Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken

wishing that Hattie was still alive, I wished at least she’d had a different death. I wished she had spent some time dying, in other words: I wished I could have sat on the edge of her sickbed, that I could have climbed the roof—
    No. Even if I try, make myself over into Harold Lloyd or Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., my fantasy self puts one knee on my bedroom windowsill, looks down, and climbs back inside. Okay, I would sneak past Annie, then, into Hattie’s room, ready to risk some killing germ, weighed down with a board game and bagfuls of candy from the dime store. Her arms would worm out from under Annie’s fierce tucking, ready for presents.
    I believed then—part of me still believes—that I had killed Hattie. I had called out, knowing she would always answer me. It must have been windy up on the roof, said Annie; it must have been slick; she must not have known how tricky it was to walk on slanted shingles. I never explained that she had plenty of practice. When Rocky asked what Hattie had died of, I wouldn’t say, because I believed that if I put it into words, it would be true. But my version of her death, the one in which I killed her, became true anyhow. Secrecy turns the slightest worry into your deepest fearful belief; over time, it builds up, a pearl inside an oyster, and that’s how carefully you guard it.
    Now it seems to me that Hattie was never quite a Sharp, though I know that any of my sisters, magnified under the glass of time and regret, might seem so. Each one, you might have said: the youngest, the oldest, the kindest, the best mother, the middle girl of all those girls—she was the one we couldn’t spare.
    Or me. Years later, if it had been me, someone would have said, The only boy. Surely his father’s favorite. Look, here he is among the girls in his Battenberg lace collar. He was going to go into vaudeville, you know. Uncle Mose could dance like a dream.
    In all of my memories of Hattie, forever and ever, I’m looking up at her chin and dreaming of the day I’ll be tall enough to look down on the curve of her nose. (I never would have been.) She looks like an allegorical figure, like Liberty, or Grace, or the Pride of the Rock Island Line, or the Woman at Home for Whom You Fight.
    She’s Hattie, though. She’s a long-nosed, curly-headed, acid-tongued, too-smart-for-her-own-good Jewish girl from Iowa, and every day I wish she were still here to boss me around.
    The morning after Hattie died, my father helped me dress. That was a dance in itself, Pop holding out first my pants, then my shirt. I hopped as solemnly as I could, tried to sneak the casts on my wrists down sleeves without touching the fabric. Then I tipped up my chin to make room for his buttoning fingers.
    â€œSad life, sad life,” said Papa. “Sad life, Mose.”
    And I thought, I am the ruined one.
    Two steps closer, and I would have caught her. I was certain of this. She fell into my hands, and then my wrists gave way. I tried to remember the feel of her silk dress rushing past my palms, but I couldn’t.
    That afternoon, my family sat in the sanctuary of the temple, nearly braided together on our bench: Rose lay across my lap, my father had his hand on my back beneath my jacket, Annie leaned on his shoulder, Fannie had her arm linked with Annie, then Sadie, then Ida: there was no air between us at all. My sisters’ wise husbands kept their distance: when a mother dies, a husband can comfort, can present himself and your life with him as a kind of substitute, but after the death of a sibling, a husband and children seem skimpy compared to the grief. The rabbi recited the Twenty-third Psalm, the one that told you not to be afraid of death because God walked with you always.
    It wasn’t God’s company I wanted.
    At home, my living sisters fussed till I had to run up the stairs and slam the door and roll in my bed with guilt for hating their kindness.