The Second Sister (15 page)

Chapter 23

T
here's a phrase somewhere in the Bible about shaking the dust off your feet when leaving a town that has made you unwelcome or unhappy. I'm not religious enough to be able to explain the original purpose of that act, but in my mind, it means you leave that place behind and never think of it or its inhabitants again.

When I left Nilson's Bay, just one day after my high school graduation, that was my intention. I wanted to shake the Door County dust from my feet and never think of or return to this place again. But now I'm back and I'm not sure I want to forget anymore. The longer I am here, the more I feel like I have to make sense of it, to see if Alice and Barney were right when they said I was remembering wrong.

Maybe that's why, as I was driving home from the library, I suddenly took a hard right onto a road that leads to Kangaroo Lake, where the accident happened.

 

Mentally, those two words are always capitalized for me, as if they are the title to a book: The Accident.

Well, maybe not a book. Maybe a chapter heading, or the second act in a three-act play, the scene that separates the beginning of the story from the end, the pivot point that changes everything. That's what the accident was, the thing that changed everything.

When my sister's unresponsive body was pulled from the water on that hot day in August of 1996 and laid on the ground while a man performed CPR for what seemed like hours until she finally, finally, finally coughed up a lungful of lake water and began to breathe, everybody, including the doctors at the hospital, said it was a miracle that she'd survived.

I suppose that was true. But in some sense, Alice didn't survive the accident. Yes, she could breathe and talk and care for animals and draw beautiful pictures, but she wasn't the same person after that. Neither was I.

It was a Saturday in late August and time for the end-of-summer picnic for the high school kids. The Tielens family had nine kids in the school system, and so the picnic was always held at their house on Kangaroo Lake. Jeremy Tielens, seventh in the line of nine, was a year ahead of me in school.

The yearly gathering was something we all looked forward to. Even though Door County is surrounded by water on three sides, the waters of Lake Michigan are generally too cold for swimming even in summer, so getting an invitation to go swimming in one of the warm, private inland lakes was a treat, but swimming wasn't the only thing we were excited about.

For Door County kids, summer vacation was something of a misnomer. Most people who live on the peninsula full-time are self-employed. Summer, with its good weather and accompanying onslaught of tourists, was the time when they made most of their money for the year, and so it was all hands on deck.

Some kids worked on the family farms—planting or herding or weeding or picking or packing—and the children of entrepreneurs helped out at the family business. For example, Denise's parents owned a motel in Jacksonport, so she spent her summer cleaning rooms. Alice worked at the animal hospital, cleaning cages and assisting Dad in the clinic. He never asked me to help at the hospital, said I made the animals nervous, so I worked at Al Johnson's restaurant, serving and clearing thousands of plates of Swedish pancakes and meatballs for tourists.

After such a long and labor-intensive summer, we were almost looking forward to going back to school and to seeing one another at the Tielens' picnic. It gave us a chance to renew old friendships, catch up on the news, and, like the normal, healthy, hormone-driven adolescents that we were, show off for members of the opposite sex.

The girls always put a lot of thought into what they should wear to the annual picnic. I'm less sure about the boys. No matter the occasion, they always showed up in the same jeans, T-shirts, and ball caps, but that didn't matter. From eighth grade on, I'd noticed that the summer months wrought an astounding transformation on the male members of our class.

They'd show up at the August picnic looking taller, tanner, and more muscular, mature, and desirable than they had when we parted ways in May. It really was kind of miraculous. I suppose the same thing must have been happening to the girls, but I didn't take much notice. Maybe the other girls got better looking over the summer months, but I was sure it wasn't happening to me, not at all.

I was small for my age, slow to develop, wore glasses, and had a bad overbite that required me to wear braces from the sixth grade on. The other day, I found some of my old school pictures while going through a box of photo albums. Sure enough, I looked just as geeky as I'd always felt.

