Even If You Were Here
Angi Becker Stevens
Every afternoon after school, my little sister Francie dies on our couch.
The cause of death is different every day. Sometimes it’s from cholera and sometimes it’s a drug overdose or a gunshot wound. She does her research. She clutches at the right parts of her abdomen: kidneys, liver, heart. Sometimes she’s just delirious, but usually she screams and moans and I go in my room and turn the music up really loud to try and drown it out.
When she had the plague, I said, “Shouldn’t that take longer?”
“I’m taking poetic license,” she said. “I have to be done dying by the time mom gets home.”
Francie knows it would upset mom to come home and find her dying.
Some days she freezes to death and the house is nice and quiet so I can pretend I’m home alone.
No one knows why Francie is obsessed with death. A lot of people we know are gone, but as far as we know they’re all still alive.
“What if your father is dead?” Francie asks me sometimes.
My father and Francie’s father are not the same father.
“He isn’t dead,” I tell her.
“How do you know?”
Sometimes I lie and tell her he sends me birthday cards with a hundred dollars in them. The truth is I don’t know if he’s dead.
Sometimes I think about how it would make me feel if he was dead, and I think that probably it wouldn’t make me feel much of anything.
Before Francie started dying all the time, we used to try to figure out some way that her father could have also been my father, even though our mom didn’t meet him until I was almost three years old. We used to say that maybe they secretly met before that, but mom couldn’t tell anyone because she was still married. We just thought it made more sense for us to be whole sisters instead of half, because we’re more alike than me and my brother, and me and my brother have the same father.
I knew it was just a game, though. Me and Peter have the same nose and it isn’t our mom’s nose. I don’t know if Francie knew it was just a game. She was just a little kid then, before she started dying.
My mom works really hard all the time. She’s the receptionist at a dentist’s office, which I guess isn’t hard work, just sitting behind a desk and answering the phone, but she has to do that all day and then come home and be our mom without anyone around to be our father. And she takes a class here and there at the community college, too. She’ll finish her degree someday, she always says, even just taking one class at a time. Mostly, when I try to think of a word to describe my mom, the word I think of is “tired.” If we really get on her nerves, the worst she ever says is that we make her tired.
Mom doesn’t know that Francie dies on the couch every day, but she knows that Francie talks about dying a lot because Francie drew pictures and wrote stories about dying in school. Mom made Francie start going to therapy, once every two weeks because that’s as often as we can afford.
Francie wants her therapist to be our new father. I tried to tell her it would be against doctor-patient confidentiality or something like that, but she said she didn’t think he had the same rules as a normal doctor.
Me, I’m pretty much done with fathers.
On talk shows, some girls are already pregnant when they’re my age. I can’t imagine being naked in bed with a boy. My mom was only nineteen when she was pregnant with Peter. Now Peter is nineteen. Sometimes I wonder if Peter will ever be anyone’s father.
Peter is the only one Francie never says is dead. Even though we haven’t heard from him in three months, Francie never asks me, “What if Peter’s dead?” Sometimes I secretly worry that might mean that he actually is. But then another postcard comes eventually, with a strange stamp in a language I can’t read, just one postcard for all of us that never says as much as I want it to say.
Our house is a perfectly nice house. It’s small, but it’s not like we’re in a trailer or something. It’s a nice little house in a nice neighborhood with a lot of trees and a lot of bigger houses. It’s not like we’re poor. We’re just okay. I go to a nice school. I get new school clothes every year, from Target mostly, but still. Francie only gets stuck with hand-me-downs for the more expensive stuff, like winter coats and snow boots. A lot of people are just okay.
