The Sister Season (2 page)

“Dear God, he’s really gone.”

C
laire was the first to arrive.

Not really a surprise to Elise, as Claire was the most . . . unattached. No children, no home to button up for a few days, not even a goldfish to find a sitter for.

To Elise, her youngest daughter seemed to be hopelessly and perpetually fearful of making a commitment. The first sign of anything permanent, be it a kitten or a car loan, and the girl oozed Panic Attack and ran for the hills. Elise tried desperately to assign the fear simply to Claire’s age. Twenty-eight was still so young. Though she herself had had two daughters by the time she was twenty-eight, Elise realized that for this generation, twenty-eight was, technically, just barely out of adolescence. At least that’s what they said these days. She could only imagine what her own mom would have thought about that—being a teenager while your best childbearing years were slipping away like broken yolk from a cracked egg.

Could be immaturity, could be some sort of unnamed trauma or a faulty gene, but sometimes Elise suspected her daughter’s reluctance to grow up could simply be blamed on where she currently lived, which was to say, not in Missouri. Not only not in Missouri, but in California, of all places. California seemed to Elise to always be a great place for young people to go show off their bodies and abuse their hearts, but the Midwest was where
connection
was made. Where
commitment
happened. Ah, but she supposed that making this assumption about a place she’d never even visited was unfair. California could be perfectly respectable. How would she know?

Every so often Elise had the nagging feeling that it was more about the way Claire had been raised. Had Robert permanently bruised her youngest’s heart? Was it beyond repair? Elise didn’t even want to think about that. It was one thing to bear a child with a faulty gene; it was quite another to take a perfectly healthy gene and ruin it.

Besides, did it really matter now? The girl was nearly thirty. Her father was dead. And even though his death was new, his absence from Claire’s life certainly wasn’t. The two hadn’t spoken in years, ever since that horrible night at the Chuck Wagon. If Claire was still hurting over that, she’d never said as much during one of their monthly check-in phone calls. Though Elise supposed she had taught the girls that being long-suffering was a virtue. Maybe it was her mistake.

Oh, how she didn’t want to start counting mistakes. She was sitting on the mother of all mistakes.

Elise’s knees shook and for a moment she wasn’t sure if the bare-branched crab apple tree near the driveway was swaying or if it was her vision. Dear God, Claire’s father was dead. The girl wasn’t here for Christmas, or here for a visit. She was here for a funeral. Her father’s funeral.

Claire arrived in a taxi, of all things, and Elise watched from the porch as her daughter flung crumpled bills over the seat at the driver’s shoulder before tumbling out, carrying a tattered camouflage backpack over one shoulder. She was wearing huge sunglasses, even in the dim winter-afternoon light, and Elise could see how her youngest daughter might often be mistaken for a celebrity when she was home in Los Angeles. Her yellow-blond hair and sharp features were the spitting image of a younger Robert, with the tininess of Elise’s own side of the family, the McClure clan, making her look fragile and feminine. She was button-cute. Adorable. It could perhaps even be said that she was “the beautiful sister,” but beautiful in a haphazard way, as if beauty meant nothing to her. An unfair beauty.

In her mind, Elise hopped off the porch step and raced down the gravel path to her daughter, wrapped her arms around Claire’s slight shoulders, maybe even squealed a little and let a few tears squeeze out onto her cheek. How many years had it been since Claire had come home? Six? Seven? More than that, even? She didn’t want to think about it.

But, for reasons even she couldn’t understand, the idea of rushing into her daughter’s arms never translated into the actual motion of doing so. Elise leaned forward on her toes with the desire to make it happen, but her arms stayed wrapped tightly around her torso, her hands clutching the sweater she’d draped across her shoulders when she heard the taxi’s tires first crunch on the gravel around the bend on the Miller’s Creek side, signaling an approach off the main highway to the farmhouse. She watched, coiled and motionless, her lips pulled into a tight line, her eyes squinting against the wind that had begun to blow, as her daughter hoisted the backpack higher on her shoulder and picked her way up the long walk, slow and steady as a well-coached bride, her lithe legs, tan and poking out from beneath a pair of cutoff shorts, pooling into a pair of natty fur boots.