But that summer, my sixteenth, it was finally my turn for transformation. My braces came off in June, and my long-awaited bust arrived not long after. In mid-August, I took a good chunk of the money I'd earned busing dirty pancake and meatball plates and bought a pair of contact lenses and a swimsuit just like one I'd seen on a
Sports Illustrated
model: bright yellow bikini bottom, belted and with a gold-tone buckle, and a matching bandeau top with another buckle in the middle that gathered the fabric and made the bust look bigger.

The contacts were one thing, but when my mother found out how much that swimsuit cost, she was furious.

“Ninety-five dollars! For
that
! Did they charge by the inch? If you think that I'm going to let you go down to the lake and parade around in that skimpy little . . .”

You get the idea. It's the same fight mothers and their teenage daughters have been having since the beginning of time. In the end, she did let me wear it. Well . . . it wasn't so much that she
let
me as that she hurried off to work at the church rummage sale and couldn't stop me.

It was an incredibly hot and humid day. When we arrived, Mr. Tielens was firing up the grill so he could cook some brats, and Mrs. Tielens was handing out glasses of lemonade. The girls squealed and hugged when they saw one another and the boys gave each other high fives and playful elbows in the ribs. Somebody brought a boom box—remember, it was the nineties—and started playing Green Day.

Carrying red Solo cups full of lemonade, we headed down to the lake to lay our towels out on the grass. Alice and her group, all rising seniors, set up camp next to a small cluster of birches. I headed in the opposite direction, far from them and closer to the water, to sit with Denise. I stretched out on the towel and, noticing Peter standing nearby with Clint and a couple of other guys, started applying sunscreen to my legs, belly, and breasts, taking my time and keeping my eyes down, pretending not to notice that he was watching me.

After a couple of minutes, the guys stripped off their shirts and jumped into the water. We girls sat on our towels to talk, tan, and steal glances at the half-dressed boys who were swimming and horsing around. Peter came swimming over toward our group with that cocky grin of his, then swept his whole arm across the surface of the lake, splashing water on me and my friends. I screamed, pretended to be mad, and jumped up from my towel and into the water. A five-minute water fight ensued.

Of course my feigned anger turned quickly to laughter. I was thrilled that Peter was paying attention to me. He grabbed one of my arms and I squealed and tried to wriggle away, but my heart rate about doubled. However, when he came up from behind, looped his arms around my waist, and lifted me halfway out of the water, saying he was going to get even by dunking me under, I screamed for real. A little splashing was one thing, but I'd spent an hour and a half doing my hair that morning.

Realizing my alarm was genuine, Peter put me down and let me go. Then Clint called and Peter swam over to see what he wanted, so I got out of the water and went back to sit on my towel.

Denise was grinning when I sat down. “Oh, geez! Oh, geez!” she hissed in a delighted stage whisper. “He picked you up and practically held you over his head like you didn't weigh anything!”

“Oh, stop it. He only lifted me halfway out of the water.”

“He couldn't keep his hands off you, Lucy! He likes you! He really does!”

I stretched out full length on my towel.

“No, he doesn't,” I said with a smile.

“Yes, he
does,
” she insisted. “I took a look at the front of his swimsuit when he jumped out of the water, and his . . .”

“Denise!” I cringed and slapped her shoulder. “Quit it! That is so gross!”

Denise rolled her eyes, a smug smile on her face. “Oh, please. Spoken like a virgin. But I bet you won't be one for long, lucky duck. He is
so
cute.”

Denise sighed and I closed my eyes, enjoying the sun on my wet skin and the sensation of having someone, at last, feel jealous of me.

“You know,” she said, “if you play your cards right, you might even get it over with today. There's a bunch of trees and bushes over there on the far side of the cove. After lunch, you could ask Peter if he wants to go on a walk. I'd cover for you.”

“Eeww,” I said again, opening my eyes.

