Sisters

Chapter 13

The next few weeks were insanely hectic for Sabrina. She took care of her father, and tried to buoy his spirits. Candy wasn't as much help as she'd hoped. She was easily distracted, disorganized, and still too upset about their mother's death to assist in the ways Sabrina needed. In so many aspects, Candy was still a child, and now she expected Sabrina to mother her. Sabrina did her best, but sometimes it was very hard.

After signing the lease, they went back through the house to decide which of the furniture they wanted to keep. There were a lot of pretty pieces that Sabrina and Candy both agreed they liked. She helped Candy put her apartment up for rent. It was off the market in three days, at a profit to Candy. She was going to make enough from it to cover her rent. And Sabrina got out of her lease, for a minimum penalty. She sold some of her furniture, put other pieces in storage, and earmarked what they'd need on East Eighty-fourth Street. Candy had rented her penthouse fully furnished, so they had nothing to move from there. Sabrina had told Candy to book the movers for August first. It was something she could do to help. And between the four hundred phone calls she had to make, Sabrina visited Annie every day. She had finally agreed to move in with them and see how it went. After her second meeting with Dr. Steinberg, Annie had told both of her sisters that if they babied her or made her feel helpless, she would move out. And both Candy and Sabrina had agreed, and said they would be respectful of her and wait until she asked for their help, unless she was about to fall down the stairs.

By the third week of July, when Annie was released from the hospital, all three girls were excited about the house and living together again, in spite of why they were moving there.

Annie's first days at her father's house were difficult. Being there without their mother was newer to her than to the others. They had already been there for three weeks without her. For Annie, it was all fresh. She knew the house perfectly, so could move around fairly easily, but in every room she expected to hear her mother's voice. She walked into her closets, and felt her clothes with her fingers and put them to her face. She could smell her perfume, and almost sense her in the room. It was agony at times being there, and reminded her again and again of her last vision of the steering wheel slipping out of her mother's hands as she flew out of the car. The memory haunted Annie, and she spoke of it during every session with Dr. Steinberg. She couldn't get it out of her mind, nor the feeling that she should have done something to stop it, but there hadn't been time. She even dreamed of it at night, and losing Charlie after the accident just made things worse. In some ways, she was glad she was moving to New York, and not back to Florence. She needed a fresh start. But her father had agreed not to give up her apartment there for a while.

Her treatment plan when she left the hospital was fairly straightforward, and the ophthalmologist explained it to Sabrina as well. Sabrina was beginning to feel more like Annie's mother than her sister. She was responsible for everyone now. Annie, Candy because she was still so young and irresponsible at times, and their father, who seemed to be getting more helpless by the hour. He lost things, broke things, cut himself twice, and couldn't remember where anything was, or worse, had never known. Sabrina commented to Tammy on the phone late one night that their mother must have done everything except chew his food for him. He had been totally pampered, protected, and spoiled. She had been the consummate wife, and it wasn't Sabrina's style. She tried to get him to do some things for himself, with very little success. He complained a lot, whined constantly, and cried often. It was understandable, but Sabrina was at her wit's end dealing with him and everything else.

Annie's doctor wanted her to have follow-up CT scans after her brain surgery, and he had strongly recommended that she attend a training school for the blind in New York for six months. He had told her and Sabrina that it would allow Annie to become independent, and able to live successfully on her own, which was ultimately their goal. Annie had been sullen about it for days after they talked, and wandered around her father's house looking depressed. She had a white cane, but wouldn't use it. In her parents' house she managed well, as long as no one moved anything. Candy left a chair out of place in the dining room, and as Annie cruised through the room unsuspectingly, she fell flat on her face. Candy apologized profusely as she helped her up.

“That was not cute!” Annie said, furious with her, but more at the fates that had humbled her this way. “Why did you do that?”

“I forgot… I'm sorry…I didn't do it on purpose!” It was the kind of thing Candy would have said as a child, and still did. Intent was all that mattered to her, not result.

Annie was determined to bathe herself alone, and forbade her sisters to come into the bathroom with her, although she'd never been modest before, and no one in the family really was. Their father was circumspect and never appeared at breakfast without a robe, and their mother had been as well, but the girls had always drifted in and out of each other's bathrooms, looking for hair dryers, curling irons, nail polish remover, clean panty hose, and a missing bra, in various states of undress. Now Annie went in fully dressed and closed and locked the door. Her second day home, her bathtub had overflowed, and as water poured through the dining room chandelier directly below it, Sabrina realized what had happened, and ran upstairs. She pounded on the door, and Annie finally let her in. Sabrina turned the tub off for her, standing in two inches of water on the marble floor.

