Perfectly Undone
As expected, she’s kneeling on the grass at the base of the large porch. Her coffee mug is perched on the railing. Her purple gardening hat flops in the breeze, and she’s digging a hole in the soil with a vigor that seems to be doing more harm than good. It’s Mom’s version of bourbon. Abby was always her favorite, but gardening used to be the one thing she and I did together. I’d be in charge of the hand trowel and the watering can. She’d smudge a line of dirt down my nose and call me “all knees and elbows.” A lifetime ago. We stopped once Abby died, when there was no longer room there for anything less than perfection.
“Has she been out there all day?” I ask, noticing the pink of the skin on her wrists between where her gloves stop and her three-quarter sleeves end. The doctor in me winces. The daughter in me holds my tongue.
“Since the sun rose,” my dad says.
I try to imagine Mom as I remember her from childhood. I try to remember her flowing skirts I used to chase around the house. How she used to lie on the couch and let me braid her hair for hours. How she used to blast Tom Petty and bake cookies with us kids after school. I can’t reconcile that woman with the one I know today. The truth is, Dad, Charlie and I lost that woman long before Abby’s death. But it seems that Abby’s death was when Mom finally lost her, too.
I sigh and rejoin the men.
“Drink?” Charlie asks. He grabs the bottle and adds another finger-worth to his glass.
“I have to go into the clinic,” I say. Working on my application is a better way to honor my sister’s memory than bourbon.
“Drink?” he asks again. I roll my eyes.
“Not everyone’s boss is so forgiving,” I say.
“Neither is his,” Dad says, “but it’s not like I can fire him.” After Charlie finished college, he took a job at the family finance firm because he knew it was the only place he’d be able to do as little work as possible for the most amount of pay. If he wasn’t so charming, his lack of motivation would drive me crazy.
Charlie chuckles. His eyes are already glassy.
After a long silence where we put off the inevitable, Dad says, “She would have been thirty-three this year.”
Thirty-three.
She was two years older than me. When we were teenagers it often seemed like a decade. Abby was a contradiction of wild and wise. She would study for a calculus exam for hours, then sneak out of her room to go to a boat party on the lake, only tiptoeing back in once the sun began to rise. She’d brush her teeth, drive her VW Bug to school, ace her test. If she’d survived, she would have been an enigma amongst teen mothers. I know she had her doubts, but I always believed in her.
“She would be...pregnant with her fourth kid,” Charlie says.
“Fourth?” I sputter, then laugh.
Last year we decided that her third child had just turned two. Even though I know her first child never could have lived, even if Abby had, I like to pretend she would have been a girl—the niece I almost had, even if she only ever existed as a fetus. I think Abby would have finished high school, and then college, found a man who loved her because she was a mother, instead of abandoning her for it. Eventually, her adventurous spirit would have given way to her maternal instincts, and she would have found that motherhood was the ultimate adventure. She wasn’t the nurturing type as a teenager, but I like to think she would have grown into it, given the time. That’s how I like to imagine her anyway. Dad and Charlie let me lead the first time we played this game and have continued to elaborate on my initial idea. Probably because they think I need it more than they do. They’re probably right.
“She’s decided to have her tubes tied after this one, though,” I say, giving them and my sister a break. “She recently rediscovered her passion for writing, and she’d like to go back to school once the baby stops nursing.” In high school she always said she wanted to write for a magazine. She would have been good at it, too.
Dad grins, and tears form in the corners of his eyes. “I like that.”
I picture her in a natural-lit room in a big white house on the other side of the lake, by a window that overlooks the water, notebook in hand. She would have stayed here in Lake Oswego. She would have married a guy who knew her in high school, but had gone unnoticed by her. In their midtwenties, they would have met at Mrs. Collins’s yearly barbecue, and they would have fallen in love across the perfectly mowed grass. He would have admitted weeks later that he’d loved her since he first laid eyes on her. All the boys did.
It’s a morbid game and we all know it, but it’s better than hiding from it. Mom wants to remember her little girl exactly the way she was. I force myself to remember, even when I want to forget. Though truthfully, on the bad days, I wish I’d never had a sister at all.
