Delisia had braved rush hour traffic to pick up her sister at the airport, navigating the congested access road filled with anxious drivers and a constant stream of cars, as overhead, wide-body aircraft roared their way on a flight path to the western runways. Now she perched on an armchair in the guestroom as her younger sibling unpacked the few things she had brought for the extended weekend. Extracting jeans and a black blazer, Aline then dug around in the bottom of the bag until she pulled out a wad of newspaper and slowly peeled it back to reveal a piece of pottery she handed to Delisia.
“It’s just a small gift for you. To say thank you… for all you do.”
Nodding, Delisia pushed back a lose strand of hair before twisting her thin body to reposition for comfort. She and Aline had the same build, same rounded features and when younger, they often pretended to be twins.
Turning the pottery over and over, Delesia examined it carefully, then looked up.
“I’m not getting a good feeling from you, Lina. Is something wrong?”
“I had to take a sleeping pill last night. Still feel slightly hung over.”
“Is that what happened the last time we scheduled a zoom?”
“When we were planning this trip? Yeah, I couldn’t sleep. So I medicated.”
“I’m sorry… But you know this going to be a hard couple of days. I need your help…”
“This is not just an excuse Dee…”
Aline put the last of her things in a drawer and closed the bureau emphatically. Delisia sighed loudly, mentally marking a placeholder in hopes of continuing the conversation later. She returned to examining the ceramic piece she had just been gifted.
“This is what’s called kintsugi, right?” she asked. “They repair all the cracked pieces by putting them back together with gold.”
“I found it in a little shop around the corner from my apartment,” Aline said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Delisia paused for a moment before speaking, her eyes focused on the pottery.
“Do you think this was intentionally broken and then put back together?” she asked, “or do you think the vase was created from already broken pottery?”
***
Awake in the early hours of the following day, Delisia’s mind was full of muddy and conflicting thoughts. It had not been easy to get her parents to leave 7536 Stewart Avenue. Every time she and Aline broached the subject of moving, the two aging seniors confirmed that next year would be best. Then their mother had an accident, everything changed and in the ensuing months, there were extensive family conversations. Aline weighed in with big picture ideas and opinions from the east coast and Delisia, who lived a few miles from her parents, toured multiple local facilities and created detailed spreadsheets. Woodlake Manor, with its luscious landscaping and generous apartments emerged as the top choice, and her parents signed a contract that would allow them to stay there until the end of their lives.
Bud was satisfied with his daughters’ careful planning, yet hesitated when it came to making the down payment. He nearly missed the deadline and then continued to second guess the choice to move even after all the paperwork was signed and Delisia took him to lunch. His voice shaky, his glasses tipped halfway down his nose, he mumbled his truest wish.
“I wanted to give that money to you and your sister.”
“We’ve been over this a million times, Dad,” Delisia said, reaching out to hold his hand. “This is really the best decision. You’ve got enough money now and you and mom were having trouble really caring for that old house anyway.”
He grudgingly agreed. Real estate prices had skyrocketed in the city, and the maintenance chores had become overwhelming. But then, moments later, holding a fork mid-way to his mouth, he paused.
“I don’t know Dee. Really. How much longer do you think we’ll live?”
It was a question Delisia thought about often, her reflections always arriving at a dead end. There was no way of determining what would happen or how her parents’ lives would affect her own. At least she had convinced Aline to fly out and help with this final move, and in the future, the retirement community would provide house cleaning and meals and there were medical staff on site. Still, her father’s high blood pressure and diabetes and her mother’s increasing arthritis were a constant concern. Her proximity meant that she was going to be the one her parents turned to when they needed help.
Putting aside her morning musings, she got out of bed to knock on the guestroom door.
“Are you up, Lina?” Delisia said. “We need to leave on time.”
When there was no answer, she knocked again and entered, finding Aline stretched out, staring at the ceiling. She turned to her side and sat up. Delisia leaned in the doorway.
“I’m not sure what’s going on Dee, but for the last two nights I haven’t been able to sleep.”
She reached her arms over her head towards the ceiling then touched her chest with her left hand.
“I wake up and there is a tightness here, a panicky feeling. I can’t breathe. I get up, walk around, do yoga. Nothing helps.”
“Do you think it has to do with the move?” Delisia said. “Once mom and dad leave, there will be no home to go home to.”
