Maybe Less
Eva Shapiro
We are going to be happy, my sister says, and I try to believe her. She is sitting on the couch, and I am sitting on the floor. I am afraid to touch her, because she looks as if she might evaporate, like a cloud of smoke. We are going to be happier than we are right now. I repeat it back to her. We are going to be happy. I try to sound reassuring. She is staring at the floor, right to the right of my knee and I am afraid to make eye contact with her, afraid to get this moment wrong. I get up and walk to the kitchen. I make hot chocolate with water because there’s no milk. I put in too much cocoa powder to make up for it. She holds the mug in her hands, lets the steam blur her glasses. She takes a sip and says, Thank you, it’s perfect. See, I say, we are already getting happier. I’m horrified as soon as I’ve said it, to have made light of this moment, ruining it forever. But she laughs, takes another sip, says, I told you so.
Or it starts like this: on December 22, my sister Mira, twenty-four years old, soon to be recipient of a master’s in public policy, and a strong believer in the friendliness of any intelligent life we might soon discover in the near-by universe, told me that she was going to have a baby. She actually told me that she was going to have a baby in six months maybe less, which is the kind of non-specific elaboration that Mira can so effectively use when she is worried. The first thing I said was, Oh. And the second thing I said was, Okay, wow. And the third thing I said was, Six months?
Maybe less, she repeated, because you know, you don’t know. Things could happen. She didn’t elaborate on things, but the unnatural stillness of her hands showed a running list of her own worries. Wow, I said again, Congratulations? Yes, that was the correct response, although ideally it would be a statement, not a question. Mira nodded anyway, an efficient acceptance. She said, I’ve always liked the name Nora.
That was yesterday. And now we are sitting, staring at the stained insides of our hot chocolate mugs, wondering who will find the right thing to say. Or maybe Mira is thinking about onesies and pureed food or maybe just what movie she wants to go see on Christmas. I want to know how to comfort her. It’s not that I never see Mira cry, because she cries often, frustrated, or overwhelmed by the endings of movies or the commercials where dogs and fathers come home to their families. But I hear her voice break when she says I don’t know what to do about school and I don’t know what to do about child care and I don’t know if I should move home and I don’t know– and the only thing I can think is that I’m not yet ready to be an adult.
I’ll wash your mug, I offer finally, cracking the silence down the middle. She hesitates a moment, just looking at me, and I hold out my hand. She gives me the mug and I duck into the kitchen, give the water from the faucet plenty of time to heat up, and wash the cups slowly, watching last dregs of chocolate sink down the drain. When I come back, Mira is watching the basketball game, just beginning the second quarter. We turn our heads towards the television, Mira silently, me, with an exaggerated groan at a should-be-foul, and then I feel embarrassed about it.
We are going to be happy. I want to believe her.
The next morning, I hover in the doorway to the room that is Mira’s when she’s home, the guest bedroom the rest of the year, and Mira’s, always, in conversation. She makes the bed, which she never used to do. It occurs to me that while I always regress to a younger version of myself when I’m home from school, Mira appears to have matured rapidly, become unknowable. Is there a movie you want to watch today? she asks me. This is a Mira that I recognize. Our plan had been to watch the major movies before the Golden Globes this year, but we’ve mostly been stuck on the Hallmark channel. Anything is fine, I say, as long as it’s something dumb. Mira doesn’t look up from the corner of the blanket she’s straightening. Of course, she says, no space in the brain for something serious. This is the closest we get to talking about it. We watch a movie. We pass a bag of almost-stale twizzlers back and forth, even though I outgrew my taste for them years ago. The characters in the movie hate their siblings, and I think about how lucky I am. As far as I know, she doesn’t cry again.
I hear her talking to our mom later, low voices in the kitchen, and I wonder if Mira is confessing her deepest worries, fears, whatever it is that she’s thinking right now. I imagine that our mom knows all the right answers. That she is saying, Miriam, here is what you do, I will help you. I wait outside the door for a moment, wanting to hear, but it’s muffled and trying feels invasive anyway. I walk into the kitchen, thinking maybe I’ll join the conversation, maybe I’ll be given access to the deepest, realest parts of my sister, but instead Mira offers me apple cider. I want to ask what they were talking about, but I can’t risk letting Mira not answer. Because then I would have to look her in the eye today and then again tomorrow and every time I think back on this Christmas it would be to remember a dinner table with moo shu vegetable, and knowing I wasn’t enough for her.
We watch movies.
We usher in the new year by pausing our movie long enough to watch the ball drop, and our parents toast us with sparkling cider. I toss the bottle cap at Mira, pretending it’s a champagne cork, and then wonder if I shouldn’t have called attention to the fact that Mira isn’t drinking. We can hear a few stray fireworks over the soccer field down the block, and on the television it’s sleeting in New York, and I feel lucky to be watching from inside. Mira leaves the next day, and I leave a week later. When I am asked, my first day back, by the girl-who-I-always-sit-next-to-in-discussion-section how my winter break was, I tell her the truth, which is that I would be a better Golden Globes voter than most, if not all, of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
When Mira first went away to college, we spent hours on the phone together. Talking endlessly, or just sitting with phones pressed to our ears, her at her dorm room desk and me staring out my window at the quiet traffic on our street. We talked about the weird food in her dining hall and whether the Wizards would be bad again, and then I would give the phone back to my mom who would ask me, How do you think Mira is? I would say, honestly, I don’t know.
And by the time I went off to college, four years later, the pattern was well established so I talked to her about the weird food in my dining hall and whether the Wizards would be bad again and I never told her about how I had stopped believing I was good at school how I didn’t think I was getting any smarter how I had dreams about how much I missed walking in Rock Creek Park how I had lots of people who liked me but I wasn’t sure I had friends. We are going to be happy.
