Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, I sing in my head as I hold my hair back and bend over my cake, smelling vanilla and wax. One swift intake of breath, and I blow out all fourteen candles. Tendrils of smoke rise from fourteen charred wicks, and from behind the haze I see Mom and Dad clapping—she, skinny, her smile straining towards happiness, and he, unshaven, his green polo too tight over his stomach. “What’d you wish for?” Dad asks in a high theatrical voice, as he does every year, knowing that I will never tell. But this year it seems to go without telling; in the darkened hotel suite, I can feel our three minds drifting into the bedroom where my sister, Irene, is still sleeping. In the thick, humid silence that follows, Mom walks to draw the curtains. The beach down below comes again into view: white surf lipping the sand, and the tiny bodies like ants, drowning in the frothy shoreline. In the light that floods the room, I see that the cake decorator spelled “Olivia” wrong, with two L’s. Happy birthday, dear me-e, happy birthday to me.
We cut the cake, leaving a piece aside for Irene when she wakes up. Constant drowsiness is a side effect of Seroquel, or Topamax, or Lamictal—or any other of the antipsychotics and anticonvulsants she’s been cycling through since being released from the clinic last month. We’re seated around the dining table, cutting little cubes of cake with our forks. Mom usually bakes her famous carrot cake for our birthdays, but this time it’s a generic Safeway cake. I can tell from the aftertaste, the tang that suggests florescent lights, the bright cold metal of shopping carts. I’m wearing my birthday present, a red and white striped swimsuit, under my clothes, and every so often I have to shift to fix a wedgie.
“So, how does it feel to be fourteen?” prompts Mom, pushing away the remnants of her cake.
“I dunno,” I say. “Kinda the same. Kinda different.”
Dad scratches his beard and gives me a sidelong glance. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s that age. We’ll have to start watching her, Maureen. Those boys’ll come knocking.”
“Dad.”
But I’m saved from further teasing by the sound of a doorknob turning. Irene wanders into the living room, her hair matted from sleep and one hand shading her eyes. I turn back to my cake, scrape the prongs of my fork against the plate, anything to keep from hearing the ticking of a childproof cap and the spilling of pills into a white palm. I hate to see her bony shoulders shake when she downs her medication every morning. I hate to see her hollowed eyes wince as she throws the pills down the back of her throat. And then that motion like a whooping crane as she swallows and sighs.
Mom half rises from her seat and asks, “How are you feeling, honey? We’ve got birthday cake if you want some.”
“No, thank you,” Irene says dreamily, sliding onto the seat next to me. She hugs me, and I feel the hardness of her collarbones against mine. “Happy birthday,” she says, as brightly as she can, but when she pulls away her face is a neutral mask, like she is a marionette. When she reaches to take a glass of proffered milk, her limbs twitch and lift as if attached to strings.
Irene hasn’t always been like this. She used to pick me and my friends up from school and let us roll the windows down and stick our hands out into the roar of the wind the way Mom tells us not to do. When I had friends over, she heated up macaroni and cheese with us and giggled into Cokes as if she knew what we were talking about, how Danny likes Debra but Debra likes Victor. And once, when I was crying in my bed because I was grounded and couldn’t go to the movies, Irene stepped into my room and let me put my head in her lap. She always smelled like rosewater. Using the sleeve of her shirt, she wiped my hot, wet cheeks and said, “It’s not so bad, Ollie—we’ll do something fun together tonight,” and she waited until our parents were asleep and put on Friday the 13th. While I squealed and hugged a pillow to my chest, Irene just giggled, and I thought she was so brave and so good. At two in the morning, she dragged my sleepy body to bed. When I murmured that I loved her she smoothed the covers and stayed quiet until I slept.
It wasn’t until three months ago, really, that I noticed that her bedroom door down the hallway was closed a lot more often. When I knocked, I heard only the rustle of blankets or the click of the lock. When she did emerge, I couldn’t recognize that long, ashen face with the crust of two-day-old eyeliner rimming her red eyes. What terrified me most, though, was the way she talked. Her mouth would go slack and her eyes floated away, like ghost eyes, and sometimes she would forget she was speaking altogether. Just when we couldn’t take it anymore, just when Mom took out the phonebook and tremblingly thumbed toward Dr. Delvac, Irene snapped out of it. She blew down the stairs like a new woman to go out running or to meet some boy for coffee. Sometimes she shook me awake, and we’d scamper down the stairs to watch cartoons together, and I was so relieved by the raw, live flush in her face that I never thought to ask about that other person, that haunted Irene.