It took many years after moving out of my parents’ house to unearth who I was. I say unearth rather than find because it wasn’t so much a process of adding layers as shedding the grief and confusion of my teen years. After Abby’s death, I buried myself in guilt, searched for solace in the arms of the opposite sex when I couldn’t find comfort at home and, at the same time, put up a wall between me and everyone I loved, or ever could love. Cooper is the only one who ever broke through, who ever made me feel worthy of being seen. I’m still working on showing him all of me. When I push through the anger that my best friend and my mother were stolen from me, I can almost see that honest version of myself—bullheaded out of love, steady enough to lean on, an unapologetic dreamer.
The layers I couldn’t shed have thickened like an outer shell, covering the weaker membranes. I am fiercely defensive of the person I turned into after Abby’s death, tiny and rubbed raw at first but, over the years, with the safety of Cooper’s unwavering love, grown strong and powerful in my own way. I have feared the day someone in my life would crack that shell, and I’d fall to pieces again. And because I love Cooper more than I’ve ever loved anyone—maybe even more than I love Abby—he alone holds the power to break me. It’s why I’ve never told him the role I played in my sister’s death. If he knew, I would never be able to look at him without seeing the pity in his eyes. I would never be able to hide from that constant reminder, and I’d be robbed of my only comfort. So I let it smolder inside of me, and I foolishly allow Cooper to keep lifting me up, the friction of it eroding my shell.
Every year around the time of Abby’s anniversary, I feel that urge all over again—to leave and lose myself in someone who knows nothing about me, someone with whom I can pretend to be anyone but me. And because Cooper foolishly loves me, he doesn’t push, doesn’t question me, knowing from the first time we met that forcing me to open up when I wasn’t ready would make me run. I never hid from him how many men I’d run from before.
I find myself drawn to the window. I raise my hand to place it on the glass but think better of it. Mom hates fingerprints. She’s moved to some still-dormant rosebushes farther down, pulled out her pruning shears. I fear what the poor shrubs will look like when she’s done with them. I don’t remember much from the days when we used to garden together, but I do remember there’s such a thing as too much love. It seems that after Abby’s death, she put all the love she had into that garden, and since then there hasn’t been any left for us. Losing my sister broke each of us in our own way, but it was the way Mom pulled away from us afterward that broke our family as a whole.
I feel my dad’s presence over my shoulder.
“You should go out there,” he says.
“No,” I say. “Not today.”
“Dylan...you can’t expect your mom to move on from it if you never do.”
“I have moved on,” I whisper. But we both know it isn’t true.
4
After the anniversary of Abby’s death, I throw myself into my grant application with more fervor. I leave before Cooper in the morning. I close myself in my office during lunch and stay at the clinic until long after Cooper is asleep. The looming deadline pushes me, but also the painful reminder of why I need this grant and why medicine needs this research.
Because my sister, at the age of eighteen, died of pregnancy.
Abby never shared the details of her sex life with me, but by the time she was sixteen, I was sure she had one. I was too embarrassed to ask. She was a good girl at heart, but she had a wild streak that pushed her further than having a drink or two at a lake party or spending eight minutes in the closet with a boy during Seven Minutes in Heaven.
When she got pregnant, I never doubted that she’d keep the baby and that she’d somehow make it look easy. She’d do it all—raise a child and continue on to college. Somehow she’d still be more successful than any of us imagined possible. More successful than I would be.
And then she died.
When it was over, the doctors told my parents it was an ectopic pregnancy, a rare but dangerous condition when the fertilized egg embeds into the fallopian tube or the abdomen instead of in the uterus. If caught early, the pregnancy can be terminated and the mother can be saved. If it goes undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, it’s a ticking time bomb. The egg that would have been my niece or nephew ruptured, and Abby died of blood loss before anyone knew what happened.
Sitting in front of my computer the night before Vanessa’s deadline, my fingers on the keyboard, I think of the pain and fear Abby must have suffered that night, alone. I think of all the women who have suffered similar fates and how I can help them. I connect to that deep need inside me to fix it all. Before I leave the clinic, I put the final touches on my application, and I email it to Vanessa.
