The Sisters (27 page)

At least this way she could come up once in a while and hold the bracelet and remember, and years from now, when she was eighteen, she could come take it back for good, even wear it again, and nobody could tell her what to do. If her Captain Stevens could survive more than six years in a prison camp in Vietnam, she could wait to have back her token of him. And inside her mind, she wouldn’t have to wait at all. She could think about him as much as she liked, think how—even if she knew it wasn’t true—he might be her father, how she would run across the front yard to him and jump in his strong arms, how he would swing her around and then gently set her on her feet again. Together, they would walk hand in hand to the kitchen, where Mother would turn and laugh in surprise and kiss Captain Stevens and hold out one arm to each of them to gather them to her in a hug.

But why couldn’t he be her father? Things like that happened in books and movies all the time—people getting lost from each other and finding their way back again. Maybe Captain Stevens had changed his name and so Mother wouldn’t realize who he was until she saw him on the news.

It was Lynn’s fault Grace thought about these things, thought about them until she was sick to her stomach. Grace was only four or five when she started looking into men’s faces, trying to see something of her own. That was a year or so after Lynn had come home from the hospital. One night, while Mother was working the late shift, Lynn was lying in her bunk, forcing Grace to listen to her plan to write a letter to her father—their father, Grace believed—a letter saying how much she missed him. Lynn said she would send the letter as soon as she could find out his address. “Then,” her sister said, “he’ll come and take me away.”

Grace couldn’t remember now why she’d said it—perhaps Mother had scolded her for something earlier that day—but she’d said to Lynn, “Maybe I’ll go with Daddy, too.”

“He’s not
your
father,” Lynn said. “He told me. He’s
mine
. No one else’s.” Then Lynn had hissed at her through the dark, just like a snake, “
You’re
the reason Mother sent him away. Daddy told me. Mother thought she was going to get the other man to marry her, but he ran off. He didn’t want you.
Nobody
wanted you.”

Grace looked down once more at Captain Stevens’s name. “I love you,” she said, then took off the bracelet, kissed it, and slipped it into the gap, tucking it just under the lip of the plank, resting it on the pillowy insulation.

She’d shoved the box so far under where the ceiling slanted, she couldn’t get behind it to push it back, and it was too heavy to pull, so she would have to empty it, at least partway. The box wasn’t taped shut, just the flaps folded over each other, and when she pulled them loose, a moth flew toward her face. On top, there was a green button-up sweater, like the kind Grandpa wore around the house in the winter, sprinkled over with holes where moths had been munching. She laid the sweater on the floor and pulled out five or six McCall’s patterns, obviously used but the pieces refolded neatly inside the envelopes. The pictures on the envelopes showed aprons trimmed with ruffles and lace, and soft, drapey dresses with swishy skirts, matched with white gloves and hats touched up with netting and flowers. Except for women in the movies she watched with Grandma, and the ones interviewed at the Kentucky Derby about their grand hats made specially for the day, the only women Grace had seen wearing hats and gloves were a couple of the very old ladies at church, but instead of elegant high heels, those ladies wore what Lynn had mocked as “sensible shoes.” Next, Grace pulled out a book all about making slipcovers, and then another about curtains, and underneath these, stacks of
Good Housekeeping
and
The Ladies’ Home Journal
from the 1940s. Under the magazines lay what Grace at first thought was a record album cover. On the front, six- or seven-year-old Shirley Temple, in a short yellow dress, seemed to be trying to sneak out from some giant’s scrapbook. An open jar of paste, half as tall as Shirley, sat in front of the book, as if the unseen giant might at any moment pluck the brush from the jar, snatch up Shirley, and paste her inside forever.

“Grace!” Down below, Grandma rapped on the frame of the open attic door. “You been up there too long now. Come on down. The hot chocolate’s ready.”

“Just a second, Grandma.” Grace pushed the nearly empty box over the gap in the floor and rushed to put everything back inside except the scrapbook. Lucky she knew just where she’d stored her old coloring books, so she was able to grab several, plus the candy tin full of crayons, and stack them up on the scrapbook before she started down the steps. Grandma was waiting just outside the door.

