The Night Sister (13 page)

“I saw you outside last night,” Mama said, face stern.

Rose was doing her Saturday-morning chores—feeding Lucy and the chickens. She wore high rubber boots and last year's winter coat; it was too short at the sleeves now, but still warm.

“Me?” Rose finished filling Lucy's trough with grain and made sure she had enough water.

Taking care of Lucy was her favorite chore and had been her responsibility since she could remember. Though the cow had been born the same day as Sylvie, making them twins of a sort, it was Rose who truly loved Lucy best of all. When she looked into Lucy's large eyes, she believed the cow knew things, things that could never be spoken.

Rose loved all the animals. Once, when she was very little, they'd had a shaggy black farm dog named Ranger. Every night, he slept down in the kitchen, next to the stove. Some mornings, little Rose would wake up beside him, snuggled against his warm black fur.

“What are you doing out of your bed?” Mama would scold, and Rose would say that old Ranger must have come to pick her up and carry her down to sleep with him so he wouldn't be lonely.

“Rose thinks she's a puppy,” Sylvie said. And Rose rather liked this, and went around barking instead of speaking until Daddy threatened to give her a good spanking.

“Please don't lie to me, Rose,” Mama said now, coming into the pen. If she was up here, then that meant Sylvie or Daddy must be watching the office, dealing with checkouts. “It was after midnight. What reason could you possibly have to be wandering around outside after midnight?”

Rose gave the old Holstein a pat, right on her Vermont-shaped spot. “I was looking for Sylvie.”

“Sweetheart,” Mama said, lifting Rose's chin so that she would look up into her mother's eyes, “I asked you not to lie.”

“I'm not lying!” Rose insisted—why was it she was always the bad girl, the liar, the one who got caught? “I woke up and she was gone. I came downstairs to look for her and saw her outside, going into the tower.”

Mama gave her a disbelieving look.

“I went out and followed Sylvie into the tower,” Rose explained. “And then she…disappeared.”

But she hadn't just disappeared, had she? She'd climbed to the top of the tower and turned into a moth.

“People can't just
disappear,
” Mama said.

“Well, Sylvie did.”

But not really. She just…
changed.
Rose had been thinking hard about it all night, puzzling over it, and again and again she came back to one startling conclusion: her sister was a mare! Just like in the stories Oma told her. Maybe Oma had even known; maybe that's why she told Rose so much about mares, to prepare her for the day she would realize that her own sister was one.

Rose wished, more than anything, that she could talk to Oma about all of this.

“Perhaps you only imagined you saw her,” Mama suggested. “I'm sure she was right there in her bed the whole time.”

Rose didn't answer. Arguing was useless.

The front door of the house banged open, and Sylvie emerged, wearing a bright-red cardigan and carrying a letter. When they got back from Barre last night, Sylvie had sat down at the typewriter and pecked away at the keys. Rose asked her what she was writing, but Sylvie wouldn't say. She claimed that Rose was being a pest and had better go to bed or else she'd go tell Mama.

“Are you going to tell Daddy I snuck out?” Rose asked.

“No, not this time. But if I catch you outside again, I will. Your father has enough to worry about these days; he doesn't need to hear about you sneaking around like an old alley cat.”

Rose felt her muscles tighten. “What's Daddy worried about?”

She thought of the woman with the green coat. Vivienne. He didn't look worried when he was with her.

Earlier this morning, when she first came downstairs, she'd heard Mama and Daddy arguing. She'd come in just as Mama said, “I'm not an idiot, Clarence.” Then both her parents had seen her, and her father, flustered, said, “Don't you have chores to do, Rose?”

Now Mama looked at Rose a minute, considering whether or not to answer. She looked around to make sure Daddy wasn't close by. “He's worried about the highway they're planning to build. What it might do to business. He went to a meeting with men from town the other day; they believe that, once the interstate is complete, people won't have much reason to take Route 6 anymore.”

“That won't happen,” Rose said. “People won't forget us. Right here at the motel we've got things no one on the highway has. We've got the tower, the chicken circus, Lucy the cow.” Rose gave Lucy a pat on her lucky spot. “People will still come.”

Rose stopped talking when she saw that Sylvie had reached the mailbox. She opened it, slid her letter inside, and pulled up the red flag to let the postman know they had a pickup. Who had Sylvie written to? It made Rose feel twitchy all over, not knowing.

Mama smiled at Rose. “I hope so, Rose, I really do.”

Rose slipped out of Lucy's pen, and Mama followed, latching the gate behind them, as Sylvie came up the driveway with a contented smile.