Aline shrugged. “I don’t think that’s affecting me. What has mom been saying?”
“She’s glad it’s finally happening. But she’s worried about Dad.”
You are angels, their mother had always told them in difficult times, and she had found plenty of opportunity to make use of that phrase. The big crises took a toll on Jessie — Bud’s loss of a job, her lingering grief over a miscarriage, her sister’s early death from cancer. But she was also sensitive to the day-to-day setbacks. Their mother despaired over even the littlest things and Delisia found these memories loomed larger when her sister visited, as if Aline’s presence gave her permission to remember the strain.
Jessie’s sole job in life had been to run the house and take care of her girls, but too often the sisters ended up taking care of her. A broken washing machine could push their mother into despondency. A neighbors’ rude comment often required a morning in bed. When they were young and she was angry and out of sorts, they would crawl into her lap and she would caress their hair. As they got older, they learned how to distract her with school news and triumphs or coax her to go for a walk. Then when she had the complete breakdown, they went every day after school to the hospital for a visit. “I can almost see your halos,” she would tease them as her mood brightened, and she would brag to the nurses about her lovely daughters.
The celestial phrase now came to mind, but Delesia didn’t say it aloud. Instead, she touched her sister lightly on the back.
“We need to get going…”
Aline stretched her legs. A muscle twitched in her cheek.
***
When they arrived at the house, Delisia could tell by her sister’s face that she was stunned with the emptied space, the once lively home nearly freed from its material history. The furniture had been readied for the moving truck, the shelves almost cleared of books and knickknacks and everything else was in a box. The worn bungalow was just under fourteen hundred square feet, built in a Los Angeles suburb developed in the post-war housing boom, and Delisia had insisted her parents paint it before they put it up for sale. Together they had picked out a warm coffee color for the exterior and matched it with deep maroon trim, enabling a quick sale for a price Bud considered astronomical. That had eased some of the pain of leaving but nostalgia remained. This was where her parents had moved just after their honeymoon. This was where they had brought two tiny babies home from the hospital.
Delisia gave her mother a hug and then began to help. Jessie was finishing her final packing, carefully placing a few things in four cardboard boxes open on the floor and Aline looked around as if puzzled by the remaining household items.
“Why hasn’t this china been packed?” she asked.
“I want to carry these things myself,” said Jessie.
“And what about the family photos and these old childhood trophies?
“I’m leaving those for last,” Jessie said. “Don’t worry Lina.”
“You should have come two weeks ago when we first started packing,” Delisia said, looking around to see what else needed to be done. “You could have weighed in then. And you could have come to the neighborhood farewell party.”
“I told you why I couldn’t come,” said Aline. “And it was just a suggestion.”
Delisia turned away as Jessie reached out for a short hug.
“Where’s dad?” Aline asked.
“He’s collecting cuttings,” Jessie said. “A manager from Woodlake Manor called and said they’ve agreed to provide him a small garden plot.”
Delisia stretched to the top of the tallest bookshelf to grab one more ceramic cat, dusted it with the tail of her shirt and put it in one of the boxes with newspaper and taped it shut. Aline pointed to two items sitting on a side table.
“I hope you two don’t mind,” she said, “but Mom, what are you doing with these?”
“Oh dear,” she said, “my jewelry. I’ve given away all the costume stuff, but these are the important pieces.” She handed a long red box to Lina and a black box to Delisia.
“I’m giving my pearls to Lina and the necklace with the locket is for Dee.”
Delisia had not seen her mother’s jewelry in over twenty years as she always buried the case way in the back of her closet. She remembered her mom wearing the pearls at Aunt Sophie’s wedding, and it made her smile to think of Jessie in a grey silk dress, her hair curled for the occasion, happy in her role as maid of honor at her sister’s wedding. The locket with the turquoise stone had been her grandmother’s. Both keepsakes were links to their mother’s history and Delisia knew she was proud to pass them on.
Yet there was another memory.
