Rosebush by Michele Jaffe

nice when you opened your eyes.” She tugged at a thread on the corner of one of my blankets. “They said you might never, but I knew you would. I knew you wouldn’t leave us.”
    The sweet craziness of her wearing her special dress jolted me from my selfishness. Oh, little sister, I wanted to say. I’m sorry you have to go through this.
    She went on, pulling at the thread more deliberately. I couldn’t see her eyes, only her long dark eyelashes, made longer by the magnification of her glasses. “Mom was just scared, that’s why she acted all angry,” she said. From the time she could talk, which had happened when she was only fifteen months old, Annie had been our mother’s number-one fan. Even though she was only seven now, in some ways she was the most mature member of our family. “She didn’t mean to yell. She was so scared you were going to die and then when you lived, she just had too many feelings, and they kind of all came out at the same time. Because she loves you so much. You know how she does that.”
    There was no reason for me to argue with Annie. Let her keep an ideal image of our mother as long as she could. I blinked once.
    “And—” She paused, then rushed on. “I brought you something.”
    She went to the corner of the room and started digging around in the backpack she carried with her everywhere. Inside she had two books (in case she finished one), a fruit roll up, twenty dollars (five of them in quarters), a Swiss army knife, and an extra set of shoelaces. I’d never bothered to ask how she settled on those items.
    When she came back to the bed, she was holding a toy stuffed dog with a worn patch on his head and his right foot. It was technically mine, but I hadn’t seen it or thought about it in years, not since we left Chicago at least.
    As though she could read my mind, Annie said, “I kept it. I sleep with it sometimes. I hope that’s okay.”
    I meant to blink once, but instead I blinked a lot of times because my eyes pricked with tears.
    Memories—memories I kept locked very far away—came flooding back now and I couldn’t stop them. Sitting with my father on the old rocking chair in his study, having him read me poetry. I must have been really young because I remember I could get my whole body into his lap. That’s how I picture us, both with our shaggy dark hair and pale skin. “Bastard children of the lusty Spanish sailors routed in the battle of the Spanish Armada and the kind Irish lasses who took them in” was how he described his ancestry, always with a twinkle in his blue, blue eyes. As much as Annie resembled our mother, I resembled our father, or at least I inherited his coloring and his wide-spaced eyes and strong chin and slightly too-big mouth. I don’t think I ever had the twinkle, though.
    I loved his study, the brightly colored rag rug on the scarred golden-planked floor, the way the white molding around the window was so thick with repainting that it had lost all detail, the bookshelves that covered every wall surface, the sheer yellow curtains that turned the light a buttery color where it slanted across the unruly piles of paper on his desk and landed in a pool right in front of us. It wasn’t grand—not like Joe’s house, where the moldings were pristine and the windows were tinted and the rugs were so deep they came up to your ankles and the books all had matching red-leather spines that have never been cracked—but it felt like home.
    I could sit there for hours listening to him read aloud to me, but what I loved most was when he read poetry, and in particular when he read the Robert Frost poem “Road Not Taken.”
    My father went from himself to a shadow in only three months. At first when the doctor said he was sick—“Some kind of muscle-wasting disease. We don’t know what it is”—it was hard to believe. He still looked like Dad, and sounded like him. But soon he began to change. It was like watching someone fade out of a photograph,