In THE ORPHAN SISTER, when her father mysteriously
disappears, Clementine Lord, one part of a set of triplets,
struggles to understand the secrets surrounding his
disappearance. One of her pregnant sisters, Olivia, harbors
the secret her father carries, but refuses to share it with
her siblings and her mother. Clementine and her sister,
Odette, attempt to use abilities that they have possessed
since childhood to either wear Olivia down or read her mind
to find the secret. Neither sister is aware that the secret
they'll find tucked away in their sister's mind will change
their family forever.
While their mother attempts to keep her cool and O & O deal
with the pending births of their children, Clementine
recalls how close her sisters have always been and how she
has always felt like an extra part in what should have been
a pair. She ponders the unorganized pattern of her life as
opposed to the perfect flows of those of her sisters. As
she looks back over her life and how lonely she has always
been, she finds love, understanding, trust, and forgiveness
in the places that she never imagined they would be.
Gwendolen Gross explores the mysterious power of multiples
in THE ORPHAN SISTER. The triplets finish each other's
sentences as well as tap into each other's thoughts; yet
Clementine feels so disconnected that she considers her
sisters twins (removing herself from the equation). Gross
masterfully creates a bond that is close and distanced at
the same time. Although Clementine shares life and date-of-
birth with her sisters, she is clearly carved out as a
unique individual. In this powerful and mysterious telling
of how messy the road of life can be, Gross also deals with
infidelity, rags-to-riches, and how finding oneself can
sometimes only be done when someone else loses their way.
In the end, Clementine finds more than just her place
amongst her sisters. She finds her family in the midst of
the biggest storm they have ever faced.
Clementine Lord is not an orphan. She just feels like one
sometimes. One of triplets, a quirk of nature left her the
odd one out. Odette and Olivia are identical; Clementine is
a singleton. Biologically speaking, she came from her own
egg. Practically speaking, she never quite left it. Then
Clementine’s father—a pediatric neurologist who is an expert
on children’s brains, but clueless when it comes to his own
daughters—disappears, and his choices, both past and
present, force the family dynamics to change at last. As the
three sisters struggle to make sense of it, their mother
must emerge from the greenhouse and leave the flowers that
have long been the focus of her warmth and nurturing.
For Clementine, the next step means retracing the winding
route that led her to this very moment: to understand her
father’s betrayal, the tragedy of her first lost love, her
family’s divisions, and her best friend Eli’s sudden
romantic interest. Most of all, she may finally have found
the voice with which to share the inside story of being the
odd sister out. . . .
Excerpt
ONE
When my sister Odette called to tell me Dad hadn’t shown up
for rounds, my first guilty thought was that he’d had a
heart attack on the Garden State Parkway, that his Benz had
swerved, swiveled, and scraped against the railing near exit
142 until it flipped into the opposite lane like a beetle on
its back, ready for the picking of crows. He’d fumbled for
the aspirin he always kept in the cup holder, in a wood and
silver pillbox he couldn’t unclasp when it mattered at last.
Blood would mat the silvery-red mix of his still-thick hair,
his eyes would be open, he’d be dead, and I’d never have a
chance to prove him wrong.
Of course, my second
thought was to feel horrible for my first.
“No, he
didn’t say anything to me,” I said. I almost suggested she
call Olivia, but I knew she didn’t need to, because Odette
and Olivia, my twin sisters, know each other’s opinions,
their desires and mistakes, without speaking in words.
Though sometimes I am party to this peculiar frequency,
sometimes I stand feeling like the last chosen for a team
because they are identical twins, and I am their triplet,
number three. I don’t match physically (they are four inches
taller than I and my eyes are hazel green to their clear,
cold blue) or hear as clearly in the ether of their silent
communication.
“I think I’ll try Mom again,” said
Odette. She was using her distinctive stage whisper that
meant she wanted everyone standing in that hospital room at
Robert Wood Johnson to know she was conducting important
business on her cell phone. She was allowed to have a cell
phone. She was a doctor.
“I can,” I sighed,
thinking I didn’t want to.
“Just wait,” asserted
Odette, but we both already knew I’d procrastinate awhile
and then go seek out Mom.
“Dinner he would
miss—rounds, no. I’ll start and give him another hour,”
Odette finished.
If I were talking to anyone else,
I’d have been unable to relinquish my frustration. Even
Olivia didn’t root me to myself like magnet to steel.
I did feel calmer when I heard both my sisters’
voices. And I could tell them apart—Odette’s had an almost
imperceptible deepness, a quiet, sad quality, a clarinet,
while Olivia was all flute, in all circumstances. No one
else could hear this, however.
