What Happened to My Sister: A Novel (33 page)

“No sisters or brothers? Ah, here we go,” he says, looking up at something past the couch, then standing, “sweet tea for a sweet
little girl. Thank you, Miss Ruth. That looks like just what the doctor ordered. Here, let me take that from you.”

He’s reaching, then sitting at the edge of his folding chair, then holding a straw to my lips.

“There you go, a little hydration’ll do you a world of good,” he says. “When was the last meal you had, sugar?”

I’ve only been gone and on my own for one day but you’d think it was a year the way my mouth waters hearing him say the word
meal
. I guess he can tell how hungry I am because he says, “Been that long, has it? Miss Ruth? Excuse me a minute, Caroline. I’m going to see if we can’t rustle up some food for you. I’ll be right back.”

“Yeth, thir.”

I’m tired. I’m tired of twisting my brain into knots to think what to do. If I tell him Momma got mad and threw me out, if I tell him she hurt me, he’ll go over to arrest her and if he goes over to arrest her she’ll tell him I’m crazy and if she tells him I’m crazy he’ll have me sent away. But then I remember.

Emma.

“Hey, kiddo, I’m back,” Mr. Ford says, resting a tray of food on his lap. “How about a piece of cinnamon toast? That sound good?”

After eating catalogs and clay and ketchup packets in between the goody bags, I don’t need to tell you how I feel about buttered toast with cinnamon sugar sprinkled on it. Miss Chaplin even cut off the crusts.

“That’s it,” he says, holding the other triangle out for when I finish chewing this one. He smiles and says, “I guess you
were
hungry,” and I nod and try to smile back at him while I chew.

“While you’re working on that, there’s something you need to know, Caroline,” he says. I figure he’s about to tell me again how he’s not gonna let anyone hurt me. Or that I can tell him anything. The last thing I ever thought he’d say is:

“Honey, we know about Emma.”

I stop working on the toast in case maybe I heard him wrong.

“Now, I know you didn’t want anyone to find out, but Caroline, there are some things that shouldn’t be kept secret. And when you went missing Cricket and her mom and Miss Chaplin—well, they were worried sick. And they did the right thing calling me. Don’t go getting mad at Cricket, I forced it out of her. She didn’t want to betray your confidence but she also knew what we all now know: you’re in way over your head, baby girl. You need to let us help you. And in order to help you, I need to know where you’ve been and what happened that made you look like the losing end of a prizefight. I know I sound stern—I don’t mean to come down hard on you—but if you don’t tell me I’m going to have to go over to the Loveless and find someone who will call a spade a spade. Your mama, maybe.”

“No! It ain’t her fault!” I hurry to stop him and I cain’t sit up easy but you can bet I’m trying.

“So tell me, then,” he says, and while I quickly finish chewing what’s in my mouth, he sets the food tray on the low table at the end of the couch. The glass table with a lamp that has a Charlie Chaplin hat for a shade.

“I knew she hated it when I studied her”—my thick tongue slows me up but it looks like he can understand me so far—“but she was having one of her fever dreams and I went to tell her it was just a nightmare and she saw me standing over her, staring at her—but the thing is, I wasn’t studying her right then, I swear—”

“Slow down, peaches,” Mr. Ford says. “I can’t understand you when you talk fast like that. Take a deep breath and slow down.”

I do as he says.

“I was crowding her and Momma hates me crowding her and I knew that but I guess I wasn’t thinking it at that exact time.”

“What happens when you crowd her?” he asks.

If I tell him the rest, he won’t understand. He doesn’t know Momma like I do. If I tell him the rest—

“Go on, Caroline.” He says it like he’s reading my thoughts, and just in case he
can
read thoughts I better just call a spade a spade, like he said to.

“I got punished,” I whisper the words. Then I remember something. “Mr. Ford? Did y’all find a Bible when you found me? I mean, I think I was carrying something when I got here. A Bible that belongs to someone else but I been borrowing it and I meant to bring it with me.”

He nods. “We found a notebook and a Gideon Bible out front on Miss Chaplin’s porch swing, don’t worry. We got them both safe and sound here for you, honey.”

I settle back against the couch cushions.