She had been eight years old and playing with Aline when they found their mother’s jewelry box while she was napping. They were intimidated by these prized possessions but pawed through the pins and bracelets anyway, choosing golden beads to string around their necks and clipping sparkly earrings to their lobes, completing the dress-up with smeared lipstick, eye shadow and that wonderous womanly accessory, the high-heel. Without thinking, they had woken Jessie up to parade in front of her, giggling while they shuffled their feet awkwardly in shoes three sizes too big. But Jessie was not amused and had, for the first time in their lives, hit them. Across their bottoms, and over their chests, she had been in a near hysterical rage until the girls disentangled themselves from her embrace, fled to their bedroom and locked the door. Jessie sat outside and cried, finally calming down and begging their forgiveness.
Delisia wondered if the gift of jewelry had also brought Aline back to that long ago day. Behind the locked bedroom door they had made a vow, a childish pledge to always care for each other, a sacred promise voiced at an innocent age when they thought whatever they said aloud would always be true.
Glancing at her sister, she saw the pearls were around her neck and she was stroking them gently. Leaning back on the sofa, Aline’s breathing was heavy, her left hand was pressed to her chest, her eyes were closed.
***
After the moving van left, Delisia found her mother in the back yard staring out across the empty garden, its perimeter ringed in sage and lavender, an olive tree and cherry laurel in each corner. Jessie looked smaller now it seemed, her hair a solid white and pinned up with bobby pins, her shoulders drooping, her hands seemingly clasped in defeat.
“You okay, mom?” Delisia asked, reaching out to put an arm around her shoulder.
“I was so happy here… especially when you girls were young. We had your birthday parties in this yard, you played tag with your friends… When do you think Lina will be coming home?
“I don’t know, mom. I really don’t know.”
“I miss her.”
“I know mom. I do too.”
Delisia sent Bud and Jessie ahead to meet up with the moving van and then she took one last walk-through of the house, leaving Aline sitting on the carpet by the front entry, scrolling on her phone. As she moved from room to room, the place itself felt sad, its only owners moving on, its identity shifting from family home to just another tract house in a sprawling, anonymous metropolis. “All done,” she said, finishing the tour. Reaching out a hand to help Aline up, Delisia let her sister go out first and then slowly closed the door for the last time.
When they arrived at Woodlake Manor, Jessie was already arranging family photos on the mantel, the movers having unloaded the van and placed the large furniture in the new apartment, a space half the size of their parents’ bungalow.
“Don’t you want to unpack the kitchen first mom,” Delisia said, “and put away your clothes?
“I think I should do this,” Jessie said. “It will help this place feel more like home.”
On Stewart Avenue, the family photos had been arranged haphazardly on a number of bookshelves, their inclusion the result of a recent event or a re-ordering that Jessie decided on when she dusted. Now Delisia noted, her mother had grouped all the photos of her and Aline separate from other family images; there she was in a frilly christening gown with the chubby legs of a one-year-old next to another photo of her hugging Aline, dressed in the same outfit, a year and a half later. There was a picture of the two of them masquerading as princesses in lavender and pink for Halloween and twin witches in all black the following year. There were photos from high school; Aline in a white tennis outfit hitting an overhead serve, Delisia holding a soccer ball, surrounded by the team. And the widening gap of adulthood; Delisia at the Thanksgiving dinner table, taking a selfie with her parents and aunts, and Bud and Jessie posing with Aline at the Empire State building in New York City.
“Is this who I think it is mom?” Delisia asked, taking a framed snapshot of an older man surrounded by three children out of the box. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this old photo.”
“I pulled that out of storage,” Jessie said. “You recognize us, right? That’s my father and me and my sisters, your aunts.”
Delisia looked closely at the black and white image of Grandpa Jenkins and his offspring, its edges slightly frayed, a water stain in the righthand corner. She had never met her grandfather, but she knew he had been born into a family that lost everything during the Great Depression and never quite recovered. She had heard stories that he was a live wire, a non-stop talker and infinitely curious, a man of boundless ambition who started several businesses but was never successful. He made ‘bad choices’ is the way Aunt Doris had put it when she told Delisia about his life, but he never hurt anyone. He just took things that weren’t his, she said.
“I think your mother struggled the most when he was away,” her aunt had explained one summer, showing Delisia a few newspaper articles that referred to the time her grandfather had spent in prison. “Jessie was the youngest and our dad’s favorite.”
