Bloodline(87)

“Excellent,” Dad agreed.

My heart soared. We hardly ever traveled farther than up the highway to Saint Cloud for co-op groceries, but now that Mom had her full-time teaching job, there’d been talk of road-tripping this summer. Still, I’d been afraid to suggest we visit Aunt Jin. If Mom and Dad were in the wrong mood, they’d kill that idea for eternity, and I really needed some Aunt Jin time. I loved her to death.

She was the only one who didn’t pretend I was normal.

She was there when I was born, stayed on for a few weeks after that to help out Mom, but my first actual memory of her was from right after Uncle Richard’s funeral. Aunt Jin was a decade younger than Mom, which put her at no more than seventeen at the time. I’d caught her staring at my throat, something a lot of people do.

Rather than look away, she’d smiled and said, “If you’d been born two hundred years ago, they’d have drowned you.”

She was referring to the red, ropy scar that circled where my neck met my shoulders, thick as one of Mr. T’s gold chains. Apparently, I’d shot out of Mom with the umbilical cord coiled around my throat, my body blue as a Berry Punch Fla-Vor-Ice, eyes wide even though I wasn’t breathing. I exited so fast that the doctor dropped me.

Or at least that’s the story I was told.

There I hung, a human dingleberry, until one of the nurses swooped in and unwound the cord, uncovering an amniotic band strangling me beneath that. The quick-thinking nurse cut it, then slapped me till I wailed. She’d saved my life, but the band had branded me. Mom said my lesion looked like an angry scarlet snake at first. That seemed dramatic. In any case, I suspect the nurse was a little shaky when she finally handed me over. The whole fiasco wasn’t exactly a job well done. Plus, Rosemary’s Baby had hit theaters a couple years before, and everyone in that room must have been wondering what had propelled me out of the womb with such force.

“It would have been bad luck to keep a baby whose own mother tried to strangle it twice,” Aunt Jin finished, chucking me under my chin. I decided on the spot that it was an okay joke because Mom was her sister, and they both loved me.

Here’s another nutty saying Aunt Jin liked to toss my way: “Earth. If you know what you’re doing, you’re in the wrong place.” She’d waggle her thick eyebrows and tip an imaginary cigar as she spoke. I didn’t know where that gesture was from, but she’d giggle so hard, her laugh like marbles thrown up into the sunshine, that I’d laugh along with her.

That’s how every Aunt Jin visit began. The joke about drowning me, some meaty life quotes, and then we’d dance and sing along to her Survivor and Johnny Cougar tapes. She’d spill all about her travels and let me sip the honey-colored liqueur she’d smuggled from Amsterdam or offer me a packet of the biscuits she loved so much and that I’d pretend didn’t taste like old saltines. Sephie would want to join in, I’d see her on the sidelines, but she never quite knew how to hop on the ride that was Aunt Jin.

I did.

Aunt Jin and me were thick as thieves.

That made it okay that Dad liked Sephie way more than me.

I wrinkled my nose. He was really going to town on that massage. Mom had left to refill her and Dad’s drinks even though he’d offered, since it was taking him so long to rub Sephie’s shoulders.

“Sephie,” I asked, because her eyes were closed and I wanted that to stop, “what’s your dream for the summer?”

She spoke quietly, almost a whisper. “I want to get a job at the Dairy Queen.”

Dad’s hands stopped kneading. A look I couldn’t name swept across his face, and I thought I’d memorized every twitch of his. He almost immediately swapped out that weird expression for a goofy smile that lifted his beard a half inch. “Great! You can save for college.”

Sephie nodded, but she looked so sad all of a sudden. She’d been nothing but moods and mysteries since December. The change in temperament coincided with her getting boobs (Santa Claus delivered! I’d teased her), and so I didn’t need to be Remington Steele’s Laura Holt to understand that one was connected to the other.

Mom returned to the dining room, a fresh drink in each hand, her attention hooked on my dad. “Another game of cribbage?”

I leaned back to peek at the kitchen clock. It was ten thirty. Every kid I told thought it was cool I didn’t have a bedtime. I supposed they were right. Tomorrow was the first day of the last week of seventh grade for me, though. “I’m going to sleep. You guys can play three handed.”

Mom nodded.

“Don’t let the bedbugs bite!” Dad said.

I didn’t glance at Sephie as I walked away. I felt a quease about leaving her up with them when they’d been drinking, but I wrote it off as payback for her always falling asleep first the nights we were left alone, back when we’d sometimes sleep together. She’d let me climb in bed with her, which was nice, but then she’d crash out like a light, and there I’d lay agonizing over every sound, and in an old house like ours there was lots of unexplained thumping and creaking in the night. When I’d finally drift off, everything but my mouth and nose covered by the quilt, she’d have a sleep spaz and wake me right back up.

I couldn’t remember the last time we’d slept in the same bed, hard as I tried on the walk to the bathroom. I rinsed off my face, then reached for my toothbrush, planning out tomorrow’s clothes. If I woke up forty-five minutes early, I could use the hot rollers, but I hadn’t okayed it with Sephie, and I’d already excused myself from the table. I brushed my teeth and spit, rinsing with the same metallic well water that turned the ends of my hair orange.