And then there were three (For Sharon and Andrea) By Laura J. Oliver

I’m at my sister’s horse farm basking in a late-March, Blue Ridge mountain twilight, enjoying a glass of wine around the firepit with my two older sisters. Golden Mica-dog is on sentry duty gazing out over the fields and lake like the good boy he is—keeping watch for bears, beavers, and falling stars. He will never be known for his intelligence, fairly or unfairly, because he is such a good-looking blond.

We are comparing memories—and it’s gratifying when they are the same; how Mom drove like there was a wasp in her blouse, the blue Ford with the hole in the floor. You could see Eagle Hill Road streaming like a river beneath your feet, speeding to the bus stop or home from the A & P. Sometimes we recall the same event but entirely differently– the emotional lens of our visions unique to each.

Because there are three of us, often two memories will coincide with gleeful validation but not convince the outlier who hangs on to what she alone knows is true. The car was black! It wasn’t a Ford! That kind of thing. That role changes with each memory.

As with your siblings, we learn things from each other that we never knew about our own histories. My eldest sister remembers saving our middle sister from a group of boy-bullies who had surrounded her on a piece of playground equipment, dead-reckoning her bike to disperse the danger, but she is the only one who remembers the event. And I remember, but don’t share, a similar memory where Tommy McVeydo-The-Rotten-Tomato (kids are callous, what can I say?) had backed my very pretty 14-year-old sister up against the pasture fence in what I now recognize was a moment of highly charged flirtation. As a 9-year-old, I saw a threat, a call to glory, and threw myself between them, thwarting a budding romance.

I had not yet learned to read the room.

And these exchanges are as grounding as the land we gaze over. Siblings. The only people in your life who know your whole story, who know where you came from, what you overcame, and whether you turned out alright. Though it is good to remember that if life were a court of law, nothing is less reliable than eyewitness testimony.

Carpenter bees are bombing us, and the red and yellow pepper hors d’oeuvres. We look up the species to be sure they’re not bumblebees, then whack them. They sport shiny, hairless abdomens and are further identified by their flight patterns–diving and zigzagging. Vanishing like UFOs. Like drones.

Like memories.

Barnstead, the renovated barn we grew up in– was full of wasps, and we start sharing bee memories. The invisible but ominous buzzing against the screens in our bedrooms upon returning from school, waking to wasps crawling up our pillowcases or tangled in our tennis shoe laces when getting dressed in the morning, late for the bus.

My middle sister’s memory is that I helped her kill wasps in her room—that she was afraid, and I was not. This is interesting because it could not be further from the truth. Things that sting terrified me as well—but I’m guessing her memory is accurate—that I did come into her room with bee-slayer bravado because what I know about myself is this: when I’m terrified of something, and you are too, your need flips a switch, and fear becomes fierceness. How does that work? That we can take on for another, what we cannot face alone. While cowering in my own room in a bee face-off, in her room, it was, “He’s on the curtain. Get ready to run.”

I can read the room now.

We vow to come back to the farm for the full moon in June –to watch it rise like blessings over the lake.

The next day, we decide to take a tour of the hilly 80 acres of forests and fields, and since I’ve got some aches from running with the dog the day before, we use the ATV known as Jethro (picture a golf cart with upgraded horsepower). We park it at the bottom of the steepest hill, so we won’t have to hike back up to the house later. My sister drives like there’s a wasp in her blouse, as if she’s on her way to a fire, or as if …she is our mother’s daughter.

My oldest sister calls shotgun, and I’m on the open side—no door and a slippery seat we three barely fit on, but she links her arm in mine to hold me in, to keep me safe.

I brace with my outside leg and clutch a roof strut, and we are laughing now as we accelerate down the hill because if this is how we’re going to die, it’s very funny and kind of okay.

 Your siblings are the longest relationship you will have in this life. Interestingly, it is an involuntary arrangement. At first, anyway. But later, if you are fortunate, you will gather by choice when you can.

Our own families are grown. Our parents are gone

We start over from where we began.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.