The Sister Who Drove Me to Bangor

The braid

I have not told anyone this, not even Colette. In January, at the fifth treatment, I fell asleep in the infusion chair. They give you something for the nausea that makes you heavy, and the room was warm, and the pump ticked.

I woke only partway, with my eyes closed, and felt hands in my hair.

Somebody was dividing what I had left of it into three strands. Not rough, not quick. Gently, and then tighter, pulling the way you pull when you are a girl of twelve at a kitchen chair at six in the morning, with a mother already gone to the shed.

It was a French braid. I knew it by the weight and the pull at my temples, hard enough to make my eyes water. Nobody had braided my hair like that since I was thirteen.

I did not open my eyes. I lay there with the tears running sideways into my ears, and I let my sister do it.

I heard Sheila’s voice, soft, a few feet away. “Oh, that’s lovely. Look at that.”

“She has a cowlick,” said Ginette. Her voice was thick. “She always did. You have to start behind it.”

She took an elastic band from her purse and tied it off.

When I opened my eyes, she was sitting very straight with her hands in her lap, looking at the wall.

“It’s too tight,” I said.

“It’s supposed to be too tight,” said Ginette. “That’s how it holds.”

I wore that braid home and did not take it out for two days. When it started to come loose, I stood at the bathroom mirror pressing it back together with my fingers, and cried into a hand towel.

The storm

The last week of January, driving home from the sixth treatment, we watched the sky close.

It had been spitting snow since Bangor. By Houlton it was a white wall, and a state trooper had a cruiser across the road.

“Closed north of here,” he said through the window. “Nothing moving. You’ll want to find a room.”

There was one room left, in a motel off Route 1 with half its sign lit. The girl at the desk gave us a key and two paper cups of cocoa mix.

Two beds with brown bedspreads, one lamp, a heater under the window that made a noise like a kettle.

It was the first time in thirty-two years we had been shut in a room together with no way out.

We ate saltines and cheese from Ginette’s cooler. The wind pushed at the glass.

At about eleven o’clock, with the lamp out, I said into the dark, “Gin.”

“Hm.”

“What’s in the bag?”

I heard nothing for a long time. The wind. The heater.

Then the springs creaked and the lamp clicked on, and my sister sat up on the edge of her bed in her stockings, her gray hair flat on one side. The brown paper bag was on the floor beside her. She had carried it in from the car herself.

She lifted it into her lap and held it in both arms.

“I meant to give it to you on your porch,” she said. “I had it on the seat that day. I got as far as the porch swing and I couldn’t do it. Then you said you had people, and I couldn’t find my voice. Then it was Bangor, and you were in that bed. I told myself I would wait until you were strong.”

“I have been telling myself that for four months.”

“I’m asking now,” I said.

She opened the bag.