My first week back at school I rush to every class, convinced I’ll be the last to show up, that I’ll have to climb over a row of people’s legs to get to an empty desk, the professor already lecturing and I’m blocking everyone’s line of sight. Instead, I end up ten minutes early to everything, mindlessly refreshing my email like something interesting is going to show up, ever. It takes until Thursday for me to realize I haven’t heard from Mira. On Friday, I realize it again, lying on my bed, exhausted from running around doing nothing all week, so it isn’t until Saturday that I send a text with a few too many exclamation points to seem totally normal. Four minutes later, Mira calls me. She asks me about my week, and I do my best to make the truth sound funny. I say, I keep thinking I’ll be late and so I’ve been ten minutes early to everything, but with the words hanging in the air, it feels intensely personal, like telling her the wishes I make on fallen eyelashes, or what I pray for. She says to me, Simone, you worry too much.
I know, I say. I do it for fun.
This is the moment that I think, Mira is pregnant. And then I think, how is this not the first thing I think of in the morning, the last thing in my head before I go to sleep? Oh G-d I am the worst sister ever. I want to ask her how she is feeling. I want to ask her how Jonah is, she hasn’t mentioned him and for all I know he went running the second he found out. For all I know, I found out before Jonah did. Baby Mira. Baby Mira-and-Jonah. I want to ask her if she has cried again, but I am scared that any wrong word will speak the tears back into existence.
Mira tells me about the class she’s TA-ing, and how she’s convinced a girl in the front row knows more than the professor and will make them all look like fools. She tells me calling on the girl is Like flipping the red card, and I laugh. It was a game we played over and over when we were little, a game of complicated rules which we invented on the top of the board from the game Clue. It makes me happy that she still thinks about it. I do, too. And then she says, Did you know that babies don’t see a whole spectrum of color until they're five months old? No, I say, I didn’t know that. And then, How weird. She hangs up shortly after, and I wonder whether she learned that from the internet, or if she went to the library and checked out a book.
On my way home from class the next day, I run into the girl I sit next to in my discussion section. It’s strange to see her outside of class, with an earbud tangled in her scarf from when she pulls it out to say hi to me. She has a floral print backpack which strikes me as stylish, although if I wore it, I would feel childish. She asks me what class I am coming from and for a moment I can’t remember the name of the class so I tell her what I remember from lecture, The levels of bacteria in the College Creek Watershed are too high for safe human contact, and she goes along with it, says, Where’s the College Creek Watershed? and I say, Right here. She says, Is that what those people outside the library with the signs about single-use plastic were talking about? I admit that I’m not sure who those people were, because I largely avoid the library, and further, that a lot of people talk about single-use plastic but not all of us are specifically concerned with the College Creek Watershed. She seems embarrassed about this, and I realize too late that I have made her feel stupid, so I say, I’m sorry, although I don’t specify about what. I tell her that I will check out what the people by the library were doing. My brain feels a long way from my mouth. She turns off to go meet a study group, and I am relieved that I get out a polite goodbye in time for her to wave and smile and disappear with her floral print backpack.
Mira and I shared a room for the first nine years of my life. We pushed our beds together and whispered into the night, long after we were supposed to be asleep. I never looked at the clock so that I could honestly say I didn’t know how late it was. When Mira told me stories, the combination of her age and the clarity of her voice made them true to me. Just like the characters in our favorite books, we talked about magic.
She would say, What if we woke up tomorrow morning and all of Connecticut Avenue was paved with jello?
And I would say, and the trees are sour apple lollipops?
Sure, the trees are lollipops, and the grass is sprinkles, and the L2 is made of marshmallow.
Does it still smell like gas?
No, silly. The buses run on marshmallow fluff.
What would you do, she would say, if we woke up tomorrow and all of Connecticut Avenue was paved in jello and the L2 ran on marshmallow fluff?
I would stall. I don’t know. What would you do?
When I was nine and Mira was thirteen, she moved into the second bedroom, which had been the guest room. She didn’t tell me in advance, and I remember thinking I must have done something wrong, because one day I had to go to bed and Mira wasn’t there anymore. It felt like an emptiness so present it sucked the light out of the room. Mira and I have been living primarily in different cities for the last seven years, and some days I still feel like that.
My mom is the one who says to me, you know Mirala hasn’t been feeling well. The nausea, still. She says it like she assumes I would know, and then pivots the conversation back to my plans for summer break, like that’s the important news in the family. I text Mira later, asking her how she is, trying to sound casual. I want to ask her about being pregnant but every iteration of the question that passes through my head sounds younger and more uninformed than the previous. I don’t say anything.
So my mom is the one who tells me when things are going well, when the nausea has mostly faded, when Jonah thinks he isn’t in a good place right now to raise a baby, when six months, maybe less has become five months, maybe less, four months, maybe less. Sometimes when I call, she has just gotten off the phone with Mira, It’s been a hard week, she tells me, it will get easier. That’s the way bodies work, and people. At two months, maybe less, she tells me Mira is home. That way we can help, she says, leaving me to wonder if she means help with Mira, help with the baby, help with the bills. I don’t want to sound judgmental, so I don’t ask.
In these conversations, the baby-to-be becomes less hypothetical. My experience with babies is holding younger cousins, playing Candyland with them a few years later, marveling at their clumsy fingers and determination to convince me that their purple card is, in fact, yellow. It occurs to me that I will be an important person in the life of baby Mira, my niece-or-nephew-to-be. I think about how, unlike my parents or my sister, baby Mira will always know me as an adult, someone more similar to her mother than to themself. I think that I would like more time to become a full person before someone sees me that way.
It turns out that the students talking about single-use plastic outside of the library are not worried about the College Creek Watershed so much as they are worried about the whole Chesapeake region. I spit out a statistic buried deep in my head about how quickly the area around the Bay is sinking, to show that I know what they are talking about, and also that I pay attention in class. They seem pleased to have a new ally in their fight, and my phone quickly fills with new contacts, other people who want to talk about single-use plastic and, while we’re at it, should we compare notes for the marine science midterm? I tell my mom that this is my new project, and I guess she tells Mira, because they both make sure I know what a great thing they think it is. I agree that it’s a good cause, although mostly, my cause is getting ignored by passing students who don’t want to hear about single-use plastic, while we stand on land that is slowly sinking.