“What’s that you got?” Grandma tapped at Shirley Temple, who, Grace now saw, was also on the back in the same picture.

“This was underneath the coloring books,” Grace said. “Is it okay if I look at it?”

“That’s your aunt Alma’s. She was crazy for Shirley Temple. So was your mother.”

Grace knew this. Among the things Mother treasured, which neither she nor Lynn had ever been allowed to touch, was a cobalt blue juice glass, a ghostly image of Shirley Temple’s head smiling out the front. For Mother’s sake, Grace had tried to like Shirley’s movies—and she did like it when Shirley danced with Bill Robinson or Buddy Ebsen—but it made her mad that all lost or orphaned Shirley ever had to do to get a father was to want one. That had never worked for Grace.

Grandma put a firm hand on Grace’s shoulder, steering her toward the kitchen. “Come on in and lay it on the table so we can see it.”

The kitchen was warm and smelled thickly and wonderfully of the hash Grandma was making for them with the last of Sunday’s roast beef. It was Grace’s second-favorite meal, after the roast beef itself. Tiny whiffs of hot chocolate tucked themselves between the waves of the meat, carrots, and potatoes.

Grandma set two brimming mugs on the table, three marshmallows melting in each, and pulled two chairs close together. Grace smiled when Grandma turned the scrapbook on its front so she could open it from the back. Nobody in the family besides them looked at books that way.

“That’s a queer thing to paste in a book.” Grandma ran her fingers across tinted drawings, cut from old magazines, of living rooms decorated in soft pinks and yellows. On the next page there were funny ads for appliances—one showing a couple in evening dress, a Persian cat at their feet, looking inside a refrigerator held open by a man in a tuxedo, the caption declaring “Plus-Powered Kelvinator Cuts the Cost of Better Living.” Another ad proclaimed the “Streamlined Beauty” of a boxy stove.

Grandma turned another page. “Well, look a’ here,” she said. “That’s a picture of the ’37 flood. Probably took that from an airplane, or maybe the fire tower.” The ink was faded on the dingy newsprint, making the scene look foggy, more eerie. Right in the center, a church steeple pointed like a rocket at the stormy sky, while, for what must have been miles and miles, houses that looked a lot like theirs seemed to float on the rims of their pitched roofs.

“Your aunt Alma must have started keeping this when she was seven or eight, I guess,” Grandma said. “I was carrying your mother when the flood came.”

Back and back they paged. Aunt Alma, younger then than Grace was now, had pasted in a picture of men in police uniforms and hard hats sorting through hills of canned food to pack in boxes for relief stations; one of a child squalling in his mother’s arms while a dark-haired doctor gave him a shot for typhoid; another of people elbow-to-elbow among cots at a shelter; and several more of people being helped into rowboats in the flooded streets.

“See that?” Grandma said. “Me and your aunt Alma rode in one of those. Your grandpa went off early in the morning to help build them.”

Grace pointed to one picture that showed a woman and a little girl, each holding a frightened cat. She thought of her own cats, Smokey and BoBo, and tried to think of how she would manage to save them in a flood. She’d worried all night about them out in the snow, hoping they’d found a warm place before it got too deep, maybe through the hole Grandpa had cut for them in the shed door; Grandma wouldn’t allow them in the house.

Now Grandma laid her finger on the picture, almost like she wanted to stroke and soothe one of those terrified cats. “There was this lady on our street,” she said. “Mrs. Mialback, I think her name was. She was all set to get into our boat with her little white dog, but—” Grandma turned over the page quickly. “But—some woman—she made a fuss about the dog. Wouldn’t let it in the boat.” Grandma pressed at the deep V lines between her eyes. “I never did know if she got out okay—I mean Mrs. Mialback. She wasn’t there when your grandpa moved us back in the house, and none of the ones that did come back to the street seemed to know what became of her. Used to be a nice place she had, but nobody ever came to fix it. They tore it down the summer Grandpa bought this house.”

