The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [14]
Faith must have known, too. She rose from the water, steamy chlorine footprints on the pool’s concrete lip, grinning from ear to ear as they all waited, and suddenly Phoebe was angry—why her? Why always her? Then, without warning, blood poured from her sister’s nose over her mouth and chin and neck, spattering the wet concrete, as if by accident she’d breathed out blood instead of air. Faith frowned, raising a hand to her face. “Oh,” she said, and there was a beat of confusion before their father bolted to her side, laid Faith gently on the grass and sent Barry running for ice, a wet towel.
When the nosebleed finally ended, Faith slept for a solid three hours. Their father moved her tenderly into the shade of a tree, but she didn’t wake; she was exhausted.
Phoebe and Barry went swimming, then ordered grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. At the sight of Faith’s thin, sleeping shape, Phoebe felt something move in her stomach and was ashamed of herself for having wanted her sister to jump.
Phoebe’s ragged memories of her father made her angry at herself; she should have watched more closely, should have memorized whole days from his life. She remembered the strength of his arms, the rough, easy way he would lift her to his chest—absently, as if she were a cat he wanted to put outside—would toss her into the air or spank her without warning, so startling Phoebe that her crying came as an afterthought.
His dark mustache was unexpectedly soft. Mornings when her father and mother were still in bed, Phoebe would burrow between them, inhaling the milky warmth of their flesh, softer after hours of sleep.
Grandma and Grandpa O’Connor still lived in the Southern California town where Phoebe’s father grew up. Mirasol was mostly Navy—Grandpa had been a military policeman—and the small olive-colored house where these grandparents lived could not have contrasted more starkly with the others’ St. Louis mansion. But Mirasol had the ocean. Sea wind rattled the doors of the neighborhood church, grains of sand fell from prayer books. As Phoebe watched the priest break the Host, she would think, That could have been my father. He’d almost become a priest. Phoebe imagined his strong arms lifting the golden chalice to drink the blood of Christ, placing a pale Host on the tongue of each parishioner, murmuring “Amen” to their “Body of Christ.” But to Grandma and Grandpa O’Connor’s lasting sorrow, her father had refused a place at Holy Cross Fathers at Notre Dame and gone instead to Berkeley, where by his own account he endured his electrical engineering courses so at night he could play the bohe-mian, sketching nude models in paint-spattered art studios.
Afterward he’d moved to San Francisco, lived in North Beach and worked the construction jobs that had cost him some hearing on the left side. On weekends he would set up his easel behind the Maritime Museum and paint the old blue-eyed Italian men who played bocci. Phoebe’s mother had met him there, on a trip to San Francisco with friends from Bryn Mawr, a graduation present from her parents. After their wedding Phoebe’s father took an engineering job at IBM, the job Phoebe came to believe had cost him his life.
Phoebe grew up surrounded by sketches of Faith: in their mother’s arms at the hospital, at home in her crib, on a rabbit skin, splashing in her bath, in a high chair, car seat, playpen. Beside the vivid record of her sister’s childhood, Phoebe’s own existence felt shadowy, and this confused and enraged her. Seven years younger, she grudgingly endured stories of how Faith had lunged for everything in sight with her small, star-shaped hands: bees, hornets, broken glass, diamond earrings. Everyone spoke of her daring, how when her father pushed her on the swings Faith would egg him on, yelling “Higher! Higher!” until at four years old her swing overshot the bar it was attached to, wavered in midair and dumped Faith onto the sand.
Their mother screamed, bolted from the bench where she’d been rocking