“Jesus, Mom,” Claire said a few feet before reaching Elise’s perch on the porch, her nose wrinkled. “I forgot about the cow shit.”

Elise allowed herself the tiniest grin. “We haven’t had livestock here for years,” she said, the same defensiveness in her voice that had always been there when Claire complained about country living, about the land that had sustained her family for generations. Which she did often. Other than Tilly, Claire had no use for animals. Or farming. Or living in a town that had only one grocery store and no gay bars.

Claire sniffed the air. “Then it must be the Hennessees’,” she said, clomping up to the porch and stopping just in front of her mom. She let the backpack drop to the ground and tilted up her sunglasses-covered face.

This was the part Elise never quite knew what to do with. Claire had always been the demonstrative one, the one always clawing at Elise’s belly, always grabbing for her hands, wrapping her whole body around Elise’s legs, her eyes needy as a beggar’s. And a part of Elise ached to hug her daughter, her limbs absolutely twitching with longing to reach out and pull that child up onto the porch, bury her face in those blond waves. But Elise’s own mother had so rarely touched Elise and her brothers, unless it was to set after them with a hastily torn branch or a wooden spoon. And Robert had never so much as patted the girls on the tops of their heads in approval. This just wasn’t a huggy family, and that fact felt like a mountain between Elise and her daughter. One she regretted and wished she could go back and change, but it existed just the same. She could no more reach out to Claire than she could fly.

“Cliff Hennessee died three years ago,” Elise said instead. “Marie moved up to Kansas City soon after. The young couple that bought their property farm corn. No cattle.”

Claire shrugged, turning her head slowly, peering into the sky. “It’s infused in the air, then.”

Elise nodded. “Could be.” But before she could decide what to say next, Claire wrapped herself around her mom, trapping Elise’s arms where they were, across her chest, mummy-like. Elise was startled, rigid under her daughter’s grasp.

“God, Mom, I can’t believe he’s gone,” Claire breathed into her neck. Not sadly. No tears that Elise could detect. No heaving sobs. Elise wouldn’t expect there to be. From anyone.

“I know,” she croaked, because she’d had the same thought earlier that day when she’d started to pour his thermos of coffee and had caught herself just as the first drop splashed against the glass inside. Involuntarily, her eyes closed, and once again she felt herself swirling and whirling as if swept inside the bitter, cracking wind, the click of the crab apple branches against one another perhaps instead the sound of her bones breaking, splintering into dust. As if Claire would soon be clutching the sweater and nothing more, her fur boots covered with pieces of her mother.

They stayed like that until the cab had backed down the long driveway and headed toward the Miller’s Creek turnoff, leaving nothing but the sound of crunching gravel in its wake, and then Claire abruptly let go. Involuntarily, Elise’s hand reached for the wall to steady herself. Her sweater dipped off of her right shoulder and hung loosely across her back.

“It’s so damn cold here,” Claire said. “And it really does smell like cow shit. Why do people live on farms anyway? Let’s go in.” But Elise caught a hint of hesitation on her daughter’s part—was that a deep breath filling the tiny woman’s chest?—just before Claire bent to pick up the backpack. She wondered what memories might flood Claire as she walked into the house for the first time in so long. Was she afraid?

Maybe not. Maybe the hesitation was on Elise’s part. Once Claire crossed the threshold of the old farmhouse, would it be just like it had always been? Was Elise counting on that too much? Was she really expecting to see Claire prancing around on a stick pony and stealing bites of divinity out of the bowl Elise had set on one of the end tables this morning? Surely she wasn’t expecting something so ridiculously impossible. Robert was gone. And, the way he’d gone, he’d taken so much of her with him. She was ripped with guilt over it, but she simply had to put what had happened out of her mind and get a grip.