“I wouldn’t ever leave Smokey and BoBo to drown,” Grace said.

Grandma shook her head but didn’t answer. She turned the pages back to the flood pictures they’d already looked at. “Won’t be a flood here,” she said. “When I was laying in the bed waiting on your mother to be born, I made up my mind I wasn’t going to let your grandpa rest until he’d moved us to higher ground. And I didn’t.”

Grandma lifted the open scrapbook to catch the light coming through the window in the back door. Something slipped out, like a long postcard, dropping on its edge to the table and then onto the floor. Grace pushed out her chair and got on the floor to get it.

“Grace, get up,” Grandma said. “What are you doing down there?”

Grace picked up the card, yellowed around the edges. It wasn’t a postcard. The back had some writing across it, the name of a photographic studio in Louisville, and a date, 1924. On the front were two identical-looking pictures of a pretty dark-haired girl who looked about Lynn’s age—fifteen or sixteen. She wore an old-fashioned white lace dress and sat, unsmiling, on a swing.

Grace clutched the card and pushed up from the floor. “Why would somebody want two of the same picture? Is this like our school pictures, where you get a sheet and cut them all apart?”

“What is that?” Grandma reached out her hand.

“It fell out.” Grace held the card for her grandmother to see. “Says it was made in Louisville. She’s pretty.”

Grandma closed her eyes, her face white, and for a moment Grace thought Grandma was going to faint. “Mabel,” she said.

“Mabel?”

“My sister.”

“You have a sister? Where is she?”

Grandma’s white face became red and her eyes opened, fierce. “Clear away all this foolishness.” She stood up, the card still in her hand, looking off somewhere beyond Grace. “Take this book back up to where you found it. I’ve got to get the table set for supper.”

It was only 2:30. “There’s just us tonight, Grandma.”

“If the snow clears, we might have a houseful!”

Grace tried to move, but she was as frozen as if she’d been buried under the drifted snow. It would be days before the plows would get to them.

“Grace, I told you to put this up. Now!”

Grace grabbed the scrapbook from the table and ran through the house and up the attic stairs, taking no care to watch her step. She dropped the scrapbook onto the floor and flung herself on the old sofa, sobbing. The cushion smelled of mice, and she imagined her tears seeping through the upholstery, dampening their soft gray heads. The mice could suck the tear-soaked stuffing, quenching their thirst without having to suffer the cold. But no, tears were salt, and could only make the mice more thirsty.

When she could cry no more, she sat up on the sofa. The scrapbook lay open and twisted on the floor, the spine broken. She knelt beside it, doing her best to tuck the brittle pages back into place. When she was finished, she hugged the book to her chest and returned to the box that now sat under the slant of the ceiling. She shivered with cold and thought longingly of the hot chocolate left behind on the table, the marshmallows melted into foam, probably too cool to warm her now. Remembering the green sweater, she pulled it out of the box and wrapped herself in it. She would stay here awhile, warming herself in Grandpa’s moth-eaten wool, slipping her fingers into the gap of the floor, with Capt. Mark P. Stevens just beyond her reach, waiting until Grandma remembered her and called her back down.

F
IFTEEN

Hanging Rock Road

October 1978

Siler, Kentucky

LYNN

“I
THINK I RECOGNIZE THAT
STORE
!” Lynn pointed out the window as the car breezed past a deep-porched frame house with a weathered, hand-painted sign identifying it as Odell Anderson’s Grocery.

Derek glanced up in the rearview mirror to get a look at it. “How much further, you think?” he asked. “I’m getting low on gas and it doesn’t look to me like we’re going to find any stations out here.” He had wanted to stop for gas an hour ago, near Newman, but Lynn wouldn’t let him. It would be just her luck, she told him, that they’d pull into the Shell station and there Mother would be, gassing up the Nova. Lynn had scrunched down as the expressway carried them past town, afraid that someone in a passing car would recognize her and word would get back to Mother.