The Second Sister (16 page)

At about the same time I heard the distant whine of sirens, Alice's inert body suddenly convulsed. Mr. Tielens shouted to his sons, Jeremy and Michael, who helped him turn Alice onto her side. Her body jerked again and she coughed, spewing out a murky mixture of lake water and phlegm. Alice's eyes were still closed, but she began to breathe on her own, her skin turning from blue to pink, like a chameleon adjusting to a new environment.

That was when I started to cry, to sob. She was going to be all right. The relief that washed over me was so overpowering that for a moment, I thought I might faint.

 

She wasn't all right. But we didn't know that for a couple of weeks.

The neurologist sat us down in the conference room in the hospital to explain the extent of the damage to Alice's brain and that we shouldn't expect her recovery to go much further.

“We can continue with rehabilitation therapies, but at this point,” he said, “what you see is pretty much what you've got.”

It wasn't a good meeting. Mom started to sob and Dad let completely loose on the doctor, who stayed surprisingly calm in the face of my father's attack. I guess he'd seen that kind of thing before.

After he left, Dad spun around and fixed me with eyes of ice. “Where were you, Lucy? Can you explain that to me? When your sister was drowning, where
were
you?”

It was the longest single utterance my father would make to me for the rest of his life.

 

But as it turned out, the neurologist's predictions were too dire. Alice's condition
did
improve.

Within a few months she was able to walk, but with a slight shuffle, able to speak and read and write, but laboriously, and to draw with surprising skill that only increased as the months passed. In fact, with the exception of her handwriting, all Alice's small motor skills remained intact and even improved with time. The collection of quilts she eventually left behind testifies to that.

It was really kind of miraculous; even the doctors admitted as much. My mother attributed Alice's remarkable improvement to the hours she'd spent in prayer, petitioning God and St. Agnes for healing. My father said that was a load of bull and pointed instead to the many hours he devoted to helping Alice with her physical and occupational therapy and to the fact that, unlike the doctors, he refused to give up on her or accept anything less than a complete recovery.

At some level, I suspect they were both right. Without their intervention and their ceaseless and utter devotion, Alice wouldn't have come back as far as she did; I have no doubts about that. For the first time since I could remember, they were on the same page. I'm not saying that Alice's accident suddenly united them in love; it didn't. But it certainly united them in purpose. They had only one concern and focus, and that was Alice's recovery.

I don't blame them for that—if I were a parent in that situation, I'd do the same thing. Alice needed them, but I could make my own way. I'd been doing it for years.

If I'm honest with myself, the thing that truly drove me to shake the Door County dust from my feet wasn't my parents' emotional abandonment of me. It was the things people around town said to me in the aftermath of the accident.

It was kind of like what had happened after Alice rescued me. No matter where I was or what I was doing, they'd ask me the same questions about how Alice's recovery was going, how my folks were holding up, how miraculous it was that she'd survived, and, of course, that unspoken question that they asked only with their eyes....

As I stood at the water's edge and the biting wind of a fast-moving storm turned the skies to gray, I could see it all: the Tielens' house on the far side of the lake, the slate-gray boards of their neighbor's dock on the opposite shore, maybe a hundred feet from the place I now stood, and the spot in between, where my sister had almost drowned, the patch of brown earth where she had lain unconscious and blue before taking her first breath as a different being. I could see it all, every inch of it, and I knew exactly where I'd been on that day. What I can't explain is why, not even to myself.

And when I finally got back into the car, my fingers numb with cold even though I was wearing gloves, and drove back home, arriving just after dark, I understood that this dust I can never shake off, the day I can't change or atone for, the question will follow me wherever I go.

Chapter 24

M
rs. Lieshout had suggested that I consider taking a quilting class or at least connecting with some of the local quilters, but I decided to tackle it on my own.

Lacking the IQ points Alice had—or had before the accident—I always had to work harder. There was no other option, and in time, I came to enjoy leaning in and figuring out how to do difficult things on my own. In time,
that
became my instinct, outworking everybody else to make up for my deficits. That's not all bad. At this point in my life, I feel confident I can understand and master anything printed between the covers of a book. Absolutely anything.

I didn't sleep very well after my visit to the library. The dream was back, but when I woke up the next day I decided it was time to quit brooding and get busy. As soon as I finished my breakfast, I grabbed a cup of coffee and went up to the sewing room and read both
Quilts for Beginners
and
The Novice Quilter's Handbook
from cover to cover twice, with a pad of paper nearby so I could jot down notes to myself.

After a while, Freckles came padding into the room, jumped onto the window seat, and curled up to watch me. Soon Dave showed up as well, standing at the threshold of the room to see what was going on. I was so happy to see him out from under the sofa at last, but resisted the urge to pet him, afraid that I might scare him off. After a few minutes, he joined Freckles on the window seat and started to purr.

Smiling at this small victory, I sat down at the Singer with the manual I'd finally located by lifting up the seat of the sewing stool and familiarized myself with the basic operation of the machine. Winding the bobbin was tougher than it looked. I was able to make it work on the second try, but not before untangling and unwinding about five miles of blue thread. Dave seemed fascinated with the thread, so I took the blue snarl and set it on the edge of the window seat. He batted it around while I threaded the machine and inserted the bobbin into the case according to the instructions.

Everything seemed fine, but when I tried sewing two scraps together, I ended up with a whole line of loose, messy loops of thread. Frustrated but determined, I completely unthreaded and rethreaded the machine. Four times. After the fifth attempt, my test stitches were perfectly straight and evenly spaced. I had no idea why, but decided not to question it.

