What Happened to My Sister: A Novel (26 page)

Off in the distance I hear a man’s voice announcing
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are closing in five minutes. Please move to the front of the store
. I wish I’d eaten something earlier, my stomach’s growling loud. I missed getting to the trash bin out back before the garbagemen came and I already ate the “goody bag” Miss Chaplin sent home with me yesterday, dangit. I really don’t want tonight to be a clay night.

There’s a kid, Kenny’s his name. He lives with his grandpa one floor down and two doors over from us at the Loveless. Their room is the same as ours but every inch of their window is covered
with stickers so it’s more like a wall than a window. Kenny eats pieces of a clay pot broke into tiny bites. He said it gets warm when it’s inside your belly and when it’s warm it grows back into Silly Putty clay. Then you’re not hungry because your stomach’s filled up completely. Kenny said you feel fuller than at Thanksgiving.

So the other day I did just like he said. I worked up a gob of spit and held it in my mouth so it was waiting for the hard clay. Before biting down I used my tongue to swish it around and give it a
spit bath
. That’s what Kenny called it:
a spit bath
. He said you do that inside your mouth and after you been rolling it around you feel better about biting down on it.
Pretend it’s chocolate M&M’s
, he said. It wasn’t so bad but it wasn’t M&M’s either.

It must be my lucky day because I get back to the Loveless and Momma’s not home yet. Phee-you! I close the curtain and quickly get ready for bed in case she comes in. Here’s another way I’m lucky: taking off my shorts I find five packets of ketchup in my pockets. After squeezing every drop of ketchup from them I crawl into my bed. I wish I had borrowed one of the books Cricket offered me but I couldn’t because what if Momma saw. I try squeezing my eyes shut to remind them it’s time to go to sleep but I’m not tired. Then I remember I hid the bookmark flashlight under my mattress. I pinch it and the room turns silver. I love this dang thing. I pretend it’s a beam from a spaceship and I sweep a ray of light across the floor. That’s when I see it.

The light flashes on something sparkly from behind a square metal air vent about a foot off the floor. Me and Emma used to love this baby book about a family of mice who lived in the tunnels behind an air vent in the wall that looks just like this one. I cain’t believe I never noticed it there before. I crouch down in front of it and pinch the bookmark and what do I see but Momma’s travel case! So
that’s
where she hid it. My fingers are small enough for me to slide the edge of my fingernail into the grooves of the screws
holding the grate in place. I’ve got to be fast about it—Momma could come in any minute. My heart’s thumping so hard I can feel it in my ears. In my head I keep hearing this old bluegrass song Mr. Wilson used to hum while he whittled: “Time’s A-Wastin’.”

Those are the only words of the song he’d sing out loud—the rest he’d just whistle or hum. Those words, though—they’re bouncing from ear to ear across my brain like a pinball machine while I turn the last screw.

Time’s a-wastin’
.

I lift the metal grate away so I can pull the travel case out. It’s real dusty and I almost sneeze but I hold my breath and count to ten like Mr. White told me you could do if you need to keep from sneezing. Like in church.

Time’s a-wastin’
.

I need to make haste.
Hurry up
, I tell myself. Funny how you stop being hungry when you’re in a hurry and you’re scared you might get caught doing something you shouldn’t be doing.

Momma probably figured she didn’t need to lock the case if she hid it real good from me. Inside it smells like Momma from when she used to wear perfume. There’s a clunky wood bracelet I never saw before. A small packet of papers rubber-banded together—letters maybe—but I don’t have time to read them. A silver flip-top Zippo lighter. A neatly folded
diploma
that shows Momma graduated from high school. A dirty old braided friendship bracelet made of rope. Some ticket stubs.

Time’s a-wastin’
.

Now I can practically
taste
my heartbeat, it’s going so fast. I’ve got to hurry up but it’s hard since I don’t know what I’m looking for. This might be my only chance so I’ve got to make sure I check ever-thing. Good thing I’ve got
eagle-eye vision
like Mr. Wilson said because anyone else might’ve missed seeing the paper-thin tear in the fabric lining. I get up real close and blow some air at it and there it is. The thing I didn’t even know I was looking for.