When I was just about to start high school and Mira was just about to finish, she asked me for advice for the first time. She had a friend from high school who was going to the same college, and Mira wasn’t sure that she wanted to live with her friend. I was proud that Mira wanted my advice, and I told her it would be nice to have an old friend in a new place. Mira chose to have a randomly selected roommate, and I could never shake the fear that I had given the wrong answer, and that she judged me for it. Every time she asked for my advice, I waffled, thought about how my response could forever shape the way she saw me.
She doesn’t ask me for advice about the baby.
On the phone, I open my mouth to ask her if she has thought more about names, but I remember that this is bad luck. I open my mouth to ask her if it’s true what people say about how you should talk to the fetus, but that sounds weird and judgy just in my head. I open my mouth to ask if she is healthy, if everything is going right, but it sounds so cold, like something I should already know. There is a block in my throat and I know it’s my own imagination, but when I try to speak I start coughing and it feels so real. I open my mouth to tell Mira that I love her, and I say those words, I love you and hope that she understands it means that I love her, I love the baby-to-be, and I am scared of all of the things that I don’t know and don’t know how to say.
When I was around eight years old, it snowed unusually deep and I begged my mom to let me go sledding. Mira didn’t want to go and I doubt our mom did either, when we could have been sitting in front of the radiator. But at my insistence, we dragged ourselves outside, with doubled up socks and the cuffs of our jeans already wet. I dragged the sled out to the front of the hill and climbed in carefully. When we had both been small enough to fit, Mira and I would sit one behind the other and our mom would gently push us down the hill until we had the momentum to go flying. That time, I had to do it myself, which felt both independent and lonely. I flew down the hill, spun to a stop, collected myself, and began the trudge back up the hill, sled dragging behind me. It was on the second ride down the hill that I pointed the sled just slightly in the wrong direction, hit a weird divot in the ground, and went flying straight into a tree.
I remember the cracked plastic of the sled and the snow on my cheeks and in my hair and under the collar of my winter coat. I do not remember Mira running down the hill, running faster than even the sleds were going, but I know that she did because I remember her in front of me, picking me up, saying, Calm down Simone be calm this isn’t a big deal there’s barely any blood and mom will be here in just one second. And then our mom was there and we walked slowly back up the hill and home, our mom dragging the sled because Mira wouldn’t let go of my hand. In the end she was right, it wasn’t a big deal. All I got was a nosebleed and a strange bruise around my eye and the understanding that Mira would race down a hill for me when I needed her to. Her job, as an older sister, was to look out for me. My job was to trust her.
I stay around school for a month after exams end to wrap up loose ends on the single-use plastics project and pretend my junior year isn’t yet over. We’re canvassing for a city council vote, and I spend whole days going house by house down the streets around campus, ringing doorbells and dropping off pamphlets. Most of the doors remain shut despite my most polite knocks, and some get slammed in my face. Occasionally, the people behind the doors are supportive, which makes me feel good. My parents tell me I am doing something important, which makes me feel proud. The houses around campus are the same brick colonial style with the same oak trees out front as the houses I grew up around, which makes me feel settled. When I realize that I am here and Mira is home, preparing quietly for a baby who will live on land that is sinking towards a polluted ocean, I feel like I need to move faster, knock on more doors, talk to more people. I have something I need to do, and this makes me feel good too.
My mom calls me early in a day which I have planned to spend knocking on doors and saying the phrase single-use plastic so many times it starts to sound like nonsense and not a critical factor to influence the world in the generation to come. She tells me that she and Mira and our dad are headed to the hospital, that we’re about to welcome the new baby into our family. This is how she says it, welcome the new baby. I think that it sounds like the baby has been living somewhere else and has just come to join us, will sit with us at family dinner and make conversation as we try not to talk about mutual friends who the baby doesn’t know.
I am supposed to go to a city council meeting tonight. It’s the only meeting of the month, and we’ve spent all week preparing. I am not speaking, but I have a stack of flyers to hand around. Many of them are printed in the wrong colors, and we left them that way because wasting paper goes against everything we want to be. I will almost certainly miss the moment of the baby’s birth anyway. Mira will be tired and need sleep, our parents will be distracted, the baby will remember nothing. I could go tomorrow, when things will have calmed down and I can be helpful. We were going to hand out flyers at the city council meeting and celebrate either our success or the uselessness of what we do, maybe both. We were going to eat ice cream and laugh about all the doors which had been slammed in our faces. I was just starting to think that I liked these people, and that they liked me too. That for the first time, I would leave campus knowing that in the fall I would come back to people I call my friends.
The Chesapeake region will sink anyway. My sister is having a baby, no matter what. I need to go home. I need to go to Mira, and to this baby-to-be, who will shortly be an actual baby, with fingers and toes and vocal chords and, I suppose, a consciousness. I want someone else to tell me what to do. I wish that the voice in my head sounded like someone else, anyone else, who wasn’t me, someone who I would trust and listen to. I need to go home, because it’s Mira, and she can’t come to me.
As the train winds past Ashland, I try to rest against the window until the vibration of the car becomes unbearable, and then I sit up straight and close my eyes and try to picture the newborn baby, who in my head looks like a plastic doll just pulled from a plastic box, but with Mira’s eyes. The eyes are reminding me that I should have talked to her six months ago, or any time since, that I am a bad person or a coward or worse, less of a sister than I claim to be.
