He seemed to be searching for the title.

            “‘The Open Window,’” I said. “‘Romance at short notice was her specialty.’”

            He blinked at me. “And ‘The Interlopers.’ I love ‘The Interlopers.’”  

            “Nice story,” I agreed. “Amazing irony.”

            “Irony? Well, maybe, but more important is the idea that life sometimes doesn’t give a person a second chance.”

            I said nothing for a few moments. Jake is smart—I’ve always conceded that in some ways he may be the smartest of our mother’s children—but he was now trespassing in a literary neck of the woods, a place I knew something about. I sat up straighter. “What’s on your mind, Jake?”

            He looked at the floor, at the bookcases, at a spot somewhere beyond my right shoulder. Finally, seeming to muster something—was it courage?—he faced me. “Remember when we were kids and we had to take baths together sometimes because there wasn’t enough hot 

water for everybody?”

            “Sure. We’d put a huge pot of water on the stove and—”

            “Once, when I was twelve or thirteen, we were in the tub together and I did something that’s been bothering me a lot lately.” He looked at the floor for a moment but met my eyes again. Bravely, I thought. “I need to ask for your forgiveness.”

            “We were kids.” I waved a hand in dismissal.

            “It’s been on my mind for a month. I can’t shake it.”

            “Forget it.”

            “The Devil has me in his grip. He knows no mercy.” He squirmed, small movements of his shoulders and arms, as if trying to break away from an invisible embrace.

            I didn’t want to go to that distant place and told him so.

            “Help me, Danny.”

            Something sparked red against black like an old wooden kitchen match igniting. “My God,” I said, “the Devil has you? I thought you and the Devil were on speaking terms. ‘The Lord told me that I needed to be born again,’ I mimicked, my frustration from all his preaching during the past year boiling over. ‘The Devil whispered in my ear.’ You were twelve, for God’s sake. Dad died when you were twelve and I was seven. Everything was crazy that year. And this is what you remember? Why do you want to go back and wallow in that shit field?  Forgive yourself, goddamnit, or get that guy you’re always talking about, Brother James or whoever, to forgive you. Jesus fucking Christ.”  I found myself standing, leaning on both hands across my desk as I peered into my brother’s eyes and dared him to respond. “No 

interest in this at all,” I said more quietly. Trembling, I took my seat.

                                                                            * * *

I run into Jake at the mall several weeks after the cancelled Sunday dinner. It’s the kind of blustery April afternoon that makes me wonder if spring will ever return. Goose bumps crawl up my back as rain pelts the umbrella. I duck into an entrance, pick up an item I had on order, and see him when I turn for the exit. He’s carrying a sack marked ImagiNations. We make our way to a table in the center of the nearly deserted food court, where he extracts a boxed puzzle and begins explaining the theory and complexity of the thing.                          

               “It’s the latest in a series,” he says. “Three dimensional, imported from Japan. Considered by the experts to be the most challenging.” He continues for a while and I try to listen, vaguely wondering how one becomes an expert in the area of three-dimensional puzzles. I even study the picture on the box of this complicated maze, but not being a science person (“What!  Everyone’s a science person!” Jake had once responded when I’d offered that feeble disclaimer), I begin to drift. The aroma of some flavored coffee—hazelnut cream, I decide—floats on the warm air. Tired after a full day at the University, I fight an inclination to nod off.

            He pauses and beams at the puzzle. I jump at the opening. “Jake,” I say, and hesitate. I’m not sure why everything I’d planned to say to him about Sam’s troubling memory has slipped away. I sit there looking at his amused expression.

            He cocks his head and runs a finger over his mustache. His eyes twinkle. “What do you have on your alleged mind?” he asks and smiles, delighted by his attempt at humor.

            My voice returns. “Remember when you told Sam that the Devil caused her MS?” I realize  I sound shaky and that bothers me.

            “I know what you’re referring to. That was years ago.”

            “She’s still hurt over that.” I expect him to protest. Jake is never happy to hear a bit of news that he should have figured out himself.