You know how sometimes you could swear you were someplace you never could have been just because you’ve seen it in pictures so many times? Or how you feel like you know someone you’ve only just heard a lot about? It’s like your brain playing a trick on itself. Well, when I shimmy the small square of a photograph up from its hiding place, I get that feeling. Only this time I know it ain’t my mind horsing around. I don’t know how to explain it so I’ll just say that I am one hundred percent sure I am holding in my hand a real-life picture of my baby sister. Emma. It’s her! With her face all scrunched up like someone pinched her leg and she’s about to let out a holler. After all this time being told she wasn’t real. After a town full of people told me I was crazy. After swearing to Momma I would never say her name again. After promising the state lady I didn’t ever have a baby sister. After all that I now have real live
proof
!

I thought it would feel different, finding out she existed, proving I’m not crazy. I figured I’d want to show someone or shout it from the rooftops or just say
Ha! Told you so!
to the kids at school who called me Scary Carrie but turns out I don’t care about any of that right now. All I care about is seeing her little face again. I smile looking at it and even though I’m so full of happy I might could burst, part of me wants to cry.

Emma
. I’m holding Emma! Yeah, it’s only a small picture of her not the real thing but that doesn’t matter. It’s her! Emma. Emma Emma Emma.

I forgot babies don’t have teeth—the picture shows tiny pale ridges lining her gums, holding the places where teeth will grow in. I can practically feel her soft baby blond peach fuzz when I trace her head with my finger. Studying the picture up close I see that she looks a little different from how I remember, and then I see why. At first I thought it was a shadow cast on the side of her face by the person taking the picture (Momma?) but then I realize it’s a birthmark. Which is weird because it’s just like Mr. White’s.
His was on his forehead, though, and Emma’s is on her cheek, but still. It’s weird.

My sister.

Emma!

Then pow! Sitting here cross-legged in front of the open vent, I have another flash shoot across my brain and it’s what I’ve seen before but with a little more added in this time. A pudgy baby arm reaching out to me from over a grown-up shoulder then—this is the new part—then I see two big hands shaking shaking shaking something like you’d shake a snow globe.
Pow!
The something being shook? For a second I think it’s a doll but then it dawns on me it wasn’t a doll at all. It was a real live baby! And I don’t know how it took me so long to catch on that the pudgy little arm reaching out? It was Emma’s. The flashes have been trying to tell me something only I haven’t been paying them any mind! Shoot, I’ll have to think on this later.

Time’s a-wastin’
.

I hurry to slide the picture under my mattress, taking care not to bend or fold it, then I push the fabric lining up against the inside wall of the travel case and it stays put. Momma won’t notice the picture missing. Not for a while I bet, and by then I’ll have figured out what to do. The braided bracelet was halfway out from under the packet of papers when I opened the case but maybe Momma doesn’t remember leaving it that way so even though it was her that did it she’ll think it’s me. I better straighten it up the way she’d want it straightened. But then maybe it’s a trap. Maybe she’s left the bracelet like that on purpose because she knows I would set it right and then I’d be caught.
What should I do what should I do what should I do?
What would Mrs. Ford do?

Time’s a-wastin’
.

Mrs. Ford would hurry up, that’s what she’d do.

I leave ever-thing exactly like I found it, click the case closed, and slide it back into the tunnel, all without making a sound. The
metal grate fits back into place, and just as I’m turning the second screw tight I hear Momma at the door. I scramble up into my bed and squeeze my eyes closed so she’ll think I’m asleep.

With the sound of Momma bumping into things and cursing under her breath in the background, I let my mind go on a field trip. Sometimes, like tonight, if I’m real hungry or if I cain’t easily fall asleep, I close my eyes and take a ghost tour of our old house in Toast and how we looked in it.

What worries me, though, is I’m starting to forget what Daddy looked like. I go real slow, moving from room to room, making sure to notice ever-thing that crosses in front of my ghost self so I can hold on to the memory of it. In my mind’s eye I can see the teensiest details but lately, no matter how hard I try, I cain’t picture Daddy’s face. I remember the last time I laid eyes on him, but that’s exactly what I don’t want in my head.