When the train stops for a little too long in Charlottesville I think about how Mira was my first and closest friend, before I knew what this meant or why it was special to have someone who would devote so much attention to you. I think about how when I tell stories or make jokes they often start with My sister and I or My sister was telling me. I think about how someone at school had mentioned, off-handed, a year or so back, You and your sister must be really close, and without thinking for a second I had said, She’s my best friend. As we pull into Union Station, I think about how last year on Mira’s birthday I didn’t send a gift, because I couldn’t think of something worth giving her, something that meant enough. I mailed her homemade a card with just a few, awkward sentences, drawn with the same ballpoint pens I take notes in class with, and hoped that this was enough to demonstrate how much I cared.
In the hospital room, sitting on the plastic chair that has our mom’s sweater hung over the back, I say, I love you, I love you, I love you, and I love the baby too. Mira says, you haven’t even met the baby yet but she sounds tired and happy and I feel tired and happy too. She tells me that the baby was born only a few hours earlier, and has been in the nursery, where my parents are now picking her up, while Mira took a nap. After all this time, I can’t quite wrap my head around meeting this baby, this person who has just come into existence. I think again about the card that I sent Mira last fall, and I say, What would you have wanted for your birthday? And Mira says, what are you talking about? Her birthday is half a year away. I say, I wish I knew how to get you a good present. I don’t know what you would want. She looks at me, still confused, and I don’t know how to explain so I say, The hospital really shouldn’t use disposable utensils, you throw them away and they end up contaminating water sources, and then I say, I’m trying to tell you something, and Mira says, Can it wait until later? I say of course, and promise myself that this was a dress rehearsal and I will not let myself be derailed by single-use plastic again.
Our parents come back, our mother holding a swaddled blanket with a hat on top, who is now my niece. Mira holds the baby, which the internet has told me is important to bond. It amazes me that a gesture so small, so early in life, could really matter at all. I reach out to touch the side of the blanket, thinking that I want to be bonded to the baby from her first hours as well, but Mira’s arm is there, so I tap the tips of my fingers against the blanket, feeling like I’m invading on something. I want to apologize for this, too, so I say I love you, thinking that I probably don’t say it enough. And Mira says, I love you too, always. She sounds so confident, and I wish I had felt that confident about anything, ever.
Mira tells our parents to get food, and they say that they aren’t hungry, and then Mira tells them that she is hungry, and they go to get her food. I stare at the bundle that is the baby, and I wonder if she is too warm all wrapped up in the blanket. And then I tell her, tell them both, I’m going to do better. Because this is the most important part.
Better at what? Mira says.
At talking. At talking to you, especially. I pause on the last word for a second, enjoying it. You’re very special to me.
Mira looks at me a little strangely, like she’s not quite sure how I got to be sitting next to her. Simone? She says, Are you okay?
I’m sorry.
For what? Simone?
Why do you sound so worried about me? The words snap like a rubber band, my voice creeping higher. I force myself to hold still. I don’t want the baby to start crying. Why is it so easy for you to sound worried?
Simone. I don’t understand.
Mira. Should we just keep saying each other’s names.
Simone.
I wait out the echo of her voice saying my name gently in my ears, and then enjoy the silence. And then I stop enjoying the silence, it becomes near unbearable and I know that this is my cue to explain, finally, to put my voice and my thoughts and my overwhelming heart to some use.
I say, I thought I should know how you were doing without having to ask. I say, I was scared to ask. I didn’t know, and I didn’t ask, and I didn’t pay attention and you went and had a whole baby while I acted like nothing was changing. And I say, I’m sorry.
I want to wrap myself in a blanket like the baby has, just for the comfort of having something around me. I want to drink a gallon of water to soothe my dry mouth. I want to look my sister in the eye.
Simone.
Mira. I’m really sorry.
It’s too warm for a blanket. I can’t move to get the water. I look the baby in the eye. Her eyes are blue, the way babies’ eyes often are, but they won’t stay that way, we don’t have a single gene for blue eyes anywhere in our family. The baby closes her eyes, reminding me that this is not the point. I look up at my sister, who is frowning, like she’s concentrating.
Thank you, Mira says, it was a really hard few months.
We sit with this knowledge for a moment, and then the baby makes a noise, just a tiny Eh eh eh, and Mira rocks her arms, confidently, so I have to assume this is what the baby wanted. I say, So you decided on Nora? Mira tells me that Nora can mean light, which is beautiful, or terrible, which is not, or lightbulb, which might be even worse. She tells me that the point is not the meaning of the name but the way it sounds on your tongue, and I say the name aloud, trying to feel what she means, but I can’t make it work. I think that probably Mira is a little tired to be making any sense anyway, so I tell her that Nora is a perfect name, that it fits the baby just right, that the baby will be full of light and occasionally terrible and may even go on to invent a clean energy lightbulb that never burns out. I think that maybe I am too tired to be making sense either, and neither of us are in a position to do anything about it, because there is Nora, blinking sleepily in the afternoon light.
I say, What can I do?
In the next few days? Mira says, probably a lot. And right now? She pauses, I guess you could finally ask me how I am. This seems more than reasonable.
How are you? And we both have to smile, because it is a little cold and a little impersonal and also a very good question, and Mira says, Okay, I guess.
We look down at Nora, her tiny nose and the few tufts of hair on her head and I say, She looks just like you, just to make Mira smile again, and it works. With her ring finger she reaches to touch the baby’s tiny knuckles and now I can’t look Mira in the eye, because I know she is starting to cry. Actually, Mira says, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. I have the option to pretend not to notice the tears. But there are a lot of things I can do, in the next few days. I look my sister in the eye and say, can I help? And so Mira hands me the baby.
Nora cries, a little whimper that could mean she is hungry, or tired, or bored, or just likes the sound of her own voice. My sister sighs a small sigh, just a slow exhale of breath, which is equally unreadable to me. I look down at Nora, who screws up her eyes to start another wail, and I say to her, And how are you, Norala? In the corner of my eye, I can see Mira start to smile a watery smile. Yeah, I continue, this whole new world is a little overwhelming, right? I can hear Mira laugh, just a little. But don’t worry, I say, we are going to be happy. In my arms, Nora doesn’t stop crying, but she looks at me, and I think she understands.
