It rained the morning you were born.
I was six, and furious with our parents for daring to have another child. They had our older brother—the golden-haired, athletic son any parents would be proud to have—and they had me—the brunette musician with a flair for the dramatic.
Luke’s hair wound itself into tight ringlets in the evening after his bath, softening to gentler waves by morning. My hair was straight, and I always insisted on wearing it parted on the side, with a matching barrette to hold it out of my face. We were lovely children—why did they need you?
Eight-year old Luke wore his racecar pajamas that morning. He lay on his stomach beside the Christmas tree and indolently flicked at the ornaments on the lowest branches.
“Mommy hates it when you do that,” I informed him from my seat at the piano. My feet dangled in the air.
“Mind your own business,” he said. He flicked another ornament, then sighed and rolled over onto his back. He yelled the babysitter’s name, and asked if he could go outside and play.
“No, you can’t,” I said. “Because—“
“I know, I know,” he cut me off. “Because it’s raining. I can see out the window just as good as you.”
“But it’s not just raining. It’s pouring. It’s raining cats and dogs. It’s a monsoon, it’s a flood, it’s a disaster!” I hopped off the piano bench and padded across the floor to sit beside him. “It will rain for days—days and days and days—and we will wonder if there was ever a time when it wasn’t raining.”
Luke had been scowling at first, but when he realized that I had begun one of my stories, he smiled a little, and rolled onto his stomach, looking up at me.
Delighted at holding my big brother’s attention, I continued. “We’ll have to leave this house, and find higher ground. It will be someplace far, far away from here, and we will probably never be able to return. It will be a great tragedy for our city—probably the whole state. And if the rain doesn’t let up, the whole world! Not very many people will survive.”
Luke rolled over onto his back again, tapping an ornament with one finger, watching it swing back and forth. Outside, it rained harder.
“But our whole family will make it to a safe place, and we’ll build a new house. Probably not as big as this one, or as nice, but it will be safe, and it will be ours, and that will be enough.”
Rain striking the window made an angry, percussive noise, and my words trailed off into nothingness. Moments later, the phone rang.
The peaceful moment shattered as Luke bolted from his place on the floor and dashed to the phone. “I GOT IT, I GOT IT!” he screamed, and picked up before the babysitter could.
He listened intently, then his face fell. “Oh. Cool.” He handed the receiver to the babysitter and shuffled away. “It’s a girl,” he said.
“I guess they’ll name her Susanna, like they wanted to.”
“Guess so.”
I sighed. “Even her name is better than mine.”
“Do you think they’ll call her Susie for short?” Luke asked, without much interest.
The gloomy expression on my face matched his. “Our lives are over,” I said solemnly.
“I wanted it to be a boy,” he said petulantly.
“Why are you so mad? At least you’re still the only son. Now I’m the horrible older sister. They’ll lock me away in a tower, with nothing to eat but crumbs! They’ll raise her like she’s a princess, and she’ll wake every morning to beautiful music and I’ll waste away to nothing.” I moaned and hid my face in my hands.
“Oh, they’ll give you more than crumbs,” Luke said.
“That is not the point.”
“Well…”
I looked up at him and flung my hands out in desperation. “Well what?”
“I’ll bring you a grilled cheese.”
I stared at him. “You can’t.”
“How come?”
“My tower will be far away from here, and very dangerous to travel to.”
Luke shrugged. “So what? I can take a plane or something.”
“But it will be heavily guarded, with poison thorns all around the bottom, and a mile high. You won’t even be able to see the top of it from the ground.”
“I can climb it,” Luke said confidently.
I fingered one of the little bows on my nightgown. “You’d do that?” I asked him.
“Yeah. It’ll be easy.”
I sniffled. “I don’t want to go to the tower.”
“Hey.” He put his arm around my shoulders. “Don’t worry about it. If you have to go to the tower I’ll come see you every day, and I’ll always bring a grilled cheese.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
They brought you home the next day, around lunchtime. The roads were icy those few days before Christmas, so we didn’t go see you in the hospital. I was angry with you, because I had decided that it was your fault I hadn’t seen my mother for days. I don’t remember much about our first meeting, except that I thought you thoroughly ordinary, and I pitied you for being born third, when Mommy and Daddy already had two wonderful children to compare you to.
At first, Luke and I did all we could to ignore you. But Luke was always intrigued by novelty, and within the first few hours of your arrival, he had already turned into another one of your minions, bowing and scraping and serving your every whim. By the end of the day, he loved you, and I was sick with envy at no longer holding the exclusive rights to his affection.
You cried every night the first week you were home. Luke never woke up, but I heard it—those irritating, piteous cries that lasted for hours—and I hated you even more.