A few days later, after I’ve received Vanessa’s response, Cooper walks into the kitchen, startling me with his “Hey.”
I look up, then back to the counter, where potting soil is spilled across the granite, and I’m scooping it into ceramic seed pots with my hands. I’m home early and in the only pair of sweatpants I own—the ones I wear when I’m sick—and a glass of red wine is within reach, soil granules clinging to the stem in the shape of fingerprints.
“Hi,” I bite out.
“Whatcha doing?” he asks.
“I found these seeds,” I say. I thrust the dirty, rain-puckered packet at Cooper, and he takes it, stepping back to avoid my hand before it brushes against his untucked work shirt. “Do you think they’ll still grow?”
Cooper shrugs. “I don’t really know anything about gardening.”
“I know. But just... What do you think?”
He examines them more closely. “I don’t see why not. I think it would take a lot more to damage them than a little water and dirt.” His mouth quirks up on one side, obviously entertained by my state, but I take his joke seriously.
“What’s going on, Dylan?”
The concern in his voice drains the energy from me as quickly as a plunger into a syringe, and I stop. The kitchen is a mess. My hands are shaking.
“Vanessa called me into her office today. She isn’t going to support my grant application,” I say.
Cooper’s head drops forward. His hair falls down around his eyes. I can’t tell if he’s upset for me or himself. He knows the process doesn’t stop here—this is just a roadblock that makes it take even longer.
I open my mouth but nothing comes out.
Vanessa’s exact words were that my goal was too ambitious. There was no way I’d be able to monitor so many women in a two-year study. I’d need more money, more research assistants, more volunteers. Or more time. I told her I didn’t think the field could wait much longer. What I couldn’t tell her was that I didn’t think Cooper could wait much longer either.
I could ignore her—submit my application anyway—but the board won’t review it without a letter from my mentor. I could try to find another mentor, but they aren’t easy to come by, especially with only a couple of weeks left until the deadline. The truth is, since there are no grants listed specifically for women’s health, my application will get pooled into a general category, which makes the competition stiff with or without Vanessa’s support. I’m out of options right now, and it will likely be a year or more before another suitable grant becomes available. I was hesitant about whether or not I was really ready to do this research, but now that the opportunity has been ripped away from me, I don’t know what to do with myself. I have no purpose.
Cooper comes over and wraps his hand around the back of my neck, lacing his fingers into my hair. “I’m sorry, babe,” he says. “That’s tough.”
I shrug and sniffle. “That’s life, I guess.” I take a sip of my wine, gathering myself.
Cooper’s hand drops, and he looks out the window to the backyard, his expression vague and distant. I don’t need to see his eyes to know what he’s feeling. His exasperation shows in the slouch of his shoulders, the downward tilt of his head.
Finally, he opens his hands to me and says, “Come here.”
“Cooper, I don’t want to—”
“Come here.”
“What?” I ask him, my voice bordering on hysteria.
A moment passes in silence before he drops his hands. “Dylan, you’re a doctor now,” he says. “You can do whatever you want. I don’t understand why you have to have this grant to help people.”
“It’s these people I need to help, Cooper.”
I set my glass down on the counter with too much force, and wine sloshes onto the granite like drops of blood. I escape out the back door and walk down to the creek, my breathing shallow, unwilling to defend myself again, after trying and failing with Vanessa. Doing right by the people we love should be reason enough.
No, life with Abby wasn’t always easy, especially during her final months, but Abby and I had always been close growing up. Though we fought, like sisters do, I knew I could count on her when it mattered. When she became a senior in high school, though, she started to spread her wings more than my parents and I were used to—more than we were comfortable with—like she knew the freedom she’d always craved was just around the corner and she couldn’t wait that long. She suddenly stopped sharing the gossip she’d heard from her friends with me when I crawled into her bed in the middle of the night. She started locking the door to her bedroom more often and disappearing with random people from school in the evenings. One Friday night, as she prepared to go to a boat party on the lake, I lay on her bed and watched her put on her makeup, hoping to get the details. An invitation would be too much to ask for.
