Two Sisters

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VERA

The house was yellow.

I know it was yellow because I chose the color. I was seven and our mother let me pick from the paint swatches at the hardware store and I chose the yellow that was almost gold, the yellow of late afternoon in August, and our father painted it that summer on the ladder while June and I sat on the porch and handed him things.

June was afraid of the ladder.

She wouldn't go near it.

She sat with her knees pulled up and watched from the steps.

This is one of the earliest things I know about my sister: her fear of heights. The specific, physical fear that made her go still and quiet in a way she wasn't still and quiet about anything else. June was loud. June was everywhere. June was the one who ran and climbed and talked too much and knocked things over with the edge of her particular energy.

Except near the ladder.

Near the ladder she was someone else.

I remember handing our father the brush.

I remember June on the steps.

I remember the yellow.

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JUNE

The house was white.

It was always white. It was white when we moved in and white when we left and our mother used to say the white made it look clean from the street, made it look like a house that had its act together, which was the specific, aspirational standard our mother applied to most things.

Vera will tell you it was yellow.

Vera will tell you she chose the color.

I don't know where she got this. There was no painting. There was no ladder. There was no August afternoon with our father on the ladder because our father was not the kind of man who painted things, who did the domestic maintenance of a house he lived in, who climbed ladders while his daughters handed him brushes.

Our father was not there in August.

Our father was not there for most of it.

Vera knows this.

She was there when we learned it.

Wasn't she.

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VERA

June's bedroom was across the hall from mine.

I could hear her at night. The specific sounds of a person sleeping near you, the breathing and the occasional turning, the small acoustic life of a body doing its nighttime business. I found it comforting. I still find it comforting, the sound of another person sleeping nearby, and I have traced this back to those years, to the house and the hall and the breathing across it.

We talked through the wall sometimes.

Not through the wall literally. We'd leave our doors open and talk in the dark across the hall in the specific, permitted version of staying up past bedtime that our mother allowed because she could hear us from her room and as long as she could hear us she knew we were fine.

June used to tell stories.

She was good at it.

She'd start something in the dark and her voice would go and I'd follow it and by the time she stopped I'd be almost asleep and the story would be in the dream already, already becoming something else, already mine.

I miss the stories.

I miss hearing her across the hall.

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JUNE

I didn't have a bedroom across the hall from Vera.

My bedroom was downstairs.

The house had two floors and Vera's room was upstairs at the end of the hall and my room was downstairs near the kitchen, which I hated, which I complained about for years, which our mother explained as practical because I was younger and she wanted to hear me if I woke in the night.

I woke in the night often.

I don't remember talking through walls.

I don't remember voices in the dark.

What I remember from the nights of that house is the specific silence of a room near the kitchen, the refrigerator's hum, the particular quality of a silence that is the absence of other people rather than the presence of them.

Vera's room was at the end of the hall upstairs.

I know this because I went up there sometimes.

I know this because I stood in the doorway sometimes and watched her sleep.

She slept very still.

Vera always slept very still.

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VERA

The summer I turned nine, June and I found the door in the woods behind the property.

Not a real door. The remains of one. A frame with rotted wood still hanging, standing alone in the trees, belonging to no structure, which is the specific and unsettling quality of a door without a house: it implies a passage without a destination, a threshold that opens onto only more of what's already there.

June was frightened of it.

I was the one who wanted to go through.

I stepped through the frame and turned around and June was still on the other side, not following, doing the thing she did when something frightened her which was going very still and very quiet, her face doing that specific, particular thing it did.

I stepped back through.

I took her hand.

We went home.

She talked about the door for years after.

We talked about the door.

It was ours, the door. The specific, shared property of a memory that belonged to both of us equally, that we could produce together in conversation with all its details intact and matching.

I have tried to produce it with her recently.

She says she doesn't remember a door.

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JUNE

I don't remember a door.

I remember the woods. I remember going into the woods alone sometimes, the specific, deliberate solitude of a child who needed to be somewhere that required no performance, who had learned early that the woods asked nothing of her.

