Magpie Tales#70

Tess Kincaid's photo prompt this week is a family portrait.

Julia

   My sister was born at home, on my birthday, when I was eight.  Gran came to stay even though Mum said she'd be alright, she'd manage, and when I came in from school Gran said "Well, Lucy. You have a little sister. Come and see." She took my hand and led me to the small bedroom that would be the nursery and we stood by the crib, looking down at the sleeping baby. I learned later, much later, that what I felt as I gazed at this mite, my eighth birthday present, my new sister, is called 'falling in love.' I knelt by the crib and stroked her baby hair and her tiny fingers and asked Gran what she was called and Gran said something so amazing I couldn't believe it. "Your Mum and Dad said because she came on your birthday and is a sort of twin, you can choose her name."

   So I asked could she be Julia, because there was a ballet dancer in my reading book called Julia, but a sister  was better than any dancer and Mum and Dad both said she would like her name and I wondered if I would ever tell her how she got it.
   Now when I look back, her early years telescope into a handful of memories. Her first word is "Oosy." She holds my two hands and I go from room to room, backwards, helping her toddle. We become "Jucier and Looly." Some nights at bedtime she brings Sydney, her toy panda and stands by my bed, meaning can she come in for a cuddle and we pretend we are poor waifs lost in a dark wood until Sydney rescues us and we fall asleep. She shows me how you wiggle a loose tooth and gives me the first when at last it comes out. Yes, I still have it. Mum says sometimes when I am at school she lies where the sunshine comes in through the bay-window in the afternoon, and moves round with it till I get home, and then we make lego towers or houses till tea is ready and I watch her hands, so careful, and see her concentration, and I gulp with love for her.

   When I was fourteen, nearly, I became a woman. I told her what was happening and how sometimes my tummy would hurt. She asked if this happened to Mum and Gran and was wide-eyed when I told her this happened to all women and then she forgot about it, as children will. She was nearly six. But she gave me Sydney. She was “too old for him now, Loola. He can keep your sore tummy warm.”

   She had her friends and I had my boyfriends and then all too soon, the same month she became her school’s triple-jump champion, she too became a woman. The school taught the mechanics. I told her about joy and yearning and heartbreak, how to be careful and that she could always talk to me, and then one day, out of nowhere it seemed, there she was, my bridesmaid, sixteen, poised and lovely, grown taller than me. I didn’t throw my bouquet. I gave it into her hands, Julia, my beautiful sister, and we began going our different ways.

   My marriage was four years old and less than I had hoped it would be when she visited one day and told me she had been pregnant but had miscarried at the first trimester and had things to tell me. She looked wrecked. She didn’t want tea, or a drink. I went to the bedroom and came back with Sydney, and she knew what I meant. We lay down. I held her and let her cry, and that’s when my husband came in. He called “Hi, Luce,” from the hall and Julia said “Oh, My God!” He came into the bedroom and looked at us on the bed, and began shouting about what he’d always known. How I thought more of my fucking sister than I did of him and how we were a pair of lezzas. I got all of what was wrong with me and with our marriage, while Julia hid her face and sobbed until I said “For God’s sake shut up, Zack! She’s just lost a pregnancy.” He just said “Julia?” and went very still.
   How could I not have known? Why did I not guess? She’d had things to tell me! Next thing I was screaming at them out of red caves of rage. I rolled off the bed, hauled my tall sister to her feet, called her a fucking bitch and punched her, punched my beloved Julia once, right where their baby had been, so she doubled over, retching. When they had gone I sat on the bed for hours, sometimes silent, sometimes wailing. Zack phoned first. I asked him not to come back. I was leaving him. I heard him begin to say something about Julia before I put the phone down. It was three days before Julia phoned. All she said was “Lucy, I betrayed you. But I’m not with Zack,” before I heard her phone go down.

   That was four years ago. She never writes, or calls. But several times a year, and always on our birthday, I get photographs by email. They are often mountain scenes; in the Cascades, Yosemite, the Chilean Andes. And recently, pictures of Save the Children projects in Africa, and at last, at last, one showing Julia, tanned and lean, wearing shorts and a big hat, reading to a group of rapt African kids. Love is a verb, not a noun. I email back – “Come home, Joo.” And her message says “In a while. How’s Sydney?” so that I cry, properly cry at last. It may be a little or a long while, but some day it will be the right day, when she truly feels she is forgiven as I now know she has forgiven me, and we are ready, both of us, to accept the other’s forgiveness, and can learn to be sisters again.