What Happened to My Sister: A Novel (19 page)

If a great big giant came in and threw a heavy winter blanket
over Mother, Cricket, and me, you’d have about the same hollow silence that chokes us right now.

“What’s August eighth?” Carrie practically whispers the question.

I stand frozen mid-movement, unable to speak while a familiar wrenching ache sinks so deep it’s in my marrow.

“August eighth is the day my sister died,” Cricket says in a quiet voice, watching me carefully.

How could I have believed a watch I know to be broken? What kind of a mother doesn’t realize it’s the anniversary of her daughter’s death?

“It was three years ago today she left us, bless her heart,” Mother is saying, though her voice now sounds far away.

I gulp for air and somehow make it from the refrigerator to a chair at the kitchen table, though I can’t feel my legs moving.

“I thought today was the sixth,” I whisper to nobody. “All day long I’ve thought today was the sixth. My watch says it’s the sixth.”

“I know, honey,” Mother says, reaching across the table to gently stroke my hand, which somehow feels like it belongs to someone else. I look down at it. Maybe it’s the hand of a mother who knows the correct date. A mother who knows it’s the three-year anniversary of her firstborn child’s death.

Over by the sink, a worried Carrie wrings her hands and in a pleading voice says, “Y’all can call me something else. I never really liked my name anyway. I won’t ever use it again, I swear. We can name me something else and then you won’t be sad and I can come over again. I’m real good at remembering names so I won’t forget my new one, I swear. Please.”

Mother’s chair scrapes the floor when she pushes back from the table.

“Cricket, could you help your old grandma up from the chair please,” she says, figuring I’m in no shape to do it.

Faster, Dad! Push me faster!

This is just the sort of calamity I’ve tried to avoid. Being surprised by sadness is like getting sucker punched in the gut. It takes all the air out of you, and for a brief moment you think you just might die from the pain. In all my disaster preparedness I somehow overlooked the fact that we’re still recovering from a disaster of the worst kind.

I look up to see my mother enveloping little Carrie in a hug.

“Oh, honey pie, aren’t you just the sweetest thing,” she’s murmuring, stroking Carrie’s messy hair. “You have an exquisite name and we are being so rude talking about this whole coincidence in front of you like we are. Come sit down and have something to eat. Cricket, get the chips out of the cabinet, will you, honey? Now, Carrie. Tell me a little about yourself, sweetness. Where are your people from?”

I can’t crumble. Not now, at least. I’ve got to pull it together for Cricket. And Carrie. Oh, Jesus, Carrie.

I try to screw my face into a smile, but from Cricket’s frown I can see I’m not fooling anyone. Eddie. I’ll call Eddie. Just thinking about him right now makes me want to cry for some reason.

“I’ve got to take Carrie back,” I say. “I’m sure her mother’s worried sick.”

“Oh no she ain’t, I mean, she’s
not
,” Carrie says. “She’s not worried sick.”

“Okay, well, maybe a little while longer,” I say.

“You were about to say where you live, honey,” Mother says to Carrie.

They talk for I don’t know how long, and I’m grateful for it. While I am truly pleased to see Cricket’s coping better, part of me is a little shocked that she can so easily push aside her grief over her sister, pressing me like she is now, to take her and Carrie somewhere tomorrow (the mall? the library?) even. I make a show of considering it so I can buy a little more time with my thoughts.

Faster, faster, Dad!

Cricket would have loved those wheelchair joyrides Ed always took Caroline on during those last days but we curtailed her visits to the hospital because we thought it might be too scarring. We agreed she was too young to be hanging out with dying cancer patients all the time, even if her sister was one of them. We wanted
to protect her childhood
, such as it was. How were we to know it’d do far more harm to her by keeping her away? We didn’t know how adept Cricket was at putting on a happy face to keep us from worrying about her. We never said as much but I think we both figured we’d make up our lost time with her after … when … Oh, Jesus, we just thought we would make it all up to Cricket someday. How could we have known Cricket was silently suffering just as much as her sister, maybe even more?