The idea of tackling a big quilt was intimidating, so I flipped through the projects in the handbook and picked out a baby quilt made from four-patch checkerboard blocks alternated with big squares that looked cute and fairly simple. The fun part was picking out fabrics. I needed only three, but it took me close to an hour to settle on the right three—one with big, mostly green polka dots and just a touch of turquoise and a calmer turquoise floral that went perfectly with the polka dots. Those were for the checkerboard blocks. The big squares would be a simple white on white with a kind of starburst pattern.

Finally satisfied with my fabric choices, I got out Alice's green cutting mat, a rotary cutter—it looked like it was meant to slice pizzas—and a long, clear, plastic ruler.

The instructions said to lay the fabric on the mat, place the ruler on the edge of the fabric and measure in two and a half inches, use the rotary cutter to cut a long strip of fabric, then cut the strip into two-and-a-half-inch squares. It seemed simple enough.

But the thing about rotary cutters, I would soon learn, is that they are sharp. Really, really sharp. When you're using one, you should be very careful to keep your fingers, especially your thumb, planted securely on the ruler, well out of the way of the blade.

Unfortunately, I wasn't careful.

The blade sliced into the fleshy part of my hand, right below the thumb joint and across the top of my index finger too. I screamed and both cats bolted from the room in a panic. Freckles got tangled in my feet and almost tripped me. My hand hurt so bad that I thought I might pass out from the pain. There was blood everywhere—I mean
everywhere.
I couldn't see how deep the cut was, but I knew I needed stitches. The doctors' offices were closed by then, so I'd have to go to the hospital in Sturgeon Bay.

I grabbed the white starburst fabric and wrapped it around my hand to keep blood from dripping onto the carpet and hurried downstairs. Dave, his eyes wide with fright, was standing at the bottom of the staircase, but ran back under the sofa when he saw me coming. I went into the kitchen to get my purse and car keys, but quickly realized there was no way I could drive myself to the hospital. The wound was painful and bloody, but not life threatening, so I didn't want to call 911. I decided to see if one of the neighbors would be willing to drive me.

There were no signs of life at the three houses closest to me, but a white Subaru with a rusted fender was parked in front of the fourth house and the porch light was on.

The little girl who opened the door was my pint-sized neighbor with the pink boots. She looked at my face and then at my hand and started to scream at the top of her lungs. I didn't blame her. By that time the blood had soaked all the way through the white fabric, so I must have looked pretty gruesome, especially to the eyes of a five-year-old. A moment later, her older sister, Ophelia, the one who had sprinted past her just to prove she could, ran in to see what the commotion was about, and she started screaming too.

Maybe I should have just called for the ambulance.

A third girl, who had reddish hair, freckles, and a scowl on her face, appeared from a hallway, shushing the other two and pushing past them. Seeing me, her eyes went round and her face went white. For a second, I thought she might scream too.

Instead she opened her mouth and yelled, “Mom!” When no answer came she yelled again and louder,
“Mom!”

An irritated adolescent voice from the back of the house yelled back. “She's having happy hour with the girls!”

“Go get her! Now!”

“
You
go get her! I'm trying to make dinner!”

“Juliet! Really! Go get Mom!”

“Viola, I
told
you, I'm busy! What's going on out there?”

The girl from the consignment shop, the same girl I'd seen sitting on our glider and staring out at the water, walked into the room, wiping her hands on a frayed kitchen towel.

“Ophelia! Portia! Will you two shut up and . . .” As soon as she saw me, Juliet dropped the towel. The two little girls ran to her and grabbed her around the waist.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I'm really sorry to bother you, but I had . . .”

She ran out of the room before I could finish. The little ones ran after her, and one of them, the youngest, I think, started shrieking again. A door slammed and the cries of the little girl faded into the distance. The red-haired sister, Viola, stayed where she was and stared at me with a kind of horrified fascination.

After a moment she said, “I think Juliet went to find my mom. Do you want to come inside?”

I shook my head. “Probably not a good idea. I might drip blood on the carpet.”

“Oh. Right.” Another stretch of silent fascination and then a frown. “How did you do it?”

“Sewing.”

Her eyes went wide again. “Does it hurt?”

“A lot.”

The screen door slammed again. A confused, panicked gaggle of girl voices with one lower, calmer, gravelly, grown-up voice, like the pulse of a patient bassoon in an orchestra of piccolos, came from the back of the house.

“All right, all right. Calm down. If she was able to walk over here on her own steam, it can't be
that
bad.”

The girls, youngest to eldest, came through the door with their mother, Daphne Olsen, right behind. This was
her
house? These were
her
children?

I hadn't known that, but looking more carefully at the two littlest girls, Ophelia and Portia, I realized they were two of the three chattering children who had been with Daphne at the library the day before. Maybe the third girl was a friend of the other two? I'd been so distracted by pain and blood when I got to the door that I hadn't put two and two together.

Daphne seemed not the least bit surprised to see me standing on her doorstep. She walked up to me and, without asking permission, lifted up my hand and carefully pulled back the blood-soaked folds of fabric to examine the wound. She sucked a little air between her teeth as she saw the depth of the cut.

“Boy, you really did a number on yourself, didn't you?”

Before I could answer, she turned to her daughters and started issuing orders.

“Ophelia, run and get my car keys. Viola, go into the bathroom and bring a big, clean towel to wrap this in. Portia, quit crying. Juliet, give the kids their dinner and make them help clean up after. I'll call you from the hospital.”