However, the questions were there like weeds, undaunted, invulnerable, and as defiant as Roxy.
What did she look like now?
What was her life really like?
Was she happy? Did she have everything she wanted?
Was she sad about losing her family?
Mostly, I wanted to know if she ever thought about me. It suddenly occurred to me one day that Roxy might have believed that my father risked my mother’s life to have me just so he could ignore her. He was that disgusted with her. Surely, if Roxy thought that, she could have come to hate me.
Did she still hate me?
The answers were out there, just waiting for me. They taunted me and haunted me.
I had no doubt, however, that I would eventually get to know them.
What I wondered was, would I be sorry when I did get to know them?
Would they change my life?
And maybe most important of all, would I hate my sister as much as my father had?
1
My father was always the first to rise in the morning, even on weekends. He was never quiet about it either. All three bedrooms in our town house just off Madison Avenue on East 81st Street in New York were upstairs. It was a relatively new building in the neighborhood, and Papa often complained about the workmanship and how the builders had cut corners to make more money. He said the older structures on the street were far more solid, even though ours cost more. Our walls were thinner, as were the framing and the floors.
Consequently, I could hear him close drawers, start his shower, close cabinets, and even talk to Mama, especially if their bedroom door was open. The cacophony of sounds he made was his rendition of Army reveille. Of course, being the son of an Army general, he actually had heard it most of his young life. His family had often lived that close to the barracks, depending on where his father had been stationed, especially when they were overseas. When I commented about it once, Mama said the volume of the noise he made after he got up in the morning was a holdover from the days when Roxy lived with us. Her bedroom was on the other side of theirs. She would never wake up for school on her own, so Papa would be sure to make all this noise to get her up much earlier than was necessary. No matter what Mama said, he was stubborn about it. Maybe Roxy had inherited that obstinacy from him. Who could be more inflexible when he had made up his mind than my father?
Even though he basically had defied his own father’s wishes and chosen a business career rather than a military one as his older brother, Orman, had, Papa still believed in military discipline. Disobeying an order in our house could lead to the equivalent of being court-martialed. At least, that was how it felt to me, and I’m sure it had felt that way to Roxy, especially when he told her to leave the house. To her it must have been like a dishonorable discharge. Perhaps, despite what Papa said, she felt some shame. I imagined she would, even though I couldn’t remember her that well anymore. After all, it was now a little more than nine years since I had last seen her or heard her voice.
I often wondered if she had seen me and secretly watched me growing up. During these years, did she hide somewhere nearby and wait for a glimpse of either my mother or me? One of the first things I used to do when I stepped out and often still do was to look across the street, searching for someone Roxy’s age standing behind a car or off to the side of a building, watching for any sight of us. Even if I didn’t see her, I couldn’t help but wonder if she followed me to school.
Sometimes I would pretend she was, and I would stop suddenly and turn to catch her. People behind me would look annoyed or frightened. Whenever I walked in the city, whether to school or to the store or just to meet friends, I would scan the faces of any young woman who would be about Roxy’s age. I often studied some young woman’s face so hard she flashed anger back at me, and I quickly looked away and sped up.
One of the first things my parents had taught me about walking the streets of New York was never to make too much eye contact with strangers. I supposed Roxy would be like a complete stranger to me now. I even had trouble recalling the sound of her voice, but I did sneak looks at the pictures of her that Mama had hidden away every chance I had.
I believed that Roxy would be as curious about me as I was about her. Why shouldn’t she be? Although I feared it, it was hard for me to accept that she hated Mama and me because of what Papa had done to her. Despite his stern ways, it was also hard for me to believe she hated him. Maybe it was difficult only because I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t even want to think that someone with whom I shared so much DNA could be that bad, that immoral. Or did it mean that somewhere deep inside me there was a strain of evil that would someday rise to the surface, too? How would it show itself? What emotions, lusts, and desires did we share?
Having an older sister who had become so infamous to my parents naturally made me worry about myself. When I suggested such a thing to Mama once, she looked at me with pain in her eyes. I know the pain was there, because, like me, she didn’t want to believe Roxy was so wicked and sinful or as evil as Papa made her out to be. Then she softened her look and told me to think of Cain and Abel in the Bible. Abel wasn’t evil because Cain was. Abel was good.
“Besides, we must not believe that evil is stronger than good, Emmie. You’re my perfect daughter, my fille parfaite, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui, Mama,” I would say whenever she asked me that, but I didn’t believe I was as perfect as Mama or Papa thought I was. Who could be?