            “She never said anything about it,” he says quietly.                                     

            “She mentioned it to me a while back. A couple of times. I think it’s something you need

to take care of.”

            He cups a hand over his mustache in thought. The seconds tick off in my head. Should I tell him how Sam keeps repeating the story of that evening? Just as I open my mouth to speak, he nods. “Not a problem. I’ll call first chance I get.”

            “Great.”

            “She misunderstood my reference. What I wanted her to realize—”

            I hold up a hand. “Tell Sam.”

            I let my disappointment over the Sunday visit slide into the recycling bin. This has been easier than I had hoped.

            But replaying the meeting as I head for home, I begin second-guessing myself for cutting him off. I wonder what Biblical precipice he’d have tottered on the brink of, feeling sure his explanation would have involved deep chasms and blue-black shadows. I quickly grow weary of this speculation, though, and tell myself to let it go. Jake will say something to Sam that will help her stop reliving an event that is still painful. That pleases me.

            As I drive along the hills rising above the city, I recall something from long ago. My first wife and I were entertaining in the backyard of our old country place in the knobs of southern Indiana. The afternoon—it was our first summer on that small farm—was lovely, its breezes carrying the sweetness of honeysuckle to our picnic table. Sam and Britt had driven out to see 

the place for the first time. Jake and his wife Sarah had also come, Sarah beginning to show in her fifth month of her pregnancy. All of us were watching Becky as she played at the back of the big lawn not far from the chicken coop. She was tossing fistfuls of ground corn to eight or ten Rhode Island Reds and squealing in delight as they pecked at the ground around her.

            Jake smiled. “I saw a little boy saved last week. It was the most remarkable thing.”

            Sarah put a hand on his arm. “Not now, honey.”

            For a moment I thought he would take her advice. I believe he tried to but wasn’t able. “But it was so incredible,” he blurted. “A five-year-old boy in church last week walked to the altar and declared himself a Christian. He disavowed Satan. It had to be a miracle. He was saved by the Holy Spirit.”                                                              

            “All the little children are saved,” Sam said quietly. She never entered into religious discussions. But she adored Becky. They sometimes spent an hour playing games together on her carpet. I think she felt that Jake had slighted his niece. Her niece.

            I looked up to see Becky chasing a hen at the foot of the hill rising beyond the yard. In that instant I knew Sam was right, that all the children are saved, and I suddenly detested this Great Thug of Jake’s who required the perfect stiff salute before accepting you into his club, even if you were a perfect child of four.

            Perhaps Jake was bothered by Sam’s response—I was never sure about it—but after Sarah whispered into his ear he changed the subject. But he wasn’t finished. “I dreamed last night that we’re going to have a boy,” he announced with a nod. “The Lord came to me and told me we’re having a son.”

            “That’s interesting,” I said. “I had a dream last night myself. I dreamed you and Sarah are having a girl.” 

            He frowned at me. I excused myself from the table and walked toward the house, my nerves tingling. My unplanned response to Jake pleased me. I rarely lie, not because of any sense of righteousness, but because it strikes me as degrading and foolish. But this lie I savored. When Jake’s daughter Peggy was born five months later, I was jubilant, though I admitted it to no one.      

            As I pull into my driveway, the rain still falling in the early darkness, I chuckle at the memory, bittersweet though it is.

* * *

The weather breaks by the first of May. Cold storms from early spring have given way to winds circling up from the southwest, bathing the Ohio Valley with temperatures in the eighties. In celebration Clare and I invite Sam and Britt to dinner at this home we built several years ago out beyond the suburbs. On our acre azaleas blaze and tulips nod in a big circle of purple and white. Dogwood branches droop, heavy with blossoms. “We live in heaven,” Clare suggests.

