The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [34]
“What will I do? What will I do if she dies?” Rose asked, and she spoke so quietly the words seemed to disappear in midair.
Bean sighed. “If you had a brain in your head, you’d quit your job and go to England to be with Jonathan. Do you see the theme here?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Then you’re out of excuses. Whatever happens with Mom or doesn’t means absolutely nothing to you in terms of your future.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, sister mine, that the only thing keeping you here is you.”
FIVE
In Rose’s dream, she was sitting in the backseat of Jonathan’s car as it moved down the highway, the trees whipping by in a blur of green. There was no front seat and no driver, and she scrabbled with her fingers, reaching desperately forward, trying to grab the steering wheel and the pedals. When she looked out the windshield at the road ahead, it was dark and blurred. The car sped faster and faster, and Rose reached forward again, her hands still falling in empty space, no matter how she twisted her body.
A clap of thunder so enormous it rattled the windowpanes jerked her awake, and she sat up in bed, clasping her hand to her pounding heart. Calm, Rose, calm, she thought to herself, breathing in and out slowly, in through her nose, out through her mouth, deep yogic breaths that stilled her mind and brought her heart back from its racetrack speed.
Rose had taken yoga classes for over a year, from a gentle woman about our mother’s age, with shining silver hair and a body both soft and limber, combining a grandmother’s warmth with an athlete’s musculature. The instructor, Carol, seemed so at home in herself that it had made Rose feel more comfortable with her own body, which she hid in billowy T-shirts, hanging to her knees over loose-fitting sweatpants, despite the way they restricted her movements.
Our mother’s ancestors were Russian, sort of, from that small area of Poland that had been annexed so many times by so many different conquerors the residents had entirely ceded their nationality and stopped bothering with any such appellations. So we were what you might call sturdy peasant stock, built for farming, for breeding, for work. Rose en-vied Carol’s slim-hipped elegance as the instructor shifted from pose to pose, but she found, in time, the legs she had hated for so long allowed her to do much the same things. This period had coincided with the most passionate lovemaking she had ever had, with anyone, even Jonathan, and she wondered sometimes if she had agreed to marry him partly because of the yoga. It had made her feel beautiful, luxuriant, pliant.
But then a few months ago Carol had announced that she and her husband were retiring, to Florida of all places—and the new instructor, a bleached blonde named Heidi, who wore kitten heels with her yoga pants, terrified Rose. Heidi had come in for the first class and turned the heat up fifteen degrees, so Rose found herself red-faced and sweating, clumsy in a space where she had learned to feel so lovely. As Heidi moved around the class, correcting Rose’s stances repeatedly, Rose’s heart had begun to pound, and she gasped for air. Finally, she had grabbed her mat and stuffed her feet, swollen from the heat, into her flip-flops.
“Leaving, dear?” Heidi had asked, coming up beside Rose, her hands icy on Rose’s fevered skin. She looked at Rose pityingly, as though she had known Rose would not be able to make it through.
Rose nodded, blinking back tears, and escaped.
She had not gone back since. She could feel the difference in her body, the tightness in her muscles where there once had been flexibility, the hitches in her heartbeats becoming more frequent, but Rose had not even considered going back to such a painful failure.
But the breathing still worked, she noticed, checking her heart with her palm once more before she pushed the sheets away, sliding her legs over the side of the bed and sitting for a moment before