You’re probably wrong about my father, too. He wasn’t some drunk deadbeat. He was a scientist. He was a rocket scientist. You probably think I’m making that up, but I’m not. He was six years older than my mom, just finishing his PhD when she got pregnant with Peter. He worked at the university after that, but what he really wanted was to go work in the actual space program. Peter said that our father would have taken us with him to California when he got work out there, but our mom wouldn’t go and he wouldn’t stay. I was too young to remember any of it, but I’ve never quite believed him. I’ve always figured that if our father had really wanted us around, he would still call us once in a while or something, maybe fly us out there for Easter break. Half the time there’s still snow here in April, but in California it’s probably warm enough to swim in the ocean. I’ve never even seen the ocean before. Sometimes I stand in the backyard out by our wood pile where the grass is always too long and everything is always damp. I stand there and wonder what makes my mom belong here in the musty Midwest, and what makes some other people belong in places that are dry and bright. I wonder which one I’ll turn out to be.
One night after Francie was sleeping, I went out to the kitchen where my mom was sitting with a cup of coffee and her textbooks spread out on the table, and I asked her, “Do you think Peter is dead?”
“Of course he’s not dead. Why would you even say something like that?”
“We haven’t heard from him in such a long time,” I said.
“He doesn’t always have phones or computers,” my mom said. She laughed, “I don’t even know what country he’s in!”
“Why did he have to go walk around the world?” I asked her. “Why couldn’t he go to college like everyone else?”
“Some people, especially boys, feel like they need to go find themselves,” she told me.
I didn’t understand what it meant to find yourself. I didn’t know how Peter could possibly find himself anyplace we weren’t in. I thought losing yourself was a better phrase for what he was trying to do.
I stood there for a few minutes longer. I wanted to say that Francie dies on the couch, that I don’t know what to do with her anymore, that I get tired sometimes, too. But I saw the way her brow creased and she rubbed at her temple and I thought how I didn’t even know when she found any time to sleep. So instead of saying anything I just gave her a kiss goodnight and went to bed.
Stacey McDaniels has been in my class at school for three or four years at least, but she just moved to my street a couple months ago. She has hair the same brown as mine, only hers is stick straight and super shiny. In the past year, she’s gotten rounder in all the places where I’m still boxy and flat. On the days she stops by after school, I always find excuses to stay outside until I’m sure Francie is done dying in the house.
Stacey teaches me to smoke out behind our garage. She steals Virginia Slims from her mom. In school we’re both good, not really geeks or suck-ups, but the type who are just quiet and don’t make any trouble and get mostly Bs. I like the way it feels to secretly do something I’m not supposed to do. After we stub out our butts, we bury them in the dirt, and Stacey sprays us both with sick-sweet raspberry body spray. We always have dirt caked under our fingernails when we finally go in the house, so it seems like our secret is that we’re some kind of animal, that out behind the garage we become something earthy and primitive.
“Look,” Stacey said one day, pressing her fingertip into my arm. “We have birthmarks in almost the exact same spot.” She slipped her hand quickly into mine and we stayed sitting there in the grass and dirt not moving for a long time. When we kissed, I could taste the smoke in her mouth even though the taste was in my mouth, too.
One time, Peter and I looked for our father on the internet. We found proof of his existence, his name on a few boring reports from the lab out in California, but we couldn’t find anything that would tell us the things we wanted to know: Who was he? What was his life like? Did he think about us? Why did he go?
I told Peter that someday when I had the money to buy a website, I’d buy one and use it to ask our father questions. I’d use his full name and ours, so if he ever googled any of us, he’d find it. Peter said it was a stupid idea, but Peter thinks spending a year walking around with a backpack and sleeping outside is a smart idea, which tells you how much he knows.
Peter has all the power now. By the time we get a postcard from some tiny country we’ve never heard of, the date on it is three weeks old. He’s already moved on to someplace else. There’s nowhere to write him back. His computer is still in his bedroom in the basement. I write him letters there and save them all to a folder on the desktop. He can read them if he ever decides to come home.
Francie told me the other day that in a fire, your eyes pop first, though you’re probably already unconscious from the smoke inhalation at that point. I thought, someone has got to take away this kid’s internet access. It’s not just child molesters lurking out there. It’s all that information, all the things you never need to know.
