Dad says Callie is “non-lingual.” Me, I’m not so certain. I keep trying different languages and cadences with her to see if anything clicks. It never does. We have this thing between us that Mom calls language, but it isn’t that. It isn’t a language. It’s more that we have this way of reading each other. Of being very specific with our eyes and our faces, our postures, our vibes. We have these signals, almost, or at least I think we do.
But if Callie can talk to anyone, it’s plants. Not that plants are people. I know plants aren’t people. But she’s always been good with them, ever since she was small. She seems so calm and just generally at home around them, with her hands in the dirt, her eyes shut—not tightly, but just softly closed. As if when she’s with them, they help her remember some other home. Which is weird, considering she was born in the Arctic.
Or at least the Arctic is where Dad and his research crew found her, along with a hundred or so other infants, in a ship, all alone. Not a parent or any other human in sight, just a hundred or so babies all alone in the Arctic. I shiver, and it’s not just from the thought of the cold.
I look at Callie in the rearview. Her eyes are still sorry, but her face is going toward the window, and for a second I think she’s watching the lights of the highway count us down to the hospital. But then I realize she’s looking at herself and her sad and sorry eyes.
“Hey, kid sister,” I say. “Callie?” I say. She almost turns around.
The fits have been getting worse. Mom calls them “conniptions,” but there’s no way I’ll ever say that word out loud where anyone could hear it. Whatever they are, they’re getting worse, and they’re happening to my sister, who can’t ever tell me what it’s like to be her. Whenever I look into her eyes I feel like I can almost see it, except I know that’s just me wishing I could tell a story about a time and place where everyone can be understood, where we are all able to really get to know another person and hold them close and find real comfort in that, and then we all have a pizza party and build a tent in the living room and make a scale model of the solar system and hang it from the ceiling and then go to college and then get good jobs, and the economy is stable, and the government is just, and the story only ends when nobody is scared of being alive anymore.
Stories are pretty great if you don’t mind crying sometimes.
Callie’s eyes are full of something I don’t have the words for, and the lights of the hospital are just ahead.
TWO
IN THE HOSPITAL, everything is fine.
Callie looks at the lights and the door, and after we find a parking spot close to the entrance she seems to pull it together enough to help me help her up and out of the backseat and into the lobby. I open the door for Callie, because the child locks have been on for the past few weeks, and if you were to ask me why, then I’d tell you a story about coming home one day and finding Callie sitting in the backseat of my car. Or another story that’s different but the same, about coming home and finding Callie furiously packing and unpacking suitcases. And anyway, the child locks have been on for the past few weeks.
Callie grows calmer with each step we take toward the automatic doors, and I can’t help thinking that it might not be fair for me to assume that she’s actually pulled herself together. I can’t tell if this is a situation she even has the ability to pull together, whether or not her growing calm after the worst of these fits is her attempt to control something uncontrollable, something big and terrifying that grips her in a scary part of her brain she can’t ever do a thing about. I want to ask someone about this, but I don’t really know who or how to ask in such a way that won’t make them look at me weird, or even worse, look at Callie weird, the way they’d look at someone who they think should be taken away to be observed in an environment away from “outside factors.” Because I’m pretty sure I fall under the category “outside factors.”
“Outside factors, kid sister,” I say to Callie, and she smiles a bit but doesn’t look at me. I should talk to her more, I think. “I should talk to you more, huh?” I say, and she smiles a bit more, and I smile back. Finally she looks at me and then again over to the hospital, but her smile’s gone now. Her mouth took it back and instead gave her an expression I don’t know how to read.
“Sometimes,” I tell her, “I think we’re like different editions of the same book.”
I know that this doesn’t make any sense, but it maybe sounds nice.
AND SO HERE we are, in the hospital.
As a government-mandated condition of caring for an Arctic Recovery Orphan (which is the official term for Callie and the others found in the Arctic when they were infants), there are regularly scheduled check-ins with what my parents call a “caseworker.” What Callie’s particular “case” is is something I couldn’t tell you if I wanted to. I would, though. Want to. But nobody asked me. Or told me. Nobody tells me much of any use, at any rate.