Eva Shapiro
We are going to be happy, my sister says, and I try to believe her. She is sitting on the couch, and I am sitting on the floor. I am afraid to touch her, because she looks as if she might evaporate, like a cloud of smoke. We are going to be happier than we are right now. I repeat it back to her. We are going to be happy. I try to sound reassuring. She is staring at the floor, right to the right of my knee and I am afraid to make eye contact with her, afraid to get this moment wrong. I get up and walk to the kitchen. I make hot chocolate with water because there’s no milk. I put in too much cocoa powder to make up for it. She holds the mug in her hands, lets the steam blur her glasses. She takes a sip and says, Thank you, it’s perfect. See, I say, we are already getting happier. I’m horrified as soon as I’ve said it, to have made light of this moment, ruining it forever. But she laughs, takes another sip, says, I told you so.
Or it starts like this: on December 22, my sister Mira, twenty-four years old, soon to be recipient of a master’s in public policy, and a strong believer in the friendliness of any intelligent life we might soon discover in the near-by universe, told me that she was going to have a baby. She actually told me that she was going to have a baby in six months maybe less, which is the kind of non-specific elaboration that Mira can so effectively use when she is worried. The first thing I said was, Oh. And the second thing I said was, Okay, wow. And the third thing I said was, Six months?
Maybe less, she repeated, because you know, you don’t know. Things could happen. She didn’t elaborate on things, but the unnatural stillness of her hands showed a running list of her own worries. Wow, I said again, Congratulations? Yes, that was the correct response, although ideally it would be a statement, not a question. Mira nodded anyway, an efficient acceptance. She said, I’ve always liked the name Nora.
That was yesterday. And now we are sitting, staring at the stained insides of our hot chocolate mugs, wondering who will find the right thing to say. Or maybe Mira is thinking about onesies and pureed food or maybe just what movie she wants to go see on Christmas. I want to know how to comfort her. It’s not that I never see Mira cry, because she cries often, frustrated, or overwhelmed by the endings of movies or the commercials where dogs and fathers come home to their families. But I hear her voice break when she says I don’t know what to do about school and I don’t know what to do about child care and I don’t know if I should move home and I don’t know– and the only thing I can think is that I’m not yet ready to be an adult.
I’ll wash your mug, I offer finally, cracking the silence down the middle. She hesitates a moment, just looking at me, and I hold out my hand. She gives me the mug and I duck into the kitchen, give the water from the faucet plenty of time to heat up, and wash the cups slowly, watching last dregs of chocolate sink down the drain. When I come back, Mira is watching the basketball game, just beginning the second quarter. We turn our heads towards the television, Mira silently, me, with an exaggerated groan at a should-be-foul, and then I feel embarrassed about it.
We are going to be happy. I want to believe her.
The next morning, I hover in the doorway to the room that is Mira’s when she’s home, the guest bedroom the rest of the year, and Mira’s, always, in conversation. She makes the bed, which she never used to do. It occurs to me that while I always regress to a younger version of myself when I’m home from school, Mira appears to have matured rapidly, become unknowable. Is there a movie you want to watch today? she asks me. This is a Mira that I recognize. Our plan had been to watch the major movies before the Golden Globes this year, but we’ve mostly been stuck on the Hallmark channel. Anything is fine, I say, as long as it’s something dumb. Mira doesn’t look up from the corner of the blanket she’s straightening. Of course, she says, no space in the brain for something serious. This is the closest we get to talking about it. We watch a movie. We pass a bag of almost-stale twizzlers back and forth, even though I outgrew my taste for them years ago. The characters in the movie hate their siblings, and I think about how lucky I am. As far as I know, she doesn’t cry again.
I hear her talking to our mom later, low voices in the kitchen, and I wonder if Mira is confessing her deepest worries, fears, whatever it is that she’s thinking right now. I imagine that our mom knows all the right answers. That she is saying, Miriam, here is what you do, I will help you. I wait outside the door for a moment, wanting to hear, but it’s muffled and trying feels invasive anyway. I walk into the kitchen, thinking maybe I’ll join the conversation, maybe I’ll be given access to the deepest, realest parts of my sister, but instead Mira offers me apple cider. I want to ask what they were talking about, but I can’t risk letting Mira not answer. Because then I would have to look her in the eye today and then again tomorrow and every time I think back on this Christmas it would be to remember a dinner table with moo shu vegetable, and knowing I wasn’t enough for her.
We watch movies.
We usher in the new year by pausing our movie long enough to watch the ball drop, and our parents toast us with sparkling cider. I toss the bottle cap at Mira, pretending it’s a champagne cork, and then wonder if I shouldn’t have called attention to the fact that Mira isn’t drinking. We can hear a few stray fireworks over the soccer field down the block, and on the television it’s sleeting in New York, and I feel lucky to be watching from inside. Mira leaves the next day, and I leave a week later. When I am asked, my first day back, by the girl-who-I-always-sit-next-to-in-discussion-section how my winter break was, I tell her the truth, which is that I would be a better Golden Globes voter than most, if not all, of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
When Mira first went away to college, we spent hours on the phone together. Talking endlessly, or just sitting with phones pressed to our ears, her at her dorm room desk and me staring out my window at the quiet traffic on our street. We talked about the weird food in her dining hall and whether the Wizards would be bad again, and then I would give the phone back to my mom who would ask me, How do you think Mira is? I would say, honestly, I don’t know.
And by the time I went off to college, four years later, the pattern was well established so I talked to her about the weird food in my dining hall and whether the Wizards would be bad again and I never told her about how I had stopped believing I was good at school how I didn’t think I was getting any smarter how I had dreams about how much I missed walking in Rock Creek Park how I had lots of people who liked me but I wasn’t sure I had friends. We are going to be happy.