“So we have an understanding, then,” Mama said. “No more wandering around outside after bedtime?”

Rose nodded, her eyes on Sylvie, who was going into the house.

“Promise me,” Mama said, lifting Rose's chin again.

“I promise,” Rose said.

Mama nodded. “Good girl. Now, finish up your chores, and then come in and have breakfast.”

“Yes, Mama.”

Rose waited until her mother was back in the house, busy in the kitchen. Looking through the windows, she didn't see anyone watching; she imagined they were all around the table, spooning out oatmeal, sprinkling cinnamon, brown sugar, and raisins on top.

Rose turned and ran down the driveway to the mailbox. She opened it, pulled out the letter. It was addressed to Alfred Hitchcock in Hollywood, California.

Without thinking any more about it, Rose slipped the letter into her coat pocket. Then she ran back up the driveway to join her family for breakfast.

Mr. Alfred Hitchcock

Paramount Studios

Hollywood, California

October 8, 1955

Dear Mr. Hitchcock,

My uncle Fenton took me to see
The Trouble with Harry
at the Paramount in Barre—the same place I saw you just over a week ago. We found the place where you signed the wall. I actually let myself touch your signature—what a thrill! I just loved the movie! Miss MacLaine was absolutely brilliant. I understand it was her first movie role. I'm wondering how you came to cast her? How does someone get a part in one of your movies if they're not already a star?

I have enclosed a picture of my sister Rose and I performing in our World Famous London Chicken Circus. It's something we do for the motel guests. We've trained the chickens to do all kinds of tricks, and at the end, I hypnotize them. It's really quite a show. Rose and I were in the newspaper for the circus last summer—a man came and interviewed us and took our picture.

If you are ever in Vermont again, I would love for you to come to the motel and see the circus.

I'm the older girl in the picture, with blond hair. Rose doesn't care for cameras, so she's making a face.

Rose is just as strange as usual. Well, maybe more so. Lately she's always watching me, spying. She hides in the closet, under my bed. She thinks I don't see her, and I pretend not to, just to see how long she can stay hidden, which actually turns out to be a rather long time. She even watches me when I sleep! Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and there's Rose, standing over me with a flashlight, shining it down onto my face. Mama says not to pay Rose any mind, that she's just jealous. She's got a funny way of being jealous, if you ask me.

Well, that's all I can think of for now. I hope you are busy making your next picture—I can't wait to see it! If you ever have time, I'd love to get a letter back. Or an autographed picture even. That would make me feel like the luckiest girl in all of Vermont!

Sincerely yours,

Miss Sylvia A. Slater

The Tower Motel

328 Route 6

London, Vermont

Piper stared at Amy's daughter, unable to shake the sense that she'd traveled back in time and was sitting with Amy again. The girl was a dead ringer for her mother; paler, certainly, and looking shell-shocked, but it felt eerily as if Amy had been cloned.

The girl was staying in a run-down trailer with her aunt Crystal—Mark's sister. Crystal had set them up at a kitchen table with a scratched-up Formica top, with warm cans of Coke and a plate of saltine crackers and squares of plastic-looking orange American cheese.

“My name is Louisa, but no one calls me that—only teachers on the first day of school, and the lady who works at the doctor's office.”

“What do people call you, then?” Piper asked.

“Everybody calls me Lou. Just Lou.”

She looked like a kid who never saw sunlight, a sickly kid; even her freckles were faded. Her eyes were a murky blue; her hair was fine blond wisps. There were shadowy blue-black circles under her eyes. Her lips were chapped.

The trailer was a dump, and Piper hated seeing any kid forced to stay here. The kitchen floor was sticky with God-knew-what; there were piles of dishes in the sink; the curtains, once white, were yellowed from the cigarette smoke that permeated every surface. Being in the trailer was like crawling into a giant ashtray.

Amy's sister-in-law, Crystal, had led Piper right inside. Crystal was tall and thin with frizzy brown hair that she kept pulled back in a dirty Scrunchie. Her nails were painted a green that reminded Piper of baby puke, and the polish was chipped and peeling. She had a canker sore in the corner of her mouth. “Can you keep an eye on her for an hour or so?” she'd asked. “I've gotta go to the store.”

“Um, sure. Why not?” Piper had said casually, thinking,
Who leaves a traumatized child alone with the first person who walks through the door?

Crystal lived in the trailer with her boyfriend, Ray. Ray was a bartender at a place in Barre where they had topless dancers (Piper had learned this from Margot). He was at work when Piper got there, but she saw evidence of him: a pair of large black motorcycle boots, a chipped coffee mug that said
RAY
on the kitchen counter, a photo of Crystal and a heavyset man with greasy black hair on the fridge.

