Pieces of My Sister's Life by Elizabeth Arnold

under her sweater and the seat of her jeans hanging loose against her body. Shake her and her bones would probably rattle like a maraca.
    “Sorry ’bout the mess,” she said as I opened the door. “We hardly ever have guests anymore, and cleaning’s not exactly one of my priorities.”
    How bizarre, the casualness of this, as if I were just a visiting friend. There was a heaviness in my chest, like my heart and stomach were all one solid mass, and I wanted so much just to say
Fuck it all
and hold her, pull her so close I’d be able to feel her again. It was obvious, though, that if I did she’d pull away.
    This was like a twisted dream, this hallway to someone else’s home, the bottom step where I’d learned to tie my shoes, Eve standing above me, instructing where to tuck the laces. But now the hall was dressed in Victoriana and even smelled different, like old food, like a motel restaurant. It was distorted to something else entirely, and I suddenly lost all sense of direction. Which way to the kitchen? Where do these stairs go?
    We walked into the den, now crowded by a white hospital bed. Eve sat on the bed and I stood beside it, trying not to stare at the bony wheelchair set where a rocker used to be. As I turned from it she reached for my wrist, held it for a brief second, then let her hand drop to her side. “Gillian’s over at Mom and Dad’s,” she said.
    For a second I was afraid she might be speaking from a cancer-induced brain funk, then realized with a slightly sick feeling that by
Mom and Dad
she must mean the Caines. “How are they?”
    “Same old, same old, Dad saving the bikes and Mom saving the earth. They take care of Gillian every day after school. What with me on my last legs and Justin locked upstairs with his books, they’ve been totally indispensable. That’s where he is now, in case you’re wondering, which of course you are. Upstairs writing or staring out the window. He seems to think they’re both equally productive.”
    Justin was upstairs. I reached for the blanket at the end of the bed and wrapped it over my shivering shoulders.
    “Look at your face. You’re thinking I look like shit, right? Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and think some crackhead broke into the house.” She shrugged. “I feel better than I look, though. This is remnants from the chemo, but now I’ve stopped I’ll beef up, probably just in time to kick the bucket.”
    “You don’t look bad,” I said, knowing how it would sound, an empty platitude, like trying to convince a kid that her hooked nose and buckteeth were actually cute.
    “Watch this,” Eve said, her eyes glinting with merriment, becoming for a brief second the eyes I’d known. She reached for a button by the side of her bed. A chiming doorbell sounded from upstairs. “This thing comes with all the gizmos. Not that I need them yet, but it’ll be useful in a few weeks when I don’t have the breath to call them downstairs to watch me die.”
    “Eve…”
    “Can’t wait a few weeks? Well, it might be a few days or it might be months, nobody knows for sure. Makes it kind of exciting, doesn’t it? Like playing the lottery, will it be today? Justin went and bought this damn bed and chair instead of renting, like he thought it would make me live longer. Guess he couldn’t deal with the prospect of having to estimate a duration of rental.” She flashed a grin, more a stretching of lips than a smile.
    I shook my head. “Please, don’t.”
    “It’s okay, I don’t want to talk about it either, there’s no point. It’s why Justin called you, I guess. He thinks there’s something I can learn or some peace I should reach, but really I’m way beyond peace. There’s no time and I don’t have the energy, and besides, once I’m dead, who cares?” She nodded over my shoulder. “Speak of the devil.”
    “Honey?”
    I looked up and there he was, and all of it hit me at once. Hundreds of remembrances flashed