Delisia thought of this now, staring at the photo, as if something about it would help her understand why her grandfather made those choices and if some tiny detail might also explain how his actions affected her mother. As a teen-ager, she had often wondered about the connection between the Great Depression and the sickness of the same name. After her mother’s diagnosis, just before she and Aline entered middle school, Bud had finally explained to them how their mother suffered and that she would now improve with medication. Depression, he had told them, is a very difficult state of mind.
“Shall we help you unpack these other boxes?” Aline asked but Jessie shook her head.
“We’ll do a little bit more, then we’ll rest.”
“Don’t forget that dinner is served at five thirty,” Delisia told Jessie as she and Aline hugged their mother good-bye. “We’ll be back to help you tomorrow.”
***
Delesia is puttering around the kitchen having insisted on putting out plates for the take-out they grabbed on the way home, instead of eating the food out of cartons. Aline is having a few olives and sipping a drink.
“I’m not sure why you were so concerned about today,” Aline says. “Mom and dad seem fine at the new place.”
“You didn’t feel any sense of loss when we shut the front door? You didn’t feel like an era had ended?”
“Dee, I left that house nearly twenty years ago, it hasn’t been my home for a while.”
“But it was our home….Lina, it was our family home.”
“I know that.”
“Well… maybe you don’t feel anything because you’ve basically deserted us.”
“Oh Dee…come on…What do you mean?”
Delisia opens a drawer to get out silverware, places it on the table and returns with the food. She takes her seat, motioning to Aline to sit down.
“You helped with the final moving decision, Lina. I know that. But you left everything else to me. You didn’t help with putting up the house for sale, you didn’t help find a real estate agent, you weren’t here to help with all the logistics of getting them packed up…”
Delisia knows her voice is getting louder and faster, the pent-up energy of the last few months coming to the fore as Aline remains quiet.
“You begged off coming out to help. You didn’t get any boxes, pack the bathroom items, sort the Christmas decorations. You didn’t help mom decide which of her shoes she could leave behind…”
“Okay, okay. I get it. I understand all you’ve done. But you know I can’t be around mom for any extended length of time. It’s too painful.”
“Well… You need to grow up!”
Delisia takes a long, deep breath and Aline shakes her head.
“I told you I’ll be able to help out financially, but I’ve got to work.”
“I work too Lina, and Dad sold the house for fifty times more than he bought it. They don’t need your money.”
Delesia looks directly at her sister and Aline meets her gaze for a few moments, then looks away. She takes a sip of water and the two return to silence, eating quietly.
“The curry chicken is good,” Aline says and Delisia nods assent but keeps her eyes focused on her plate.
“We need you, Lina, not your cash. Our parents gave us their love and care, however flawed. We owe them the same in return.”
***
Delisia is awakened by a gentle rustling noise and sits up to find Aline standing in the bedroom doorway, her slim form illumined only by the faint glow from a nightlight in the hall.
“What are you doing up Lina?”
“I can’t sleep. Can we talk a little? Please?”
She pads in, kneels next to the bed and taking Delisia’s hand, puts it over her heart. It throbs.
“Do you feel it? It’s bad Dee. I almost can’t breathe the adrenaline is rushing so fast.”
“Shall we go to the hospital?” Fully awake now, Delisia is afraid.
Aline shutters and shakes her head.
“But I’m not mom, Dee, I’m not mom,” she sobs.
It is their worst fear, a familial anxiety. A concern they know is whispered among relations and close friends. The worry that one of them will collapse and come to share their mother’s illness, her despondency, her sadness, her gloom.
“Oh Li-Li, I’m sorry, so sorry,” Delisia mumurs softly, giving voice to a familial pet name. Then pushing back the covers, she reaches out for her sister and pulls her into bed. It is a sleep time ritual they have not engaged in since they were small. Aline turns on her side, clutches her pillow tightly and snuggles her foot beneath her sisters as her breath comes in surges, then slows and recedes to a normal tempo. Under the weight of the day, Delisia lies awake, staring first at the ceiling to quiet her thoughts, then slowly shifting her attention to the swoosh-swoosh of passing cars, and the shadows that appear like fluttering wings on the bedroom wall. Once again drowsy, her lashes dust her cheeks. The sisters sleep entwined until dawn.
Sylvia Sensiper is an artist and writer. She has published in Intima, Glacier Hills Review, and The Autoethnographer and her scholarly work has appeared in Current Psychology and Children and Youth Services Review. Her photographs are in the collection of the UC Davis Health System