Her Sister Rebecca

by Quinn Tyler Jackson

Every Friday morning, Ella Donatello awoke before the rest of her family. It had been that way for the past five years. First, she would slide out of bed from her side—always the same side—put on her slippers, and tiptoe out over the hardwood floor of the bedroom into carpeted second floor hallway. Once in the hallway, she would slowly close the door behind her, but not enough to click the knob. Confident that she would not disturb anyone, she then walked to her right, to the bathroom at the end of the hallway, close the door, and, with the lights still not on, turn the sink taps until the temperature of the water was to her liking. She did not use soap, but instead only rinsed her face with the water, and when she finally felt refreshed enough to continue, with her fresh facecloth, she dried under her eyes, down the bridge of her nose, under her bottom lip, and behind each ear. She then put the facecloth aside, opened the door of the bathroom, and took fifteen careful steps to the stairs leading into the landing of the first floor of the house.

She had descended the staircase so many times without any light that she could do it with her eyes closed, a caprice she allowed herself on Friday mornings. Once at the bottom step, she opened her eyes, finding herself facing the front door of the house, standing on the checkered marble of the landing. The deadbolt was well-oiled and made no sound as she unlocked the door. At the foot of the door, on the rough but clean welcome mat was her Friday morning newspaper.

With her paper in hand, she closed the door, locked it, and went into the main living room. Above her easy chair was a chain, which she pulled to turn on the reading lamp. As she always had, she turned to the horoscopes, read her own, and then put the paper aside. She knew that her coffee maker would have a full carafe by the time she made it to the kitchen, since it was set to start on a timer.

On this particular Friday morning, however, when she arrived at the coffee maker, the display was blinking midnight and the coffee was not ready and waiting for her. For the first time in five years, Ella Donatello’s schedule had been disrupted. Her palms started to sweat so badly that the coffee cup she had fetched from the cupboard almost slipped from it. The water was still in the machine. The coffee grounds were still in the cone, dry.

“Damned power!” she said, putting her cup down on the kitchen counter so carelessly that it sounded as if it chipped. In five years the power had not gone out. It had not sounded particularly windy in the night. She noted that the clock on the stove also needed to be reset. Both clocks should have read six-thirty, but instead taunted her with midnight. She pressed the start button on the coffee maker; her routine had been disrupted, but she would bring regularity back to her in the form of a hot cup of coffee. Order must be restored.

When she opened the creamer carton, she immediately noticed the smell. It was off. Carl had bought an expired carton. In five years she had not had her coffee black. In five years she had not had the coffee waiting for her after her horoscope. Carl was always so careful about expiry dates on bread and dairy. Why had he missed the date. She looked at the numbers on the carton and realized that it was not past its date. Had the power been out long enough that everything in the refrigerator had gone off? She put her hand on the plastic wrapping of the cheddar. It was very cold. The cream carton itself, even though the cream had spoiled, was also cold. It had simply been bad. She wondered if Carl had put the grocery receipts in the usual utility drawer so she could take the carton to the store and get a new one without having to pay again.

As she was running her fingernail down the receipt to find the carton of cream, Ella suddenly thought of her sister, Rebecca. She did not often think of Rebecca, and the image of her sister’s face in her mind almost startled her. Had her Friday been so thrown into disarray that Rebecca came to mind?

* * *

“All I have is whitener,” Rebecca said as she poured the coffee.
“You know that stuff will kill you, right?”

Rebceca’s face went cold at her sister’s chiding. “Is anything ever good enough for you, Ella?”

“It’s just not healthy,” Ella retorted. “Anyway, two scoops of that is fine.”

Rebecca spooned the whitener into the cup, stirred it, and handed it to her with an almost shaky hand. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to snap at you. Greg’s been on my nerves, is all.” She sat across from the small kitchen table, lit up her cigarette, and with the hand her smoke was in, rubbed the muscles above her eyebrows.

Three children by two failed marriages, and the eldest had always been the source of Rebecca’s wrinkles.

“Hasn’t he sorted that all out by now?” Ella asked. The kitchen window was open, but her sister’s smoking still made her want to scream. Now was not the time to complain about another health matter; Rebecca was clearly already at the end of her rope.

“All what? I can’t even remember what it was last time we talked. It’s that crowd he has himself in.” When her eyes were closed and nearly bruised with worry, she was not Ella’s younger sister, she was almost her mother. “He owes—I don’t know if I should say it....”

“What is it?” Ella asked, careful to keep the tone of her voice non-judgmental.

Rebecca brushed her hair back in what was clearly an attempt to appear devil-may-care about what she was about to say, but her hands were still shaky. “It’s not like when we were young, Ellie. We smoked a bit of bliss … you know? Gas, grass, or ass, you know? Not like today, where they get into debt for ….”

It was then that a sister’s understanding finished Rebecca’s unspoken revelation about Greg’s situation for Ella.

