It’s sunny without a cloud in the sky as I walk to my car, but when I slam the door, shadows haunt me from the inside. It’s five days before Christmas and I’ve just had another piece of my skin removed, finding out, again, that a piece of me I thought was a birthmark was actually cancer.
I call my sister.
“This is not a big deal,” she says firmly.
I want to remind her about last Christmas—the mole she’d found on her elbow, how she’d called her doctor every hour on the hour, and when he didn’t respond, she’d emailed him photos of the mole, a yellow tape measure straightened underneath.
“Okay, but I kind of think if this was you, it would be a big deal,” I say.
“Well, maybe. But it’s not. It’s not a big deal, okay? So be thankful for that. From an outside perspective, not a big deal.”
I pull the edge of my sock down and prod the bandage on my foot. The mole had been on the left side of my heel for as long as I could remember.
“How can it be cancer?” I’d asked the surgeon. “The mole’s always been there.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he’d said. “They’re normally from childhood. The damage has long been done.” He laughed and waved his hand dismissively, and I looked down suspiciously at my body and wondered why I couldn’t let go of the world beneath my skin.
I miss the mole. I peel the bandage back, and stare at the pinkish-purple skin. It seems bashful and I wish I’d left it alone, thinking maybe some things are not meant to be examined too close.
“I just yelled at an old lady at work,” my sister says, her voice louder now. “She called me the wrong name. I gave her some papers and she said, oh thanks, Alyssa! I said, ‘it’s Esther!’”
“That’s kind of weird she called you Alyssa,” I say. She makes no sound of recognition and I add, “since it’s my name,” feeling as though I had to remind her.
She’s silent for a while and then she says, “I guess it triggered me a little,” and I look up from my heel, bite my lip, and pivot away from myself.
“Well, it’s almost your birthday.”
Her birthday is Christmas Day. This year, she told us Christmas will be scheduled from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m.—enough time to open presents, have breakfast, sing a couple songs, and then it’s on to her birthday. She says it like a joke, but I know we’ll follow her schedule. I figure she’s allowed it now, after all the years we spent Christmas with my father’s new family. A day full of his kids ripping bows from miniature Mercedes SL-6s and golden rings while my sister and I lingered on the edges with two pairs of woolen socks like distant cousins.
“It’s SmartWool. Quality stuff,” he told us.
Some years there was no mention of Esther’s birthday at all. Other years it was after dinner, just before bed, when he’d linger over the table in the quiet of the day, look over at her kind of amused, laugh, run his palms on the top of his head. “Oh geez! Geez! It’s your birthday! Happy Birthday! Geez! I almost forgot! Would you believe it?”
And of course, we would believe it.
I drive to Old Town to one of the kitschy southwestern stores with walls lined with fur shawls, bejeweled cowboy boots, and rows upon rows of silver and turquoise earrings. These stores are made for Texas women in their sixties. They are not made for my sister, but I am desperate and late and cannot show up one-handed with only a Christmas present on her birthday.
“What do you want for your birthday?” I ask her.
“Oh, you don’t have to get me anything.” She says she’s coloring with my niece and nephew. Her mood seems to have lifted and her voice is light and happy and full of the delight that comes with concern for trivial things.
“Well I’m in a store, okay? Do you want jewelry?”
“Yeah, I like jewelry.”
I move toward the glass case. “Any particular gem?”
“I don’t know gems.”
“Color?”
“I like purple.”
“Amethyst?”
“Yeah, whatever.”
I ask the lady behind the counter to see the purple stones.
“We also have a lovely collection of opal and laborite,” she says. The lady has dark eyes,
bleached blonde hair, and a different Christmas themed glittered nail on each finger.
“Do you like laborite?” I ask Esther. The woman reaches for a pair of stones with her left hand. Her ring finger is a snowman, adorned in gold.
“Look, I don’t care. I like purple, okay?”
My niece and nephew fight in the background. Esther threatens to take a Barbie, now two Barbies, and then there are cries and two separate doors slamming.
“You know,” Esther says. I imagine her standing from the carpet of her living room, walking to her kitchen, and gazing out her window. I picture Sunglow azaleas born from seeds from my mother’s garden blooming in her yard and cardinals bathing themselves in a stone birdbath my sister keeps heated through winter. It is December but the birds are still there, and the azaleas are bright pink beneath snow. My sister does not like to see things go.
“I was walking with my neighbor. She bought something from that cooking store, Sur de something,” she says. I hear her turn on the sink.
“Yeah, so she tells me I was at Sur la Table, and she says table all French and snotty like tahblay, and I immediately don’t like her anymore. I ask her, ‘what did you say?’ Then she says it again, ‘tahblay’, with that same accent and everything, and I said, ‘look, don’t call me anymore.’ She said, ‘what? What do you call it?’ I said, ‘table. It’s called table.’ Then she says it again, that word. ‘Tahblay.’”
She draws the word out, long and slow, and as she says it, I can hear her eyes roll and her fist clench as she twirls her pinky mockingly in the air. “I told her, ‘look, I don’t care. It’s table and I’ll never say it that way and you know what? Do you know how douchey you sound saying it?’”
