The Sister Season (3 page)

Claire laughed, a single bark. “What a coincidence! So is mine! Or is his death all about you, Queenie? You being the Sister in Charge and all.”

But before she could continue, the storm door opened, letting in a whoosh of stale green air, and Eli tromped in on untied high-top-sneakered feet. He tossed his mess of dyed blue-black hair (
quite festive, actually,
Elise thought), revealing one dark, brooding eye that so closely matched his mom’s, Elise felt as if she’d been transported back to the 1970s when she looked at him.

Mom,
she could hear tiny Julia saying, those wide eyes brimming with tears,
Daddy won’t let me bring in Mr. Claws. It’s freezing out there. And he’s sick. The coyotes will get him.

Julia,
Elise heard herself say back,
he’s an old barn cat. You can’t get too attached to those. You know that.
Though Elise had later gone into the barn and cried her eyes out, stroking the cat’s fur, covering him with an old quilt, and wishing that just once her husband had let their oldest daughter be led by her heart. Oh, how Elise hated to see those eyes, as impossibly deep as cave pools, spill over once again.

“Eli!” Elise cried, holding out her arms in a weak invitation and taking a few steps forward, but not enough to fully close the gap between them. She hadn’t seen her oldest grandchild in what seemed like ages, hadn’t held him since he was a little boy. Perhaps it was the hug from Claire, or the emotional drain of losing Robert, or the spirit of Christmas that made her reach for him. All she knew was she wanted to fill her arms with him. Wanted to feel him, young and vibrant and so utterly alive. Wanted to smell his scalp, see if it smelled like Julia’s used to when she was his age. And she didn’t know exactly how to make that happen.

The boy simply shifted his weight, gazing at the floor, his messenger bag strap looped over one arm, the bag resting on top of his shoe. “Hi,” he said, more to the tile than to her, and Elise felt her hands lower slowly, like a white flag of surrender.

“It’s so good to see you, honey,” she said, and he responded with a soft grunt that might have been a word, but Elise couldn’t tell. He swayed uncomfortably, and Elise picked something imaginary off the front of her shirt. “Well . . . ,” she said, trailing off, trying to decide what to say next that might break through the invisible barrier that seemed to always spring up between Yancey family members, and bring her grandson into her arms.

But Eli spoke first. “Car’s here,” he said in a new man-voice, changing the subject and shattering Elise’s hopes of a tender reunion moment. She noticed that the hems of his jeans were filthy and had holes, that his T-shirt was threadbare, his chin dotted with pimples, his mouth an uneven scowl.

He had been the baby who was always in a clean bib. The one in tiny designer overalls and expensive baby shoes chewing on the edges of black-and-white flash cards with images of boats and balls and shapes on them. Bred to be as well kept and as brilliant as his mother and father. Now he was a slob. What had happened? Was it simply that he’d become an indifferent teenager, or was there something more?

“Hey, sport,” Claire said, ignoring his news. She reached up and tousled his hair; he ducked away from her hand.

“Hey,” he responded, and crossed his arms.

“You remember me?”

He shook his head. Elise caught Julia rolling her eyes from across the room, the unspoken question—
why would he?
—floating uncomfortably over the kitchen.

“Ah, well.” Claire’s smile stuck in place, but her voice got a little tinier, and she seemed unsure how to go on from there.

“Eli,” Julia said, “why don’t you go out and see if Aunt Maya needs help with her bags?”

“She won’t.”

“Go see.”

“I don’t need to.”

“I’m asking you to go out anyway.” Julia took two steps toward her son and crossed her arms over her chest to match his posture. There was an edge in each of their voices, and both Claire and Elise froze, embarrassed and confused by whatever was passing between the two of them. “Go help your aunt with her bags.”

“Mom! God! She’s not alone! Uncle Bradley is with her.”

All three women stared at one another.

“Fabulous.” Claire sighed and pushed away from the table. “My room is calling.” She patted Eli’s shoulder on her way by, though this time he didn’t duck away from her hand. “Thanks for the warning, man.”

They could hear the front door bang open and the pounding of Maya’s children’s feet across the wooden floor in the front room, followed by jubilant cries of “Look! Presents under the tree!”