He looked smaller than usual, laying facedown on the ground just inside the front door the way he was. I remember thinking he was doing a magic trick, because a flower of deep dark red bloomed out from a tiny circle near the middle of his back, below his left shoulder, right in front of my own eyes. The petals, bright red against the white businessman shirt he was wearing, blossoming wide open while I stood there looking down at him. Momma got real cross and said for me to go to my room when I came in and asked where Emma was—I can hear her voice still.

“God dammit, go!”

From the top of the stairs I watched Momma huffing and puffing trying to move Daddy and I remember wondering why he didn’t wake up with all her pulling when Momma finally gave up. I was still there when she squatted down beside him, put her head in her hands, and started to cry. Through her sobbing she was talking to him but he kept on just laying there.

She didn’t seem to care that Daddy was sleeping through all her questions and tears. I tiptoed away to go find Emma.

Later that night Momma, all red-eyed and puffy, called me to her room and told me to sit next to her on the bed because she had
something important
to tell me.

“I don’t believe in sugarcoating things so here it is,” she said, tapping ash into the overflowing saucer she used for an ashtray. “Your father’s dead. I was pinning clothes on the line out back when a man banged on the door—”

“Daddy’s dead?” I remember turning the words over in my head, not really understanding what they meant at first.

“Listen to me,” she said. “I’m trying to tell you. A man banged on the door hollering for him and then I heard a pop and came running in time to see Selma Blake’s husband walking back to his truck with a rifle, cool as a cucumber now that he went and killed the man who’d been sleeping with his wife.”

I cried so hard I couldn’t hear the rest.

It was a small house, our house in Toast. The kitchen floor was always clean as a whistle—Momma liked ever-thing
clean as a whistle
back then—and I never knew how hard it was to keep it that way until Momma stopped coming out of her room and left it all up to me. I remember listening to Momma crying, thinking for a time that even the
house
was sad Daddy died because Momma sobbed so hard in her bed it made the walls shake. I spent lots of time wishing and praying to God that she’d come out of her room and that Daddy would come back to life and take us all out for ice cream.

My ghost tour takes me past the front hall table with the dish that Daddy tossed his keys into whenever he came through the door. They’d clink into it, covering up the three blue
Ks
. When Momma found it at a yard sale she said
well, I’ll be! Isn’t this just the funniest thing
to the lady selling it who told her it wasn’t what she thought—the KKK was her sister’s initials or something. But how she knew what Momma was thinking and why Momma said it was funny is still a mystery to me. Momma gave it to Daddy for Christmas
that year, saying
I didn’t know y’all had a gift shop—I may have to come to one of those meetings y’all’re always holding
, and he laughed and said
now that I’d like to see
.

That time is fuzzy in some parts, clear in others. Like I can see myself mixing flour and water to make flapjacks or hunting through emptying kitchen cabinets for any kind of crumb to keep me and Emma and Momma alive. Momma needed to eat just like ever-body else. I’d leave whatever food I made or could find outside her bedroom door. I can even see the pile of dirty laundry that started forming at the bottom of the stairs when Momma was hiding in her room. That pile was super-duper cool—I would jump onto it from the third stair, pretending it was a trampoline in the circus.

After Momma came out of her room and started moving around in the world again, she’d come into my room to wake me up in the middle of the night. I never got used to it. It scared me silly ever-time. The worst part was not knowing when it’d be. I’d go up to sleep not knowing if it would end up being one of the nights she’d burst in. It always turned out that just when I’d forget to worry about being woken up in the pitch dark, I’d feel a shove and then
click!
the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling would switch on and Momma’d be standing over me, unsteady on her feet, swaying like the black folks in church, popping me quizzes I didn’t have answers for.

“Tell me how it happened,” she said that first time. Her voice was a day voice that seemed louder because she was using it at night.

I remember rubbing my eyes and squinting against the brightness. I thought at first she was sleepwalking. She was making no sense at all. She wore eye makeup back then—I remember because it’d be all smeared from her crying.