My Sister Got Switzerland. I Got the Basement

My sister Zoe had been sick in Switzerland for two years.

For those two years, my mother never once let me turn on the heat upstairs. She'd shut the valve in my room with a wrench and left it that way.

"Zoe's room is kept at sixty-five degrees. Not one degree warmer. What gives you the right to sit up here roasting?"

I slept under two blankets all winter. Most mornings my fingers were too stiff to tie my shoes.

Zoe couldn't keep solid food down, so my dinner was always cold.

Zoe hadn't had a birthday since she was seventeen, so I never got a cake.

Zoe needed a nurse just to sit up in bed. So me winning a race? That made me a monster.

That afternoon I took first in the 1600 at the state championship.

My mother pulled the medal off my neck in the parking lot. She didn't say one word the whole drive home.

When we got there, she walked me straight down to the basement.

There was no light switch down there. The switch was at the top of the stairs, and she was standing right next to it.

"Nora. You know why you're down there."

She hadn't even taken her coat off. Beige, not a wrinkle in it.

"Because I came in first."

"Because you don't think about your sister for one second." She sighed. "Last month Zoe couldn't roll over on her own. A nurse has to turn her every two hours or she gets bedsores. And you're out in the sun holding this thing up for pictures. Does that seem right to you?"

"Then I shouldn't have run. You could have said something."

"I did. You didn't listen."

"You never said anything."

"You want to go see her?"

"Yes. I've asked you a hundred times."

"When you grow up a little."

Before I turned twelve, a line like that would have made me cry. I would have sat right down and started wondering whether I really was that selfish.

Now I just wanted my medal back.

I held out my hand. "Give it to me."

She lifted it a few inches higher.

I went for it.

I was half a head taller than her. I ran six miles a day. I thought I could take it off her.

She slapped me back onto the stairs. My lower back hit the railing and for a while I couldn't straighten up.

"I let you run because the school needs to see that everything is normal in this house." She turned the medal over and looked at the back. "Not so you could bring it home and wave it around."

She dropped it on the floor and ground her heel into it.

Metal on concrete. It was an ugly sound. The ribbon came apart along one edge.

Then she took out her phone and photographed it lying there.

"I'll send this to your sister," she said. "So she knows her little sister is keeping her company."

I was still on the stairs, still trying to get my breath back.

"She can't hold a phone. That's what you told me."

My mother looked up. For about a second, she didn't say anything.

"No dinner tonight." She turned and went up. "Zoe lives on an IV. You can skip one meal."

The door shut. The bolt turned twice.

Click.

Upstairs the TV came on. My dad was watching a game, and he had it up loud.

I climbed the stairs and banged on the door twice.

"Dad."

The TV went one notch louder.

I hit it again. I'd banged on that door plenty of times before. The longest was forty minutes, until my hands went numb. He never came down. Not once.

So I stopped.

I sat on the stairs for twenty minutes, until my eyes adjusted. Then I got up.

There was a stack of boxes in the corner. The one on top said ZOE MEDICAL in black marker.

I'd been through that box before. Twice in three years. Both times all I found were bills from St. Anne's in Switzerland. Letterhead, account numbers, the whole thing. They looked real.

Every month my mother spread them out on the dinner table for my dad, and then explained that my food budget would have to come down again.

So I believed it.

But yesterday I took out the trash and found a shipping label that hadn't been torn all the way through.

The return address wasn't Switzerland. It was this state. The next county over.

I moved the top three boxes off the stack. Underneath was a newer one, taped shut, the corners still clean.

That box hadn't been there before.

I cut the tape with the edge of my medal.

No hospital bills inside. Just a stack of bank statements.

The payee column had one name on it, all the way down.

Cedar Ridge Academy.

One payment on the first of every month. Thirty-two hundred dollars each time. More than twenty months of them.

The last one was last month.

I had no idea what Cedar Ridge was. The name sounded like a school.

But my sister was supposed to be at St. Anne's. She was supposed to be lying in a room kept at sixty-five degrees, getting turned over every two hours.

I held the top statement up to the little window where the streetlight came in and read it over and over. It still didn't add up.

Footsteps on the stairs again.

I shoved the whole stack back in, pushed the box into the corner, and piled the other three on top of it.

Then the lights came on.

My mother was standing in the doorway. She wasn't holding food.

She was holding a pair of garden shears.

"I was thinking about this upstairs." She smiled. "Zoe lost all her hair to the chemo."

"You, walking around like that. Does that seem right to you?"

I backed up until my shoulders hit the wall.