“We also found you clutching on to this pretty tight,” he says, holding up …

The picture of baby Emma.

I close my eyes, and for the first time since right before I stuck up for Momma and shot Richard, for the first time since we turned the page and landed at the Loveless, for the first time in what feels like forever, I feel Emma here with me. And
that
gives me courage. I take as deep a breath as I can and then spill the beans.

“Emma’s my baby sister,” I start from the beginning. “She’s opposite of me. She had hair that was near-white blond and tiny bird bones …”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Carrie

“Honey, remember our deal? You promised to stay out of the way once you got her to open the door,” Mrs. Ford says to me, “so come on out onto the balcony here so the police can do their work.”

Momma looks her up and down and says, “Calling her
honey
already—isn’t that just perfect.”

The policeman is talking to a black lady in a suit holding a clipboard. He’s using words like
child services
and
fostering
and
safe houses
. Mrs. Burdock is in her bright-colored housedress pacing on the balcony in front of our open door, muttering to herself about
cleanup crews
. Ever-body’s talking at once.

Another policeman pushes past Mrs. Burdock, talking into his radio. He stands at the far side of Momma’s bed, across from Mr. Ford.

“What’s going on? What’re y’all doing?” I ask Mr. Ford as he’s pulling the covers off Momma. “Wait, stop!”

I wish all these grown-ups would just
leave her alone
! Don’t
they know this is gonna make it worse for me later, when they leave? Momma’s gonna skin me alive for this.

It’s all going so fast. Mrs. Ford keeps waving to get my attention so I’ll go out by her but what about Momma?

“How long have they been living like this?” the lady in the suit is asking Mrs. Burdock.

“Too long, I’ll tell you that much,” she says.

“Fifty-one-fifty,” a policeman’s hollering into his radio but it keeps breaking up so he says it over and over again.

“Place needs to be fumigated,” Mrs. Burdock’s saying to no one in particular.

And then I see room 217 like they must see it. The trash is stacked up pretty high in the far corner—I’m sure they think it’s Momma’s fault but it was
my
job to empty the trash.
I’m
the one who forgot to do it, not her. The flies settle—
they’re only buzzing around because y’all are going through our things
, I want to yell out. I want to tell them
it’s not always this messy
. I want to cover up Momma’s too-skinny body—I hate ever-one seeing her like this.
She’s so beautiful
, I want to holler.
Y’all just don’t know. She was voted Most Beautiful in her high school
. Suddenly ever-thing feels naked and ugly and tiny with so many people in it.

“It was only supposed to be until we got ourselves situated,” I say out loud. In case anyone’s listening. “Until Momma found work. Why’re y’all going through ever-thing like that? Wait, don’t hurt her! Momma? Please, Mr. Ford, please don’t hurt her.”

“Honor, you’ve got to get Carrie out of the way,” Mr. Ford says. “This isn’t something she needs to see.”

Momma’s picked now to laugh good and hard.

“Honey,” Mrs. Ford is saying, “Carrie, come on with me, now. We’ll just go down and wait in the parking lot.”

“Momma, I’m sorry.” I wriggle away from Mrs. Ford and run over to Momma, who’s being held up to standing by two policemen, one on either side of her. “Momma, please don’t be mad.
I’m sorry. I know I never should’ve left the room. You’re hurting her! Wait, Momma? Momma, this is Mrs. Ford and she’s real nice. She’s been so good to me, Momma.”

By then the policemen have Momma in the middle of the room. She’s swaying to music that ain’t playing.

“Ma’am, we’re looking for your daughter Emma,” Mr. Ford says. “Any ideas where she’d be?”

“Ask
her
.” Momma slurs the words, tipping her head in my direction, then tapping out a cigarette from the pack.

“We’d like for
you
to tell us, ma’am,” the other policeman says. He shines a flashlight at her face but Momma just looks away and blows smoke to the sky. Cool as a cucumber.

Then she looks over at me.

I look from her to Mrs. Ford to Mr. Ford to the lady in the suit to Mrs. Burdock.
What’s going on?
I want to scream.

“Go on and tell them,” Momma says.

“Carrie? Do you know where your sister is?” the suit lady asks. She’s using my name like she knows me. And acting like I lied to her when
I haven’t ever met her before thank you very much
.

