November 16 - The last night in the house

Alex heard the whistle of the tea kettle, the sound drifting up from the kitchen, and for a moment she imagined it was the muted sound of train whistle streaming somewhere through the night before she realized this couldn’t be and understood what she was really hearing. She sat up on the air mattress that served as her bed for the night and glanced at her watch. 3.30. She had yet to find sleep tonight. Throwing off the coverlet, her feet floundered about on the floor a moment before finding her slippers, and she tossed her robe around her shoulders as she pattered softly down the stairs.

Meg was at the counter, stirring a spoon absently in the cup of tea she had poured, making small tight circles round and round in a lazy fashion as though she had forgotten she held the implement in her hand. After a moment, she squeezed the belly of a plastic honey bear and watched the amber ooze into the cup, then clicked her spoon against the rim of her tea mug three times – one two three. It was an infinitely familiar sound to Alex, who watched as Meg completed the ritual and then replaced the spoon on the counter.

“You too?” she asked from the doorway. Meg gave a start and turned to look at her sister. She seemed upset a moment at being found-out in her nocturnal wanderings, but then her features softened. “Yeah,” she admitted. “No sleep for me tonight. Tea?” Alex nodded and eased herself onto one of the stools where, for so many years, they had eaten breakfast side-by-side: bowls of cereal from the boxes that Anna McGeehan would line up on the counter in order of ascending height, or packages of instant oatmeal, or triangles of toast that their mother dusted over with cinnamon and sugar.

“Where did you find the tea kettle?” Alex asked, stirring her spoon aimlessly just as her sister had.

Meg shrugged. “One of the boxes by the door. Right on top, so not so hard.”

“And the teabags?”

Meg gave a guilty laugh. “I always bring them with me.”

Alex nodded as if this made sense; Meg had always been the one who was prepared.

She wondered if her sister was more prepared for this moment than she. Although only older by eleven minutes, sometimes she felt that eleven years separated her and Meg. Meg had always known which school activities she would devote herself to, which friends she would pursue. She had selected her college major eight years before she arrived on a college campus, knowing that it was economics for her, followed by an MBA and a career on Wall Street. Meg had gone on to do exactly thus. For Alex it had always been different, choosing each option in life because it presented itself, not because she went for it. If you had told her as a young girl age eight sitting on this stool for breakfast that she would go on to be the pastry chef at an It eatery in Chicago, she might have laughed at you, but somehow that was what she found herself doing, a career that had fallen into her lap, not one of her choosing. It was the same for the tea, she thought with an internal laugh. It was Meg who liked this blackberry variety they were sipping. Alex would stutter whenever the tea cart was presented to her in a restaurant. “Uh, whichever you suggest,” she would say to the server. Likewise with desserts, dinner specials, clothing sales, anything really. The manager of her restaurant said he was thankful the dessert menu was set every night and didn’t depend on her making up her mind.

So the question she asked now was: “Were you surprised?” Meg sipped thoughtfully at her tea, her brows drawing down over the rim of the cup like two fuzzy caterpillars.

“Surprised? No,” she confessed. “Sad, yes.”

Sad. Such a funny emotion, to feel about a space, an inanimate object. Anna hadn’t told her two daughters that she was selling the house, not until the sale had gone through and nearly everything was packed in boxes and stowed away. She had asked them to come for these last few days, to help clean out closets that, once open, began to vomit out pieces of the past. Old artwork from their kindergarten years, pictures from proms, old bank statements and lost letters and useless pieces of wax and paper clips and packages of moth balls, all being spewed out by closets and drawers and crates in the garage that had hibernated peacefully for years and now were affronted by the human flood that was emptying them all. And now this, the last night in the house.

Alex winced as her tea burned the roof of her mouth. She had forgotten how hot Meg liked it. Or, not forgotten, precisely, but let it slip her mind for the moment. Her sister had gone through a ‘tea phase’ where she had to make scalding hot tea every night before bed or she couldn’t sleep; she said she liked making it that hot because then she could add an ice cube and watch it melt and once the tendrils of melted water had settled in the tea, it would be the perfect temperature to drink.

“Remember how Mom used to yell at us for making witch’s brew in this kitchen?” Alex asked of a sudden. Meg chuckled into her cup.

“Oh yes.” She pointed to where they used to sit on the kitchen floor, by the sink. “We’d perch right there and take her biggest pot and add every possible thing in the refrigerator until it stunk up the whole house.”

Alex giggled. “Yup.”

Meg’s fingers drummed against the ceramic. “Remember all the boys we brought home who were made to sit and squirm on that couch under Mom’s first-date interrogation?” Alex turned her head and could see the imprints of those boys’ bottoms still, one after the next, ankles crossed and nodding their heads with a, ‘Yes ma’am,’ and, ‘No, ma’am.’

“I remember,” she agreed. “Remember sledding down the hill in the backyard?”

“And crashing into the trees that time you got the concussion.” Both girls were grinning now. “I remember.”

The laughter faded and the only sound was the ice cube hissing its way into nothingness in Meg’s second cup of tea.

“You think Mom will be okay in a nursing home?” she asked finally. Alex nodded not because she believed it but because it made the empty house less frightening. It had been Anna’s decision after all. Alex shuddered at the idea of making such a final choice. “This place is too big for her now.”

Meg nodded without believing it, and they were silent for a while, sipping.

“Sleep?” her sister asked finally, draining her cup and setting it into the sink. She looked around a moment, as if for a sponge or a dish towel, any normal kitchen thing, before remembering these items had been put away.

“Sleep,” Alex agreed, doing the same. She ascended the stairs to her childhood bedroom for the last time.