My first week back at school I rush to every class, convinced I’ll be the last to show up, that I’ll have to climb over a row of people’s legs to get to an empty desk, the professor already lecturing and I’m blocking everyone’s line of sight. Instead, I end up ten minutes early to everything, mindlessly refreshing my email like something interesting is going to show up, ever. It takes until Thursday for me to realize I haven’t heard from Mira. On Friday, I realize it again, lying on my bed, exhausted from running around doing nothing all week, so it isn’t until Saturday that I send a text with a few too many exclamation points to seem totally normal. Four minutes later, Mira calls me. She asks me about my week, and I do my best to make the truth sound funny. I say, I keep thinking I’ll be late and so I’ve been ten minutes early to everything, but with the words hanging in the air, it feels intensely personal, like telling her the wishes I make on fallen eyelashes, or what I pray for. She says to me, Simone, you worry too much.
I know, I say. I do it for fun.
This is the moment that I think, Mira is pregnant. And then I think, how is this not the first thing I think of in the morning, the last thing in my head before I go to sleep? Oh G-d I am the worst sister ever. I want to ask her how she is feeling. I want to ask her how Jonah is, she hasn’t mentioned him and for all I know he went running the second he found out. For all I know, I found out before Jonah did. Baby Mira. Baby Mira-and-Jonah. I want to ask her if she has cried again, but I am scared that any wrong word will speak the tears back into existence.
Mira tells me about the class she’s TA-ing, and how she’s convinced a girl in the front row knows more than the professor and will make them all look like fools. She tells me calling on the girl is Like flipping the red card, and I laugh. It was a game we played over and over when we were little, a game of complicated rules which we invented on the top of the board from the game Clue. It makes me happy that she still thinks about it. I do, too. And then she says, Did you know that babies don’t see a whole spectrum of color until they're five months old? No, I say, I didn’t know that. And then, How weird. She hangs up shortly after, and I wonder whether she learned that from the internet, or if she went to the library and checked out a book.
On my way home from class the next day, I run into the girl I sit next to in my discussion section. It’s strange to see her outside of class, with an earbud tangled in her scarf from when she pulls it out to say hi to me. She has a floral print backpack which strikes me as stylish, although if I wore it, I would feel childish. She asks me what class I am coming from and for a moment I can’t remember the name of the class so I tell her what I remember from lecture, The levels of bacteria in the College Creek Watershed are too high for safe human contact, and she goes along with it, says, Where’s the College Creek Watershed? and I say, Right here. She says, Is that what those people outside the library with the signs about single-use plastic were talking about? I admit that I’m not sure who those people were, because I largely avoid the library, and further, that a lot of people talk about single-use plastic but not all of us are specifically concerned with the College Creek Watershed. She seems embarrassed about this, and I realize too late that I have made her feel stupid, so I say, I’m sorry, although I don’t specify about what. I tell her that I will check out what the people by the library were doing. My brain feels a long way from my mouth. She turns off to go meet a study group, and I am relieved that I get out a polite goodbye in time for her to wave and smile and disappear with her floral print backpack.
Mira and I shared a room for the first nine years of my life. We pushed our beds together and whispered into the night, long after we were supposed to be asleep. I never looked at the clock so that I could honestly say I didn’t know how late it was. When Mira told me stories, the combination of her age and the clarity of her voice made them true to me. Just like the characters in our favorite books, we talked about magic.
She would say, What if we woke up tomorrow morning and all of Connecticut Avenue was paved with jello?
And I would say, and the trees are sour apple lollipops?
Sure, the trees are lollipops, and the grass is sprinkles, and the L2 is made of marshmallow.
Does it still smell like gas?
No, silly. The buses run on marshmallow fluff.
What would you do, she would say, if we woke up tomorrow and all of Connecticut Avenue was paved in jello and the L2 ran on marshmallow fluff?
I would stall. I don’t know. What would you do?
When I was nine and Mira was thirteen, she moved into the second bedroom, which had been the guest room. She didn’t tell me in advance, and I remember thinking I must have done something wrong, because one day I had to go to bed and Mira wasn’t there anymore. It felt like an emptiness so present it sucked the light out of the room. Mira and I have been living primarily in different cities for the last seven years, and some days I still feel like that.
My mom is the one who says to me, you know Mirala hasn’t been feeling well. The nausea, still. She says it like she assumes I would know, and then pivots the conversation back to my plans for summer break, like that’s the important news in the family. I text Mira later, asking her how she is, trying to sound casual. I want to ask her about being pregnant but every iteration of the question that passes through my head sounds younger and more uninformed than the previous. I don’t say anything.
So my mom is the one who tells me when things are going well, when the nausea has mostly faded, when Jonah thinks he isn’t in a good place right now to raise a baby, when six months, maybe less has become five months, maybe less, four months, maybe less. Sometimes when I call, she has just gotten off the phone with Mira, It’s been a hard week, she tells me, it will get easier. That’s the way bodies work, and people. At two months, maybe less, she tells me Mira is home. That way we can help, she says, leaving me to wonder if she means help with Mira, help with the baby, help with the bills. I don’t want to sound judgmental, so I don’t ask.
In these conversations, the baby-to-be becomes less hypothetical. My experience with babies is holding younger cousins, playing Candyland with them a few years later, marveling at their clumsy fingers and determination to convince me that their purple card is, in fact, yellow. It occurs to me that I will be an important person in the life of baby Mira, my niece-or-nephew-to-be. I think about how, unlike my parents or my sister, baby Mira will always know me as an adult, someone more similar to her mother than to themself. I think that I would like more time to become a full person before someone sees me that way.
It turns out that the students talking about single-use plastic outside of the library are not worried about the College Creek Watershed so much as they are worried about the whole Chesapeake region. I spit out a statistic buried deep in my head about how quickly the area around the Bay is sinking, to show that I know what they are talking about, and also that I pay attention in class. They seem pleased to have a new ally in their fight, and my phone quickly fills with new contacts, other people who want to talk about single-use plastic and, while we’re at it, should we compare notes for the marine science midterm? I tell my mom that this is my new project, and I guess she tells Mira, because they both make sure I know what a great thing they think it is. I agree that it’s a good cause, although mostly, my cause is getting ignored by passing students who don’t want to hear about single-use plastic, while we stand on land that is slowly sinking.