“This isn't working,” Sabrina said calmly. “I know you don't want it, but you need help. You need to learn some tricks of the trade here, or you're going to drive yourself and everyone else nuts. What can I do to help?” Sabrina asked, cleaning up the bathroom.

“Just leave me alone!” she shouted at her and locked herself in her room.

“Fine,” Sabrina steamed, but said nothing more. In the end, she had to call an electrician, a carpeting firm to dry the carpets, and a painter to repair the damage. Annie was furious with both her sister and herself. It took two more incidents for Annie to agree to at least think about going to school in September, to learn how to deal constructively with being blind. Until then she pretended to herself that it was a temporary condition and she could deal with it on her own. She couldn't. That much was clear to all of them, and her anger at all of them was very wearing. She was no longer anyone they recognized. She wouldn't even let Sabrina or Candy help her comb or brush her hair, and the second week she was home she chopped it off herself. The results were disastrous, and Sabrina found her sitting in her room, on the floor, sobbing, with her long auburn hair all around her. She looked like she'd been attacked by a buzz saw, and when Sabrina saw her, she put her arms around her and they both cried.

“Okay,” Annie said finally, resting her head on her sister's shoulder, “okay…I can't do this…I hate being blind… I'll go to school… but I don't want a dog.”

“You don't have to have a dog.” But she clearly needed help. Just seeing her in the mental state she was in was depressing their father too. He felt helpless when he watched her stumble and fall, pour hot coffee on her hand as she tried to fill the cup, or spill her food like a two-year-old.

“Can't you do something for her?” he asked Sabrina miserably.

“I'm trying,” she said, doing her best not to snap at him. She was calling Tammy five and six times a day, who was feeling guilty for having left, and still hadn't found anyone to fill the pregnant star's place. Her life was in turmoil too, and she felt as though she was letting her family down by being in L.A. All of them were desperately unhappy in one way or another, and Annie most of all.

She finally let Candy fix her hair. She was too embarrassed to go to their mother's hairdresser to let them clean it up. She didn't want them to see her that way, blind, with hair that looked like it had been lopped off with a machete. She had used her desk scissors, and it looked pretty bad. Her hair had been beautiful, silky, and long, much like Candy's, only longer and a reddish-brown color instead of blond.

“Okay, new hairdo coming right up,” Candy said, sitting on the floor with her the day after she'd cut off her hair. Until then, she looked like she'd just been let out of prison. Her hair was sticking up all over the place, some bits were short, others were slightly longer, and all of it was a mess. “I'm actually pretty good at this,” Candy reassured her. “I'm always cleaning up people's hair after shoots, when some nutjob psycho hairdresser does something that fucks the model's hair up even if it looked great at the shoot. But the good news here,” Candy said cheerfully, “is that you can't see what I'm doing. So if I fuck it up, you won't get mad.” What she said was so awful that it made Annie laugh, and she sat, looking docile, for the entire procedure as Candy snipped, tugged, brushed, combed, and snipped some more. It looked stylish and adorable when she was through, and Annie looked like an elegant Italian elf with a slightly spiked top and a little longer on the sides, and all of it framed her face with its shining copper color and set off her green eyes. Candy was just admiring her work when Sabrina walked into her bedroom, and saw hair all over the floor. The room was a disaster, but Annie looked prettier than ever, as though she'd gone to a top hairdresser in London or Paris for her new style.

“Wow!” she said, as she stood in the doorway, impressed by how competent Candy was. It was her business, after all, to look stylish, sexy, and fashionable. It was the best haircut Sabrina had seen in years. “Annie, you look fantastic! It's a whole new you. And now we know what Candy can do if her modeling career ever tanks. You can definitely open a hair salon. You can do mine any day.”

“Do I really look okay?” Annie asked, looking worried. It had been a major gesture of confidence to let Candy cut her hair. She had had no idea how bad it looked after her irate hack job-totally awful and scary-looking. And Candy had transformed it into something magical and cute. It was sexy and young, like Annie herself, and actually looked better on her than her long straight hair, which Candy had always told her made her look like a hippie, and half the time she wore it in a braid. She had gone from Mother Earth to movie star in half an hour, at Candy's hands.