Now, at the table, I realize with a lurch of the stomach that I recognize her large, slightly crooked nose and the small point of her chin. That is my nose, my chin. And as hard as I fight that thought, that I am ashamed of looking like her, that cruel, curling thought—I think it.
“Why don’t you girls go down to the beach?” suggests Mom as she clears the dishes. There is a red smudge of lipstick on her front tooth. “You could do with a healthy tan.”
Mom’s eyes find mine, and I hear again what she said to me yesterday as she slammed the car trunk on our prostrate suitcases: “Take care of your sister for a while, Olivia. She’s been through a lot and needs to be with someone who understands her.”
Irene turns her face away and faces the light so that all I can see is the glowing outline of her profile and the slant of her eyelashes. This is the closest to “yes” that she gets.
Irene is sitting next to me in her floral sundress, her arms folded in her lap and her legs outstretched. She hasn’t shaven in a while, and the stubble on her legs catches the sand as she sways from side to side. Her toes grip and ungrip the edge of her towel. Two gulls take off next to us, and their shadows momentarily eclipse her face so that I can’t see her expression. She glances up and observes, “Those gulls must be mates.” This is another side effect, the restlessness, the slow and drifting way she sometimes talks aloud.
It must be two hundred degrees, and I’m sweltering helplessly, desperately, just a couple yards from the sweet, cool spray of the water. I lick my lips and taste salt on the humid breeze.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go in the water, Irene?” I ask for the third time, propping myself up on my elbows.
“No, I don’t think so,” says Irene. She suddenly looks at me, and I can feel my stomach curl up towards my spine because I know what is coming next. She pulls her knees up toward her chest and says, “I guess I should tell you one of my secrets.”
I am so tired of hearing her secrets. The Irene I know would never keep secrets from Mom and Dad, and if she did, she would never dole them out to me this way, like they were gems bequeathed to me, like only I would understand and appreciate them.
“At the clinic they let me watch television, and it was almost always the evening news,” Irene begins. Her voice is soft and clear, and cuts through the steady drumbeat of someone’s radio further down the beach. “And it felt like the reporters were talking only to me, giving me clues, and I was supposed to figure out what they were really saying. I thought maybe if I put everything together they would let me go, they would let me come home. I spent so much time wondering what a gas station holdup really meant.”
I roll onto my stomach and rest my head on my arm to block out the sun. I don’t comment because it only encourages her.
“From the window, you could see the Disneyland fireworks at night,” says Irene. “They looked so disembodied without the music, so sad and beautiful and strange, just lights blooming out of clouds. I thought that was a kind of code, too. If I could just figure out why they changed from red to blue to green to gold—that was another way out.” She laughs derisively at herself. “It’s so silly. You probably don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
Then she places a cool hand on my shoulder, and I turn over to see her narrowed eyes. “You’re growing up so quickly, Ollie,” she says. “Fourteen is such an important number.”
Suddenly my whole body aches to move, to leave her lingering gaze, to let her writhe in the sand and jitter by herself. I clamber onto my feet and brush the sand from my body.
Irene squints up at me and asks, strained, “Where are you going?”
“I’m just going to get an ice cream. Do you want one?” I nod towards the boardwalk.
Her face closes at the sight of pastel umbrellas and bright red gondolas swinging from the Ferris wheel. For a glistening moment I think she will refuse, but then she extends a hand towards me. I hesitate before pulling her up, and when I do her fingers clench hard onto mine.
“I’m paying,” she says, but I have dropped her hand and am already striding across the sand, the soles of my feet burning as I make my way to the promenade.
I enter the crush of people with a couple paces between Irene and me. The stalls along the way advertise sunglasses in the shape of pineapples and giant pitchers of beer. From behind me, I hear Irene say faintly, “Only ten dollars a pair.” A group of kids rushes by me, a blur of gleaming hair and twiggy limbs, and I wish I were with them, windmilling my arms as we dash to the ocean. When I reach the ice cream booth, I deliberate longer than necessary over vanilla or chocolate ice cream, and then a sugar or waffle cone. The boy at the register flashes me a smile under his blue visor as he hands me the cone (waffle, double vanilla), and I smile back winningly.
“Do you have three dollars, Irene?” I ask, trying to read his nametag as Rick (Nick?) punches some numbers into the register. “Irene?”
But when I swivel on my bare heels to face her, I meet the fat, stubbled jowls of a man over forty. He has his arms crossed over his chest impatiently. In his sunglasses, I see my own startled face in miniature.
I spin back to Rick, who is tapping his fingers on the top of the register, and apologize, “My sister has the money. I’ll be right back,” and I push through the line, ignoring the boy’s calls as I hurry back to the beach.
