Chapter 17

1989

GEM HAD BEEN IN THE HOSPITALtwo weeks, the first week fully unconscious, the second, awake, eyes open, but not meeting anyone's gaze. Unresponsive to voices, stimulation. Aphasia, the word was—no ability to communicate, no ability to understand. That's what the doctors said at least, but Gloria wasn't convinced. It wasn't possible that Gloria was still moving through the world, hearing birds and drinking coffee and scratching her arm if her sister wasn't—it would be like a body dancing without its head.

So she tried to find her wherever she was and bring her back. She started with the barroom trick, when they used to finish each other's sentences as kids. They hadn't done it in years. Focused her mind, asked where she was. Nothing. Thought, What I need to heal is—but there was no response. So Gloria had shown up at the hospital with a pad of paper and crayons. She pinched Gem's fingers around the mauve, moved her arm across the page so that faint purplish streaks appeared on the white, stripes of bruise. Gloria took her hand away, ready for Gem to take it up on her own. To confirm that the person she was pretty fucking sure had done this to her was in fact the person who had. But the crayon fell to the bed, Gem's hand limp and open.

Next came a typewriter Gloria heaved onto the bed, hoping Gem could find the keys, and later a set of pre-written sentences on flash cards Gem could point to, an alphabet she could indicate by blinking. Nothing worked. Gloria did not give up. She got more creative, shifting from the land of language into something else. She slid into the hospital bed beside her sister one night. Stiff sheets, the smell of antiseptic. Their faces, which for so long had been nearly identical, were growing further apart—Gem's bruised, swollen on one side, sticky from a line of dried pus. And yet, Gloria thought, perhaps she could still pull off the trick they used to play on their mother, where one pretended to be the other. Perhaps Gloria could find a way to take Gem's place here. She had to, because there was just one of them who was wholly good, just one of them who knew how to raise a child, just one of them who deserved, more than the other, to stay alive.

In those hospital months, Luce sat rigid beside her baby brother as he slept in his car seat, or she jiggled him on her lap if he cried, giving him a bottle. She overheard the nurses tell Gloria that kids bounce back quickly, they're so adaptable, they probably don't even really understand what's happening.

She understood.

It used to be that the worst thing she could imagine was her mother taking her away from Gem. But now she knew. There were always worse things that could come.

It was in the hospital lobby, on a take-a-book, leave-a-book shelf, that she found her first biography. It was about the man who stashed killing kits all over the country to murder women he stalked. She hid the book at first—Gem would have freaked out if she caught her reading something like that—but her mother didn't even notice. The words were dense and the book was long, but every time she found herself getting bored or scared, she looked over at Gem. The stories in this book were worse. Luce was taking action. She was acquiring a whole world of information that her mother didn't even know, true knowledge of the world that made what had happened to Gem not so extraordinary at all.

She watched her mother in the hospital, weeping, pleading, pacing. She heard her cuss and yell and chase a doctor down the hallway. She did not crouch down to where Luce sat to explain what was happening, to hug her, to see if she was okay. So Luce fed Roo his bottle. Shook a toy for him to paw. She remembered coming into the hospital room one day, dusk turning the corners into shadow, and her mother in the chair beside her sister's bed, head rolled back, moving her lips very quickly. Luce had never been to church, but she knew, from people who protested on the streets, that this was some kind of prayer. "I can't do this by myself," Gloria whispered to her sister. "I don't know how to keep you safe and help you heal and take care of these kids. Help. Tell me what to do."

"Gloria?" Luce asked quietly from the doorway.

"Sshh," Gloria said. "I'm trying to find her voice." She rocked forward then, knocking over a stack of magazines she'd brought in from the waiting room. One clattered by her foot and landed with the pages open. Gloria picked it up. The pages were stained and faded, but the image was unmistakable. Seven bald women, standing in front of an estuary. The redwood witches, who lived in a place where no woman could be harmed.

"You bitch," Gloria said, laughing as she picked up the magazine. Gem's hand, close to Gloria's face on the bed, clenched. Gloria grabbed it, asked her to squeeze if she could hear, kissed it. Nothing happened. Asked Gem if this was what she wanted for them, if this was where they needed to go. She set Gem's hand on the magazine, and still, nothing happened. Luce, tucked in the shadows of the doorway, watched all this unfold and understood only some of what she was seeing.

Gloria stared down at Gem's palm, studied it. Stared for a long time, willing communication. A nurse came by right then, scootching past Luce, and saw what Gloria was doing. "Oh, you're a palm reader?" she said to Gloria. "I've been dying to try it. Will you do mine? How much does it cost?"

And that was it, a fault line opening in their lives. The impetus that would move them to the Red Grove. The beginning of Gloria's business. It was that simple. Accidental. Gloria, in need of money, said yes to the nurse, and yes to the nurse's friends who wanted appointments, and yes to everyone else as the business grew. At first, after one of these sessions, Gloria would lean down to her sister, snorting, chuckling, say, Can you believe people are falling for this crap? It was easy enough to invent what to say to someone, what someone needed to hear. Making money had never been simple, until it suddenly was.

But something started to change once they moved to the Red Grove. Gloria noticed it only when she did a reading with her sister in the room. Sounds rose. As if she were backstage, listening to the cacophony of audience chatter before the curtain raised. Dozens of indistinguishable voices. She listened and listened and could not hear individual voices, but she listened on. And then, eventually, rising like an instrument readying for its solo, one voice grew a little louder.