“I want a shower,” Claire was saying as she jerked open the storm door and disappeared into the entryway. “Longest flight of my life. You know how long a flight from LAX to Kansas City is?” She turned, mugged wickedly at Elise. “Of course you don’t. You don’t ever leave cow town.” She yanked off her sunglasses, her icy blue eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot in the gloom of the front room. Elise really needed to put some brighter lightbulbs in the floor lamp. “Smart woman,” Claire added. “A lot of crying babies on that flight. You mind if I shower?”

And with that, Claire had gone, eaten by the shadowy hallways of her childhood home. The storm door had squeaked shut, and Elise was still standing on the other side of it, staring in, bewildered, one arm bare and goose-pimply in the wind. She blinked, shrugged the sweater back up onto her shoulder, and turned to stare out at the road.

Julia would be arriving from Kansas City soon. Maya would be here within hours. All three girls, home together at last. After all that had happened between them. After all that had happened with the whole family. After what had happened with Robert. After what had happened the night of his death that they didn’t know about, could never know about. The very thought chilled Elise. Her teeth chattered.

A hawk swooped down across the road, lighting on top of the orchard gate on the other side. It sat there, silent and stately, not even so much as a muscle twitch as the breeze ruffled its feathers.

The wind pushed an old tire swing lazily back and forth on its rope, and for a crazy second Elise was sure she heard Claire call out to her. Not the mature Claire wearing the oversized Nike sweatshirt and barking about cow shit and long flights and crying babies. The young Claire, her untamed hair springing out from her temples, the gap between her front teeth large enough to push a quarter through.

Mom,
she heard.
Watch me, Mom! Look what I can do!

And Elise’s heart caught as she saw that little girl stand atop the tire and shimmy up the rope to the limb above without so much as a pause to breathe.

You be careful, Claire!
she heard herself calling back.
You break your arm and your father will have both of our hides.

A giggle. A leaf dislodged and falling to the ground. A call of
I did it!
And Elise’s relief, despite her repeated worried glances over her shoulder to see if her husband had been watching out the front room window.

Yes, you did it,
she thought to herself. Claire had always done it, everything she ever put her mind to.

The wind shifted and the empty swing turned a lazy circle, and just like that the little girl was gone. Just like that, the squeals and giggles and monkey-like springing from branch to branch and the pulling of the ticks and the Popsicles were gone. Elise found it almost impossible to believe that the woman with the camouflage backpack was the same girl, even as she knew she’d watched the transformation happen, bit by bit, argument by argument, year by year, until the years, and the child, simply . . . went away.

Maybe it wasn’t California that caused her youngest daughter to be so unattached in life. Maybe it wasn’t that she was still an adolescent like all those TV psychologists with their ill-formed theories said.

Maybe it was only a matter of Elise not praising Claire for climbing from swing to branch, not telling Claire that a free spirit such as hers was a gift. Not building up her daughters enough, so worried was she about Robert’s reaction to anything and everything they did. Maybe it was a matter of not stepping in enough. Or of stepping in too much. Of trapping that free spirit so it more closely matched his ideal. Maybe she had done it, by virtue of not being the mom her daughter needed.

The hawk had soundlessly taken off, and as the wind clacked the branches of the crab apple tree together once again, Elise turned to the front door, wiping a tear from her cheek. Memories would do her no good now. She had a funeral to get ready for.

More important, she had a Christmas to celebrate with her daughters.

E
lise was elbow-deep in the linen closet pulling out fresh towels to leave in all the bedrooms when she heard gravel grinding under tires again.

She quickly tugged out an armload of towels, wishing she’d made the extra effort to buy new ones. Maybe crimson and evergreen ones, or towels with little Santas or snowmen or colorful gifts embroidered in festive thread along their hems. A part of her—the irrational, unreasonable part that kept creeping up on her with no warning—worried that not having special Christmas towels would ruin everything. That she would never pull off the beautiful Christmas she wanted with her old yellow and brown towels. But the reasonable part of her, the determined-to-make-this-work part, overrode her shaking hands, and she shut the linen closet door with her hip, concentrating on the sound of the car as it got closer and closer to the house.