* * *

The sound of the coffee finishing its brewing cycle—the gurgling last throes of the drip—suddenly filled the kitchen, and with that sound came the unmistakeable aroma of her usual Friday morning. She pushed Rebecca out of her mind, poured herself a cup of black coffee, and took her first sip. Although bitter, it was good enough to pretend this Friday was like every other Friday. The cost of a single small carton of spoiled cream no longer seemed to matter, and Ella resumed her routine.

She found an orange, cut it into slices, and chewed out the pulp. It was a horribly ungraceful way to eat an orange, she knew, but the bitterness of the coffee washed away and she forgave herself for not first slicing off the peel; her teeth would have to do for that. As she threw the first orange peel into the kitchen trash bin, she suddenly again thought of her sister Rebecca.

She realized that she wanted to go see her right away. That she was still in her nightgown did not matter. She had, after all, eaten her orange like a savage and had her coffee without cream. It was still early enough that she could drive in her night clothes and there would not be enough traffic on the way for it to make a difference. Driving with her slippers on, she would somehow manage. Within a minute of her desire to see her sister, she was out the front door, her purse over her shoulder.

The car started without effort and she was on her way.

* * *

“Where have you been dressed like that?” Carl asked when Ella returned home an hour later. He was already dressed for work and leaning over a plate of scrambled eggs he had made for himself. “I was worried to death.” He pushed his plate aside, tipped down his glasses, and blinked a few times at the sight of her.

Ella did not know what to say. She still had the fresh air of outside clinging to her night clothes. Autumn air had a way of sticking to one’s clothes when one first entered from having been out. Did Carl need to know she had been to see her sister Rebecca? Did he really need to know? He had managed to make himself breakfast for the first time in five years of Fridays. Every other Friday, his over easy eggs would have been waiting for him when he’d come downstairs. If he could make his own breakfast, he could survive without knowing where she had been.

“It’s nothing,” she replied.

At this, Carl tipped his glasses down even more. His expression was almost one of approval to her. Was that a smile on his mouth? “OK, then,” he finally said. He then took a sip from his coffee, and the act of putting his cup to his lips seemed to remind him of something. “Oh! The cream was off this morning! I didn’t notice it until I took my first sip.”

Had he noticed that all the clocks had reset to midnight?

“The power went out last night,” Ella replied, trying with the sound of her words to imply that the power’s going out and the cream’s being off were somehow one and the same thing.

Carl glanced at the clock on the stove. “Did you reset it, then?” he asked. “Looks like quarter to eight to me.”

Had she reset it? She looked at the time on the coffee machine, and it, too, read quarter to eight. She did remember pushing the button to start the coffee brewing cycle manually, but she did not remember resetting the two clocks to the proper time before heading out to see her sister Rebecca.

Ella Donatello felt the room spin and she put her hand on the kitchen counter to be sure not to fall over.

“You’re looking pale,” Carl noticed out loud. “Terribly cold to be out and about dressed in your night clothes, love. Do try to not catch cold, will you?” He began rinsing his breakfast plate in the sink, careful in his arm movements to avoid getting his cuffs wet from the tap.

“Perhaps I’m getting a flu,” she replied, still holding onto the kitchen counter to avoid a fall.

Her husband put his hand, now carefully dried at the dishcloth, on her right shoulder, and with the palm of it, sent his love into her shoulder. His touch had a way of reminding Ella how much he loved her; it was steady and real, and the mere brush of it reminded her that she was not alone. “Take care. Rest today. How about you and I go out for dinner tonight rather than eat in? I’ll pick a place.”

Ella nodded that, yes, that sounded like a good idea. It was Friday, after all, and a good night for the two of them to be getting out. She would rest all day and perhaps feel better by evening.

Twenty minutes later, Carl was off to work. Ella had sat in her easy chair with the light off, and closed her eyes. She remembered how the air had smelled at the cemetery earlier that morning. Autumn was such a wonderful month for clean air. Rebecca’s gravestone had been well kept by the groundskeeper; once there, she almost felt silly having worried about it for all the years she had not visited the grave. It was a clean, dignified place of rest.

But what about those clocks? Had she reset them? She could not remember. Carl had mentioned the cream’s being off, so she had not imagined all of the irregularities of the morning. Why hadn’t the coffee machine started brewing as it always had so many Fridays over so many years, then?

And why had her mind drifted to her sister Rebecca?

The swarm of uncertain thoughts in Ella Donatello’s head became too much for her, and she opened her eyes. Everything was there, right before her. The art on the walls, the vases in the corners, the light fixtures above her. Even the leather of the easy chair was as it had all been, every other Friday for the past five years. Normally, by this hour, she would have been properly dressed. That one thing was different about this particular Friday, but given all the other chaos that had transpired, it fit perfectly and did not alarm her.
She decided to let go of it, closed her eyes again, and drifted into sleep on the chair. Carl would take care of the rest. The groundskeeper would take care of her sister Rebecca. Next Thursday night, she had decided before falling completely into her sleep, she would not bother setting the automatic cycle on the coffee machine.

It would be good to wake up next Friday to black coffee, made on the spot, and to bite the orange out of the peel instead of taking the time and care to use a paring knife.