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When she was born, she was born blue.
Unlike her big sister, Tara came out of their mother quietly. She didn’t make a sound for a whole minute until the doctor slapped her back and forced her into life.
There, she took a deep breath and screamed, and the blue in her face faded away.
It was her first-grade teacher who was the first to say that the blue never quite faded away from her eyes. Tara didn’t even know that.
Somehow, Sam did. Her big sister always knew that Tara was born blue and would always stay that way. She took Tara under her wing and let her follow her whenever she wanted, like a duckling and its mother. Wherever Sam went, Tara would follow, and that was that.
Here and there, their father would break into a sudden laughing fit, his face relaxed and clear.
Can you believe that?
He’d say, shaking his head down at Tara.
You were trying to leave us before you could meet us!
And here, in the dim hallway of her childhood home, she can believe that especially so, as she stands in what once was her childhood room on the cusp of her eighteenth birthday, without her big sister.
Somewhere before her tenth birthday, Sam changes. Her big sister, always known for her antics, suddenly stopped attending church. In their family, dysfunctional and all, that was a sin worse than death, to turn one’s back on God. Their mother blew up and fought with Sam every Saturday night while their father tucked himself away in his office. As always, Tara would sit outside the door and wait for Sam to return with a lopsided smile and arms outstretched for a hug.
One night, after her mother and big sister fight, Sam exits her bedroom, quickly scoops Tara up, and slips out the back door. The two don’t talk, and Sam doesn’t let go of her grip on Tara until they enter an ice cream shop. There, they silently eat two scoops of strawberry ice cream with extra whipped cream on top. Eventually, Sam reaches over and smudges cream onto Tara’s nose, and the silence breaks with Tara’s soft giggles.
That was when Sam gave Tara the first hint of her impending departure. It didn’t come as an outright surprise but was somewhat hidden in bits of advice Sam had concocted in her mind.
As she cleaned dried ice cream off Tara’s chin, Sam spoke briskly, her words a bit rushed, as if she had forced herself to say them in one breath. “Study hard, keep your grades up, but once high school comes, make sure to take at least two AP classes a semester,” she hummed. With her hand pressed against Tara’s cheek, she smiled, and her eyes shone in the way she did before she cried— but a tear never fell. Instead, she just shook her head and finished her thought.
“That way, you’ll have a decent chance at getting into a good college.”
With the taste of sweet cream on her tongue and confusion in her heart, Tara just nodded and smiled. “Okay, Sammy.”
They never spoke of that moment again.
Around her eleventh birthday, Sam snuck into Tara’s room. Their father had left a few months prior, and their mother had fallen behind on bills in his absence. It didn’t get very cold in California, but as December crept in, their old home’s bones and heating system got shakier. Once their mother disappeared into her room, the two sisters would often share a bed to conserve heat.
As she felt two strong arms wrap around her middle, the advice came quickly.
“I know Chad can be really lazy with self-care and personal hygiene, but please let him or Mindy know when you need a haircut or a doctor’s appointment.” Sam’s lips brushed the shell of her ear, and in return, Tara shivered. Her sister hugged her tighter, and she could feel Sam’s shaky breathing against her back. It never occurred to her that her big sister could feel fear.
Looking back on it, that should’ve been her second warning that things would change.
Instead, she let Sam hold her close, her grip impossibly tight on her ribs, and finish her thoughts. “You’ll probably need to remind them repeatedly, but they’ll make sure you get it done. Eventually, they’ll get the routine down.”
She felt something damp on the back of her t-shirt, right on the crook of her neck. It could be the ceiling leaking again, but Woodsboro had no snow forecasted.
But snow was a better explanation than the alternative. Against her sister’s grip, she squirmed uncomfortably. “Can we not talk about this right now? It feels heavy,” she murmured, her voice muffled by her pillow.
Luckily for her, they never talk about it again.
Four days after her twelfth birthday, Sam takes Tara shopping. The two never went shopping together except for scraps of groceries from the food pantry, as Tara wore Sam’s hand-me-downs, and Sam wore whatever she could nab from her friends. It was a gloomy day, the weather dropping to a balmy forty degrees, chilly for California’s standards. There wasn’t much money in their pockets, but Tara had a twenty-dollar bill from Mindy and Chad, just waiting to be spent. Sam knew it and dragged Tara from shop to shop in the Woodsboro Mall until they found the perfect outfit for Tara.
After their fifth stop, while Tara was clad in a brand new pair of jeans and a shirt in a tiny fitting room, Sam stopped and grinned at her. The smile startled Tara, as Sam had been stoic the whole trip, her brow furrowed as if she were on a mission of some sort. Her big sister hadn’t talked to her, just handed her random outfits, shook her head each time she disapproved, and nodded once when she liked it. A smile, after all this silent treatment, was enough to make Tara back into the wall in surprise.
Sam sucked in her cheeks and handed Tara her clothes, a signal to change so they could leave. As she pulled on her pants, her big sister scratched the back of her neck, almost bashfully, as if she were about to divulge an embarrassing secret.
“Oh, this might sound weird,” Sam starts, her cheeks blushing pink, “But wear underwear with pantyhose. It’ll feel weird and bulky, like a diaper, but it’s for the best. Going without pantyhose is kind of weird.”
Tara raised an eyebrow at the admission but said nothing. In return, Sam shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably, a sheepish smile still on her face.
“Also, that’s how you get yeast infections.” She paused, her cheeks colored crimson. “I would know.”
That was enough to make Tara uncomfortable. “Sam,” she chided, her eyebrows knit together in confusion, “Knock it off. You’re acting really strange.”
She pulled on her t-shirt, hung up the clothes she was trying on, and swiftly left the room. A few minutes later, Sam follows, a shopping bag in hand. Wordlessly, she hands Tara the pair of jeans and shirt she had tried on, and they leave the mall in silence.
