Our mom died when I was eleven, Jada fourteen. Mom was pregnant and died from an ectopic pregnancy. It was hard on all of us, but Jada seemed to pick up the pieces faster than I did.
Dad had done his best to keep things from falling apart. His secretary at his realtor office, Alice, came to the house a few days a week to help out. Alice was great and did our laundry, made cookies, and tried to talk to us the best she could. But our mom was perfect and, as much as I loved Alice, she always seemed like a fill-in. I remember watching her mill around Mom’s kitchen one afternoon a few months after the funeral, Jada sitting at the table peeling an orange. Alice was making plans to take her to a play she wanted to see.
I sat and sketched on a notepad, drawing little doodles of arrows, and felt so utterly alone. I just wanted to scream that everything was wrong, pound my fists on the table and yell at Alice to get out! To stop touching all my mom’s things. Every item she moved made things a bit farther from the way Mom had left them. It destroyed me, but I felt trapped. I didn’t know what to say.
When I tried to bring it up to Jada later, she shushed me. She told me that I didn’t need to be so hateful and that we were all doing the best we could. That we were in it together.
Over the next few years, I mastered the art of being “in it together,” yet being absolutely alone.
I realized that saying how miserable I was only made Jada more miserable, too. So I learned to keep my mouth shut and deal, to not spread the pain. Let happy people be happy—why ruin that?
It was a life lesson I learned way too early. Pick your heart up off the floor when it was smashed, put it back together as best you could, and paste on a smile. You could be a mess on the inside but still look put together on the outside. As long as things looked okay, everything was fine. Smoke and mirrors wasn’t just acceptable, it was preferred.
Sad but true.
The sunlight streamed through the windows of Jada’s bedroom and I turned to look at my sister. The light made her even more radiant.
“I didn’t go through it or anything,” she said. “As soon as I saw the cassette tapes, I knew it was yours so I closed it back up.”
I released a heavy breath and walked to the window looking over the base of the mountain. Cane Alexander, Jada’s husband, had positioned their bedroom for optimum viewing pleasure. They could literally lie in bed and watch the lights twinkle below. He hadn’t missed a single detail, which was a testament to how much he loved my sister. Cane typically did things with wider brush strokes. But when it came to Jada, his attention to detail was relentless.
The thought of Cane being so caring and considerate to Jada was endearing. When I met him originally, he was the ultimate bad boy. I had been at Max’s house one night and Cane had swung by. He had given me a smirk and made more vulgar comments about his evening than I cared to remember. He was the opposite of Max in so many ways. Although Max’s moves in the sheets outdid the tales Cane was telling, Max would never say that. Not in front of me, anyway. He was too thoughtful, too sweet. Cane, on the other hand, was giving us a play-by-play.
Max really liked Cane and there was something about their interaction that night that cut through Cane’s vulgarity, something that gave me a clue that there was more to Cane Alexander than the man whore he portrayed himself to be. That’s the only reason I didn’t object to him meeting my sister when she returned to Arizona after her divorce. If Max trusted him, I trusted him, and obviously it was the right choice. Cane had become the best husband I could ever imagine for my sister.
“Thanks for not throwing this out,” I laughed nervously, tucking the box under my arm.
I turned to watch Jada struggle to get off the bed. Her belly had begun to pop, swelling with the growing baby inside. She put a hand on the bed and the other on her stomach and slowly got to her feet.
“You okay?” Jada asked me, rubbing her belly.
I smiled, walking to her and rubbing it, too. “I am. I’m excited to meet the little jellybean.”
“I’m so excited, Kari,” she confessed. “I mean, I have quite a bit of time left, but I’m already sad thinking about it being over. It’s just that once you find out you’re pregnant, everything changes. Silly, I know, but it’s true.”
“It’s not silly,” I said weakly, feeling a lump form in my throat. “You were made to be a mom.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
“I do.” I heard Max and Cane in the other room and figured Max was about ready to leave. I knew he had to work the next day and he’d want to get home before it got too late. “I think we should probably get going, but I’ll be by later this week. I found some of your things when I was cleaning your old room yesterday. I’ll bring them with me.”