By the time I get back to our spot, the ice cream has turned into a milky soup that trails down my fingers. I leap neatly over the bodies of girls dozing with magazines over their faces and count four beach towels back from lifeguard post number four. My towel has turned into a fluorescent pink lump, and there is Irene’s, a perfect rectangle next to it, but there is no Irene.
I try not to panic right away. I dig my heels into the sand and approach our area, half hoping that Irene will come into view like a mirage, her long body undulating in the heat. But of course she does not. There is only her bag, half buried in the sand, and my flip-flops at right angles next to it.
Chewing the edge of the cone, I pivot around. In the bright wash of light, everyone looks the same. “Irene?” I call out. Then, louder, “Irene!”
Maybe she stopped to look at the sunglasses. I weave through the crowd, this time hitting people with my shoulders and hearing them from far away; their small words, like “Watch it!” and “Whoa,” don’t mean anything.
Irene’s not at the hut. I stand at a loss for a second before plunging back the way I came and heading towards the water. I realize that the chocolate filling at the tip of the cone has melted all over my hand, and I let it drop in the sand.
I am conscious of my heart in my chest, the bloodweight swinging low and heavy. I wish I had thought to grab my phone so I could call Mom and Dad and tell them that it’s happening again, Irene’s gone.
It happened a couple months ago, during one of her manic periods. I was sitting at my computer with my feet propped on the desk, balancing the keyboard on my lap and digging through a greasy Burger King bag for stray fries. I had an essay due for World History the next day and was trying to figure out how to stretch the two pages I had about the Byzantine Empire into a third. The house phone rang, three fluttering cries, and then I heard Mom answer it downstairs. An instant message from my best friend Ashley popped onto the screen: “Eric Grossman. Eric Grossman’s gonna ask you to the Jersey Jam.” I groaned a little through a mouthful of fries and was typing rapidly about why Eric Grossman would be a horrible date to the school dance (greasy nose, arrhythmic) when Mom rapped on the door.
“Hold on,” I said, but Mom had already wrenched the door open. Her curls were wild, and her chin quivered as she demanded, “Do you know where Irene is?”
I heard the thinness in her voice and exited the chat. Irene was confined to the house after eleven because she had taken to staying out nights and slipping back home in the mornings, wild-eyed and smelling of cigarettes. My parents allowed the cigarettes because they calmed her, but I could tell the growing snarl on Irene’s lips scared them.
“No idea,” I said. “I thought she was in her room. Why?”
“I don’t know,” said Mom, and she hid her face in her hands. “I just got a call from her friend. Rebecca. I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She was—she was crying. Something about Irene running out.” She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Irene hasn’t called you or anything?”
I slid my legs off the desk and wiped my hands on my jeans. “No. Irene never calls me anymore.” In saying it, I realized it was true.
Dad appeared in the doorway. He was pulling on a jacket and digging around for his keys at the same time. “Olivia doesn’t know anything?” he asked Mom, his eyes blind behind the glare of his glasses.
“No,” said Mom helplessly.
“What did Rebecca say?” I demanded, standing up. “Where are you going?”
Mom gripped my shoulder, her nails digging into the skin. “Don’t worry, Olivia. We’ll sort it out. I’d rather you wait here in the house.”
“No, I’m coming with you,” I insisted, pulling my shoes on and hobbling down the hallway behind them. “What did Rebecca tell you? Is Irene okay?”
“They had an argument,” said Mom. “That’s all I know.” At that, Mom’s voice faded into a whisper, and Dad whispered back. Their soft shadow voices continued on in the car as we veered through abandoned streets that looked damp under the streetlights. I remember unbuckling the seatbelt so that I could peer out all the windows, all the time thinking Come home, Irene. Come home, Irene.
After circling the surrounding streets of Rebecca’s house for fifteen hysterical minutes, we pulled up to the little park a few blocks from our house. “There she is!” gasped Mom, and I saw Irene, crouched on the curb with her knees nestled against her chest. As Dad slowed the car, I realized how thin my sister had gotten in the last few weeks. I could see the long swooping hollows of her collarbones and the thin bend of her arms on top of each other. Under the harsh snowy glare of the headlights, Irene looked up and did something funny with her face—bared her teeth, or crumpled her lips, or one right after the other. Dad killed the ignition, and I clambered out the door. Mom reached Irene first, scooping her up in her arms and burying wet words in her daughter’s hair. When she let her go, I saw a thin line of blood across Irene’s arm, and I stopped in my tracks. Mom placed her hand on the small of Irene’s back and guided her into the car, where she slumped in the backseat. I cringed, as if my parents had placed a stray dog next to me.
No one said anything for a while as our car glided back out onto the main street.