Claire stopped when she reached Julia, pulled up on her tiptoes, wrapped her arms around her sister, and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. “It really is good to see you, Queenie,” she said. “Relax a little. This is gonna be . . .” She shrugged, then sauntered away. “Great! It’s gonna be just fucking great!” Her voice echoed from down the hall as she headed toward her room.

Elise felt the corners of her mouth twitch into a nervous grin.

It was going to be . . . something, all right.

M
aya’s four-year-old son, Will, was lying on his belly on the floor under the Christmas tree, coloring, as Elise peeked into the den after washing and putting away the dinner dishes. Gray evening light pressed into the corners of the room, and the boy looked cozy and sleepy in his footed pj’s, his legs bent upward behind him, lazily kicking the bottom branches of the tree. A soft
clink
sounded with every kick as two ornaments butted against one another.

Nearby, seven-year-old Molly played with Elise’s granny’s porcelain Nativity set as if the pieces were dolls in a dollhouse. Her tiny, lispy voice singsonged as she moved baby Jesus up onto the thatched roof of the barn, a cow sitting sentry by his side.

Elise smiled. They were good kids. Well behaved. It broke Elise’s heart to think of their upbringing being anything like their mom’s, filled with difficulty and heartbreak. But she supposed it probably was. After all that had happened, it was impossible to pretend that things were good between Maya and Bradley. Not that marital problems couldn’t be fixed. But there were marital problems, and there were Maya and Bradley, tempestuous as the day was long, beginning the moment they met. Rather than “love at first sight” it seemed to be “distrust at first sight” with the two of them. Elise wasn’t sure if she even knew the full extent of what had happened between them, only that it had been big and shattering and had somehow involved Claire.

Of all the unanticipated things that had happened over the past two days, Elise was most surprised to see Bradley standing in her kitchen now. She’d expected Maya, of course, and even the kids, but it was rare that the whole family traveled together. Bradley usually had “business” somewhere. What “business” meant for Bradley depended on whom you asked. And you didn’t want to ask Claire.

The family had been too tired from travel to do much talking during dinner. Claire had eaten in silence and then ducked back to her room, Julia and Eli had made small talk, then bundled up and taken a walk to the creek, coming back after everyone had gotten up from the table and slipping into their room silently. Bradley had taken his laptop to the den, and Maya had dumped the kids immediately in the bathtub. Elise had heard them singing and playing while she’d cleared the table.

Which left her the chance for only the most minimal chat with her middle daughter.

How was the flight?

Okay, I suppose. Bradley slept, so it was just me and the kids.
Hint of bitterness there.

Been a long time since you were down this way. Bet a lot’s changed.

Mmm—yeah, I barely recognized the strip.

We got a Target.

I saw that.

There was nodding of heads, and Maya drank her mug of wine in two long gulps. Elise had stared at her daughter’s feet, wondering how someone could travel all day in five-inch heels, and more important, why one would do such a thing.

Though she supposed she knew why. Maya’s life would always be about trying too hard. To be beautiful. To be poised. To be thin. To be smart. To be . . . everything Bradley wanted. Why someone would want to try so hard to please such a man was beyond Elise, but she supposed nobody could make sense of how and who they loved. Love just happened, even when it was bad for you. If anyone could understand that, it was Elise.

Everyone but the kids seemed to be turning in early. Nobody was in the kitchen, and the back of the house was still silent. Elise pulled her coat off the hook by the back door and stuffed her feet into the rubber boots she left there year-round, then slipped out through the sunporch. She needed something to do. Something to take the edge off her worries. Something to make the memory of what had happened with Robert go away.

The frozen grass crunched under her shoes as she headed for the little garden shed behind the honeysuckle bushes. In years past, the shed was home to powders and sprays, pesticides and plant food and trowels and hoes and muddied gloves, and its door was constantly open. Seemed like, especially during the summers, Elise was always in the shed, fumbling around for the tool she needed or the right spray or a bucket or watering can. But, like everything else on the farm, in recent years she’d just gotten too tired for the garden, and had barely been inside the shed, much less had a yearning to restock it.

She pushed the door open and, by feel, poured three big scoops from the birdseed barrel into a bucket. She couldn’t do anything about the chickens, but she could at the very least feed the wild birds. A walk with a purpose just might do the trick to ease her mind.

