The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [10]
Faith was sobbing. She waved the shears in Barry’s face. “Stop it,” she screamed, “or I’ll kill you!”
Barry paused. He looked at the shears, then smiled. He broke the painting over his knee. Faith plunged the shears into her own thigh.
Then everything stopped. Barry’s face went so white Phoebe thought at first that her sister had killed them both. There was a long, almost leisurely pause when none of them moved, when the day tingled around them.
Then everything happened at once: Faith sank to the ground. Barry tore off his T-shirt and tied her leg in a tourniquet. Phoebe pounded wildly on the door of their neighbor, Mrs. Rose, who ferried them to Children’s Hospital in her clattering station wagon. There were shots, stitches and lots of questions. It was a game, they’d all insisted—instinctively, without plan or discussion among them—a game that had gone too far.
It had always seemed to Phoebe, looking back, that on that day something shifted irreversibly among the three of them. As Faith lay in the emergency room, bleached from loss of blood, Phoebe saw in her sister’s face a kind of wonderment at the power of what she had done. It was spring 1966. That fall Faith would start high school, and within a year would be immersed in what had become, in retrospect, the sixties. But when Faith and Barry fought, none of this had happened yet. Faith was thirteen, wearing green cotton pants. She knew nothing of drugs. Even the first of so many boyfriends had not yet crossed their threshold.
After the fight Barry kept out of Faith’s way. He would watch her from a distance, following her movements with his dark eyes. He was afraid of her. And Faith, after that day, no longer seemed frightened of anything.
Phoebe went upstairs to her sister’s old room and shut the door. After Faith died, their mother had tried to clear this room out, but Phoebe raised such a clamor she agreed to wait, and a few months became a year, then two; it was somehow too late.
For the past three years Phoebe had slept here. Just slept. Her clothes and possessions she kept in her old room, down the hall. Phoebe knew her mother disapproved of this arrangement, for she never came in Faith’s room to perch on the bed and talk, as she had before.
Faith had draped her ceiling in reams of blue batik. Glass pyramids lined her shelves, scarabs and rare beads and miniature gold incense burners. Outside the window hung a cheap set of wind chimes, cloudy, peach-colored discs reminiscent of Communion wafers. They’d come from the sea, Phoebe thought. Their sound had the giddy unevenness of children’s laughter, or some fine thing splintering into pieces.
Phoebe flopped on the bed, still in her Wallabees, listening to Faith’s chimes and feeling the house pull in around her as it always did when strangers left it. Faith’s room was full of pictures, snapshots of toothless grins and Christmas trees, birthday cakes suspended above the upturned faces of children in party hats. Faith had loved pictures—photographs, their father’s drawings, it made no difference—she’d craved any glimpse she could catch of her own life reflected back at her.
Objects crowded the shelves of her sister’s closet, a Mexican straw hat embroidered with flowers, a cowhide wallet, flesh-colored arrowheads from the rain-soaked fields around St. Louis, on and on it went, down, down, until at the very bottom lay—what? Phoebe didn’t know. But something. The key to a mystery was buried among the forgotten moments of her sister’s life, times when