Then Dad cleared his throat and said, “Irene, is everything okay?” And it sounded like gravel on his tongue.
Irene struggled with herself before moaning, “I don’t know.”
Mom glanced at Dad before half-turning and saying, “Honey, Rebecca called me, and she said you two got into some kind of argument. What happened?” A silence. “We won’t be mad.” Then, heavy with hesitation, “How did you get that cut?”
“She said I’ve been acting weird,” said Irene, and then she rolled over, her neck tucked so far inside her arms that it looked like it had been snapped. Her voice came muffled and wet. “Like some freak. And then that’s what I did—I freaked out and slapped her. I don’t know how it happened. And then she called me a crazy bitch, and she scratched me.” Irene lifted her head so that just her eyes glistened over the tops of her arms. She looked straight at me. “I’m not crazy.”
Dad drove through a red light.
“You were doing so well,” said Mom quietly, to no one in particular.
Later that week, Mom phoned Dr. Delvac, and our house settled into a summer frost. Often, I heard Irene sobbing in the kitchen before downing her drugs and settling into a hateful silence. She walked from room to room on numb legs, tapping the walls and checking for responses.
Come home, Irene, come home, I find myself repeating as I pace up and down the beach, the bed of broken shells below the surf pricking the tender pads of my toes. Water numbs the inside of each knee as I wade deeper into the sharp cold swells. Bodies tumble into the waves in my periphery, their laughter sounding harsh and mean. A rope of kelp wraps itself around my leg and skims the water as I walk. I swing my arms wide.
I pass lifeguard post number eight. Then I pass lifeguard posts numbers nine, ten, and eleven. And then at lifeguard post number twelve I stop, exhausted. I put my hands on my sides and listen to the grating of my breath. I’m dizzy from the heat, the shock of the water, the strangled panic at the base of my throat. I lean my hand on the warm wood of the lifeguard tower and stare upward at the black 12 painted on the white slats. It swings in my vision before sharpening, and as if my mind were doing the same thing, Irene’s voice crystallizes in my head: “Fourteen is such an important number.”
It’s like something in me releases, evaporates. I feel terrifyingly fourteen, like my toes are cupping the edge of a vast new world, and this time Irene isn’t on the other side to receive me, but she isn’t behind me pushing either; she is holding my hand like sisters do when they shiver.
I’m running now, my feet sliding in the sweet hot drift of the sand, feeling it cake onto my wet legs. For a moment I forget what I’m running towards, and I am happy just to be moving, to have all four limbs of my body pumping opposite each other. Then I slow at lifeguard post number fourteen, and I see her, and I remember her, I remember Irene.
She hasn’t taken off her dress. Her skirt is ballooned up around her legs as she floats, dreamy, waist deep in swollen water. Irene doesn’t see me; she has her eyes closed. She’s smiling. Her cheeks are tinged an ethereal pink. She bobs towards me without knowing, and when she opens her eyes again she doesn’t look surprised to see me.
“Hi, Ollie,” she says. “Did you get your ice cream?”
“Yeah,” I say breathlessly. “I thought you were going to pay for it.”
She giggles and swings her arms, sending droplets of water at me. “You little thief. I couldn’t even keep up with you. But aren’t you glad you’re breaking in your new swimsuit? It looks cute on you.”
And she falls backward in slow motion, bending first at the knees and then arching her back as she lowers herself into the water. The bust of her dress clings to her wet skin, and the sun glimmers in the small pool of water at her neck. Then just her face is above the water and her hair fans out around her head, swaying like deep-sea grass. She squints at me out of one eye and laughs.
“Come here,” she says. “I have something to tell you.”
I swim out, my legs breaking through reflections of legs in the water. I touch Irene’s shoulder as I reach her, and she lifts herself upright. Water streams from the ends of her hair.
“Another secret,” she says, “is that at the clinic they served us macaroni and cheese all the time, and when I got it I always thought of you.”
“Yeah?” I shade my eyes with my hand.
“Yeah,” says Irene. “It was something I didn’t have to read into, it was so much like home already.” She picks at her waterlogged dress. “I knew exactly what it meant.”
I don’t say anything. I just nod, and take her hand, and then we both kick out into the water. The salt stings our eyes as our bodies ripple outwards, and after a while our feet don’t reach the bottom anymore. Our toes brush each other’s toes. Irene blinks slowly while treading water, trying to shrug off the medicine. But she can’t, of course, so she leans back and floats in her chemical dream. The backs of our eyelids burn pink as the waves bear us gently on. I can hear the faint rasp of Irene’s breath next to my ear, and I can hear the thin cries of gulls circling above, and I can hear her heartbeat slowing to fill the pauses between mine.