“You don’t talk about her much,” he said.

Rachel smiled and touched his face. “You’re sweet, Louis. I never talk about her. I try never to think about her.”

“I always assumed you had your reasons.”

“I did. I do.”

She paused, thinking.

“I know she died… spinal meningitis… “ “Spinal meningitis,” she repeated. “There are no pictures of her in the house anymore.”

“There’s a picture of a young girl in your father’s-”

“In his study. Yes, I forgot that one. And my mother carries one in her wallet still, I think. She was two years older than I was. She caught it… and she was in the back bedroom… she was in the back bedroom like a dirty secret, Louis, she was dying in there, my sister died in the back bedroom and that’s what she was, a dirty secret-she was always a dirty secret!”

Rachel suddenly broke down completely, and in the loud, rising quality of her sobs, Louis sensed the onset of hysteria and became alarmed. He reached for her and caught a shoulder, which was pulled away from him as soon as he touched it.

He could feel the whisper of her nightdress under his fingertips.

“Rachel-babe-don’t-”

“Don’t tell me don’t,” she said. “Don’t stop me, Louis. I’ve only got the strength to tell this once, and then I don’t want to ever talk about it again. I probably won’t sleep tonight as it is.”

“Was it that horrible?” he asked, knowing the answer already. It explained so much, and even things he had never connected before or only suspected vaguely suddenly came together in his mind, She had never attended a funeral with him, he realized-not even that of Al Locke, a fellow med student who had been killed when his motorcycle had collided with a city bus. Al had been a regular visitor at their apartment, and Rachel had always liked him. Yet she had not gone to his funeral.

She was sick that day, Louis remembered suddenly. Got the flu or something.

Looked serious. But the next day she was okay again.

After the funeral she was all right again, he corrected himself. He remembered thinking even then that her sickness might just be psychosomatic.

“It was horrible, all right. Worse than you can ever imagine. Louis, we watched her degenerate day by day, and there was nothing anyone could do. She was in constant pain. Her body seemed to shrivel… pull in on itself… her shoulders hunched up and her face pulled down until it was like a mask. Her hands were like birds’ feet. I had to feed her sometimes. I hated it, but I did it and never said boo about it. When the pain got bad enough, they started giving her drugs-mild ones at first and then ones that would have left her a junkie if she had lived. But of course everyone knew she wasn’t going to live. I guess that’s why she’s such a… secret to all of us. Because we wanted her to die, Louis, we wished for her to die, and it wasn’t just so she wouldn’t feel any more pain, it was so we wouldn’t feel any more pain, it was because she was starting to look like a monster, and she was starting to be a monster… oh Christ I know how awful that must sound… “ She put her face in her hands.

Louis touched her gently. “Rachel, it doesn’t sound awful at all.”

“It does!” she cried. “It does!”

“It just sounds true,” he said. “Victims of long illnesses often become demanding, unpleasant monsters. The idea of the saintlike, long-suffering patient is a big romantic fiction. By the time the first set of sores crops up on a bed-bound patient’s butt, he-or she-has started to snipe and cut and spread the misery. They can’t help it, but that doesn’t help the people in the situation.”

She looked at him, amazed… almost hopeful. Then distrust stole back into her face. “You’re making that up.”

He smiled grimly. “Want me to show you the textbooks? How about the suicide statistics? Want to see those? In families where a terminal patient has been nursed at home, the suicide statistics spike right up into the stratosphere in the six months following the patient’s death.”

“Suicide!”

“They swallow pills, or sniff a pipe, or blow their brains out. Their hate…

their weariness… their disgust… their sorrow… “ He shrugged and brought his closed fists gently together. “The survivors start feeling as if they’d committed murder. So they step out.”

A crazy, wounded kind of relief had crept into Rachel’s puffy face. “She was demanding… hateful. Sometimes she’d piss in her bed deliberately. My mother would ask her if she wanted help getting to the bathroom… and later, when she couldn’t get up anymore, if she wanted the bedpan… and Zelda would say no… and then she’d piss the bed so my mother or my mother and I would have to change the sheets… and she’d say it was an accident, but you could see the smile in her eyes, Louis. You could see it. The room always smelled of piss and her drugs she had bottles of some dope that smelled like Smith Brothers’ Wild Cherry cough drops and that smell was always there… some nights I wake up… even now I wake up and I think I can smell Wild Cherry cough drops… and I think.

if I’m not really awake… I think ‘Is Zelda dead yet? Is she?’. I think…

Rachel caught her breath. Louis took her hand and she squeezed his fingers with savage, brilliant tightness.

“When we changed her you could see the way her back was twisting and knotting.

Near the end, Louis, near the end it seemed like her… like her ass had somehow gotten all the way up to the middle of her back.”

Now Rachel’s wet eyes had taken on the glassy, horrified look of a child remembering a recurrent nightmare of terrible power.

“And sometimes she’d touch me with her… her hands.

her birdy hands… and sometimes I’d almost scream and ask her not to, and once I spilled some of her soup on my arm when she touched my face and I burned myself and that time I did scream… and I cried and I could see the smile in her eyes then, too.

“Near the end the drugs stopped working. She was the one who would scream then, and none of us could remember the way she was before, not even my mother. She was just this foul, hateful, screaming thing in the back bedroom… our dirty secret.”

Rachel swallowed. Her throat clicked.

“My parents were gone when she finally… when she. you know, when she… “ With terrible, wrenching effort, Rachel brought it out.

“When she died, my parents were gone. They were gone but I was with her. It was Passover season, and they went out for a while to see some friends. Just for a few minutes. I was reading a magazine in the kitchen. Well, I was looking at it, anyway. I was waiting -for it to be time to give her some more medicine because she was screaming. She’d been screaming ever since my folks left, almost. I couldn’t read with her screaming that way. And then see, what happened was… well… Zelda stopped screaming. Louis, I was eight… bad dreams every night… I had started to think she hated me because my back was straight, because I didn’t have the constant pain, because I could walk, because I was going to live… I started to imagine she wanted to kill me. Only, even now tonight, Louis, I don’t really think it was all my imagination. I do think she hated me. I don’t really think she would have killed me, but if she could have taken over my body some way… turned me out of it like in a fairy story I think she would have done that. But when she stopped screaming, I went in to see if everything was all right… to see if she had fallen over on her side or slipped off her pillows. I got in and I looked at her and I thought she must have swallowed her own tongue and she was choking to death. Louis”-Rachel’s voice rose again, teary and frighteningly childish, as if she were regressing, reliving the experience-”Louis, I didn’t know what to do! I was eight!”

“No, of course you didn’t,” Louis said. He turned to her and hugged her, and Rachel gripped him with the panicky strength of a poor swimmer whose boat has suddenly overturned in the middle of a large lake. “Did someone actually give you a hard time about it, babe?”