“You sure you’ll be okay while I’m gone?” Canon asks.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay while you’re gone? You’ve barely left this room since I checked in. Kenneth and Jill need you. The movie needs you. Go.”
“I’ll be here,” Mama reassures him. “By the time you get back, she’ll be done.”
Done with dialysis. Hooked up to this machine for hours at a time motivates me even more to find a match. I know this is how some people manage kidney disease, but this doesn’t fit how I see my life as a performer, dancer, actor. I don’t want to be chained to this machine. I can’t be.
“Okay.” Canon wears his hesitation in every line of his face. “I won’t be long.”
“Tell everyone I said hello.” I want to be on set so badly and I hate how things have stalled because of this.
Canon kisses my forehead and then my lips in a touch that lingers but, with my mama watching, doesn’t deepen. I want it to.
“I love you,” he whispers, pulling back to search my eyes.
“Love you back.” I give him a gentle shove. “Now go.”
“I’ll be back.”
“You mentioned that.” I laugh. “But first you have to go to come back.”
Shaking his head, he grabs his bag, waves at my mother, and strides from the room as purposefully as he goes everywhere.
“Now that is a man,” Mama breathes.
“He sure is.”
I smile faintly, losing some of my shine now that Canon is gone. I’m actually exhausted and slightly miserable, but Canon is already hovering and here pretty much around the clock. He may not be thinking about Dessi Blue, but I am. It’s my break. It will be one of the biggest movies of the year. It’s potentially Canon’s most significant work. It’s Evan and Kenneth and Jill and Trey and Monk and Verity and Linh and all the cast and crew who worked and sweat and sacrificed to make this important piece of not just entertainment, but history. Lost, discarded history. We have the chance to restore, to amplify people and events that have too long been overlooked, and my damn kidneys are not going to ruin that because the director cannot focus on anything other than his sick girlfriend.
But now that he’s gone, I slump into the pillows and watch the machine cleaning my blood and sending it back into my body since my kidneys have abdicated their duties.
The hospital door eases open and Terry walks in carrying an armful of magazines, which she passes to Mama, and a bag overflowing with colorful balls of yarn. She settles into a chair near the door and pulls out needles and yarn.
“You knit?” I ask skeptically. It doesn’t really fit my image of her as the temptress who lured my fiancé into a scandalous affair.
“Yeah.” She shrugs, not glancing up from her yarn. “It’s soothing.”
“There’s a whole group of us at church who do it,” Mama pipes up, reaching into Terry’s bag for another set of needles and some yarn.
“Oh, you go to church, too?” I ask with raised brows, because Terry left church as soon as Mama could no longer make her go. I, however, was still singing in the choir until I left for college.
“Terry’s the choir director,” Mama says, pride evident in her voice.
“Nothing compared to Broadway, obviously,” Terry says, roughly thrusting a needle into the innocent pile of yarn. “Or a big-time movie.”
“At least Mama’s seen you in the choir.” I close my eyes and lean back into the pile of pillows. “More than I can say.”
“I came and saw you that time, Neevah,” Mama says.
“That one time in twelve years.” I open my eyes and laugh. “Not that I’ve been in that many shows. Canon plucked me out of relative obscurity.”
“You just have to rub that in our faces, too, huh?” Terry says, dropping the needles in her lap. “That you’re dating Canon Holt and he’s crazy about you. We get it, Neevah. Your life is perfect.”
“Perfect?” I choke out an incredulous laugh. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m hooked up to a machine that is cleaning my blood, and have to beg for a kidney from the sister who can’t stand me. Also, the big break I have for this movie? Not going so good since the whole production is shut down until I’m well enough to go back to work. What’s so perfect about that?”
“You got out of Clearview, for one.”
“You could have, too, if you’d wanted.”
“Not with a baby on the way and no income.”
“Well, you screwed Brandon in that bed, T. Wasn’t nobody gonna lay in it for you.”
“Bitch,” Terry snarls, standing, her fists balled at her sides. “You think just because you’re sick you can say anything you want to me and get away with it?”
“No, I think I can say anything I want to you and get away with it because you’re a cheat who hasn’t earned my respect.”
“Well, you respect this kidney, though, don’t you?”
“Take your kidney!” I shout, sitting up in the bed. “You and your kidney can catch the next flight back to Clearview, far as I’m concerned. I’ll get a kidney from someone I can actually stand.”
“Stop it!” Mama stands in the space separating Terry and me like a referee in a boxing ring. “Do you hear yourselves? You’re supposed to be sisters.”
“Sisters don’t do what she did,” I clip out, drained by the shouting match and falling limp on the pillows.
“I did you a favor and you know it,” Terry says. “Like you would have lasted in Clearview with that scholarship letter burning a hole in your drawer. You would have broken it off with him anyway.”