I tried to pretend you didn’t exist, but that soon proved impossible. By being born, you had earned a place in the hearts of every member of my family. I didn’t understand. All you did was coo and cry and scream and poop and spit and sleep and kick your fat legs. Anyone could do that.
I resented you for the next two years. Without ever trying, you were everybody’s favorite. I didn’t even care that my name was your first word.
“Marta,” you said, and smiled up at me.
“My name,” I informed you coolly, “is Martha.”
“Marta,” you repeated, waving your fat, baby fists.
Everyone was so excited about your first word that they all started calling me Marta. The name doesn’t bother me anymore, but at the time, it was infuriating. It wasn’t my real name, and all the adults in my life were making fools of myself by indulging a baby who didn’t know or care that she’d gotten her way.
My real reason for hating you, though, sprang from the fact that our family and friends had every reason to adore you: you were perfect.
It was as if our parents had taken all the good things about me, and all the good things about Luke, and watered down our bad qualities, and put them in this third child. The result was a harmonious mixing of hot and cold, light and dark.
Your hair, in contrast to Luke’s blonde ringlets and my flat, dark hair, was a light, lovely shade of brown that framed your round little face in wispy waves. We all had dark brown eyes, but yours were loveliest of all—framed by thick, captivating, dark lashes. You were never as dramatic as me, but you were always animated, and people were drawn to you. You had Luke’s natural athleticism, but at only two years old already wanted to learn to read and write. You were curious, charming, adorable, delightful.
In short, completely nauseating.
By the time you were three, you were speaking in full, cogent sentences, and you followed me everywhere.
I passed you sitting at the kitchen table, drawing fat clouds with a purple crayon.
“Where are you going?” you asked, swinging your feet back and forth.
“Outside.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Garden.”
“Me too!” you squealed, dropping the crayon and wiggling out of your seat, following me out the back door and into the breezy spring afternoon. “What are we gonna garden?”
“I am going to pull weeds away from the flower bushes.”
“What for?”
“To keep them away.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re bad.”
“But why?”
“They just are, okay?”
“Okay.”
I knelt down in front of one of the shrubs that lined the fence of our backyard and got to work. Dressed in a short-sleeved yellow dress with a tiny white bow on the collar, you squatted beside me and watched. For several minutes, you didn’t say anything, and were very, very still.
My hand knocked a flower off the bush accidentally.
“What’s that?” you asked.
“Flower,” I answered.
“What kinda flower?”
“A pink one.”
“Rose. Daisy. Pink Flower.”
“No, that’s not its name.”
“Oh. What’s its name?”
“It’s an azalea.”
You frowned, and your lips slid into a half-pout of confusion.
I sighed. “Say it after me. Uh.”
“Uh.”
“Zayl.”
“Zayl.”
“Yuh.”
“Yuh.”
“Azaela.”
“’Zaela.”
I looked down at your little face, brows furrowed in concentration. You lifted hopeful eyes up to me. “Was that right, Marta?”
I shrugged. “Close enough.”
You watched me pull up a few more weeds.
“Marta?”
“What.”
“Can I have that ‘zaela?”
“Sure.”
Your face lit in a smile, and, lifting it with careful little fingers, placed it in the small pocket on the front of your dress. “Can I help?” you asked.
I shrugged again. “Okay.”
When we went inside at dusk, we both had dirt on our faces and in our hair, and there was a hole in your dress where you’d snagged it on the fence. Our hands were filthy, and our knees deeply matted with dirt.
Our mother didn’t even scold us, just put us in the bathtub together and dumped in more bubble bath than we really needed.
“That was fun,” you said, running your hands back and forth under the water streaming from the faucet.
It had been, but I didn’t want to say so.
“Can I help again tomorrow?” you asked.
“I’m not going to do it again tomorrow,” I said.
“Okay. But next time?”
Help might not be so bad, I thought. I had to pull the weeds anyway, because Daddy had made it my job. It had gone faster with you helping today anyway. You hadn’t even annoyed me at all.
“If you want to. You know, Susie, I kind of like you.”
You splashed some water around. “Okay. I love you.”
I pushed some bubbles around. “Okay.”
And that is why, dear, sweet Susie, I can never forgive myself. I’m sorry—so, so sorry. I can never say it enough, because on that clear morning in April, I committed the greatest sin of all.
We were going to the library to study together, then out for lunch, then manicures, then a movie. It was going to be our day. I was seventeen, due to graduate from high school the next month, and you had agreed eagerly to this sisters’ outing. We had been friends for eight years, since you became my weed-pulling helper at three, and even though the age difference was significant, I think I loved you more than the rest of your admirers, because you weren’t just my little sister—you were my friend.