My sister has a keen nose for airs that are not one’s own. Once, when I came back home, I told her “bueno-bye.” It was a thing I’d heard New Mexicans say, and I said it with a forced ease, pretending it was my own.
My sister narrowed her eyes, snorted out her nose. “What did you just say?”
Esther comes by this naturally. It is a response to our father, who is a special kind of pretentious. The kind that claims to be a “citizen of the world” while paying thousands of dollars on articulation coaches to hide his Southern twang. The kind that had his Dumbo ears surgically pinned back and told us both we should really consider doing the same.
When Esther and I were ten and seven, we spent the summer with him on a lake somewhere in Austria. I can’t tell you much about the town. I can’t even tell you the name. Most days my sister and I stayed locked in our hotel room. We tied paperclips to floss, dropped them over the balcony, and pretended we were fishing, reeling in summer hats from the heads of people passing by on the street below.
My dad came home around six each day, and we ate dinner at the same restaurant every night. It had the cleanest wooden floors I’d ever seen. Blue and white checkered tables and a bearded waiter in knee-high socks named Klaus. My dad spoke German to Klaus. They smiled and laughed together and when Klaus walked away, my father leaned into us.
“Geez, how do you guys not know German, huh? Just English, huh?” He shook his head and stabbed his schnitzel with a golden fork. “I mean I just can’t believe you’ve never been here! How have you never been to Austria before?” He stuffed the schnitzel into his mouth, grumbling as he chewed.
I was still young and wished I knew more, but my sister knew enough and sulked behind the same walls that would take a lifetime for me to build. We lived with our mother in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Our father was from there too. He’d left long ago and spent his whole life running away.
He was flying back there only to take us home. The night before we were supposed to leave, we ate at the restaurant with the clean, wooden floors. “Ein Abschiedsessen,” Klaus said to my father. “Farewell dinner,” he said to us slowly as though he could not imagine we knew any language at all. Klaus brought out three eggs in ornate, bite-sized glasses. He tapped the side of the fist egg with a spoon and my father reached for it, tilted the glass up, and drank the yolk in one gulp.
I watched in amazement. My sister pushed her glass across the table and folded her arms.
“I’m not eating that,” she said. She widened her eyes toward me, “and you shouldn’t either. You’ll get sick.” Klaus bowed nervously, then walked away.
“What?” My dad scowled across the table. His nose wrinkled between his eyes just like hers. “Don’t be ridiculous. People have been eating raw eggs for hundreds, thousands of years, and you think they get sick?” He pushed his lips out slightly, lifted his eyebrows, and reached for her egg. “Geez, bet you’re ready to get back to Boone!”
My sister stuck her lips out just like him. Her nostrils flared as she watched him grab her egg and slide it to me.
“Here,” he said. “You can have two.”
I stared at the two eggs in front of me. They were brown and spotted and smelled like sulfur.
Esther side-eyed me. With one hand, my dad pinched salami and cheese off his plate.
“So, look, something’s come up,” he said, his eyes glued to his fingertips. “Work’s asked me to go to England for some meetings. I need to spend about two weeks there, and, you know.”
He pressed the tip of his tongue against his upper lip as he folded the salami carefully over the cheese. “You know how your mom is.”
Esther glared at him as he took a bite.
“What?” he said, his mouth full of chewed salami and cheese. “It’s not like she’ll let you stay!” A cube of cheese dropped from the bottom of his salami onto his lap. He picked it up, examined it from all sides, then dropped it on the ground beneath his chair. “So, plans are changing a little. The stewardess will take you through security and everything. Help with the connection in Brussels. And then a different one will meet you in Atlanta.”
I slid from my chair, crawled beneath my seat. I did not like to see things unclean.
“What are you doing? Don’t touch that. Someone else will clean it up.”
I froze with the cheese in my hand. When he looked away, I swallowed the cheese; I did not want to go against him, but I have never been as sure as he is—that messes would always be cleaned.
When I sat back down, Esther had turned her back to our dad. Her arms were folded across her body and she shook her head slowly in disbelief.
“What?” he said. “Kids fly alone all the time.”
She slammed her napkin on the table and stormed toward the room. The ornate glasses shook against each other. A long, dark crack ran down the smaller of the two eggs, and a trickle of bright, yellow yolk oozed from beneath its shell.
“Ah, shit! Look what she’s done, huh?! She’s just so sensitive,” he muttered. He shook his head and pressed the broken one aside carelessly.
“Come on. This one’s still fine! It’s good! Try it, you’ll see!” He pressed the bigger one to me, but I kept looking at the broken one, the line of yellow yolk leaking out the side.
I worried Esther was right. What if I did get sick? And then was sick on the plane and some stranger or stewardess would have to take care of me? But of course, it wouldn’t have been a stranger or the stewardess; it would have been her, ten years old, flying across the ocean with a vomiting little sister.