She hurried down the hall, stopping only long enough to drop three towels on Julia’s bed—one for each member of Julia’s family—and then rushed upstairs to drop off a few in Maya’s room, as muffled
whumps
of car doors slamming in the driveway drifted up to her. She realized she had given Maya her best towels, and paused to fold back the corner of the top one pristinely. Maya would appreciate details such as best towels and folded corners. Actually, Maya would
need
those details.

Claire had showered and retreated back to her bedroom to rest and freshen up before her sisters arrived, leaving Elise to wonder what else she’d forgotten besides the towels.

The back door creaked open downstairs. “Hello?” a voice called. “Mom?”

“I’m here! Yes! Hello!” Elise yelled back, heading down the steps toward the kitchen. She entered just in time to see her oldest daughter, Julia, primly set an expensive-looking suitcase on the tile just inside the back door and reach with one hand to pull off a crocheted hat. “You’re here!” Elise cried, breathing heavily, excitedly. Now that two of them had arrived, it was starting to feel real—Christmas, Robert’s death.

Julia ran her fingertips through her short hair, fluffing it back into place, and then folded up the hat and stowed it in her coat pocket. “Sorry if we’re late. Eli had some . . . issues . . .” She shook her head. “Car sickness,” she added, but something about the way her usually rich and commanding voice petered out over the word made it sound untrue.

“You’re not late at all,” Elise said. “Claire’s here, but Maya’s not yet.” She stood awkwardly, gazing at Julia, so tall and lean, her posture not just straight and stiff, but . . .
important
. She might have described her firstborn as “handsome,” with her grandpa Mick’s sturdy chin and her aunt Nannie’s wide forehead. Some days, even when Julia was a child, Elise felt as if she could look at the girl all day long. But standing around doing nothing but gawking at things was not something Elise did often. Instead, she moved toward her daughter, arms outstretched to take her coat. Julia slipped out of it and smoothed the sleeves of her turtleneck, glancing out the back door. “Where are Tai and Eli?” Elise asked.

“Oh. Well,” Julia said, pulling out a chair at the table, “Eli’s out there checking things over.” She gestured toward the door through which she’d just entered. It had once led to a high concrete-slab porch, one where all the cousins would sit, dangle their legs over the edge, and take turns cranking the ice cream barrel. Years ago, Robert had enclosed it, turned it into a sunporch that was more greenhouse. It was stuffy and moist inside, and filled with ferns and palms and—as of yesterday morning, between phone calls and cookies and arrangements with the funeral home—pots and pots of poinsettias decorated with tiny felt cardinals and golden bows. “And Tai stayed behind,” Julia continued. “His research project is at a kind of critical stage and . . .” She trailed off, waving her hand dismissively, sinking into the chair and resting her elbows on the kitchen table. Her shoulders appeared abnormally hunched to Elise, and she had the thought that her usually poised daughter looked preoccupied. Maybe even a bit wilted.

“Research?” Elise said, carrying Julia’s coat into the front room and hanging it in the closet by the front door, just as she’d done a million times over the girls’ lifetimes. Was it her imagination or did the coat, for just the slightest second, turn lavender and sparkly? Was that a little heart appliqué she saw adorning the back of it, and the shadow of a rip in one sleeve where a nail caught it on the monkey bars at school? She shook her head to clear it, wrestled the coat (
Hunter green, Elise. Lands’ End. Not a child’s coat, for God’s sake.
) onto a hanger, and stuffed it in the closet. “He’s working during Christmas break?” She shuffled back into the kitchen.

Julia shrugged her wide shoulders, staring out onto the sunporch, and once again Elise thought she saw distraction in her daughter’s face. “Life of a professor. It’s not a big deal, really. He never knew Dad, and it’s just a couple of days.”

