“Sister.”

By Rachel Rueckert

Sister

Do you remember the night it rained? When we were teens and I had just stepped out of the shower? You announced you were going outside, and I obediently followed, even though you were younger. You always possessed that air (your mother called you Bossy Boots). We pranced into the torrential downpour. You twirled, your palms towards the ripped-open sky. I laughed and opened my towel and felt the water smack my bare chest, and you scolded me because what if the neighbors saw, because this was a suburban street, but no one could see in this rain, then you giggled too and we ran barefoot down the dark road and felt the flood lapping at our ankles, and it was then, around this time, that I considered you my sister, that I loved you. We never said “step.” Just sister.

You never liked my dad. I remember how you cried about your sweater, the baggy blue one that matched the color scheme of our first family picture in front of the fireplace. My dad, your mom, my three siblings, your two. Back then, we could cram the whole family of nine into the Ford Expedition. And we were a family, I told myself. I needed to believe we were a family after my unstable mother cut me out. But you saw through what the adults told us. And how could I have known you were right? I’m not sure I would have wanted to know how everyone would scatter.

You hated strawberries. You liked to gossip. You let me drag my mattress into your bedroom when your older sister bullied me. My dad said you were a copycat, that you transferred to my high school to be like me, that you took up photography to be like me. Who knows if that was true, but it is a fact that I envied you. You followed me to college, where you dressed me up and took my portrait. You said you had more clothes than God. I touched those silky blouses and chiffon skirts, draped your gold necklaces around my throat. I never knew how to dress and spent all my cash on plane tickets, on escaping. I looked to you. How beautiful you were becoming. Red lips, sapphire eyes, and hair that could flash platinum, red, chestnut, pink, lavender.

Perhaps you too were itching to escape. The two of us were the first kids to get out of Utah after our parents split. I went east, you west. You changed your first name, much to your mother’s dismay. Then you changed your last name, married a man in your early twenties who promised to travel the world with you. I remember you shaking at the front of the church as you held the groom’s hand, how you wept through your vows. You remarried a year ago in Paris to a good man. I sent a card. You were not at mine.

You phoned last year around this time, out of the blue. You said you might move to New York, and wouldn’t it be nice to be closer? I moved to New York but didn’t reach out. I might have been afraid, even jealous. How large you loomed in my mind. My camera remained buried in the closet. You were still more confident, maybe the stronger soul, the one who deserved this thundering city of possibility. Why did it take so long to call? I cannot say. Maybe you were a reminder of a painful life I wanted to leave behind. I can be such a coward.

Last we spoke, you told me a story of your mother mailing a shredded box of all your childhood possessions, how the deliverers left the ruddy package out on the sidewalk where rain drowned it. The soggy sides tore off. How you found broken frames, warped photos, and empty wine bottles from her furious, drunken packing. Everything was destroyed, you said. I too have lost all the artifacts from my childhood, thrown out by my own mother. I too know the weight of this watery inheritance. There is so much to miss. But I am not yet used to losing everyone. Not yet. Perhaps there is still time for us.

Do you remember the night it rained?

A night when two motherless girls laughed back at the storm.

Rachel Rueckert is a writer based in New York. She is pursuing an MFA in nonfiction at Columbia University, where she also teaches essay writing. she has also studied at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in River Teeth, The Literary Review, Hippocampus, Tupelo Quarterly, Sweet, The Carolina Quarterly, The Columbia Journal, and others.