“Momma?” I cain’t make any sense of all this. “Momma, what’s happening?”

I’m in more trouble than I ever thought I could be. The best thing for me to do right now is try to make it right with Momma because I’m gonna have to face her when they leave. No one can save me then.

“Tell them, Momma,” I say. I just cain’t help it, the tears come whether I want them to or not. “Tell them we’ve been through that before. I know I only imagined her, remember? You said she wasn’t real, Momma. Tell them.”

“Tell them what?” Momma says, dragging on her cigarette. “You think you know what happened, you tell them. You with your eyes boring holes in my head …”

“Momma, I’m sorry,” I cry.

“You were there, that’s right, but you were a child. You weren’t awake in the middle of all those nights, hours of crying crying crying enough to where I nearly pulled out my own hair from the sound of my own sobbing. Your dear
daddy
. Ha!”

“Momma don’t talk bad about Daddy—”

“You think you can sit in judgment on me? You think I don’t see your eyes guilting me over it? Well here it is. Here’s the moment you been waiting for. Drumroll, please! Your dear daddy shook her and shook her—to make his point he just
had
to shake her.”

When a new policeman takes up the doorway and says, “Hey, Ford-o, we got the go-ahead,” ever-one stops picking through our things to surround Momma.

“You have the right to remain silent,” one is saying, pinning her arms behind her back with one hand, feeling for the handcuffs hanging from his belt with the other.

Momma has started a flood of words seems like she’s been dying to say for years. She’s slurring bad but I understand every word:

“Mountain girls are supposed to know how to keep a good clean house, keep their men happy, cook a square meal but Lord help me I never did know how to do all that right. And boy didn’t my mama love to remind me. I never knew how to stop that squalling. You—look at you. You’re doing it now. Like you always have. You stand there, staring at me, waiting for me to fail like I always do. Like you knew I’d fail—”

“No, Momma, please,” I say, through hiccuping.

“You’d waltz on in there like you were schooled in child rearing, like
you
were the mother and I was the kid. Sure enough she’d quiet up the second you neared her—”

“Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law,” the policeman says, clinking shut the second of the cuffs, then checking in a little notebook hid in his back pocket to be sure he got the words right.

“You’d get hold of her and rock her and look at me like
I
was the village idiot.” Momma’s talking to me like there’s no one else in the room. Like she wasn’t being arrested. “Well I’ve got a news flash for you: this is a
relief
. I’ve been knowing this day would come sooner or later.”

Since I cain’t stop Mr. Ford or the other policemen I run over to Mrs. Ford and the suit lady.

“Where’re they taking my momma? Why’re y’all taking her?”

The lady in the suit looks down at her clipboard and starts to answer, “Let’s see now. Manslaughter. Child endangerment …”

Mr. Ford holds up a hand to hush her from going on and gives the other policemen a signal to hold up. He wants to hear what Momma has to say just as much as I do.

“It didn’t matter I told him she was his.” Momma keeps talking, as though they all understand who she’s talking about. “We both knew different. You were his
precious baby
but
she
was
mine
. I knew he hated that I favored her but I never thought he’d
hurt
her. Shaking her so hard that night her head near to snapped off. I got her away from him, took her to your room. He and I fought pretty hard that night, sure we fought. But then we got tired of saying the same things over and over, threatening the same threats. I went to bed and when I woke up—he was gone and so was she. Well, I just lost it. The fury came on me. I got the gun from the shoe box he kept hidden in the garage—the gun he didn’t think I knew about but oh, I knew about it all right. I was waiting on him to come back, training it on the door, and when I saw that smug face of his coming through the door I pulled the trigger and in a split second everything changed. I’ll never know what he did with her body.”

Mr. Ford says, “All right boys,” and they walk Momma out.

I flatten up against the handrail so I can get around the knot of them, in front of them on the stairs. They move her slowly step … by … step. Her legs buckling don’t matter—the policemen are holding her up.

“Stop staring at me!” Momma shouts down to me. “You see? Y’all see what she’s doing? She’s got the judge and jury in those eyes—look at her. Look at her and tell me you don’t see what I been dealing with all these years.”