            Before they arrive, I move my wife’s mini-SUV from the attached garage. They’ve visited several times before, so we’ve discovered it’s easier for Sam to come into the house this way: 

only one step to climb, a straight shot into the hall leading to the kitchen, and from there to the deck. I wonder if she’ll be on her cane or her walker. Not the wheelchair, I hope. Her episodes are more frequent now, easily exacerbated. I want the evening to be pleasant for both of them, these women who have met more than their fair share of obstacles on this journey. A blessing remains, though: I’ve only seen that old fear in her eyes a time or two in these past years. And I never wanted to see it again.

            At seven she shuffles in, her right hand carrying a cane, her left poked through Britt’s arm that’s bent at the elbow. They move in baby steps to the deck just off the kitchen, where we settle, the big green umbrella tilted to block the early evening sun. Britt is chatty, discussing her newest show at a Market Street art gallery. But there’s a reserve about Sam. I wonder if they’ve quarreled before arriving. We eat grilled pork chops and corn—Britt cuts it from the cob for Sam—and spinach salad. The women love the chops. 

            Remembering how much Sam enjoys it, I break out the Bailey’s Irish Cream after dinner. While Clare produces a fresh carafe of coffee and I attend to the bartending, I think about asking Sam if Jake has called. I can’t decide if I should. The sky begins to streak in sheets of violet. As I pour the Bailey’s into the mugs, Clare spots a single doe making her way across the field towards a clump of woods. “It’s a magical time of the evening,” she says.

            When we’re on our second Bailey’s, I catch Sam’s eye. “Have you talked to Jake lately?”

            “A few days ago. Britt, when was it that Jake called?”

            “A week ago Thursday,” she says.

            I wonder how Britt can remember such a piece of trivia.

            Sam tilts her head at me. “How’d you know he called?”

            “I asked him to.”

            She puts her coffee down. “Why?”

            “You know why.”

            “Well.” She pauses and my mind fills with misgivings. What if she thinks I’ve 

discounted her wishes? Why haven’t I thought of that possibility before? But she continues. “He called to tell me that I still don’t understand. He wanted to explain my illness from a Biblical point of view. Stanza and verse.”                                                 

            I wonder if Sam notices my discomfort as she reaches for the bottle of Irish Cream and adds a generous dollop to her mug. She takes a long, slow drink. “He said my cure could be found in the cross of Jesus Christ. ‘Christ heals all festering sores,’ he said. ‘Smoking’ (she flicks an ash from her cigarette), ‘drunkenness’ (she raises the bottle of Bailey’s and tips it forward, as if in a formal toast), ‘homosexuality’ (she puts a hand on Britt’s arm, and I can feel the love), ‘and illness’ (she knocks the handle of her cane against the table). Four out of four. Batting a thousand, by God. He said I need to read about the Lydian maiden who was cured by St. Paul. Acts 16:16.” 

            She glances at the three of us, stopping with me. I gaze down at the table. How could Jake have done this? The son-of-a-bitch promised me. Then I remember how I’d cut him off when he’d tried to explain what he was going to tell her. I feel heat rising in my cheeks.

            I have no idea what to say to her. I wonder if she’s angry, but her voice is steady. “Actually, I told him to shut the hell up,” she says, “that I didn’t give a damn, but you know how Jake gets when he thinks he’s been misunderstood.” She coughs out a sarcastic chuckle. “So he got going again, mentioned the witch of Endor, made sure I knew she wasn’t the 

accomplice of the Devil, only the victim, that her malady was created by the demon’s presence in her body. He stressed that the apostles didn’t condemn her as a conscious sinner. I think he included that last point to make me feel better.”  

            There’s a long, quiet moment at the table. She takes a draw from her cigarette and exhales slowly, the smoke swirling in the warm winds of this perfect evening. “Why didn’t you let it go, Danny?”

            She crushes the glowing tip of the cigarette into the ashtray. I take in the darkness that settles over us. A glimmer of light filters through the glass door in the kitchen onto the deck, so I can make out her face, calm as always, but her question hangs there unanswered. A sudden breeze catches and tosses her hair. When she brushes it away from her face, there's the unmistakable glint of fear in her eyes.

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