“So who’s going to be there?” I asked.
Abby finger-combed her blond hair back from her face and leaned closer to the mirror on top of her dresser. She blinked her eyes as wide as they would stretch before she pulled out the wand from her mascara tube and began to apply thick, black layers to her already long lashes.
“I don’t know,” she said evasively. “The usual.”
I knew she didn’t try to keep me at a distance on purpose. At least, I hoped she didn’t. It was just one of the habits she picked up from hanging out with the popular girls. They kept everything about themselves from each other, only trading other people’s secrets like currency.
I scooted farther forward on her floral-print comforter and tested out the question I really wanted the answer to. “Is Christian going to be there?” I asked.
Abby’s cheeks flushed beneath her applied blush, and I knew the answer without her having to say it. She plunged her mascara wand back into the tube and turned to me.
“Everyone’s already talking about us being prom queen and king,” she said, biting her lip as if she didn’t dare believe it. Up until the previous year, Abby had always flown under the radar—the kind of girl who got along with everyone, never falling into any particular clique. When her breasts filled out, though, and she started to catch the attention of the football quarterback, the popular girls had no choice but to bring the enemy closer into their fold.
“Have you kissed him yet?” I asked, pushing my luck. It was the wrong question. Abby frowned and turned back to her mirror.
“Of course we’ve kissed, Dylan. Don’t be ridiculous. I’m eighteen, not twelve.” I hated it when she talked to me like I was so much younger than her. Oftentimes, though, I felt like I was. At sixteen, I’d hardly talked to a boy I was interested in, let alone kissed one.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, but Abby was already closing her makeup bag and checking her purse for the necessities. I spotted her lip gloss on her nightstand, scooted across her bed on my stomach, swiped it up and handed it to her. “You really seem to like him.”
She softened. “I do,” she said. “He’s just so... And he makes me feel...pretty. But I don’t want to be one of those forty-year-old women who married their high school sweetheart, is tied down with kids and is completely miserable because she never lived while she could, you know?”
I nodded, though I couldn’t conceive of Abby ever being forty.
“You should have some fun, too,” she said with a laugh and pressed her palm against the side of my head, pushing me over onto her bed. We both laughed, and long after she left, I couldn’t wipe the smile from my face—not only because Abby and I both knew what a ludicrous idea it was—me going to a party, me making out with a guy behind the English building—but because I knew that she might be going through a rebellious phase, but when she came out on the other side, we’d be best friends still. I had one thing going for me that no other girl could claim, no matter how popular: I was her sister.
* * *
I come home from work on Tuesday to an unfamiliar truck parked in the driveway. It’s a newer model Chevy with silver metallic paint, and though it’s hidden by the shade of our trees, slivers of sunlight catch its sparkle in the places where it isn’t covered in mud. Handles of miscellaneous tools stick out at all angles like Cooper’s hair after a hard sleep. There’s a parking sticker on the windshield for a big-time tech company in the city.
Inside, I toss my keys on the foyer table and call out Cooper’s name, but he doesn’t answer. I peek into the bedroom and bathroom, but it isn’t until I pass through the kitchen that I hear Cooper’s voice, along with that of another man, coming from the other side of the back door. When I step outside, they break from their conversation like I’ve caught them in the act of planning a crime. The stranger is dressed in designer jeans and a dark button-up shirt with hands covered in soil up to his elbows. He seems to have no concern of spreading it as he crosses his arms over his chest.
“There you are,” Cooper says. He comes over to place a hand on my back and leads me forward a few steps. “Dylan, this is Reese. Reese, this is my...Dylan.” He’s always hated the word girlfriend. He says it makes us sound like teenagers, whose biggest concern is where to sit in the cafeteria at lunch, rather than two adults who have lived together and loved each other for the better part of a decade.
“Um...nice to meet you?” I say, more a question than a statement.
“And you,” he says. He dips his head in a little bow but makes no move to shake my hand, thankfully. He looks young—midtwenties, maybe—his hair dark in purposefully unruly wisps drawn up from his head.