Elise felt a knot form in her throat and she had to turn away. She had thought everyone would come. She hadn’t planned for families to be apart during the holidays.

She walked over to the sink and stretched up on her toes to peer out the window. There, standing with his arms crossed over his chest, staring out at the pasture, was Julia’s only son, Eli. “Goodness, he’s grown so much just since I saw him last,” Elise said.

“Tell me about it,” Julia answered, deadpan. “More than you know.”

Elise took in the boy’s mop of dark hair with the cowlick sticking up in back, his long, knock-kneed legs. “He looks like a little man out there. Just almost exactly like . . .”

Robert.

Elise had fallen for Robert Yancey when he was not much older than her grandson was now.

Quarterback. Glee Club. Youth minister at the little Baptist church on the south side of town—the one Elise’s father had always called “the Jesus-save-me hand-raisers.” He had dimples. He smelled like fresh-cut mint. He drove a slick car and listened to country music and spit tobacco into paper cups.

He had a hard side, one that was reminiscent of her grandpa Mick, and as the son of a hog farmer himself, he knew farming. Elise found him irresistible, and one year after they met, they were married in that Jesus-save-me-hand-raisers church, Elise in a plain white satin gown feeling queasy and frightened and excited and breathless and in love.

“Like what?” Julia asked, snapping Elise back into reality.

“What?”

“You said he looks almost exactly like . . .”

“Oh,” Elise said in a small, faraway voice, touching her collarbone with her fingers lightly, not noticing the concern etching itself on her daughter’s face. “Like your father.” She offered Julia a feeble smile.

Julia looked out the back door again. “I suppose I can see a resemblance,” she said. “I never really thought about it. People always say he looks like me.”

“Of course. I’m probably just imagining things,” Elise said. “I’m sure I’m seeing the resemblance to you. That makes sense.”

But the boy did look like his grandfather. As Eli shifted his weight, dropping his messenger bag on the grass next to his feet and then sinking, cross-legged, onto the ground beside it, Elise was sure she’d sped back in time fifty years and was seeing her Robert going through those same motions.

But Robert was gone, and Elise knew that. She tore her eyes away from Eli, and stared instead over his head at the derelict chicken coop, so long out of use that one wall looked like it might cave in if so much as a leaf fell on it. She’d often thought about fixing it up, having chickens again, seeing if a tidy coop would bring back some of the magic she’d felt as a child on McClure Farm, but looking at that wall made her feel so tired inside, as if she hadn’t slept in decades. Maybe she hadn’t.

McClure Farm had been in Elise’s family for three generations, and had always been an extended-family affair. Every Midwest McClure lived there at one time or another, and it was once a writhing, buzzing hub of auntie and uncle business, cousin encounters, and backbreaking chores, with Elise’s grandmother McClure overseeing it all with her tough stare and hard, calloused hands. There was always enough bacon for everyone, always fresh-baked biscuits on the stove, always babies squalling and crawling after grasshoppers through elbow-high patches of clover. But make no mistake—there was also always work to be done.

And, God, that farm—that vibrant, living farm that she’d grown up on—had been gone for so long. Robert had retired, had let everything go to weed, and as with everything else that he’d ruined over the years, she’d simply let it happen, no matter how much it meant to her. How many years had she been pining to get the farm back in running order? How many years had she been miserable? Enough to let the wall of the chicken coop, where she’d spent so many summer mornings gathering the breakfast eggs, a bandanna over her nose and mouth, fall into ruin. Had that been Robert’s fault? Or hers? She was having a hard time deciding what was whose fault these days.

“So I was telling Tai that you’ll probably want to come stay with us sometimes. He’s okay with it,” Julia was saying.

Maybe a Barnevelder, Elise thought. Weren’t those the ones that laid the dark brown eggs? Or was she thinking of a Jersey Giant? Now, those were some hardy chickens. No matter, but something fancy would be nice. Maybe one of those chickens with the poufy feathers around their heads. What were they called again? Those would delight the grandkids.

“Mom.”