Her teacher was the first to point it out. Cricket withdrew into herself and was no longer participating in class, which, up until her sister got sick, she had done on a regular basis. Ed and I sat in numb silence in those too-small chairs, Ed’s knees practically up at his chin, staring at Miss Jensen as she ticked off the changes she’d noticed in our daughter. I nodded yes when she referenced Cricket’s obsessive nail biting (“and then there’s the issue of her fingernails, but I’m sure you’re already working on that with her …”) and nearly lost it when I got home and noticed—for the first time—Cricket’s nubby nails chewed off below the quick, dried blood where she had bitten off her cuticles, ripping the skin from some fingers all the way up to the joint.

The truth was that neither of us had noticed anything amiss with Cricket. We were too focused on Caroline and chemo and bone marrow drives to see anything else. Miss Jensen asked about Cricket’s sleep, noting she often appeared exhausted at school, and sure enough, when we asked Cricket about it, she broke down and sobbed that she’d been having nightmares and hadn’t slept all
the way through the night in months. We’re her parents—how had we missed all that?

Looking across at my little girl showing Carrie a flashlight, chattering away, I see that the difference in her is astounding. She is a rare gem, this child of mine. I just wish someone other than her family knew it. Then it occurs to me.

Carrie knows it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Carrie

Ever-where you look there’s something interesting to look at. They got so many
things
it’d be hard to count even if someone offered to pay you a penny for every item you made note of. So many that if Miss Chaplin had to move from here to a tiny map dot in the mountains—Hendersonville maybe—it’d take her weeks just to pack it all up. Don’t even get me started on how much money she’d make if she decided to sell it all in a yard sale because she was turning the page by moving away. I’m telling you: there are a bazillion things under this one roof.

Miss Chaplin tells Cricket and Mrs. Ford that she’s
borrowing
me for a minute. She stands behind me and with her hands on my shoulders she guides me like a shopping cart into the front room with all the boy dolls.

“It’s taken me over three decades to gather all of this together,” Miss Chaplin says, standing now in the middle of the room. “We have the premier collection of Charles Chaplin memorabilia in the United States.”

I worry she thinks I’m staring on account of the way she looks. Her being so fat and all. She probably weighs a thousand pounds. I went to a county fair once and there was a booth where you could guess the weight of the person setting there and if you got it right you’d get a huge jar of gum balls and I guessed wrong but Tommy Bucksmith was close so he won the jar and he didn’t share one single gum ball with anybody. Not one. That was the fattest person I ever saw—the man at the guess-the-weight booth at the county fair. Until today. So I try to make her think I’m not thinking about her being fat by asking her questions I didn’t put any thought into.

“Where’d that one come from?” I point to a random doll that’s no different from a million others lined up alongside it and I make sure to look her in the eye because that’s what polite people do.

She looks as pleased as if I’d told her she won the Miss America pageant. Which, not to be mean or anything, she isn’t likely to do anytime soon.

“Well, someone has a good eye,” she says, putting strength behind the
some
part of the word
someone
. “That particular likeness is one of a limited edition put out by Madame Alexander on the occasion of what would have been Uncle Charlie’s one hundredth birthday.”

The skin on the back of her arm stretches into a wing when she reaches to bring it down from the shelf. She’s as careful with it as Momma was with that glass pitcher we had to part with back in Hendersonville.

“Look at this,” Miss Chaplin says, turning it over and holding the base up close for me to get a look. “See the numbers there? Read them out loud for me, honey, will you? My eyes aren’t as good as they once were.”

“There’s a number seventeen,” I say, squinting to make out the
tiny marks stamped into the wood, “then a line then the number two hundred and twelve.”

She nods like she’d known the answer and says, “That means there were two hundred and twelve dolls produced in total, and of that two hundred and twelve, this particular doll is number seventeen.”

The way she looks at me I know I’m supposed to say something about this fact but I don’t know—is this a good thing? Or is she kind of sorry she didn’t get the number one doll? Me, I’d gun for number one.

I settle for “wow” and that seems to suit her fine.

