Excerpt
Excerpt from Chapter One "Bearing Gifts"
The day I first met my sister Anne, twelve years ago, is stitched into the lining of my memory as clearly as my name. When I left the house that Sunday, it was chilly outside and great gray clouds hung low in the November sky. I laid the presents Id wrapped for Anne in the back seat of the Jeep, then pulled out of the driveway. The car was frigid as an icebox inside, so I turned the heat on full blast, and by the time I was on the expressway, heading south toward Baltimore, Id begun to warm up. I drove fastmore out of habit than anything elseas the clouds were darkening, quickly, into a gunmetal shade of gray that matched the blacktop.
Anne was thirty-five years old. I was thirty-eight. Though she lived only a half-hour from my house, Id never seen her beforenot even a photograph. I'd never touched her hand, never heard her voice. I didn't even know the color of her eyes, but I imagined them to be green like mine. All my life, Anne had been a family secret, and I'd pretended she did not exist. What would she be like? I wondered over and over as I took the Northern Parkway exit and headed toward Belvedere Avenue. Fumbling for cigarettes in the small, worn knapsack that accompanied me everywhere, I drove by Gilman School, the private school my older son attended, and then through Roland Park, one of Baltimore's exclusive neighborhoods where stoic mansions were the norm, immaculate gardens the rule.
The smell in the air smacked familiarly of old money and blue-blooded gentility. Although I had grown up outside of Baltimore, in the country, the atmosphere there was just as rarefied as in Roland Park. Our house, a large Victorian, dated back to the turn of the century and sat like a dowager atop a hill overlooking a vast sweep of valley. The closest neighbor lived half a mile away. Stern-faced box bushes fronted the house, and flower gardens were everywhere. With rose bushes lining the long driveway, a wraparound porch that comfortably accommodated a hundred guests at summer cocktail parties, a living room the size of a ballroom (and more fireplaces and rooms than a family of four could ever use), the house evoked a Gatsby-like era. But the air inside whispered of the civilized restraint and discipline my mother still believes come from good breeding and good boarding schools. A place where human smells were largely absent, home felt like a museum to me. Anne, too, spent her childhood outside of Baltimore, in a secluded country setting, but behind the barred windows of Rosewood State Hospital, a mental institution. At the age of twenty-three, she was transferred to a supervised group home run by the Baltimore Association for Retarded Citizens, or BARC, and thats where I was headed.