My Sister, Before She Was in the Cast
I have three memories of my sister before she was in the cast. On the day Sophie was born, my father walked from the hospital to his mother’s house, where I was spending time with Grandma Heidi. I hugged his knees, unaware that it was time for the baby’s birth. He found a yellow legal pad and pen and encouraged me to watch as he sketched a silhouette of Sophie’s head in one continuous stroke. He made a few more attempts, filling up the entire page, until he thought he had it right.
“Like a watermelon,” he said. “Oblong. Yours was flat as a pancake.” Then he left, hurrying back to the hospital.
A few weeks later (I can gauge by the pictures), my father took portraits of me and the baby. He positioned the giant wooden rocking chair in front of the western window. I climbed in, and he placed the baby in my lap, instructing me to hold her tightly so she wouldn’t accidentally slip to the floor. The sunset turned red outside the window as he snapped an entire roll of film. The pictures are still stored in a wooden chest in Grandma Heidi’s dining room. We take them out every five years or so. In one, Sophie’s tiny wrinkled hand emerges from the swaddling next to her closed eyes, and I am speaking to her. According to my father, Sophie was almost ready to be out of diapers just before she was in the cast.
“Emilaaaaay!” I remember him calling from the baby’s room. I stumbled in. The baby was laughing hysterically, naked, with my father firmly pinning her to the floor with one finger on her bellybutton. The dirty diaper lay exposed next to her. She tried to reach for it but could only feebly flail her limbs.
Recently, Sophie had invented a move my father called the diaper-flip. As soon as the dirty diaper was unstrapped from her body, she would plant her heels on the ground and drive her hips upward into a tiny bridge, grab the edge of the diaper from under her ass and fling it across the room.
With the parent distracted, Sophie would flip over and crawl away at top speed, screaming in either effulgent delight or dark rage. As this continued for weeks, diaper changing became the exclusive province of my father.
“Emily, I can’t hold her down like this and put the clean diaper on her at the same time,” he said. My father never was able to effectively communicate his considerable genius. I stood dumbly. “Use your finger,” he enunciated, “to hold her down by the bellybutton just like I’m doing.” Sophie laughed harder. I did as he instructed, and we passed the baby off like a baton between racers.
As my father tells it, Sophie’s rage subsided for a few days, eclipsed by the absurdity of the new ordeal. It wasn’t long, however, before she mustered the determination to bat my hand away with one flailing arc from her own. All of our eyes affixed themselves on Sophie’s hand, still in motion, expecting it to travel towards her ass, but mid-route she had a funnier idea, and planted her own finger in her own bellybutton. Her laughter became delirious. She acquiesced to the diaper changing for an interval of time that we could not reconstruct later, when we wondered how long after that she broke her leg.
The cast was barbie pink with white gauze exposed at all ends. It encircled her ribs at her tiny armpits and extended to the ankle of the broken leg and the knee of the uninjured leg. Though the cast increased her volume considerably, her arms and bald baby head looked swollen, like an oversized ice-cream scoop on a tiny cone. She had to pee in it and she could not scratch the sores that plumed on her skin.
Sophie’s rage fissured like a crack exposing the core of the earth. First, she screamed continuously for two years. At five years old, she began hitting herself. Through long, long years, she had meltdowns every day. Our parents divorced and had a pendulous, never-ending custody battle.
Our father took to counting slowly out loud as Sophie screamed. One, two, three, four. If she interrupted him, he started again, which enraged her. If she hit him, he forced her to sit in his lap while he started counting over. She would scratch him, so he held both her fists in one of his hands. She would smash her head into his chest or bite him, so he used his other arm to hold her head immobile. She would spit on him and say she hated him, so he moved his arm to gag her mouth.
Once, I could see that she couldn’t breathe, and he didn’t remove his arm until the third time I told him. I told my mother. For two years afterward we only visited our father at the courthouse, or at the park with a court-appointed social worker present.
When Sophie was eight, I witnessed my mother hitting her while she lay on the bathroom floor. For once, Sophie was in tears rather than enraged. “Stop, please stop, you’re hurting me,” she cried repeatedly. My mother kept beating her. I didn’t tell anybody.
Sophie almost didn’t graduate high school due to unfinished math homework. She must have glimpsed the stretch of desolation that lay in her near future, because she locked her eyes on one shining mirage. College. She submitted her missing work and graduated, then soared through college, became a math teacher, and earned a pension. During these years, my father told me the story of her broken leg exactly once, never to be repeated.
He said he came home to the baby wailing in her crib and my mother in another room. My mother said the baby had been bitten by a spider. The leg was swollen, and there were two pin-prick scabs, side by side, as if made by a needle. A few days later, they took the baby to the hospital, where they learned her leg was broken. My father was interrogated by police for hours, but he was afraid that his children would be put into foster care if he said the wrong thing, so he just repeated, I don’t know, I don’t know.
The year before Sophie earned her pension, she saved me from an abusive relationship. She housed me because I was not safe in my own house, and she audited the mutual bank account I held with my abuser, finding thousands of dollars missing. I mulled over the fact that I had not saved her in childhood, when she needed saving.
One evening I interrupted her accounting to ask, “What was it like being you, when you were a child?”
“I don’t know,” she answered light-heartedly. “I don’t remember.” She looked away.
Later, I asked my father, “Do you ever miss Sophie, but like tiny, totally crazy Sophie?”
“God, only about ten times a day,” he said.
The next month, I asked Grandma Heidi, “Do you think my mom broke Sophie’s leg?”
“There is no doubt in my mind that she did,” she answered. “I can just see her getting angry and wrenching Sophie’s legs apart during a diaper change. It was broken at the hip, that’s why the cast had to cover so much of her body.”
A family is an improbable collection of souls trying to save each other. Today, Sophie scintillates with intelligence like a skyscraper reflecting the sky. She does not raise her voice or hands. Her words do not carry resentment or guilt. Sophie, the most improbable soul among us, walks like she has never seen the land of the damned.