When I got back to the room, Esther’s bags were already packed. The blanket was pulled over her head, and I folded my clothes in silence as she lay underneath the covers. When our dad knocked on the door, she threw back the blankets and scrunched her face toward me in a firm warning.
“Hey. Hey, Alyssa,” he said softly. “Don’t you want to go on the hike? See the lake and the mountains?”
A part of me wanted to go, but I studied my sister’s face and knew it was her—not him—who’d be getting me home. He gave up eventually and we stayed quiet, listening for his footsteps on the other side of the door. Maybe we were trying to decipher them, searching for some pattern that would lead us to answers to questions we didn’t yet know how to ask. Our room was silent with anger and worry, and there was a heaviness about it that felt like the roof was caving in, that it might bury us, like we might be trapped forever underneath all that silent anger and worry.
But then the sky turned to night, and red sparks burst in the window from fireworks in the valley below. It was the Fourth of July. The other Americans, though likely not our father who was above such things, were setting off fireworks by the lake, and my sister said something, finally. I wish I could remember what. I can’t. All I can remember is that, whatever she said, it made me laugh so hard my side cramped and I doubled over in a mix of pain and laughter. I laughed and laughed, begged her to stop, tried to catch my breath, wiped away my tears and told her, “Stop! Stop! Please! It hurts!”
We kept on laughing. Laughed until we fell asleep and forgot all about the pattern of our father’s footsteps.
I wonder if he heard us laughing—if he tried to decipher it in the same way we did his footsteps, some pathway that would lead him back to us. Or maybe he heard us and felt relief, absolved of guilt, thinking he’d done more than enough giving us each other. He was only 36 then, a year older than my sister is now, and it didn’t yet seem clear which way it was all going to go. Like maybe he’d make it up to us somehow. Maybe this would be the only abandonment, not one of many, and someday we’d all sit around laughing, reminiscing about the time my sister was afraid of something so silly. An egg.
Back on the phone in the store in Old Town, I hear my sister shut off the sink.
“Guess who sent a present?” she asks.
I hold the amethyst earrings between my fingers. “Who?” The earrings are wrong—too dangly and ornate for her. I point to a pair of simple studs.
“Dana. He sent a present to the kids.” We don’t call him dad to each other anymore. It’s like somewhere along the way the name slipped from his skin. “A train set. It’s for like two-yearolds! J. opened it and said, well that’s something, but it’s kind of baby-ish.”
Her son, J., just turned seven.
“I guess he’s trying, though.”
I saw him once, three years ago. He came to visit me with his family. I couldn’t tell you why. The first night he got drunk. Told me, “you know, you and Esther were never priorities to me.”
“Yeah, we know,” I’d said. At the time I didn’t feel like crying, but I never told Esther because I never could figure out how to make it funny.
I tell the lady with the glitter nails I’ll take the studs. She holds up a finger, pulls out a matching bracelet.
“I asked J. if he knew who it was from.” Esther’s voice is low and I picture the top of her nose crinkling, holding back laughter like a sneeze. “I told him it’s from Dana. Then I say, ‘do you know who that is?’ And you know what he said?”
The laughter is banging beneath her words. I feel tingling in my belly and my side cramps in anticipation.
“He said,” she pauses, and my stomach spasms. “He said,” and she can barely get it out. “He said, ‘your aunt?’”
I double over with laugher, and she’s laughing so hard she can’t breathe. “Stop,” I say. “Stop! It hurts!” I fan my hand in front of my face. Tears line my eyes.
“I know, little guy. It’s too confusing,” Esther says, and her voice is soft and floaty now in the way it gets about her kids. I picture her holding her side, catching her breath, wiping the tears from her eyes.
“You know you really don’t have to get me anything,” she says. “I mean you’re going to be pretty disappointed in your gift.”
“I know I don’t, but…” and my voice trails off because we are always filling in roles for each other that we cannot name.
“Hey, take a picture of your heel, okay? You need to take a picture of it so you can monitor it, make sure there are no little tendrils they’ve forgotten.”
“What? They just removed it.”
“You never know. Those things grow from somewhere deep. They can come back. All it takes is one little bit, stewing in there, growing little legs.”
“Okay, I’ll look at it.”
“I’m serious! Before you leave the store, you need to look at your heel and send me a picture.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say and hang up the phone.
The woman smiles, the pair of studs glisten in her open palm. “Look,” the woman says,
turning the bracelet slightly in the other palm. The light from the sun hits the bracelet,
bounces back to the earrings, and illuminates a web of dark crystals woven inside.
“See?” she says. “With all three, they really shine.”
I look from the bracelet to the earrings and from the earrings back to the bracelet again.
“Just the earrings,” I say. They shine just fine, all on their own.
E. Alexandra is a psychologist in New Mexico. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in FLARE: The Flagler Review, Forbidden Peak Press, unstamatic, Cathexis Northwest Press, Eastern Iowa Review, STORGY, and Prometheus Dreaming. She studied journalism and creative writing at New York University and applied/educational psychology at Columbia University. She is working on a novella and a collection of short stories.