“What?” Denise blinked, looking genuinely confused by my revulsion. “I think doing it outside would be romantic. Way better than in the backseat of Buddy's car; that's for sure.” Denise rolled onto her left hip so she could see me better. “We went to the drive-in last weekend and it was so cramped and hot. The upholstery kept sticking to me.”

I made a face. “Oh, ick! Denise!”

She shrugged. “You've got to do it somewhere.”

“Well,
I'm
not doing it in the back of a car! Ever. And I'm not asking Peter to go for a walk and then trying to jump him. That's so forward.”

“Forward?” Denise rolled her eyes again. “Geez, you sound like my mother. Yesterday, just because I phoned Clint to ask if he was coming to the picnic, she called me a chaser.”

She was my friend so I didn't say anything, but Denise
was
a chaser. Just a few months older than me and she'd already slept with three guys. Her current boyfriend, Buddy, was a college kid who'd come up for the summer to wait tables at the White Gull Inn. Now that summer was coming to a close, she was obviously on the hunt for a replacement.

Denise sat up on her towel and tossed her head so her hair flipped over her shoulder. Clint noticed her, smiled a little. Denise smiled back and wiggled her fingers in a little wave. Clint elbowed Peter, who looked toward us and grinned that cocky, self-satisfied grin of his.

I turned my head away, lay back down on my towel, and closed my eyes again.

“The boy who wants me is going to be the one to do the chasing, not the other way around. Even if I have to wait.”

“With an attitude like that,” Denise said, “you could end up waiting a loooong time. Like until college. Or even till you're married! Like my folks did. By then you'll be too old to enjoy it.”

 

Mr. Tielens called us for lunch when the brats were ready. It was so oppressively hot when we finished eating that even the girls abandoned their towels and got into the water. Somebody had the idea to organize some races. That's when it happened.

Alice was racing from the Tielens' dock, on the east side of the lake, to the west side. I don't know exactly what happened. Maybe it was too soon after she ate and she got a cramp? They say that's just an old wives' tale, but I can't think why else it would have happened; Alice was always such a strong swimmer. All I know is that she was there and then she wasn't. That's how it seemed. But I didn't actually see it happen. I was on the other side of the lake.

I heard a commotion, looked up, and saw a crowd of kids standing on the shore, yelling and pointing to a spot far from the shore. Alice wasn't among them.

By the time I realized that, five of the older boys, including Peter, were swimming to the middle of the lake as fast as they could. Mr. Tielens was pulling a canoe off the grass and into the water. He climbed in and started paddling after the boys and yelled at his wife to dial 911.

Mrs. Tielens ran into the house and I dove into the water, swimming faster than I'd ever swum before, but the boys got there first. They flipped their bodies forward and kicked their feet up behind them like a school of playful porpoises, disappearing beneath the water for as long as their breath held out, then resurfacing to take another huge breath before diving down again.

As soon as I reached them I started diving, too, keeping my eyes open wide in the murky water, searching for my sister, the sensation of panic growing exponentially with each passing second. I went under two, three, four times, searching desperately and finding nothing. I broke through the surface again and heard more screaming from the shore, but this time it was different. There was a note of exultation in the cries of the girls on the shoreline.

Treading water and gasping for breath, I looked to my left and saw nothing, then paddled in a half circle to my right. Peter and Jeremy Tielens were swimming in tandem, each with one arm hooked under one of Alice's arms as they dragged her on her back toward the canoe. When they were close enough, Mr. Tielens grabbed Alice by the arm and pulled her lifeless, unresponsive body aboard. The hopeful cries from the shore became weaker and more tentative, then faded into silence.

I don't remember the swim back to shore, only that I was exhausted when I arrived. Someone, Mrs. Tielens, I think, wrapped a towel around my shoulders. I stood with the others circled around my sister, her skin slightly blue against the red spandex of her one-piece suit, and watched silently as Mr. Tielens performed CPR. I think I prayed, but I'm not sure now.

Mr. Tielens worked on her so long that the circle of onlookers began to diminish, as some of the girls gave up hope and drifted away, weeping.