The Almost Archer Sisters by Lisa Gabriele Read Free Book Online Page A

cracking with ire. “I have to get the fuck out of here.”
    “I’m
trying
,” I said, speeding up slightly.
    “That’s not what I meant.”
    We hit all four red lights in the stretch to the blessed highway, Beth trying to muffle the winces my cautious braking caused. At one point she finally let the strap across her belly go slack. It was the last time I remember her ever using a seat belt.
    At the farm, Lou was in the side yard with Scoots, watering the hydrangeas. I ran into the house, yelling a big phony hello through the kitchen window. Beth carefully crept up the stairs where I followed her with a glass of water.
    “I need those pills now,” she said, her forearm thrown across her eyes. It was like her body was a big empty puppet with old sprightly Beth still desperately operating the limbs.
    “They’re for tonight,” I said, bossily. “You have to wait.”
    “Now, Peach. All of them.”
    I ran down to the kitchen and fished through my purse for the yellow envelope. I noticed Lou had secured the morning Polaroids on the fridge with several fruit magnets, our eyes betraying no hint of our true destination.
    L OU NEVER FOUND out about the abortion. But after Beth broke up with Beau, older boys began to call the farm with alarming frequency. Lou often talked about that final year with Beth as one might describe a short trip to a dangerous country like Lebanon, or Liberia, a journey plagued by roadside skirmishes, shady men, rock throwing, late-night phone calls, police, and mysterious rashes. High school counselors called about Beth so often Lou eventually put them on speed dial. After a shoplifting stunt on a field trip to Cedar Point, during which she necked with a brown-toothed carnie on a dare and let the air out of the bus tires while it stopped to gas up, Beth was assigned to see a psychologist twice a week. Now with a captive, paid audience, Beth made up a story about how, after his wife had died, Lou was left with a sick sexual hunger. When he was done with us, she told her psychiatrist, he’d hand the both of us over to the bachelor brothers next door, in exchange for marijuana cigarettes and pornography. After the cops came, Beth had to admit it was an awful joke, that Lou wasn’t even much of a tickler.
    Still, the good doctor diagnosed Beth with borderline personality disorder, the root cause of all her emotional eruptions and burgeoning addictions, though the only side effects seemed to be Lou’s chronic ulcers and my budding insomnia.
    Lou dismissed her X-rated stunt as the product of leftover grief from our mother’s death, the kind of thing, he said, that can make a person feel like they’re a gas-soaked rag, begging bystanders formatches. But why hadn’t these defects dented my own character? I was there that day too? And wasn’t she my mother as well? Where was my buried grief, dramatically manifested? How come there were no expensive doctors listening to my sadness?
    Around that time, Lou went to great expense to restore two minutes of Super 8 footage featuring Nell and Beth on the front lawn of the farm chasing after me. I couldn’t have been more than two in the film, the smallest blur soundlessly running away from a medium-sized blur and a tall blur, presumably Nell.
    “That’s it?” Beth asked, rolling off the love seat. “We can’t even see anything.”
    “That’s it,” Lou said. “The film’s mostly damaged. Want me to replay it?”
    Beth shrugged.
    “Yes,” I said. “Again.”
    Lou had hoped the film would jangle whatever was left of the grief stored inside her, but Beth lost interest after the third play. Eventually, Lou said no to the pills and the therapy, figuring plain old love and simple understanding would straighten Beth out long enough to reawaken her ambition to leave us.
    I N BETH’S FINAL year of high school, she managed to score not only entry-level marks, but her risky style sense secured her a place at Parsons School of Design in New York. Despite