Page 51 of The Better Sister

“Remember when Mom would make us say our prayers at night, and I’d get all scared?”

I had forgotten how much I loved Nicky’s belly laugh. “You were terrified every single night that the Lord wouldn’t give you your soul back.”

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.Why do we force children to recite something so utterly terrifying?

I had never learned to pray until I was eight years old because my parents didn’t go to church until Dad joined AA.

“I was so scared,” I recalled. “But then you changed the words for me: ‘If I should die before I wake, I’ll wait for you at Wallace Lake.’” It was still a creepy thought, but at least Nicky and I would be together in a familiar place.

She broke out into an amused smile, as if she had a private joke. “You have the worst memory—”

“No, I don’t.”

“Not about everything, but it’s like you’ve got holes in your brain when it comes to Cleveland. It was definitely Shadow Lake, because that’s where my friends and I would sneak off on weekends to drink and get high. It was my way of being a wiseass about the fact we had to pray because Dad wanted to stop drinking.”

“I missed the joke,” I said, feeling slightly sad about her correction.

She shrugged. “Besides, you’re the one who liked Wallace Lake for that fishing thing they did for little kids every year. You probably switched them in your head over the years.”

I replayed both versions of the rhyme in my head and realized that she was right. It was “I’ll wait for you at Shadow Lake.”

“Don’t look so bummed,” she said. “I’ve seen how you like your wine. It would be a much better afterlife than sitting around waiting for your sister to die, too.”

“Good point,” I said. She also had a point about my childhood memory having selective gaps. “How long did the prayer phase last?”

“My whole ninth-grade year, into the summer before he fell off the wagon.” Eventually sobriety took, but not on our father’s first try. By the time the program worked for him, he seemed to focus more on the actual steps than making the rest of us go to church. Nicky moved into the family room and sat down on the sofa. “Do you even remember him drinking?”

Usually I would take a moment like this as my cue to turn in for the night, but I found myself wanting to continue the conversation. Carrying my wine, I joined Nicky on the couch. “Sure. Like if I came home and could hear the Stones playing from the sidewalk, I knew we’d probably find him with a beer in his hand.”

“It was never one beer, Chloe. He’d go through a twelve-pack. Mom would be so embarrassed to take the cans back for the deposits that she’d make the two of us do it. Don’t you remember that?”

“Maybe.” Did I? The cans, yes. That they were beer? Not really.

“Mom and I hated how much you loved him.”

The statement was shocking in its clarity. I set my wine on the table. “I don’t even know how to process that, Nicky.”

“It’s fine, you were young. Way too young to understand. But you’d get so happy when he’d crank up the music and grab you and dance in circles. But Mom and I knew that his version of a party was only beginning. Don’t you remember how on those nights in particular, she’d make a point of getting you into your pajamas and putting you to bed early? She and I would lower the music a little tiny bit at a time—enough so you could fall asleep, but not so Dad would notice what we were doing and get mad. I’ve never asked you this, but do you even remember him hitting Mom?”

I nodded. “Of course.” Only a few times, always when he was drunk. I couldn’t actually picture the images in my head. Did I see it? Or only hear it? Somehow, I knew it had happened.

“So why were you always so much closer to him than to her?”

I honestly didn’t know. I had never even thought of it that way. “Is that even up to a kid? It was more like he was the one who decided to be close to me. She wasn’t.”

“Because she was always trying to manage Dad. You couldn’t see that? You didn’t see how miserable she was?”

“Of course I did. But at the time, I thought it couldn’t be that bad, or she’d leave him. It seemed more like she was using him as an excuse for everything that was wrong with her.” I had spent my whole career writing about the power imbalance between men and women and never realized what a hypocrite I was when it came to my own family.

“Like what you think about me?”

How many times had I told Nicky that she had to stop blaming her crappy childhood for her failings as an adult? “No,” I said quietly. “At least, not anymore.”

“You never understood that you and I basically had different parents. I remember Dad kicking the crap out of Mom while she was huddled in a ball on the floor. I remember him coming home wasted, crawling into my bed, and putting his hand in my panties, thinking I was Mom.”

“Oh, Nicky.” All this time, my instinct had been to silence her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t want to know. But it’s all right. I get it now. Believing you had a good dad who wanted all of the best things for you allowed you to be who you are now. It’s what made you so ambitious. And you’re probably right I used him as an excuse to fuck up a good decade and a half of my life.”

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