“You look a lot better than okay,” Sabrina reassured her. “You look like the cover of Vogue. Our baby sister definitely has a knack with hair. All these hidden talents we seem to have. I seem to have missed my calling as a maid. Which reminds me, ladies, if we're going to play Hair Salon in the future”-it was a game they'd loved as children, doing each other's hair and nails, and creating a gigantic mess-“do you think we could do it in the bathroom? I'd like to remind you that Hannah is off this week, and the cleaning staff is me. So please…”

“Oops…,” Candy said, looking embarrassed. She hadn't even noticed. She never did. She was so used to other people waiting on her and cleaning up after her, on shoots and even in her apartment, that she was totally unaware of the mess she'd made. There was hair everywhere. “Sorry, Sabrina. I'll clean it up.”

“Sorry,” Annie added, wishing she could help, but there was no way she could see the hair, or even sense it, to help clean it up.

“Don't worry about it,” Sabrina said to Annie. “You can do other stuff to help me out. Maybe you could help Dad load the dishwasher. He must have a vision problem too-he keeps putting dishes in it with food on them. I don't think he gets how it works. The dishwasher just cements the food onto the plates and cutlery. I guess Mom never let him help.”

“I'll go downstairs,” Annie said, getting to her feet and feeling her way out of the room. She looked absolutely beautiful with her new haircut, and Sabrina told her so again.

She found Annie and her father in the kitchen twenty minutes later. Annie could feel the food on the plates and rinsed them off. She did a much better job of it than their father, who wasn't blind, just helpless and spoiled. It was depressing to see how lost he was since their mother had died. The strong, wise father they had all looked up to had vanished before their eyes. He was weak, scared, confused, depressed, and cried all the time. Sabrina had suggested seeing a shrink to him too, and he refused, although he needed one as much as Annie, who seemed to be liking hers.

She let Annie babysit for him, while she and Candy went into the city to get ready for their move. Annie had already been to the house and felt her way around it. She said she liked her room, although she couldn't see it. She liked having her own space, and said it was a decent size, and she was pleased with having Candy across the hall, in case she needed help. But she didn't want anyone's assistance unless she asked. She had made that clear. She got into jams constantly, but tried valiantly to work them out for herself, sometimes with good results. At other times she didn't, which usually led to temper tantrums and tears. She wasn't easy to live with these days, but she had a more-than-valid excuse. Sabrina hoped that going to a training school for the blind would improve her attitude. If not, Annie was going to be tough to be around for a long time. Between their father's crushing depression over losing his wife and Annie's anger over her blindness, the atmosphere around them was extremely stressful for them all. And Sabrina noticed that Candy was eating less and less. Her eating disorder seemed to be in full bloom since their mother's death. The only normal person Sabrina could talk to was Chris, who had the patience of a saint, but he was busy too, with his latest mammoth suit. Sabrina felt as though she was being pulled in fourteen directions, caring for all of them and organizing the move, especially now that she was back at work.

“Are you okay?” he asked her worriedly one night. They were at her old apartment, and she had said she was too tired to even eat. She had had a beer for dinner and nothing else, and she seldom drank.

“I'm exhausted,” she said honestly, laying her head on his lap. He had been watching the baseball game on TV while she packed her books. They were moving in three days, and there was a heat wave in the city, which her air conditioner couldn't make a dent in. She was hot and tired and felt filthy after packing for several hours. “I feel like I'm caretaker to half the world. I don't even know where to stop. My father can hardly tie his shoelaces, and he does less and less every day. He refuses to go back to work. Candy looks like she just got out of Auschwitz, and Annie is going to kill herself slashing her wrists while she tries to slice the bread and won't let anybody help. And nobody is doing anything to make this move happen except me.” He could see that she was near tears and completely overwhelmed.

“It'll get better once Annie goes to school.” He tried to sound encouraging, but he had noticed everything she had said. It was incredibly upsetting being around her family these days, and it worried him too, mostly for her. She was carrying all the weight, and it was way too much for her, or any one person. He felt helpless as he watched, and did all he could to help her.

“Maybe. If she sticks with it, and is willing to learn,” Sabrina said with a sigh. “Annie wants to do everything herself, and some things she just can't. And the minute she can't, she gets crazy and starts throwing things, usually at me. I feel like we all need a good shrink.”

“Maybe that's not a bad idea. What are you doing about Candy?” It was always about what she was doing, as though they were all her children and it all rested on her. She had renewed respect for her mother now, for raising four children, and taking care of her husband as though he were her fifth child. She wondered how she did it. But she had done nothing else while they grew up. Sabrina was working at her law firm, trying to move into the new house, run back and forth from Connecticut to the city, and keep everybody's spirits up, except her own.