She decided to go to the tree line on the north side of the pasture first. Plenty of birdhouses and feeders out there, from back when Robert and the girls went through their woodworking phase. It had been years since she’d checked on those houses, which the girls had nailed, crooked and loose, to the trunks of the trees. Elise wondered if they were even still there, or if time, weather, and the squirrels had destroyed them by now.

Robert had always been good with his hands. Could fix anything, but also had a gentle touch, almost like an artist’s. It was one of the things that had attracted her to him. In her mind’s eye, she could still see the cowlicked young man standing sheepishly before her, holding out an oiled jewelry box.

Beautiful box for the beautifullest girl in school,
he’d said.

“Beautifullest” isn’t a word,
she’d replied with a giggle, pressing her toes into the ground to make the wooden swing she was sitting on stop moving.

They oughta invent it, though,
he’d said.
Just for you
.

He’d hand-carved that box. Etched an intricate little hummingbird right into the top of it, surrounded by vines and roses and tiny hearts. It looked as if it had taken hours. Hours that he could have spent working on his father’s farm or on his forward pass or on his car. But he’d used that time making a box for her. That was probably the moment that Elise first realized that he really did love her. It was the moment she realized it would be safe to marry Robert Yancey.

The memory nearly buckled her legs right in the middle of the old pasture, and she had to stop and put down the bucket of seed, lean over with her hands on her knees.

“Dear God,” she moaned, puffs of steam circling her face with each ragged breath. “Dear God, he’s really gone.” And this time her knees did buckle, as the image of his face filled her mind. The cute boy with the dimples; the red-faced, hard man who called her useless and berated her and never once remembered a Mother’s Day; the betrayed man, dead in his recliner at age sixty-seven. It seemed as if they could not possibly all be the same person. Who had he really been? And how did she not know?

She slumped back onto her bottom in the cold grass and gulped as much air as she could squeeze into her lungs. Still, it felt like only teaspoonfuls. The sky swam, gray and burdened with coming snow, and she was sure she saw a birdhouse nailed to a tree just about ten feet in front of her, but damned if she could take a single step toward it . . . or even push herself back up onto her feet.

Maybe it would be better to just freeze here. Maybe that would be easier. After all these years of stoically withstanding that which was so hard, maybe she could just, for once, go with the path of least resistance. Die in the fields, as her own daddy had done.

“Mom?” she heard distantly, but she was still too busy trying to steady her breathing to process exactly where it was coming from. She thought there were maybe some footsteps approaching along with the voice, but in her mind she wasn’t sure if they were human footsteps or maybe the footsteps of Lucifer, Uncle Ed’s nasty old bull that had scared her so as a child. Wait, no. It couldn’t be Lucifer. They’d butchered him decades ago. They’d eaten him, Elise feeling halfway afraid to ingest his meat, for fear it would make her mean, too.
Think, Elise, think. You’re really losing it now.

Then she heard the voice again. “Mom?” And this time it made sense to her—the voice of her middle child, Maya.

With great effort, Elise pushed herself back up to standing. Still the world spun, but at least she could give the impression of having things under control.

Maya caught up to her, running clunkily through the pasture in her high-heeled boots.

“Mom! You okay? Did you fall?”

Elise nodded wearily. “Fine. I was just . . .” She trailed off, unsure how to finish the sentence. Distantly, she felt cold, and she wasn’t sure if the words would form even if she willed them to. She took a deep breath, squeezed her eyes shut. “Just feeding the birds,” she finally managed.

Maya squinted at the seed bucket at Elise’s feet. “At night? On the ground?”

And the question was so ridiculous that things began to snap back into place for Elise. Come back to reality. The sky slowed and then stopped tilting, her lungs opened, her thoughts cleared. She waved her hand dismissively toward the ground. “Old hoof divot,” she said. “I thought maybe I’d rolled my ankle in it, but I’m fine.” She held one foot up and rotated it for proof.

Maya eyed her, unconvinced. Elise tried a tight laugh.

“Goodness, you girls are all watching me way too closely. It’s your father who died, not me.” Instantly, she felt guilty for saying it, but Maya looked unfazed. Elise picked up the bucket and tromped toward the tree line, Maya tripping after her in those ridiculous boots and a creamy white ski jacket. “Go back to the house. You’re going to get that jacket dirty.”