“Babe, Reese is a landscape architect.”
“A landscape architect,” I repeat in an attempt to digest this. “Like, a landscaper?”
Reese smirks.
“Well...” Cooper steps toward me and touches my fingers but doesn’t take my hand. “After the thing with your application, I wanted to do something nice for you. I saw you with those seeds the other night and it reminded me of the promise I made you. I want you to have that garden you’ve always wanted. He’s going to fit us in around other clients as a favor.”
When we lived in our studio apartment, I used to tell Cooper all the time how much I wanted a garden.
But why now? Like I’ll forget about my research grant? Like I’m a child he can distract with a new toy?
Cooper’s eyes are bright with excitement, unaware of how I really feel, or maybe just ignoring it. He knows by now that sometimes that’s all he can do. I look around our neglected yard and try to picture a garden there. I’ve done it dozens of times, but this time all I can see is my mom’s garden and the way she was tearing into it on Abby’s anniversary.
“I don’t know,” I say. “We don’t really have time for this, Cooper.”
I try to direct my words in Cooper’s direction, aware of the stranger’s stare. I don’t want to appear ungrateful, but I’m having a hard time believing Cooper’s intentions are completely selfless. I wish I knew he still believed in my research. I wish I knew he still believed in me.
Cooper takes my hand fully. “But...maybe you’ll find this is what you really need.”
What I really need... I wish I knew.
Tears prick the corners of my eyes, and I turn my face so neither of them can see. I let my hand fall from Cooper’s.
“Fine,” I spit out. “I want a moat.”
Reese lets out a chuckle.
“A moat?” Cooper asks.
I sniff and stand up straighter, composing myself.
“Yep,” I continue. If Cooper wants me distracted, I’ll make it the biggest project either one of them has ever seen. “All the way around the house. Flowing water. And a waterfall.”
“Okay,” Reese says, his response smooth and amused. “What else?”
I list a few more things—flowers I like, stepping-stones, a swing.
A few minutes later, I watch through the front window as Cooper walks Reese to his truck. Cooper laughs at something Reese says, then takes his hand in a firm shake and the deal is done.
I meet Cooper at the front door when he comes in.
“What do you think?” Cooper asks, still not seeming to understand how his act of kindness is affecting me. “Happy?”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to maintain it. I’m not my mom.”
I clench my teeth shut to keep my chin from quivering. Cooper frowns. He knows how tenuous my relationship is with her. It’s been a sore subject since he first asked me about my family—an innocent question all couples bring up at the beginning of a relationship. But without telling him the whole truth about Abby, I always had a hard time explaining our discord to him in a way that made sense.
One Christmas a few years ago, I overheard him ask my dad about it. Fumbling over his words, Dad had tried to lay it out for him—how when I was seven, his father had died and we’d moved into my grandfather’s house in Lake Oswego, the most prestigious gated community in the Portland area. Everything about our lives changed—Dad taking over his father’s investment company, the three of us kids going from public to private school and Mom fulfilling the implicit obligations of a woman of upper-class society. It went against everything she’d had planned for our life, and she resented it. She pulled away from all of us. All of us except Abby—her carbon copy—and I had felt most betrayed by that. With as much time as Dad spent at the office to avoid Mom’s anger, I was surprised to discover he’d noticed it all those years. Cooper never brought up the subject with me again.
“Is that what all that was about?” Cooper asks. He nods toward the backyard. The moat, he means.
I release all the air in my lungs. It’s all the answer Cooper needs. He takes me by the hand and pulls me over to the couch. He sits me down, then he sinks into the spot next to me. When that’s not close enough, he pulls my legs onto his lap, awkwardly bumping elbows and knees. I rest my head on his shoulder.
“Do you remember when we went to Hawaii for Stephen and Megan’s wedding?” he asks.
I nod against his neck, my nose brushing his loosened tie. Cooper, Stephen and I were still in the middle of our internships, but despite all three of our protests, Megan refused to put the wedding off any longer. “You’re always going to be too busy,” she’d said. “You just have to make the time.”