Piper watched as Lou sipped at her can of Coke. She started to explain that she was an old friend of Lou's mother's, and that they had played together back when they were girls only a little older than she. That had made Lou smile, the idea that her own mother had been young once—as young as her, even.

“We used to roller-skate at the bottom of that old pool at the motel,” Piper told her.

The girl suddenly smiled. “I've skated there, too!” she said. “I got bit by a spider down there once.”

“Ouch,” Piper said.

Lou nodded. “They live in the drain. It was a bad bite; it turned into this big old open sore that took forever to heal, and Mama wouldn't let me go in the pool anymore.”

Piper gave a little shiver.

“I have to skate in the driveway now, but it's all pebbles. Sometimes Mama takes me to the bike path and then we—” She cut herself off. Her face looked so serious, and Piper felt all the breath leave her as she again realized how like Amy this girl was—the pouting lips, blue eyes with extra-long lashes, a smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks.

Without thinking, Piper reached out a hand to stroke her straggly hair. She longed to brush it, to put little bows in it—something bright and cheerful. She thought of how Amy used to dye her bangs bright colors with Jell-O.

The girl flinched, and Piper pulled her hand away.

“I bet that was nice, riding on the bike path,” Piper said.

Lou's eyes got stormy (again, just like Amy's) before she took a deep breath and closed them. “Aunt Crystal, she says it's okay to still love Mama, no matter what she's done. She says we've got to remember the good things about Mama.”

Piper nodded.

“I got a friend who collects butterflies,” Lou said suddenly. “Kendra. She's not very nice. Sometimes she rips the wings right off while they're still alive.”

“That doesn't sound very nice at all,” Piper agreed.

Lou nodded. “Sometimes she's mean to me, too.”

“What does she do?”

Lou squeezed her Coke can, denting the sides. “Calls me stupid because I'm not so good with math and spelling. I get bad grades on quizzes and stuff. Mama always says there are different kinds of smart.”

Piper nodded. “She's absolutely right.”

The girl smiled at Piper, but then the smile faded. She started to pick at the skin around her thumbnail.

“Why did you come to see me?” Lou asked.

“Because I wanted to meet you.”

Lou nodded and gave the Coke can another hard squeeze. “Do you want me to tell it like it happened?”

“What's that, love?”

“Every grown-up who's come says”—Lou puffed up her chest and put on a deep, authoritative voice—
“In your own words, tell us what happened.”

It reminded Piper of something Amy would have done.

“You don't have to tell me anything,” Piper said, heart thudding. This was why she was here—wasn't it?—but suddenly she didn't want the girl to tell her what happened. She just wanted to sit here, sipping Cokes, and ask her more about school, about her friends. She wanted to find some little way to make Lou's life better, a tiny bit normal, not be just another adult ready to drag her through the horror of what had happened that night.

Lou shrugged. “I don't mind, I guess. The more I tell it, the more it becomes like a story. A real bad story that happened to some other girl.”

Piper wanted to take her away from here, out of this shitty trailer, out of the town of London, where she'd never be allowed to forget the tragedy. She wanted to put Lou on a plane and bring her back to L.A., back to her tidy home. She could turn the office into a nice bedroom, with a canopy bed covered in stuffed animals. She could give Lou a good life. She could keep her safe.

Piper had never longed for a child. Her life seemed full without one. She had a successful business, lots of friends, the occasional (though rarely serious) romance. Yet this girl was awakening some deep, primal mothering instinct inside her.

“Only if you want to,” Piper said.

“It was late,” Lou began. “After midnight. I heard Mama downstairs in the kitchen, banging around. She did that when she was drinking sometimes…fell into things, opened and closed the cupboards real hard.”

“Did your mom drink a lot?” Piper asked, swallowing hard. She hated the thought of Amy's becoming a drunk. Amy seemed bigger than that somehow, above addiction. But alcoholism, she knew, ran in families.

Lou squinted. “Sometimes. Daddy, he quit years ago, but Mama, she always kept a big bottle of white wine in the back of the fridge. So I heard her banging around in the kitchen first, then in the hall closet. That's when she must have been getting the gun. Daddy kept it there the way Mama kept wine in the fridge—just in case.”

Sweat began to form on Piper's forehead and the backs of her hands. She loosened the scarf she was wearing, undid the buttons on her sweater. There was a rank odor in the room that seemed to be getting stronger. Something moldering: damp earth, fungus.

“She started up the stairs. She was saying a rhyme:

“ ‘When Death comes knocking on your door

you'll think you've seen his face before.