“Maybe that’s true. Who knows? But you slept with him a year before the scholarship and walked around all that time letting me believe he loved me.”
“He did love you.” Terry’s bitter laugh sounds like it hurts. “Everyone did.”
“So you decided to take everyone away from me? Or was that just an added bonus?”
“Nobody told your ass not to come home.”
“And look at you with him? Look at Quianna, knowing she was the result of you betraying me? The first time I saw her, I had to lock myself in my old room I was crying so hard. Not because she was a reminder, but because she was so beautiful.”
Tears spring to my eyes and I bite my lip to keep it from trembling. “She looked just like you, and I was angry I couldn’t just love her, just be her auntie without all of this between us.”
“You can,” Terry says more softly. “She barely knows you, but she wants to be just like you. She’s in every school play. Sings like she breathes.”
“Reminds us all of you,” Mama adds, smiling and sitting back down to pick up her knitting.
“She does?” I ask weakly.
“I told her I was coming out here about your kidney and she wanted to come, but she has exams,” Terry says. “We, um, haven’t been getting along lately. Not since she found out why you never come home.”
I recall her stricken expression, her anger in the kitchen when she overheard us arguing.
“I’m sorry she had to find out that way,” I say. “So she never knew about Brandon and me?”
“What was I supposed to say? I stole your daddy? I almost got rid of you because I didn’t want to lose my sis . . .” She doesn’t finish the thought, but I can see how saying even part of it affects her. Her lips tremble and her fingers clench around the knitting needles.
“Don’t say that, Terry,” Mama reprimands.
“Well, it’s true.” She lifts her chin defiantly. “Thank God I didn’t go through with it, but I was scared. I had no money and I knew it was shady, what Brand and me did. I was terrified of losing Neevah once she found out, and I did.”
“You didn’t even seem that sorry,” I tell her. “It felt like you had won something and I didn’t even know we were competing.”
“There was a small, petty part of me deep inside that felt like, finally, I have something she wants. I’m the best at something this one time.”
“The best at my boyfriend?” I ask in harsh disbelief. “You were the prettiest girl at our school. In the whole town, T. You could have had anyone you wanted, and you chose the one who should have been off-limits.”
“I was young and stupid. I paid for it.”
“It’s not so bad, Terry,” Mama says, her voice low and gentle. “You have a husband who loves you and an amazing daughter. A great job. A great life that most folks would envy. Learn to be content.”
“I am satisfied.” Terry casts me a baleful look. “Until she comes around, and I think of all the things I don’t have. What I gave up.”
“I bet you were glad I couldn’t bring myself home to face you, weren’t you?”
“I really didn’t want to hurt you,” Terry says. “But on some level, I did want you to know how it felt not to have what you wanted. For someone else to have it, because it felt like you had it all. Ironically, I drove you out of town and onto all the things I always suspected you’d have and I wouldn’t.”
“What exactly did you think I had?” I ask, puzzled. “You were the popular one. The prettiest one. The one everybody wanted.”
“I wasn’t the one Brand wanted,” she said softly. “I’m ashamed to say it now, but I went after him to prove I could do it. And once I had him, he hated me. Do you know how it feels to be married to someone who’s in love with someone else? Who loves your sister and resents you for ruining that?”
“Are you saying that he still—”
“Not anymore.” Terry chuckles, a wry grin playing at the corners of her mouth. “I think he finally accepted he was stuck with me and decided he may as well get on with loving me, since we had no choice. At first, though, yeah. So I didn’t want you around, no.”
“Quianna mentioned some trouble between you two,” I venture. “Are you—”
“We working on it.” Her lips tighten and she fiddles with the pile of yarn in her lap. “Marriage is hard, but we trying like everybody else.”
“I’m . . . well, I’m glad.”
Dr. Okafor enters, carrying a clipboard and her usual air of efficiency.
“Terry,” she says, a bright smile on her face. “If you’ll come with me, we’ll start the first battery of tests.”
Terry sets her knitting aside and stands to follow Dr. Okafor. I can’t let her go like this. We just spent the last ten minutes talking about things we should have been discussing the last twelve years.
“Terry,” I say, not sure what should come next.
She turns at the door, her expression guarded again—braced for the resentment, the anger that has characterized our relationship.
“Yeah?” she asks warily.
“Just . . . thank you.”
She doesn’t smile exactly, but relief flickers in her eyes and maybe the first kindling of hope. She’s my sister. Used to be my best friend. Has been my enemy. Bad blood has been between us for years—maybe we can finally find our way to a clean start. I’m literally hooked up to a machine taking all my bad blood and making it clean. Making it new. Surely, somehow, she and I can do the same.
