A Real Imaginary Sister

Sometimes annabel wondered if she and Louisa would have become close if their mother hadn’t gotten ill. Their age difference had prevented them from really growing up together. Louisa had left for college when Annabel was nine—at exactly the age that Annabel was starting to feel curious about her. After that, Annabel saw Louisa only periodically. Louisa’s college was on the West Coast, an expensive six-hour flight away, which meant she only came home twice a year. Annabel’s school friends would tease her about her “imaginary sister” because none of them had ever met Louisa. But there was something imaginary about Louisa, even to Annabel. She associated her sister so closely with holidays and vacations that it was hard for her to picture Louisa outside their family’s rituals.

Her sister’s life only became more distant after she graduated from college and moved to San Francisco. Once, during Louisa’s Christmas visit, Annabel ran into Louisa unexpectedly at the gas station near their house and was so happily surprised that she gave Louisa a huge hug, as if they hadn’t seen each other in days. Annabel had been out with her friends and Louisa joked to them that she was never given such treatment at home. Which was true. But in that moment, it was as if Annabel had finally gotten proof of her sister’s existence beyond the confines of their parents’ home, and it gave her unexpected comfort, this tangible proof that, when she grew up and went out into the world, Louisa would already be a part of it.

When Annabel’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, her sister was living with their parents temporarily. Annabel thought this was good timing, considering, but both her mother and her sister seemed unhappy with the situation and would call her, separately, irritated with one another and needing to vent. Annabel was in college, and she felt protected by academia—“the liberal-arts bubble,” as her classmates called it. While her mother and sister bickered and visited doctors, Annabel sank into her course work, reading evolutionary theory alongside modernist novels and plays. In her spare time, she sang in a choir and read fashion magazines. She felt happy, except for when she got calls from home. The easiest thing was to stay in the library, away from her phone—and from her computer, where her inbox was dominated by messages from Louisa. As a study break, Annabel would sometimes use the library’s catalog computers to log on to VAX and check her e-mail. But it wasn’t much of a break to read three new e-mails from Louisa, telling her of improvements in their mother’s ability to keep her food down or how she had gone two days without a nap. Louisa’s e-mails had an upbeat tone, as if she thought these tidbits would comfort Annabel. She didn’t realize that it had never occurred to Annabel that their mother was vomiting daily, or that she couldn’t stay awake for an entire day.

Louisa eventually moved out of their parents’ house and to New York City, where she had been planning to move all along. Her plans had been derailed, first by their mother’s illness, which had been diagnosed a week after she arrived on the East Coast, and then by her fiancé, who broke off their engagement abruptly. He was supposed to follow Louisa to the East Coast, where they would settle down and start a family, but after she left, he decided he preferred San Francisco. Louisa insisted it was for the best, that she was glad to have the chance to start everything afresh. She had just turned thirty and moving to New York was a long-deferred dream. “I’ve tagged along after too many men,” she told Annabel. “When you graduate, don’t follow some boy around—even if he begs you.”

When Louisa first gave Annabel that advice, she was in no danger of being begged to go anywhere, but a few months after her mother got sick, Annabel...