When he comes creeping up your stairs,

you'll know him from your dark nightmares.

If you hold up a mirror, you shall see

that he is you and you are he.' 
”

Piper shivered. She remembered Grandma Charlotte reciting that same little rhyme to them years ago, not long before everything changed.

Lou's singsong voice sent chills through Piper. She wanted to beg her to stop, not to go any further. Lou closed her eyes tight, and began to rock slowly as she spoke.

“First, she went into her bedroom, where Daddy was sleeping. She crept right in, quiet as a mouse. But he must have woke up, because they started arguing.”

“Could you hear what they were saying?” Piper asked.

“No, but there was a lot of noise, yelling and stuff breaking, and Mama screaming. Then:
bang!
”

Piper jolted.

“All I could think was that I had to hide. I jumped out of bed and stuffed the pillows under the quilt so she'd think I was in there, sleeping. I saw that once. In a movie.”

Piper nodded. “Then what did you do?”

“I opened the window that leads to the roof. Levi and I used to do it all the time. We'd go out there sometimes to watch the stars.”

Piper nodded. She remembered going out that same window when she slept over at Amy's—how they'd sit out on the roof and puff at cigarettes Amy had stolen from her grandma, take sips of the salty cooking sherry they'd found down in the kitchen. Amy would pretend she could name all the constellations, but Piper knew she was making it up. Amy's sky held nightmarish images: a toad swallowing a little girl, the queen of the spiders, a hand wielding an ax.

“Mama came back down the hall. I stood right by the window, listening. I heard Mama go into Levi's room.”

“ ‘Mama?' Levi called. ‘What are you doing?'

“ ‘Saving you.'

“ ‘From what?'

“ ‘Nightmares.'

“Bang! Bang! Bang!”

Piper leaned back, as if the shots had been fired into her own chest.

“Then she came for me. I saw the light when she opened the door. I was right beside the window, crouched down low. She walked up to my bed, and without pulling back the covers, she fired the gun again. Then she went back out into the hall, and there was one more shot. It was quiet after that.”

Lou's eyes looked as glassy as a doll's.

“I stayed out on the roof even after everything got quiet. I didn't want to see inside.”

Lou was silent for a moment, perhaps imagining what she might have seen if she'd gone inside. Piper struggled to keep herself from picturing it.

When she spoke again, her voice was shaking. “Finally, Jay Jay came out and found me, and he carried me back inside. My face was pressed against his chest. He told me to keep my eyes closed, not to open them until he told me to.”

“Jay Jay?” Piper asked. She'd forgotten that Amy used to call Jason that. But how did Lou know?

“Mama's friend. He's a police officer. He came to the house to visit Mama last week. He must have said something that made her sad, 'cause when I walked in that afternoon, she was crying. Jay Jay was holding her hand.”

Piper let out a little gasp, then faked a cough to try to cover it up.

“But that night,” Lou continued, “when he carried me through the house and told me not to open my eyes, he was the one crying. And I knew that whatever had happened was real, real bad, to make a police officer cry.”

Piper thought of a hundred things she could say, maybe should say—words of comfort or empathy, reassurance—but everything seemed grossly, insultingly inadequate. The refrigerator hummed. The clock on the stove ticked. Soda bubbled and ticked in their cans. A radio played off in another room, the music so faint Piper wondered if she might be imagining it. She thought of the little transistor radio Amy used to carry around tuned to the top-forty station.

“One time,” Lou said suddenly, “Mama took me to the city and I saw a little stone man with wings carved into the top of a building.”

“A gargoyle?” Piper asked.

“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “That's what I imagined I was up there on that roof, holding still, trying not to breathe. A gargoyle.”

C
rystal returned from the store an hour later with a carton of cigarettes and an enormous bottle of generic diet soda. She soon made it clear that Piper's babysitting services were no longer needed. As Piper drove back to Margot's house, she replayed Lou's simple, terrible story over and over in her head, sorting through all the details one by one.

What had Jason been doing at Amy's last week? Surely, if Margot had known about this visit, she would have mentioned it to Piper. Which meant he'd kept it a secret, but why? Each possibility she let herself imagine was worse than the last.

But something else felt wrong about Lou's story, too.

The realization was gradual, the way night falls in the summer—the light fading slowly, so slowly it's barely perceptible—and then you see fireflies, stars. There all the time, but only now visible.

Jason had clearly said that Lou had blood on her feet when he found her on the roof. If she'd crept out the window when she heard the first shot, stayed there perched like a statue while the nightmare inside went on, where did the blood come from?