If I’d never really liked my sister, could I still step up for her daughter?

The lies that we tell ourselves, I think, are often to hide the most brutal truths of all.

The uncomfortable truth is this: We never really liked Shana very much. There were seven of us, and Shana was smack in the middle. Maybe that’s what made her so irritable, so quick to complain about everything, so reluctant to be happy. Every other Shabbos meal when we were teens had that interval when she’d pick a fight and storm off, leaving someone in tears and Mommy close to breaking down as well.

It had been a surprise when we’d gotten engaged at the same time, Shana at 21 and I at 20. I’d envisioned her a spinster at 60, criticizing my grandparenting. Marriage is going to mellow her out, Mommy said to me in an undertone at one fitting, as Shana argued loudly with the seamstress. But Mommy had been wrong. Yitz had been a little strange and socially awkward, but he’d stayed with her for 14 years, through three children and Shana’s loud and public outbursts, until it had been just too much.

Shana got sole custody. That might have tipped us off that the situation wasn’t what it seemed, but it was hard to imagine that she was blameless. After all, Shana was… difficult, we’d learned to say delicately. A handful. She’s very sweet deep down, if you just filter it out. Sometimes I’d have her over for long and lazy Shabbos meals, the little ones playing together and our teenaged daughters exclaiming at the pictures in a magazine, and we’d chat like sisters until I’d almost believe it.

When she became quieter, more tired and subdued, picking at her plate and spending hours staring at nothing through the window of her living room, we might have seen the signs. But none of us thought too much about it, until Raizy called my cell phone on Sunday, a sob suppressed in her throat, to say that her mother hadn’t left her bed or agreed to eat anything since Friday afternoon, and she was scared.