I went into the woods alone.

I don't remember Vera coming with me.

I don't remember Vera in the woods at all.

I remember her in the house. At the table. In the kitchen with our mother. In the upstairs room at the end of the hall, the door open, the particular stillness of her sleep.

But the woods were mine.

I am certain the woods were mine.

When Vera talks about the door in the woods, about the summer we found it, about taking my hand and walking me home, I listen and I do not say what I am thinking, which is:

I was not with you.

I don't know who you were with.

I don't know whose hand you took.

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VERA

There is a photograph.

I have it. It's in a box in my closet, the box of things from the house, from the years of the house, the accumulated physical evidence of a childhood that I can hold in my hands and verify when the verification feels necessary.

The photograph is of two girls on a porch.

The porch of the yellow house.

The older girl, which is me, has her arm around the younger girl, which is June.

We are both looking at the camera.

We are both there.

I have shown June this photograph.

She looked at it for a long time.

She said: that's you.

I said: that's both of us.

She said: I know in the specific tone of someone who is agreeing with the statement and not agreeing with the statement simultaneously, who is giving you the word without the meaning.

I put the photograph back in the box.

I do not take it out anymore.

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JUNE

There is a photograph.

Vera has it.

She showed it to me once and I looked at it for a long time and I said: that's you.

She said: that's both of us.

I said: I know.

The girl in the photograph with Vera is not someone I recognize.

This is not something I have said out loud.

This is not something I plan to say out loud.

Some truths require a specific kind of courage I have not yet assembled, the courage to say: I don't know who that is, but I know who it isn't, and I know what that means, and I have known for a long time, and the knowing is the thing I have been living inside of, the thing that makes the yellow house and the door in the woods and the voices through the walls into something I cannot argue with even though I should be able to argue with it, even though the arguing should be simple, even though I was there, I was always there, I was in the house, I was in the woods, I was on the steps watching our father on the ladder.

Our father was not on a ladder.

The house was white.

I am certain the house was white.

I am certain of almost nothing else.

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VERA

June called me last week.

She calls sometimes, not often, in the specific, irregular rhythm of a relationship that has survived things that relationships don't always survive, that has the particular texture of two people who know each other completely and have decided, mutually and without discussing it, to know each other at a certain distance.

She asked about the house.

I told her I'd been thinking about the yellow.

She was quiet.

I said: do you remember the summer Dad painted it.

She said: Vera.

Just my name.

The way she says my name when she is about to tell me something she has been not telling me, when she has reached the limit of the not-telling and needs to put something down.

Vera.

I waited.

She didn't say anything else.

We talked about other things.

We said goodbye.

I sat for a long time after with the phone in my hand.

I thought about the door in the woods.

I thought about the frame standing alone in the trees.

I thought about the passage that opens onto only more of what's already there.

I thought about stepping through it.

I thought about turning around.

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JUNE

Vera called me last week.

She calls sometimes.

She talked about the house. She talked about the yellow. She said do you remember the summer Dad painted it in the voice she uses when she needs me to confirm something, when the confirming is the whole point of the call.

I said her name.

I almost said the thing.

I have been almost saying the thing for years.

I did not say it.

Some doors you stand in front of for a very long time before you understand that the going through is not the question.

The question is what you find when you turn around.

What is still there.

What was always there.

What has been there in the house and the woods and the hall across from the room at the end of the hall and the steps where one of us sat watching and the ladder and the yellow and the white and the photograph and the girl in it whose face I do not recognize and will not name.

I did not say the thing.

I said goodbye.

I sat for a long time after.

I thought about Vera.

I thought about the specific, particular stillness of her sleep.

I thought about standing in the doorway watching.

I thought about the breathing I could hear.

I thought:

she was always so still.

She was always so still.

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Neither of them says which one.

The house holds both stories.

The house is yellow.

The house is white.

The door in the woods opens onto only more of what's already there.

One of them turns around.

One of them was already on the other side.

The photograph is in the box.

The girl in it has no name.

Both sisters are certain.

Both sisters were there.