“I'm not doing anything about Candy. She used to see someone for her eating disorder when she was younger. And she's been better for a while, not great but better. Now it's completely out of hand again. I'll bet you anything she's lost five pounds, maybe ten, since Mom died. But she's an adult. She's twenty-one. I can't force her to go to a doctor if she doesn't want to. And when I mention it, she goes nuts. The danger is that she'll wind up sterile, lose her teeth or hair, or worse, develop a heart problem, or die. Anorexia is nothing to screw around with. But she won't listen to me. She says she doesn't want kids, she gets hair extensions so her hair looks great anyway, and so far her health doesn't seem to be affected. But one of these days it's all going to take its toll, and she'll wind up in the hospital with an IV in her arm or worse. Mom used to handle it better than I did, but she had more clout. No one listens to me, they just want me to solve the problems and get off their backs. I don't know how I got stuck with this, but it's a really shit job.” They both knew how she had gotten stuck with it. Her mother had died. And Sabrina was next in line, as oldest child. And she had a personality that let her take on everyone else's problems and try to solve them, no matter what it did to her life. She did it at work too. And no matter what Chris said, or how often he urged her to take it easy, she always did just one more thing, for someone else. And the person who always got short shrift and didn't get her needs met was her, and now him as well. They had hardly had five minutes of peace alone in the last three and a half weeks since the accident. He kept her father entertained and cooked for the entire family every weekend, and she did everything else. They were suddenly like the parents of a large family, taking care of their many children, except that all of them, for one reason or another, were dysfunctional adults. She felt as though her family and her life were falling apart. But at least Chris was still around. Tammy had warned her that he wouldn't be, if Sabrina didn't take it easy and slow down. It was easy for her to say, living in California, three thousand miles away, while Sabrina was running the show, and picking up pieces everywhere. She felt as though their once-orderly life was in tiny shards all around her. She lay on the couch and cried.

“Come on,” Chris said to her then. “I'm putting you to bed. You're wiped out. You can finish packing tomorrow.”

“I can't. The movers are coming to take the stuff to storage, and I have to be back at my dad's tomorrow night.”

“Then I'll do it. That's it. Bedtime. No discussion,” he said, taking her by the hand, pulling her off the couch, and leading her into the bedroom. He undressed her as she smiled at him. He was truly the best man in the world. She was feeling a little giddy from the beer on an empty stomach.

“I love you,” she said, climbing into bed in her thong and nothing else. Candy had given it to her as a gift. She never bought herself things like that. And Chris loved it.

“I love you too. And I love that too,” he said, touching the black lace thong. “As soon as you move, I'm taking you away for the weekend. We're turning into a couple of old farts. Your sisters are just going to have to manage without us for two days.” She knew that she needed to spend time with him too. It was only fair. They hadn't had a minute alone since her mother died, and by the time she fell into bed at night, she was too tired to even think about making love, and too sad. She was still in deep mourning for her mother, and so was everyone else. Chris understood that, but he missed the life they had led before it happened. He knew things would get better eventually, but it was hard to say when, particularly given the magnitude of Annie's problem.

And he wasn't at all sure what it would be like staying with Sabrina once she and two of her sisters were living together. It had the possibility of turning into some real high drama and chaos, or like sleeping in the dorm of a sorority. He wanted time alone with her and was afraid that he might not get any for the next year. It was a scary thought, but he didn't want to upset her by voicing his own fears or complaining. She had enough on her plate as it was, and he didn't want to add to it. But like Sabrina, he was getting short shrift too.

He lay down next to her on the bed, stroked her hair, and rubbed her back, and within five minutes she was sound asleep, as he lay next to her, wondering if they'd ever get married. Having the full responsibility of her entire family now wasn't likely to help his cause. He was going to give her a few months to calm down, and then talk to her about it. He wanted to get married and have a family. And one of these days he wanted her to bite the bullet and take the leap. He didn't want her to miss out on having kids because she was scared and had seen too many bad divorces and bitter custody battles through her work. That was no excuse to shortchange them. Not anymore, after three years together. In normal times, they had a wonderful relationship, and Chris wanted more. His worst fear was that normal would never come their way again, and her sisters would become her life.

When Sabrina woke up in the morning, he was gone. He'd had an early breakfast meeting with the associate counsel on his case, to bring him up to speed. He had left her a note, telling her to take it easy. She smiled when she read it. He said he'd see her in Connecticut on Friday night. And then he was coming back into the city with her on Saturday to help her move. It was going to be a wild weekend. Candy was coming into the city to help. And their father would be babysitting Annie, or the reverse. Sabrina just hoped that everyone kept it together and no major disasters happened. She no longer had the same faith in life-that things would turn out okay-that she'd had a month before. Her mother's death had shown her that everything could change in the fraction of an instant. Life could end. And look what had happened to Annie.