Elise startled, whirled so that the small of her back was pressed to the sink.

Julia’s eyes were as wide and steady as ever.

“I’m sorry, I was thinking about the chickens,” Elise said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“What chickens?”

Elise paused, gathered her thoughts. What chickens, indeed? They were only in her mind and she knew that. Of course she did. She waved her hand. “Nothing. Never mind. I’ve been distracted lately.”

Julia leaned back in her chair, her eyes so enormous that Elise wondered how anyone could not feel her stare from a hundred yards away. Something about that gaze had always made Elise feel small and lacking, even when it was prodding at her from inside a bassinet. “Well, of course you are, Mom. That’s why Tai and I think you need to spend some time with us. You don’t need all this space to yourself. We can talk about options.”

“It’s really not that much space.”

“It’s a hundred acres. All that area behind the tree line? The pond? The fields? You and Dad together were barely able to take care of it as it was. How can you keep up with all of that by yourself?”

Elise set her cup down and pressed her fingers to her temple. “I don’t know, Julia. The man’s only been dead for a day. I have plans, but no time. There’s never time. I don’t need people telling me what to do and how to do it. I got enough of that from him.” She winced when she heard her own voice, realized the harshness of it. Julia’s mouth was frozen open in surprise, and immediately Elise wanted to stuff the words back into her mouth. This visit was supposed to be different, was supposed to be light and loving. She was supposed to be bonding with her daughters, now that she could. She was not going to lose her control.

But . . . she only just needed a few minutes to think about hens. Get her thoughts straight.

“Queenie!” she heard from behind her, and let out a gust of air as Claire shuffled into the room, yawning and looking puffy with sleep.

Julia’s mouth clamped shut and she visibly straightened her spine. “Hello,” she said, her voice not altogether warm but not icy, either. Just hesitant.

“God, you look old. Where’s your kid?”

“Thank you. So sweet of you to point that out. And
Eli
is outside.”

Claire padded to the storm door, her furry boots replaced by woolen socks, and peered outside. “Shit, he got big.”

“That’s because he’s fourteen now.”

Claire turned, her face bemused. “It’s been that long?”

Julia offered her a condescending smile. “Time flies.”

“He just had a birthday a few months ago, you know,” Elise said, ladling some steaming wine into three mugs and bringing them to the table. Claire pulled out a chair and plopped into it. Elise settled into her seat at the head of the table.

“That so?” Claire blew across the top of her mug as if she were blowing the heat off a cup of cocoa.

Elise nodded, the conversation dead-ended, and she wished that she could think of something new to say. Something not volatile. Thing was, she wasn’t sure what was not volatile between her daughters anymore. She wondered if they knew anything about chickens.

“And did Maya come to the birthday party?” Claire asked.

“She lives in Chicago,” Julia said, as if they didn’t already all know this. As if they didn’t already have her flight schedule memorized. The very moment she would arrive at the house hung over them like doom. As chilly as things were between Julia and Claire, it was nothing compared to the fracture between Maya and Claire. That fracture was a canyon.

“I just thought . . . ,” Claire said, but she sipped her wine rather than continue.

“No, I haven’t seen her since before Will was born.”

“That would be because she ran away before Will was born.”

Julia shot Claire a look. “She didn’t run away. Bradley got a job.”

“More like Bradley got a sexual harassment suit from whoever he was really boning.”

Elise stared, her eyes moving between her two daughters. “Now, nobody knows exactly what—”

“I know exactly what, Mom. Don’t get me started on what.” Claire’s eyes never left her sister’s face, even as she tipped the mug to her lips and sipped.

Julia stood abruptly, her chair rustling against a potted poinsettia.
Maybe I went a little too far with the poinsettias,
Elise thought, and wondered if she could move them around during the night a little, see if she could make it seem less like she was trying too hard when the girls woke up in the morning.

“I really don’t want to have this conversation right now,” Julia said. She scooped another ladleful of wine into her cup. “My father is dead.”