The Trauma Bay My Sister Entered

Neither of us said anything else that night that mattered. I told them visiting hours for recovery would open at six in the morning, that someone would come get them when Kristy was moved to a room, and I walked back through the doors to finish my shift, because I still had a department to run and other patients who needed me, and because I was not ready, that night, to have the longer conversation that both of us could feel waiting on the other side of it.

I came back at seven the next morning, after four hours of sleep I do not remember taking, because I wanted to check on Kristy myself before rounds, the way I would for any post operative patient of mine, and because some part of me, I will admit, wanted to see what the morning looked like in that family waiting area with daylight in it instead of fluorescent midnight dread.

My parents were both still there. I do not think either of them had gone home. My mother’s eyes were red in the particular way that tells you someone has been crying quietly, repeatedly, for hours, trying each time to stop before anyone notices.

Kristy was awake when I came in to check on her, pale, sore, but stable, the monitors behind her showing exactly the numbers I wanted to see. She looked at me for a long moment before she spoke.

“Can you get Mom and Dad,” she said. “I need to say something, and I need them both here when I say it.”

I brought them in. My mother sat in the chair closest to the bed. My father stood near the window, arms crossed, the way he always stood when he was bracing for something he did not want to hear.

“I lied,” Kristy said. Her voice was thin from the anesthesia and from something else underneath it that had clearly been building for a long time, maybe the full five years, maybe longer. “About Erin. About all of it. She was never expelled. She was never falsifying anything. I made that up, that whole week Dad was in the hospital, because I was standing in that kitchen every single day by myself, and Erin was three states away finishing a test, and I was so tired and so scared and so angry that nobody was asking how I was doing, only how Dad was doing, and I wanted, for once, for someone in this family to look at me instead of her.”

The room was very quiet. My mother’s hand had gone to her own chest.

“I told you she got kicked out,” Kristy went on, looking only at our parents now, not at me, “because I knew it was the one thing you could never forgive, cheating, lying to patients, and I knew once you believed it, you would stop comparing every single thing I did to everything she was doing, because she wouldn’t be the golden one anymore. I wanted her gone from the comparison. I didn’t think about what it would actually do to her. I didn’t let myself think about that part for five years, because if I thought about it, I’d have to admit what I actually did to my own sister, and I wasn’t ready to be that person. I’m still not sure I’m ready. But I watched her hold my own organs together last night after everything I did to her, and I can’t carry this one more day.”