My
Sister: Falling, Rising
by Drew McNaughton
Posted: February 22, 2003
Jessica, my sister, didn’t fall from the tree as much as
she seemed to leap out of it. I was either five or six, and I had
been chasing her up the giant willow when she jumped and missed,
by an easy foot, the branch she had hoped for with her thin, open
hands. She sailed past me on the way down. I could see the cross-hatched
soles of her shoes. I could see that her eyes were closed. I noticed
that she seemed asleep, and it was when she struck the first limb
during her descent, her nine-year old body pinwheeling, all the
air forced from her in a bored groan, that I could put words to
what I understood. Something bad has happened. All of her
weight came down on the outstretched arm she’d hoped would
break her fall but only snapped, like green wood, beneath her.
Some time passed where she seemed dead on the ground. Her broken
limb was flailed out from her body. I could not move to help her
rise from the ground. When she did stand, I could tell that there
was nothing holding the broken arm together except the sheath of
skin around where the bones of her elbow should have been. There
was something of a mutant in the motion of the broken arm swinging
loosely at the elbow, the way the skin stretched and her hand flapped
against her leg beyond her control. As she staggered across the
lawn, still staring at the impossible arm, I worried what she might
tell our father. I held myself to the massive trunk, and I was too
frightened of the distance between where I stood in the tree and
the earth beneath me to move up in the branches, and terrified of
stepping down, though I was much lower in the limbs than she had
been. She had not cried out when the bones had snapped beneath her,
she had remained absolutely silent.
I would walk into the living room seven years later, after a soccer
game I’d lost, and see my sister supine on the couch, striking
herself in the stomach with a tightly closed fist. She concentrated
before each blow, her eyebrows raised themselves to a ‘V’
and the muscles in her cheeks knotted as she set her jaw. She told
me when I asked that she was worried, terrified, that she might
be pregnant. A boy, a party, the back of a car and the condom broke.
“Holy shit, Jess.”
“I know, huh?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m killing it.”
She balled up her hand in front of my face, as if proving something,
and swung it sharply against her belly-button.
“You keep tightening your stomach,” I said. “It
won’t work that way.”
“You do it. I’ll close my eyes and you punch. You punch.
Hit hard.”
She held a pillow over her head and I readied myself. I thought
about some small target, swimming beneath her skin, somewhere between
her ribs and her crotch. It did not seem so serious to me, the thought
that a baby — because that is how I imagined it, fully formed,
thumb-sucking — might be somewhere inside her. I didn’t even
know anything about sex, not really. I imagined a boy on my sister,
though, some boy in a leather jacket, collar flipped-up. And when
I punched her — so hard I think I felt her spine on the other side
— it was the boy I imagined I was hitting. She rolled off the couch
holding herself, retching. She’ll barf it up, I thought.
“You punched a baby,” she said when she gained her
breath.
And we must have started down that road, laughing, because we could
think of nothing else to do. She told me that it hurt too much to
laugh, but of course, that made things worse. She looked out the
window after a while, when we’d calmed down. I called Planned
Parenthood to price abortions, but the woman on the other line heard
my sister laughing in the background, and hung up.
It wasn’t like you’ll think. We weren’t sad about
the thing. She was my sister, and we laughed about it because the
thought of a baby was as unreal to us as it is real to you, in your
imagination. That’s the thing. You have to understand that
she did not scream when the nerves in her elbow were severed and
the bones crushed beneath her own weight. And though there was,
of course, no way for me to know she was not pregnant that day,
it’s not about that.
I remember the next day we went swimming. I remember the way her
face looked when she realized that I could see the place just below
her heart where the skin had become dark and purple in the outline
of her brother’s fist.
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