When I was just about to start high school and Mira was just about to finish, she asked me for advice for the first time. She had a friend from high school who was going to the same college, and Mira wasn’t sure that she wanted to live with her friend. I was proud that Mira wanted my advice, and I told her it would be nice to have an old friend in a new place. Mira chose to have a randomly selected roommate, and I could never shake the fear that I had given the wrong answer, and that she judged me for it. Every time she asked for my advice, I waffled, thought about how my response could forever shape the way she saw me.
She doesn’t ask me for advice about the baby.
On the phone, I open my mouth to ask her if she has thought more about names, but I remember that this is bad luck. I open my mouth to ask her if it’s true what people say about how you should talk to the fetus, but that sounds weird and judgy just in my head. I open my mouth to ask if she is healthy, if everything is going right, but it sounds so cold, like something I should already know. There is a block in my throat and I know it’s my own imagination, but when I try to speak I start coughing and it feels so real. I open my mouth to tell Mira that I love her, and I say those words, I love you and hope that she understands it means that I love her, I love the baby-to-be, and I am scared of all of the things that I don’t know and don’t know how to say.
When I was around eight years old, it snowed unusually deep and I begged my mom to let me go sledding. Mira didn’t want to go and I doubt our mom did either, when we could have been sitting in front of the radiator. But at my insistence, we dragged ourselves outside, with doubled up socks and the cuffs of our jeans already wet. I dragged the sled out to the front of the hill and climbed in carefully. When we had both been small enough to fit, Mira and I would sit one behind the other and our mom would gently push us down the hill until we had the momentum to go flying. That time, I had to do it myself, which felt both independent and lonely. I flew down the hill, spun to a stop, collected myself, and began the trudge back up the hill, sled dragging behind me. It was on the second ride down the hill that I pointed the sled just slightly in the wrong direction, hit a weird divot in the ground, and went flying straight into a tree.
I remember the cracked plastic of the sled and the snow on my cheeks and in my hair and under the collar of my winter coat. I do not remember Mira running down the hill, running faster than even the sleds were going, but I know that she did because I remember her in front of me, picking me up, saying, Calm down Simone be calm this isn’t a big deal there’s barely any blood and mom will be here in just one second. And then our mom was there and we walked slowly back up the hill and home, our mom dragging the sled because Mira wouldn’t let go of my hand. In the end she was right, it wasn’t a big deal. All I got was a nosebleed and a strange bruise around my eye and the understanding that Mira would race down a hill for me when I needed her to. Her job, as an older sister, was to look out for me. My job was to trust her.
I stay around school for a month after exams end to wrap up loose ends on the single-use plastics project and pretend my junior year isn’t yet over. We’re canvassing for a city council vote, and I spend whole days going house by house down the streets around campus, ringing doorbells and dropping off pamphlets. Most of the doors remain shut despite my most polite knocks, and some get slammed in my face. Occasionally, the people behind the doors are supportive, which makes me feel good. My parents tell me I am doing something important, which makes me feel proud. The houses around campus are the same brick colonial style with the same oak trees out front as the houses I grew up around, which makes me feel settled. When I realize that I am here and Mira is home, preparing quietly for a baby who will live on land that is sinking towards a polluted ocean, I feel like I need to move faster, knock on more doors, talk to more people. I have something I need to do, and this makes me feel good too.
My mom calls me early in a day which I have planned to spend knocking on doors and saying the phrase single-use plastic so many times it starts to sound like nonsense and not a critical factor to influence the world in the generation to come. She tells me that she and Mira and our dad are headed to the hospital, that we’re about to welcome the new baby into our family. This is how she says it, welcome the new baby. I think that it sounds like the baby has been living somewhere else and has just come to join us, will sit with us at family dinner and make conversation as we try not to talk about mutual friends who the baby doesn’t know.
I am supposed to go to a city council meeting tonight. It’s the only meeting of the month, and we’ve spent all week preparing. I am not speaking, but I have a stack of flyers to hand around. Many of them are printed in the wrong colors, and we left them that way because wasting paper goes against everything we want to be. I will almost certainly miss the moment of the baby’s birth anyway. Mira will be tired and need sleep, our parents will be distracted, the baby will remember nothing. I could go tomorrow, when things will have calmed down and I can be helpful. We were going to hand out flyers at the city council meeting and celebrate either our success or the uselessness of what we do, maybe both. We were going to eat ice cream and laugh about all the doors which had been slammed in our faces. I was just starting to think that I liked these people, and that they liked me too. That for the first time, I would leave campus knowing that in the fall I would come back to people I call my friends.
The Chesapeake region will sink anyway. My sister is having a baby, no matter what. I need to go home. I need to go to Mira, and to this baby-to-be, who will shortly be an actual baby, with fingers and toes and vocal chords and, I suppose, a consciousness. I want someone else to tell me what to do. I wish that the voice in my head sounded like someone else, anyone else, who wasn’t me, someone who I would trust and listen to. I need to go home, because it’s Mira, and she can’t come to me.
As the train winds past Ashland, I try to rest against the window until the vibration of the car becomes unbearable, and then I sit up straight and close my eyes and try to picture the newborn baby, who in my head looks like a plastic doll just pulled from a plastic box, but with Mira’s eyes. The eyes are reminding me that I should have talked to her six months ago, or any time since, that I am a bad person or a coward or worse, less of a sister than I claim to be.
