The Thirteenth Tale

SISTERS

When it was time, I went to Emmeline's quarters. It was the first time I had been there as an invited guest, and the first thing I noticed, before I even entered the bedroom, was the thickness of the silence. I paused in the doorway-they had not noticed me yet-and realized it was their whispering. On the edge of inaudibility, the rub of breath over vocal cords made ripples in the air. Soft plosives that were gone before you could hear them, muffled sibilants that you might mistake for the sound of your own blood in your ears. Each time I thought it had stopped a hushed sussuration brushed against my ear like a moth alighting on my hair, then fluttered away again. I cleared my throat. "Margaret." Miss Winter, her wheelchair positioned next to her sister, gestured to a chair on the other side of the bed. "How good of you."

I looked at Emmeline's face on the pillow. The red and the white were the same red and white of scarring and burn damage that I had seen before; she had lost none of her well-fed plumpness; her hair was still the tangled skein of white. Listlessly her gaze wandered over the ceiling; she appeared indifferent to my presence. Where was the difference? For she was different. Some alteration had taken place in her, a change instantly visible to the eye, though too elusive to define. She had lost nothing of her strength, though. One arm extended outside the coverlet and in it she had Miss Winter's hand in a firm grip.

"How are you, Emmeline?" I asked nervously.

"She is not well," said Miss Winter.

Miss Winter, too, had changed in recent days. But in her disease was a distillation: The more it reduced her, the more it exposed her essence. Every time I saw her she seemed diminished: thinner, frailer, more transparent, and the weaker she grew, the more the steel at her center was revealed.

All the same, it was a very thin, weak hand that Emmeline was grasping in the clutch of her own heavy fist.

"Would you like me to read?" I asked.

"By all means."

I read a chapter. Then, "She's asleep," Miss Winter murmured. Emmeline 's eyes were closed; her breathing was deep and regular. She had released her grip on her sister's hand, and Miss Winter was rubbing the life back into it. There were the beginnings of bruises on her fingers.

Seeing the direction of my gaze, she drew her hands into her shawl. "I'm sorry about this interruption to our work," she said. "I had to send you away once before when Emmeline was ill. And now, too, I must spend my time with her, and our project must wait. But it won't be long now. And there is Christmas coming. You will be wanting to leave us and be with your family. When you come back after the holiday we will see how things stand. I expect… "-it was the briefest of pauses-"we shall be able to work again by then."

I did not immediately understand her meaning. The words were ambiguous; it was her voice that gave it away. My eyes leaped to Emme-line 's sleeping face.

"Do you mean…?"

Miss Winter sighed. "Don't be taken in by the fact that she seems so strong. She has been ill for a very long time. For years I assumed that I would live to see her depart before me. Then, when I fell ill, I was not so sure. And now it seems we are in a race to the finish line."

So that's what we were waiting for. The event without which the story could not end.

Suddenly my throat was dry and my heart was frightened as a child's.

Dying. Emmeline was dying.

"Is it my fault?"

"Your fault? How should it be your fault?" Miss Winter shook her head. "That night had nothing to do with it."

She gave me one of her old, sharp looks that understood more than I meant to reveal. "Why does this upset you, Margaret? My sister is a stranger to you. And it is hardly compassion for me that distresses you so, is it? Tell me, Margaret, what is the matter?"

In part she was wrong. I did feel compassion for her. For I believed I knew what Miss Winter was going through. She was about to join me in the ranks of the amputees. Bereaved twins are half-souls. The line between life and death is narrow and dark, and a bereaved twin lives closer to it than most. Though she was often short-tempered and contrary, I had grown to like Miss Winter. In particular I liked the child she had once been, the child who emerged more and more frequently nowadays. With her cropped hair, her naked face, her frail hands denuded of their heavy stones, she seemed to grow more childlike every day. To my mind it was this child who was losing her sister, and this is where Miss Winter's sorrow met my own. Her drama was going to be played out here in this house, in the coming days, and it was the very same drama that had shaped my life, though it had taken place for me in the days before I could remember.

I watched Emmeline's face on the pillow. She was approaching the divide that already separated me from my sister. Soon she would cross it and be lost to us, a new arrival in that other place. I was filled with the absurd desire to whisper in her ear, a message for my sister, entrusted to one who might see her soon. Only what to say?

I felt Miss Winter's curious gaze upon my face. I restrained my folly.

"How long?" I asked.

"Days. A week, perhaps. Not long."

I sat up late that night with Miss Winter. I was there again at the side of Emmeline 's bed the next day, too. We sat, reading aloud or in silence for long periods, with only Dr. Clifton coming to interrupt our vigil. He seemed to take my presence there as a natural thing, included me in the same grave smile he bestowed on Miss Winter as he spoke gently about Emmeline's decline. And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline's breathing.

Then the day faded and tomorrow would be Christmas Eve, the day of my departure. In a way I did not want to leave. The hush of this house, the splendid solitariness offered by its garden, were all I wanted of the world at present. The shop and my father seemed very small and far away, my mother, as ever, more distant still. As for Christmas… In our house the festive season followed too close upon my birthday for my mother to be able to bear the celebration of the birth of some other woman's child, no matter how long ago. I thought of my father, opening the Christmas cards from my parents' few friends, arranging over the fireplace the innocuous Santas, snow scenes and robins and putting aside the ones that showed the Madonna. Every year he collected a secret pile of them: jewel-colored images of the mother gazing in rapture at her single, complete, perfect infant; the infant gazing back at her; the two of them making a blissful circle of love and wholeness. Every year they went in the trash, the lot of them.

Miss Winter, I knew, would not object if I asked to stay. She might even be glad to have a companion in the days ahead. But I did not ask. I could not. I had seen Emmeline's decline. As she had weakened, so the hand on my heart had squeezed more tightly, and my growing anguish told me that the end was not far off. It was cowardly of me, but when Christmas came, it was an opportunity to escape, and I took it.

In the evening, I went to my room and did my packing, then went back to Emmeline's quarters to say good-bye to Miss Winter. All the sisters' whispers had fluttered away, the dimness hung heavier, stiller than before. Miss Winter had a book in her lap, but if she had been reading, she could see to read no longer; instead, her eyes watched in sadness her sister's face. In her bed, Emmeline lay immobile, the covers rising and falling gently with her breath. Her eyes were closed and she looked deeply asleep.

"Margaret," Miss Winter murmured, indicating a chair. She seemed pleased that I had come. Together we waited for the light to fade, listening to the tide of Emmeline's breath.

Between us, in the sickbed, Emmeline's breath rolled in and out, in a smooth, imperturbable rhythm, soothing like the sound of waves on a seashore.

Miss Winter did not speak, and I, too, was silent, composing in my mind impossible messages I might send to my sister via this imminent traveler to that other world. With every exhalation, the room seemed filled with a deeper and more enduring sorrow.

Against the window, a dark silhouette, Miss Winter stirred. "You should have this," she said, and a movement in the darkness told me she was holding something out to me across the bed. My fingers closed on a rectangular leather object with a metal lock. Some sort of book. "From Emmeline's treasure box. It will not be needed anymore. Go away. Read it. When you come back we will talk."

Book in hand, I crossed the room to the door, feeling my way by the furniture in my path. Behind me was the tide of Emmeline's breath rolling in and out.