“It’s last year’s anyway,” Maya responded, her breathing labored as she tried to keep up with her mother’s stride. “It’s the boots that are a problem. Why did I wear heels to the farm?”

“I was wondering the same thing. Really, you can go back now. I’m just going to see if any of your old feeders are still here. Give the birds some seed.”

Maya’s hand grazed Elise’s arm lightly. “No, I want to spend time with you, Mom. Make sure you’re okay. You are okay, right? You didn’t look okay back there.”

Elise stopped, put down the bucket again. “Well, of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Maya rolled her eyes. “You found him.
After
. He couldn’t have looked good.”

Elise’s heart threatened to skip a beat again. If only Maya knew the truth. But she pushed the thought away. What was done was done and there was no need to upset everyone. “He looked like himself,” she said. “It wasn’t gruesome, if that’s what you’re worried about. He might as well have been watching one of those silly college football games on TV. In fact, he had been, so that’s exactly what it looked like.” She picked up the bucket again and strode to the first feeder, filling it with fistfuls of seed.

“But he wasn’t watching football, Mom. He was dead. Dead is dead. He couldn’t have looked good.”

“He looked . . .”
shocked, angry
, “peaceful.”

Maya huffed impatiently, as if she was displeased at Elise’s lack of proper grief. “You were married to the man for forty-seven years. You found him dead in his recliner. That can’t have been the most peaceful experience of your life.”

Elise whirled around, doing her best to look steady. In her mind she begged her daughter to stop talking about this. To stop making her see Robert’s dead face behind her closed eyelids. To stop reminding her of that night, of what really happened. She pasted on a smile. “Maya. He’s gone. It’s okay. We were prepared to one day say good-bye. Nothing lasts forever. You grew up on a farm. You know this. Things die.”

Maya’s shoulders slumped. “He wasn’t a sick goose, for God’s sake.”

“I know that. You think I don’t know that?” Elise ducked under a low-lying branch and found the second feeder. It was missing the pegs for the birds to stand on, so she just scattered some seed on the ground underneath instead, the seed rattling as it hit the layer of dead leaves below the tree. “I know you and your sisters are worried. But I’m fine. Really, I am. You make a life with someone, you prepare for this day. You’ll see. Someday you and Bradley will be old and you’ll start to prepare yourself for the possibility of his death.” She tapped her finger on her temple. “Mentally.”

Maya made a short snorting sound. “If we make it that long,” she mumbled. “Which is doubtful.”

Together, they wandered along the tree line, Elise peering into the thicket for the third feeder, which seemed to be gone. She felt better, almost as if she’d talked herself into feeling better by assuring Maya that she was much finer than she really was. The shaking in her knees was gone, and her lungs seemed to have opened up. She let her body go on outdoor autopilot, the tip of her nose numb from the wind, her hands red and chapped and gritty from running them through the seed, the crow’s-feet at her temples collecting water from her eyes. This was what she knew best. As long as she could still do this, still work the farm as best she could, maybe she would be okay after all.

“Are there still problems?” she finally asked, glad for the change of subject.

Maya shrugged. Her pace was uneven; they were too near the creek and the heels of her boots kept sinking into the softer ground. Ruining them, surely. “I honestly just . . . I don’t know. It’s complicated.”

“I was surprised to see him here.”

“He refused to stay home alone with the kids. That’s his new thing. There it is.” Maya pointed to an old oak set a few trees back into the woods. Stuck to the side of it was the third feeder, looking as good as new. They walked over and began filling it, both of them taking turns with the fistfuls of seed. “I made this one,” Maya said. “Dad yelled at me for wasting nails.” She gave another of those sardonic snort-laughs, and Elise wondered if this, too, was part of Maya’s Chicago Perfection Persona—the guttural, dysthymic chuckle. “He could be such an asshole. Is it a sin to say that?”

Elise blinked. “Your father? Or Bradley?”

And this time Maya really did laugh out loud, the laugh Elise remembered from her childhood—not that snorty laugh that sounded as if she were poking fun at a servant. “Both, I suppose.”

There were just a few handfuls of seed left in the bucket now. They took turns sprinkling it along the ground, until finally the bucket was empty.