When the train stops for a little too long in Charlottesville I think about how Mira was my first and closest friend, before I knew what this meant or why it was special to have someone who would devote so much attention to you. I think about how when I tell stories or make jokes they often start with My sister and I or My sister was telling me. I think about how someone at school had mentioned, off-handed, a year or so back, You and your sister must be really close, and without thinking for a second I had said, She’s my best friend. As we pull into Union Station, I think about how last year on Mira’s birthday I didn’t send a gift, because I couldn’t think of something worth giving her, something that meant enough. I mailed her homemade a card with just a few, awkward sentences, drawn with the same ballpoint pens I take notes in class with, and hoped that this was enough to demonstrate how much I cared.
In the hospital room, sitting on the plastic chair that has our mom’s sweater hung over the back, I say, I love you, I love you, I love you, and I love the baby too. Mira says, you haven’t even met the baby yet but she sounds tired and happy and I feel tired and happy too. She tells me that the baby was born only a few hours earlier, and has been in the nursery, where my parents are now picking her up, while Mira took a nap. After all this time, I can’t quite wrap my head around meeting this baby, this person who has just come into existence. I think again about the card that I sent Mira last fall, and I say, What would you have wanted for your birthday? And Mira says, what are you talking about? Her birthday is half a year away. I say, I wish I knew how to get you a good present. I don’t know what you would want. She looks at me, still confused, and I don’t know how to explain so I say, The hospital really shouldn’t use disposable utensils, you throw them away and they end up contaminating water sources, and then I say, I’m trying to tell you something, and Mira says, Can it wait until later? I say of course, and promise myself that this was a dress rehearsal and I will not let myself be derailed by single-use plastic again.
Our parents come back, our mother holding a swaddled blanket with a hat on top, who is now my niece. Mira holds the baby, which the internet has told me is important to bond. It amazes me that a gesture so small, so early in life, could really matter at all. I reach out to touch the side of the blanket, thinking that I want to be bonded to the baby from her first hours as well, but Mira’s arm is there, so I tap the tips of my fingers against the blanket, feeling like I’m invading on something. I want to apologize for this, too, so I say I love you, thinking that I probably don’t say it enough. And Mira says, I love you too, always. She sounds so confident, and I wish I had felt that confident about anything, ever.
Mira tells our parents to get food, and they say that they aren’t hungry, and then Mira tells them that she is hungry, and they go to get her food. I stare at the bundle that is the baby, and I wonder if she is too warm all wrapped up in the blanket. And then I tell her, tell them both, I’m going to do better. Because this is the most important part.
Better at what? Mira says.
At talking. At talking to you, especially. I pause on the last word for a second, enjoying it. You’re very special to me.
Mira looks at me a little strangely, like she’s not quite sure how I got to be sitting next to her. Simone? She says, Are you okay?
I’m sorry.
For what? Simone?
Why do you sound so worried about me? The words snap like a rubber band, my voice creeping higher. I force myself to hold still. I don’t want the baby to start crying. Why is it so easy for you to sound worried?
Simone. I don’t understand.
Mira. Should we just keep saying each other’s names.
Simone.
I wait out the echo of her voice saying my name gently in my ears, and then enjoy the silence. And then I stop enjoying the silence, it becomes near unbearable and I know that this is my cue to explain, finally, to put my voice and my thoughts and my overwhelming heart to some use.
I say, I thought I should know how you were doing without having to ask. I say, I was scared to ask. I didn’t know, and I didn’t ask, and I didn’t pay attention and you went and had a whole baby while I acted like nothing was changing. And I say, I’m sorry.
I want to wrap myself in a blanket like the baby has, just for the comfort of having something around me. I want to drink a gallon of water to soothe my dry mouth. I want to look my sister in the eye.
Simone.
Mira. I’m really sorry.
It’s too warm for a blanket. I can’t move to get the water. I look the baby in the eye. Her eyes are blue, the way babies’ eyes often are, but they won’t stay that way, we don’t have a single gene for blue eyes anywhere in our family. The baby closes her eyes, reminding me that this is not the point. I look up at my sister, who is frowning, like she’s concentrating.
Thank you, Mira says, it was a really hard few months.
We sit with this knowledge for a moment, and then the baby makes a noise, just a tiny Eh eh eh, and Mira rocks her arms, confidently, so I have to assume this is what the baby wanted. I say, So you decided on Nora? Mira tells me that Nora can mean light, which is beautiful, or terrible, which is not, or lightbulb, which might be even worse. She tells me that the point is not the meaning of the name but the way it sounds on your tongue, and I say the name aloud, trying to feel what she means, but I can’t make it work. I think that probably Mira is a little tired to be making any sense anyway, so I tell her that Nora is a perfect name, that it fits the baby just right, that the baby will be full of light and occasionally terrible and may even go on to invent a clean energy lightbulb that never burns out. I think that maybe I am too tired to be making sense either, and neither of us are in a position to do anything about it, because there is Nora, blinking sleepily in the afternoon light.
I say, What can I do?
In the next few days? Mira says, probably a lot. And right now? She pauses, I guess you could finally ask me how I am. This seems more than reasonable.
How are you? And we both have to smile, because it is a little cold and a little impersonal and also a very good question, and Mira says, Okay, I guess.
We look down at Nora, her tiny nose and the few tufts of hair on her head and I say, She looks just like you, just to make Mira smile again, and it works. With her ring finger she reaches to touch the baby’s tiny knuckles and now I can’t look Mira in the eye, because I know she is starting to cry. Actually, Mira says, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. I have the option to pretend not to notice the tears. But there are a lot of things I can do, in the next few days. I look my sister in the eye and say, can I help? And so Mira hands me the baby.
Nora cries, a little whimper that could mean she is hungry, or tired, or bored, or just likes the sound of her own voice. My sister sighs a small sigh, just a slow exhale of breath, which is equally unreadable to me. I look down at Nora, who screws up her eyes to start another wail, and I say to her, And how are you, Norala? In the corner of my eye, I can see Mira start to smile a watery smile. Yeah, I continue, this whole new world is a little overwhelming, right? I can hear Mira laugh, just a little. But don’t worry, I say, we are going to be happy. In my arms, Nora doesn’t stop crying, but she looks at me, and I think she understands.