“Now take a look at this and tell me what you think,” she says, waddling across the room to a glass case I hadn’t noticed before and pointing to a china plate ringed in gold with Charles Chaplin’s face in the middle, hat and all. I try to imagine what a shock it’d be to the person eating, say, meat loaf off the plate handed to them, finishing it entirely and realizing the whole time they’d been eating on top of a fancy man’s head.

“Wow,” I say again because I’m too stupid to think of something different. Plus, she seems happy with just that one word so
why mess with success
, as my daddy used to say when Momma’d ask him why he never got the promotion he’d told us he was going for.

“ ‘Wow’ is right,” Miss Chaplin says.

She pulls a pretty gold necklace up from underneath her blouse and dangling from it is a tiny key she fits into the lock on the front of the case. “You may find this hard to believe, Miss Carrie, but see this gold line here? The one around the edge? That’s real eighteen-karat gold.”

“Really? It’s real gold?”

“Yes, ma’am,” she says. “And all the black in his hair and top hat? That’s a layer of real ebony. Do you know what ebony is?”

“No, ma’am,” I answer her while trying to keep my hands to
myself. I so badly want to trace the gold-circled edge. To see what real gold feels like.

“Ebony is a rare kind of wood,” she says, lifting the plate off its stand over the cups and saucers setting in front and out of the case. “Just think how difficult it must have been for the manufacturer to put these pieces together. The china, the wood, the gold. It boggles the mind. You can hold it if you like.”

Of course I want to know what this plate would feel like in my hands but then what if something happened and I dropped it? I’d never forgive myself ever and, worse than that, she wouldn’t forgive me either. So I shake my head and say, “I’m scared I’ll break it, ma’am. I’m pretty clumsy. Momma always says it too. Shouldn’t it be in a museum or something?”

“Don’t be silly, here you go,” she says, simple as pie, putting it in my hands like it was a deck of playing cards. “I trust you.”

Now I cain’t recall anyone ever saying those three words to me. Ever.

I trust you
.

“It’s heavier than it looks, isn’t it.” She smiles, knowing somehow that’s exactly the thought forming in my brain at that very second.

“Yes, ma’am. It’s two temperatures too,” I say, “the white china part is cool but the black is warm. Why’s it like that?”

“Well, you’d have to ask a physicist to get the answer to that,” she says, “but it has to do with the different textures. The different solids and this and that.

“Now, I know my granddaughter’s waiting on you, but let me show you one more thing before y’all go off and play,” Miss Chaplin says. “You’re probably bored to tears by now.”

“No, ma’am,” I say. “I’m not bored at all.”

It’s true. If you’d have asked me an hour ago if I’d care to know about a bunch of dolls and plates all covered with a man’s face and
hat I’d have said
no sirree
. But it ain’t as bad as you might think, learning about all this museum stuff.

I don’t tell her that me and Cricket weren’t going to play—that’s something babies do. She’s being so nice, calling me
sweetheart
, talking to me like I’m grown-up like her.

Miss Chaplin motions for me to come closer to get a look at a small iron statue of—you guessed it—Charles Chaplin, leaning on his cane in what looks like a small town. He’s facing an official-looking building, like a post office.

“
This
is a real crowd-pleaser,” she says, fanning her hand out to reveal something that don’t quite look to me like it’d please a crowd but what do I know. “We used to conduct tours here, and this was usually what the kids loved best. Watch.”

Miss Chaplin puts a penny in a slot at the base of Chaplin’s cane and presses a lever like a pump for a well of water and suddenly the statue moves. Chaplin leans forward into a bow, and when he does, his cane pushes the penny and it slides down a ridge to the building, whose doors magically open to take it in. A little iron dog moves alongside the penny like it’s chasing it and I wouldn’t be shocked if it started barking.

“It’s a bank!” Miss Chaplin says, watching my face be surprised. I never saw anything like this.

“See? Wait, the bank doors are a little slow to close back up. Shoot, I’ve been meaning to oil this for years.”

When they do close up ever-thing stands still again and if you were to walk into the room right now you’d think it was just a boring statue. You’d never know it had come to life like it just did only a few seconds ago. I’m not a baby anymore but if I were I’d ask her to do it again. That was really something.

The phone rings and Mrs. Ford hollers “I’ll get it” from another room.