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mouth or changing a poopy diaper. I didn’t mind. I loved being the special sister, the big sister after four long years of being bossed around or ignored by Margaret. My birthday became more about Natalie and me, our beginning, than the day I was born. No, now my birthday was much more important. The day I got Natalie.
    Natalie did not fail to delight. A stunning baby, she became more beautiful as she grew, her hair silky and blond, her eyes a startling sky-blue, cheeks as soft as tulip petals, eyelashes so long they touched her silken eyebrows. Her first word was Gissy, which we all knew was her attempt to say my name.
    As she grew, she looked up to me. Margaret, for all her gruffness and disdain, was a good sister, but more of the type to take you aside and explain how to get out of trouble or why you should leave her stuff alone. For playing, for cuddling, for company, Nat turned to me, and I was more than willing. At age four, she spent hours putting barrettes in my kinky curls, wishing aloud that her own blond waterfall of smoothness was, in her words “a beautiful brown cloud.” In kindergarten, she brought me in for show-and-tell, and on Special Person’s Day, you know who was at her side. When she needed help in spelling, I took over for Mom or Dad, making up silly sentences to keep things fun. During her ballet recitals, her eyes sought me out in the audience, where I’d be beaming back at her. I called her Nattie Bumppo after the hero of The Deerslayer, pointing to her name in the book to show her how famous she was.
    Thus went our childhood—Natalie perfect, me adoring, Margs gruff and a little above it all. Then, when Natalie was seventeen and I was in my junior year at William & Mary, I got a call from home. Natalie had been feeling crummy for a day or so. She was not one to complain, so when she finally admitted that her stomach hurt pretty badly, Mom called the doctor. Before they could get to the office, Nat’s appendix ruptured. The resulting appendectomy was messy, since infected fluid had spread throughout her abdomen, and she came down with peritonitis. She spiked a fever. It didn’t come down.
    I was in my dorm room when Mom called me, nine hours away by car. “Get home as fast as you can, Grace,” she ordered tightly. Nat had been moved to the ICU, and things weren’t looking good.
    My memories of that trip back home alternated between horribly vivid and completely blank. A professor drove me to Richmond International Airport. I don’t remember which professor, but I can see the dusty dashboard of his car as clearly as if I were sitting in that hot vinyl front seat right now, the crack in the windshield that flowed lazily down from its source like the Mississippi bisecting the United States. I remember weeping in the plastic seat in front of my gate, my fists clenched as the airplane crept with agonizing slowness toward the terminal. I remember my friend Julian’s face at the airport, his eyes wide with fear and compassion. My mother, swaying on her feet outside Natalie’s cubicle in the hospital, my father, gray-faced and silent, Margaret tight and hunched in the corner near the curtain that separated Natalie from the next patient.
    And I remember Natalie, lying in a bed, obscured by tubes and blankets, looking so small and alone that my heart cracked in half. I took her hand and kissed it, my tears falling on the hospital sheets. “I’m here, Nattie Bumppo,” I whispered. “I’m here.” She was too weak to answer, too sick even to open her eyes.
    Outside, the doctor spoke in a somber murmur to my parents. “…Abscess…bacteria…kidney function…white count…not good.”
    “Jesus God in heaven,” Margaret whispered in the corner. “Oh, shit, Grace.” Our eyes met in bleak horror at the possibility we couldn’t imagine. Our golden Natalie, the sweetest, kindest, loveliest girl in the world, dying.
    The hours ticked past. Coffee cups came and went, Natalie’s IVs were