“I think you should get a haircut too, while we’re out,” you said.
“Why?”
“Something short and sassy. To transition you from high school to college.”
I laughed. “I don’t think a haircut is going to make much of a difference.”
“No, it will. If the layers are done properly they’ll frame your face beautifully and you will appear much older, which will be great for all those college parties.”
You were eleven and loved the beauty tips in the teen magazines I brought home every now and then. I usually ignored them, because they all sounded the same and rarely had anything interesting to say, but you devoured them, and always informed me if there was something you thought I needed to know.
“I don’t think I’ll be going to many parties,” I told you dryly, but you just shook your head.
“Nope, sorry, you’re wrong. You’ll be so popular it will make all the sorority girls sick with envy. And you’ll have a different date every weekend.”
“Right,” I said. “Because I’ve had so many of those in high school.”
“The boys here are losers,” you said with a disdainful little sniff. “In college, they will appreciate you.”
I doubted it, but you seemed to have your heart set on it. “All right,” I agreed. “I’ll cut my hair.” I glanced over at you. “If you want.”
“I do,” you said, with a decisive nod. There was a pause. I was thinking about leaving home, thinking about how much was going to change.
“Should I cut my hair?”
I looked over at you. Your soft, brown hair hung in waves on your shoulders, but it had always been manageable at any length.
“I think you’ll look great no matter how your hair is cut.”
You beamed at me, and I turned down the radio so I could focus on you more easily. The traffic was unusually heavy for this time of morning, especially en route to the library, of all places.
I grinned. “Hey… you want to get matching haircuts?”
“Yes!” Your smile turned a little sheepish. “If you don’t think it’s too cheesy.”
I shook my head. “Nope. I think it’ll be great. And it’ll make me feel closer to you when I leave.” I paused. “I’m really going to miss you, Suz.”
“Me too, Marta,” you said softly.
Without taking my eyes from the road, I reached over and took your hand. It was slender and pale, just like mine, and I thought of all the piano duets we had played together since you’d started your lessons.
You knew was I was thinking, and squeezed my hand. “We can play duets over the phone, right?”
My eyes filled. “Yeah, of course,” I said. “Of course we will.”
You sighed and leaned against the window without letting go of my hand. “Okay.” There was another pause, and I had just managed to get a hold on my emotions when you said, “I love you.”
I looked over at you. “I love you too,” I said.
I didn’t see it. Neither of us did—that huge, silver truck barreling out of nowhere.
Maybe that’s not true. I did see it, but only for a millisecond before it hit the side of the car. It smashed into the window where you were resting your head, and the glass shattered and the car dented in so far it nearly folded in half and we went spinning across the pavement, ricocheting off other cars before we rolled—once, twice, three times—into the ditch.
I screamed and screamed and shut my eyes, but those moments when we were upside down seemed to stretch into eternity. We landed upright. I couldn’t hear anything. I was dizzy and my arm had been so thoroughly crushed that I was certain it couldn’t be saved. They were going to amputate my arm, and I’d be a freak. Forget the haircut, what I needed was a prosthetic arm.
“Susie…” I moaned.
You didn’t answer. I opened my eyes, managing to turn my head just enough to look at you, then wished I hadn’t.
I stared at you, even though it wasn’t really you anymore. You were gone, and only your body—your perfect hair and your beautiful eyes and your charming smile—was left behind. I didn’t see the blood, didn’t see the horrible thing that had happened to you. I just saw the empty shell that was once my little sister, and I couldn’t breathe.
When they pulled me out of the car they had to pry my hand from yours; we had still been holding hands when the truck hit. My arm, two ribs, and my shoulder were broken, but the most painful part of my removal from the car was when they peeled our fingers apart. I started crying then, and calling your name. Susie, sweetheart, wake up. Please, Susie, say something. Susie, Susie, please, please don’t go.
They laid me on the stretcher and I stared up into the sky. I looked straight into the sun without blinking, and my hair tickled my nose as the soft, spring breeze brushed it across my face. We had landed in an azalea bush planted near the street, and the fuchsia flowers were scattered across the ground.
A battered azalea somehow found its way onto my stomach, and I cried harder as I watched it sway when they lifted me up into the ambulance.
After your funeral I knelt down in front of your grave. As the dew seeped into my black skirt, I carefully laid a lock of my dark hair onto your grave, beside a pair of fuchsia azaleas—one large, one small—and a weed I’d pulled from your favorite azalea bush in our backyard.
It rained the morning you were born, but Susie—sweet, beautiful, baby sister—the morning you died, the weather was perfect.
I also love how Luke knows he can climb that tower, since he's so macho and manly.
