About Our Estrangement

I was nine and you, as usual, annoyingly younger. 

A humid shade prevailed inside our bargain vacation cabin, so we took our fun outdoors. After a half-morning of hiding-and-seeking and heaving exaggerated sighs because of the heat, and of squabbling because that’s what sisters do, we chased each other to what we called the lake, although it was barely a pond. 

The mothers were lolling about while waiting for the daddies to bring the drinks and ice. An elderly woman lazed under a beach umbrella with her poodle. She allowed us to pet it until it ran from our overzealous stroking. We were about to chase it, but she raised a bejeweled hand and asked, “Why don’t you girls go read comic books instead?” 

“Because she’s only four and can’t read,” I thumbed toward you. “And because I’ve already read them all. Thrice.” 

You giggled at my saying three times in that fresh, unusual way. At your age, the word thrice must have seemed novel. I shrugged at your naiveté. 

As we walked nearer to the shore, I decided that although we wanted to swim, we should wait until after lunch so our wet hair wouldn’t drip into the bologna sandwiches and chips. 

“Potato chips should never be soggy,” I proclaimed. 

You hesitated before agreeing. I regarded your hesitation as a sign that our mother was right: you were beginning to have a mind of your own. 

To pass the hour until lunchtime, we threw rocks in the water. You made a small, flat stone skip twice. I was impressed. I didn’t think you had it in you. I assumed a wide-eyed look of faux delight at your athleticism, and I hollered, “Way to go, kiddo!” 

You were tickled magenta pink, in part because of the sun, but mostly because I had deigned to admire you. In those days, I was so much older and wiser than you. What I thought mattered. 

Not wanting you to fail at a three-skip attempt, and since I could think of nothing more interesting to do, I reconsidered our getting in the water. You were turning an even deeper shade of pink, and we were both sticky. I concluded that if we just waded gently into the lake, we could cool our bodies but keep our hair dry. 

We eased in past your waist and to the middle of my thigh, and then you lost your footing and suddenly you were in over your head. I watched your tight curls sway into mere waves. I remember thinking how silky your tresses seemed. And I remember wondering if mine would also silken, were I to submerge myself as you had. 

I probably assumed you wouldn’t remain underwater for long, that you’d bob back up, automatically, as if you were something light and full of air—a colorful beach ball, perhaps, or a life preserver shaped like a mermaid. But you didn’t. 

A second later, from the shore, Mom saw that you weren’t bobbing and, adult that she was and not equating you with either ball or life preserver, she wailed, “Oh my God!” 

I snapped to attention. I reached in fast and grabbed your hair and pulled your head out of the water without thinking. 

It was a reflex, like swatting a fly or scratching an itch. I did it because Mom’s wail shocked me into action. I wasn’t trying to save you. I didn’t even know you were drowning. 

But you were. And save you I did. Mom said so. To anyone who would listen. Even to me. 

In fact, after you fell sleep that night, as I lay supine, uncovered, and silently mouthing the usual evening prayers, she crouched by my cot. 

“You saved her,” she whispered. “Do you realize you saved her? Do you understand that if you hadn’t been there, if you hadn’t pulled her up, your sister would have drowned?” 

She asked these questions pointedly, as if she were demanding answers and not speaking rhetorically as, in some nebulous way, I understood she must have been. And as she asked, she shivered and hugged herself tightly. I was struck by how her eyes bulged and by how forcefully she clenched her teeth. 

Her countenance was scaring me as much as the thought of your near-death was scaring her. I pulled the sheet over my head. 

Then she said, “Thank God you were there,” and after grasping my shoulder through the sheet hard enough to leave a next-day bruise, she left the room. 

I couldn’t sleep. The night was more sweltering than the day had been. My cot abutted the screened window, but that offered no relief because there was no breeze. The loud crickets didn’t help. Neither did the full moon. 

I still couldn’t sleep come dawn, even though the crickets and the moon had packed it in and the air had cooled to bearable. 

But here’s the thing: although that was then and this is now, what I want you to know is that I’ve lain awake, frightened, through a thousand dawns since. Yes, even after I became an adult and moved to houses with triple-paned windows that promised to shut out the crickets of the world. 

And even after I hung thick, heavy curtains to fend off the shine of insistent moons. 

And even of late when, in lieu of heat, there is ice in the air. 

It had ramifications, Mom saying that I saved you although I hadn’t meant to. It had ramifications. 

Would she have said that I’d killed you? Would she have said that it was I who let you die, if I hadn’t been startled into motion? I wouldn’t have meant to do that either, as heaven is my witness. I wouldn’t have meant to let you die. 

I swear mine was a reflex, not a plan. At nine, I had little experience in thinking things through, and none in making life-and-death decisions, much less on the fly. I didn’t even learn the word impromptu until I turned twelve or thirteen. 

Funny how we never know what small gesture will prevent a drowning or weigh us down with irrevocable responsibility. In the pit of my stomach, you’ve been my charge ever since the day I became your savior. Not that you ever saw me knot myself taut. 

Mom stopped trumpeting me as a hero soon enough, and I never told anybody, including you, about all this. 

I trust that because you were a kid when it happened, you don’t remember. So, I don’t blame you for not knowing what it did to me. How could you know? We—each of us—can only hope to know what we can remember. If that. 

Whoever would have guessed that my guileless act would lead to a lifetime of trouble between us? I’m not saying that I cringed every time you lost your footing. I just knotted tighter. 

It was the look on our mother’s face. Her wail. Surely this is something you can understand. 

ZOË BLAYLOCK

Zoë Blaylock is a Pushcart Prize–nominated writer whose work has appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly, The Examined Life Journal of the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, Electric Spec, the Innisfree Poetry Journal, and other publications. She is currently editing her first novel and writing a long-form hybrid narrative.