Human Sister

Mom, and Dad, Grandpa refused to speak to me in what he called parentese.
    Uncle, who was seventeen days younger than Mom and was not biologically related to her through either his mother or father, was tall and handsome, with dark brown skin and wavy black hair. Aunt Lynh had beautiful, shiny, straight black hair, light brown skin, and an oval face with Asian eyes. She never said much on those early Vidtel calls, preferring, it seemed, to gaze admiringly at Uncle while he spoke.
    Elio was a year and thirty-three days older than I. Like his mother, he never said much when they called, usually just “Hi” when Uncle nudged him. He’d inherited Uncle’s dark skin, but his jet-black hair was straight, his face was round, and his chocolate irises—so dark I could hardly distinguish them from his pupils—were set, as were his mother’s, in enchantingly beautiful, acutely angled frames of skin that seemed drawn back toward his ears, especially when he smiled. His hair was parted in the middle and fell in thick fronds over his forehead and eyes.
    I found him both fascinating and disconcerting, for unlike First Brother, he usually appeared to be staring at me, though slightly askance, his strange eyes studying me from behind shafts of tousled hair. I was immensely curious about what he was like, what he was thinking, and what he was so studiously observing in me; but his appearance never failed to shock me into silence, so that I, like him, said little more than “Hi” whenever he appeared on Vidtel.
    About two months after Uncle’s ashes were buried in Grandma’s garden (I was told that he’d thought it was the most beautiful and peaceful place he’d ever seen), Vidtel announced a call from Aunt Lynh in Amsterdam. I was reading a story to Grandpa at the time, and when the call came he nodded, his gaze moving in an arc from me to the door. I hurried out of the room. Grandpa had told me that Aunt Lynh was depressed and was seeking his advice (he had been trained as a medical doctor at Stanford), so their conversations were strictly confidential. She had been so depressed, in fact, that she hadn’t even come to California to attend Uncle’s burial.
    After his call, Grandpa told me that Aunt Lynh and Elio were in trouble and needed his help. “Lynh’s parents and only sister were killed in a car accident years ago, so with Marcus gone, we’re the only family she has. Neither she nor Elio speaks Dutch. She can’t find work. Elio isn’t in school. It’s a mess.”
    “So, why did she move to the Netherlands?” I asked. “Why did she take Elio there?”
    “She told me she wanted to raise Elio in a country that cherishes differences.”
    He departed for Amsterdam that evening. While he was gone, Grandma and I baked my favorite double chocolate cake and chocolate chip cookies. We also worked in the garden and visited the winery, where Grandma tasted wines and talked with Carlos Hernandez, the vineyard manager, about things like fermenting and blending, while I shared the sweets we had made with the winery workers and the tasting-room guests.
    Grandma was soft to hug—Grandpa sometimes kidded her about liking her own cooking too much—and she always smelled of floral perfume, usually tea rose. She had thinning straight white hair, pale gray-blue eyes, and prominent Nordic cheekbones. In photos taken in her twenties and thirties, she appears slender, light blonde, and strikingly beautiful. I inherited the cheekbones, the youthful slimness, and hair even lighter in color; but somehow it all failed to coalesce into what one would call beautiful.
    She seemed always to be content in the moment, radiating warmth and love. Through her I found happiness in natural things: flowers, clouds, trees, food—her salads, picked year-round from our garden and greenhouse, were so vibrant with reds, greens, and yellows that I sometimes imagined I was eating scenery from magnificent paintings. And each month, not wanting to miss a single return of the full moon, she and I would go out near sunset to watch the receding integument of light, then the moon, a marbled yellow blossom displaying silhouettes of bats and birds and of the seasonally eerie, naked branches of the old valley oak tree sentried alone on a nearby hill.
    Grandpa called on Vidtel at least once every day he was gone, and as the days passed he seemed increasingly satisfied that matters were improving for Aunt Lynh and Elio. He seemed especially pleased when he