We were
polyzygots—they were identical, monozygotic, one egg and one
sperm met and then split into two zygotes. I was
fraternal—another egg, another sperm, but the same timing,
which means I was like an ordinary sibling in terms of
genetic material, and they were halves of a whole.
We
had this special triplet quirk called Party Trick we
developed in elementary school, time of Ouija boards and
Monopoly (you would never want to play a strategy game with
us; we knew how to team up and committed our own form of
natural selection): we could speak word by word, each of us
in turn, with the fluidity and natural cadence of a single
person speaking. We were sleepover favorites when we were
little; this was captivating, no matter how dull the
subject. “We” “don’t” “like” “ham” “because” “it’s” “too”
“salty.” It wasn’t practiced. We had a pact to do it
whenever one of us asked—something we used rarely as adults,
but still, it was always there, ability, connections, quirk,
Party Trick.
In the middle of this crisis, I was
struggling with my computer, trying to gain access to an
online exam I needed to take in the next twenty-four hours.
The server rejected my password. I was all ready, notes,
coffee softened with Ghirardelli chocolate powder and
half-and-half, a final exam indulgence. I had a bag of
carrots and a bag of cheddar bagel chips and a giant sports
bottle of water, even though I knew, from my undergraduate
research, that bottled water is less stringently regulated
than tap. I had my blanket and my most devoted mutt,
Alphabet, who was lying on my feet as if he knew I wouldn’t
walk him until I’d at least half finished the timed exam.
You could only log out and back on once. I had to get an A.
I hadn’t done as well on the lab portion as I meant to, but
that was because I’d broken up with Feet (officially
Ferdinand, an engineering graduate student from Spain who
had fabulous dimples and little regard for my privacy), my
brief boyfriend whose nickname should have kept me from
giving him my phone number in the first place.
Sitting ready at my desk, I tried to log on. I used
my password, dogdocClem, but the system said it was invalid.
Dad always did this: he made us worry. He blustered in at
family gatherings and brushed away queries about his
lateness like lint from a suit. But somehow we all worried
he was Not Okay—and I was the especial queen of worrying
this—as if his Okayness held together the very universe.
I tried again, pounding the keys as I typed in my
account number and the password. I was still invalid. I felt
invalid. My head throbbed and I was still wondering whether
Dad was all right. So instead of starting my exam, I
apologized to Alphabet, restarted my computer, and got up to
go see my mother.
Maybe he ran away, I
thought, as I walked up to the conservatory. My father had
built two additions for my mother: an art studio, because
she had once casually mentioned she might like to take art
classes again, and the conservatory of flowers, a long,
inventive, difficult-to-maintain greenhouse that extended
from the back kitchen into the lawn. She was usually there,
my mother, though we had full-time gardeners for the roses
and the vegetables that would be transplanted, after the
last frost, into a raised plot by the three maidens’
fountain. Mom made exquisite botanical drawings, having
taken a class at the New York Botanical Garden before we
were born. Sometimes I thought she was simply a woman of too
many talents and opportunities—each was diluted in the soup
of all her possibilities.
Maybe he went up to the
house in Vermont because he is getting senile and thought it
was summer vacation. Maybe he’s had enough of keeping
everything gripped in his fist and he let go; he went mad,
like King George III.
I’d been mulling, for
about six months, the possibility that my father might have
early dementia, or even Alzheimer’s. I’d researched the
topic when I should have been studying chemistry. Symptom
one: memory loss that disrupts daily life. This was a
disruption, for sure, though generally his focus on—and
memory of—family commitments and plans had always been
rigorously limited. Symptom two: challenges in planning or
solving problems. No. Yes. Maybe. He had twice had Mom
reschedule her plans for an anniversary party because he had
forgotten about other commitments. But this wasn’t new.
“I’m going to have to go to the golf outing,” he
said, the second time. “You don’t have to come.” My mother
had sighed, dialing her party planner.
Symptom three:
trouble with tasks at home, work, or leisure. No. He seemed
to have no problems with work. Until now—not showing up for
rounds. I was probably getting ahead of myself. I never used
to get ahead of myself; I used to let the world unroll like
a scroll, the beginning happening before the middle and the
end, but ever since Cameron, I’d wanted more dimensions, I’d
worried more about the unrevealed paper.
So when
Odette called I should have just waited, I should have
circumnavigated the mess of other people’s early and late,
but I was a triplet, and triplets have extra arms, extra
eyes, extra marginally obsessive worries. I thought of my
father standing by his car, staring at his keys as if they
were foreign objects. Last week, I’d been witness behind the
carriage-house curtain as he stood like that for a moment;
was he thinking, or was he lost inside his own head? Was
this the beginning of a crumbled father? The beginning of
interventions and wheelchairs? No. No. Maybe.
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