It was easier never to bring up that moment again.
Her thirteenth birthday was a different story. Sam, for whatever reason, threw a massive birthday party. The Carpenter sisters weren’t particularly popular people, but for whatever reason, everybody in Tara’s class showed up to the party. They held it at their house, surprisingly fitting in over forty pre-teens and a couple of teenagers. Their mother wasn’t home, nor did she indicate when she would return from her work trip, but that was okay with the two.
After they blew out the candles on the cake and handed out cups full of root beer and fruit punch, Sam pulled Tara aside to help fix some decorations peeling off the walls. Tara held the ladder firm while her big sister taped the streamers back onto the wall, her tongue sticking out in effort. As she held the ladder, Tara watched as her classmates weaved through the crowd, laughed, and danced to the shitty pop music that was blaring from Amber’s parent’s speaker. It was so easy for everyone else to dance like the world wasn’t changing beneath their feet, as if people didn’t leave or change. Everything was so
easy
for everybody else but her. Even though it was her party, she could still feel the blue creep into her face, bleeding from her eyes, coating her hands in a deep, dark cobalt blue.
How was everyone so comfortable with the change around them, and why wasn’t Tara?
A roll of streamers bounced off her forehead and pulled her out of her thoughts. She looked up at Sam, her brow furrowed in annoyance, and several insults sat at the tip of her tongue.
Sam shook her head and smiled despite the annoyance on her sister’s face. She ripped off another piece of tape and slapped it to the wall. “Please make sure you marry a kind person,” she started, muffled by the partygoers around the two. Tara craned her neck forward, trying to capture every word from her big sister’s lips. “It doesn’t matter who it is, but make sure they’re kind to you and their parents.”
Sam jumped off the ladder in one quick movement, and her hands immediately found their way to Tara’s hair. She ruffled the hair, then cupped her baby sister’s face with a wobbly smile. “But if it’s a man living with his parents until he’s well into his forties,” she paused for extra dramatic effect, “
Run.”
Tara slapped her sister’s hands off her face, her mouth closed straight. “I’m not getting married anytime soon,” she mumbled. “I’m only thirteen.”
For a brief second, the music skipped, and in return, forty kids groaned in dissatisfaction. There, Tara saw the glassiness of her big sister’s eyes as if tears were at bay in the dark brown pupils. Tears of what, she had no idea, but it was enough to make her annoyance stumble. The two stared at each other for a moment, and the emotion within Tara’s chest swelled, an uncomfortable bubble that pressed against her heart and forced her to stay still. Sam stood with her hands in her pockets, her eyes glassy, and her lips downturned in sorrow.
Somebody, presumably Chad, slapped the speaker, and the music began again.
Sam shrugged. “You will someday.”
She turned on her heel and grabbed the ladder with one hand, the other chucking Tara under the chin. “And when that day comes,” she paused, as her thumb swiped across her little sister’s chin with gentle, wordless love, “Make sure it’s the best day of your life. Pull out all the stops.”
Before her sister could escape to the garage, ladder in hand, Tara grasped the hand on her chin, her eyes crinkled in confusion. “Sam, I don’t understand. Why are you saying this?”
If she had known that her questions would never be answered and that Sam would be gone by her next birthday, she would’ve stayed silent and allowed Sam to touch her with a softness of a love long gone.
But instead, she pushed on.
“Life goes on, little one.” Sam adjusted the ladder on her shoulder as a brief wince of discomfort flashed across her face. Tara held on tighter to the hand still on her chin, suddenly aware of the loss on the horizon. What she was losing, she had no idea, but she knew it was big enough to make her eyes bleed blue once again. A thumb brushed the tear that fell down her cheek, rough skin meeting cold cheeks. “I need you to be prepared. It goes on, and you can never get it back if you let it slip away.”
The music around them grew impossibly louder, the bass shaking the floorboards beneath their feet. She could feel the split juice on her sneakers seep into her socks, and her ears rang from the noise. Still, none of the outside factors around her shook her quite the look in her big sister’s eyes. Something was about to happen, something that she couldn’t stop, something she couldn’t see coming. It was on the horizon, and it would take Sam from her. She couldn’t quite explain it, nor even begin to understand why, but she knew then that it was coming, and it was unforgiving.
“You sound like God,” she mumbled, tears falling.
“One day, you’ll understand that God doesn’t care for suffering. He can’t save any of us or alleviate our suffering because it’s inelegant. It’s inelegant to save the very people he had died for all those years ago.”
It takes everything within her not to scream that
;
I
know God doesn’t care! I know he’s taking you from me, and I know he doesn’t care! He won’t save me, but you could!
Instead, her words fell flat on her tongue, and she stared up at her big sister, her mournful eyes bigger than the moon peeking through the closed blinds. It was there that Sam finally looked away, her jaw clenched in an effort not to join the tears that fell down Tara’s cheeks.
As Sam looked away, Tara found her voice. “Are you talking about God or yourself?”
She will remember Sam’s words for the rest of her life.
“I’m not God. I couldn’t ever find any fun in being God.”
—
It occurs to her years later, as she sits in the waiting room of the Meeks-Martin’s family doctor that Sam was right about it all.
Taking AP classes helped her chances in college, even if European History was a waste of time and Calculus was too tricky.
She had to remind Chad and Mindy about six times that she needed a doctor’s physical, but eventually, they got her in.
After her first party, once she got home from running from the cops, her pantyhose saved her from the scratches that her bare legs would suffer against the fence she had jumped.
As the clock slowly ticks closer to her eighteenth birthday, while she sits in the waiting room, she wonders where all the love went and why it took her big sister with it.
She never does find out why.
And the blue in her eyes stays.